Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 23, 2005

And a Christmas present too

Saturday Night Live's "Christmas-time for the Jews" video.

A real Chanukah present for Elder of Ziyon readers

Over a year ago I came up with an interesting idea.

I am not nearly as fluent in modern Hebrew as I should be, but I thought that since Arabic and Hebrew are so similar, if I could create an Arabic font that used corresponding Hebrew characters, people who were very familiar with Hebrew but who didn't know Arabic letters could read and begin to understand Arabic newspapers. All you have to do is configure your browser to use this font for Arabic, or cut and paste the Arabic to a word processor and then change the font to this HebArabic font.

In other words, change this:

مسؤولون : قريع سحب ترشيحه من الانتخابات

قال مسؤولون فلسطينيون يوم الجمعة ان رئيس وزراء السلطة أحمد قريع الذي استقال من منصبه الاسبوع الماضي ليترشح على قائمة حركة فتح للانتخابات التشريعية سحب ترشيحه. وأضاف المسؤولون أن قريع اتخذ هذه الخطوة احتجاجا على عدم قيام الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس بتأجيل الانتخابات وبسبب دمج قائمتين متنازعتين لفتح ... التفاصيل

Into this:

With only a limited amount of Hebrew knowledge you can pick out the words "Palestinian" and "Mahmoud Abbas", and you see many words beginning with the "al-" prefix.

Here is possibly a shortcut way for Hebrew speakers to learn Arabic.

So I commissioned someone to create the font to my specs, and they did.

It isn't perfect: there seem to be different Arabic standards, right-to-left sometimes gets messed up, and altogether it is not a plug-and-play type thing. I am not doing technical support for this! But it is a fun tool to play with.

It works under Windows but I see no reason it shouldn't work on Macs as well.

Here is the font in ZIP format. Enjoy, and Chag Sameach!

Good news roundup

Israeli creates popular diet with lots of bread
Petah Tikva scientist find gene that causes mental retardation
Copper oxide in textiles keeps bacteria away
Israel lends billions more than it borrows
New high-tech boom in Israel

Two sides to every story?

Which one makes more sense?

Iranian and Arabic news

Israeli news

Israeli occupation troops on Wednesday murdered a Palestinian activist in the northern West Bank town of Hamas.

The troops reportedly arrested and then killed Ziyad Mousa whom the occupation authorities accuse of having killed an Israeli occupation soldier earlier this year.

According to eyewitnesses, Israeli troops stormed a building in downtown Jenin where they killed Mousa.

The eyewitnesses said Mousa was only armed with a pistol and didn't resist arrest.

"Despite this, the troops killed him in cold blood rather than arresting him."
The eyewitnesses described the killing of Mousa as "a cold-blooded murder and extra-judicial execution."
Hamas officials in the West bank called on the international community to condemn the murder.

"Where is the international community which cries out whenever a Zionist is killed or injured?" said one Hamas spokesman in the northern West Bank.

An elite Border Guard unit shot and killed one of Hamas’ commanders in the West Bank town of Jenin wanted by security forces for killing an IDF soldier in November.

Ziad Suleiman Khalil Moussa, 28, of Marka near Jenin, was located in Jenin Wednesday afternoon and killed in exchanges of fire between Border Guard policemen and Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank town.

Moussa was responsible for the killing of IDF Sergeant Yonatan Evron, 20, near Jenin last month.

A trained police dog was killed and a policeman was lightly wounded during the operation. The policeman was treated at the scene and then taken to Afula’s Emek hospital.

Two Palestinian gunmen were also injured and taken to a Jenin hospital in Palestinian ambulances.

Palestinian Authority officials said Moussa’s killing will draw Hamas back into the cycle of violence, after a long period of commitment to a truce with Israel.

NerdTests.com User Test: The Orthodoxy Test.

When even a computerized test cannot categorize me, I know I'm doing something right.

(from Lamed Zayin, via Elie, via OrthoMom, via Town Crier....)

The United States of Islam

It is not easy to understand the motivations behind Iran's Ahmadenijad (see "Towards a psychoanalysis of Iran" and "Media analyzes Ahmadinejad - and gets it wrong"). It is tempting to denounce Ahmadenijad as a madman, or to come up with explanations that are incomplete.

The real explanation is surprisingly simple: Ahmadenijad is positioning Iran to become a world superpower, and to a great extent he has already succeeded.

What makes a superpower? Part of it is military might, to be sure, but a more important component is the ability to lead. Ahmadenijad's rhetoric is not aimed at his people; rather he is stepping into the vacuum that the Islamic world has had for decades - trying to become a leader in the war against Islam's enemies.

There is a strong religious component to this desire, as I have mentioned before and as this article spells out very well, but it appears that Iran's president is aiming not only to make Iran the religious center of Islam, but the political center as well.

How does one assert political leadership of the Muslim world?

Take the one issue that all Muslims agree on (the destruction of Israel) and outdo all of the others.
Take on the undisputed existing world leader, showing bravery where everyone else is frightened.
Create the most powerful military in the Islamic world, one that now threatens the West.
Strengthen industry and scientific R&D to become technologically independent of the enemy:

The Supreme Leader pointed to the threat posed by the global arrogance led by US against different nations and said that under such circumstances, there is not way but, to get stronger, rely upon Almighty God and bolster self-confidence to make use of domestic potentials.
Ayatollah Khamenei said that nations should get stronger in the field of economy, science and politics, adding that reinforcing military and defensive capability is a major need for the nations.

Act as a leader, speaking for other countries (notice the use of the plural "nations" in the quote above)
Improve economic and political ties with more neutral countries. (A significant percentage of the Iranian news agency's stories are about economic initiatives with Europe, Asia and Africa - Iran hardly feels isolated even after its verbal provocations.)
Attack the enemy militarily (Hezbollah, Iraq)

It is worth emphasizing that while the Arab world has become anti-intellectual and anti-science, the Iranians are anything but. In many ways their path to superpower status is similar to the US' path - military, economic and technological might.

Looking at the world map with this perspective, Iran's "bloc" already includes essentially the entire Arab world, much of Africa, Pakistan, North Korea and probably Indonesia. Russia and China are pretty much neutral, although some former Soviet republics are solidly in the Islamic camp. India may not be Islamic but it has more Muslims than any Muslim country.

And as European countries becomes more Islamic and remain dependent on Islamic oil, it is not entirely clear that they are solidly in the US camp in this battle - a significant part of their population is very sympathetic to an anti-Western viewpoint. Iran is not only aiming at increasing its power, but in isolating the US as well.

Nuclear capabilities, along with missile technology, will cement Iran's leadership status as the world's second superpower. And the Iranians have already noted that North Korea became a nuclear power without the West stopping them, and they fully expect that while the protests will be noisier, things will end up exactly the same for them.

From all appearances, it looks like they are right.

Anti-semites crawl out from under rocks to support Ahmadinejad

One of the interesting side-effects of Ahmadinejad's public Jew-hatred has been how it is emboldening other assorted bigoted trash to show their miserable faces in whatever venues they can find.

Check out Holocaust-denier Mark Weber's article in "Axis of Logic" (reprinted from the Tehran Times), terror-supporter Preston Taran's ravings in Amin, and Kim Peterson (supporter of bombings) and his defense of Ahmadinejad in Dissident Voice.

When you wipe away the veneer of pseudo-logic, all that is left is pure Jew-hatred masqerading as liberal, universalist values.

Iran TV adds blood libel to its hit parade

The Iranian mass psychosis have been keeping MEMRI very busy.

Political Analysts on Iranian TV: The Jews Killed Children and Used Their Blood for Passover

Following are excerpts from a TV debate with Iranian political analysts Dr. Hasan Hanizadeh and Dr. Ali-Reza Akbari, which aired on Jaam-e Jam 2 TV on December 20, 2005.

Ali-Reza Akbari: Historians and eye-witnesses, some of whom are still alive... There are still many people who saw with their own eyes what happened 70-80 years ago. These people are alive and are of sound mind. They still possess the analytical abilities they had back then. They are our witnesses, and they deny the existence of crematoria at a place called Auschwitz.

Perhaps the reason... In my opinion, the people who say that the phenomenon of burning Jews on German soil during the World War II crisis is similar to a holocaust do so as a result of propaganda and due to psychological reasons.

In any even, a case of burning people has been registered in history, when many human beings were burnt because of their beliefs. The people who were burnt then were, in fact, Christians. They were burnt by the people who ruled Yemen, who were Jews. This event took place 400 years before the advent of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. Since then, the burning of human beings has been termed "holocaust."

[...]

Host: Were there six million Jews at all at that time, who could have been annihilated in the crematoria?

Hasan Hanizadeh: First of all, this figure is greatly exaggerated. The number of Jews in the world does not exceed 12 million. Only now, 57 years later, has it reached this figure. Clearly, at that time, considering the dispersion of the Jews, there could not have been six million Jews in Europe alone. In any event, the Zionist lobby and the Jewish Agency use this issue as a club with which they beat and extort the West.

Unfortunately, the West has forgotten two horrendous incidents, carried out by the Jews in 19th-century Europe - in Paris and London, to be precise. In 1883, about 150 French children were murdered in a horrible way in the suburbs of Paris, before the Jewish Passover holiday. Later research showed that the Jews had killed them and taken their blood. This event caused riots in Paris back then, and the French government found itself under pressure.

A similar incident took place in London, when many English children were killed by Jewish rabbis. These two incidents still haunt the minds and souls of the Europeans, but due to the growing influence of the Zionist lobby in Europe - or to be precise, the influence of the Jews - these two incidents are, unfortunately, never mentioned.

But don't call Iran anti-semitic - it upsets them.

A special edition, focusing on the effective and innovative recruiting methods employed by the PA Police.

Human resource managers around the world closely watch the PA for ideas on how to find well-qualified candidates for their own companies.

Especially striking are the management interview techniques as well as the insistence that the potential new hires meet their future co-workers in real-world situations so that they can integrate better into their new jobs with a minimum of re-training. Also, PA management negotiates salaries during the first interview, and lets the candidates know their decision instantly.

MBA (Management By Assassination) programs are starting to take notice as well.

A group of Fatah gunmen on Tuesday stormed the Bethlehem Municipality building on Manger Square, demanding money and jobs in the Palestinian Authority's security forces. The attackers left the building 90 minutes later after receiving assurances from PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that their demands would be met.

At least 15 masked gunmen, who described themselves as members of Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, forced their way into the municipality at noon. Armed with rifles and pistols, they ordered all employees to evacuate the building immediately and later closed all entrances to the compound. Some of the gunmen took up positions on the municipality roof.

Scores of Palestinian policemen cordoned off Manger Square, ordering shopkeepers and a handful of tourists to leave the area.

A masked gunman who spoke to reporters on behalf of the attackers said he and his friends were trying to send a message to the PA leadership about the need to meet their demands, which include recruiting more than 320 Fatah militiamen to the security forces, resuming monthly payments to each one of them and guarantees that Israel would stop pursuing them.

[Bethlehem Governor] Ta'mari, and the local commander of the PA's Preventative Security Force, Colonel Majdi al-Attari, later entered the building to negotiate with the gunmen. Ta'mari said after leaving the municipality that he had reassured the attackers that he would make every effort possible to fulfill their demands.

Ta'mari disclosed that Abbas personally talked to the gunmen by phone and promised to look into their demands. "President Abbas, who was personally following the case from Ramallah, talked to one of the gunmen by phone and assured him that everything will be ok," he said.

Iran has 3000 km cruise missiles - can reach Berlin

In testimony given on Tuesday by Israel's Director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi said something frightening:

Ze'evi said that Iran had recently received 12 cruise missiles with a 3,000-km range, which are capable of carrying nuclear warheads. 18 such missiles were transported from Ukraine to Russia, of which 12 had somehow managed to end up in Iranian hands. The other six were received by China.

To illustrate, here is a map of what a 3000 km range from Iran's borders would include (this is my map, but if the scale in Expedia is accurate this should be pretty close):

Berlin, Rome, and all of India are in danger from Iranian nuclear weapons.

Not to mention that Ahmadinejad has, according to Geman sources, purchased 18 North Korean missiles with a range of 2500 km - whose range he wants to extend to 3500 km and add the ability to fit with nuclear warheads.

That extra 500 km would include Paris, Oslo and just barely hit the shores of the UK.

The prophet of 1949

An absolutely amazing Page One editorial from the Palestine Post of March 9, 1949. The author, David Courtney, was a non-Jewish British journalist who penned Column One in the 40s and 50s for the Palestine/Jerusalem Post.

The column could have been written today.

Cross-posted to Palestine Post-ings.

Media analyzes Ahmadinejad - and gets it wrong

The liberal media has analyzed the Iranian madman's comments and settled on the least problematic explanations possible. Breathe easy, the New York Times has spoken!

Its first analysis is that Ahmadinejad wants turn back the clock to the 1979 Iranian revolution - and then the Times admits that Iranian unity didn't occur until the Iraq/Iran war, so that doesn't make sense.

Then the Times posits that he wants to isolate his country so he can more easily move Iran's nuclear program forward (why exactly he wants to do this, the Times doesn't explain). But if this was true, the Iranian "news" agency would not be bending over backwards to find allies who agree with him and to negotiate with Europe - see this, this, and this just from today. A significant part of Iran's press is obsessed over international relations.

And finally the august NYT contradicts it's own analysis yet again:

The anti-Israeli oratory also has roots in the president's domestic standing.

Some Iranian analysts say that by increasing the world's hostility, Mr. Ahmadinejad is hoping to reproduce that sense of internal unity.

Iranian analysts say he is also trying to satisfy, and perhaps distract, supporters who have begun to feel disappointed that he has not provided financial relief. Throughout his campaign, Mr. Ahmadinejad promised to try to redistribute the nation's vast oil wealth.

"His comments are more for domestic consumption," said Saeed Laylaz, an Iranian political analyst. "He wants to control the domestic situation through isolating Iran. Then he can suppress the voices inside the country and control the situation."

And then a couple of paragraphs later,the NYT demolishes its own argument:

With Iran facing a raft of problems - widespread unemployment, collapse of rural life as more people head to the cities, and a general sense of drift among the young - Mr. Ahmadinejad's comments on Israel have drawn little domestic attention.

So here we have three theories from "experts" where the NYT's own facts do not fit the theories, but amidst all the handwaving the reader gets the impression that Ahmadinejad has no interest in actually exploding nuclear weapons over any other country.

Here is a textbook case where liberal wishful thinking trumps facts.

The AP has a slightly better analysis, arguing that his anti-Israel and anti-semitic comments are"part of a strategy to keep anti-Israel sentiment alive in the Middle East." But even so, they uncritically quote an Iranian "hard-line lawmaker": "'The bottom line is he wants to keep anti-Israeli sentiments alive,' Afrouq said. 'He doesn't think of military action.' "

The real bottom line is that the media does not even want to admit the possibility that someone could be evil. This goes against all liberal thinking - no one is bad, just misunderstood.

No one outside of Charles Krauthammer mentions Ahmadinejad's messianic tendencies and his obsession with the second coming of the "12th Imam". No one wants to talk about how the year before his "World Without Zionism" conference he had a "World Without America" conference.

It appears to little old me, without reading Farsi, that Ahmadinejad is looking to move the center of the Islamic world to Iran - and his Islamic world is the of the Islamofascist variety. His threatening statements against Israel and the West are not meant for domestic consumption, rather for worldwide Muslims already being indoctrinated in hate against the West.

He does view the 1979 Iranian revolution as important because it was a victory of Islam over the decadent West, represented by the Shah. But Muslims look at it from a global perspective, not a national one. The surge of militant Islam is not a localized phenomenon. From an Islamist viewpoint, the entire world will become one ummah and a victory in Iran is just one step on the way to worldwide Islamic domination.

This is why the issue of "Palestine" is so important to him - it represents the closest encroachment of the hated West into the Muslim geographic center. But beyond that, the Westernization of Arab countries and Turkey are another threatening trend - witness his recent banning of Western music in Iran. By turning his country into a shari'a state, with the "pure" morality of Islam, Ahmadenijad is trying to influence and pressure other Muslim nations towards fundamentalism and zealotry. And he knows that he has a ready audience in Arab countries. His being elected president has, to him, given him a world stage to promote Shi'ite Islamic supremacy as interpreted by his religious leaders - and he is wasting no time to take advantage of his new prominence.

After all, as I have mentioned before, Holocaust denial is nothing new in that part of the world. But when was the last time it made world headlines?

Ahmadinejad wants nothing less than to turn the world to Islamic extremism, and to be its leader. Threatening Israel can get attention - but destroying Israel would give him a legacy as well as energize the entire Muslim world behind his cause.

Because in the end, given a choice between the most liberal and Arab-loving Israel that Meretz could dream up and a crazed trigger-happy Muslim nutcase, the Islamic world has consistently sided with the nutcases.

Iran: Anti-semites? Us?

The Mehr News Agency has an amusing editorial defending Iran's tolerance towards its own dhimmi Jews:

No pogroms here
TEHRAN, Dec. 19 (MNA) -- With all the uproar about Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Zionist statements, it’s necessary to set the record straight by putting things in historical perspective.

A small Jewish community has been living in Iran for over 2500 years, and they have never been persecuted. Today they number about 25,000. The Iranian Jews have synagogues, observe their religious rituals, and have complete freedom of religion.

The Jewish community has one representative in the Iranian parliament, which is called the Majlis. Iran’s other religious minorities also have proportional representation in parliament. The Zoroastrians have one seat, the Armenian Christians have two seats, and one MP represents the Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities.

Although life is not perfect for Iran’s Jews and there is some prejudice against them, there have never been pogroms against the Jews here. Can Poland or Russia say that? Can several other European countries say that? A careful examination of history shows that the Jews have actually been safer in Iran than in Western countries.

The Jews have never been banned from Iran, whereas they were banned in certain European countries. The Jews of Iran were never locked up in ghettos, as was the case in some European countries.

In 2500 years, not one synagogue has been destroyed in Iran. Jewish graveyards have never been desecrated in Iran. In contrast, this still occurs in some Western countries.

There has never been a Kristallnacht in Iran.

This amazing defense boils down to "We never did what the Nazis did, so you can't criticize us!"

Unfortunately, Iran does have more than its share of true anti-semitism. Beyond the fondness Iranians have for the Farsi edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, their Sahar TV aired programs accusing "Zionists" of stealing Arab children's eyes to cure blind Jewish children; and they have accused Iranian Jews of spying for Israel, gouging out the eyes of a 78-year old cantor and then executing him in one case.

And Iranian Holocaust denial has been above-ground for years, especially in the pages of the Tehran Times:

[The] Tehran Times seemed especially obsessed with the Holocaust. Perhaps “the biggest lie in history,” a 25 January 2001 article maintained, took formal shape during the Nuremberg trials, where a confession “obtained by means of torture” became “the cornerstone of the official Auschwitz version.” No one has ever asked “the Jewish swindlers,” who present themselves as “gas chamber witnesses” any critical questions. Yet, “the terrible accusation” of genocide, is based only upon “the lies of a handful of Jewish swindlers like Rudolf Vrba, Filip Mueller and Elie Wiesel,” and “the confessions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess who was tortured for three days by his Jewish and British interrogators before signing the statement his tormentors had prepared for him” (Tehran Times, 17 Feb. 2001). There is “no documentary evidence for the gassing of even one human being in a German camp,” it added, and the German documents do not confirm “the Holocaust story,” in fact, they “directly refute it” (1 Feb. 2001).

But, hey, they have a point - any Iranian Jews who obediently paid the dhimmi "jizya" poll tax were treated like second-class citizens, much better than 1940's-era Polish Jews. And Islamic supremacism isn't anti-semitism, is it?

Haveil Havalim #49 posted

The eagerly anticipated First Anniversary edition of Haveil Havalim has been published at SeranEz.

Congratulations on all those who helped HH make it to this milestone, most notably Soccer Dad.

Is Ahmadinejad a chimp or an ape? A scholarly debate!

TEHRAN, Dec. 18 (MNA) -- The Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that the view expressed by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad that there are some doubts about the Jewish Holocaust is not something new and is a matter of "scholarly debate".

It has been a matter of considerable debate among zoologists and anatomists as to whether Iran's president Ahmadinejad is an ape or a chimpanzee. Here are some of the scholarly arguments on each side:

First, let's look at the anatomy of the president's face:

Notice the wrinkles surrounding his eyes and his prominent facial hair, as well as his obtrusive nostrils. Many prominent scientists feel that he bears a striking resemblance to Koko the baby ape:

However, his ritualistic behavior more closely tracks those of homosexual chimpanzees.

In this striking similarity, look at Ahmadinejad's facial expressions when he shows his mating ritualistic sexual affection for another male of his species:

Now look closely at the facial expressions of these chimpanzees:

DNA testing would, of course, solve this debate once and for all, but for various political reasons the Iranian zoo that houses Ahmadinejad is not allowing his blood samples to be taken at this time, despite protests by prominent zoologists and other scholars.

So, the scholarly debate rages on.

UPDATE: Others have researched this as well.