Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, January 11, 2014

01/11 Links: Ariel Sharon dies at 85, The death of pan-Arabism, Liberman Praises Kerry's plan?

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Israel and the death of pan-Arabism

The post-pan-Arab Middle East exposes the truth that has been obscured for a century. The Jews and their Jewish state are a natural component of our diverse neighborhood, just like the Kurds, the Christians, the Druse, the various Muslim sects, and the Arabs. The demise of pan-Arabism is our great opportunity, at home and regionally, to build the alliances we need to survive and prosper. But so long as our leaders insist on clinging to the now irrelevant dream of appeasing the defunct pan-Arabists, we will lose these opportunities and convince our allies that we are treacherous, disloyal and temporary.

A criminal culture

Since the stupidity of Oslo, Israelis and the PLO have been ‘negotiating’ to arrive at yet another partition of the sliver of Jewish land that exists precariously among the 22 Arab nations of the Middle East and North Africa. The Palestinians have never stopped incitement and terrorism, and they have never negotiated in good faith toward an end to the conflict. They have pursued a strategy of alternating violence and deceitful diplomacy whose objective is the elimination of Jewish sovereignty.
And yet President Obama says they ‘deserve’ a state!
In deciding whether establishing a new state here is a good idea, it makes sense to think about what the character of that state will be. And there is no doubt that ‘Palestine’ will be an aggressor and a locus of terrorism. A criminal culture will produce a criminal state.
How could the embodiment of the philosophy of Yasser Arafat be anything else? (h/t NormanF)

Obituary: Israel’s indomitable protector, Ariel Sharon emblemized military audacity, evolving politics

Ariel Sharon, the general and prime minister who embodied the Zionist notion of the new Jew — a robust man, adept with both plowshare and sword, and feared, hated, and adored for his proficiency with the latter, is dead. He was 85 years old.
Doctors at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer said that Sharon, who had been in a vegetative state for eight years, had suffered renal failure in recent days, which led on Saturday afternoon to multiple organ failure and death.

Kids in Gaza schools learning to kill Jews

Hate 101, as (apparently) Reuters goes to Hamas schools to see what those cute tykes are learning.

Hamas, like all good governments, is investing its money into the next generation.

(h/t Ian)

01/10 Links Pt2: Israel: The first modern indigenous state, Meryl Streep Blasts Walt Disney

From Ian:

Israel: The first modern indigenous state

Just as black people struggled for their rights and basic human dignity during the American Civil Rights Movement, so the Jews continue to struggle for our rights and basic human dignity within our 3,500 year old national home. Just as native peoples everywhere seek to free themselves from the negative influence of hostile conquering populations, so the Jews of the Middle East seek to free themselves from the never-ending hostility of their former masters in that part of the world.
The so-called “Palestinian national movement” is not a national movement of an indigenous people. It is a national movement designed specifically to overthrow the indigenous people and replace that people with the very people who conquered them and held them in something akin to servitude (dhimmitude) for thirteen long centuries.
Like indigenous peoples throughout the world, the Jewish people, too, are worthy of self-determination and self-defense.

Actress Meryl Streep Blasts Walt Disney as Anti-Semitic; ZOA Condemns Actress Emma Thompson

Hollywood actress Meryl Streep blasted Walt Disney as an anti-Semitic misogynist in an unusually long and scathing speech at a film awards dinner on Tuesday night, Variety reported on Thursday.
Ironically, Streep’s nine-minute speech was to honor the actress who portrayed ‘Mary Poppins’ creator P.L. Travers in The Walt Disney Company’s ‘Saving Mr. Banks,’ Emma Thompson, who the Zionist Organization of America denounced on Thursday for her letter in the Guardian advocating for a boycott of Israel’s Habima Theater troupe, which is to perform later this year at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, in London.

Nelson Mandela: Co-opted, Re-mixed and Re-delivered

Anti-Israel activists deliberately manipulated footage of Nelson Mandela, speaking at a 1990 Town Hall meeting anchored by Ted Koppel on ABC Nightline in New York, in an effort to eliminate his declaration "The support for Yassir Arafat in his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secured borders"
Lies. Manipulation. Selective editing. Could these ethically bankrupt anti-Israeli propagandists stoop any lower?

SWU: Anti-Israel Propaganda Exposed

"How Israel plans to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates"

We all know the Arab theory that the two blue lines on the Israeli flag stand for the Nile and Euphrates rivers, symbolizing Israel's dream to expand to a huge state as promised in the Bible.

Today, Arabs and antisemites are convinced that the "Greater Israel" plan is alive and well.

How does that jive with the fact that Israel has been doing nothing but giving land up since 1977?

Glad you asked. You see, it is all explained in this article in a Hezbollah-leaning website, but apparently it got the ideas from this recent Global Research article expanding on old bizarre theories by the late antisemite Israel Shahak.

You see, Shahak was obsessed with an obscure article written in an Israeli journal in 1982 by someone named Oded Yinon. Out of all the hundreds and thousands of articles written by Israelis, Shahak was convinced that this article, available for all to see, represented Israel's real strategy.

The Global Research article says:

When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

The Zionist project supports the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the eventual annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

Greater Israel would create a number of proxy States. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (See map).

The funny thing is that Shahak's translation of Yinon's article has very little to say about Israel actively causing Arab regimes to fracture. In fact, most of the article (and possibly all, since Shahak cannot be trusted to translate accurately) talks about how this dissolution of the Arab world is inevitable, given the hatred between Sunnis and Shiites, different tribes in Syria, Iraq and Jordan, oil rich states run by a tiny elite but not sharing the wealth with the poor citizens, and so forth. In some ways Yinon's article has been vindicated; he pretty much predicted the Arab Spring in 1982. (Yinon does seem to say that Israel must re-acquire the Sinai from Egypt because the loss of its oil would send Israel into an economic tailspin otherwise. That seems a bit quaint nowadays that Israel is looking to be an energy exporter.)

If Israel's strategy in the 1980s was to cause the Arab world to collapse, it failed, as the current Arab Spring upheavals came over 20 years later.

But the beauty of the theory - especially for Shiites - is that the problems in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so forth can now be blamed on Israel, which is behind everything! Sunni leaders are Israel's puppets!

The Hezbollah article says:

The Zionists ruling Egypt want to turn Egypt gradually into a state of no states, as in Somalia, Iraq, as is happening now in Syria; to destroy Egypt to achieve the dream of a Zionist state from the Nile to the Euphrates.

So that explains everything! Israel is going to rule perhaps 150 million Arabs, because it just wants to. The Arab leaders are Israel's puppets. And the Protocols will be realized! Bwahahaha!

(See also this post from 2007 of a reasonable sounding Egyptian going off the rails when discussing this.)

01/10 Links Pt1: Israel kills fewest innocents but takes most heat, Kerry goes home with three No’s

From Ian:

Israel kills fewest innocents but takes most heat

Professor Richard Falk is a top UN official. Recently he declared that Israel wreaks carnage upon the Palestinians, harboring what he termed "genocidal intent." If we want to understand the relationship between the industry of lies and the discourse of human rights, we could do worse than examine the case of this bad man, perhaps a Jew, who is an embodiment of this link.
Let us gauge the genocide claim. In 2013, 36 Palestinians were killed, according to the human rights organization B'Tselem. At least 30 of those were either involved in clashes with IDF soldiers or were members of terrorist organizations. Only a few innocents were killed. The death of each one of them is to be deeply regretted. Yet one should add that there isn't another conflict in the world where the fatality rate among civilians is as low as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In other conflicts it is estimated that between 60 and 90 percent of fatalities are innocents. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are a minority.

IDF Blog: After Mortars Fired from Gaza, Israel Air Force Targets Terrorists, Terror Site

After mortars were fired from Gaza at Israel, the IDF targeted terrorists during their final preparations to launch rockets toward Israel early Thursday morning (January 9). No damage or injuries were reported among the soldiers.

WATCH as the IAF targets a Gazan terrorist site preparing to launch rockets:

Charles Krauthammer: How to fight academic bigotry

Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.
And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.
And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.

Iran says again Israel must be destroyed, and Hezbollah will fire the missiles

This week there was a double memorial service at the Hazrat Zahra mosque in Tehran.

The first person being remembered was General Ahmad Kazemi, commander of Iran's Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution who died in a plane crash in 2006, which some allege was sabotage.

The other was not for an Iranian at all, but for the Hezbollah commander Hassan Lakkis, assassinated a month ago in Beirut.

One of the facts revealed at the memorial is that Hezbollah was "the first nucleus of the resistance in Lebanon was formed by forces of the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards," and that Lakkis was trained by Iran and had a "special loyalty to Imam Khomeini."

The ceremony showed (yet again) how Hezbollah is nothing more or less than a remote arm of Iran's military.

Two banners were set up at the service, showing two quotes: one from Ayatollah Khomeini and the other from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The quote from Khomeini says "Israel must vanish from the entire world."

The Farsi in the Nasrallah photo says "to target Israel, we need only a few missiles." They mistranslated "a few" as "some."

The juxtaposition of the two banners makes an unmistakable statement: Iran is threatening Israel, militarily, and Hezbollah is the means that it intends to use to accomplish that.

At the event, which had many senior Iranian military figures, officials spoke of a "big surprise that Hezbollah has in store for Israel, and that Hezbollah warehouses are filled with highly accurate missiles aimed at Israel. Another speaker spoke of a time, not so far in the future, that will witness "an apocalyptic battle" across the region for the Holy Land.

Iran is supplying even more advanced missiles to Hezbollah - today.

A few years ago when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that "Israel should be wiped off the map/off the pages of time" there was a lot of apologetics saying it was a mistranslation, or that he didn't mean "militarily," or that Ahmadinejad was just a blowhard and didn't set Iranian policy so it was no big deal.

Iran is saying that Hezbollah, as an arm of Iran, will wipe Israel out. There is no ambiguity here. But people who refuse to see the truth will always find reasons to ignore the facts, even when the facts are printed on large banners in English.

Photos of today's Islamic Jihad rally against Kerry

Just another day in Gaza.

This is an Islamic Jihad rally to denounce any possible peace deal - because any deal would allow Israel to still exist, which is against Palestinian Arab principles.

Dr. Mohammed al-Hindi, a member of Islamic Jihad's "political wing," spoke and led the crowd in both marching and in the obligatory stepping on an Israeli and American flags.

Hysteria!

Ma'an says:

A Palestinian inmate in Israel's Ofer prison suffered from "hysteria" after carrying out an extended hunger strike, a prisoners' ministry lawyer said Thursday.

Ehab al-Ghaleet, a lawyer for the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs, said that Thaer Abdullah was on hunger strike for 50 days, as a result of which he was treated in Assaf Harofeh medical center.

Throughout that period Abdullah suffered from brain dehydration and had to stop his strike before he was returned to Ofer prison, al-Ghaleet said.

Abdullah was brought to a psychiatrist when he returned to Ofer due to his hysteria, al-Ghaleet said.

There has not been a psychological diagnosis of "hysteria" for decades.

What would Def Leppard think?

Ma'an goes on:

Since 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel, representing 20 percent of the total population and 40 percent of all males in the occupied territories.

I showed that these numbers are complete fiction a number of times.

Anti-Israel groups love to pick up on ridiculous claims like these.

It would be hysterical - if so many didn't believe and disseminate the lies so easily.

(h/t Bob Knot)

Israeli Arabs really don't want to live in "Palestine" (video)

From Israel's Channel 10; translation by Yoel:

01/09 Links Pt2: Israel Palestine Who’s Indigenous?, Tamar Gas Field Worth $52 B to Israel

From Ian:

Israelly Cool: Israel Palestine Who’s Indigenous?

Now you might ask, why is this important? It is important to indigenous people because we cannot allow the argument that conquerors can become indigenous. If we, as other indigenous people, allow that argument to be made, then we are delegitimising our own rights.
If conquerors can become indigenous, then the white Europeans who came to my indigenous lands in North America could now claim to be indigenous. The white Europeans who went to Australia and New Zealand could now claim to be indigenous. If we, even once, allow that argument to be made, indigenous rights are suddenly devalued and meaningless. This is somewhat peculiar, as those who are arguing for Palestinian “indigenous rights” are usually those who have little grasp of the history, and no understanding of the truth behind indigenous rights.

Report: 2013 Christian Persecution Driven by Islamic Extremism

Of the 14 countries labeled as “extreme persecution,” 11 of them are countries with a predominantly Muslim population, including several Middle Eastern countries such as Syria at number 3, Iraq at number 4, Saudi Arabia at number 6 and Iran at number 9. However, North Korea was the worst offender at number 1.
Egypt, where there has been widespread persecution of its Coptic Christian minority over the past year by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, ranked at number 22. While the Palestinian Territories ranked at number 34.
The report noted that in 36 of the 50 countries, Islamic extremism was the driving force behind Christian persecution.

Tamar Natural Gas Field Worth $52 Billion to Israeli Economy – Ernst & Young

The natural gas in Israel’s Tamar field is worth some $52 billion to the Israeli economy, accountants Ernst & Young Israel said in a new report. The CPA firm will present their report at a gas and energy conference in Tel Aviv next week, according to Israel’s Globes business daily.
The initial findings of the study found that Tamar, which began production less than a year ago, boosted Israel’s GDP by almost 0.5 percentage points, and is projected to boost GDP by 1.5 percentage points for 2014.

Turkey wants to monitor and censor Internet use

From Hurriyet Daily News:

A draft bill will permit authorities to limit access to the Internet and monitor all actions by individuals online and keep such records for two years, daily Hürriyet has reported.

Three articles about Internet usage were concealed within a longer draft bill on the Family and Social Policy Ministry’s organizational structure and responsibilities, Yalçın Doğan, a columnist from daily Hürriyet, revealed yesterday.

The draft law will permit officials to limit keywords more easily, meaning access to videos on video-sharing websites such as YouTube that include keywords deemed problematic by Turkish authorities will be blocked.

All individuals’ Internet records, including details about what sites they have visited, which words they have searched for on the web and what activity they have engaged in on social networking websites, will be kept for one or two years, according to the draft law.

Web providers will also be forced to become members of a new Internet union to be formed under the control of government, Doğan wrote.

The draft bill is designed to “protect the family, children and youth from items on the Internet that encourage drug addiction, sexual abuse and suicide,” according to daily Hürriyet.

And the records of what people do in the Internet are no doubt also meant to protect the family - the family of thugs that is running Turkey.

I received 252 visits from Turkey over the last month, which is not a significant percentage of my readers but which places it at #29 out of 174 countries that visited EoZ. Hope none of my Turkish readers get in trouble.

In other Turkey news, the government is also acting to place the judiciary under its control.

Iran's Khamenei complains about "Satan's" enmity towards Iran

The Supreme Leader comedy show keeps adding new material.

Nuclear negotiations with major powers had revealed U.S. “enmity” towards Iran, the Islamic republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Thursday the official IRNA news agency reported, hours before the resumption of talks in Geneva.

“We had announced previously that on certain issues, if we feel it is expedient, we would negotiate with the Satan (the
United States) to deter its evil,” Khamenei told a gathering.

“The nuclear talks showed the enmity of America against Iran, Iranians, Islam and Muslims,” he said.

Don't expect to see this in the mainstream media, which has lately adopted a new meme that Iran and the US have many strategic interests in common.

Let's not publish any of that "Satan" stuff - it just muddies the waters of how we want things to be.