Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

US Senate to give Palestinians $200 million - without conditions

Unbelievable. Time to write to your senator.

The Senate will restore a presidential waiver to $200 million in fast-track aid for the Palestinians, meaning the money will be spent without conditions.

The removal of the presidential waiver last month by the U.S. House of Representatives would have made it much harder for President Bush to send funds directly to the Palestinian Authority. JTA has learned that the Senate Appropriations Committee will restore the waiver Wednesday when it refers the request to the full Senate. It will keep in place nonbinding language urging the president to assign the money to projects run by nongovernmental organizations, and requiring two spending reviews in the next six months, but restoring the waiver removes any conditions on the aid.

Bush wants to fast-track the aid to facilitate Palestinian sovereignty after Israel pulls out of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank this July.

Sharon's folly, continued

I know I've covered this before, but the follies of "disengagement" keep adding up and the Bulldozer keeps going ahead.

Sharon says (and maybe thinks) that Bush will support him in keeping Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, at least near Jerusalem (another possible retreat for Sharon?) He is apparently hoping that by trading Gaza he can strengthen Israel's hold on the WB.

But Bush is making no such commitment, and anyway the clock is running out on his presidency. Who says the next President will be as sympathetic to Israel as W is?

More troubling is that Israel is not only preparing for rocket attacks on Ashkelon after the Gaza withdrawal - they are expecting it!

And of course Hamas is considering the withdrawal a victory for the intifada and evidence of Jewish weakness.

There are very few reasons being given for this bizarre plan besides those that involve lots of wishful thinking. It didn't work during Oslo and one had to ask why, exactly, people think it is a good idea now to give up the most precious commodity in the Middle East while asking for nothing in return.

Abbas solves terrorist problem!

Abbas, being the brilliant head-of-pseudo-state that he is, decided that he can get rid of all wanted Palestinian terrorists by just hiring them as trusted employees!

I mean, it isn't as if they've done anything that he disapproves of, right?

Notice also the fractured English in this press release from the Palestinian International Press Center.

GAZA, Palestine, April 4,2005 (IPC+Agencies)---Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) issued Sunday a decree to set up two committees in charge of solving the issue of the wanted people by Israel by recruiting them in the PNA institutions

According the local Al Ayam daily newspaper, the decree gave the committees of officials in Gaza Strip and the West Bank two weeks to resolve the issue of the wanted people.

The statement by presidnet office siad that the wenated people will be no more liable to amy attack or chase up by the israelis.

The president moved to contain the chaotic and lawlessness and place all the security service in the west bank in high alert staring in late Saturday evening.

On the other hand, the interior minister Nasser Yousef announced the appointment of an acting interim national security chief Nidal el-Assouri, a veteran security agent, a day after the former commander Hajj Ismail had quit over the Ramallah incident.

Shin Bet foils Museum attack

One wonders how much of the current "calm" is from Palestinians really agreeing to halt attacks and how much is from the excellent work of Israeli intelligence.

Security authorities have foiled a plan in February to stage a terror attack at the Armored Corps Museum at Latrun, near the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Highway.

The story was cleared for publication Monday.

The General Security Service says a Popular Front cell planned to dispatch two suicide bombers and a car bomb to the busy tourist site.

Yousef George Daoud, 27, was arrested in February on suspicion of masterminding the plot, which also included Nadel Mahmed Yousef Abu Alma and Fahmi Basil Avodi, who were detained in January.

Under investigation, the trio admitted they were planning the attack. They picked the site because one of the terrorists was familiar with the area from a former job at the nearby Trappist Monastery.

The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected the Palestinian Authority's claim that it enjoyed sovereign immunity and upheld a lower court ruling ordering it to pay $116 million to the estate of Hamas terror victim Yaron Ungar.

"The defendants [The PA and the PLO] argue that the state of Palestine exists," wrote the court, "that they constitute core elements of the state and that therefore they are immune from suit. This argument has a quicksilver quality. It is hard to pin down exactly when or how the defendants assert that Palestine achieved statehood...

"We recognize that the status of the Palestinian territories is in many ways sui generis (exceptional). Here, however, the defendants have not carried their burden of showing that Palestine satisfied the requirements for statehood under the applicable principles of international law at any time."

Hamas increases range, accuracy of Kassams

I'm sure that they are testing the rockets to make sure that they don't accidentally hit schools or synagogues. Those Hamas thugs are so considerate!

Palestinians are performing testing of the Kassam off the coast of the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving the range and accuracy of the rocket, an IDF Operations Branch official told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.

According to Brig.-Gen. Gadi Shamni, head of the IDF operations department and former division commander of the Gaza Strip, the missiles' range has been increased to 9 km. The previous range reported to the committee has been 7 km. He said testing was also being carried out within the strip.

Shamni said the accuracy of the rockets was also being checked by boats deployed to check the nautical landing sites.

Prime violators hold seats on U.N. rights panel

Freedom House is a human rights organization that actually gets it.

The world's most repressive countries hold more than a quarter of the seats in the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission and their presence has subverted the panel's mandate, a respected watchdog group reported yesterday.
In its annual report on the world's biggest human-rights abusers, Freedom House lists 18 countries as the 'worst of the worst regimes' and notes that six of them -- China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe -- are members of the commission.

Chief rabbi declares Bnei Menashe from India to be descended from ancient Israelites

Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar decided on Wednesday to recognize the members of India's Bnei Menashe community as descendants of the ancient Israelites.
Amar also decided to dispatch a team of rabbinical judges to India to convert the community members to Orthodox Jews. Such a conversion will enable their immigration to Israel under the Law of Return, without requiring the Interior Ministry's authorization.

The International Fellowship of Christians & Jews (IFCJ), a group that raises money among evangelical Christians for Jewish causes, has undertaken to finance the process of converting the Bnei Menashe community and bringing them to Israel.

The Bnei Menashe community consists of close to 7,000 members of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribe, which lives in northeast India near the border of Myanmar (formally Burma). For generations they kept Jewish traditions, claiming to be descended from the tribe of Menashe, one of the ten lost Israeli tribes that were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. and have since disappeared.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the tribe's members converted to Christianity, but about 30 years ago, some of the community began moving back to Judaism and set themselves apart from the rest of the tribe.

A number of researchers who visited the group over the years got the impression that their traditions are authentically Israelite in origin.

Everyone knows disengagement won't help, no one wants to stop it

Yediot Acharonot (Hebrew) reports:

Right after the Gaza disengagement, according to military assessments, the cessation of terrorist attacks will end.
The theater of operations will be Judea and Samaria.
The threat will entail attacks on major roads, military camps, and settlements.
The main threat will come from mortar and Kassam rocket attacks on Route 6 (Trans-Israel Highway) and on the cities of the coastal plain.
The terrorist organizations have started to order rockets, while Israeli security services unite in an attempt to block the smuggling.

Meanwhile, Ha'aretz reports that the Great White Holocaust-Denying Hope is losing power by the day:

Abbas' ongoing conflict with his prime minister, Ahmed Qureia - first over the composition of the cabinet, and recently over Qureia's aggressive statements against coordinating the disengagement from Gaza with Israel - show that contempt for Abbas' authority has even reached the ranks of the PA.

On Wednesday night, the PA security services did conduct patrols of Ramallah, on Abbas' orders, but they refrained from clashing with or arresting the armed men - and yesterday, the PA agreed that these men would also not be arrested or interfered with in the future. When some of these men later strode boldly through the Muqata's front door, no one laid a finger on them.

Almost three months after taking office, it has become clear that Abbas' influence over the armed men, the security services and the leaders of Fatah's institutions is virtually nonexistent. The gap between his exalted international standing and his ability to impose his authority at home is growing, and it is not clear what will remain of his promises to reform the PA and provide personal security to ordinary Palestinians.

And ABC points out that Abbas' tough words don't even last a day:

Palestinian officials Thursday backed away from a pledge to crack down on gunmen who shot up Mahmoud Abbas' office building, underlining the difficulties authorities face in restoring order in the chaotic West Bank.
The Palestinian leader was in the building but unhurt in the gunfire late Wednesday. He ordered his forces to go after the gunmen, who security officials said had "crossed a red line" by attacking the seat of government. But in the light of day, officials adopted a conciliatory line, and one even admitted they feared coming under armed attack themselves.

Under a compromise, the gunmen will be allowed to rejoin their former units in the security forces.

That "red line" sure moves quick in Ramallah.

So it appears that Israel and the US are relying on a weak, lying terror-supporting weasel to enforce his worthless agreements. It appears that Hamas will (or has) taken over Gaza completely, and has plans to take over the PLO, so the homes built by Israelis who sacrificed so much to build on uninhabited land will end up being used by those who are sworn to kill them.

Is there any advantage to "disengagement"? In real terms, it is unclear. Israel is certainly gaining diplomatically in trying to better relations with other Arab countries. It does not appear to be treated any better in the European press, ironically. But most of the advantages are vapor - Israel is hoping that it will have a stronger hold on the West Bank communities, Israel is hoping that major attacks stay low for a few months after disengagement (no one is realistically thinking that the violence will not return within a couple of years), Israel is hoping that Egypt will help stop smuggling of weapons into Gaza, Israel is hoping that Kassam rockets won't pour into Negev towns, Israel is hoping that Palestinians will reduce their endemic hatred of having Jews owning land in the Middle East.

And the downside of giving in to terror is significant.

Sounds a lot like Oslo, when Israel placed its trust in Arafat. And even then, Israel promised its citizens that if Arafat wouldn't live up to his agreements then Israel would re-occupy. In exchange for empty promises, Israel ended up giving up its legal claim to the territories, implicitly agreeing with the world's assessment of Israel as land thief, not as a legitimate claimant to Judea, Samaria and Gaza. And then as now, Israel trusted an American president (who is personally very fond of the Jewish state) to look out for her interests and back her up if she has to defend herself.

But in a world of geopolitics, it is a bit naive to put your faith in personalities rather than clear, enforceable, bilateral agreements in which the penalty for non-compliance is clear and agreed as well.

It does appear that the current Israeli government has not learned the lessons of Oslo well enough. It does not take a prophet to predict that disaster is looming; all we can hope at this point is that it is only a small disaster or that a miracle occurs.

Antisemitic nutcase professor in North Carolina

You have to check out this home page. It's got it all...USS Liberty, Rachel Corrie, the fake "We Control America" quote, bizarre conspiracy theories concerning Israel, ISM links, links to Al Jazeera, and much, much more. Not to mention a link to an Introduction to Islam from a website that supports suicide terror.

This is the type of idiot that is teaching at US colleges.

And, as LGF reports, her final exam reeks of bias. Can you imagine a student passing the course if he or she disagrees with this moron's ridiculous conspiracy-minded premises?

Dubai offended by picture of Jewish kids in school textbook

Once again, we'll see how long it takes NGOs to condemn the bigotry in Dubai....

DUBAI — Education authorities here have promised to review a book taught in an international private school that features a photograph of two Jewish children sporting plaited hair and yarmulke.

Dr Obaid Butti Al Mohiri, the Director of Curriculums Centre at the Ministry of Education, said he would order the withdrawal of the book for primary Class I of the Dubai International School if the complaints raised were found genuine.

Several teachers of the school telephoned Khaleej Times, complaining against the picture, captioned ‘We play together; we stick together’, featured in the book Friends Forever. The teachers said that of all the pictures in the book, the students reacted sharply to only this picture.[...]

When contacted, Dr Mohiri expressed anger that the matter was brought to him. “What should we do when we do not have enough staff to review textbooks in more than 400 schools countrywide?”

Hat tip to Dave at Israellycool.

Internal Columbia investigation clears Columbia profs; blames Zionist students. NY Times colludes in whitewash.

Isn't it nice to be able to handpick the people who are going to investigate you?

Update: Noted liberal columnist Nat Hentoff wrote an excellent article about the bias that the investigating committee had.

Columbia University, after a months-long investigation, has determined that only a small fraction of complaints from Jewish students against anti-Israel professors constituted intimidation.

The faculty committee appointed by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, to investigate a series of student allegations against professors in the Middle Eastern studies department issued a report yesterday largely clearing the accused scholars of blame. At the same time, committee members described a polarized classroom environment in which pro-Israel students disturbed lectures and seminars with inappropriate interruptions.

In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.

One of the incidents not mentioned by the report involves assistant professor Joseph Massad, who allegedly told a class that it was Israelis - not Germans or Palestinians - who shot to death the Israeli Olympic athletes in the 1972 Munich Massacre, according to one of Mr. Massad's former students.

Mr. Massad's alleged interpretation of events is sharply contradicted by historians, who say the 11 Olympic athletes were murdered by their Palestinian hostage-takers in a botched rescue operation conducted by German authorities. Historians have debated whether some of the athletes died in the crossfire between German police and the kidnappers, but the notion that the athletes were killed by Israeli gunfire has not been given credence.

The committee gently criticized Mr. Massad in its report for purportedly threatening to expel a female Jewish student, Deena Shanker, from his classroom in 2002 when she asked him whether the Israeli military warned Palestinian Arab civilians of the West Bank before launching military strikes there. "That provoked him to start screaming, 'If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians then you could leave the class,'" Ms. Shanker told the Sun last fall.

Mr. Massad has denied threatening the student, whose account of the incident has been backed by at least one another student, and said he treats his students fairly and with respect.

The committee said Mr. Massad had no real intention of expelling Ms. Shanker from the class, but he lost his temper and "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism."

The committee, however, did not come to a conclusion on guilt in a separate incident involving Mr. Massad. In an incident that occurred in spring 2002, Mr. Massad is alleged to have refused to answer a question posted by a student, Tomy Schoenfeld, at an on-campus lecture until the student, an Israeli army veteran, told the professor how many Palestinians he killed.

The committee reported that although another student corroborated the incident, "It is conceivable that Professor Massad did not know that Mr. Schoenfeld was a student," and said the incident seemed to "fall into a challenging grey zone."

The committee did not investigate issues of professorial bias in the classroom, stating that it "judged that our charge did not encompass the examination of such matters."

On the issue of anti-Semitism, the committee concluded: "We found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic. Professor Massad, for one, has been categorical in his classes concerning the unacceptability of anti-semitic views."

The committee made no mention of an article that an Iranian professor at Columbia, Hamid Dabashi wrote for an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, last fall in which he wrote that Israelis suffer from "a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture."

In an admonishment to students, the committee stated, "There is a thin line between participating fully and enthusiastically in a discussion, and intervening in a fashion which significantly disrupts the class."

The panel also essentially cleared the professors who on April 17, 2002, canceled classes on the day of an anti-Israel rally on campus and encouraged students to attend the demonstration.

Zionist Cardinal

After years of hearing pro-Palestinian Vatican rhetoric, this is refreshing.

This speech probably dooms his papal chances, but it is still nice to see.

A cardinal considered a candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II delivered a strong message in favor of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land on Wednesday night, rejecting the claim that European Christians' support for the State of Israel is based on Holocaust guilt and saying that all Christians should affirm Zionism as a biblical imperative for the Jewish people.

Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, part of a visiting Austrian delegation, made the remarks in an address at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the topic of 'God's chosen land.'

After asking, 'What does Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] mean to us,' Schoenborn answered by stressing the doctrinal importance to Christians of not only recognizing Jews' connection to the land, but also ensuring that Christian identification with the Jewish Bible not lead to a 'usurpation' of Jewish uniqueness.

'Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to His chosen people,' Schoenborn said, adding that Pope John Paul II had himself declared the biblical commandment for Jews to live in Israel an everlasting covenant that remained valid today. Christians, Schoenborn said, should rejoice in the return of Jews to the Holy Land as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

A Palestinian priest challenged the cardinal on that point, asking how he could preach to his Palestinian congregation that the establishment of the modern Jewish state was not a 'catastrophe,' as they called it, or the result of European powers' guilty conscience following World War II.

Schoenborn responded by saying that "I am myself a refugee" – at the end of World War II, when he was an infant, Schoenborn's parents fled to Austria from Czechoslovakia – and that he felt pained at the unrecognized injustice that thousands of Czechs had suffered. However, he said, both that case and the Arab-Israeli conflict were matters of international law, whereas the chosenness of the Jewish people and their inheritance in the Holy Land were matters of faith that date back to the Bible itself.

Schoenborn also said he hoped the conflict here would be resolved in accordance with international law, and with respect to justice for the Palestinian people. "We are all longing for that solution," he said. "Yet I am not naive. Conflicts are part of [both sides'] love of the land, and always have been... There is no simple solution."

What are Islamic schools teaching? (Daniel Pipes)

March 29, 2005
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2489

"Shocked" is how Aisha Sherazi, principal of the Abraar Islamic school in Ottawa, described the reaction of the school's administration and board on learning last week that two of its teachers had incited hatred of Jews.
And "shocked" was how Mumtaz Akhtar, president of the Muslim-Community Council of Ottawa-Gatineau, described his own reaction to the front-page news about the Abraar school.

But they may have been the only two persons on the planet to be "shocked" to learn that teachers at an Islamic school are promoting anti-Semitism or other aspects of the Islamist agenda. The fact is, inquiries into Islamic schools repeatedly discover just such a radical Islamic outlook. Some examples:

New York City: An investigation by the New York Daily News in 2003 found that books used in the city's Muslim schools "are rife with inaccuracies, sweeping condemnations of Jews and Christians, and triumphalist declarations of Islam's supremacy."

Los Angeles: The Omar Ibn Khattab Foundation donated 300 Korans (titled The Meaning of the Holy Quran) to the city school district in 2001 that within months had to be pulled from school libraries because of its anti-Semitic commentaries. One footnote reads: "The Jews in their arrogance claimed that all wisdom and all knowledge of Allah was enclosed in their hearts. … Their claim was not only arrogance but blasphemy."

Ajax, Ontario, 50 kilometers east of Toronto: The Institute of Islamic Learning is a Canadian emulation of the extremist Deobandi madrassahs of Pakistan. It focuses exclusively on religious topics, has students memorize the Koran, demands total segregation from the Canadian milieu, and requires complete gender separation. Former students complained about the school's cult-like devotion to its head, Abdul Majid Khan, and complained that it is a "twisted religion."

Then there are four leading Islamic schools in the Washington, D.C. area:

The Muslim Community School in Potomac, Md., imbues in its students a sense of alienation from their own country. Seventh-grader Miriam told a Washington Post reporter in 2001, "Being American is just being born in this country." Eighth-grader Ibrahim announced that "Being an American means nothing to me."

A textbook used at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Alexandria, Va., in 2004, authored and published by the Saudi Ministry of Education, teaches first graders that "all religions, other than Islam, are false, including that of the Jews [and] Christians." An ISA class valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was recently indicted for plotting to assassinate President Bush.

The U.S. government revoked the visas in 2004 of sixteen people affiliated with the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, of Fairfax, Va. In the words of the Washington Post, "That decision followed accusations that the institute, a satellite campus of al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, was promoting a brand of Islam that critics say is intolerant of other strains of the religion as well as Christianity and Judaism." In addition, the IIASA is under investigation for ties to terrorism.

The Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences of Ashburn, Va., referred to as a "purported" educational institution in an affidavit justifying a raid on the school, had its financial records seized in 2002 on suspicions of links to terrorism.

Nor are schools the exception among Islamic institutions in North America. A recent study by Freedom House found a parallel problem of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Christian materials in U.S. mosques. The most prominent American Muslim organizations, especially the Council on American-Islamic Relations, spew antisemitism and host a neo-Nazi. The same applies in Canada, where the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, publicly endorsed the murder of all Israelis over the age of eighteen.

So long as Muslim leaders simply declare themselves, in the spirit of Capt. Renault in the movie Casablanca "shocked, shocked" whenever news of Islamist supremacism leaks out, this cancer will continue unabated. The Islamic schools, the mosques, and other Muslim organizations like CAIR and CIC will continue their cat-and-mouse game so long as it works.

It won't work only when outside pressure is brought to bear on them by politicians, journalists, researchers, moderate Muslims, and others. They must state clearly and frequently the unacceptability of Islamist venom. Only then will today's fraudulent "shocked" reaction finally become sincere.

The word "Allah" in Arabic hewed into the eastern wall of the Temple Mount

&amp;amp;amp;lt;img&amp;amp;gt;

Once again, an egregious example of intolerance from Islam. This story is buried because it only happened to a Jewish holy site - imagine the world outrage if a similar incident happened in Mecca? Wars have been fought over less.

Notice also the absence of any response from the Arab world, the Waqf, and the Palestinian Authority.

The double standard is alive and well, and it is time for Jews to take control over Jewish holy sites. The Waqf has shown itself to be irresponsible time and time again, and Jews will protect Muslim holy sites fat better than any Muslim will protect Jewish holy sites. Some things are more important than the mythical "peace process", and when Jews willingly give up their holiest sites to the control of those who want to destroy them, they are giving up their major claim to the land of Israel.

The word "Allah" in Arabic was found hewn into the eastern wall of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, in one of the worst acts of vandalism at the history-rich site in the last several years, archaeologists and eyewitnesses said Wednesday.

The vandalism was discovered late Tuesday night on a half-meter section of the 2,000 year old wall, which is undergoing repair by a team of Jordanian engineers.

Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said that police suspect that one of the Arab workers repairing the wall was behind the vandalism, adding that police had opened an investigation into the incident.

"This vandalism, coupled with Israel's lack of archaeological supervision at Judaism's holiest site is simply lawlessness of the first order on the part of the Government," said Temple Mount expert and Hebrew University archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar.

Mazar's non-partisan 'Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount,' which has been decrying the lack of archaeological supervision at the site for five years now, launched a complaint with police against the vandalism, which
police said would be removed by mid-morning.

Israel's Antiquities Authority had no immediate comment Wednesday.

According to decades-old arrangements in place at the site, Israel maintains overall security control of the Temple Mount while the Wakf or Islamic Trust is in charge of the day-to-day maintenance of the compound.

In the late 1990's, following the construction of an underground mosque at the site, Islamic Wakf officials dumped more than 12,000 tons of earth, with history-rich artifacts, at a garbage dump outside the Old City, an action which Israeli archaeologists called "an unprecedented archaeological crime."

In contravention of the law, Israeli archaeologists from the Antiquities Authority have not been carrying out supervision for more than four years now at the bitterly contested site due to their concern about renewed Palestinian violence.