Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 17, 2015

Friday open thread

Since no one reads the blog on Friday afternoons anyway!

04/17 Links Pt1: A Hamas State of Palestine in Gaza (For Now); Hamas: It’s ‘our right’ to abduct Israelis

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas's Plan: A Hamas State of Palestine in Gaza (For Now)

Palestinian political analysts believe that it is only a matter of time before Hamas succeeds in fulfilling its scheme to turn the Gaza Strip into an independent state.
"The discussion is no longer whether there is a separationist plan for the Gaza Strip, but when and how it would be implemented," said Hassan Asfour, a former Palestinian Authority minister affiliated with Fatah. "It is the duty of the Palestinian Authority leadership to say what it intends to do to foil this plan."
Addressing the Palestinian Authority president, Asfour added: "Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, it is not enough to talk on television about [Hamas's] separation plan. Think of ways to thwart it. Otherwise, no one will say that Hamas 'hijacked' the Gaza Strip; instead everyone will be talking about how the Palestinian Authority leadership abandoned the Gaza Strip."
If and when Hamas carries out its plan and establishes its own sovereign state in the Gaza Strip, the international community, primarily the U.S. and EU, will have to come to terms with the fact that the two-state solution has finally been realized; the Palestinians ended up with two states of their own -- an Islamist emirate in the Gaza Strip and a PLO-controlled state in the West Bank.
The Americans and Europeans will also have to listen very carefully to what Hamas is saying: namely, that a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, or any part of the Palestinian territories, would not end its struggle to destroy Israel and replace it with the State of Greater Palestine.

Melanie Phillips: Out of Obama’s frying-pan into Hillary’s fire?

During her nine years as a senator for New York state, which includes arguably the most Jewish city in the world outside Israel, she posed as a friend of Israel and the Jewish people. Yet this hardly matched her previous or subsequent attitudes.
In November 1999, on a visit to the Middle East while Bill Clinton was in the White House, Hillary publicly appeared with Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha. Mrs. Arafat proceeded maliciously and falsely to accuse Israel of using poison gas against the Palestinians and contaminating with chemicals Palestinian water sources.
Having impassively listened to a simultaneous translation, Hillary gave the terrorist’s wife when she finished a hug and a kiss. After all hell subsequently broke loose, Hillary belatedly criticized all inflammatory rhetoric, dismissed the kiss as the Middle East equivalent of a handshake and claimed that the translation – which reporters who were also listening to it reproduced correctly – was “unclear” and “incomplete.”
There is much evidence of where her real sympathies lie. In his book American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power, Christopher Anderson wrote: “At a time when elements of the American Left embraced the Palestinian cause and condemned Israel, Hillary was telling friends that she was ‘sympathetic’ to the terrorist organization and admired its flamboyant leader, Yasser Arafat.”
Her hostility to Israel has been revealed in her own words and deeds. In her memoir Hard Choices, she accuses Israel of being an occupying force and claims that it denies “dignity and self-determination” to Palestinians in the West Bank. But these claims are malicious distortions employed by Israel’s enemies.

Inside Obama’s Meeting With Jewish Leaders

For 36 years now, Iranian officials have threatened to annihilate Israel. As Basij commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi said recently, “Destroying Israel is non-negotiable.” There may be different centers of power throughout the regime, as Iran experts posit, but everyone agrees with the Supreme Leader that Israel—the “Zionist cancer”—has got to go. Middle East experts and experienced Iran watchers in the West typically dismiss such threats as instrumental rhetoric intended to thrill local bigots and separate the Arab and Persian masses from their rulers. So why take such rhetoric seriously? The Iranians wouldn’t ever really use the bomb. In fact, they’re very clever, rational people.
Of course, if you’re a leader in the American Jewish community, you can’t help but hear Iran’s exterminationist rhetoric in a different frame. So maybe the legacy of Rabbi Stephen Wise was on the mind of American Jewish leaders Monday when President Barack Obama called them to a meeting at the White House. It being Holocaust Remembrance Week, who wants to be remembered as the contemporary version of Wise, who chose to protect his relationship with Roosevelt rather than criticize a president who did nothing to save European Jews from extermination?
“It was one of the tensest meetings I can ever remember,” said one participant who has been invited to many White House sit-downs over the years and requested anonymity. “The president spoke for 25 minutes, without notes,” he told me. “It was very impressive. Some people said very nice things, others expressed concerns, and talked about the role of Congress, and he talked about presidential prerogative, and cited other precedents for it. Lots of people challenged him very strongly, like about taking the threats of dictators seriously when Khamenei says death to America, death to Israel, death to the Jews. The president said he knows what the regime is, which is why he is trying to take away their weapons. He didn’t dismiss what the Iranians say, he just didn’t really address it.”

Muslim on Temple Mount really tries to disrupt Jewish tour guide (videos)

This is pretty funny.

It shows a deranged Muslim man trying mightily to shout over a calm Jewish tour guide who ignores him completely.

As he gets ignored, he starts grunting like an animal. He then walks around aimlessly while shouting, unsure if he wants to be filmed or not.

Meanwhile, while Jews aren't allowed to silently pray on the Temple Mount, Hamas terror rallies are perfectly acceptable, as this video from this morning shows:

People on Facebook call themselves "Death to Jews"

Earlier today there was a rumor, found out later to be false, that the Arab who murdered a Jewish man with his car yesterday had a Facebook page that gave, as his secondary name, "Death to Jews" - in Hebrew.

It was another Arab from Jerusalem:

(This page has since been taken down.)

One other person, a woman from Gaza, uses the same parenthetical name:

When you look in Arabic, you find a number of others (some of which seem to have changed recently):

This person is Italian, and there is nothing about Israel on his page. It seems he just wanted to tell the world he hated Jews but hide it from Facebook.

Most of the people who use "Death to the Jews" as their parenthetical name are, of course, Arab:

This one claims to have actually worked at Facebook.

This one is probably just anti-Zionist, right?

Here's a Facebook page called "Death to the Jews - We are all Palestine" hiding as a concert venue. I don't think he means those across the Green Line.

Other Facebookers try to show off their Jew-hatred in other languages:

Supposedly, Facebook recently tightened up its standards. But they don't seem to look very hard for some kinds of hate.

Fatah terrorists appropriate iconic Iwo Jima image

From the Fatah Facebook page,

This is, of course, appropriated from the famous iconic photo of US Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945, as this comparison of the mirror image of Fatah's poster with the original picture shows:

There is one change, though: US Marines are replaced with masked terrorists.

There is nothing that they won't steal and claim as their own.

IsraAID to Vanuatu after Cyclone Pam (video)

Cyclone-washing, as some Israel-haters would call this.

(h/t Irene)

04/16 Links Pt2: Israel comes to a standstill as sirens blare for Holocaust Remembrance Day

From Ian:

Israel comes to a standstill as sirens blare for Holocaust Remembrance Day

At 10 a.m. on Thursday morning, Israel came to a standstill as sirens blared throughout the country to commemorate the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. During the two minute siren, traffic came to a standstill and people stopped working to remember the Holocaust.
The siren will be followed by a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square attended by President Reuven Rivlin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and other senior governmental, military, and political figures.
Afterward, at the Hall of Remembrance, a ceremonial reading of the names of Holocaust victims will take place.
On Thursday, Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog will speak at a memorial at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.
Also Thursday, the Jewish National Fund and B’nai B’rith will hold a memorial at Jerusalem’s Martyrs’ Forest to posthumously honor a Greek rabbi who led partisans against the Nazis.

JPost Editorial Holocaust remembrance

Even those who were tiny babies then – hidden from the Nazi extermination apparatus that hunted diligently for every last Jew – are elderly today, 70 years after the Third Reich was vanquished.
Soon no one who was alive then will be around to help counter the lies of Holocaust-deniers or the deliberate trivialization and kitschy universalization of the lessons the Holocaust ought to impart to our nation of survivors.
The inexorable march of time is already leaving its stamp even on attitudes here, in Israel, including on Holocaust Remembrance Day. This morning, as we stand in silent vigil for the 6,000,000, there will be those among us tempted to ascribe it all to a one-off regime from long ago, not particularly relevant to today and now.
But, all around us, the hate still thrives and that there are no bounds to the lengths that haters will go to rationalize and justify it.
The falsehoods disseminated by the Nazis and their avid collaborators have been adapted to mutating historical agendas, but the grotesque displays of hypocrisy are no different. The Jewish state is as defamed and demonized as the so-called “Jewish race” had been in order to pave the way for industrialized genocide.
Like their predecessors, the Jewish state’s would-be annihilators posture as morally upright members of the international community and blame the victim for a monstrously magnified set of “unforgivable” sins.

March of the Living begins in Auschwitz

Thousands of young people from at least 45 countries participated in the March of the Living in Poland at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex of camps.
The 27th International March of the Living took place Thursday on Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each country’s delegation was accompanied by a survivor to tell his or her personal story.
Yad Vashem chairman Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yaffo and former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, led the two-mile march from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau extermination camp. Lau told the participants how he survived the Holocaust, and he showed a Torah scroll that had survived and required extensive repair.
Survivor Sigmund Rolat recalled his Polish nanny, Elka, who remained with him in the Czestochowa ghetto in order to protect him.

Two tweets from Iran's Supreme Leader yesterday show that the US has lost its perch as being Great Satan to Israel's Little Satan.

If US officials act agnst Zionists' wishes,they threaten to make them resign or create scandal for them.That’s why they’re Zionists’ yes-men
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) April 15, 2015

US govt has entrusted its economic power & national status to Zionist capitalists’ network & it's them who decide for the US.11/27/14
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) April 15, 2015

Congratulations to Israel on this much deserved honor. Thanks also go to those "Zionist capitalists" for their integral role in controlling the US.

Drinks all around! (Oh, sorry...that's insensitive of me.)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day. It’s a day to honor the Jews who fought their murderers and those who were unable to, and to note the dishonor of those who, while in no danger themselves, failed to act to protect their people.

It’s not enough to have a big emotional catharsis on Yom Hashoah, to cry about the children, mothers, fathers, poets, Torah sages and others who were murdered because of their Jewish blood.

It’s not enough for well-meaning Jewish organizations to put on plays and presentations to bring a sense of the Holocaust to safe and well-fed Jews who otherwise would have little understanding of it.

It’s not enough to present programs about lost shtetl life, Yiddish culture, Jewish food and hazzanut (I guarantee that NPR will broadcast segments full of pathos that will tear out the hearts of their listeners — before they cut to the news program in which they will misrepresent the efforts of today’s Jewish state to keep bloody history from repeating itself).

These things are perhaps necessary, but they are not sufficient. Especially for American Jews, who while refreshing their memories of what happened 75 years ago, need to ask themselves hard questions about how they are responding to what’s happening today. Here are two lessons from the Holocaust and their modern-day applications.

1. You can’t depend on other nations not to endanger themselves for your sake, or even to lift a finger. With a few exceptions (Denmark, Bulgaria) any place that fell under Nazi influence became a furnace for its Jews. Roosevelt didn’t want to be bothered, perhaps, or maybe he thought a few less Jews in the world wouldn’t be a big disaster. The British government made the conscious decision to prioritize the maintenance of colonial control over its route to India over the lives of the Jews that could have been saved had they been allowed to go to Palestine.

2. Listen to your enemies and take them seriously. The Iranian regime talks daily about destroying Israel. It is ‘non-negotiable’, according to an Iranian militia leader. Hamas agrees and so do the supposedly ‘moderate’ elements in Ramallah. Don’t kid yourself. They mean it, just as Hitler meant it.

Today there is a Jewish state, in which about half of the world’s Jews live. It may be the last recourse for European Jews when Europe becomes Eurabia. A few years ago, many would have said that I was being overly dramatic, but not today. But Israel faces growing military threats on every one of its borders, while the modern manifestation of traditional Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism, is tearing at it economically, socially, legally and diplomatically — perhaps not as concrete a threat as the Iranian bomb, but potentially as dangerous.

Do you, American Jew, care about those Israeli and European Jews? If so, you should be fighting your administration’s initiative to ally itself with the Iranian regime and to remove the obstacles to its acquiring nuclear weapons. At the same time, you should be standing up aggressively against the delegitimization and demonization of Israel in your media and universities. Otherwise, you are morally equivalent to those American Jews — including Jewish leaders — who preferred not to rock the boat while the Holocaust was burning in Europe.

Jews in the US have their vision obscured by the thick fog that inundates thinking about Israel, a fog that is pumped out as if by huge machines powered by massive amounts of money, petrodollars from Arab countries, cash from George Soros and his affiliated fund-raising organs (e.g., MoveOn.org), and even money donated to organizations like the New Israel Fund and J Street by naive Jews. The fog is one part Arab narrative, one part vicious lies about Israel’s actions and one part pure Jew-hatred.

Blow away the fog and you find that there really is no hard moral question about whether to support the ‘oppressive, racist apartheid state’ of Israel because it is none of those things. The truth is exactly the opposite: Israel faces hateful, racist, genocidal enemies.

Blow away the fog and look at your president. Look at those he surrounds himself with. Look at what he does, not what he says. You will see a man who is slandering Israel and its leaders, trying to weaken the state while empowering its enemies. America supports Israel, but the Obama Administration does not, and only the American people and its Congress can hold him back from doing even worse.

Let me close with one more point: don’t be smug in your safety, far from Hizballah’s missiles and the Iranian bomb, without a population of extremist Muslims to make your daily life hell, as is happening in Europe.

American Jews have had it very good since the end of WWII and especially since about 1960. That is unlikely to last. Antisemitic incidents are multiplying, and the university campuses are bubbling with Jew-hatred. Even your physical security is not guaranteed, with the infiltration of ISIS and Hizballah into your hemisphere.

There are signs of decay in your political institutions, your middle-class is under pressure, your family structure is cracking up, your government is becoming more authoritarian. All of these things are not good for the maintenance of a free, open, creative society that will also be tolerant of Jews.

Some day you, too may need a strong Israel to fight for your rights in the international arena. Don’t laugh — things change more rapidly than you may imagine. You may even need a refuge.

04/16 Links Pt1: Violence and terror is Fatah’s way; Iran "Deal": West's Surrender Triggering War

From Ian:

PMW: Fatah: Violence and terror is Fatah’s way

A recent post by Fatah on Facebook made it clear that fighting Israel militarily with weapons is still a central Fatah policy. A photo of Fatah members in military uniforms armed with automatic weapons, with the Palestinian flag in the background, featured the following text:
“My enemy, I swear you will not escape the people and the revolution”
[Facebook, "Fatah - The Main Page," April 11, 2015]
The message that violence and terror is legitimate was also highlighted in a video posted on Fatah's Facebook page, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the launching of Fatah. The video commemorated five suicide bombings and a shooting attack against Israeli civilians, in which a total of 55 people were murdered. The video also honored suicide bombers and showed scenes from attacks blended with footage of Fatah terrorists firing rockets

Fatah glorifies terrorists and suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israelis

Iran "Deal": West's Surrender Triggering War

Not only have Western leaders given the Iranian regime the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons; they have let Iran initiate and sanctify a nuclear arms race to destabilize an already volatile region. They have also given Iran the opportunity to get billions of dollars to accelerate its nuclear weapons programs – and they are negotiating to lift all sanctions either early or late so that Iran can get still more.
They also allowed Iran to keep four American hostages: Jason Rezaian, Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati and Robert Levinson, who has not been heard from for years and may be dead. The State Department has said that "their freedom should not be linked to negotiations," so their release was not even discussed. Their immediate release was the first matter that should have been discussed.
What Western leaders have deliberately ignored is the nature of the Iranian regime: Totalitarian regimes never abide by the agreements they sign. Islamists often refer to Muhammad's treaty of Hudaybiyyah. In 628, Muhammad agreed to a 10-year truce with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. Two years later, when Muslim forces had gathered strength, Muhammad broke the treaty and marched into Mecca. Since then, in Islam, no treaty can be made for more than ten years, and even then, it is not a treaty, it is a truce -- to be broken again if Islam's side is strong.

At Memorial, Netanyahu Says Iran Nuke Deal Shows that Lesson of Holocaust Not Learned

Speaking at a ceremony commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a speech delivered Wednesday evening at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum that the nuclear deal being negotiated with Iran showed that the West had not learned the lessons of the Holocaust, Ynet reported:
The Israeli prime minister used the opportunity to remind those watching of the role of democracies in stopping tyrannical regimes. “Leaders of the enlightened countries understood that it was a window of opportunity to establish a new world order based on protecting freedom, eradicating evil, and opposing tyranny. In a loud and clear voice, they pronounced the central lesson of the Second World War for democracies – we must not turn a blind eye to the expansionist intentions of tyrannical regimes. Appeasement of such regimes increases their propensity for aggression, and if this aggression is not curbed in time, humanity could endure much more difficult wars.”
“Many in the world declare that the lessons learned are also valid today. They declare ‘never again’. But as long as these words are not heeded in practice, they are meaningless,” said the prime minister. “I wish I could stand here and tell you the world truly learned from this incomprehensible tragedy. Just as the Nazis hoped to crush a civilization, so Iran strives to take over the region and from there spread onwards, with the stated intention of destroying the Jewish state.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin also appeared to refer to Iran in his speech at Yad Vashem.
“We will not belittle any threats. Nor belittle shameful statements calling for the extinction of the Jewish people. Yet, while we are prepared, we are not scared.”

Egypt's destruction of smuggling tunnels on the Gaza border is having an economic impact - on the price of guns and ammunition.

Firas Press reports that Gaza arms dealers are frustrated by Egypt's actions of destroying tunnels with either explosives or by flooding them with waste water.

Arms dealer "Abu Mohammed" said that arms smuggling operations have been suspended since mid-February and this has had an impact on the availability of weapons, missiles and ammunition which has led to higher prices in the market.

He said that the price of one bullet has gone from between 3-4 shekels up to 7- 9 shekels.

An Egyptian Kalashnikov rifle has gone from $900 up to $ 1,300, and Chinese Kalashnikovs from $1200 to $2000,and Russian versions are now going for $3000.

"The smuggling operations have ceased almost entirely; rarely does one succeed in smuggling very light weapons and ammunition here," he said.

The arms dealer added that the heavy and medium missile smuggling operations completely stopped since the last war on Gaza.

This is just more evidence of the dire economic situation in Gaza, Perhaps the UN and Oxfam can release reports about how much more difficult it is for Gaza terrorists to obtain their basic necessities, and how Israel must therefore lift its "blockade."

Wait - they are already demanding that!

I have always been skeptical of Egyptian claims that Gaza is the source of weapons, explosives and fighters in the jihadist terror in the Sinai. It never made sense that material that had to be smuggled into Gaza from Libya and the Sudan - through the Sinai - were being smuggled back. The jihadists can get weapons far more easily directly from the same sources Hamas was getting them from. The Egyptian government and army simply can't stand the Muslim Brotherhood aligned terror groups in Gaza and use the Sinai terror as their excuse to isolate the sector.

Haaretz columnists seem to be competing with each other as to who can write the most offensive pieces.

Today's entry comes from Ariel Rubinstein, where he enumerates twelve reasons why Israel should abolish Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It is a perfect example of how a brilliant person (Rubinstein is an expert on game theory and a winner of the Israel Prize on Economics) can also be very, very ignorant.

For example he starts off with "Holocaust Remembrance Day should be canceled, because the few who do have someone to remember will not forget those who died, and those who do not cannot truly remember."

In other words, national or institutional memory is meaningless. Why even teach history to begin with? Most of those things happened more than 50 years ago!

Rubiinstein seems to really hate religious Jews, and he wants to distance himself from those that were murdered by the Nazis as not being like him. He writes "anyone who genuinely wants to remember the destroyed Jewish study halls in Poland has no need to take part in the March of the Living at Auschwitz, they can see them in Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim."

Jews in Europe also had libraries and shops and doctor's offices. But anyone can find those things today as well! Why bother to remember them? In fact, they had lives, too - which can presumably also be replicated.

"Holocaust Remembrance Day should be canceled, because a large proportion of the victims of the Holocaust were ultra-Orthodox Jews, and their followers in Israel and abroad do not accept the day as a fitting date to mark the destruction. It would be better to adopt the tradition and to append the lamentation for the Holocaust to the Tenth of Tevet or the Tisha B’Av fast days, on which in accordance with Jewish tradition all of the bitter tragedies of our people are mourned."

But all the other events that Tisha B'Av and 17 Tammuz and 0 Tevet and Tzom Gedalyah happened before anyone today was born! Why remember them when no one alive remembers them?

His most offensive reason, though, is this one:

Holocaust Remembrance Day should be canceled, because it is an unnecessary opportunity for an unapologetic peek at the pornography of death. Anyone who feels compelled to look at pictures of executions or a final glimpse of victims before they die are invited to watch the colorful videos of Islamic State.

What an obscene statement. ISIS wants people to view their videos for a specific reason: to cause fear and to gain recruits from sick people, today. Holocaust films are not meant to be titillating, If Rubinstein reacts to Holocaust films the same way he reacts to ISIS videos, then we have revealed exactly how sick he is.

It is no surprise that his last reason makes a comparison between Jews and Nazis, by saying "The danger of turning into beasts also looms over members of the chosen people."

What a disgusting man.

I wonder how game theory deals with players who are so filled with hate and spite that they cannot be considered rational.