The German who saved 7200 Jews

On September 28, 1943, two days before Rosh Hashanah, a German diplomat in Denmark, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, warned the Danish political leaders (one of whom later became the Danish Prime Minister, as this article indicates) that the Germans were planning to deport all of Danish Jewry to Theresienstadt within days. Duckwitz, a maritime attache, arranged for Sweden to accept the Jewish refugees and delayed the German patrol boats that would have caught the escaping Jews by placing them in dry-dock.

The citizenry of Denmark immediately worked together en masse to arrange for the incredible logistics of transporting thousands of Jews safely to Sweden in only three days. It appears that the final number saved was 7220 Jews and 680 non-Jewish relatives. Of the 500 remaining Jews that were deported, only 51 died, mostly due to Danish pressure on Germany for the well-being of their citizens.

More details can be seen in this article, with additional information here and here.

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Two Haaretz op-eds that actually make sense

Moshe Arens used to be my favorite Israeli politician before he withdrew from politics (and before Natan Sharansky emerged from the Gulag.) His stuff is worth reading.

One mistake after another
By Moshe Arens

Author and columnist Hillel Halkin, who initially had not been critical of the Oslo accords, writes in the September issue of Commentary: "It has long been obvious to all but the incurably or willfully blind that the 1993 agreement signed in Oslo between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization was a horrendous blunder on Israel's part. Rarely in history has a country so foolishly opened its gates to a Trojan horse as Israel did when it welcomed Yasser Arafat and his PLO brigades, handed over to them most of the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank, and gave them the arms to impose their rule on the local inhabitants. How could such a mistake have been made by experienced political and military leaders?"

This probably expresses the view of most Israelis today - those who saw the Oslo accords as a major error right from the start, as well as those who supported them at the time they were signed.

After 45 years of war, belligerency and terror, and after the first intifada, one could perhaps excuse the impatience the Yitzhak Rabin government displayed with the ongoing and seemingly endless conflict - an impatience that led to caution being thrown to the wind, and the subsequent haste and disorderly process that led to the Oslo accords. The enthusiasm with which the agreement with Yasser Arafat was greeted throughout the world, together with the Nobel peace prize awarded to Rabin, Shimon Peres and Arafat, were seen by many as confirmation that the Israeli government under Rabin's leadership had finally taken a bold and courageous step toward the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It took Arafat's erratic behavior, his dictatorial and corrupt rule over the Palestinians under his control, and a quantum leap in the level of Palestinian terror directed against the population of Israel for most Israelis to begin to come to a more sober assessment of these ill-fated accords.

Seven years after the Oslo accords, then prime minister Ehud Barak announced he was going to put an end to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This time, under the watchful eye of the president of the United States at Camp David, and by now presumably knowing full well with whom he was dealing, Barak made Arafat an offer he thought Arafat would not be able to refuse. Arafat was offered major concessions, which had never even been discussed in public, in return for an agreement that would "end the conflict once and for all."

When Arafat, nevertheless, turned down Barak's offer, the latter did not call it quits. With his government by now in tatters and having no mandate for the concessions he had offered, and with an election in the offing, Barak delegated his ministers to offer further concessions in a desperate attempt to reach an agreement before Israelis went to the polls. It didn't work - and not only did it fail, it turned out to be the prelude to Palestinian acts of terror against the Israeli population that set new heights in violence and brutality. It was a major blunder that, in history, will no doubt take its place alongside the Oslo accords. And again, one might ask the question: How could an experienced military leader like Barak commit such foolishness?

But, as is well known, Israelis do not give up easily. If we cannot reach an agreement with the Palestinians, we are just going to solve the problem ourselves - unilaterally. We are going to put some space between us and the Palestinians or, in other words, disengage - even if creating that space means pulling Israeli citizens out of their homes by force. It is almost incomprehensible that this ludicrous idea - that in this tiny country, in which Jews and Arabs live cheek by jowl, we can separate the peoples so as to avoid all contact - has been promoted by another experienced military man and politician, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and has seized the imagination of many Israelis.

The fortuitous demise of Arafat, the arrival of Mahmoud Abbas as elected leader of the Palestinians, has given another boost to this idea, now embellishing it with the anticipation that disengagement will not only get Jews and Palestinians out of each others' hair, but will actually lead to peace between Israel and a Palestinian state.

As happened after the Oslo adventure, and again at the time of Barak's egregious offers to Arafat at Camp David, Sharon's disengagement plan is being praised as a bold and courageous move in much of the world, and the Nobel peace price committee is probably already preparing next year's award. But if, as seems likely at the moment, the Palestinian mini-state in Gaza turns out to be a nest of terrorist activity against Israel, the Noble prize will have to be mothballed and Israel, sobered up for the nth time, will have to go back to meeting the challenge of handing the Palestinian terrorists a decisive defeat, in the realization that this is the necessary condition for progress toward peace in the area.

Hat tip to Israpundit.

In an amazing turn of events, Haaretz also publishes a second op-ed that doesn't suffer from liberal wishful thinking:

If you lie down with missiles

By Yoel Marcus

I wonder how many times we can go on quoting Abba Eban's immortal observation that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity without boring the reader. But what can you do? It still fits. The Palestinians haven't learned a damn thing. They have a morbid knack for making the biggest, most stupid mistakes whenever the door opens a crack and a chance comes their way to establish a state alongside Israel. What prompted them, after the Oslo accords were signed with such pomp and circumstance, to send suicide bombers into the heart of Israeli cities? Why, the moment the Barak, Arafat and Clinton summit ended at Camp David, did they kick off the Al-Aqsa Intifada that left 4,000 people dead on both sides? What is the sense in holding a victory parade in Gaza and then firing a massive volley of Qassam rockets into territories that Israel left of its own will? What is the logic in choosing a critical time, when Sharon is fighting for his political life against rebels in his own party, to bombard Israel with 40 Qassams in one night? What do they want? An Israel led by Bibi and Uzi Landau? For a moment, it seemed that Hamas was abiding by Abu Mazen's request to silence the guns while the disengagement was under way, when Sharon made it clear there would be no withdrawal under fire. But the instant the last Israeli soldier left Gaza, the Hamas chiefs couldn't wait to take credit for "chasing out" the Israel Defense Forces and knocking down the settlements. In a bid to grab the reins when the Palestinian Authority goes to the polls in January, they've been stirring up the crowds as only they know how - until the Qassam explosion that killed 19 Palestinians and wounded 200. Hamas couldn't sell the lie that Israel was behind the blast, even to al-Jazeera. Forty Qassams launched in one night was bad news for Abu Mazen on the eve of his summit with Sharon. Condoleezza Rice raked him over the coals and demanded that he disarm Hamas. Establishing a democracy with armed militias is out of the question, he was told. An analogy would be Lehi and Etzel, Israel's pre-state militias, taking over the country by force after the establishment of the state. David Ben-Gurion, aware of this danger, not only took away the weapons of these militias, but disbanded the Palmach. Those who keep monsters at home shouldn't be surprised when their appetite grows with the eating. The goal of the Hamas leadership is to rule the PA roost. Abu Mazen appears to be too weak to enforce the one government-one army rule. He knows very well that Mussa Arafat, bumped off by Hamas, lived 200 meters from his home in Gaza. Hamas derives its power from the Palestinian street. It would be a strategic error on its part to do anything to bring Israeli artillery, tanks and planes back into firing range, now that the IDF has left the Gaza Strip and the inhabitants have been given a chance to rebuild their lives, free of the shackles of occupation. Put it this way: He who goes to bed with Qassams should not be surprised if he wakes up with a boom. Both Abu Mazen and his interior minister denounced Hamas. When its leaders tried to shift the blame on Israel, it was Abu Mazen who didn't let them get away with it: "Those who brought in combustible materials should have considered the possibility of a match being struck." Nice words, but not sufficient. The president of the Palestinian Authority has enough army and police units, and all the international backing he needs, to deploy them in Gaza in a display of strength against Hamas. Hamas has not only been lambasted by the ministers of the European Union but defined by the Bush administration as a terror organization. For Israel to make more painful concessions for the sake of an agreement, it will take more than the shameful goings-on at the convention of the Likud Central Committee, and more than last night's vote and its consequences. What is needed more than anything is a leader on the other side who is no less forceful than Sharon - a man who is prepared to fight against the extremists and the enemies of peace, and be more than a partner on paper.

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January 22, 1933: Arabs protest Jews leasing land in Transjordan

This small story from 1933 illustrates, more than anything else, the root of the "conflict" between Israel and the Arab countries.

Arabs do not want Jews to own or control land in the Middle East.

Everything else - pretending to care about Palestinian refugees, or about "war crimes", or "international law" or "UN resolutions" - are all lies, window dressing to cover the naked bigotry that stands behind all the bluster. Arab Muslims cannot stomach the weak dhimmi Jews owning any tiny bit of land that was ever under Muslim control. No matter how legally it is acquired, Arabs would be just as livid at the thought of Jews owning land as they are today about "occupation."

Jews are OK as long as they subject themselves to living as second-class citizens in Arab countries, paying their jizya. But once they actually try to act as if they have any real rights, well, that is not acceptable to the mentality of the vast majority of Arabs.

The root of the conflict is pure bigotry against Jews.

It is not even clear if any Jews were interested in leasing (not buying!) the land mentioned in this article, or if it was only a rumor. This doesn't slow down the vitriol, as thousands of Arabs rally against the possibility of Jews controlling any land in sacred Muslim territory.

Notice how at that time the Arabs are not shy in saying their opposition is to Jews, not Zionists; that they call the legal transfer of land "robbery" when it is to Jews; and the now familiar method of subtly threatening the West (in this case, Britain) if they don't cave to the Arab demands.

To understand the Middle East today, read this article from 72 years ago very carefully.

In an ironic footnote, one can find one other mention of Ghor Al Kabad in Transjordan in 1939, where Jews help out the Emir who owns land in the controversial area:

Yes, it truly is awful to let Jews touch "sacred Arab land."

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Jerusalem man kidnapped, killed by Hamas

A Jewish resident of Jerusalem was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and murdered, police said Monday.

The body of Sasson Nuriel, 50, of the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze'ev, who was kidnapped earlier this week was found Monday morning in the Beitunia industrial zone.

Nuriel's body was discovered following a four-day Shin Bet and Israel Police manhunt which resulted in the capture of one of the suspected members of Hamas cell believed responsible for the killing, police said.

Nuriel, who worked as a sweets salesman in the nearby West Bank industrial area of Mishor Adumim, east of Ma'aleh Adumim, went missing on September 21. After police received notification, a massive manhunt was initiated in the area around Jerusalem for Nuriel's whereabouts.

According to the Shin Bet investigation, Nuriel was kidnapped by a Hamas cell active in the Ramallah area on the afternoon of September 21. The arrest of one of the suspected members of the cell Monday morning and subsequent interrogation led police to the victim's body.

Channel Two news reported that a Palestinian worker at the sweets plant was suspected of involvement in the kidnapping, and possibly enticed Nuriel to drive his truck towards the Ramallah area.

The terror supporters that get upset when Israel arrests Palestinians rarely mention incidents like this - pure terror against the innocent.

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Iranian 'news' gets its scare-quotes mixed up

It used to be that Iranian "news" sources would "report" about news from Israel and "Palestine" with a liberal use of "scare-quotes" around the word "Israel," usually referring to it as the "Zionist regime."

Today, for some strange reason, I am seeing that they are scare-quoting "Zionist" and not Israel.

Maybe next they'll start getting rid of the vowels of anything vaguely Jewish, so we'll be reading about "Z**n*sts" and "*sr**l".

LONDON, September 26 (IranMania) - Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi deplored new wave of extensive air raids of 'Zionist' regime against innocent Palestinian people, IRNA reported.

He condemned Israeli air raids against Palestinian activists and said that the extensive air attacks against defenseless Palestinians indicated that (Ariel) Sharon cannot abandon its nature of warmongering and murder.

"The Zionist regime's announcement of withdrawal from Gaza with US green light was a ploy to misuse inattention of the international community, especially those Islamic states which resumed diplomatic relations with the 'Zionists' to pave the way for new round of repressive moves against the Palestinians," Asefi said.

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The media's love affair with Hamas

As a followup to yesterday's media circus, with hundreds of articles breathlessly reporting Hamas' latest lie that they will stop all attacks from Gaza, there was another statement from a Hamas spokesman yesterday:

“We decided to participate in the elections as part of our legitimate struggle against the occupation”, Al Masry said, “Resistance is a legitimate and strategic right, Hamas will not disarm”

Even more explicitly, Hamas' leader Mahmoud A-Zahhar described in a recent interview the true goals of Hamas, going way beyond the destruction of Israel to the establishment of a pan-Muslim state throughout, presumably, the entire areas ever occupied my Muslims (probably including Spain):

TML: What is the final goal of Hamas?
A-Z: If you ask any Palestinian or Muslim, wherever he lives – in America or in Britain or in Indonesia – he would tell you that according to the religious point of view, this land is part of the Arab and Muslim nations. This means, that there is no other option but to reunify this land once again.

TML: What is 'this land' that you are talking about? Are you talking about the whole of Israel?
A-Z: I understand where you are headed, and I will answer you. First of all this Palestinian land, and all the Arabic nation, is all part of the same area. In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state; there was no independent Jordanian state; and so on. There were regions called Iraq or Egypt, but they were all part of one country. That is why it is not permitted to [agree to] establish separate countries, which was the case after the Sykes-Picot Agreement [1916]. Our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic. Therefore, it is not allowed to establish an Arabic state over the land of Palestine alone. Also, remember this land is still occupied. To sum up, the Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state. The European example is clear. Europe's history is filled with wars and blood. Its races are varied, its languages are varied, and nevertheless it established the European Union. The Islamists' view, which Hamas adheres to, is that a great Muslim state must be established, with Palestine being a part of it. Within this state, Israel has no place – its history is different, its language is different, its religion is different, its culture is different, and its security and political affiliations are different. This is the view of Hamas movement.

Why will the mainstream media never place as much importance on Hamas' aggressive statements as on its lies?

There are a couple of possibilities:
1. "Man bites dog" - it is not news when Hamas acts like terrorists, so their statements are not "newsworthy." This would be true, if the media indeed makes it clear in their other articles mentioning Hamas what kind of a record Hamas has in terror and breaking previous "promises" The media's failure to mention this context in Hamas-related article shows that this is not the reason.

2. Liberalism. The liberal media cannot philosophically accept the existence of evil third-world people, and holds that everyone is inherently good, and only circumstances make them do bad things. (Somehow, evil capitalists and Republicans are a given.) So naturally they will trumpet the news that fits their worldview and softpedal the news that contradicts it.

3. Wishful thinking. Related to #2, this is that the media reports the news that they hope is true, rather than the news that is true.

Either way, we are stuck with MSM that will report the news through their less-than-truthful filters, and this results in casual news consumers thinking that a liberal, open, democratic Israel is the aggressor and that Hamas and Fatah are legitimate freedom fighters.

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Media reports Hamas lies; ignores facts

Many hundreds of media outlets picked up on this story earlier Sunday:

GAZA (Reuters) - A senior Hamas leader said on Sunday that his militant group would stop launching rocket and other attacks against Israel, hours after Israel killed a top Islamic Jihad leader in Gaza in an air strike.

'The movement declares an end to its operations from the Gaza Strip against the Israeli occupation, which came ... in response to the assaults by the enemy,' Hamas's most senior leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, told reporters in Gaza.

How many bother to report these stories that came afterwards?

A mortar shell landed in the orchards of Kibbutz Erez near the border fence with the northern Gaza Strip Sunday after midnight.

Earlier Sunday night, a Kassam fell in an open area in the western Negev.

Of course, the media doesn't consider such attacks to be "news" when no one is killed, but how many times has the mainstream media mentioned that Hamas' promises are consistently broken?

On the contrary, despite the many violations of the "cease fire" by Hamas and other Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, the press keeps acting as if they are still abiding by it. See this example as well as this one from AP.

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George Galloway blames Zionists for Hitler

The wacky ramblings of George Galloway plummeted to new depth a couple of weeks ago, in this little reported interview with an obscure far-left blog.. It is hard, however, to distinguish between what is a paraphrase of Galloway and what are the editorial comments of the bizarre blog that interviewed him.(Hat tip to WW4 Report.)

Of course, the past masters of government sponsored terrorism were the Zionists, who created the condition in the Arab countries, and in some European countries to stampede the Jewish populations out of the countries they had been living in for many hundreds years and get them into a Zionist state. Galloway comments:

"Suddenly Jewish people who had been the victims of Christian persecution suddenly saw their Synagogues being blown up, their countries being attacked and all kinds of provocations being staged so packed their bags and moved to occupied Palestine, then to be called Israel."

It's well documented that the United States has adopted such provocation "dirty tricks" before and during the Vietnam war and ever since.

"It's always the case that in a big and complex State machine, there are all sorts of elements, they don't have to be endorsed by all of the political leadership, they can be people representing a trend in the political leadership." Galloway states. He went on to once again lambaste the disgusting Neo-Conservative war crazed movement that had recently attempted to falsify documents to implicate Mr Galloway in the very corruption that they consistently revel in:
[...]
Returning to staged terrorism and Zionism Mr Galloway pointed out that Zionism has nothing to do with Jewishness. The Zionist movement, as it is well documented, funded Hitler before World War Two and many of the figurehead of Zionism were not and are not Jews.

"The reality is these people have used Jewish people, and they have used them with this ideology of Zionism, to create this little Hitler State on the Mediterranean, to act as an advance guard for their own interests in the Arab world, and we're all paying for it, the Palestinians have paid for it, the Arabs have paid for it, and now the American people are paying for it, and why should we? We don't want to live our lives in a permanent state of warfare and division."

The danger in the Arab world is that the people their know we are not evil and corrupt like our governments are, but they also know that we democratically elect our governments, Galloway goes on to decree. They are supposed to act on our behalf and that's why this corrupt version of "democracy" is being flatly rejected across the Arab world.

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Catchy group title

This article makes clear that the sudden pretense of thawing in relations between Israel and some Muslim countries is more the results of US arm-twisting than any real change in attitudes.

But ya gotta love the name of the anti-Israeli group in Bahrain:

At the demand of the US, the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain has announced the removal of its boycott of Israelis goods. The US made canceling the boycott and closing down the boycott offices in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, a condition for a US-Bahrain free trade agreement. The significance of Bahrain’s announcement, however, is unclear.

The Society for Resisting Normalization with the Zionist Enemy in Bahrain criticized the announcement, saying that it was “a strategic decision that requires preliminary discussion in parliament."

I'd love to see a membership card of that "society." Maybe the logo has a hook-nosed Jew killing a dove.

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Gaza greenhouse looting continues unabated

Poor Mort Zuckerman. Imagine what Israel could have done with $14 million.

A week after they descended like locusts on the greenhouses that Jewish settlers nurtured in Gaza, looters continue to pillage what should be a prize asset for a fledgling Palestinian state.

And the Palestinian Authority, which took over Gaza after the Israelis evacuated the territory, appears powerless to stop them.

When a Daily News correspondent visited abandoned Jewish settlements in Gaza, he found brazen vandals dismantling farms that once produced some of the world's finest tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.

The now-gutted greenhouses were gifts to the Palestinian people from U.S. philanthropists, who raised $14 million to buy them from departing settlers.

Palestinian Interior Ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Qusa insisted the damage was limited to 30% of the 4,000 or so greenhouses - and blamed most of the vandalism on spiteful Jewish settlers. 'The Palestinians damaged so little you can't even count it,' he said. (As we've noted, AFP reported those claims as facts.)

One of the philanthropists, Daily News Chairman and Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman, called that assertion 'ridiculous.'

'We thought it was a chance to show the Palestinians that there were more benefits from cooperation than confrontation,' Zuckerman said. 'I'm just sad that they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. ... It's almost inexplicable.'

The World Bank reported 90% of the greenhouses were intact when the Israelis left. Facts on the ground reveal that much of that bounty is now gone.

"All over Gush Katif the greenhouses have been damaged and a lot was stolen from them," Karim said, referring to former Jewish settlements in southwest Gaza. In Gadid, much of the expensive equipment used to tend the crops was stolen. So were the water pumps, irrigation lines and all the fuse boxes.

At the former Katif settlement, a Palestinian soldier, Pvt. Mohamed Cidawi, said looters made off with most of the metal support beams and even stole the plastic and canvas coverings that protected the vegetables from the hot sun.

"Go away," Cidawi shouted when he spied a boy with a sledge hammer preparing to smash a fuse box. "If I see you here another time, I'll kick your ass!"

In the nearby Neveh Dekalim settlement, there were no soldiers to stop 29-year-old Samir Al-Najar and his eight-man crew from demolishing a half-acre greenhouse. Al-Najar insisted the land was his family's before Israel occupied it in 1967 and that he was reclaiming it.

"I want to reorganize the land so we're clearing it out for now," Al-Najar said as two workers carried off a stack of tall metal support beams. Asked whether he intended to sell the materials, Al-Najar shook his head. "We'll probably rebuild with them, but I want the greenhouses to be our own, not Jewish ones," he said.

Sounds like it is time to give them even more money!

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Hezbollah met with Fatah while Egypt border was open

From Maariv-Hebrew, via Daily Alert:

While the Gaza-Egypt border was open last week, senior Hizballah official Kais Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt where he met in El Arish in northern Sinai with leaders of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza, a Palestinian news agency reported.
Obeid is considered by the Israeli security services as responsible for the group's operations in the territories; he was directly involved in kidnapping IDF officer Elhanan Tannenbaum.">Israel News - Daily News Alert from Israel: "While the Gaza-Egypt border was open last week, senior Hizballah official Kais Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt where he met in El Arish in northern Sinai with leaders of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza, a Palestinian news agency reported.
Obeid is considered by the Israeli security services as responsible for the group's operations in the territories; he was directly involved in kidnapping IDF officer Elhanan Tannenbaum.

More evidence of the direction Gaza is going, despite the glowing reviews from wishful thinkers.

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Get ready for "Moderate Hamas"

One of the favorite Arab games in trying to destroy Israel is starting again.

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Hamas could one day amend a charter calling for the destruction of Israel and hold negotiations with the Jewish state, a political leader of the Islamic militant group in the West Bank said.

"The charter is not the Koran," Mohammed Ghazal told Reuters in an interview in Nablus on Tuesday.

"Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions ... The realities are different."

The unprecedented comments by Mohammed Ghazal clashed with recent pronouncements of more senior Hamas officials in Gaza.

But they reflected an apparent shift in Hamas toward the political mainstream and to winning greater world acceptance in the run-up to Palestinian parliamentary elections and after Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Here's the game:

• Kill Jews. The more, the better. Loudly advocate terror, proudly.
  
• While killing Jews, have a few "leaders" make statements that don't sound quite as genocidal as their true intent. Put them in jackets and ties. Trim their beards. The best ones are doctors - always a nice touch.
• Look at all those microphones! All that media attention just for saying what they want to hear!
  
• Have the world start to recognize and reward the meaningless, slightly less terroristic statements.
  
• Ensure that there are still groups that still explicitly call for the genocide of Jews and worldwide terror, so you can look better by comparison.
  
• Do a few more symbolic gestures with no substance whatsoever to solidify your newfound status as a "realist."
• Never, ever criticize the "more radical" groups. They might believe you and then kill you.
  
• Bask in your new political power, achieved with no real concessions whatsoever.
• Get money from gullible Europeans and others aimed at encouraging "moderate voices" and dutifully send the money to your terrorist friends.

It worked (and is still working) for the PLO, and for a while it was working well for Hamas (remember it's "political wing" and "military wing" that the world believed was separate?) Now Hamas is playing the same game again, a terrorist implementation of "good cop, bad cop" where the Western world is playing its part to the hilt.

Using these methods, Holocaust deniers can become "president," suicide bombers can be heroes, children can be taught to hate an entire religion, women can be subjugated, lies can become the official language of the "government," agreements never need to be honored, and you can stil rest assured that the world pressure will not be on you, but on the people you want to destroy. Because you are now moderate, and the "dangerous extremists" are the Jewish teenagers who dare to wear the color orange.

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Muslim scholars slam Egyptian Imam for allowing relations with Israel

This article from Egypt is interesting from a couple of angles.

It shows how Israel's existence is still not accepted, and never will be accepted, by religious leaders of Israel's "peace partner."

It also shows how the famous Al Azhar university, possibly the most influential Muslim institution in the world, will change its religious rulings to be in sync with the Egyptian government. (Read the entire article for more examples of that; this is just the beginning.)

Last week's Israeli withdrawal from Gaza appears to have received the approval of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, who was quick to rule that normalisation with Israel was religiously acceptable.

"Islam does not prohibit normalisation with other countries, especially Israel, as long as this normalisation is in non- religious domains and serves some worldly interests," Tantawi told a gathering at a festival held to mark the national day of Al-Sharqiya governorate.

Tantawi's statement immediately provoked heated debate inside and outside the Sunni world's most prestigious seat of Islamic learning.

Prominent Palestinian Islamic scholar Sheikh Hamed Al-Beitawi, who is also head of the Palestinian Scholars League (PSL), was quick to denounce the fatwa on the grounds that it "greatly serves the Israeli occupation, which is unacceptable in Islam," and urged the Grand Imam to retract it.

"It is obvious that the fatwa was issued following increased American and Israeli pressure on Arab leaders who already have relations with the Zionist state," El-Beitawi said in a PSL statement. He condemned the fatwa as contradictory to Islamic tenets "because it is the religious duty of all Muslims to help their brothers in driving the enemy out of their lands."

Tantawi's ruling seems to have created rifts within Al-Azhar where many scholars criticised the edict, saying it only reflected the personal opinion of the Grand Imam and not Al-Azhar as an institution.

Sayed Khodeir, former head of the research and translation section at the Islamic Research Academy (IRA), said Tantawi's ruling "was political rather than religious. "It is religiously correct to normalise relations with a country you have peace with but not when this country is usurping Muslim lands and killing Muslim brothers and children," Khodeir explained, saying it would perhaps be in the interest of Egypt to have peace and economic ties with Israel but from a religious viewpoint. "Those who don't care about the affairs of their Muslim brothers do not actually belong to them," Khodeir said.

"As Muslims we consider ourselves in a state of conflict with Israel so long as it insists on occupying Muslim lands, desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque and Islamic shrines and massacring Muslims," Khodeir said. "Egypt cannot be regarded as separate from what is going on in neighbouring Palestinian lands."

Prominent Al-Azhar scholar Abdel-Azim El-Mataani added that normalising relations with Israel "is not religiously -- or even logically -- acceptable at this particular time when it is using all sorts of aggression and tyranny against Muslims and posing a threat to Arab national security."

El-Mataani said the IRA had formerly issued an edict condemning normalisation with Israel. Former IRA member Sheikh Ali Abul-Hassan had previously issued a fatwa forbidding an Israeli judo team from playing in Egypt or any other Arab and Muslim country. He described such an invitation as an acceptance of what Israel has done and is still doing to Muslims, including usurping land, money and honour.

"This IRA fatwa sounds more logical because we should never accept the Israeli humiliation of Arab and Muslim nations," El-Mataani said.

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that Israel's very existence, no matter how much land is given to Arabs, is a major affront to Islam as interpreted by most "scholars."

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Poor terrorists don't get paid enough

The US and the EU are falling over themselves to give more money to the PA.

Secretary Rice is a little uneasy over the PA's foot-dragging on disarming Fatah, but not enough to actually stop sending them more money:

"Now, I think it would be a good start for the Palestinians, by the way, if they would disarm the militias of Fatah. That would be a good start. They have a roadmap obligation to disarm terrorist organizations and militias. But as a starting point, because I understand that there are complications with Hamas and there are questions about how capable they would be of actually insisting on disarmament of Hamas."

Abbas has other ideas:

The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday rejected an appeal from the Quartet to dismantle armed militias and called on the international community to stop meddling in the Palestinians' internal affairs.

Ministers of the Quartet – the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union – said in a joint statement Tuesday that following Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians needed to "dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructures."

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the appeal, saying the Palestinians knew how to handle their own affairs.

And where exactly is this money going? A little factoid buried in another article about Palestinian infighting may give us a glimpse:

Hani al-Hassan, a former interior minister in the Palestinian Authority, escaped an assassination attempt on his life Tuesday night when a group of masked men fired several shots at him during a visit to Nablus.

Hassan, who is a member of the Fatah central committee, was not hurt. Sources in the city said the assailants belonged to Fatah's armed wing, Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have issued several threats against Hassan in the past, accusing him of suspending their salaries when he served as interior minister under Yasser Arafat.

Isn't this interesting? Members of the terror group are angry because their salaries were suspended by the PA interior minister?

Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems to imply to me that there is still a relatively consistent funding source directly from the PA to the Fatah terrorists that neither Abbas nor Condi are bothering to address in public. So many "observers" are supposedly watching how the PA is spending its money and no one is uncovering the fact that terrorists are still getting funding straight from the PA?

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Gaza is paradise for Egyptians, hell for Reuters

How many stories have we read that mentioned how terrible the conditions are in Gaza, how overpopulated and destitute it is, how Arabs who live there are in such desperate straits that they have no choice but to turn to terror?

Evidently, Egyptians have a much different picture of Gaza.

Many Palestinian men who flocked into Egypt after the IDF evacuated the Philadelphi corridor have seized the opportunity to search for brides. Palestinian sources estimated on Tuesday that at least 100 Egyptian brides were smuggled into the Gaza Strip in the past week.

One of the brides, who identified herself as Samira, said she agreed to marry the man she met only hours earlier "because this was an opportunity that should not be missed." Samira, 28, lived with her family in Al-Arish.

"In Egypt, it's very difficult for a woman my age to get married because I'm considered too old," she said. "Moreover, the economic situation in Egypt is not as good as in the Gaza Strip."

Another bride from Al-Arish said that she always been dreaming of marrying a Palestinian. "Palestinian men are better than Egyptian men," the 27-year-old said. "They know how to look after their wives and provide for them a decent living."

So it appears that the horrible consitions that Israel forced Gazans to live in is preferable to the everyday conditions of the leading "moderate" Arab country
Meanwhile, Reuters publishes a bald faced lie about Gaza to add to the myth of how unbearable it is to live there:

Palestinians would build 3,000 homes for poor families in southern Gaza at Morag, once a stronghold of settler resistance to the Israeli pullout that Washington praised as a potential spur to renewed peacemaking.

The remainder of the housing will be erected elsewhere across the coastal Gaza Strip, the most densely populated place on earth and home to 1.4 million Palestinians.

As we have shown, this is not even close to true.

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