Friday, October 20, 2006

  • Friday, October 20, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
After scouring the Internet, here is every picture of Jerusalem that I could find from Islamic sources before the 20th century:






















And here are a very tiny number of the pictures of Jerusalem done in Jewish art:

Wall painting by Eliezer Zusman Katz in the synagogue of Unterlimberg, Germany, 1739 (extant)


Wall painting in the Nicolina Synagogue, Jasi, Romania. The building was destroyed a few days after the photograph was taken


This MIZRACH - SHIVITI is an early American papercut,made in the U.S.A. in 1861. The upper frame contains a gate, presumably that of the Temple in Jerusalem. It carries the inscriptions: "This is the gate to God", and above it, in two separate medallions, "I have set the Lord always before me." As a Mizrach, it would always be placed o the wall of the house facing Jerusalem.


The Second Temple in Jerusalem, wood-cut from the 19th century.


From the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah, the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

  • Friday, October 20, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
The problem with the prevalent Western liberal attitude is that it cannot accept the existence of a fundamentally irrational player on the world scene. If one believes that all problems can be solved through negotiations, as the EU, UN and American Left do, then one must also believe that the other side is always rational and has the roughly same value system that you do.

So the head-in-the-sand crowd will always insist that if only we keep talking like civilized humans, the other side will act reasonably - because that's what we would do, and we are all the same under the skin, let's sing Kumbaya together in four-part harmony.

Ahmadinejad's outrageous pronouncements have become so commonplace that the Western press seems to be treating him more like an eccentric Kaddafi than a Hitler. Let's look at what is happening, just today:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday called the U.N. Security Council and its decisions "illegitimate."
Ahmadinejad told a crowd of thousands gathered at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital Tehran Friday that “Israel no longer has a reason to exist, and will soon disappear. The Zionist regime, thank God, has lost all reason to exist”.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Europe on Friday it was stirring up hatred in the Middle East by supporting Israel and said it “may get hurt” if anger in the region boils over.

“You should believe that this regime (Israel) cannot last and has no more benefit to you. What benefit have you got in supporting this regime, except the hatred of the nations?” he said in a speech broadcast on state radio.

“We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbors of the nations in this region. We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt,” he said.
"You imposed a group of terrorists ... on the region," he said, addressing the US and its allies. "It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow."

"Nations will take revenge," he told a crowd of thousands gathered at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital Teheran.

Iran, nearing a confrontation with the West over its nuclear program, has developed a missile called "Zelzad 1." Its namesake is a Koranic verse that tells of a conflagration which precipitates Judgment Day. The missile is emblazoned with the slogan: "We will trample America under our feet. Death to America."
The fasting people taking part in the rallies are chanting such slogans as "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" to express their hatred of the world hegemonic powers.
By the way, the last sentence was repeated verbatim in no less than 11 different articles from the Iranian press.

So, we have a man who is openly pursuing nuclear weapons, openly threatening the Western world and openly laughing while the EU and UN continues to try to "negotiate" with him, buying him all the time he needs to turn Iran into a superpower.

He also knows that by repeating his ideas about Israel and America over and over again, he will get gullible "open-minded" Westerners to eventually think, "Say, let's investigate if what he says is true." It is not a huge leap from Ahmadinejad's words to those of Walt and Mearsheimer.

Ahmadinejad's threats cannily exploit the Left's fear of conflict. If supporting Israel will inevitably lead to war, and war is to be avoided at all costs, then maybe it is better not to support Israel. All the pseudo-intellectual anti-Zionist rationalizations follow from the primal fear of conflict. The Left's antipathy towards Israel is not from naked anti-semitism nearly as much as out of this fear.

It is another variant of the century-old threat of the mythical "Arab street" which worked so effectively with Britain and its White Paper as to result in the deaths of untold thousands or millions.

Oh, we will talk a good game, saying how unacceptable it is for Iran's president to speak like this. But we won't actually do anything, just as we didn't do anything about North Korea despite a decade of warning.

Short-term self-interest of the West is the greatest ally that Ahmadinejad has.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

  • Thursday, October 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
I just saw this posting at DovBear:

Last night, former AG John Asshcroft implied to the Daily Show's audience that their host Jon Stewart, a great American, would not go to heaven. Here's how it went down (paraphrased):

Stewart: Let's make a bet. If the Cardinals win tonight, I'll give you a TDS tee-shirt. If the Met's win, I go to heaven.

Asshcroft: Well, my father was a preacher and he used to say he was in sales, not management... I'll tell you what. If the Mets win, you can move to St. Louis and you'll think you've gone to heaven.


So now this ancient grounds for anti-Semtism, and the pogroms and acts of mass murder that followed, is being played for laughs? Asshcroft can concede that he thinks Jews lack the spiritual stuff needed to enter the eternal kingdom of the Lord and no one boos? Suppose Stewart was black and he asked for admission to the White-only restroom. Would the audience have then tittered so appreciativly?


I just saw the clip and DB quoted it pretty accurately.

But what on Earth made him think that Ashcroft made an anti-semitic comment? Because Jon Stewart is Jewish????

It is obvious what Ashcroft meant with his "sales, not management" comment - that he cannot guarantee anyone's entry into Heaven but he can try to get people to buy the concept. It follows easily from there that what he can guarantee is that a visit to St. Louis is tantamount to a visit to heaven. All done in a very joking way, while seated on Stewart's "Seat of Heat."

This all comes back to the stupidity of partisanship. I touched on this theme last week and it has really been bugging me. It is not by any means limited to the Left, it is equally idiotic on both sides, as people obsess over the tiniest details of the lives of the people on the other side that they hate with a passion, convinced beyond all reason that the other side is Evil Incarnate.

And when Mr. Evil Incarnate makes a statement, it symbolizes Everything Bad about His Ideology and Those who Think Like Him.

How often do we have to see the moronic argument that "The other side says it is moral/just/progressive. Here is a case where someone on that side did something immoral/unjust/Neanderthal. Ergo, the entire group is a bunch of hypocritical subhumans and I cannot understand why any sane person would want to be associated with them." ?

And these are not stupid people making these stupid arguments. They are smart people who are so blinded by their ideology and their irrational hate for the Other Side that they completely lose any sense of logic or proportionality.

To use this example: Bigotry exists on both the far Right and far Left. If people are really concerned about anti-semitism or racism, let them work to eradicate it from their own side, not throw stones about the hypocrisy of the other side. If they don't, it means that they really don't care about bigotry to begin with, but only about scoring political points.

And that is the true hypocrisy.
  • Thursday, October 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Al-Quds newspaper reports on the three PalArabs killed in the past two days, along with kidnappings, shootings and various other mayhem. (I had already mentioned one of them in a previous post.)

It describes the events as "unfortunate."

Anyway, as best as I can piece together from the news report and from headlines at PCHR that link to nonexistent articles, it seems that yesterday:

  • In one "regrettable" incident, a man named Nabahin was killed as he tried to drive his car into his garage in the Bureij camp.
  • Another "policeman" died as a result of injuries from internal fighting last Sunday.
  • One guy in the Jabaliah camp was abducted, shot a couple of times and released.
  • A Fatah "activist" shot a Hamas "activist" in the back while he was guarding a hospital in Beit Lahiya.
  • The Qatshah family shot and wounded another "policeman" near Rafah.
  • The same family then beat another "policeman" in a field nearby.
  • Gunmen in two Mercedes, no doubt outraged at their poverty-stricken status caused by the Zionists, shot another person in Khan Younis.
  • Those ubiquitous "unknown gunmen" shot a student at Najah University as he was returning from prayers.
  • At a technical school in Khan Younis, about ten uniformed "militants" of the General Intelligence Service shot randomly in the air and the students responded with rock-throwing.
So we are now at 119 known PalArabs violently killed since late June. And the chaos seems to be growing.

It's a good thing they have all those thousands of armed policemen - who knows how much worse it would be without them keeping law and order?

UPDATE: 120.
hospital medical sources announced Shahid Kamal aggression in Beit Lahia town in northern Gaza last night killed one of the elements of the force executive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Jamil Sakr Basyuni young (21 years old) shot his colleague in Beit Hanoun.

.With three citizens yesterday, including a child in two separate armed city of Khan Younis..Medical sources indicated that Basyuni arrived at the hospital a critical situation where the difference in life because of the seriousness of his health because of his several shots in the body.
  • Thursday, October 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
In celebration of the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 declaration of this Friday as Qods (Jerusalem) Day, here is an article from 1910 when early Zionism was in full bloom about how ruthless and bloodthirsty the Jews were as they reclaimed their land.


Can you imagine how awful life must have been for the Arabs there? Their economy went from practically nothing to a strong agricultural one. Real estate values soared. Hospitals were built. Railroads, electricity, telephones all arrived in Palestine.

Many Arabs became rich from selling land, worthless to them, to those strange Jews who actually thought it was valuable. Land that was considered by Arabs to be unusable were turned into gardens by the Jews - who then turned around and employed the Arabs.

Arabs from Syria and Transjordan, who stayed away from Palestine for hundreds of years, suddenly decided to move there - because those awful imperialist colonialist Jews were creating an economy where there was none.

Now, today, which Arab population in the Middle East enjoy the best living standards and the most freedom?

The ones who stayed in Palestine to live together with those horrible, racist, Zionist Jews in 1948 during the "naqba"!

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

  • Wednesday, October 18, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
This Friday is Qods Day, when Muslims pretend to care about Jerusalem. It was instituted by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran's "Religious Weblogs Office" wants all blogs to commemorate this day, so who am I to disagree?

Let's talk about how important Jerusalem was to the Arabs in the nineteen years the Old City was under Arab rule, from 1948-1967:
  • Did Jordan, which annexed the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1950, move its capital to Jerusalem? Ummmm...no.
  • Jewish families who lived in the Old City's Jewish Quarter for centuries were kicked out.
  • Did the Arab Muslims who are supposed to be so committed to religious pluralism allow Jews to worship or even visit Jerusalem? Ummmm...no. (The 1949 Armistice Agreement specifically stipulated that Jews should be allowed to visit their holy places.)
  • During Jordanian rule, more Palestinian Arabs moved to the East Bank than any who immigrated westward and into East Jerusalem. The population of Muslims in Jerusalem did not increase all that much in those 19 years.
  • In 1951, the Jordanian king Abdullah I was assassinated - inside the Al Aqsa Mosque, by a Palestinian Arab who heard rumors that Jordan and Israel were considering a peace treaty.
  • Christians in Jerusalem were also persecuted during that time period: their schools were forced to close on Fridays rather than Sundays, they were not allowed to purchase land.
  • While the Dome of the Rock was accorded a measure of respect, the rest of Jerusalem was pretty much ignored throughout the Muslim world.
  • Jordanian radio broadcast Friday prayers from Amman, not Jerusalem.
  • No foreign Arab leader visited Jerusalem during those 19 years.
  • The PLO's founding document does not mention Jerusalem. (last three from Daniel Pipes, h/t Soccer Dad.)
It would be a safe bet that this is a model of how Jerusalem would be treated if it should ever come under Muslim rule again.

Thank God that will never happen. For centuries, Jews risked their lives to move to a Muslim-ruled Jerusalem that was thoroughly neglected by the Muslim world, and Christians made regular pilgrimages there as well. Jerusalem, under Muslim rule, was a filthy and disgusting ruin, not even a shell of how it looked before the Romans conquered it.

Three times a day for nearly two millennia Jews prayed for the restoration and rebuilding of Jerusalem. It was a beautiful city whose destruction was considered a tragedy beyond comprehension by all Jews.

For nearly two millennia others conquered Jerusalem but no one bothered to rebuild it. The only people to truly care about Jerusalem were the Jews. And the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 is considered a holiday for all Jews today.

So, I am happy to celebrate Qods Day this Friday, the last Friday of Ramadan, because when it comes to Jerusalem, the good guys won.
As readers of this blog know, I've been spending some time over the past few days reading auto-translated PalArab media websites. Here are some general observations:
  • Unlike newspapers all over the world, including Arab newspapers, there are almost no local "human interest" stories. A great majority of "local" news is dedicated to Israeli actions.
  • Local crime, especially "clan clashes" and Fatah-Hamas violence, is only sporadically reported and definitely downplayed. While the 15 killed earlier this month did get some press the other violent acts that are a part of daily life are either considered normal or something meant to be minimized. Almost no individual acts of local terror will get covered in every newspaper the way that an Israeli arrest or incursion does - I have to look through many papers to find a single mention.
  • There is some obsession with local Israeli politics, pretty much a funhouse mirror version of Haaretz or Yediot. Small stories get large headlines and vice versa.
  • When it comes to paranoia, Jews don't come close to Arabs. There are many stories about Western attempts to obliterate Islam altogether, and lots of articles about imaginary plots by Jews to destroy the mosque on the Temple Mount.
  • As can be expected, the theme that Jews have no historic or religious connection to the land is prevalent. Articles will regularly say things like "historians have proven that there was no Temple in Jerusalem" or that Jews going to Joseph's Tomb to pray are "desecrating" it.
  • Normal journalistic standards that can be expected in Western media, as well as in most English-language Arab media - the pretense of objectivity - is in much shorter supply. I have no doubt that it is not as bad as in the past, now that many Arabs can read English and can compare for themselves, but the Arabic media is tilted away from the truth compared to their English-language counterparts.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

  • Tuesday, October 17, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Reuters:
A senior figure in Hamas, the Islamist group that heads the Palestinian government, published an article on Tuesday condemning internal violence and questioning whether it had become a "Palestinian disease."

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas who also acts as the spokesman for the Hamas-led government, said he was disturbed by growing factionalism in the Palestinian territories, including recent deadly clashes between rival political movements.

"Has violence become a culture implanted in our bodies and our flesh?" he asked in the sharply worded article, published in the widely read Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam.

"We have surrendered to it until it has become the master and is obeyed everywhere -- in the house, the neighborhood, the family, the clan, the faction and the university."

It was the second time in recent months that Hamad, who is based in Gaza, had written an opinion piece in al-Ayyam critical of Palestinian in-fighting.

In August, he criticized Palestinian militant groups fighting
Israel, saying they were not doing the cause of Palestinian independence any good by launching attacks at moments when it appeared progress was being made.

In the article published on Tuesday, Hamad said the presence of armed men on almost every street, and their attendance at every rally, whether political or not, had created an atmosphere of guns and violence that damaged prospects for calm.
...

Hamad wrote that 175 Palestinians had been killed by "Palestinian gunfire" since the beginning of the year.

His original autotranslated article is here. It includes this startling (for Palestinian Arabs) section:
Who should be responsible? Do we all bear responsibility? Yes!!! Are we participants of this great sin? Yes!
To see a Palestinian Arab blame his own people for their problems, and not the Zionists, is close to amazing. (Other Arab newspapers are not as charitable towards Palestinian Arabs.)

As far as his estimate of 175 of his people killed by their own people this year, the number is certainly higher, although it is hard to know exactly how much higher. I counted 116 dead since late June, and PCHR lists an additional 61 between February 21st and Operation Summer Rains. We can safely assume at least 20 more killed from January 1st to February 20th, and we have seen that PCHR does not count some of the deaths that other press mentions, as well as those who die from earlier injuries. I would conservatively estimate between 220-250 violent PalArab deaths this year so far from gunfire, work accidents, random shootings at weddings and funerals, clan clashes, honor killings (both women and men!) and the like.

(H/T Soccer Dad via email.)
  • Tuesday, October 17, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Three Palestinian Arab civilians from the same family were shot at a checkpoint west of Gaza City.

Of course, no human rights organizations will protest this - because the checkpoint was set up by a Palestinian Arab family:
at approximately 21:00 on Monday, 16 October 2006, a member of the Baker family fired at a civilian car that did not obey orders to stop at a checkpoint erected by the family in ‘Abu Hassira Street in the west of Gaza City. Three persons traveling in the car were wounded:

1. Sa’di ‘Ali ‘Ajour, 60, seriously wounded by several live bullets to the chest and the abdomen;

2. Firial Mahmoud ‘Ajour, 57, wounded by several live bullets to the legs; and

3. Tariq Sa’di ‘Ajour, 35, wounded by shrapnel to the back.
No doubt, the family decided to set up an armed checkpoint because of the Zionist humiliation they are suffering. Or maybe they charge a toll because of the crippling economic situation started by the Zionist infidels. One way or another, it cannot possibly be the fault of any Palestinian Arabs, where the word "responsibility" is used exclusively to take credit for bombing Jews.

On the Clan Clash front, a 13-year old boy died from wounds suffered last week as two Gaza families do their best to imitate the Hatfields and McCoys. During the funeral, the mourners burned down a house and four shops belonging to the other family, and a melee resulted with five injuries, four of them bystanders.

PalArab self-death count now stands at 116.

UPDATE: 117.
Amar Taher, a Hamas terrorist, was killed by those pesky unknown masked gunmen in Nablus. Hamas will call a general strike and Abbas condemned the killing.

I only saw this mentioned in a single PalArab newspaper.

Monday, October 16, 2006

  • Monday, October 16, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
I just mentioned about how the PalArabs are so upset over the fact that Canada is agreeing to take a handful of Palestinian Arabs who were in camps on the Iraq/Jordan border for three years.

An amazing editorial in "Falasteen" makes the explicit argument: it is better for Palestinian Arabs to be languishing in "refugee" camps with sewage running through the streets than to live in the West where they may lose their interest in destroying Israel.

The English autotranslation is poor but the argument is clear.

It starts off with the usual claptrap, as if the PalArab refugees of 1948 somehow are more special than the millions of refugees throughout history that managed to resettle in other areas:
Since the Palestinians have been subjected to the worst moral and humanitarian catastrophe at the hands of Western colonialism and its strategic stepfather Israel, What led to this unprecedented disaster in terms of the volume and quality of impact of the relocation of two thirds of the Palestinian people from the land of fathers and forefathers, which is linked organically linked and functionally normal across hundreds of years.
The author then goes on to describe the horror of the possibility that the Palestinian Arabs may become responsible for their own people, rather than the UNRWA:
On this pressured Israel and America to be with dealing with the refugee issue as part of what is called a work operating within multiple areas of service, humanitarian, technical and health - headed (by) a group of European countries in the context of each area identified him, . On this issue of the refugees is a secondary issue to be agreed upon later without reference to that section of Resolution 194 specifically, Based on this already, our attempt conspiracy to the right of return for refugees through what was known as the timely implementation of the peace program, which was famous among the top of his priorities is to transfer the powers of UNRWA to the Palestinian Authority in preparation for the cancellation and consequently the termination of the relief agency first witness to the calamity and disaster Palestinian refugees.

The next couple of paragraphs are laborious reading in the stilted translation - they include decrying the fact that Jordan is not accpeting mre Palestinian Arabs into its existing camps, and that Syria should as well - but the money quote is here:
We have warned and others in more than one location and an article about the dangers to be dissipating refugee diaspora Palestinians, since this will negatively impact on the fabric of their unity and their syndicated in the areas of asylum Chairperson, It is not evidenced by the clear position of all the levels and orientations of the Palestinian people when they insisted all, in coordination with the Lebanese government in a timely manner to the need for the Palestinian refugees accepted by the reduction of their civil, social, and we have made clear to the Lebanese government at the time that the enjoyment of those rights to those relating to resettlement, because the abridgement of the rights of refugees and civil service, and those who were already suffering from it and the less frequently today after the agreement with the Lebanese government. these will lead to migration to other European countries and therefore as a result of this disruption to the bloc refugees in Lebanon and the resulting in the end of the negative impact on their right to return to their homes and property.
What he seems to be saying here is that the Lebanese government had the opportunity (whether it was internal or from outside pressure, I don't know) to integrate Palestinian Arabs into Lebanese society and eliminate their pain of refugee status - and this was considered by the self-appointed Palestinian Arab leaders to be a disastrous plan, because happy Palestinian Arabs destroy the unity of their "people!" They might move away from their miserable camps and actually build lives like normal human beings - and this is not acceptable!

The corollary, of course, is that the fictional "Palestinian" peoplehood is a farce - that the only thing that unifies the PalArabs is their hatred of Israel and their desire to see it destroyed. On an individual basis, PalArabs have proven time and time again that they just want to be treated like human beings and to be able to raise their families in dignity, and they never cared whether this was in Palestine or Jordan or Syria, or Canada for that matter. Their "leaders," symbolized here by this writer, do not want to see individual Palestinian Arabs happy, because their main card in pressuring Israel is a huge amount of miserable "refugees." The author is saying how the Western powers, in trying to help Palestinian Arabs live respectable and honorable lives, are really trying to destroy them as a people.

Which is in a sense true - a people that would assimilate into the surrounding countries would indeed disappear, unless there was a compelling religious or nationalistic force keeping them together. Since the concept of Palestinian Arab culture and nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and mostly artificially created by the hell their "brethren" put them through in not accepting them as part of the larger Arab nation, they would fade away pretty quickly. Their "leaders" have a vested interest in keeping this from happening - or else they would be left without people to lead.

This is why they are freaking out over only 46 of their people moving to Canada. If other PalArabs see that some of their people have escaped the concentration camps that their leaders insist they stay in, they will start getting ideas as well.

And who wrote this article?

Imad Saladin
- Writer and researcher in the legal and political affairs
Solidarity International Foundation for Human Rights

Here the circle of hypocrisy is complete. A person supposedly devoted to human rights is openly advocating the absence of any human rights for Palestinian Arabs. (This may be the ISM.)

An interesting exercise may be to ask an advocate of Palestinian Arab rights whether they support Canada's humanitarian gesture in taking in a few dozen PalArabs from a camp where they had no human rights and letting them move to Canada. This one issue can show exactly how corrupt and hateful the ostensibly pro-Palestinian Arab movements are - towards "Palestinians!"
  • Monday, October 16, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
It looks like we have ourselves a real live prophet!
While the West is preparing to impose sanctions on Iran, due to the country's failure to suspend its nuclear activities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still optimistic. "We shall win," he was quoted in the Iranian media as saying Monday, and added: "One day I will be asked whether I have been in touch with someone who told me we would win, and I will respond: 'Yes, I have been in touch with God'."

And in an Egyptian newspaper article, he went even further (autotranslated):
Ahmadinejad said before a crowd of supporters that he is to receive revelation from God, and that God shows miracles to those who truly believe in him.

The transfer of information from the Iranian Ahmadinejad as saying that Bush "also receives inspiration, but from the devil."

Glad he cleared that up. I wasn't sure whose side to take.
  • Monday, October 16, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Besides the terrorists vying for proper credit when they launch rockets towards Israeli civilians...
  • A 20-year old, Mohammad Al Breem, was killed in another of those "mysterious explosions" that only seem to happen in the enlightened Palestinian Arab territories. Our deathcount is now at 114. Another "activist" was seriously wounded, his legs amputated.
  • Masked "gunmen" shot and wounded a Hamas man while he was carrying his two-year old baby.
  • Gunmen burst into a local government building in Bethlehem. (autotranslated)
  • A Palestinian Arab woman managed to start two grocery stores, because of loans given years ago by those infidel Zionist Americans who work at USAID. (autotranslated)
  • Hamas is very upset that Canada is planning to accept 46 Palestinian Arab refugees who were stuck in Iraq. They hate the idea that Palestinian Arabs might settle any place that their lives would be better, because that lowers the pressure-cooker environment that Hamas is fostering to aim PalArab anger against Israel.

    Apparently, Abbas is equally upset at a nation actually wanting to help individual Palestinian Arabs who were suffering in Iraq. He thinks it is better to keep them in camps in Jordan or Lebanon where they would have no real rights.
  • Fatah condemned a Hamas attack against a Fatah media spokesman (autotranslated.)
  • If I'm reading this article correctly, there were also armed clashes between Hamas and Fatah in Jabaliyah, somewhere else in Gaza a 19 year old was shot and wounded, and a Fatah leader who was shot and kidnapped was returned.
Just another peaceful day in the territories, where the source of all evil is Israel - when a PalArab talks to the Western press.

UPDATE: A 43-year old man, Abdel-Salam Tawfik Younis, was killed by those famous "unknown persons," riddling his body with bullets shot from a car. We are now at 115 violent PalArab deaths since late June.
  • Monday, October 16, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon


GAZA, Oct 16 (Reuters) - An intense rivalry among militant groups in the Gaza Strip has taken an odd twist with some fighters now labeling rockets they fire at Israel with Hebrew to make sure they are credited for the attacks.

A Reuters photograph taken on Monday showed an Israeli policeman lifting the remains of a rocket fired from Gaza at southern Israel, with Hebrew lettering identifying it as an Al-Quds 3, a rocket made by Islamic Jihad militants.

Abu Abdullah, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad's armed wing, said the Hebrew language label was intended both to threaten Israelis and "distinguish its rockets from those of other factions" such as Hamas, whose rockets are more widely known.

Islamic Jihad is not the only Palestinian faction to sign off in Hebrew in a bid to compete with Hamas. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, has also begun doing so.

Israeli authorities nearly always refer to the makeshift rockets fired from Gaza as Qassams, the name of those made by Hamas, the ruling party and Fatah's chief rival.

Hamas, an Islamist group that is officially sworn to Israel's destruction, was the first to fire rockets into Israel and so its Qassam moniker has become the generic term.

As a result, other militant groups feel they are not getting enough credit among the Palestinian populace for the attacks they launch against Israel.

Abu Qusai, a spokesman for the al-Aqsa group, said Hebrew letters were being painted on their rockets "to distinguish them from those fired by other brothers" and illustrate their commitment to "resistance" against Israel.

Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for the Hamas's armed wing, said the group had no plans to label their rockets in Hebrew.

He called it a boon for Hamas that the "factions are running an honest and positive competition in rocket firing".

"When everybody competes to strike the enemy, this is a victory to Hamas's agenda of Jihad (holy war) and resistance," Abu Ubaida said.
I seem to remember a brouhaha a few months ago when some Israeli kids signed their names on rockets that were aimed at master terrorist Nasrallah in Lebanon. Many people were very upset that Israelis could be so heartless.

Where are those people today?

(Amazingly, Reuters translates "jihad" as "holy war." Wonders never cease, although I wouldn't be the least surprised to see a political "correction" from the politically correct leader of the MSM.)

UPDATE: Jewlicious weighs in on the marketing possibilities.
  • Monday, October 16, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
A nice article about how the West needs to understand the concept of "honor" as the Muslims, especially Arabs, view it. This is a theme we have explored before.
The Terror War Is An Honor War

By Jonathan Rauch, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 13, 2006

On August 29 in Tehran, a reporter rose during a press conference with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked to recite a poem. "Recite just two lines," said the president. "Don't make it too long. We don't have time. Just the best part."

"But it's all good," the reporter replied.

"So, read the middle." Whereupon the journalist declaimed as follows:

For the sake of defending our homeland, we will give up even our heads
We will attack any enemy like lions
We are known all over the world for our fearlessness and manliness
For the sake of God, we will turn our chests to shields

"Well done," Ahmadinejad said. "You were supposed to recite only two lines."

A U.S. president in Ahmadinejad's place would not say, "Well done, but too long." He would say something like, "You need medical help." By historical standards, however, it is the American reaction, not the Iranian one, that is odd.

The journalist-poet was speaking the language of traditional honor, a tongue that modern Westerners have largely forgotten -- to their peril, if James Bowman is right. In a recently published and bracingly original book called Honor: A History, Bowman -- a cultural critic and historian affiliated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington -- argues that honor remains a potent force in world affairs, perhaps more potent today than in many years, because it is central to the liberal West's confrontation with militant Islam. If he is right, the terror war is really an honor war, but only one side knows it.

Boiling Bowman's richly nuanced 327 pages down to four paragraphs does the book a cruel disservice, but this is journalism, so here goes. Honor, for Bowman's purposes, means "the good opinion of people who matter to us." The basic honor code requires men to maintain a reputation for bravery, women a reputation for chastity. If a man is insulted, injured, or disrespected, he must avenge the offense and prove that anyone who messes with him (or "his" women) will be sorry.

The West's history is rich with traditions of honor, and equally rich with examples of its dangers and follies, among them the duel that killed the most brilliant of America's Founders. Singularly, however, the West has backed away from honor. Under admonitions from Christianity to turn the other cheek and from the Enlightenment to favor reason over emotion, the West first channeled honor into the arcane rituals of chivalry, then folded it into a code of manly but magnanimous Victorian gentlemanliness -- and then, in the 20th century, drove it into disrepute. World War I and the Vietnam War were seen as needless butcheries brought on by archaic obsessions with national honor; feminism and the therapeutic culture taught that a higher manly strength acknowledges weakness.

"Yet we are, in global terms, the odd ones out," Bowman writes. Outside the West, traditional honor codes remain strong, and nowhere is that more true than in the Muslim world. In the modern Islamic world, few share the West's view of honor as outdated and unnecessary. "The honor culture of the Islamic world predates its conversion to Islam in the seventh century," writes Bowman.

Islam overlaid itself above honor and, unlike Christianity in the West, did not challenge it. Today's militant jihadism takes the ethic of honor to extremes, fixating on manly ferocity and glorious vengeance.

Thus, Bowman writes, "America and its allies are engaged in a battle against an Islamist enemy that is the product of one of the world's great unreconstructed and unreformed honor cultures." Jihadism wages not only a religious war but a cultural one, aiming to redeem, through deeds of bravery and defiance, the honor of an Islam whose glory has shamefully faded. It aims, further, to uphold a masculine honor code that the West's decadent, feminizing influence threatens to undermine.

Whether or not Bowman has the whole story right, the prism of honor brings puzzling elements of the current conflict into sharper focus. Americans are baffled that Western appeals to freedom and prosperity get so little traction in the Arab and Muslim worlds. America's example as the "shining city on a hill" inspired liberalizing movements from Eastern Europe to Tiananmen Square; why should the Middle East be different? One answer is that traditional honor cultures value vindication over freedom and wealth. Militant Islamism and Baathist-style national socialism offer narratives of restored greatness and heroic resistance. Ballot boxes and shopping malls offer neither. If freedom brings humiliation, what good is it?

Most wars are waged between combatants who share similar honor codes or at least comprehend each other's honor codes. This time, there is no communication across the battlefield. To Americans, it is patently clear that the attacks of September 11 were acts of unprovoked aggression; in a traditional honor culture, however, violence to protect one's honor is just as self-defensive as violence to protect one's person.

Westerners are both revolted and puzzled by jihadists' willingness to kill non-Muslim civilians. In the post-honor West, the first rule of honorable combat is not to target noncombatants. From biblical times on down, by contrast, many traditional honor cultures have made a practice of killing and enslaving civilians, whom they regarded as enemies and spoils. In a primitive honor culture, the combatant-civilian distinction is less important than the boundary between one's own honor circle -- one's self, clan, tribe, or religious co-believers -- and outsiders, whose fate is largely a matter of indifference. Modern jihadism appears to have embraced this atavistic ethic.

Traditional honor, Bowman emphasizes, is about the reputation for bravery, not necessarily bravery itself. Maintaining reputation implies saving face by never admitting weakness. When Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, Iraq's information minister during the U.S. invasion in 2003, insisted ludicrously that Iraq was winning the war, "he was simply saying what it was incumbent on a man of honor to say if he was not to lose face by admitting a shameful defeat," according to Bowman.

More consequentially, Americans assumed, in 2002 and 2003, that Saddam Hussein would not pretend to hide weapons of mass destruction that he didn't actually possess. Why would he lie to bring about his own downfall? What seemed inexplicable to a post-honor culture would seem, in a traditional honor culture, too obvious to need explaining: Saddam was more concerned about saving face -- preserving his reputation for being fierce and formidable -- than about his office or even his life. Indeed, he could not feel otherwise and still count himself a man.

In the modern West, interest trumps honor (or subsumes it). We don't shoot ourselves in the foot to prove we're tough and fierce. Or, if we do, we expect to be ridiculed, not admired. If interest trumps honor, a country will swallow its pride in the face of a defeat or setback and make the best of its lot. For Germany after World War II (and for Japan, which was quick to adopt Western ways), getting rich was the best revenge.

In a traditional honor culture, that sort of pride-swallowing compromise may not be possible. Honor trumps interest (or subsumes it). The well-educated and talented Arabs of the Levant might today be enjoying the same prosperity and security as Spain or South Korea if years ago they had accepted Israel as a fact of life, made peace, and moved on. To Hamas and Hezbollah militants and their supporters, however, Israel's continued existence is a standing humiliation, and the debt to honor must be paid, never mind the cost.

Nor can militant Islamists settle with the West. When the post-honor West says, "Come, now, give up this foolishness, join our club, be free and rich," they hear something more like, "Be our poodle, sit at our feet, enjoy the fruits of capitulation." Admonitions that bellicosity accomplishes nothing miss the point, which is that the very act of fighting ("resistance") redeems honor and therefore accomplishes what matters most.

The West thus finds itself an unwilling, and in many respects unwitting, participant in an honor feud. Clashes of interest can end in compromise, but honor feuds proffer no logical end of destruction, as Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets and Mark Twain's Grangerfords and Shepherdsons could attest. "There's no, to use a fashionable term, exit strategy," Bowman said in an interview.

Americans are naive if we assume that honor cultures yearn for freedom on our terms, and remiss if we underestimate their capacity for self-defeating belligerence. Although they are not strictly rational by modern Western lights, neither are they crazy. They are something else altogether: honor-bound.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

  • Sunday, October 15, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
As the world headlines scream about Israel targeting terrorists in the territories, it is completely ignoring how the PalArabs are treating each other:
But of course, all of the Palestinian Arab troubles come from the "occupation."

The count is now at 113.

UPDATE:
Also, an apparent faked honor crime where a girl was stabbed and left for dead; her life was saved in one of those barbaric Israeli hospitals. Hard to understand the autotranslate, though; it seems that the brother owed someone 700 shekels.

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