Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 24, 2011

"Palestinian traditions and morals" (video)

(h/t Joel)

New record/ Begathon/ Open thread

This month I have gotten 120,000 page views, making this the best month for EoZ ever - beating out July 2010, the Mavi Marmara month.

And there is still a week to go.

The posters I have been featuring - Apartheid?, Real Liberals Love Israel and now The Face of a Terrorist - have been very popular, and seem to have given me lots of new readers, as my daily averages keep going up and up.

The "Apartheid" posters in particular are now all over the place. It has been printed in newspapers (more coming, I am told.), hundreds have recommended it in Facebook and people are forwarding them in email chain letters.

I'm getting more emails than usual, which also take time to answer (please forgive me if I didn't answer you). And lots of the emails are of the type "why don't you make a poster of X?" Hey, I'm fast, but it still takes time to find the right photos and how to make it look nice! But thanks for the emails, even if I don't answer.

I also have an article about hasbara in the upcoming Passover issue of Young Israel Viewpoint, under my nom de plume Eldad Tzioni.

Also some relatively well-known people in the hasbara community have been contacting me to see if we can work together, which is really cool. Nothing to report yet, but it is still fun talking to people who have been behind some very well-known initiatives.

Like movies.

Not bad for a month when I was so busy in real life as well!

Yesterday I received a very generous donation from a remarkable woman who, I later found out, has over the years helped literally thousands of disadvantaged people go to college in Israel. She's really amazing. When I thanked her, she responded, "It is a pleasure to know that people like you exist."

Now, that's a nice compliment!

It is great to see that as I continue to take my own advice from my Hasbara lecture, it is paying dividends for the blog and, hopefully, for the pro-Israel community.

Since spring has officially started, it is a good time for me to ask that if you enjoy the blog and the hard work I do, to please consider a donation.

You can make a one time donation in the upper right corner of this page, or sign up for a monthly donation. If you prefer, you can also choose to buy something from the Elder Store, or pay the $5 to watch my Hasbara 2.0 lecture.

A big thank you to all those who have donated to EoZ! It really does help, and I do deeply appreciate any and all donations. (So does the long-suffering Mrs. Elder.)

Now...open thread time!

Miral - the posters (updated)

The pro-Palestinian Arab movie "Miral" is being released after a gala premiere at the UN. The New York Times has run a couple of stories on it already.

I have not been following the controversy about the movie that closely, and I do not know if the movie is as anti-Israel as some claim it is.

But I am offended by the movie's poster:

The implication of the poster is that the nice young woman portraying the protagonist (who is actually an Indian actress, by the way) could not possibly be a terrorist because of her innocent looking face. To me, it also implies that Israel, or perhaps the West, unjustly considers all Palestinian Arabs to be terrorists.

Unfortunately, a friendly face does not exclude the possibility of a young woman being a terrorist:

(h/t Jon Y)

UPDATE: Yisrael Medad had a special request:

Egyptian army forces women protesters to take "virginity tests"

Ain't Arab democracy wonderful?

From Amnesty International:

Amnesty International has today called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity tests’, inflicted by the army on women protesters arrested in Tahrir Square earlier this month.

After army officers violently cleared the square of protesters on 9 March, at least 18 women were held in military detention. Amnesty International has been told by women protesters that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges.

‘Virginity tests’ are a form of torture when they are forced or coerced.

"Forcing women to have ‘virginity tests’ is utterly unacceptable. Its purpose is to degrade women because they are women," said Amnesty International. "All members of the medical profession must refuse to take part in such so-called 'tests'."

20-year-old Salwa Hosseini told Amnesty International that after she was arrested and taken to a military prison in Heikstep, she was made, with the other women, to take off all her clothes to be searched by a female prison guard, in a room with two open doors and a window. During the strip search, Salwa Hosseini said male soldiers were looking into the room and taking pictures of the naked women.

The women were then subjected to ‘virginity tests’ in a different room by a man in a white coat. They were threatened that “those not found to be virgins” would be charged with prostitution.

According to information received by Amnesty International, one woman who said she was a virgin but whose test supposedly proved otherwise was beaten and given electric shocks.

(h/t Silke)

Abbas exposed as a liar on video

From Palestinian Media Watch:

It doesn't get more blatant than this!

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

West Bank rejoices over terror attack

From the Palestine Times, which is a Hamas mouthpiece:

We missed these scenes for a long time: The joy of the West Bank after the bombing in Jerusalem

Having missed the scenes of the explosions and operations that targeted Zionist buses in Jerusalem for years...

Despite condemnation by the Fatah leadership, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and described that operation as "terrorist", there was joy in the street despite the pain experienced in the cities of the West Bank.

Upon hearing the news of a bus bombing in Jerusalem, citizens hurried to the coffee shops to follow up on television news channels and radio stations to track the latest developments.

Abu Mohammed from Nablus, sitting in a café, said: "By God, it's about time for such operations, which warms our hearts and the hearts of all who [suffer] from the oppression of the occupier recently."

He added: "The occupation only understands the language of force and blood. The netanyahu government claims they want peace in public, but carries out massacres against the Palestinian people everywhere. "

Joseph, 20, from Ramallah, said as he put headphones on his ears to listen to the radio for news on the blast: "This is surely a response to the massacre carried out by the occupation authorities in the Gaza Strip, that claimed the eight martyrs, including 3 children."

He added: "The Palestinian people have become convinced that the Netanyahu government only understands the language of force and operations such as what happened today in Jerusalem."

"The people want the return of martyrdom operations .. people want to end the occupation."

There are those who expressed their joy of such events. Samira from Ramallah: "When I saw the breaking news on one of the satellite TV news and there was an explosion on Jerusalem, the joy made my heart stop."

A young man recalled happy memories of Tulkarm for operations similar to what happened today...

Others Palestinian citizens went into social networking sites like Facebook and forums on the World Wide Web, to express their joy and the news firsthand. The majority stressed our people's right to respond to crimes of the occupation.

Cutting and pasting from Reuters' "terrorist" quote

Looking at Google's cache, I can see that it was not only Reuters who wrote yesterday this disgusting phrase:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a nice article about this phrase.

But the exact same phrase was used in reports by CNN (since changed,) Sky News (since changed) and the Daily Mail (also since changed.) In none of those articles was Reuters credited. (Of course, many, many news sites still have the original Reuters report with that phrase, but they at least credit Reuters.)

Not that we needed any more evidence of how lazy many reporters are, but to plagiarize an already offensive sentence is really something.

(h/t Joel)

Morning links

The UNHRC will only vote on six anti-Israel resolutions in the coming session. That's out of 14 that criticize specific countries. See how moderate they have become?

Richard Landes coins a neologism: "neo-progs." And he uses it well.

Barry Rubin on why terrorism flourishes.

A British MP slams the BBC for its non-coverage of the Fogel massacre.

Isi Leibler says to get tough with Hamas now.

Honest Reporting notes that Western reporters are a lot more skeptical of wild Libyan claims than they are of wild Palestinian Arab claims.

FrontPage Magazine notes what I had noted recently about that ridiculous map of Arab land - but directs its criticism towards Juan Cole, who has helped popularize it.

Is the terror escalation because of Abbas' planned Gaza visit?

Last week, Mahmoud Abbas announced plans to visit Gaza for the first time since Hamas took over.

It is possible that much of the recent escalation in rocket attacks, and perhaps even the Jerusalem attack, is an effort to stop that visit.

There has been much discussion in the Palestinian Arabic media about this planned visit. Hamas itself is divided over it, something that they even admit themselves. From Palestine Press Agency:

Official Hamas sources confirmed the existence of differences between the movement's leaders of the initiative of Abbas, and said: "Yes, there are differences in views toward Abbas's visit to Gaza" pointing out that it does not rise to the level of a dispute. "We do not have any allergies to any differences of opinion because there is a specific mechanism for decision-making, The differences in this case will be decided by opinion and the Shura Council."

The view of a senior official in Fatah is that Abbas's visit to Gaza has raised fears within Hamas, saying, "Definitely, if Abu Mazen went to Gaza, the masses will come out to receive support for his initiative because there is a strong desire to end the division [between Hamas and Fatah] ... These things frighten and confuse [Hamas], and... such a visit would be for them a new referendum on their popularity, they do not want to put themselves in that position or be engaged in this thorny issue," referring to Hamas' refusal to hold legislative elections. He added, "So we are questioning the chances of support by Hamas for Abbas' initiative."

Yesterday there were reports that the political Hamas leaders in Gaza were not against the Abbas visit but the Al Aqsa Brigades and the Syrian Hamas leadership were against it.

All recent polls show Fatah defeating Hamas in any election.

Add to this equation Islamic Jihad and the other terror groups, who now enjoy a cozy relationship with Hamas but who fear a unification that would leave them without their unofficial but substantial political power.

A new terror spree, and the Israeli reaction, would do a nice job at torpedoing any chance for re-unification between Hamas and Fatah.

Which means that in this case, Israel is not even the target of the terror initiative - Fatah is.

Killing and terrorizing Jews is just a bonus.

University of Johannesburg severs ties with Ben Gurion U

From iAfrica:

The University of Johannesburg (UJ) has officially severed ties with Israel's Ben-Gurion University (BGU), deputy vice chancellor Adam Habib said on Wednesday.

"It will happen as per protocol on 1 April," Habib told Sapa.

"We had a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with them and that will now be severed."

Ben-Gurion University, however, had been working with UJ on finding a method to clean algae that has infested South Africa's drinking water. The severing of ties meant the project was likely to come an end, leaving UJ without access to BGU's extensive water expertise.

"There has been quite a lot of scare mongering that if the partnership breaks, South Africa will be confined to bad water quality," Habib said.

"The quality of our water is suffering because we are not spending the type of money on cleaning water that we need to, and not employing skill sets required.

"We can deal with acid rain water in the region if we are prepared to spend money."

UJ's severing of ties with came amidst talk of steep water tariff increases and a warning South Africa could run out of water within the next ten years if nothing was done to supplement water resources.

The Environment and Conservation Association has said that by 2015, 80 percent of South Africa's fresh water would be so badly polluted that no purification process in the country would make it fit for consumption.

The impending disaster that would be created by acid mine drainage, as well as by sewerage and industrial pollution, had on many occasions been brought to the government's attention, with no positive results, the association said.

Ah, these UJ professors are so principled, to be able to set aside the health of their people just to express their hate for Israel! How admirable!

The petition itself is a wonderful example of what a sham academia has become. 400 professors signed onto a petition to sever ties with BGU without any of them actually noticing that much of what the petition claimed are lies.

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has had disastrous effects on access to education for Palestinians. While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation..

Let's see...before the "occupation" the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza had no access to Israeli schools. Now, they do (look at Omar Barghouti.)

And is Israel restricting access to West Bank Arab universities? Well, I know that Jews can't attend them. Maybe that's what they are referring to.

Wait, it gets better:

[BGU's] President, Rivka Carmi, describes the University as a ‘proudly Zionist institution’ [3], which effectively supports the official ideology of the Israeli state.

The signatories of the petition already know that Zionism is evil, so therefore what else needs to be said?

BGU aids and provides academic scholarships and has official protocols for providing
support to army reservist students.

And as everyone knows, the primary purpose of the Israel Defense Forces is to oppress the Palestinian Arabs, not to, you know, defend Israel.

While Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute more than 20% of the country’s population, only 9.5% of B.A. students, 4.8% of M.A. students, 3.2% of Ph.D. students and a mere 1% of the academic staff in Israeli academic institutions are Palestinians [10].

Hmmmm. In 2008, 31,527 whites graduated from South African universities, as opposed to 36,970 blacks - 46% of graduates are white. Yet the population in South Africa is only 10% white. Which means that South African universities are overwhelmingly preferential to white students compared to their proportion of the population! And I am willing to be that the majority of professors at UJ are white. Maybe the world should boycott the university until 90% of its staff and students are non-white!

Perhaps the most telling section of this academic petition are its footnotes. The very use of footnotes is meant to give an aura of scholarship to the factoids being given there. So, for example, we see:

• The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report detailing how Palestinian applicants are three times as likely to be rejected by Israeli academic institutions than Jewish applicants [11].

Footnote 11 refers to a 2005 article in Adalah which itself has lots of interesting statistics - but no citations whatsoever. And that article did not quote the UNCHR, but an Israeli group called Sikkuy, for this statistic.

Of course, that statistic, even if true, is meaningless out of context. Did the study look at equally-qualified students? Did it compare grades and the results of any standardized tests?

From a scholarship perspective, any decent professor would grade this petition a D. Yet 400 academics signed it!

Which just goes to show that hundreds of South African academics are self-righteous hypocrites, who cannot even be bothered to do basic fact checking on a petition before signing it - as long as it adheres to their already pre-existing prejudices.

This sham of a petition was signed by:

- 9 Vice Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors

- 11 Deans and Vice Deans

- 21 Chairs and Heads of Department

- 170 University Professors

- 125 Academic Doctorates

South African academics are prejudiced? Yes, they are.

EgyptAir erases Israel from its website

From YNet:

Egypt Air, the largest airline in Egypt, has removed Israel from the map – literally. On its website, Ynet has learned, Jordan's land reaches the Mediterranean Sea.

The airline's subsidiary, Air Sinai, flies to Israel regularly, but customers seeking flights to Ben Gurion National Airport will have a hard time finding them. On the map are the names of the Mideast capitals – Amman, Beirut, and Damascus – but Israel is nowhere to be found.

The omission is especially odd seeing as the company continues to fly to Israel four times a week. Cairo-Tel Aviv flights were temporarily halted following the recent uprising that overturned the government, but were then reinstated.

YNet is not quite right. The map does show Israel (weird boundaries, but it is there, between Jordan and the sea):

The problem is that EgyptAir erased Israel from its entire website.

In other words, even though EgyptAir flies from Cairo to Tel Aviv four times a week, it is impossible to book a flight:

You literally cannot input "Tel Aviv" or "Israel" in any fields to book a flight.

I could not see how to book a flight via EgyptAir from Cairo to Tel Aviv on Expedia or Orbitz either. So if YNet is correct and there are still flights, I have no idea how to find them. (All I could find are stopovers in Turkey or Jordan. El Al has direct flights that for some reason were not visible in my search on those travel sites either.)