Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Mariam ship delayed yet again

Samar al-Hajj, coordinator of the Gaza bound Mariam aid ship said on Saturday that the ship is now scheduled to depart Tripoli port on August 29, instead of Aug 22

She told LBC: “It seems as if there is universal war against us … We will not allow anyone to cancel the ship’s trip.”

Hajj added that the ship will not head to Gaza directly from Tripoli, stressing: “The ship cannot be the reason for the start of a war.”

Meanwhile, a source from the Cypriot foreign ministry told Ad Diyar Saturday: “Since Cyprus is a member of the European Union and maintains its policies, it will not allow the Mariam to sail to its ports and later head to Gaza in order to avert any problems.”

Cyprus’ foreign minister had recently toured a number of Arab states explaining his country’s position from the ships docking at its ports.

Earlier reports indicated that the ship may sail first to Greece instead of Cyprus and contacts are ongoing to get Greece’s approval for docking the ship at one of its ports .

Originally, the ship's organizers said they would sail some 9 weeks ago. Sounds more like a publicity stunt than an aid ship.

But who knows - maybe they will sail to Venezuela and then towards Gaza.

Latest Latma is The Bomb

Includes The Bomb song:

Thanks to the many who sent this in!

JNews fails its stated purpose

Last March, a group of left-wing British Jews started a new website called JNews. In the words of the founder of the site, Miri Weingarten, writing in Comment is Free,

There is therefore an urgent need for reliable, real-time information, authoritative and expert commentary, and deeper and more courageous analysis – all of which must be informed by a primary concern for human rights and social justice. JNews – Alternative Jewish Perspectives on Israel and Palestine is being launched today to answer this need.

An initiative of a group of British Jews, JNews will make its output available to the British and international media through its website. It will feature news and stories focusing on the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and on the work of organisations and individuals struggling to protect and promote human rights and create conditions in Israel and Palestine in which social justice can prevail.

JNews will bring to public attention the authentic voices of those directly affected by the conflict and highlight the problems facing migrants and asylum seekers in Israel, the poor and the dispossessed, Arab-Palestinian citizens and the Bedouin. More generally in Israel-Palestine it will focus on the conditions of prisoners and detainees, the status and treatment of women, and the political and civil rights of Palestinians living under occupation and under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

While the description here is heavily weighted towards perceived Israeli abuses rather than any Palestinian Arab abuses of human rights, this description at least pretends that it would look at both.

On the site itself, it partially describes itself this way:

JNews believes that disseminating a range of viewpoints broader than that offered by most Jewish and Israeli organizations will benefit Palestinians and Israelis.

JNews supports the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians and believes the two are intertwined.

JNews believes in the application of the universal principles of social justice and human rights as the path to a just and comprehensive solution to the conflict.

Given these high standards, of being able to have a "broader" range of viewpoints and of caring about the human rights of all Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, how well has it done?

The answer is simple. It looks exactly like a Palestinian Arab publication. There is nothing Jewish nor the least bit Zionist about it.(There are two articles over five months that quote Jewish sources to advocate a secular, liberal Judaism.)

Based on keyword searches, I found exactly one article over the past five months that could be construed as critical of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas - and that was a verbatim copy of a PCHR press release about PalArab elections.

There is barely a word on the entire site criticizing Hamas' human rights record. There is nothing criticizing the PA's human rights record. Nothing about the lack of press freedoms in the territories, nothing about rockets, nothing about terrorism, nothing about Hamas and Fatah infighting.

JNews does not care about the human rights of Palestinian Arabs. They only care about the human rights of those that they can consider oppressed by Jews. In this sense, they are exactly in the mainstream of world anti-Zionism.

As far as the supposedly broad "range of viewpoints" that it was meant to have, every single article is either left, far left or ultra left (including one by the founder that quotes without any criticism an EU opinion that every part of Israel outside the 1947 partition lines is "occupied.")

JNews is yet another case of using a veneer of Jewishness in order to do one thing: criticize the Jewish state. That is the entire purpose of the site, and everything it says about caring about human rights and liberalism and a range of viewpoints is simply a lie. (So are many of the articles it chooses to publish, but that is an argument for another day.)

(h/t Bella)

Great moments in autotranslation

Ozil at the top of orgasm after joining Real Madrid

"Aid ship" updates (updated)

The media continues to claim that there is an Algerian ship headed to Gaza. Ha'aretz, the Jerusalem Post, UPI, and many others are making that claim.

They are all wrong.

It is beyond me why reporters parrot stories when they can look at the Algerian press and see that, from the outset, the ship was going to El Arish in Egypt. Algerian national radio also said that the ship was headed to El Arish.

This is why I try not to rely on secondary sources when I can avoid them. Reporters are lazy. Yesterday it took me about five minutes to track down the truth - and this is without knowing Arabic. Sheesh.

Meanwhile, the much-delayed Mariam is now supposedly going to sail this Sunday. However, it cannot go straight to Israel from Lebanon because the countries are in a state of war, and Cyprus has stated that they will not allow the ships to dock there.

I think that the IDF might be using female soldiers to handle that Mariam if it comes close.

UPDATE: Was the ship named after Mary in order to make intercepting Jews look bad? From the Tehran Times:

“After the Mavi Marmara incident, one of the women hailed Mary during our weekly meeting. Her exclamation came like a revelation, so we decided to call our ship Maryam (Mary in Arabic). The name was perfect for a vessel that comprised only women. Who could disparage the Virgin Mary, a recognized saint in most religions?” says Hajj.

Gazans kill 62-year old "witch"

From Ma'an:

An investigation by [Al Mezan] confirmed earlier reports that unidentified men fired at Jabriyeh Abu Kanas as she sat in front of her house with her 75-year-old husband. She was pronounced dead on arrival at Ash-Shifa hospital.

In a sworn statement to Al Mezan, one of Abu Kanas’ relatives said he witnessed the shooting. He told the rights group he was returning from buying Jabriyeh groceries, and saw a silver Hyundai car, with blacked-out windows and no number plates, stop outside Jabriyeh’s house. He heard what he believed to be muted gunfire, and then the car sped away, leaving his aunt bleeding from her chest.

Abu Kanas’ relatives added that a fortnight ago two cars, a Mercedes and a Skoda, tried to approach Jabriyeh but fled when her family appeared.

Locals had accused the woman of practicing witchcraft and voodoo, officials said Tuesday. Her relatives told Al Mezan that she cured people using traditional methods.

If you don't like someone in Gaza, just start spreading rumors about them. The problem then takes care of itself.

Speaking of, I hear that Ismail Haniyeh is gay...

Planes, trains and automobiles

I am traveling today, using all three titular methods.

This gives me the chance to do two things: create an open thread, and use the word "titular" in a sentence.

Blogging will be light through Sunday.

Two stories about theft

A truly awful story emerged today from Israel, as there appears to be evidence that some IDF members stole and sold equipment from the flotilla ships a couple of months ago, including laptops.

"This matter is very problematic in terms of values, as the incident allegedly took place after it was clear that the flotilla was a serious international affair," the source added. "An officer who under such circumstances steals equipment which does not belong to him, and then tries to sell it – it's almost incomprehensible."

The affair embarrassed the political arena as well, with Knesset members demanding that the army prevent such incidents from repeating themselves at almost all costs.

"This is an embarrassing, humiliating and infuriating act," said MK Eitan Cabel (Labor). "The IDF must handle this affair according to the strict letter of the law.

Meretz Chairman Chaim Oron called on the army to utilize the investigation to the fullest, noting that "the multiple number of incidents, in which basic values are compromised, requires the army to hold a thorough investigation into the causes."

There is no doubt that the citizens of Israel will not stand for this and will do whatever needs to be done to ensure that the guilty parties are punished and that the root causes are fixed. There is a deep, nationwide sense of embarrassment, anger and shame over the incident.

Contrast this with this story that received next to no coverage:

French aid group Help Doctors accused the Palestinian Hamas organisation on Wednesday of seizing equipment and files from one of its Gaza clinics which it closed in June.

"Four men from the (Hamas) interior ministry entered the clinic on Tuesday morning and seized computer equipment, telephones, chairs, office equipment and medical files," the organisation said in a statement.

The men left the premises without saying why the equipment was being confiscated, it said.

Will Hamas open an investigation? Will people be prosecuted? Will the doctors have an opportunity to sue?

And - why are these questions laughable to a world that has no problem saying with a straight face that the IDF is less moral than Hamas?

There are, sadly, bad people everywhere. The best way to measure the morality of a society is by seeing how everyone else acts when their own people do bad things.

Another town square named after a terrorist

A terrorist who heroically murdered a teenage girl.

From PMW:

On June 11, 2002, a Palestinian suicide terrorist walked into a restaurant in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya, and detonated a bomb that killed a girl, 15-year-old Hadar Hershkovitz, and injured 16 others.

Picture of suicide terrorist and Arafat on monument in town square in West Bank town Madama. [PA TV, May 15, 2010]

The town square in the West Bank town of Madama where the terrorist lived features a monument honoring "the heroic Martyrdom-Seeker" and his "heroic Herzliya operation." The monument has pictures of the suicide terrorist and of Yasser Arafat.

The text above the terrorist's picture is a verse from the Quran, urging Muslims to fight the non-believers and promising that Allah will "lay them low":

"Fight them, and Allah will punish them by your hands,
lay them low and give you victory over them,
and heal the hearts of a believing people." [Quran, 9,14]

Below his picture are the words:

"The heroic Shahada - Seeker (Martyrdom- Seeker, PA term of honor for suicide terrorists) Omar Muhammad Ziyada (Abu Samed) who carried out the heroic Herzliya operation on June 11, 2002

From the Jerusalem Post, June 13, 2002:

This coming Tuesday, Hadar Hershkowitz, 15, was to have sung and danced at her middle school graduation in a special performance of fairy tales created by the students.

Instead, friends and family members yesterday heaped her fresh grave with flowers and crowded into the Herzliya Cemetery only a few short blocks from her home to say goodbye.

Hershkowitz was killed by a suicide bomber while walking with a friend outside Jamil's shwarma grill on Rehov Sokolow. A friend, also a student at Ze'ev Jabotinsky Middle School in Herzliya, was seriously wounded in the attack.

One young speaker at the funeral said, 'We are all asking why, why was it you? ... We don't believe what happened, but still we are here to talk about our beloved friend.'

'We can still see you, hear you, and feel you,' another friend said. 'You loved life. You were nervous about starting high school, but you were still very optimistic. You were always so happy. You loved to have fun and to go out with your friends. You never liked being alone. We loved you so much and we won't forget you.'

Despite the hot sun, friends stayed in a tight circle around her grave and lit yahrzeit candles.

School principal Aviva Moran said, 'She was at the center of her social circle. She was very attached to her friends. She loved to help them. She got so much love from her family. She didn't keep it to herself - she passed it to her friends and they passed it back to her.'

I'm sure that there are outraged protests at that square every day by residents of Madama who are incensed that such a person is being honored in their town.

I'm sure that there have been many op-eds in the Palestinian Arabic media denouncing this honor.

I'm sure that President Abbas is working to ensure that this never happens again and that he will personally apologize to the family of Hadar Hershkovitz.

Because that is how decent human beings would act. And we all know that everyday, average Palestinian Arabs are just like everyone else, and would naturally find the existence of this square to be an affront to everything they hold dear.

They are the peace partners, after all. They wouldn't call a person whose entire existence is defined by his murdering a 15-year old girl at a shwarma shop a hero. That would be unspeakably horrific.

The square, which has been up since at least May, is surely an anomaly, a mere mistake and will be dismantled any day now. In fact it is difficult to even imagine that people designed and built it, that a town approved it, and that people pass it by every day without any hint of outrage.

Or, at the very least, I'm sure I can find a single person protesting it. A single Arabic op-ed. Something.

Right?

George Will on "taking risks for peace"

George Will's latest is a keeper:

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

...

The intifada was launched by the late Yasser Arafat -- terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner -- after the July 2000 Camp David meeting, during which then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede control of all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, with small swaps of land to accommodate the growth of Jerusalem suburbs just across the 1949 armistice line.

Israelis are famously fractious, but the intifada produced among them a consensus that the most any government of theirs could offer without forfeiting domestic support is less than any Palestinian interlocutor would demand. Furthermore, the intifada was part of a pattern. As in 1936 and 1947, talk about partition prompted Arab violence.

...

Israelis younger than 50 have no memory of their nation within the 1967 borders set by the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence. The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Soccer Dad)

Reuters lies on Lebanese Palestinians

Reuters-Middle East Watch picks up on a story by Mariam Karouny on Lebanon's slight easing of restrictions on what professions Palestinian Arabs can now enter, after 62 years.

One sentence is an out-and-out lie:

Palestinians themselves have repeatedly said they oppose plans to settle them in Lebanon, saying they want to go back to the villages their families fled or were forced to flee during fighting which created the state of Israel in 1948.

This is not true. What is true is that so-called Palestinian Arab leaders have said this publicly, and that the Lebanese leaders and non-Sunni citizens are also against their naturalization - but no one has done any survey or poll asking Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon, Jordan or Syria whether they would like to become citizens in the countries that they have been in for decades.

All available evidence is to the contrary.

From Forced Migration:

The Lebanese Government and the majority of the Lebanese people oppose any permanent integration of the Palestinian refugees (USCR Report, 1999: 1), under the pretext that granting citizenship to the Palestinians, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, would upset the delicate sectarian balance in Lebanon. They also blame them for the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. It is interesting to note that in the 1950s and 1960s around 50,000 Palestinians were granted Lebanese citizenship, mainly Christian Palestinians as well as some middle-class Muslim families. However, the latter achieved this by employing the services of lawyers and proving Lebanese ancestry. During the 1990s, about 20,000 more Palestinians were granted nationality (Khalidi, 2001: 16). In 1994, Shiites from the seven border villages and a year later some Sunnis, as well as the remaining Christian Palestinians who hadn’t been granted Lebanese nationality in the 1950s or 1960s became Lebanese (Peteet, 1997).

On May 27, 2003, the Lebanese Shura Council ordered the Ministry of Interior to re-examine the files of around 150,000 people who have been granted Lebanese citizenship according to Decree No. 5247 of June, 1994. The timing of this ruling is significant, as according to Lebanese law a period of 10 years has to elapse before new Lebanese citizens are granted full civil rights. The Minister of Interior has declared that he will revoke the Lebanese citizenship of Palestinians and others who have obtained the citizenship by false means.

So on at least two occasions, tens of thousands of Palestinian Lebanese were given the chance to become citizens - and they took advantage of it. As far as I can tell, none that had that opportunity spurned the offer, saying that they would prefer to go back to the villages they lived in before 1948 and would rather stay in miserable Lebanese camps.

Yet Reuters airily says, without any attribution or proof, that the entire population of "Palestinians" have repeatedly opposed such plans.

Tell that to the Youssef Ahmad, interviewed in the New York Times this week, who said "If I am going to live and die here, then I want all my rights." It sure doesn't sound like he opposes settlement in Lebanon.

Too bad Reuters felt it necessary to push this lie that keeps hundreds of thousands of human beings in misery.

Hamas deducting wages to pay for electricity

Hamas says that it will deduct 170 shekels ($45) from everyone's wages this month in order to pay for the fuel for Gaza's electric plant.

There are about 30,000 government employees in Gaza, meaning that in theory some $1.3 million will be available to pay the bills every month.

A plan was floated last month to garnish the wages of PA employees in Gaza for the same purpose.

However, the head of Gaza's electric company complained that he had no infrastructure to track the customers and the payments, and it sounds like this will turn into a new debacle.

Gaza's electric company is $1.3 billion in debt.