Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Fatah's terror wing says it won't give up its weapons

Is there any real difference between Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party and Hamas?

Once again, the answer is no.

Just like Hamas said that its Al Qassam Brigades will not give up its weapons in any "unity" agreement, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades of Fatah has said exactly the same thing.

Abu Mohammed, spokesman of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades Nidal division which operates in Gaza, said, "I do not think that the weapons of the resistance will be a roadblock on the subject of Palestinian reconciliation. On the contrary, Palestinian reconciliation will unite the Palestinian rifle against the enemy, both at the political level and at the military level."

The spokesman added, "We in the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades will not allow anyone, whether The current government in Gaza or the Ramallah government or a government of national unity to withdraw weapons of the resistance because they are legitimate weapons and directed against the enemy."

Abbas, of course, told gullible Westerners that he had dismantled the al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades in 2008. He lied.

Here they are, today:

And they are in the West Bank as well as Gaza.

As far as I can tell, they are on Fatah's payroll, and very possibly getting indirectly financed by Western governments who bend over backwards to pretend that Mahmoud Abbas and his party are the moderate, peaceful guys.

You would think that people would have caught on to the "good cop, bad cop" routine by now. Because the Fatah and Hamas terrorists are laughing every day at the stupidity of the West.

05/08 Links Pt1: Palestinian Magical Thinking; Jordan is Eastern Palestine

From Ian:

Palestinian Magical Thinking

The Palestinian elite and their children live comfortable and privileged lives in Ramallah and elsewhere in the region and beyond it. Combining this with diplomatic and political activity can be pleasant and rewarding. Combining it with military activity, by contrast, could be harmful and has already been proven not to work.
So expect more furious and pathos-filled denunciations of Israeli crimes from various UN committees largely staffed by the representatives of sundry dictatorships.
Expect Saeb Erekat and the others to come up with yet more inventive reasons as to why Islam and Arabic are “indigenous” to Jerusalem while Judaism and Hebrew represent foreign implants. And so on, and so forth.
And at the end of all this, expect more failure, more bewilderment and a pause until the next alternative to a negotiated peace is stumbled upon. This is the nature of the magical thinking that lies at the core of Palestinian Arab politics.
This politics, in its various manifestations, exists to reverse the verdict of the war of 1948. It has no other purpose.

Ex-ICC prosecutor warns Palestinians on anti-Israel war crimes effort

The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on a visit to Israel, urged the Palestinians to proceed with caution as they consider pursuing war crimes charges against Israel. He said it would be preferable for the two sides to work out their differences directly.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo said the Palestinians should not rush ahead with a case against Israel, saying they could expose themselves to the same accusations.

White House Escalates Secret Media War Against Israel

Indyk, a longtime Middle East hand and peace negotiator, has for years personally disliked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to these sources.
“It’s been going on for many years,” said one former Israeli diplomat, referring to Indyk’s leaks to the press. “He was defending the Palestinians. That is a long time story. His antipathy to Netanyahu is also a very long story. It’s not recent. It goes back years.”
Indyk has enjoyed a long relationship with reporter Barnea and has used those ties to leak stories critical of Israel and Netanyahu, the source said.

Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty field investigator, wrote an interesting article about the challenges of fact finding in war situations.

One of her main points is that eyewitnesses are often unreliable. For example:

In Gaza, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and other places I interviewed civilians who described what they thought were artillery or bomb strikes being launched by far away government forces and striking near their homes – whereas in reality the loud bangs and tremors were caused by mortars or rockets being launched by opposition fighters from their positions nearby. For the untrained ear it is virtually impossible to distinguish between incoming and outgoing fire, and all the more so for those who find themselves close to the frontlines.

Another factor she mentions:

Even if they disregard it, investigators must be alert to the fact that disinformation and misinformation can contribute to shaping the perception of events, the narrative surrounding the events, and the behaviour of people who take it in good faith and internalize it, including victims, witnesses, and others potential sources.

Here Rovera is referring to lies that spread quickly and then become widely believed - including by "unbiased" NGOs - before anyone has a chance to investigate. How many times have we seen that?
She gives a specific example from Gaza:

Fear can lead victims and witnesses to withhold evidence or give deliberately erroneous accounts of incidents. In Gaza, I received partial or inaccurate information by relatives of civilians accidentally killed in accidental explosions or by rockets launched by Palestinian armed groups towards Israel that had malfunctioned and of civilians killed by Israeli strikes on nearby Palestinian armed groups’ positions. When confronted with other evidence obtained separately, some said they feared reprisals by the armed groups.

Meaning that "eyewitnesses" will often claim that there was no terrorist activity in the area of an airstrike and Israel wantonly and indiscriminately killed people for no reason.

This gets wholly believed and parroted by the UN and other NGOs. The Goldstone Report has many such examples.

Unfortunately, in many cases the NGOs themselves are part of the problem. Rovera admits, a little elliptically:

Conflict situations create highly politicized and polarized environments, which may affect even individuals and organizations with a proven track record of credible and objective work. Players and interested parties go to extraordinary lengths to manipulate or manufacture “evidence” for both internal and external consumption.

It is a shame that Rovera didn't include Amnesty International itself as being guilty of this, and she ascribes the lack of objectivity almost only to fake evidence that is created by one side rather than to the ideological desire to find war crimes when none exist.

They might strenuously deny it, but Amnesty and HRW have systemic biases against Israel. This article, while a step in the right direction, only scratches the surface of how NGOs themselves contribute to the culture of lies in order to issue their reports and maintain their funding without doing basic fact checks.

And while Rovera notes that some "eyewitnesses" act out of fear, she doesn't go far enough. At least in the territories, the lies about Israel are repeated so often that the witnesses will often tell Western reporters and researchers what they expect to hear rather than what happened. This isn't necessarily out of fear; it is part of their culture to ensure that Israel is always blamed no matter what. It saturates their media. I cannot count how many times "eyewitness" accounts were found to be complete fiction, and fear didn't enter into the equation. However, many of the "witnesses" happen to work for the largest employer in the West Bank - the PA - which lies constantly.

Not to mention that many anti-Israel activists that will knowingly repeat the most outrageous lies to further their own agenda.

Lets hope that this article can at least open up the discussion of how inaccurate much of the reporting and research is about Israel, even from NGOs that pretend to be objective.

(h/t Sara)

He wears a tie so he's a moderate

Taleb Abu Arar, a Knesset member under the United Arab List, has said that Jews have no claim on the Kotel or the Temple Mount.

He issued a statement saying "no matter how Zionists try to falsify history, they will not succeed. The Jews do not have any right to the Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Buraq Wall Buraq, and there is no statute of limitations [on this issue.]"

Speaking from the Temple Mount in a meeting with the Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation, Abu Arar added that "Zionism is trying hard to defraud, and this is recognized by Jewish rabbis, who deny the Jewish Zionists claims in their right-to Aqsa and the Wailing Wall as invalid."

He said that the Jews who visited the Temple Mount on Yom Ha'Atzmaut "in the shadow of the Nakba" intended to change Israeli public opinion towards building a Temple on the Mount.

"The presence and the leaders of the Islamic movement in al Aqsa are here today... to deal with the break-ins and tackle the extremists trying to enter the Haram and who threatened to storm al Aqsa."

A Palestinian group that calls itself a "Human Rights Center" counted 1300 Jews and Israeli soldiers who went up to the Temple Mount in April, calling each visit a "violation."

Because, of course, Jews have no human rights.

Small children performing Talmudic rituals at the Temple Mount!

The Aqsa Heritage Foundation scours Jewish websites to find photos of evil Jews "desecrating" the "Al Aqsa Mosque" this week. They came up with this:

What they missed is that these children were performing those nefarious Talmudic rituals!

The original webpage that shows these photos of Jews at the Temple Mount on Yom Ha'Atzmaut includes this picture:

The kids are drinking water at the Muslim washing station.

But the caption in the Hebrew site says that the children, before drinking the water, naturally said the appropriate Hebrew blessing that is said before eating or drinking anything.

Out loud!

The formula of the blessings was codified in Talmudic times, so this is clearly a Talmudic ritual!

Then again, the adults managed to sneak a few prayers in before police could stop them:

Here's another photo that caused much angst among the Jew-haters - MK Tzipi Hotovely posing with an Israeli flag, with the Dome of the Rock in the background, declaring that she would love to see the flag fly over the Temple Mount:

It doesn't get much worse that that!

Administrivia: Mailing list is back

After a couple of weeks of looking for a way to restore my daily email digest, I finally found a solution that seems to work. (The first solution had severe limitations on number of emails per month.)

Hopefully everyone that had subscribed to my emails have resumed receiving the emails every day.

Unlike some of the other services I looked at, this one emails the entire article, not just the first paragraph. Photos also get sent (although not videos.)

GMail users may find that the digests are going to the spam folder, so you need to mark them as not spam to get them into your mailbox.

You can subscribe to the Daily EoZ Digest by clicking here or by using the Subscription form on the left sidebar.

New "Apartheid?" poster: Rimon Cafe, Jerusalem

Continuing to add to my viral poster series:

Over 170 of of my posters on all topics can be found here.

(h/t Arsen Ostrovsky)

05/07 Links Pt2: Deep UN, Inside the Infrastructure of Hate; Peace goes by the name Hadassah

From Ian:

The Deep UN: Inside the Infrastructure of Hate

Indeed, even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has conceded that “Israel has been weighed down by criticism and suffered from bias—sometimes even discrimination” in the international body.
The most glaring example of this tendency was UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which horrendously declared Zionism to be a form of racism. Passed in 1975 following a sustained campaign by the Soviet Union, and rescinded in 1991 after a major push by the United States, the resolution triggered a measure of international revulsion, as it symbolized the extremity of the UN’s aversion to one of its own member states. But what few people realize is the extent to which we are still living with the resolution’s influence—especially in the form of a network of extremely well-funded UN structures and offices that have until now remained largely hidden from public scrutiny.
Despite the “Zionism-is-racism” resolution having been annulled, these offices, agencies, and committees continue operating as the engine of the effort to delegitimize the Jewish state and attack it through boycotts, sanctions and divestment. It is these structures and their activities that are being exposed here systematically for the first time.

The Real Palestinian Refugee Crisis

The simplest solution would be to eliminate UNRWA and immediately subordinate all its agencies to the UN High Council on Refugees. This would be equitable and efficient–but since the prospects of such a decision being effected by the UN are slim to none, it is probably more sensible to look for solutions that can be implemented directly by the United States.
Enacting Congressional demands for greater accountability and, especially, bringing UNRWA’s refugee policies into line with those of the rest of the world, would be essential steps toward meaningful reform. At the same time, we must strive to decrease UNRWA’s hold on Palestinian society. The services UNRWA currently provides should be slowly handed over to parallel agencies within the UN, which already provide these services to others, but which have no financial or political interests in perpetuating the problem. In particular, the ultimate goal should be to wean the Palestinians off UNRWA’s largesse completely, and shift the responsibility for providing services and employment to the Palestinian Authority. Doing so would not only be good for the Palestinians, but also for the peace process. It appears that peace cannot be achieved without compromise on the “right of return,” and there can be no such compromise until UNRWA is either substantially reformed or entirely dismantled.

JPost Editorial: For the record

Recently, Jerusalem Post columnist Avraham Avi-hai placed a new word and a new concept before its readers as well as on the agenda of world and Jewish public discourse.
The word is “culturocide.” With the murder of the six million in the Holocaust, two vibrant and living Jewish languages and cultures were murdered as well.
True, pockets of Yiddish- and Ladino-speakers still exist. The languages and cultures are studied in universities, and Holocaust museums devote exhibits to the theme. But Yiddish culture, the living Ashkenazi culture of the Jews of Warsaw and Vilna, Riga and Bucharest, Vienna and Budapest, as well as of hundreds of cities, towns and villages, was destroyed together with the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe. The living Ladino/Sephardi culture was similarly slaughtered along with the Jews of Salonika and Athens, Monastir and Sarajevo.
We are now entering the 70th year since the end of World War II. The number of survivors of the Holocaust dwindles daily. They lived in a world of rich language, press, theater, film, music and literature both sacred and secular.

Second degree "pinkwashing"

We know that anti-Israel idiots pretend that the only reason Israel is gay-friendly is in order to fool the world into thinking that it is something other than a genocidal, bigoted evil entity that must be utterly destroyed - for moral reasons. Therefore, anything Israel does to promote equal rights among the LGBT community is not only false, but immoral itself because it is "pinkwashing" Israeli crimes.

How can they react to this?

Tel Aviv is known as the world’s most gay-friendly city for tourists, but few people realize the extent of social and societal action in which Israel’s LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) community is involved.

One organization of particular note is Adam L’Adam Hizdamnut Latet (Human to Human – An Opportunity to Give). For the last 10 years, it has operated anonymously, providing different kinds of assistance to anyone who asks for it, regardless of sexual orientation, religious observance, ethnic background or age.

“Normally, the LGBT community is perceived as demanding something, such as equal rights, or complaining about something, such as discrimination,” key LGBT leader Avi Soffer tells ISRAEL21c. “The idea of Adam L’Adam is that it is all about giving, both within the community and outside of it.”

It is, claims Soffer proudly, “an LGBT endeavor that is unique to the state of Israel.”

Adam L’Adam Hizdamnut Latet is run exclusively by volunteers — 10 full-time staffers, another 100 or so who donate their time when called upon to do so, and hundreds of others who work per project. Donations are spent fully on the charitable work itself, rather than on overhead and salaries.

The organization tries to fulfill all requests, whether delivering daily meals to the elderly, performing home repairs for someone whose apartment was damaged in a fire, or purchasing school supplies for underprivileged kids or the children of foreign workers.

See how sophisticated Israeli hasbarists are? They not only pretend to be tolerant of LGBTs, but they force (no doubt at gunpoint) them to open up charities to help other disadvantaged people - just to make Israelis look like caring human beings!

This malicious cycle of tolerance and charity and kindness will not stop until every disadvantaged person in Israel is happy - and that would be the worst possible outcome!

Cool Israeli medical holography shown on "Grey's Anatomy" (updated)

From Israel 21c:

The physicians on Grey’s Anatomy are all actors, of course, but the space-age medical imaging technology recently featured on an episode of the popular ABC medical drama is for real.

Viewers of the show saw how RealView Imaging, based in the small Israeli northern city of Yokneam, is making it possible for surgeons to use three-dimensional holography in planning the steps of delicate, complex procedures.

The unique display and interface system projects hyper-realistic, dynamic 3D holographic images “floating in the air” without the need for special eyeglasses or even a conventional 2D screen.

The projected 3D volumes appear in free space, allowing the doctor to literally touch and interact precisely within the image — a breakthrough giving surgeons an unprecedented opportunity for guidance before taking a knife to the patient.

In the episode, Dr. Cristina Yang (played by Sandra Oh) comes across this Israeli cutting-edge technology when she is visiting a wealthy Swiss hospital.

Her former love interest and fellow heart surgeon, Dr. Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington), explains that the holographic reproduction of a beating heart – enhanced with digital the data from X-ray, MRI or ultrasound imaging — can be manipulated and even sliced open virtually.

It is incredibly cool:

UPDATE: Here's the clip from the show (starting at around 2:30, h/t Ian)

05/07 Links Pt1: Proof Abbas deliberately destroyed peace talks; The PLO's manipulation exposed

From Ian:

Top Netanyahu aide: Here’s proof Abbas deliberately destroyed peace talks

In the April 22 letter, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Yossi Cohen, revealed that chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat wrote a policy paper in March in preparation for a Palestinian rejection of American mediation efforts and Israeli overtures — nearly a month before Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made a unilateral move to sign 15 international conventions, ostensibly in response to Israel’s refusal to honor its commitment to release the final round of prisoners, Haaretz reported Wednesday.
In fact, Cohen said, according to a copy of the latter published alongside the report, Erekat had planned the maneuver weeks before Israel announced its refusal to release the prisoners — timing that, according to Cohen, demonstrates that the Palestinian leadership never intended to follow the peace talks through.

The PLO's manipulation exposed

The peace talks crisis let the Palestinian cat out of the bag of lies. There were no excuses for the settlements, borders, prisoners or any of the other niggling obstacles apparently standing between the Palestinian nation and ourselves. The Palestinians simply refused to recognize a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state because they claim exclusive rights to all of "Palestine." Recognizing Israel as Jewish means there will be no "return" for Palestinian refugees, a demand that would ultimately spell Israel's devastation.
The PLO and Hamas' platforms (the two had been divided until now over "jobs" and the "method" of destruction and eventual lordship) blended again when a senior PA official, Azzam al-Ahmad, postured "peace" in Gaza: "No recognizing Israel as the Jewish state," and "yes to the right of return." Such statements exposed "Juha's nail," upon which, a long time ago, the PLO and Hamas hung their explosive belts scheming Israel's ultimate leveling.

Lieberman: It is time to reveal the true face of Abbas

At an Independence Day reception for the diplomatic corps at the President's Residence, Lieberman said, "Regardless of when elections will take place, it is clear that Hamas will win convincingly. This will be the result of the recent agreement signed with Hamas by Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas brought Hamas to power in Gaza, and he is now bringing them to power in Judea and Samaria. However, we are determined to prevent Judea and Samaria from becoming the new Gaza. It is clear that the real problem is not settlements in Judea and Samaria but the clear reluctance of the Palestinians time after time to pursue peace."
Lieberman called for a change in the approach to dealing with the Palestinian Authority.
"It is time to remove the mask from the face of Mahmoud Abbas and say clearly that he consistently rejects peace," he said.

PMO on Peres's Comments: Abbas Never Agreed to Anything

Peres exposed the agreement in an Independence Day interview with Channel 2 News, during which he said that he had held talks with Abbas at the request of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Peres also said that Netanyahu ultimately backed down from the deal.
"Abbas never agreed to anything. Back then as well he just wanted to receive without giving anything in return,” the PMO told Channel 2 News. “This is his method - to be ambiguous until he is pushed to make a decision, and then run away.”
“Anyone who hugs the terrorist Khaled Mashaal on Memorial Day does not want an agreement,” added the PMO, referring to Abbas’s meeting this week with the leader of Hamas regarding a unity pact signed between the sides.

New "Apartheid?" Poster: Shibel Karmi Mansour

Continuing on my wildly successful series...

This photo is a few years old; but it was the most "poster-friendly" one I could find.

Here is what Mansour looks like now, plus a recent article and video about his role in the Israel Prize ceremony.