Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 24, 2011

Israeli diplomat strike over

After four weeks of disruptions, strikes and protests – the Foreign Ministry employees committee has put an end to the diplomats' strike.

Chairman of the Professional Union Department in the Histadrut Avi Nisankorn said: "The Foreign Ministry employees stand at the forefront of the international stage and as representatives of Israel carrying out essential work, they are entitled to fair and suitable salary provisions.

"Among other things, the agreement creates incentives for employees to take on positions in difficult countries and to serve with excellence. This is an important step in strengthening and promoting the Foreign Service in Israel."

The employees are set to resume work immediately. The visit of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to go ahead as planned in spite of previous concerns.

This is the best news of the day.

While it is easy to deride Israel's outreach efforts, the Wikileaks cables tells us that there is a lot that diplomats do behind the scenes. They are the eyes and ears of the nation abroad and they are relied upon to make the correct recommendations and speak with the right people at the right times.

It may not be coincidental that it was during this strike that many of the South American countries recognized "Palestine." This is something that the Foreign Ministry might have been able to forestall or at limit damage from.

Welcome back.

Egyptian man confesses to role in church bombings

From Al Arabiya:

Egypt’s Interior Ministry announced Sunday that an Egyptian man helped the Palestinian Army of Islam group in the bombing of Alexandria church on New Year’s Eve.

According to a statement issued by the Egyptian Interior Ministry during the ceremony to mark Police Day, the man the group recruited is called Ahmed Lofti Ibrahim, born in 1984 in Alexandria and a graduate of the Faculty of Arts, Library Science Department.
Lotfi, who was arrested and is currently in detention, admitted in writing that he sneaked in to the Gaza Strip in 2008 after subscribing to the ideologies of al-Qaeda and deciding to take part in Jihad, or holy war, for which the group calls.

During his stay in Gaza, Ibrahim got in touch with the Palestinian Army of Islam and its members convinced him that targeting Christian and Jewish places of worship is part of the Jihad he is seeking to take part in.

After returning to Egypt, the statement added, Ibrahim stayed in contact with members of the Palestinian Army of Islam and in 2010, they asked him to watch several churches and synagogues in preparation for carrying out terrorist attacks.

In October, Ibrahim suggested to members of the group two churches next to where he lives, one of them was the Two Saints Church that was targeted on New Year’s Eve. He also suggested a synagogue, also in Alexandria and took several pictures of the Two Saints Church, which he sent to the group.

According to the statement, the group asked Ibrahim to find accommodation for members of the group who would come to Alexandria to carry out the operation and to provide them with a car.

Ibrahim, the statement said, was the one who suggested that the operation be suicidal. Then he left the country to undergo a surgery in his ear.

In December, the group contacted Ibrahim and told him the militants who were to carry out the operation were ready. The head of operations in the Palestinian Army of Islam later called him and congratulated him after the bombing took place and thanked him for the role he played.

I find this part interesting:

Hamas denied the presence of any link between al-Qaeda and resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip and called upon Egypt to provide proof of the involvement of the Palestinian Army of Islam in the Alexandria church bombing.

Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nounou told Reuters earlier that al-Qaeda has no operatives in the Gaza Strip and that all Palestinian groups only direct their attacks against Israel.

The Palestinian Army of Islam also issued a statement denying the group’s involvement in the bombing and its spokesman Abu Muthana accused the Mossad of planning the attack in a statement to AFP.

I don't think that anyone is saying that the Palestinian Army of Islam directly reports to Osama Bin laden, just that they subscribe to the same jihadist philosophy as Al Qaeda.

So why is Hamas so adamant to insist that a group, supposedly not associated with Hamas, is not aligned with Al Qaeda?

The reason can be found in the other part of Hamas' statement: "all Palestinian groups only direct their attacks against Israel." If Egypt considers Gaza a source of terror (which, of course, it already did, blaming Gaza groups for the rockets in Aqaba and other attacks) then Hamas' problems are doubled. They need to maintain relatively friendly relations with Egypt, the ability for their members to travel there, and the ability to smuggle in goods and weapons while maintaining deniability. Hamas certainly does not want the Rafah border crossing to be hostile.

But Hamas does have close ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which would love to see a Tunisia-type uprising in Egypt. In fact, the Hamas takeover of Gaza gave the Brotherhood hope for something similar in Egypt. The Egyptian leadership is, of course, quite sensitive to that possibility.

This being Al Arabiya, of course the idea that this is all an Israeli plot cannot be dismissed:

According to Dr. Samir Ghattas, expert on al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups, the Interior Ministry statement clarifies that the involvement the Palestinian Army of Islam is a fact and argued that the group has a presence in Egypt as well as other countries.

“The fact that the group recruited someone from Egypt means that it managed to infiltrate the country and form terrorist cells there,” he said. “The minister said Egyptian authorities have proof of that and we will know about this proof within a few days.”

Ghattas added that the group carried out this operation for other regional powers like Iran, Hamas or perhaps Israel.

“The Palestinian Army of Islam is just a tool in the hands of these powers.”

Iranian conference on "Hollywoodism"

From Tehran Times:

Foreign guests invited to Fajr film festival will be discussing the impact of Hollywood in the world of cinema.

Organizers of the Fajr International Film Festival are holding a conference entitled “Hollywoodism and Cinema” on the sidelines of the event on February 6 and 7, Culture Ministry official Gholamreza Montazemi said in a press conference held on Sunday.

French actor and political activist famous for his anti-Zionist attitudes Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, American documentary filmmaker Abdullah Hashem, and French director and screenwriter Mathieu Kassovitz are among the invited guests who will be taking part in the conference, he added.

The conference will be held on different themes including Zionism and Hollywood, terrorism and Hollywood, Hollywood and Satanism and the American lifestyle in Hollywood.

Isn't "Hollywood and Zionism" and "Hollywood and Satanism" redundant?

I hope they give out transcripts. There would be enough blog material for a month!

Palestine Papers, day 2: PLO reactions

It is a new day and there are a lot more reactions to the publication of the so-called "Palestine Papers" by Al Jazeera.

I will not go so far as some are to dismiss them as forgeries. There are too many details and too many documents. The Guardian claims that they have been authenticated, and while I am no fan of the Guardian they have incentive to validate them - newspapers do not want to be known to fall for hoaxes like the fake Howard Hughes diaries. The downside for the Guardian is simply too great to think that they did not make a good effort to prove that they are really minutes of meetings from the Palestinian Arab side.

I do believe that the papers reflect the PLO viewpoint of the negotiations, and in many details they might be at odds with the Israeli or American interpretations of those same meetings. We have seen many times that the two sides simply speak different languages.

Another important point to remember is that the PLO knows its own political roadblocks far better than the Israelis or Americans do. While America will push the PLO to make concessions - and the PLO cannot stand up to the US in private the way they proudly do in public - the Arabs know very well that some of the concessions will simply not fly; not for their people and not for the Arab League. They could pretend to put forth supposed peace plans secure in the knowledge that there is no real political way to push them through,and then they can go back to the Americans and say that the "Palestinian street" has tied their hands; they must ask for a few dozen more concessions and put the ball back in Israel's court.

While every Israeli leader across the political spectrum has been relatively honest with the people about the needs for "painful compromises for peace," the PA and PLO never did that. So it is really amusing to see how they are reacting to the release.

Saeb Erekat says that "Al-Jazeera's information is full of distortions and fraud."

Ahmed Qureia, one of the PLO leaders who was involved in the negotiations, said that these were "fabrications" and that Al Jazeera was working for Zionist interests by releasing them.

Qureia is quoted in one of the papers as discussing the Kadima primaries with Tzipi Livni, and telling her "I would vote for you." It can't be good for his career to say nice things to the person who was foreign minister during Operation Cast Lead!

Yasser Abed Rabbo, another member of the PLO Executive Committee, is going further and slamming Qatar (al-Jazeera's home) for being behind the leaks. He is demanding that the Emir of Qatar come clean on his own contacts with Israel and Iran, and says that Al Jazeera would never have done this without the Emir's pushing them to.

Abed Rabbo's statements, incidentally, indicate that the Palestinian Arab (West Bank) media wouldn't publish anything big without the approval of the PA and PLO!

Finally, one can expect that the leakers will be looking over their shoulders for quite a while, hoping that no bullets are heading their way. They are the ones that had the real agenda, and there are only so many people who should have had access to these documents.

(See also Noah Pollak's analysis. Also in Commentary, a good piece by Emanuele Ottolenghi.)

The medicine wars between Hamas and the PA

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry on Sunday released the names of employees who it claimed were dismissed by security forces in Gaza.

The Ramallah ministry demanded that the employees were reinstated to their positions in medicine warehouses in the Gaza Strip to facilitate the provision of medicine to residents.

The PA ministry also demanded that the Gaza government placed all medical aid from international donors under the administration of the main warehouses in Gaza.

It further accused the Hamas-led government of charging patients for medicines provided for free by the PA. President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree exempting Gaza residents from paying for medicine, the ministry noted.

The two ministries regularly trade accusations in an ongoing spat. The Gaza government has accused the PA of failing to meet its responsibilities to the Strip, warning several times that the health sector was on the verge of collapse.

The PA responded that Hamas was stockpiling donated medicine for use by party members, and accused Gaza security forces of dismissing Fatah-affiliated staff.

Fatah-associated media has gone further, saying that Hamas diverts the medicines away from hospitals and towards Hamas-affiliated pharmacies, where hospital patients' families are forced to buy medicine not available in hospitals.

The implication is that Hamas, by demanding more medicine from Ramallah and claiming that the medical system is on the verge of collapse, is actually using those medicines as a means to get cash to finance its own infrastructure.

Anti-semitism as a tool of Arab regimes (Mudar Zahran)

Mudar Zahran is a London-based Jordanian writer who I have previously reported was the object of public death threats from people in his home country. This article in Hudson-NY shows one reason why.

For more than sixty years of conflict, the carefully government-channeled hatred revolved around Zionism and Israel, rather than around Judaism and Jews.

Since 2008, however, the Jordanian printed media has been launching a fierce attack on almost everything Jewish.

Why would the supposedly-moderate Jordan adopt a strong anti-Semitic agenda?

The answer to this question is simple; Jordan's oppressed Palestinian majority has been seeking more civil rights in the last few years. Therefore, the Jordanian government has to distract them by igniting anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Arab regimes apparently needed a new method to direct their own people's anger towards someone else. The US and Europe were, of course, out of the question, and the communist "infidel" states were no longer in existence. Again, Arab regimes were stuck with Israel as "the source of all evil" with no way for regimes to revive that notion: their people have become fed up after decades of propaganda. The Arab regimes' "Plan B" was to ignite an even larger religious zeal by constantly reminding their people that the Israelis are "a part of a larger Jewish scheme of controlling the world."

Today, the message has dramatically changed; media language and definitions have been surgically altered by many Arab governments. The term "Zionist" has turned into "Jews," and, for the more moderate Arab media, "Peace talks" into "Jewish opposition to peace…or world peace."

The growing trend of anti-Semitism on Arab TV shows has been vigorously picking up momentum the last few years. Anti-Semitic-themed shows have become common on many of the 300-plus Arab satellite networks, including TV Channels and media outlets owned by theoretically pro-Western Arab governments are no exception -- crossing the line from anti-Semitism to open support for terrorism.

Read the whole thing.

Turkel excerpt on specifics of Mavi Marmara shots

Here is more from the Turkel Report that demolishes the idea that it is a whitewash. In addition, it destroys the assumption of the IHH and "activists" that people who were shot in the top of their heads were shot from the helicopter.

Estimating the number of shots fired that actually hit their target is very difficult. From the military debriefings, it appears that, during the course of the operation on the Mavi Marmara, the Israeli forces discharged 308 rounds (from the soldiers' testimonies, it appears that 110 rounds were shot aimed at persons; an estimated 39 hits were identified by the soldiers; out of which an estimated 16 participants were injured by shots to the center of mass), 87 bean bags, and 264 paint ball rounds. The number of rounds fired does not in and of itself imply that the use of force was excessive. From the soldiers’ testimonies, it appears that a significant number of rounds were not fired directly at IHH activists. The IDF applied a graduated use of force, including the use of warning shots and deterring fire.

When appropriate to limit the chance of causing death or serious injury, the Israeli military's graduated use of force also provides for firing at the legs and feet of a person. This use of force appears to have resulted in the wounding of a number of the IHH activists. In determining whether such disabling fire is excessive, it must be weighed against the alternative of shooting at the center of visible mass of the target, with increased likelihood of death or serious injury.

The evidence shows that the IDF soldiers made considerable use of graduated force during the operation, with soldiers switching repeatedly between less-lethal and lethal weapons, depending upon the threat being posed.

The Commission has reached the conclusion that the Israeli army did not fire any rounds from the helicopter. The only force that was used on the helicopters were 3-4 “flash bang” grenades that were deployed from the first helicopter in the initial stages of the fast roping to attempt to stop IHH activists from interfering with the ropes. The accurate use of firearms from a helicopter requires both specific equipment and specially trained personnel, with which the helicopters were not equipped.

A high angle of the trajectory of wounds in some deceased IHH activists could have been the result of a number of factors. First, some firing took place under circumstances where IHH activists were on top of or bent over one Israeli soldier who was lying on the deck while they were assaulting him. Secondly, firing also took place from the roof down towards the IHH activists who were threatening the IDF soldiers on a lower deck. Finally, in some instances, numerous rounds were fired either by one soldier or by more than one soldier to stop an IHH activist who was a threat to the lives of themselves or other soldiers. It cannot be discounted that some rounds impacted when the person had already started to fall.

The specific testimonies of soldiers are footnoted but that annex has not yet been released. The commission recommended that the annex be released as well.

Vote for Round 1 of the Pro-Israel Blog-Off!

Round One of the Pro-Israel Blog-Off is underway!

You can vote for my entry or for my competition, Liberty's Spirit or Life Through My Eyes.

The entire point is to promote pro-Israel blogs, so definitely look at the other entries, this week and all the weeks of the competition.

The winner, chosen by a combination of reader votes and the esteemed judges, gets an iPad. I wouldn't mind winning :)

Go to this page at IsraellyCool to vote!

The Palestine Papers

I have not had the time to go through the seeming bombshell of Al Jazeera releasing as many as 1600 documents about negotiations between the PA and Israel.

You can read about it here.

At this time it appears to be the Palestinian Arab version of events, so whether they will be corroborated is an open question. They certainly seems to indicate that PLO negotiators have gone beyond their public statements in their offers. They appear to show that the issue of Jerusalem is essentially not solvable. For example, while the Palestinian Arabs think that their offer of letting most Jewish areas of Jerusalem stay in Israel's hands was most generous, even the most left wing Israeli government cannot consider evicting Jews from Maaleh Adumim or even Har Homa.

The Arab backlash that is likely to occur against the PA/PLO from these documents' release may be significant. JPost has more. Someone in the PLO obviously leaked them so this indicates a severe fissure within their ranks, despite (or more likely because of) Mahmoud Abbas' political strengthening of his leadership.

The Israeli backlash may be significant as well, although Olmert and Livni will be able to deny details since it is not their version of events.

A'jad whines, threatens about Zionists. Again.

From PressTV:

A day after multifaceted talks between Iran and the P5+1, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad advises the six major world powers to stop following up the path of Israel.

Addressing thousands of enthusiastic people in the northern city of Rasht on Sunday, the Iranian president said certain arrogant Western powers, including the US, are not interested in resolving issues with Iran.

He added that Iran repeats to the officials of the P5+1 (Russia, China, France, Britain and the US plus Germany) to get rid of pressure by certain "narrow minded" Zionist individuals “if you wants talks to bear fruit.”

“In that case, grounds will be prepared for further interaction,” Ahmadinejad stressed.

The Iranian chief executive emphasized that talks should be based on justice and respect, saying, “Negotiations should lead to the recognition of legal rights of the Iranian people and other nations.”

He warned that animosity with Iran and the Iranian nation would be to the detriment of Western interests and noted that the Islamic Republic welcomes “cooperation and interaction.”

The Iranian president further cautioned the P5+1 against the continuation of their previous path and said, "Now that Iranians have become a nuclear nation, hundreds of (countries) like you will not be able to force them to retreat one iota from their positions."

The comments are fun to read as well.

Open thread

Going on a short day trip with Mrs. Elder, so carry on without me....

Kuwaiti paper extols the benefits of camel milk plus urine

A Kuwaiti newspaper describes a vacation in the desert, and then says:

Camel herders brought fresh [camel] milk directly to us, and when we were reluctant to drink, [they told us that] the research conducted on camel milk has proven that it cures diseases, suxh as autoimmune blood disorders, ascites, hepatitis, tuberculosis, ulcers, colitis and skin cancer, and recommended a cup of camel milk mixed with a cup of urine to recover from these diseases.

The comments section adds many more diseases that camel milk and urine cures, including dandruff, baldness, gangrene, cancer and a penis disease.

Bottoms up!