Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 01, 2007

PalArabs say again that Arafat was murdered

Here's an object lesson in how activist "journalism" can create lies out of whole cloth.

Stephen Lendman, who writes for far-left rags like Counterpunch, claims to have unearthed evidence from a French book by the late Uri Dan that claims that Ariel Sharon assassinated Yasir Arafat. The Palestinian Arab has been highlighting this story, although it has barely created a ripple in the West.

Let's look a little closer at what Lendman writes:

Former Longtime Confidant Accuses Ariel Sharon of Assassinating Yasser Arafat - by Stephen Lendman

Longtime and now recently deceased confidant to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Uri Dan, published a book in France that may have been his 2006 one titled Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait in which he accused the former prime minister of assassinating Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat by poisoning him.

OK, Lendman is saying straight out that Dan accused Sharon of assassinating Arafat. Here's Lendman's evidence:

Dan claimed Sharon got approval from George Bush by phone early in 2004 to proceed with his plan after he told the US president he was no longer committed to "not" liquidating the Palestinian leader who then was under siege and practically incarcerated in what remained of his Ramallah compound, most of which had already been destroyed by the Israelis in a lawless act of retribution against him.

So his evidence is that Sharon felt that he was allowed to kill Arafat. That's it. He adds stupid irrelevant (and well-known) facts to buttress this idiotic argument:

Based on his record during his tenure as Texas governor, when he authorized more death row inmate executions than any US governor in history (and was called by some the Texecutioner), this revelation should come as no surprise. It's even clearer based on Ariel Sharon's boast once about his relationship with George Bush saying: "We have the US president under our control."

Of course Lendman, completely out of evidence and completely unbound by journalistic integrity, throws in a complete fabricated quote from Sharon (and he doesn't even get the fabricated quote right!)

Arafat died in Paris on November 11, 2004 at age 75. He was taken there on October 29 that year and hospitalized for treatment for an undiagnosed illness that began developing in April and became serious enough for him to need special care. It may have already been too late when he arrived as he slipped into a coma on November 3 and remained in that state till his death eight days later from what was explained at the time as complications from a blood disorder. Indeed it may have been true if his blood was poisoned by a substance able to work slowly and from which no cure was possible at least once the former Palestinian leader arrived in Paris.

To those knowledgeable about Israel's history since it became a state in 1948 and earlier, this revelation, if true, should come as no surprise.

In other words, Uri Dan said no such thing (and Lendman isn't even sure if he has the right book!) but that's enough for this ersatz "journalist" to make wild, unfounded accusations.

Even funnier is that all of this information had been widely available in 2004:

But Uri Dan, a Sharon confidant, wrote in November 2004 that he remembered meetings in 1982 held by Sharon, then defense minister, in his Tel Aviv office "in which he asked the heads of the Mossad when they would finally carry out Prime Minister Menachem Begin's order to eliminate Arafat."

In September 2003, Sharon's vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said of Arafat that "killing him is definitely one of the options." He added: "We are trying to eliminate all the heads of terror, and Arafat is one of the heads of terror."

There have been reports in the Israeli press of a secret cabinet decision made in late 2003 to eliminate Arafat, which Dan describes as "a deliberately vaguely worded decision to remove Arafat, since he was an obstacle to peace." Officials have hinted that operational plans were drawn up to eliminate Arafat, although they say no action was taken.

Under American pressure, Sharon agreed simply to isolate Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters after the Israeli military operation to retake control of the West Bank in the spring of 2002.

But Sharon himself said he informed President George W. Bush on April 14, 2004, that he no longer felt bound by his promise to Bush in March 2001 not to harm Arafat, Dan says.

"President Bush replied that it would perhaps be best to leave Arafat's fate in the hands of the Almighty. Sharon said that one should sometimes help Him."

It is no surprise then, Dan concluded, that many Palestinians "are spreading a conspiracy theory that Israel poisoned Arafat."

Now, if Sharon had ordered the assassination fo Arafat it wouldn't bother me in the least, but Lendman has uncovered no evidence at all. That doesn't stop him from publishing it everywhere he can find, thinking he has a scoop, and it doesn't stop the paranoid PalArabs and their terror supporters from taking the story and running with it.
The Ma'an "news" agency added a detail:

>Another writer, Amnon Kabilok, wrote a revision of the book which is entitled 'Sharon,' in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He inquired how Uri Dan knew about the sickness of Arafat and its causes and symptoms months in advance of the deceased's symptoms appearing.

Amnon said that while reviewing a book by Uri Dan, he received the news that the author of that book has passed away. He also said that he struggled to get a copy of the book, which he finally obtained with the help of a French friend.

So this Kabilok was writing a revision of Dan's book, apparently without meeting Dan (who only died last month), but he didn't have a copy of the book he was revising. Yes, this all makes sense!

This is the state of terror journalism - know the facts before you look for evidence, and then make the "evidence" fit the facts. (Of course, this seems to be the state of mainstream journalism as well.)

So now the PalArab press is filled with new accusations that they claim Sharon's friend and confidante stated.

And they are, simply, lying.

New Year 1937 Eve:Toscanini and the Palestine Orchestra

1936 was a rough year for the Jews of Palestine. There were Arab riots, strikes and many terror attacks.

But the Jews did not whine nor did they quit. They fought mightily to live their lives to be as normal as possible even in situations where a bullet could come from anywhere and end any of their lives.

In one representative article in the Palestine Post, we see that Hebrew University was going forward with plans to expand even though students and faculty had been murdered by Arabs that year (All articles here are from the December 31, 1936 Palestine Post):

In the end of the year, the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini came to Jerusalem (at his own expense) to conduct in what was considered a hugely important cultural event to the Palestinian Jews as the coming out of the Palestine Orchestra. (Notice thatneither the ads nor the articles even mention Toscanini's first name; he was that well-known and revered that it was simply not necessary.)

Sadly, the bulk of the article is not available in the Palestine Post archives, but it is clear that the concert series was a smashing success. (One letter writer to the Post did complain about the actions of the press photographers at the previous week's concert, though.)

The Haifa concert on New Year's Eve was sold out:

Haifa residents could enjoy a traditional New Year's party afterwards:

And due to popular demand, an additional concert was scheduled for Jerusalem:

TIME magazine described one concert:

As a full Palestine moon rode one evening last week over Tel Aviv, exclusively Jewish city, the Hebrew Sabbath ended and thousands of Jews began to move toward the Levant Fair Grounds. There they packed the Italian Pavilion to capacity to hear great Arturo Toscanini lead Palestine's first civic orchestra through its first performance. Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, the British High Commissioner, brought with him a party of notables. Open-shirted German immigrants gathered in rowboats on the adjacent Yarkon River. A few Arab fishermen paddled quietly toward shore, listened respectfully outside the pavilion walls which are still pitted by Arab bullets.

Inside those walls Arturo Toscanini was proving again his art, and allaying the fears of those who had heard the orchestra rehearse. A week prior it had been ragged, particularly in winds & strings. But the great master made the Brahms Second come out so clear and controlled. Schubert's Unfinished Symphony sing with such freshness that the audience could forget the flocks of frightened sparrows which swooped and twittered above their heads. There was no raggedness when, partly as a taunt to Nazi Germany, he led them through a scherzo by Jewish Felix Mendelssohn.

The Palestine symphony was grateful to Toscanini for coming all the way to make its debut a success. But all Tel Aviv knew and did not forget that Violinist Bronislaw Huberman was the man who made its debut a possibility. Touring Palestine in December 1935. Huberman, a Polish Jew, was impressed by the attendance and enthusiasm of natives & exiles who came to hear his violin concerts. He determined to build for them an orchestra at Tel Aviv, their brave new cultural capital, and resigned his Vienna teaching post to do so. Already in Palestine, or easily available all over Europe, were scores of refugee Jewish musicians. It was easy to get, as permanent administrators of the new orchestra's trust fund, such influential Jews as Financier Israel Sieff of London, Belgian Industrialist Dannie Heineman. Palestine's Lieut. Col. Frederick Hermann Kisch. Palestine's top-notch lawyer, Solomon Horowitz. Dr. Albert Einstein took the honorary presidency of the U. S. branch of the organization.

The Palestine Symphony Orchestra now numbers 72. Germans make up about half the number, the rest are Poles and Russians. Six are natives of Palestine which has several competent music schools but welcomes the new orchestra as its only permanent symphony. So many first-desk musicians are playing in it that critics expect the Palestine Symphony to rank soon among the first four orchestras in the world. Impresario Huberman is proud to have engaged for the forthcoming season such guest artists as Violinist Adolf Busch and Cellist Pablo Casals. After Toscanini takes the orchestra to Jerusalem, Haifa, Cairo and Alexandria this season, Issay Dobrowen, former conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, onetime director of the Frankfort Opera, and Michael Taube, former leader of famed German ensembles, will replace him on Jewry's proudest podium.

For a people who desire and celebrate life, a few terror attacks will not break their will. In many ways, it makes them more determined than ever to live their lives exactly the way they want to.

For people who are raised in a culture of death, however, one will be hard-pressed to find any similar stories.

Of course Ellison should swear on the Koran

The controversy over Keith Ellison's desire to use a Koran to swear in as a member of Congress has raised a number of criticisms, most notably (and controversially) from Dennis Prager. A very good roundup of all points of view can be seen in the Wikipedia article on the topic.

From everything I've read, Prager is wrong and inconsistent in many areas of his article. Most of them were addressed by Eugene Volokh. But there is one aspect of this story that I haven't seen mentioned.

The purpose of the book that some (not all) public officials swear on is to show the seriousness of the oath, not as an affirmation of the contents of the book. The use of a Bible or Koran or Tanakh is tangential to the point of the oath - which is, in this case, to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Here is the text with the words in italics not being necessary:

I do solemnly swear (affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

If Ellison believes that the Bible is a corrupt and incorrect document, which is what Islam states at least in reference to the Old Testament, then insisting that he take the above oath on a book he doesn't believe in is much worse than his swearing to uphold the Constitution on a book that he believes passionately in. In other words, his swearing on a book he doesn't believe in has the same import to him as swearing on a comic book.

The fear that some have about Ellison is whether he, as a Muslim, has the ability to uphold the Constitution. There may or may not be contradictions between Ellison's flavor of Shari'a and the US Constitution, and that is a reasonable question to ask (just as some worried that JFK would put his Catholicism above his patriotism.) But his swearing on a Koran has nothing to do with that - on the contrary, it indicates that at least to him, the two are not mutually exclusive, a conclusion that could not be made if he was forced to "swear" on a book he has no belief in.

Slightly more problematic is the idea that he will replace "So help me God" with "Allahu Akhbar." While I have no problem with the words "God is great" themselves, it is very troubling to think that the very words that have been shouted to accompany the murders of thousands of Americans and other innocents worldwide should be uttered in Congress. This is not a logical argument but an emotional one, but it is one that I cannot personally let go so easily.

The Times of London "censors" Iran!

Today's Times of London printed a letter from the Iranian ambassador to Britain. Iran is upset that the Times watered down their hysterical rhetoric, and, frankly, so am I.

It would be much better for readers to see the spit flying out of the Iranians' mouths when evaluating the merit of their arguments. (Calling it censorship is, of course, nuts - editors have the right to edit. But the Times edits seriously downplays the insanity of the argument.)

Here's the letter that the Times published, along with a reconstruction (in bold) of the parts that Iran sent based on this IRNA article:

Sir, Iran (letter, Dec 26) is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and has categorically rejected development, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons on ideological and strategic grounds, while on December 11 the Prime Minister of Israel boasted about his regime's nuclear weapons ~~appeared to admit that his country had nuclear weapons, although his aides later denied this.~~

For decades the international community, especially countries in the Middle East, has been aware of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, but the reversal of the hypocritical policy of “strategic ambiguity” has posed a serious threat to the security of the region.

On the other hand, those governments which have pushed the Security Council to take measures against Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme have systematically prevented it from taking any action against Israel for refusing to abide by the NPT ~~to nudge Israel towards submitting itself to the rules governing the nuclear non-proliferation regime~~.

There is a famous Persian saying that 'Truth is bitter whether you like it or not.' The root causes of all the troubles and miseries are Israel's long and dark catalogue of atrocities, such as occupation, aggression, militarism, state-terrorism, crimes against humanity. It is these which pose a uniquely grave threat to regional and international peace and security.
HAMID BABAEI
Chargé d’Affairs
Embassy of Iran
London SW7

Babaei's screed seems almost reasonable in the way the Times presented it. Only in its original context can one see that his main point was the last paragraph, where he blames everything from Arab poverty to Saddam Hussein and the Saudi kleptocracy on Israel.

My best of 2006 (streamlined)

This was an interesting exercise. I tried going through all my posts and found dozens that I liked - it is much harder to pick only a few than I expected.

It was worthwhile, though - because looking at my posts from months ago, many of which I had forgotten about, allowed me to evaluate my posting style a little more objectively and I must say that I am proud of this blog. I found relatively few posts that look incorrect or silly in retrospect - on the contrary, I think almost all of my longer essays could be posted today with little loss of relevance.

So I am arbitrarily choosing only some posts that people created trackbacks to in their own postings.

Thanks for reading!

The most moral army in history
Some of those female prisoners
The problem with the BBC
The perfect weapon
Using Israel's morality as a weapon
Building an economy under fire: The Jews of 1939

Olmert recognizes an Arab Palestinian State

Some details on the meeting Olmert had with Abbas, from the Forward:

The meeting — long expected, oft postponed and arranged in secrecy — was the first between the two since Olmert became prime minister. Strikingly, Olmert made a point of treating Abbas as a head of state. A red, green, black and white flag waved next to the blue-and-white Israeli one in the parking lot of Olmert’s residence — the first time the Palestinian banner has been displayed at an Israeli institution. Olmert greet Abbas as “Mr. President” — dropping the Israeli insistence on the lesser title “chairman” for the head of the Palestinian Authority.

The symbols were aimed at announcing that Olmert regards Abbas as a negotiating partner. “The prime minister stated very clearly that he is reaching out to those in the Palestinian Authority who support a two-state solution and achieving [it] through dialogue,” Olmert spokeswoman Miri Eisin told the Forward this week. “We are trying… to show the Palestinian people that there are more benefits to non-violence.”

And we all know how non-violent the past month was!

And we all know how committed to peace Fatah is!

Jameel is right - they tell jokes about Israel in Chelm.

Let's hope that Israel can find leaders who aren't quite as funny.

Morning links

Judeopundit opines on Hezbollah perfume.
Jameel at the Muqata has the best title of the morning.
Omri elaborates on a past Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Smooth enlightens us to another source of PalArab terror funding.

Where a month ago is ancient history

Let's all jump into the Wayback Machine and travel far, far back into the shrouded and mysterious past. Let us unearth the words and deeds of the previous generations and try to learn from the ancients.

Yes, let's decipher the yellowed and crumbling newspaper known as Ha'aretz from November 27, 2006:

Olmert said Sunday during a visit in the Negev that "the State of Israel is so strong that it can allow itself some restraint in order to give a chance to a cease-fire."

"All of these things ultimately could lead to one thing - the opening of serious, real, open and direct negotiations between us," Olmert said. "So that we can move forward towards a comprehensive agreement between us and the Palestinians."

"Even though there are still violations of the cease-fire by the Palestinian side, I have instructed our defense officials not to respond, to show restraint, and to give this cease-fire a chance to take full effect," he said during a ceremony at a high school in the Bedouin town of Rahat, adding "the government of Israel will not miss this opportunity for calm."

Palestinian Authority security forces began deploying along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel on Sunday, in order to prevent Palestinian militants from firing Qassam rockets at Israel in violation of the cease-fire.

A short time earlier, Abbas ordered the heads of Palestinian security forces to ensure that Gaza militants respect the truce, Palestinian officials said.

Three Qassam rockets hit Israel in the first few hours after a truce between Israel and Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip went into effect, causing no damage or injuries. Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said all major militant factions in the Gaza Strip had reaffirmed their commitment to the truce, Reuters reported.

It was not immediately clear whether there was an explicit order by Abbas to use force to stop rocket fire by militants.

A senior official in Jerusalem said Israel would wait several hours to see if the attacks were isolated breaches or a full-scale violation of the agreement before deciding whether to respond.

Despite the claims of responsibility for the rockets, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian government, Ghazi Hamad, said all the armed groups had committed to the agreement, and any violations were rogue acts.

"There is a 100 percent effort to make this work, but there is no guarantee of 100 percent results," Hamad said.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Sunday morning that any attempt to fire into Israeli territories would be considered a breach of the cease-fire and treated with severity.

According to Peretz, Israel is interested in quiet, but would not accept attacks on its citizens.

PICCR: 34 PalArabs killed by each other in December so far

WAFA reports on the latest PICCR ("Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights") monthly report, which inexplicably is not on their website (neither is last month's.) But their numbers track pretty closely to mine, so assuming overlap that means I missed at least one and my count of Palestinian Arabs violently killed by each other since late June stands at 203.

PICCR breaks it down to 28 killed in Gaza and 6 in the West Bank.

Even though PICCR was established by that giant of human rights, Yasir Arafat, it appears to take its job as an independent auditor of PA institutions seriously. It blames the government and the "security forces" squarely for the lack of a judicial process in the territories.

It is a shame that their website is so poor, because very few groups and NGOs seem to take a real interest in internal PalArab problems and instead spend their time trying to find ways to blame Israel for everything. WAFA itself is a PA mouthpiece and never reports on most of the murders in the territories, even though its Arabic site updates its news stories every few minutes.

"Totally Jewish" columnist supports Neturei Karta

I can't even quote this drivel.

The upshot is that we shouldn't condemn NK because they bring Jewish books with them to Iran and give them to the dwindling Persian Jewish community (which he mislabels as "Arab.")

Perhaps his next column will praise Hamas for the great work it does with orphans.

Thoroughly sick.

Attack on Rachel's Tomb? Just terror as usual.

A tiny news item in Arutz-7:

Arab terrorists threw a pipe bomb at Rachel's Tomb late Wednesday afternoon. The bomb caused no injuries or damage. Army forces are searching for the terrorists.

A similar news brief was printed in YNet, I could find no mention in the Jerusalem Post nor Haaretz yet.

Let's look at some context.

If a Koran gets desecrated anywhere in the world, it makes headlines. If a Jew would throw a pipe-bomb at the Al Aqsa Mosque, the supposed third-holiest site in Islam, it would cause deadly riots and possibly a war.

But a pipe-bomb aimed at Judaism's third-holiest site barely rates a paragraph even in the most religious-Zionist publication in Israel. No one will make a big deal over it, there will be no angry editorials or calls for holy war or condemnations or apologies.

Even though quantitatively and qualitatively, it is equivalent to a Jew attacking the Dome of the Rock.

The reason for the lack of interest is simple: it is because there have been countless attacks on Rachel's Tomb. It is no longer news. It is no big deal that, yet again, some Arabs tried to destroy or damage an enduring symbol of Judaism. It falls below the radar of our consciousness.

But because of its banality, because of the sheer number of similar and constant attacks on not just Israel but Judaism from adherents of Islam, all of us eventually get numbed to the fact that this is an outrage.

By virtue of the sheer number of similar outrages done by Arabs day in and day out, the Arabs end up getting a free pass from the world who no longer expect them to act any better. Attacks such as this can happen without any fear of consequence, and the Palestinian Arab community as a whole supports and cheers such attacks while the world yawns.

To the average Joe who skims the headlines or watches the news on TV, this morning's attack against a major shrine in Judaism never happened. And as a result, the average person can be forgiven for assuming that each side is equally wrong, that each side does bad stuff, that it is everybody's fault. There is simply no easy way to know the truth.

Where the press fails is in not showing context. If you put it in quantitative and qualitative terms, by any measure, you can see that what the Palestinian Arabs are doing is hundreds of times worse than the worst that the Israelis are doing. Rachel's Tomb is not a Zionist outpost, it is a holy shrine for Judaism. And we are not even mentioning the crimes done constantly against the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Joseph's Tomb or the site of the Second Temple.

If someone repeats the same crime every day without consequence, eventually nobody cares. Until the victim finally decides to do something about it.

Then he becomes the "aggressor" who is instigating a "cycle of violence."

I'm a hateful racist and fascist!

An Egyptian-American blogger takes me to task and lumps me in as an example of racism in Zionist blogs:

Moving on to the Zionist (Atheists and Jews) bloggers, I happened to notice that they are regular visitors to the Egyptian and Arab blogs. One can't help noticing their hateful, racist and fascist statements towards Arabs and Muslims. They constantly claim antisemitism if you disagree with their statements. Some claim that Arabs and Egyptians on the blogs are lying about the Zionists and Israel, others freely label anyone who criticizes as a terrorist. The most used argument is that Egyptians and Arabs are not tolerant towards Jews in general.

Of course, I am always interested in any valid criticism, so I looked to see what examples she came up with to prove that I'm one of the Evil Racist Zionists.

And the answer? I didn't wish my readers a merry Christmas or a happy Eid!

Tworset self-righteously shows that she wished her readers a happy Chanukah, therefore proving her multi-culti bonafides.

I suppose she was too blinded by her hate to notice that I never wished my readers a happy Chanukah, either.

But since she has now established both that she is as loving and tolerant as anyone else, one wonders why a previous entry of hers seems to blame all American Jews for the "war on Christmas:"

In which country do 3% of the population set the agenda for 97% of the remaining majority? Please don't blame Muslims for wanting to practice their religion and culture when you allow vocal Jewish fascists for forcing their icons and religion on the rest of us. Lets be quite clear that "Christ" is being taken out of Christmas is not because of "Islamofascists" or Nasrallah or Iran. The de-Christianization and the increasing Judaicization of America is because of one subsect group alone--the vocal Jews with Judaism and arrogance as dual chips on their shoulders.

But I'm sure that her "happy Chanukah" was very, very sincere.

Since the proof of my fascism and racism was my terrible omission of seasonal gretings, then according to this very tolerant and loving mom, crimes of omission must be proof of racism. By that standard, I wonder why she didn't comment on this lovely little item:

The snow has already settled on the mountains further north, but the Christians of the Iraqi city of Mosul are scared to put festive decorations outside their homes this year. Their ancestors settled here in the 1st century AD, yet as teacher Jamal Fadi has discovered, some of their Muslim neighbours want this Christmas to be their last.

"A letter was delivered to my door with two bullets placed on top of it," said Mr Fadi, 32, standing watchfully in the neat garden of his two-storey villa. "It said: 'Leave, crusaders, or we will cut your heads off.' They want us to go from Mosul completely."

After months as a nervous bystander to the spiralling civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Iraq's Christian minority now faces the spectre of sectarian violence coming to their traditional home city. They fear that al Qaeda-backed zealots within the Sunni community, which forms the bulk of Mosul's one million population, want to end nearly 1,500 years of co-existence with an onslaught of ethnic cleansing.

But the Jews who supposedly want the stop Christmas are the bigots, right, Tworset?

Now, of course criticizing a blog for not mentioning something is absurd. And criticizing a blog as racist and fascist without any evidence is the cyberspace equivalence of slander.

I would argue that her little screed about Jews is far more hateful and far less accurate than anything I have ever posted here, and if she wants to actually disprove or argue with anything I have actually written, I welcome her to.

And if she is reading this: a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Carter intervened for Nazi war criminal in 1987

I have been resistant to calling Jimmy Carter an anti-semite, but articles like this make me wonder:

In hindsight, Carter book seen
as part of an awkward pattern
By Neal Sher
December 26, 2006

NEW YORK, Dec. 26 (JTA) — It was the spring of 1987 and the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit, which I headed at the time, was in the midst of one of our most productive and historic periods.

On April 27, as a result of an in-depth OSI investigation and despite resistance at the State Department, Austrian President and former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who had served as an officer in the Nazi army, was barred from setting foot ever again on U.S. soil.

One week earlier, after eight years of bruising litigation, we deported to the Soviet Union one Karl Linnas, who had been chief of a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia. To do so, we had to outmaneuver concerted attempts to block the deportation by Patrick Buchanan, the Reagan White House’s communications director, and my boss, U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese.

A month later, OSI announced the loss of citizenship and removal from the United States of a former Chicago resident. Martin Bartesch admitted to our office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.

In Bartesch’s case, OSI researchers uncovered iron-clad documentary evidence of his direct, hands-on role in the Nazi genocide. Among the SS documents captured by American forces when they liberated Mauthausen was what we described as the Unnatural Death Book, a register of prisoners killed, along with the identity of the SS guard responsible for the murder.

So powerful was this evidence that, in postwar trials conducted by the U.S. military, the book served as the basis for execution or long prison sentences for many identified SS guards.

An entry on Oct. 20, 1943, registers the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS man Martin Bartesch. It was a most chilling document.

Bartesch’s family and “supporters,” seeking special relief, launched a campaign to discredit OSI while trying to garner political support. Indeed, OSI received numerous inquiries from members of Congress who had been approached.

After we explained the facts of the case, however, the matter inevitably was dropped; no one urged that Bartesch or his family be accorded any special treatment.

Well, there was one exception — Jimmy Carter.

In September 1987, after all of the gruesome details of the case had been made public and widely reported in the media, I received a letter sent by Bartesch’s daughter to the former president. Citing groups that had been exposed for their anti-Semitism, it was an all-out assault against OSI as unfair, “un-American” and interested only in “vengeance” against innocent family members.

It’s axiomatic that the families of every person prosecuted under the criminal or immigration laws are affected and subjected to hardship. It was obvious, I thought to myself, that no reasonable person could genuinely believe that the Bartesch case was worthy of special dispensation.

On the contrary, it would be a perversion of justice to accede to the family’s demands and grant Bartesch relief to which no one else would be entitled. Not even the staunchest and most sincere devotee to humanitarian causes could legitimately claim that an SS murderer who deceived authorities to obtain a visa and citizenship was somehow deserving of exceptional treatment.

That’s why I was so taken aback by the personal, handwritten note Jimmy Carter sent to me seeking “special consideration” for this Nazi SS murderer. There on the upper-right corner of Bartesch’s daughter’s letter was a note to me in the former president’s handwriting, and with his signature, urging that “in cases such as this, special consideration can be given to the families for humanitarian reasons.”

Unlike members of Congress who inquired about the facts, Carter blindly accepted at face value the daughter’s self-serving (and disingenuous) assertions.

As disturbing as I found Carter’s plea, and although his attempted intervention has always gnawed at me, I chalked it up at the time to a certain naivete on the part of the former president. But now, in light of Carter’s most recent writings and comments, I am left to wonder whether it was I who was naive simply to dismiss his knee-jerk appeal as the instinctive reaction of a well-meaning but misguided humanitarian....

Maybe Carter is a misguided humanitarian, but one must wonder why a large proportion of his humanitarian efforts go towards humans who hate Jews.
(H/T Zionist Spy)

Today's Palestinian Police Phunnies: A dose of reality

This article from the Sunday Herald (UK) says so many truths about the situation that it is hard to know what to highlight. The bias that the Herald uses in making the terrorist heroic is nothing new but even so, this article is a must read.

To begin with, notice how even this article recognizes that the Palestinian "security forces" are meant to be an army to fight Israel rather than meant for law and order and stopping terror.

By day, he is a Palestinian Authority soldier, guarding his land against Israel. By night, he is a Hamas warrior, fighting his countrymen

GAZA MAN Abu Khaled leads two very conflicting lives. During the day he serves as a soldier in the National Security Force, the notional army of the Palestinian Authority (PA), guarding a token position a few hundred metres from the Israeli border fence.

But when night comes, he takes off his army uniform and puts on the black mask and fatigues of the al-Qassam Brigades, the guerrilla wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas.

Twice wounded in combat with Israeli forces as an al-Qassam warrior, on four occasions he has only narrowly escaped being killed by missiles fired from Israeli robot aircraft. [The human vs. unthinking robot motif is one used many times by the MSM to frame the conflict, but rarely so explicitly. - EoZ]

Now, however, he faces a new and even more disturbing threat to his life. In Gaza, Ramallah and Nablus in recent days, his Hamas comrades have fought bloody skirmishes with loyalists of the rival Fatah movement, which Hamas defeated in parliamentary elections last January. [Notice how the Herald is disturbed that a terrorist's life is threatened by Israel. - EoZ]

Despite Fatah's defeat, the vast majority of the PA's public servants and security men still profess loyalty to the former ruling party, leaving 23-year-old Khaled, a known Hamas supporter in their midst, dangerously exposed to violence from either side.

Last week, Khaled would only agree to be interviewed in a moving car, driving around his north Gaza home of Beit Hanoun to avoid attracting attention.

"It's miserable and terrible right now," he said. "We are afraid all the time that we could be hit, either by the Israelis or by our own factions. The al-Qassam Brigades haven't attacked any army posts yet, but they might, and I'm afraid that Fatah guys could get information that I'm a Qassam Brigades guy and come and shoot me."

Many members of Fatah's various private militia groups also double up as members of the armed forces, a tangled network of 14 rival police, military and intelligence agencies set up by the late Yasser Arafat to keep his gunmen fed, loyal and - just as important - divided.

...
In recent months, moreover, Abbas's position has been further boosted by the dramatic expansion and retraining of his own presidential guard force.

The Palestinian Authority's 3.7 million people may be wilting under the international political and financial boycott imposed following Hamas's election win, but Abbas has nevertheless found money and weapons to upgrade a personal army which is expected to reach 3000-strong. And its members' salaries are still paid even while other public servants - including Fatah loyalists - are left without.

There is now considerable debate about how Abbas has pulled this off, particularly in Gaza, where the bulk of the new-look presidential guard is leading the confrontation with Hamas's own new "Executive Force", a force set up by the Hamas interior minister supposedly to counterbalance Fatah's control of the established security forces.

It is openly acknowledged, though, that US military and intelligence personnel have been training Abbas's new force in the West Bank town of Jericho, from where they travel to Gaza through Israeli territory. Moreover, it was widely reported last week that the White House is asking Congress for as much as $90 million (£46m) in special aid for Abbas's guard, to strengthen it for a showdown with Hamas.

In a tour of the Middle East last week, prime minister Tony Blair sought to portray the Abbas/Hamas stand-off in the mould of the war against terror, as part of a wider struggle between extremist forces such as Iran and Syria - both of which support Hamas - and more "moderate" Arab leaders, such as the regimes in Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf.

Mr Blair suggested that part of the hundreds of millions of dollars in customs revenue and aid currently withheld from the PA by Israel and the West should be passed directly to Abbas's "moderate" forces. In the process, he said, care should be taken to ensure that the money went only to Abbas's security forces and not to armed factions.

But, as anyone who has visited Gaza knows, the PA security forces and Fatah's armed factions are largely the same thing.

As violence intensified last week, masked presidential guards drove through Gaza City in armoured cars and trucks mounted with new heavy machine guns, shooting in the air and openly brandishing yellow Fatah flags.

...While both sides have much to be ashamed of after months of brutal feuding, the mere suggestion that Fatah leaders are in effect working with the US - and by implication with Israel - to bully and starve out an elected Palestinian government points to fresh depths of horror ahead.
...
Fatah's rag-tag gunmen, whether in PA uniform or not, have little hope of taking on Hamas's well-trained religious warriors without extensive support from Israel, which effectively controls the wider strategic map. But victory with Israeli and US support would rob Fatah of what legitimacy it still possesses in Arab eyes, transforming it into a quisling government.

So while this article has its share of anti-Israel bias, it is important in that it shows the utter uselessness of arming and training thousands more terrorists in the name of "peace" and for a "moderate" Fatah that is equally bloodthirsty as Hamas and PIJ.

A month of a unilateral "cease fire"

As the calendar on my sidebar is showing, we now have had nine consecutive days of Qassam rockets being shot at Israel, making it 24 out of 32 days since the illusory "cease-fire" was announced that rockets have been launched (click on any day's link for more details; some of the days link to earlier articles in the day and more Qassams were fired later that I didn't capture):

So far today (12/26)there have been five rockets.

Olmert, trying hard to prove that he can decend to new levels of idiocy every day, took strong action:

The Olmert administration is depending on diplomatic retaliation at this point and instructed United Nations Ambassador Dan Gillerman to register a strong complaint with the U.N.

And how was this strong complaint worded?

"The continuous rocket attacks and grave violation of Israel's sovereignty constitutes a grim threat to peace and security in the region... which may bring to a deterioration of the situation," Gillerman continued in the letter.

Gillerman asked that the Security Council immediately condemn the attacks and warn those parties on the Palestinian side who are "provoking the situation" that they may bring to a renewed eruption of hostilities.

Evidently, in the bizarre language of UN diplomacy, dozens of Qassams don't destroy peace, but are only a "grim threat." They aren't "hostilities", but they may bring a "renewed eruption."

But surely there are fewer rockets being fired now than before the cease-fire? Certainly things are calmer, right?

Ummmm.....no.

Information collected by the defense establishment indicates that only during the months of June, July, and November more rockets were fired than in this month of calm. In contrast, during the months of February, April, August, and September, the months where there was no calm, there were less Qassam attacks than during the ceasefire.

So there is literally no relationship between Israel acting with restraint and the number of Palestinian Arab rocket attacks.

Yet Olmert, against the advice of the IDF, is gambling with his citizen's lives and betting that the world will put some sort of "pressure"on a reichlet that he himself is now funding and arming!