Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, August 21, 2006

Hezbollah funeral rally in UNIFIL compound

Hizbollah mourners on a funeral parade shoved aside anti-tank barriers at a United Nations base in Lebanon yesterday in a demonstration of their new political strength.
The party had been told it would be allowed to bury three "martyrs" at the Naqoura town cemetery inside the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) compound, but only if there was no flag-waving or political sloganising.

When the chanting procession, several hundred strong, reached the gates, it found the way barred by cruci-form steel tank traps. Mourners argued with the French guards, but failed to gain entry.
A mob of young men then dragged the barriers away and the UN opened the gates. "They will eat us alive," said a middle-aged official as the throng surged in.

A column of black-shirted men carried the three coffins to the graveyard. They waved yellow Hizbollah banners and portraits of the movement's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and yelled anti-Israeli and anti-American doggerel.

This incident was not reported in today's UNIFIL press dispatch, but it may have happened after it was already written. We'll see how UNIFIL describes this incident tomorrow.

Quick question to Muslims who think a war is being waged against them

There are countless articles and speeches from Muslims and terror supporters decrying "Islamophobia" who are convinced that the Western world is fighting a war against all Muslims. Often, these paranoid people will blame world Jewry or their popular codewords, "Zionists" and "Neocons", as the force behind this supposed epidemic of hatred of all Muslims.

I have a simple question:

How many places on the planet are Muslims afraid to walk around in full Muslim attire - women with hijabs or chadors or burqas, men with their skullcaps and beards? Where exactly are the places that they can expect to be beaten up by random people on the street who are so consumed with hate at the idea of a Muslim in their midst?

Now, compare this answer with the number of places in the world that a Jewish man can proudly walk around with a yarmulka without a trace of fear or nervousness.

Since Islamophobia is supposedly so pervasive - where are the 1.6 billion Muslims afraid to walk?

The Hezbollah/Iran funhouse mirror

Pretty much everyone (with the exception of President Bush) agrees that Israel didn't win this war. But by the same criteria of what is considered "victory," Hezbollah didn't win either.

Like Israel, Hezbollah also had stated objectives: to recover three Lebanese prisoners, and the capture the Shebaa Farms. Not only did they fail, but according to Libanoscope, their losses were much greater than originally thought, even by Israel: (translation by Daily Alert and FreeTranslation.com):

(DailyAlert)According to semi-official sources, Hizballah has undergone total destruction of its logistic and economic infrastructures, and suffered about 1,500 deaths of militiamen and leaders.

(FreeTranslation)Despite an attempt to do be quiet the local and Arabic media and to prevent them from unveil the true ones amount, it in springs and still according to unofficial sources, and often trying to keep the fear anonymity of reprisals, that the Hezbollah would have undergoes a total destruction of its logistical and economical infrastructures, and that the number of militiamen and frameworks on this part killed during this war itself Of 1 500 persons.

This announcement of the victory would resemble more to an attempt to return the defeat in victory, a clean effect to the culture of which is originating from the party of God.

Now, the perception of victory is probably more important in the Muslim world than actual victory, and Israel's strategy during the war was murky and half-hearted at best, but things are not quite as bad as some doomsayers opine.

Even a weak Lebanese Army in the south is a major step forward. Everyone, from the Arab world to the West, is emphasizing how important it is for Lebanon to be united and free. The fact that the Lebanese aren't fond of Israel doesn't mean they are any more fond of Hezbollah, and in the wake of the Cedar Revolution it seems that it would be difficult for Hezbollah to turn Lebanon itself into an Islamic state, as Iran wants. The Lebanese, for all their impotence, are generally tolerant of others and their national psyche is not going to be happy with the effective Iranian-backed coup that Hezbollah is attempting.

The many, many articles coming out of Iran and Syria declaring Hezbollah's victory also betray the truth - if the victory was so overpowering and obvious, why does it need to be mentioned so many times? It is more propaganda than reality.

For an extreme example of said propaganda, check out this article from the Iranian Fars News Agency:

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- According to the results of an opinion poll, Israelis feel more respect for Nasrallah and accept his words more that their own heads of state and their statements, said Hezbollah's representative in Tehran on Friday.

Speaking at a meeting with a group of editors and directors of Fars News Agency at the office of Hezbollah's movement in Tehran, Abdallah Safioddin described Lebanese victories over Zionists a fruit of the lessons they had learnt from Imam Khomeini and the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.

He further stated that all the problems Iran has so far had to face during the past 27 years have all resulted from Iran's opposition to the Israeli regime, adding that after the Lebanese' victory against the Zionist regime, the United States will have to reduce its pressures on the Islamic countries.

I really would love to find this poll saying Israelis respect Nasrallah more than Olmert. The best I could find was this one:

The opinion polls reflect an ultra-hawkish mood among Israelis, with most believing that their forces should have inflicted more damage. Seventy per cent told the Yediot Ahronoth newspaper that Israel should have refused the terms of the ceasefire agreed earlier this week. A similar poll in Maariv said that 53 per cent opposed the terms of the ceasefire.
Just over two-thirds support assassinating Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, even if it means restarting the war, and 63 per cent want the Israeli Air Force to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, reflecting widespread acceptance of Mr Olmert’s campaign to portray Hezbollah as little more than a proxy of Tehran.

Maybe in Iran, the ultimate criterion for respect is wanting to kill someone.

In which case, they must really, really respect the Jews.

PalArabs keep killing each other and blaming Israel

Dying and lying:

Near Jenin, 2 terrorists were killed, one critically injured as they were preparing a bomb belt that went off a bit earlier than they intended.

A 14-year old boy was killed Wednesday night during clashes between Fatah and Hamas. The "security forces" were there to "protect" a house of mourning.

Also on Wednesday night, a Hamas terrorist was killed from a "mysterious explosion" that happened in his house (as he was preparing explosives to kill Jews.)

Not dead (yet) but notable: another set of injuries from someone shooting a rifle at a wedding, including a 13-year old boy shot in the head.

So our running total of Palestinian Arabs killed by other Palestinian Arabs since Israel's incursion in Gaza is at 58.

I just quickly went through the list of deaths from PCHR since they have been keeping records and saw that between February and late June, about 56 other Palestinian Arabs had died from clan clashes, "misuse of weapons" and "work accidents." So I am aware of 114 PalArabs killed by other PalArabs since February, and one can assume many dozens more between last August and February (not to mention any later deaths from previously-reported injuries that were not updated at the PCHR site.) A good guess would be between 150-200 Palestinian Arabs killed by their own.

Why is this important? Because the Palestinian Arab "news" agency WAFA just came out with this press release:

GAZA, August 17, 2006 (WAFA)- Ministry of Health (MOH) announced Thursday that 378 citizens were killed and 1385 wounded since the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip (GS)

In a press releas, Minister Dr. Basim Na'im revealed that 91 children, under the age of 18, were among the killed, while 494 children were wounded.

He pointed out that Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), continued its aggression over this year against the West Bank, where135 citizens were killed, and 1905 were wounded, including 757 children.

He added that the Israeli army used lethal weapons, bombs and missiles which are internationally prohibited.

Dr. Na'im called on the international community, namely the United Nations and HR organisations, World Health Organisation, International Committee of the Red Cross to shoulder responsibilities and to immediately intervene to pressurise Israel to end its brutal aggression against defenseless citizens.

It is a reasonable assumption that the Ministry of Health is not distinguishing between those killed by Israel and those killed by Palestinian Arabs. It is also a reasonable assumption that they are not distinguishing between civilians and terrorists.

Which means that probably roughly half of those killed, based on PCHR's own numbers, were not killed by Israel forces - but by Arabs themselves! The press release was purposefully deceptive in blaming Israel wholly for these deaths, when in fact Israel has probably accidentally killed fewer civilians than PalArabs themselves have in that same time period!

Australia appeasing Muslims who support terror

From the Herald-Sun (Australia):

HASSAN Bazzi is one of 14 "moderate" Muslim leaders chosen by the Howard Government to "assist in eliminating intolerance".

Last Friday, he showed how he does this good work.
Bazzi went to a Sydney protest at which police had to confiscate the more viciously anti-Jewish signs, and gave a heated speech that praised the Hezbollah terrorist group that has been at war with Israel.

"Death to the enemies", he shouted. "Long life for the Lebanese resistance."

So are we glad Bazzi, head of the Al Zahra Muslim Association, is so moderate that Prime Minister John Howard chose him for his Muslim Community Reference Group?

Or are we instead alarmed that this seems to be as moderate as Islamic leaders get?

When he created his group last year, Howard was attacked for excluding radicals such as Sheik Mohammed Omran, the Melbourne extremist, who said he "dispute(s) any evil action linked to" terror boss Osama bin Laden.

But now he finds at least a third of the 14 "moderates" he picked openly back Hezbollah, listed by his Government as an Islamist terrorist group.

There is Bazzi, of course. But even the chairman of Howard's group, Ameer Ali, led half a dozen group members into a meeting with Howard to urge him to stop calling Hezbollah terrorists, despite its record of assassinations, bombings in Argentina and Beirut and rocket attacks on Israel, as well as its call for "the disappearance of the Zionist entity (Israel)".

Said Ali: "According to our views even the military wing (of Hezbollah) is not a terrorist organisation."

Another member of Howard's group, Sheik Taj Al-Din Al-Hilali, the Mufti of Australia, met Hezbollah's leader in Lebanon two years again, and enthused: "I praised it and its sacrifice. Hezbollah has become a model for all the mujahideen in the world."

But, how Howard ever came to select Hilali as a "moderate" adviser in the first place is a mystery, given he has vilified Jews, praised suicide bombers as "heroes" and called the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors".

Preston mosque's Sheik Fehmi Naji el-Imam seemed a safer choice, but even he backs Hezbollah. "Long live freedom fighters," he yelled at one protest. "We are proud of the freedom fighters."

Yet another group member, Yasser Soliman, former head of the Islamic Council of Victoria, has also criticised the Government for calling Hezbollah a terrorist organisation.

"We've seen more innocent deaths at the hands of Israel than we have seen of Hezbollah," he said. He asked why Israel's army wasn't listed as terrorist instead.

I am not saying any of the above support terror attacks, especially on civilians. But I am asking why the Government has advisers who support what it says itself is a terrorist group.

Worse, far from sacking them, the Government praises them instead. The Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Robb, told this same group two weeks ago: "When religion is invoked as a justification for terrorism, religious voices must be raised strongly in protest and I commend you here today for that."

In fact: "The difficult work that many of you did after the Cronulla riots and the publication of the Danish cartoons was a prime example of taking responsibility . . ."

It was? This "prime example" of "taking responsibility" when Muslims were rioting over cartoons involved Fehmi simply calling for the banning of these images of Mohammed on the menacing grounds that they "disturb people who can do things that we don't want them to do". Gulp. OK.

It seems Robb is in full appeasement mode, now legitimising extremism instead of countering it. For instance, a puff piece in The Australian on his work noted "he is convinced that for most of its long history Islam has been a peaceful religion", and "he reflects on the history of the Knights Templar as a period of Christian aggression".

It was also Robb who announced perhaps the Government's most wrong-headed move in fighting Muslim extremism -- spending $8 million to create a National Institute of Islamic Studies.

According to Robb, this institute, an idea of his reference group, will take 300 students and "provide many subjects relevant for those training to be Muslim religious leaders".

It would also "attract eminent, moderate Islamic scholars from around the world".

Some questions for Robb:

Can you even recognise a moderate Islamic scholar any more, given your record of picking "moderates" who actually back a terrorist group?

And if even "moderate" Islamic clerics endorse a group such as Hezbollah, why are you spending taxpayers' money to create still more of them?

This is, of course, not only Australia's problem. True Islamic moderates, by the Western definition of the word, seem to be few and far between.

A Lebanese general was arrested on Wednesday for appearing in a videotape drinking tea with Israeli soldiers who had occupied his south Lebanon barracks during their incursion of the country.
Brig Adnan Daoud was summoned and ordered held for questioning, interior minister Ahmed Fatfat said in a statement. Daoud is commanding officer of the 1 000-strong joint police-army force that had positions in southern Lebanon and was based in Marjayoun.
Israeli troops seized the barracks there last week and held him and 350 soldiers for a day before allowing them to leave the occupied zone. The Lebanese garrison, which is lightly armed, did not resist the Israeli force which moved in armour into the base.
In the videotape, aired on Israeli television and carried by a Lebanese TV station on Wednesday, Daoud was shown having tea with smiling Israeli soldiers and walking with them in the base courtyard.
Lebanon is in a state of war with Israel. Any contact with the Jewish state is punishable by a prison term.

So, are we going to be hearing from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International about human-rights violations?

Costa Rica, Jerusalem and the Green Line joke

al-Reuters reports:

Costa Rica will move its embassy in Israel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, its new president said on Wednesday, in a move that pleases Arab nations and is a blow to the Israeli government. The decision will leave El Salvador as the only country in the world with an embassy in Jerusalem.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner, said he made the decision to win more friends in the Middle East and comply with United Nations' resolutions. "It's time to rectify an historic error that hurts us internationally and deprives us of almost any form of friendship with the Arab world, and more broadly with Islamic civilization, to which a sixth of humanity belongs," Arias said at an event marking his first 100 days in office.

In 1980, following Israel's Jerusalem Law annexing the Old City and unifying the city, the UN instructed its member states to withdraw their diplomats from Jerusalem. This is the "UN resolution" that Arias is referring to. Costa Rica did move its embassy then, but then moved it back a few years later.

Obviously, by his own admission, the real reason for the move is to curry favor with the Islamic world.

Even before 1980, only a handful of countries has their embassies in Jerusalem. Most of the world did not accept Jerusalem as Israel's capital - even the Western half!

How exactly does that jive with the near-universal demand that the world places on Israel of withdrawing from all territories won in a defensive war in 1967, where West Jerusalem is clearly on the Israeli side of the Green Line? If the Green Line is the major demand, why can't the world accept Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem?

Beyond that, the Arab and Islamic states say (publicly) that a Palestinian Arab state should be set up in only the territories "occupied" in 1967. West Jerusalem is not in those territories. So why are they pressuring the world to not accept Israel's claim on West Jerusalem?

The UK claims it is because the UN originally planned to make all of Jerusalem an "international city" and as such it never accepted any nation's legal claims over Jerusalem. This is just sophistry: no one on the planet reasonably thinks that Jerusalem will ever become a separate entity under UN auspices. Improbably, the UK position also contains this statement which is close to an oxymoron:

The UK believes that the city’s status has yet to be determined, and maintains that it should be settled in an overall agreement between the parties concerned, but considers that the city should not again be divided.

So the UK position allows the UN to rule, realizes that Israeli and/or Arabs will negotiate its status, but doesn't want it divided - three pretty much mutually exclusive positions wrapped up in one.

The truth is what Costa Rica's president said - the real reason that the world doesn't accept Israel's legal, historic and moral claims on Jerusalem is because it will upset the Arabs and Muslims. And the Muslims do not accept Jewish sovereignty because their claim against Israel is not only the "territories" but the entire state of Israel.

Instead of realizing this obvious truth, the world chooses to pretend that the Green Line means something. Yet until 1967, the Arab world did not pretend to accept the Green Line either.

And one can bet that even if Israel withdrew behind the Green Line, the Muslim world will find reasons to keep attacking just like Hezbollah claimed the Shebaa Farms area is Lebanese. They would start at Jerusalem and then go on to try to make Israel accept the 1947 partition lines, continuously slicing Israel using pseudo-legal reasoning up until it no longer exists.

The lesson of Costa Rica shows that the Western world knows all these facts quite well, but chooses to ignore them because they are afraid of the Islamic world.

US Zionist Leader: "We are still Palestinians"

This is a quote from a US Zionist leader in 1903, Dr. Richard Gottheil.

Many people are aware of the "Uganda Proposal," where Great Britain offered a portion of Africa to the Zionist movement. Some Zionists, including Herzl himself, were quite interested and the resolution was brought up in the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in August 1903. The Congress voted to send an exploratory team to Africa to determine if it would be a suitable land.

What I didn't know was that even the "Territorialists" who supported the Uganda Proposal did not see it as a permanent idea, rather as a stopgap measure to save the Jews who were threatened by pogroms in Czarist Russia. They all accepted that the Jewish homeland is in what was then called Palestine, hence the "We are still Palestinians" comment. This is clear in this article I found from "The Durango (Colorado) Democrat" that describes the situation in December, 1903.

The Uganda Proposal was defeated at the Seventh Zionist Congress after a negative report from one of the investigators sent to Africa (actually Kenya, not Uganda.)

The Territorialist movement stayed around trying to find other places for oppressed Jews to move - even getting thousands to move to Galveston, Texas. The movement dwindled after the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

AP photos romanticize Hezbos

Looking at this series of pictures, all by the same AP photographer of the same Hezboterrorist, one gets the impression that it is someone posing for a fashion magazine than any reflection of reality.

A Hezbollah fighter, who refused to be identified, walks past the rubble of destroyed houses, attacked during the month-long Israeli forces' offensive, in the southern village of Aitaroun, close to the town of Bint Jbail, Wednesday Aug. 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

A Hezbollah fighter, who refused to be identified, uses binoculars to watch over Israeli army positions on the outskirts of the southern village of Aitaroun, close to the town of Bint Jbeil, Wednesday Aug. 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

And don't forget the always classic silhouette:

A Hezbollah fighter, who did not want to be identified, watches on the outskirts of the southern village of Aitaroun, close to the town of Bint Jbail, Wednesday Aug. 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

How masculine! How macho! How much these photos were influenced by the Marlboro Man!

Haifa Arabs: Katyushas better than West Bank

A heartwarming tale of unity and respect from our favorite pretend nation:

Several Arab families decided to act on Hizbullah Chief Hassan Nasrallah's "recommendation" and leave rocket-stricken Haifa during the war in south Lebanon. They traveled to Palestinian towns like Bethlehem and Ramallah, and even to east Jerusalem, but soon after decided they had rather return home and face the rocket menace. The reason: The bad treatment awarded to them in hotels, restaurants and stores, as well as ongoing harassments of their wives and daughters on the part of the local residents.

Ghani Abassi, married and a father of three daughters, decided to go with his family to Bethlehem and flee the Katyusha attacks. Abbasi traveled to the Palestinian town with some 10 other families from Haifa, who all chose to stay at local hotels. Unfortunately, this was when their true nightmare began.

"The treatment we received was disgraceful and dreadful," he said. "We walked around town for a while, but the attitude we encountered on the part of the locals was horrible. The youngsters on the street started harassing our wives and daughters and used shocking expressions that I cannot even bring myself to pronounce," he said.

Another Haifa resident, who went with his family to Jerusalem to escape from the rocket threat, said that the local merchants blatantly took advantage of the situation and inflated the prices in stores. A bottle of mineral water that usually sells for about NIS 4, for instance, was being sold to the Haifa tourists for NIS 10.
"They told us, 'you are worse than the Jews.' We heard expressions of joy over the fact we have fled our homes, and some even tried to attack us.
We were disgusted and decided to return to Haifa," he said, stressing that he used to be a regular donor to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.
According to him, after that day and the humiliation he experienced in Bethlehem, he does not plan on donating even one shekel. "We thought we are one nation and that what really hurts them, hurts us too. We went to demonstrations for them and we donated a lot of money to them because we thought they are our brothers and that is our obligation. But, what we found was exploitation and undeserving treatment toward someone supposedly from the same nation," he told.
The same resident added that he expected the families from Haifa and Nazareth to be warmly received in the West Bank towns, but what took place was the exact opposite. Today he speaks with regret about the two days he spent in Bethlehem.

"While touring in Ramallah, a few youngsters said to us, 'you are the same as, even worse than, the Jews.' We tried to understand why they were acting that way toward us, but they attacked us and a fight broke out. We are very sorry for what happened and we couldn't have expected such an unfit welcome from members of our nation whom we had respected and appreciated very much. But they didn't respect us at all, and saw as worse than the Jews. We are very sorry for what happened and that we drove all the way there to see the painful truth that they don't respect us there," said Ghani Abassi.

Following such treatment, Abassi and his friends hurried back to the lap of the Katyushas and air raid sirens of Haifa. "'We will never again make a donation or participate in a demonstration for the West Bank from now on," said one of them.

Legal analysis of 1701 - Hezbollah secret deal with Lebanon?

The Jurist website publishes an extensive legal analysis of UN Resolution 1701 by Anthony D'Amato. The author, who personally supports full Israeli withdrawal from all territories, does an exhaustive review and comes brings up the likelihood that there already is a secret deal between Hezbollah and the government of Lebanon where Hezbollah will be smoothly integrated in the Lebanese army, and that Israel already accepts that! (H/T Backspin)

OP8. Calls for Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on the following principles and elements:

* full respect for the Blue Line by both parties,

* security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL as authorized in paragraph 11, deployed in this area,

* full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of July 27, 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state,

It is clear that the authors of this provision intend the disarmament of all members of Hezbollah. But this is where common sense must interrupt our formal analysis of the Resolution and ask: what group in its right mind would consent to a Resolution that calls for its disarmament to be likely followed by arrests and prosecutions for war crimes? (See my JURIST editorial on war crimes.) The only reasonably conceivable reason Hezbollah has agreed to this Resolution is that it has been assured, by secret agreement with the government of Lebanon, that its members will not be disarmed, arrested, or prosecuted. My best guess is that the agreement calls for members of Hezbollah to be smoothly integrated into the armed forces of the Lebanese government.

* no foreign forces in Lebanon without the consent of its government,

No problem if Hezbollah becomes a governmental force instead of a foreign force.

* no sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorized by its government,

In my JURIST editorial last week, I focused upon the importation of rockets and rocket launchers by Hezbollah as the most important issue that Israel faces in this conflict. So long as Syria and Iran supply increasingly sophisticated rockets to Hezbollah, Israel's security diminishes with each shipment. What would be ideal, from Israel's point of view, is a blockade on all arms and military equipment to Lebanon. But instead Israel has settled for a loophole: there is no blockade to arms and military equipment if authorized by the Lebanese government. In my view, this is the reason why Hezbollah has agreed to the UN Resolution. Hezbollah must believe that it can look forward to importing sophisticated armaments and rockets under the authority and permission of the government of Lebanon. By the same token, the magnitude of this concession makes it appear that Israel has thrown in the towel.

Dr. Ronnie Sabel from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law comments on D'Amato's analysis as well.

Gaza honor killings - 2 sisters for the price of 1

Those responsible Palestinian Arabs, who the world says deserve a state, continue to kill each other non-stop. Here's the latest:

At approximately 19:30 on Sunday, 13 August 2006, the Palestinian Police in Deir El-Balah detained a Palestinian who confessed to killing his two sisters in an alleged "Honor Killing." The victims are Fatheya Kamel Kullab (27) and Amani Kamel Kullab (21). They were living in Jabalia refugee camp.

Palestinian police found the bodies of the two young women at approximately 02:00 on Thursday, 9 August 2006, in the Sawarha area, west of Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip. .... Sources at Shifa Hospital indicated that both were killed by gunshots. Each one was shot twice in the head. In addition, they were severely beaten and tortured before they were killed.

It is noted that the body of an 18-year old young woman was unearthed from a cemetery in Rafah on 30 June 2006. She was killed by relatives in an alleged "Honor Killing."

So far, this incident has not been mentioned in a single English-language newspaper indexed by Google or Yahoo.

If you add the 18-year old victim from Rafah and a storekeeper shot yesterday in Illar, the Palestinian Arab Self-Death count since the beginning of the Israeli incursion is now at 54.

UPDATE: A Pakistani woman who was raped by her father is about to be killed in a similarly honorable fashion, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Richard Cohen has an epiphany!

Richard Cohen, who famously said a couple of weeks ago that Israel was a mistake (and got deservedly hammered for it,) and then had a change of heart and wrote about how Israel is fighting for its survival, now has belatedly realized the crux of the issue, even if he is a bit fuzzy on the timing:

This seemingly abrupt shift to the ideological, to the religious, is the most noteworthy and ominous development of recent times. The fight is no longer over territory -- the West Bank, Gaza -- but over the very existence of Israel. The people who seem to hate Israel most, who will kill to kill it and die for it to die, are not reclaiming ancestral land -- no Iranian pines for his lost orange grove near Jaffa -- but instead cannot abide the very idea of Israel.

While the second half of the paragraph is accurate, it is hardly an abrupt shift. If Cohen had been watching the history of the Middle East these past sixty years with his newly clear vision rather than through the dhimmi lens of the "enlightened" West, he would know that there is nothing new here. Secular Arab leaders have been willing to sacrifice thousands of their own people to destroy Israel since the beginning. The PLO was founded in 1964 with that goal, and Hezbollah was founded over thirty years ago with the same goal.

The only thing to have changed is the pretense of a religious justification for a genocide against Jews in the Middle East. But make no mistake - the only difference is the pretense, not the goal. The shift towards suicide operations is tactical and a result of cultural brainwashing, not ideological nor religious. "Culture of death" is not just a right-wing cliché but an accurate depiction of today's Muslim world (especially Arab), where Muslims from Iran to Indonesia pledge to kill themselves for their war.

Now, if Cohen will keep his mind open long enough, he will soon realize that there has been an important shift in the Muslim psyche since the rise of Islamism, but it is only peripherally related to Israel. The radical Islamist world, which is much larger than the West is willing to believe, wants nothing less than total world domination. It is a supremacist political movement disguised as religion. Petrodollars and daily incitement against the non-Muslim world have combined to create the real enemy, and Israel is just the first phase in this war.

Before, Israel was an unpardonable affront to the Arab psyche. Now, it is a symbol of the hated West, where in the free marketplace of ideas, Islam loses big time. It is a reminder of the cultural backwardness of much of the Muslim world. It is a daily poke in the eye to the Koranic worldview that Jews are defined as weak, second-class citizens who are fated to be dominated by their generous Muslim masters. And this symbol is right in the middle of the Muslim world itself.

The West's ascendancy and existence is a direct contradiction to the Islamic worldview, and Israel is the lightning rod.

It is gratifying to see that Cohen no longer seems to believe the accepted liberal truth that if only Israel would give up territory, peace will result. But Cohen seems to have a ways to go before he realizes what the world is really up against.

Deadly Falafel

Here's another peek at how well Palestinian Arab democracy is working in Gaza:

This problem is evident in every area. An ordinary citizen who wants to resolve a legal problem with a friend or neighbor knows that the best way is to bypass the courts and hire armed men. Everyone has friends with weapons, and even if these are lacking, $100 will buy you four armed men for a whole day. They can help with debt collection, removing business rivals or taking over land.

There are almost daily reports of assassinations, abductions and clan fights. On Saturday, for example, 5,000 people participated in a reconciliation ceremony between two clans whose dispute had cost several Palestinian lives.

The fighting was triggered by two kids arguing over a falafel sandwich.

That falafel sandwich must somehow be related to "occupation."

The people that "peace protesters" support

Palestinian gunmen, who identified themselves as members of the Islamic Jihad group, shoot a man in a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin Sunday Aug. 13, 2006. The man, who was executed in front of hundreds of people, was accused by the gunmen of giving information to Israeli authorities, helping them to kill two militants last week in a targeted attack, said witnesses and Islamic Jihad members. The victim was identified as Bassem Malah, 22, who worked in the Israeli Arab town of Umm al Fahm.

Palestinians, some taking pictures with their mobile phones, gather around the body of an alleged 'collaborator' after gunmen, who identified themselves as members of the Islamic Jihad group, shot him and killed him in a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin Sunday Aug. 13, 2006.

A woman, mother of a militant killed by the Israeli army in 2002, steps on the body of an alleged 'collaborator' after Palestinian gunmen, who identified themselves as members of the Islamic Jihad group, shot him and killed him in a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin Sunday Aug. 13, 2006.

These are the people who are the darlings of the Left.

These are the people who thousands of people worldwide rally to support.

These are the people who "deserve a state" according to practically the entire world.

A people who celebrate death, who cheer terror, who lionize murderers.

A people with no sense of responsibility but an infinite sense of entitlement.

A people who will never act differently because the world condones when they act this way.

Show me an Palestinian Arab who clearly condemns actions like these and I'll show you a person who is in danger of the same fate as Bassem Maleh.