Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Jewish history in 3 minutes

Cute:

(h/t Joel)

Gaza students still locked out of Egyptian universities

Last month, Egypt's ambassador to "Palestine" assured Gazans that they would no longer have any impediments to being able to attend Egyptian universities and that Egyptian security will not stop them.

However, nothing has changed. Students who were already attending classes are finding that they are not allowed to attend final exams this term. According to one student, some Egyptians blamed Palestinians for being behind the Alexandria church bombing and as a result the security services resumed their restrictions on Palestinian Arabs.

Is it still spring?

UNRWA strike closes Gaza schools, clinics

A violation of Gazans' human rights?

Palestinians working for the UN refugee agency in Gaza announced a comprehensive strike for Wednesday, over the dismissal of three employees union officials say were wrongfully let go.

The strike will last all day Wednesday through Thursday, and see all of UNRWA's unessential services, like schools, clinics, and administration offices close. Nearly 11,500 workers will walk out of their jobs, effecting 238 schools and 25 clinics.

There are numerous similar UNRWA strikes every year in various areas.

It is heartwarming to see how dedicated UNRWA workers are to their jobs.

State Department snubs Jimmy and the Yentas

Off topic but delicious.

From Foreign Policy:

Former President Jimmy Carter and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari were hoping to visit the State Department this week to brief officials on their recent trip to North Korea, but nobody at the State Department was available to meet with them.

Carter and Ahtisaari, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates, had been eager to give their readout of their meetings in North Korea April 26 and 27 to U.S. officials and press their case for a resumption of food aid to the Hermit Kingdom. The two are members of the Elders, a group of senior figures who have been informally engaging with regimes that official governments won't deal with, in the hopes of finding pathways to peace. They traveled to North Korea last month with former Irish President Mary Robinson and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Bruntland. Other members of the Elders include Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi.

But no one at the State Department would meet with them, so the trip to Washington was cancelled.

"The trip was arranged at short notice and due to busy schedules and given everything else going on we were not able to arrange meetings at the right level," a spokesman for the Elders told The Cable. The State Department offered no comment on the situation.

The Chinese, however, had time for the Elders. They spent two days in Beijing April 24 and 25 and had dinner with foreign minister Yang Jiechi. Neither the North Korea nor South Korea leaders met with them, but they did get meetings with high level officials in both countries. Ahtisaari and Brundtland also had meetings in Brussels last week with President of the EU Herman Van Rompuy and several other EU officials.

It's no secret at all that the Elders' trip to North Korea was viewed as extremely unhelpful by the governments both in Washington and Seoul. Chris Nelson reported on April 29 that Clinton reacted strongly when asked in a morning meeting if she wanted to meet with Carter. From the Nelson report:

The performance of President Carter and his delegation in N. Korea this week was either shameful or fatuous...or both...and exemplifies why Carter had no...zero...USG support going in, and even less coming out, per an alleged eye witness account of Sec. St. Clinton at the morning meeting the other day:

"Do you want to meet with Carter?" Clinton is looking at papers, and just says "No." Then she pauses, looks up and adds, "HELL no!!!"

Besides going to North Korea without any administration support, Carter alienated Washington's policy community when he declared at a Seoul press conference on April 28 that "to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people because of political or military issues not related is really indeed a human rights violation."

Former NSC Senior Director for Asia Victor Cha just happened to be in Seoul that day, staying in the same hotel as the Elders, and said that people in South Korea were very upset at Carter's remark.

"People who work on the food issue with North Korea know the very real problems of diversion to the military, and Carter's statement implied that China -- because it gives food unconditionally to North Korea -- is more of a human rights upholder in North Korea than the others, which was not well-received," Cha told The Cable.

(h/t Mike)

NYT's Tom Friedman endorses Abbas' intransigence

Yet more idiocy from Thomas Friedman in the guise of being a concerned observer:

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can't speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel's future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs - between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world - Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.

I repeat: It may not be possible. But Netanyahu has not spent his time in office using Israel's creativity to find ways to do such a deal. He has spent his time trying to avoid such a deal - and everyone knows it. No one is fooled.

Israel is in a dangerous situation. For the first time in its history, it has bad relations with all three regional superpowers - Turkey, Iran and Egypt - plus rapidly eroding support in Europe. America is Israel's only friend today. These strains are not all Israel's fault by any means, especially with Iran, but Israel will never improve ties with Egypt, Turkey and Europe without a more serious effort to safely get out of the West Bank.

The only way for Netanyahu to be taken seriously again is if he risks some political capital and actually surprises people. Bibi keeps hinting that he is ready for painful territorial compromises involving settlements. Fine, put a map on the table. Let's see what you're talking about. Or how about removing the illegal West Bank settlements built by renegade settler groups against the will of Israel's government. Either move would force Israel's adversaries to take Bibi seriously and would pressure Palestinians to be equally serious.

Once again, Friedman tries to sound even-handed - he understands Israel's precarious position, he doesn't know if Israel has a peace partner, he knows that the situation is complex and fluid.

Yet he does not ever mention that all of the intransigence is from the Palestinian Authority. He doesn't point out that even the dovish Israeli governments got nowhere with Abbas, even with specific maps and plans.

To Friedman, there is but one goal: Israel caves to Palestinian Arab territorial demands. And if the PA refuses to make a deal, then Israel must give more, and more, and more until they do.

In Friedman's fantasy world, once Israel shows it is "serious," then somehow some magic pressure will appear that will force the PA to respond. Unfortunately this has never happened. In fact, Abbas' position hardened not during Netanyahu's time in office - but during Olmert's!

What is particularly galling is that Friedman, like J-Street, couches his calls for Israel and Israel alone to make concessions as if he is doing it out of love for Israel. This is garbage. If he loves Israel, he needs to wake up and use his bully pulpit to expose the Palestinian Arab intransigence and constant calls to destroy Israel via "return" - a demand that has not changed one bit since 1948. He needs to expose the incitement in Palestinian Arab society. He needs to expose the fact that the PA has not changed its position one bit since 1988 - and brags about it. He needs to point out that previous Israeli creativity to reach a peace agreement was met not with flexibility but with more demands. All of this is well-known, even to a know-it-all like Thomas Friedman.

That's what someone who cares for Israel would do.

UPDATE: The Islamic Jihad newspaper "Palestine Today" loved this column, quoting it extensively. Which is exactly what one would expect them to do with something written by such a concerned friend of Israel, right?

Iran is really paranoid about Jews taking over Azerbaijan

From Times.AM (Armenia):

The Zionist regime aims to strengthen its position in the region and what is why it develops multilateral relations with Azerbaijan, Iranian arannews.ir informs.

“Jews have fulfilled a wide project of the home-building in the center of Baku. And though the newly-built apartments are announced to be sold, they cost so much that nobody will buy them.

So, this process aims 7000 Jewish families to come and live in Baku,” the Iranian source notes.

I found the article in Aram.ir, which emphasizes that Israelis feel close to Azerbaijan. It notes that the Jews want to use this real-estate ploy to drive Muslims out of Baku.

No pretense here of anti-Zionism - they are saying that Jews supposedly buying buildings is a bad thing.

And their graphic shows the object of their fear and hate quite well:

The entire Aran.ir site is obsessed with the idea of Israel taking over Azerbaijan, with articles about a telecommunications deal between the country and Israel, and a quote from a Muslim cleric saying that Muslims will not stand to see Azerbaijan being friendly to Zionists.

Not only that, but here is an article saying that since Jews are really Khazars, they have a special affinity to many former Soviet regions like Georgia. They Iranians obsessively count how many Jews live in the region and try to figure out Israel's and Jewish leaders' plans.

Here's how they illustrate that article:

Israel really needs to take advantage of this hilarious Iranian paranoia about being surrounded by evil, scheming Jews.

Details of the Bin Laden raid (Navy Times)

Fascinating:

Aboard two Black Hawk helicopters were 23 SEALs, an interpreter and a tracking dog named Cairo. Nineteen SEALs would enter the compound, and three of them would find bin Laden, one official said, providing the exact numbers for the first time.

Aboard the Chinooks were two dozen more SEALs, as backup.

The Black Hawks were specially engineered to muffle the tail rotor and engine sound, two officials said. The added weight of the stealth technology meant cargo was calculated to the ounce, with weather factored in. The night of the mission, it was hotter than expected.

The Black Hawks were to drop the SEALs and depart in less than two minutes, in hopes locals would assume they were Pakistani aircraft visiting the nearby military academy.

One Black Hawk was to hover above the compound, with SEALs sliding down ropes into the open courtyard.

The second was to hover above the roof to drop SEALs there, then land more SEALs outside — plus an interpreter and the dog, who would track anyone who tried to escape and to alert SEALs to any approaching Pakistani security forces.

If troops appeared, the plan was to hunker down in the compound, avoiding armed confrontation with the Pakistanis while officials in Washington negotiated their passage out.

The two SEAL teams inside would work toward each other, in a simultaneous attack from above and below, their weapons silenced, guaranteeing surprise, one of the officials said. They would have stormed the building in a matter of minutes, as they’d done time and again in two training models of the compound.

The plan unraveled as the first helicopter tried to hover over the compound. The Black Hawk skittered around uncontrollably in the heat-thinned air, forcing the pilot to land. As he did, the tail and rotor got caught on one of the compound’s 12-foot walls. The pilot quickly buried the aircraft’s nose in the dirt to keep it from tipping over, and the SEALs clambered out into an outer courtyard.

The other aircraft did not even attempt hovering, landing its SEALs outside the compound.

Now, the raiders were outside, and they’d lost the element of surprise.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Watcher)

Poll: 70% of PalArabs expect a new intifada if peace talks fail

In the latest Palestinian Center for Public Opinion poll, we learn:

A plurality of Palestinian Arabs support resumption of peace talks with Israel without preconditions - 40.2% versus 25.2% who oppose them. This is at odds with PA policy.

Also a slight plurality believe that Israelis are interested in peace - 45.5% against 44.7%.

One question revealed more the biases of the pollster than the feelings of the people:

When asked “ In case all efforts towards peace have collapsed, which of the following options are most probable to administer Palestinian affairs?” more than one-third 37.4% of Palestinians are for the dismantling the PA and holding the international community responsible for the legal vacuum that will arise, whereas 24.7% are in favor of declaring a Palestinian state and escalating resistance, 34.6% for keeping the “ status quo” with developing new strategies to run Palestinian affairs, and 3.3% say “do not know”.

To the pollster, unilateral declaration of a Palestinian Arab state is obviously going to be accompanied with increased "resistance," not with peace!

The most important result was that over 70% of the respondents expect a third intifada to break out if peace talks "stumble." Which probably means that the chances are very high for a new outbreak of violence if a Palestinian Arab state is declared unilaterally - since that shows that the peace talks have already failed.

Dopey soccer star supports a new intifada

A soccer (football) star from Real Madrid, Marcelo Vieira, put up this photo on his Facebook page on Sunday:

The caption is "My heart with Palestinian now as they fighting with Israel."

Nice to know that some haters of Israel haven't quite yet figured out that they are supposed to pretend to love peace while they advocate the destruction of the Jewish state.

So far, that comment has garnered some 3,300 "Likes."

Abbas' NYT editorial, rewritten to reflect the truth

What Mahmoud Abbas would have written had he told the truth:

SIXTY-THREE years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian Arab boy left his home in the Galilean city of Safed and went with his family to Syria. His family left out of an vague fear of what a future in a Jewish state might be like, but not because they were in any danger. He never saw any Jewish troops. His family was not expelled. The child took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees. Though he and his family wished for decades to return to their home, they had chose the wrong side in the war. And although his family would happily have become Syrian citizens so they could live in honor and dignity, this right - that of citizenship - was denied. That child’s story, like that of so many other Palestinians, is mine.

This month, however, as we commemorate another year of our free choice to leave our homes — which we cynically call the nakba, or catastrophe — the Palestinian people have a new gimmick to enable us to start a new stage in the eventual destruction of Israel and return to our ancestral homes that no longer exist: this September, at the United Nations General Assembly, we will request international recognition of the State of Palestine on the land that Jordan had illegally annexed and that Egypt had taken over in 1949; land that those Arab countries never considered to be "Palestine" and which Israel won in a war where combined Arab armies tried to destroy her. We want this state, which we rejected in 1938, 1947, 2001 and 2008, to be admitted as a full member of the United Nations - without us having to compromise on our demands to ethnically clean all Jews from the land.

Many are questioning what value there is to such recognition while the land is itself in dispute. Others have accused us of imperiling the peace process. We believe, however, that this UN stunt will enable us to get everythign we have been demanding without actually having to compromise with Israel, and without accepting her right to live in peace and security. This will allow us to do what we have been tryign to do the entire time - get 100% of our demands met without having to give up a thing.

It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Jews happily accepted this compromise, even though their land would have been indefensible and crazily shaped. The Jews accepted the plan even though it didn't include their own holiest cities. The Palestinian Arab leadership, however, rejected the compromise plan outright. Shortly thereafter, my people attacked their Jewish neighbors - people they had lived with for decades - in unspeakably brutal ways. Bus bombs, sniping, even knife attacks became the norm that Jews had to live with in their own homes. Only after months of incessant attacks by Arabs did the Zionist forces start an offensive that ultimately expanded the amount of land they controlled beyond the UN partition lines. Five Arab nations simultaneously attacked in May 1948, and Israel won again as my people fled in fear, often believing hugely exaggerated rumors of Zionist massacres.

Now we want to pretend that none of that happened and that we should not have to pay a price for consistently choosing terrorism over peace, war over compromise.

Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Palestinian Arab leadership, however, happily accepted a Transjordanian plan where the West Bank would become part of what was to become Jordan. We never asked for a state while the Jordanians and Egyptians ruled us - except within Israel's 1949 armistice lines, lines that were never accepted by the international community as a border.

Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would allow us to change the rules again, to rewrite history and pretend that we are not responsible at all for the problems of the past 63 years, most of which were inflicted by our own corrupt leadership and the very Arab leaders who continue to use us as pawns in their own political games against Israel. The Arabs and even Palestinian Arab leaders are the ones who kept us in camps, not Israel. Even today, under my rule and under Hamas rule, not a single "refugee" camps has been dismantled - because the misery the people are under comes in so politically useful to us.

We don't want our quest for recognition as a state to be seen as the stunt it is, even though we have lost many of our men and women in similar political theater - for example, when we rejected the Camp David proposals for peace. We go to the United Nations now because we don't want to compromise, because we always viewed the "peace process" as a means to gain everything we want without having to give up anything, because we want to distract the world from the simple fact that Israel has been the only party to compromise since (in my own words) 1988. We want to pretend that we have given up on wanting to destroy Israel, but in reality we continue to insist on a "right to return" thathas no basis in international law and whose entire purpose is to destroy Israel demographically. We have been negotiating with the State of Israel for 20 years without coming any closer to realizing a state of our own because we have not given up on one inch of land we consider ours - land that we explicitly said we have no claim on in 1964, when Jordan controlled it.

We have rejected negotiations for about two years now, even under identical conditions that we used to negotiate regularly with Israel. We are using "settlements" as an excuse, but also the world's bias against the Likud, to pressure Israel to give up even more - even after they have given up Area A to our control, as well as Gaza. Now we have made a conscious decision to embrace Hamas, a recognized terror group, and to reject the peace process with Israel.

We are demanding statehood even though we do not fulfill the criteria of statehood listed in the Montevideo Convention, the 1933 treaty that sets out the rights and duties of states. We have no defined territory, and in fact there never was an independent country named Palestine. Our land cannot be considered legally "occupied" because there was no accepted state there beforehand - because of our own rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan made by the same UN that we now embrace. The permanent population of our land is supposedly the Palestinian people, yet we do not want them to move from their camps into our nation, but into Israel instead. Our cynicism is extraordinary, yet we have world sympathy on our side.

Our economy is completely dependent on our enemy, Israel. The only reason things have been getting better for us is because Israel has wanted real peace while we have been using them to chip away at the territory controlled by the hated Zionists. Our security cooperation has been to please the United States, not out of any desire for real peace.

The State of Palestine will include Hamas in its government. As soon as we get our recognition, Hamas and Fatah can resume their Intrafada and their squabbles as we have in the past. The chances for real democracy and real freedom in the state of Palestine is extraordinarily small. But that's fine, because since 1948, our real goal has never been to establish a state but to destroy one. Once admitted to the United Nations, we believe that the world will back us on all of our demands. In fact, our declaration of a state will lead to perpetual war and misery for the people I pretend to love.

A key focus of negotiations will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on our purposeful misinterpretation of Resolution 194, which the General Assembly passed in 1948. Of course, that resolution is not binding; it says that Jerusalem (as far as Bethlehem) would be an international city, and the very phrase that we pretend means we can overrun Israel with millions of Arabs can also be interpreted to mean that Jews can live in the West Bank where they lived before 1948. However, we have see the International Court of Justice ignore international law in our favor in the past, as well as the UN becoming a tool that the Arab League can control vis a vis Middle East issues, so we will rely on this continuing.

"Palestine" would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another, however, and not as a vanquished people ready to accept whatever terms are put in front of us. The fact that Palestinian Arabs have consistently backed tyrants and dictators like Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein should not impact our political strength. We just ask the world to forget our history of embracing terror and choosing war instead of peace.

We call on all friendly, peace-loving nations to believe our lies and our revisionist history. We want them to believe that somehow a unilateral move will lead to peace, even though it will do the opposite. We want the international community to forget that we tore up the idea of compromise so many times and instead tell them that they "promised" us a state six decades ago - a state we rejected while that Jews embraced it. Only if we get this combined scheme of an independent "Palestine" and a push to move millions of Arabs into Israel, destroying the Jewish state, will we have fulfilled the wishes that our first leader and my personal hero, the Mufti of Jerusalem, made so clear - to ethnically cleanse all Jews from the Middle East.

(original op-ed here, h/t idea by RB)

UPDATE: Israel Matzav did the same thing, upon the same person's idea.)

Local PA elections delayed - to October

The local elections that were to be held in July in the Palestinian Arab territories have been postponed, officially so that they can be set up in Gaza as well.

By sheer coincidence, the new date for these elections happens to be October 22 - after September.

I wonder why?

Muslim teens in Brussels are 4x more antisemitic than their peers

From Islam in Europe:

Half of the Muslim students in Brussels are antisemitic, according to a study 'Jong in Brussel' by the Youth Research Platform. The chapter on antisemitism was written by sociologist Mark Elchardus of the VUB. The study was conducted by the universities of Ghent, Leuven and the Dutch-speaking VUB. It polled 2,837 students in 32 Dutch-speaking high schools in Brussels.

About half of the Muslim respondents in the survey agreed with the following statements:

Jews want to dominate everything (total: 31.4%, Muslims: 56.8%, Non-Muslims: 10.5%)

Most Jews think they're better than others (total: 29.9%, Muslims: 47.1%, Non-Muslims: 12.9%)

If you do business with Jews, you should be extra careful (total: 28.6%, Muslims: 47.5%, Non-Muslims: 12.9%)

Jews incite to war and blame others (total: 28.4%, Muslims: 53.7%, Non-Muslims: 7.7%)

Mark Elchardus says that the non-Muslim/ethnic Belgians responses in this study are comparable to similar polls in Flanders. "What is alarming is that you can describe half of the Muslim students as antisemitic, which is very high. What's worse is that those anti-Jewish feelings have nothing to do with a low educational level or social disadvantage, which is the case by racist Belgians. The antisemitism is theologically inspired and there's a direct link between being Muslim and having antisemitic feelings."

Catholics and Protestants were also more anti-Jewish than secular students, but not as much as Muslims. Religious and practicing Christians scored on average 12 points more than the secular students. Religious Muslims scored 28 points higher. However, while very religious Christians were much more antisemitic than less religious Christians, there was no such difference among Muslims.