Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 21, 2011

Real Liberals Love Israel #3: Rushing to save lives worldwide

I unfortunately had to make this poster a bit taller and skinnier than the others; I prefer to keep things in proportion but I couldn't do that with this wonderful photo.

(photo credit IDF Spokesperson Flickr page)
(h/t David G for the idea)

Arab discrimination against Palestinians: How to fix it

Today is the Arab Mothers' Day.

To commemorate the occasion, hundreds of Egyptian mothers who are married to Palestinian Arab men are demonstrating in Tahrir Square to give Egyptian citizenship to their children.

An Egyptian law passed in 2004 allowed Egyptian mothers to pass their citizenship to their children with foreign spouses - except Palestinians.

The reason given is the usual excuse. As Al Ahram wrote when discussing the law in 2006:

Also, children of Palestinian fathers are not eligible for Egyptian citizenship. While this seems unfair, asserted Diaaeddin, it is in accordance with Arab League Decree 1547 for 1959. The decree calls for the preservation of the Palestinian identity as an integral part of the Palestinian cause, and prevents it from assimilating into the identity of the host country.

The Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court in 2006 ruled that the law should apply to Palestinian Arab fathers as well, but that ruling has been completely ignored by Egyptian authorities.

There is a Facebook page for the mothers in this predicament, called The Ugly Duckling's Sons. The group claims that the law could allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to become Egyptian citizens, although that number seems to be exaggerated.

This is only one example of the state-supported discrimination against Palestinian Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs alone, in every Arab state.

The mothers' protest shows that the excuse given by every Arab leader - including Palestinian Arab leaders, and even parroted by UNRWA - that Palestinian Arabs do not want to become citizens of their host countries, is a complete lie. When given the opportunity, many if not most of them would jump to gain the equal rights that citizenship affords them.

There is a simple thing that could be done that could help galvanize the world to help these victims of Arab discrimination. It would not cost much and could be done by a private organization.

Commission an independent poll of Palestinian Arabs living in Arab countries, and ask them these simple questions:

Do you feel legally discriminated against in your host country because you are a Palestinian?
Do you feel that the citizens of your host country discriminate against Palestinians?
If you had the option, and if it would not impact your status as a Palestinian, would you want to become a citizen of the country you live in?
If you had the option to become a citizen of your host country but it meant that you would lose your status as a Palestinian, would you still want to become a citizen of your host country?
If given a choice, would you like to move to another Arab country and become a citizen there? If so, which one?
If given a choice, would you prefer to become a citizen of your host country or to move your family to the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas?

Never has anyone dared poll Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere to ask them if they would take advantage of citizenship if it was offered. It is impossible to know how bad the problem is without simply asking them.

Once the poll results are known, assuming that most Palestinian Arabs are like the protesting mothers in Tahrir Square and the poll is done without bias and without governmental pressure, the issue of systematic discrimination against Palestinians in Arab countries can be tackled properly.

Human rights groups like HRW who bend over backwards to pretend that the problem doesn't exist would be forced to acknowledge that there is a problem and that the Arab governments must be pushed to stop their discrimination.

We need to expose the truth. And it would not be that hard; to commission a poll like this can't possibly cost that much money.

For decades, the world has been fed lies about how the Palestinian Arabs feel about their own lives. Isn't it time to simply ask them what they think?

And then shouldn't every Western nation and human rights group mobilize to give Palestinian Arabs the simple human right to become citizens of any Arab country, under the same rules as any other Arab?

Anti-Semitism 2.0 (Mudar Zahran)

From Hudson-NY:

The concept of the "evil Jew" has made a well-disguised comeback: Criticizing Israel and Zionis, is now deemed a legitimate option to cursing Jews and Judaism. Not only is it open, socially acceptable and legal, but it can actually bring prosperity and popularity.

Why would a Palestinian be writing this? The answer is simple: The Palestinians have been used as fuel for the new form of anti-Semitism; this has hurt the Palestinians and exposed them to unprecedented and purposely media-ignored abuse by Arab governments, including some of those who claim love for the Palestinians, yet in fact only bear hatred to Jews. This has resulted in Palestinian cries for justice, equality, freedom and even basic human rights being ignored while the world getting consumed with delegitimizing Israel from either ignorance or malice.

Worse, just as the old form of anti-Semitism has proven itself a threat as poisonous to its supporters, as it was to the Jews, the new form of anti-Semitism 2.0 could prove itself the same -- all the more likely as we see the world tolerating Iran's nuclear ambitions not necessarily out of love for the Mullah's regime, but instead because of mental fixation against Israel.

Such bias against Israel cannot be "accidental" or merely "unfortunate." No other nation has received the amount of scrutinizing, criticism, coverage, demonization and delegitimization. In fact the question to be asked is not whether there is bias against Israel; but rather why there is bias against Israel?

...Media bias against Israel dies not harm only Israelis; it comes at very dear price to us, the Palestinians. In July of 2010, for example, a seasoned journalist Robert Fisk interviewed a group of right-wing ultra-conservative East Bank-Jordanians who were calling on King Abdullah of Jordan to strip the Palestinian majority of their citizenship and property. The group, mostly made up of retired Jordanian servicemen and journalists were also calling for ending the peace treaty with Israel and "establishing it as an enemy state." Despite my attempts to contact Mr. Fisk –-along with another Jordanian-Palestinian journalist---to warn him of the people he was going to meet, he nonetheless, published an article entitled, "Why Is Jordan Occupied by Palestinians?" -- Which was mainly a manifesto for those with whom he had met. They then publicized the article as a global media victory for themselves, and drove the Palestinians of Jordan into even deeper fear for their own safety in a country where they are already oppressed by security agencies; virtually barred from any government or local authority positions, excluded from state universities, despite paying "a university tax", as well as other taxes and tariffs --which their fellow Jordanians of Bedouins heritage are exempted from-- and regularly and openly insulted by the government-run Jordanian media calling for them to be expelled.

The day before Mr. Fisk met with the extremist group, one of their members, a retired intelligence officer now turned writer, published an article calling on the Jordanian intelligence service to "chop off Mudar Zahran's head in the UK without any observance of diplomatic restraints;" would Mr. Fisk have met with an Israeli journalist calling for the Mossad to behead a Palestinian on British soil?

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A good idea from G:

Entire poster series here.

New poster series idea: Real Liberals Love Israel

An idea I've been kicking around:

My main problem is coming up with appropriate photos. How best to illustrate freedom of the press, or of assembly, or a top-notch justice system? (Diversity is a bit easier.) I want this one to be a positive campaign.

By the way, the New York Jewish Voice published 13 of my posters in their current edition (they apologized to me for not putting my URL anywhere on the page...)

Just a Molotov cocktail

Palestine Today quotes Israeli news as saying that a Molotov cocktail was thrown at an Israeli bus near Qalqilya on Sunday evening. Thankfully, no one was injured.

But this is not an isolated incident. A single well-aimed firebomb could kill many people, and Palestinian Arabs attack Israelis with firebombs a lot.

Yet the English-language media - even the Israeli English media - almost always ignores these attacks.

A quick glance at Hebrew media shows that there were two Molotov cocktails thrown at a soldier post near Rachel's Tomb a couple of weeks ago, and an Egged bus was shot at.

Last Friday, in Silwan, a Molotov cocktail was thrown towards an Israeli officer, and he briefly was set on fire. He is only lightly injured, but supposedly a video of the attack is making the rounds of Palestinian Arab media. (You can see a number of photos here, taken by Reuters but not picked up by any major newspaper that I could find.)

From reading the media, you would think that Palestinian Arabs merely throw small stones in their protests. You never hear about shootings, or firebombs. Yet they happen quite often.

They attempt to immolate and shoot Jews to death. Regularly.

But they don't usually succeed.

The Israeli media is used to this, so to them it is not news. The Western media doesn't care, so they don't allow it to be news.

And scenes like this are all but invisible to the world.

Syria says protesters in Daraa were "Palestinian extremists"

Syrian media is claiming that the instigators of the Dara'a protests on Friday, which resulted in Syrian forces killing a number of demonstrators, were "Palestinian extremists."

Syria's Al Watan writes that

The majority of those who participated in the chaos and devastation were Palestinian extremists...In the capital Damascus, an official Palestinian source confirmed the rejection of the riots triggered by some Palestinians in the Daraa camp, pointing out that the Palestinians in Syria ...will not hesitate to address those who violate security in Syria.

He emphasized that these are outside of the Palestinian consensus and will be prosecuted.

Al Watan attended a meeting that was held yesterday afternoon with all the Palestinian factions and the a delegation went to the Daraa camp with a clear message that any departure from the ["refugee"] camps would be faced by the Palestinian security first without mercy and they confirmed the complete rejection of any acts of sabotage carried out by extremist elements.

There are two UNRWA camps in Daraa.

If the protesters were really Palestinian, then Syria is apparently not the pro-Palestinian Arab paradise it styles itself to be. If they weren't, then it is very notable that Syria wants to blame its Palestinian population for the demonstrations.

Either way, it will take time for the Western media to mention this detail about the deadly protests, because the pro-democracy meme is easy to digest, but Syrians shooting members of its own Palestinian population is a little more complicated and detracts from the idea that Palestinian Arabs' only enemy is Israel.

J-Street Baby-in Chief whines that Netanyahu won't meet him

From Ha'aretz:

Ben-Ami added that although he has asked to meet with Netanyahu during his stay in Israel "to introduce ourselves and explain how we can work together as allies," he was rejected.

"Yet, as you may have read, while the Prime Minister doesn’t have time to meet a movement that now represents over 170,000 pro-Israel, pro-peace supporters, he has time to host Sarah Palin for dinner Monday night," Ben-Ami wrote.

As Yaacov Lozowick points out:

I don't know in what way J-Street represents 170,000 people, and he doesn't explain; nor am I convinced they're all pro-Israel in any recognizable way. So far as I can tell, however, there are tens of millions of pro-Israel people who listen approvingly to much of what Sarah Palin says, and will be eager to hear her tell about her trip, including the meeting she had with Netanyahu.

So who's the numerically-challenged one in the story?

I also have no idea how Ben-Ami came up with 170,000 people who feel that he represents them, but for fun I just compared J-Street's and Elder of Ziyon's traffic.

According to Alexa, J-Street's site is ranked 551,962 of all Internet sites, and Elder of Ziyon is ranked 172,095. (Within the United States, J-Street is slightly ahead of me, 112,217 vs. 118,793. In Israel, J-Street ranks 11,801 and EoZ ranks 2,457.)

I get roughly three times the number of global readers that J-Street does.

So, I guess I have triple the right to visit Binyamin Netanyahu the next time I'm in Israel. Hell, I think he should make a stop to the Elder Manor the next time he comes to the US! I demand a one-on-one meeting!

I really need to learn how to whine better, like Ben-Ami. It could do wonders for my traffic. Maybe Ha'aretz will quote me as well!

I have a piece of advice for Ben-Ami: When the leader of Israel doesn't think you are pro-Israel, perhaps you aren't pro-Israel.

Nasrallah supports Arab/Muslim uprisings - except for two

From Ya Libnan:

Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah appeared again today on TV via video link to praise the revolutionaries and protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen for their “faith and high spirituality.”

Addressing the protesters he said : “We are with you and we are ready to help you “

He did not mention anything about the protests in Iran and Syria, despite the fact that several protests have taken place in Iran against the regime and 6 protesters were killed Friday by Syrian security forces and dozens were injured.

I'm sure it was an oversight. After all, Nasrallah is so interested in democracy!

Anti-semitism at SOAS; Israel supporter bitten

From TheJC:

A pro-Israel protester has been taken to hospital after being bitten on the cheek outside SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, today. Police arrested two men on suspicion of affray and they were being held in custody at a north London police station.

Four supporters of Stand With Us had decided to go to SOAS after learning that a Celebrate Palestine event was taking place as part of Israel Apartheid Week. Two of them, Tony Coren and Gili Brenner, went inside the university and had a number of conversations with the student participants. Mr Coren said: "We had placards and some information packs, and we had some very interesting and civilised discussions."

But suddenly, Mr Coren said, the atmosphere turned hostile. "About four or five people were standing around Gili, Ro'i Goldman, and the fourth member of our group. One man began to say some extremely unpleasant things about Jews. He said that the best thing the Jews had ever done was to go into the gas chambers. One asked if he could film him. The man said yes, adding that 'these things should be heard.'"

Another man then came forward and told the abusive man that he did not have to be filmed or interviewed. Despite the abusive man agreeing to be filmed, Mr Coren said, the second man, who was "big and burly and of Middle East appearance," allegedly launched himself at one of the counterprotesters, grabbing at his camera, punching him and then biting him on the cheek.

"There was a struggle and the university security guards came out. A number of other people then began to say we shouldn't be there. The president of the union came out and said we had made our point. A policeman strongly advised us to leave."

Ro'i Goldman, who plans to study in the UK next year, said he was very shocked by the experience. But Tony Coren said he was not shocked, but was angry that the university authorities had indicated that by their very presence, the Stand With Us protesters had possibly provoked the attack.

The alleged victim was taken to University College Hospital.

These are the same protesters that were using my "Apartheid?" posters.

(h/t many who sent this to me)

Benny Morris owns Ilan Pappe (link to full TNR article)

Benny Morris exposes Ilan Pappe as a fraud in a quite definitive way.

From TNR (thanks to TNR for giving a pass-through link beyond the paywall for EoZ readers):

At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.

Here is a clear and typical example—in detail, which is where the devil resides—of Pappe’s handiwork. I take this example from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. On February 2, 1948, a young Jewish scientist named Aharon Katzir came to see David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine.

Two months earlier, the General Assembly of the United Nations had recommended the partition of the country into two states. The Zionist establishment had accepted Resolution 181, but the Palestinian Arab leadership, and the surrounding Arab states, had rejected it—and Palestinian militiamen began to shoot at Jewish traffic, pedestrians, and settlements. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun.

Katzir had come to report to the man managing the Jewish war effort (Ben-Gurion also held the defense portfolio in the Jewish Agency Executive) about an experiment that he and his team in the Haganah’s “science branch” had been conducting. As was his wont, Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary what his visitor told him. (Ben-Gurion’s diary, a major source on Israeli and Middle East history, consists almost entirely of his summaries of reports by people coming to see him; very few entries actually enlighten the reader about what Ben-Gurion thought or said.) The entry reads:

Aharon: ‘Shimshon’ [the operation’s codename], an experiment was conducted on animals. The researchers were clothed in gas masks and suit. The suit costs 20 grush, the mask about 20 grush (all must be bought immediately). The operation [or experiment] went well. No animal died, the [animals] remained dazzled [as when a car’s headlights dazzle an oncoming driver] for 24 hours. There are some 50 kilos [of the gas]. [They] were moved to Tel Aviv. The [production] equipment is being moved here. On the laboratory level, some 20 kilos can be produced per day.

This is the only accessible source that exists, to the best of my knowledge, about the meeting and the gas experiment, and it is the sole source cited by Pappe for his description of the meeting and the “Shimshon” project. But this is how Pappe gives the passage in English:

Katzir reported to Ben-Gurion: “We are experimenting with animals. Our researchers were wearing gas masks and adequate outfit. Good results. The animals did not die (they were just blinded). We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.”
The translation is flecked with inaccuracies, but the outrage is in Pappe’s perversion of “dazzled,” or sunveru, to “blinded”—in Hebrew “blinded” would be uvru, the verb not used by Ben-Gurion—coupled with the willful omission of the qualifier “for 24 hours.” Pappe’s version of this text is driven by something other than linguistic and historiographical accuracy. Published in English for the English-speaking world, where animal-lovers are legion and deliberately blinding animals would be regarded as a barbaric act, the passage, as published by Pappe, cannot fail to provoke a strong aversion to Ben-Gurion and to Israel.
Such distortions, large and small, characterize almost every page of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. So I should add, to make the historical context perfectly clear, that no gas was ever used in the war of 1948 by any of the participants. Pappe never tells the reader this. Raising the subject of gas is historical irrelevance. But the paragraph will dangle in the reader’s imagination as a dark possibility, or worse, a dark reality: the Jews, gassed by the Nazis three years before, were about to gas, or were gassing, Arabs. I note also, for accuracy’s sake, that, apart from the 1917 battle for Gaza in World War I, the only people in the Middle East who have used poison gas against their enemies in the past century have been Arabs—the Egyptians in Yemen in the 1960s, the Iraqis in Kurdistan in the 1980s. So there can be no escaping the conclusion that Pappe introduced the subject, and perverted the text, for one purpose only: to blacken the image of Israel and its leaders in 1948. This is also among the purposes of The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty and Out of the Frame.

...Those who falsify history routinely take the path of omission. They ignore crucial facts and important pieces of evidence while cherry-picking from the documentation to prove a case.

Pappe is more brazen. He, too, often omits and ignores significant evidence, and he, too, alleges that a source tells us the opposite of what it in fact says, but he will also simply and straightforwardly falsify evidence.

...About the 1929 “Temple Mount” riots, which included two large-scale massacres of Jews, in Hebron and in Safed, Pappe writes: “The opposite camp, Zionist and British, was no less ruthless [than the Arabs]. In Jaffa a Jewish mob murdered seven Palestinians.” Actually, there were no massacres of Arabs by Jews, though a number of Arabs were killed when Jews defended themselves or retaliated after Arab violence. Pappe adds that the British “Shaw Commission,” so-called because it was chaired by Sir Walter Shaw (a former chief justice of the Straits Settlements), which investigated the riots, “upheld the basic Arab claim that Jewish provocations had caused the violent outbreak. ‘The principal cause ... was twelve years of pro-Zionist [British] policy.’

It is unclear what Pappe is quoting from. I did not find this sentence in the commission’s report. Pappe’s bibliography refers, under “Primary Sources,” simply to “The Shaw Commission.” The report? The deliberations? Memoranda by or about? Who can tell? The footnote attached to the quote, presumably to give its source, says, simply, “Ibid.” The one before it says, “Ibid., p. 103.” The one before that says, “The Shaw Commission, session 46, p. 92.” But the quoted passage does not appear on page 103 of the report. In the text of Palestinian Dynasty, Pappe states that “Shaw wrote [this] after leaving the country [Palestine].” But if it is not in the report, where did Shaw “write” it?

Actually, the thrust of the “Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929,” which appeared in 1930, is completely contrary to what Pappe asserts (though it does list some non-lethal Jewish provocations—peaceful demonstrations, a newspaper article—as among the immediate triggers of the eruption of the Arab violence). The report states: “The fundamental cause, without which in our opinion disturbances either would not have occurred or would have been little more than a local riot, is the Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future.” As to the riots themselves, the report states: “The outbreak in Jerusalem on the 23rd of August [the start of the riots] was from the beginning an attack by Arabs on Jews for which no excuse in the form of earlier murders by Jews has been established.” The disturbances “took the form, for the most part, of a vicious attack by Arabs on Jews accompanied by wanton destruction of Jewish property.... In a few instances, Jews attacked Arabs and destroyed Arab property. These attacks, though inexcusable, were in most cases in retaliation for wrongs already committed by Arabs in the neighborhood in which the Jewish attacks occurred.”

Pappe repeatedly asserts, in order to demonstrate an Arab readiness for conciliation, that the Palestinian leadership in 1920-1922, including Hajj Amin, was “ambiguous” about Zionism and “was willing to compromise.” This is nonsense. Indeed, Hajj Amin was tried and convicted in absentia by a British court for helping to incite the murderous riots of April 1920.
Some of Pappe’s “historical” assertions are, quite obviously, politically motivated, but they are mistakes nonetheless. He refers to “statements made by Jewish and Zionist leaders about the need to build the ‘Third Temple.’” Husaynis often leveled that charge against the Jews, in order to incite the Muslim masses. But which important Zionist leader in the 1920s advocated the construction of a Third Temple? None whom I can name. Later Pappe reinforces this lie by remarking that “Palestinian historiography, including recent work that draws on newly revealed materials, suggests that the mufti’s concern was not baseless, and that there really was a Jewish plan to seize the entire Haram [Temple Mount].” Pappe offers no evidence for this extraordinary assertion.

Pappe repeatedly refers to “Harry Lock” of the British Mandate government secretariat in the 1920s—but the chief secretary’s name was Harry Luke. Pappe obviously encountered the name in Hebrew or Arabic and transliterated it, with no prior knowledge of Luke against which to check it: if he had consulted British documents, he would have known the correct spelling. Pappe refers to “the Hope Simpson Commission”—there was no such commission, only an investigation by an official named John HopeSimpson. He refers to “twenty-two Muslim ... states” in the world in 1931, but by my count there were only about half a dozen. He refers to “the Jewish Intelligence Service”—presumably the Haganah Intelligence Service—and then adds, “whose archive has been opened to Israeli historians but not to Palestinians.” To the best of my knowledge, this is an outright lie. All public archives in Israel, including the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv, which contains the papers of its intelligence service, are open to all researchers.

Read the whole thing, which also shows that Pappe has no problem making up facts about his own history as well!

(h/t Folderol and Mr. K. Dilkington)

Hamas deploying wire-guided anti-tank missiles?

The Palestinian Arab media is quoting Israeli sources (which I cannot find*) that Hamas is deploying a wire-guided anti-tank system.

According to the reports, on Friday the IDF for the first time faced a Russian-made 9K111 Fagot (AT-4 Spigot) anti-tank system, as they were fired upon near the security fence. No damage was reported.

Hezbollah has more sophisticated wire-guided missiles.

The Spigot has a range of up to 2.5 kilometers.

Israel recently successfully deployed in the field the Trophy tank anti-missile system, and it was used this morning to neutralize an anti-tank missile.

*UPDATE: Since I queued this post this morning, two Grad rockets have slammed into Ashkelon and two people were treated for shock. In the JPost article it says

Hamas’s so-called “return to direct terror activity” began Friday with the firing of a guided anti-tank missile at an IDF jeep on patrol along the Gaza border.

This is the second time in a month that a guided anti-tank missile has been fired from the Gaza Strip. The IDF believes that Hamas and possibly other organizations have a significant arsenal including Kornet, Faggot and Sagger-guided anti-tank missiles.