Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 15, 2007

On a personal note....

The Elder family is not known for planning ahead very much. In that vein, we just decided that a very-long-overdue trip to Israel would be fun - starting next week.

So if anyone knows of a good apartment to rent in Jerusalem (the closer to the Old City, the better) preferably with two bedrooms, kosher kitchen, Internet access and the usual amenities that spoiled Americans might want, for about two weeks, please email me at coolboardpresident - at- yahoo dot com.

תודה רבה!

The Gaza underground

One of the joys of reading the Palestinian Arab press in the auto-translated Arabic is uncovring the rich tapestry of culture, education and technology that these enterprising people have that we just don't hear about in the West.

So while we know about how adept the Palestinian Arabs are at digging tunnels under borders, we didn't know that the same skills are being used in much more productive ways.

Today, Abdel Hakim Awad, spokesman for Fatah, announced an extensive network of tunnels underneath Gaza that were all aimed at Fatah institutions and leaders - and filled with explosives. Not only that, but some of the tunnels originated in mosques. Imagine that!

Hamas Prime Minister Haniyeh responded back that the Fatah textbooks included a geography question that was asking the distances between Gaza at 30 degrees longitude and Baghdad at 45 degrees longitude, where an assassination attempt was being planned for Haniyeh. (It seems unlikely that textbooks are that new or topical, but it seems to be what he was accusing.)

There is so much more to learn about these lovely people!

UPDATE: I misunderstood the geography question - it was Fatah that claimed that Hamas had this question, showing not Fatah antipathy towards Hamas but Hamas paranoia (and, Fatah claims, divisiveness.)

The man in this picture, Moshe Aryeh Feldman (he's the one on the left), stayed an extra couple of weeks in Iran to lecture atIranian universities about how evil Zionists are. He just came back home to Austria to see that his wife had left him.

Well, at least someone still loves him.

Morning Palestinian Arab news roundup

All from Maan News:

An infant was shot in the head and killed during a clan clash (top story in Arabic, tiny news item in English)
Two more PalArabs were kidnapped in Gaza
A professor at Najah University says Iran has every right to a nuclear bomb (he didn't even pretend that Iran was only trying to create a peaceful nuclear energy program). He also blames Arabs for not being on Iran's side, saying that they all need to work together against America and Israel.
The Nablus police announced that there were 39 murders and 25 suicides in Nablus in 2006. I know most of these aren't included in my PalArab self-death count.
"Unknown" gunmen shot a PalArab policeman.
A Palestinian Arab minister revealed that there was a plot to assassinate him. The interesting twist is that the would-be assassins were hired for the task, promised $30,000 on a successful hit.
In a remarkable mirror of American-style "peace activism," there is a sit-in in tents in downtown Gaza City protesting Palestinian Arab infighting. And just like the American "peace activists," these neo-hippies want to se all the PalArabs get together in peace and love to direct all their efforts in the fight against Israel. Not so surprisingly, the people behind this lovefest are terrorists who are not involved in PalArab governmental affairs, like the Popular Front.

The PalArab self-death counts are now at 236 violently killed by each other since Operation Summer Rains and 31 so far this year.

Three blind mice

From the Washington Post:

Abbas spoke at a joint news conference with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is touring the region this week on what she bills as an effort to listen to ideas to rekindle the stalled peace process. Rice said she wants to "accelerate" a three-stage U.S.-backed 2003 peace plan known as the "road map" but has been vague about what she means. "When I say accelerate, we want to look at it and see how fast you can move," she told reporters traveling with her.

So far, Rice has been hearing conflicting advice: the Israelis have touted the idea of jumping to the second stage, an interim state, and the Palestinians have pressed for going to the third stage, a permanent state.

The WaPo doesn't bother to illuminate its readers as to what is in the "first stage" of the roadmap that everyone now seems to want to skip.

So let me fill in some of that gap. Here are the first couple of paragraphs of Phase I of the Roadmap:

In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below; such action should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel. Palestinians and Israelis resume security cooperation based on the Tenet work plan to end violence, terrorism, and incitement through restructured and effective Palestinian security services. Palestinians undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood, including drafting a Palestinian constitution, and free, fair and open elections upon the basis of those measures. Israel takes all necessary steps to help normalize Palestinian life. Israel withdraws from Palestinian areas occupied from September 28, 2000 and the two sides restore the status quo that existed at that time, as security performance and cooperation progress. Israel also freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report.

At the outset of Phase I:

Palestinian leadership issues unequivocal statement reiterating Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to end armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.

Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitment to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.

Security

Palestinians declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere.
Rebuilt and refocused Palestinian Authority security apparatus begins sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. This includes commencing confiscation of illegal weapons and consolidation of security authority, free of association with terror and corruption.

So not only are the Palestinian Arabs trying to get around the obligations of stopping terror - so are the current Israeli leaders! Olmert et.al. are ready to give the Palestinian Arabs a state, right now, with seeming no preconditions and temporary borders.

And Abbas, true to form, is rejecting this absurd gift, proving once again that peace and statehood is not the goal of the "moderate" Fatah. Building a state, with an effective police force and judiciary, with the responsibility for job creation and tax collection and all the myriad parts of a real, functioning government is the furthest thing from Abbas' mind. An entity that now has almost nothing continues to bargain as if it holds the upper hand.

And who suffers because of the famous "moderate"'s unyielding position? The people that he supposedly is leading!

Meanwhile, Rice and Olmert and Abbas ignore that pesky little fact that the current elected leadership of the PalArabs is even more extreme and even less interested in running a state than Abbas is!

We are watching the supposed leaders of three countries just pretend that terror doesn't exist, that Hamas doesn't exist and that Abbas has some power, all in a rush to reward a people who explicitly support terror with a state. They are all closing their eyes to the reality that is splashed on the front pages of papers for months - that terror still exists, that Hamas and Fatah can't cooperate, that statehood is not the desired end-state for the majority of Palestinian Arabs.

It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

"Palestinian" flag kerfuffle

The latest salvo in the Hamas/Fatah conflict is that Hamas has added some (presumably Koranic) text to the Palestinian Arab flag:

Fatah is very upset over this move, calling it "illegal."

I'd love to know exactly what it says. Right now I'd say that odds are much more likely that it says something like "Palestine will be liberated through blood and sacrifice" than that it says something like "We love the land!"

Followup on "killing the filthy Kuffar"

Last week I mentioned a Jihad Unspun article showing, from an extreme Islamist perspective, how at least one literal interpretation of the Koran is about as intolerant and bigoted and supermacist as is possible.

My question was and remains, what, if any, is the basis within Islamic jurisprudence to disagree with this interpretation?

A couple of years ago a front-page article in The Spectator pretty much claimed that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. In what may be an oversimplification, the author says that while the Koran has many contradictory verses, in general the later verses trump the earlier ones and (also in general) the later verses tend to be more intolerant.

One serious attempt to refute that article was published in Islamica magazine, and while that author blunts some of the arguments he does not seem to really attack them head on. He anecdotally claims that moderate Islamic scholars have spoken out against the extremist interpretations within Islamic law, however he brings as an example of "moderation" statements by Sheikh Qaradawi, who has written his own fatwas supporting suicide bombing Israeli civilians. He also tries to deflect the argument by comparing Koranic verses with Old Testament verses that seem to be much more radical, which is not so much an argument as it is misdirection.

Daniel Pipes is famous for saying that "militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution." However, in a rather exhaustive review by Laurence Auster, Pipes' thesis that moderate Islam represents the majority of Muslims is questioned, as Pipes himself seems unable to come up with a meanigful way to differentiate them.

My question is a bit more basic. Islamic law may be arcane to Western ears but fundamentally it should be a coherent legal system with reproducible and explainable rules. It should not be a big stretch for a knowledgable Muslim to be able to explain to a Western audience some basic rules of interpretation and be able to illuminate how some Koranic verses can be shown to not be taken literally or to have been superceded by other legal considerations.

If a Jew or a non-Jew interprets a Torah verse or a Talmudic argument in a way that makes it look evil, there are no shortage of modern Torah scholars who are ready and willing to create web pages and articles that rebut the arguments one by one. The quality of the back-and-forth arguments are almost irrelevant (a layman would not know easily which arguments are more convincing) but the important thing is that religious Jews are so emotionally invested in their belief system and its underlying basic texts that they will happily research and teach their methods of interpretation to anyone who asks.

Islam, on the surface, is similar to Judaism in that it is a legal-based religion, unlike Christianity. If the extremist interpretations are so abhorrent to the vast majority of Muslims, including Muslim scholars as the Islamica article attests, then where are the web pages that refute the jihadist interpretations, point by point? Where are the books and articles that go into detail about these verses? If the extremists are such a tiny minority, why are we not seeing them treated the way that the Neturei Karta was treated by every major Orthodox Jewish group in the wake of their visit to Iran?

Much of Robert Spencer's work seems to show that there is no real alternative way to interpret Islam that does not tend to support extremism. Where are the Muslims that can prove him wrong - in the context of the Koran and Shari'a?

Because even if the arguments are esoteric and delve deeply into Islamic legal principles that outside people could not possibly appreciate, just the existence of such resources would go a long way towards the West believing that militant Islam is an anomaly and not mainstream.

Personally, I really want to believe that moderate Islam exists and is predominant. But the most moderate Islam that I have seen has been either still way too extreme for Western cultural mores (Qaradawi), or a clear repudiation of Islam's basic tenets (Wafa Sultan).

Am I wrong?

Small update

Last night when I was writing this post I wanted to link it to an old post of mine about synagogue desecration by Arabs in the 1930s and 1940s. But my old post used images from an image hosting service that seems to have deleted the images.

So, I just reproduced the post again with the images, and it is worth reading it every time Arabs complain about how others disrespect their holy sites:

If I ever get time I'll go through my old Palestine Postings articles and update all of them that may have been affected by the image host problem.

PalArab violence below the radar

Just because relatively few people were killed this week doesn't mean that people in Gaza are getting along any better.

Here are some of the day's headlines:

The Alkavarnh family in Gaza gave out a press release (autotranslated):
The family said in a statement : that on 1-9-2007 on Tuesday, when the brother Raed Mahmoud Alkavarnh and his return to his home, as members of the executive force stationed in the abandoned mosque of Amr Bin Abdul Aziz in the town, shooting directly at his car and fought.

Her family, said that had nothing to do with any organization from near or far, but it is the family Alkavarnh, each claim the honor of the executive to desist from such acts, which do not serve the interests of only the enemy, indicating that those who opened fire are known to have a name, and the testimony of executive power themselves and the people living near the scene of the crime.

The family : "we are not advocates of civil war, and that any prejudice to any person of the family is an attack on the family, and we will respond in an iron hand, and in a manner that would have grave consequences, and that those who attempted to assassinate our son are known to us, and we will deal with them as individuals, strong, and will be a lesson for others, God.

"Whoever will not forgive us, no matter how long it takes Sanhasph Umm Qasr"

A bomb in Bethlehem and gunshots against an Arab police chief and some stores.
A PalArab news agency was attacked again (and threatened with more)
Hamas news reported some Fatah infighting, with one death. Fatah denied it.
This is all besides the shooting at the imam earlier.

A lesson in comparative reporting

First read this article from Guardian and Electronic Intifada writer Jonathan Cook, who we last saw praising Hamas. In this example, Cook looks at the Christian exodus from Palestinian areas and squarely blames Israel. Here is an excerpt, but for this exercise, read the whole tedious thing:

This intimate involvement of Palestinian Christians in the Palestinian national struggle is one of the reasons why Israel has been so keen to find ways to encourage their departure -- and then blame it on intimidation by, and violence from, Muslims.
In truth, however, the fall in the number of Christians can be explained by two factors, neither of which is related to a clash of civilisations. The first is a lower rate of growth among the Christian population. According to the latest figures from Israel's Bureau of Census Statistics, the average Christian household in Israel contains 3.5 people compared to 5.2 in a Muslim household. Looked at another way, in 2005 33 percent of Christians were under the age of 19, compared to 55 percent of Muslims. In other words, the proportion of Christians in the Holy Land has been eroded over time by higher Muslim birth rates. But a second factor is equally, if not more, important. Israel has established an oppressive rule for Palestinians both inside Israel and in the occupied territories that has been designed to encourage the most privileged Palestinians, which has meant disproportionately Christians, to leave.

This policy has been implemented with stealth for decades, but has been greatly accelerated in recent years with the erection of the wall and numerous checkpoints. The purpose has been to encourage the Palestinian elite and middle class to seek a better life in the West, turning their back on the Holy Land.

Palestinian Christians have had the means to escape for two reasons. First, they have traditionally enjoyed a higher standard of living, as city-based shopkeepers and business owners, rather than poor subsistence farmers in the countryside. And second, their connection to the global Churches has made it simpler for them to find sanctuary abroad, often beginning as trips for their children to study overseas.

Now, read this article from Der Spiegel, which talks about the exodus of Christians from the Arab world as a whole. Here's part:

Given the lack of hard numbers, demographers must rely on estimates, whereby Christians make up about 40 percent of the population in Lebanon, less than 10 percent in Egypt and Syria, two to four percent in Jordan and Iraq and less than one percent in North Africa. But the major political changes that are currently affecting the Middle East have led to shrinking Christian minorities. In East Jerusalem, where half of the population was Christian until 1948, the year of the first Arab-Israeli war, less than five percent of residents are Christian today. In neighboring Jordan, the number of Christians was reduced by half between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1990s. There were only 500,000 Christians still living in Iraq until recently, compared to 750,000 after the 1991 Gulf War. Wassim, one of the seminary students now fleeing to Kurdistan, estimates that half of those remaining Christians have emigrated since the 2003 US invasion, most of them in the last six months.

Demographics have accelerated this development. Christians, often better educated and more affluent than their Muslim neighbors, have fewer children. Because the wave of emigration has been going on for decades, many Middle Eastern Christians now have relatives in Europe, North America and Australia who help them emigrate. Their high level of education increases their chances of obtaining visas. Those who leave are primarily members of the elite: doctors, lawyers and engineers.

But there are deeper-seated reasons behind the most recent exodus: the demise of secular movements and the growing influence of political Islam in the Middle East.

As I said, it is worth reading both articles fully.

The first article is written by a British reporter who tries do hard to sound reasonable and tries so hard to defend his thesis, even though upon closer examination it can be seen that he fills the article with irrelevant anecdotes and no evidence whatsoever beyond his own fevered fitting of facts to his preconceived conclusions.

And the second article looks at the same information and shows that the problem is throughout the Middle East, not just the PalArab territories as Cook would like to have you believe, and it is clearly the result of Arab and Muslim policies, not Zionist ones.

Even a few seconds of thought show that Cook's thesis is absurd. Israel is specifically targeting Christians to emigrate from the territories so that the only people left would be the Muslims who applaud blowing up Jews? Despite his example of George Habash who nobody has heard from in decades, today's terror groups are exclusively Islamist. To even imagine that Israel prefers Palestinian Muslims to Palestinian Christians (even with the PalArab Christians' complete dhimmitude) is nothing but the result of an Israel-hating fantasy.

Cook has an agenda and his duplicitous "reporting" betrays that fact in more ways than you can count. And even as he belittles other news articles for blaming Palestinian Arabs for driving the Christians out of the Holy Land, he shows none of the intellectual rigor nor ability to draw conclusions from facts that one would expect from a reporter.

Despicable attacks on mosques and Muslim clerics

This is a headline you will never see.

Last Friday, Hamas attacked and killed a prominent Gaza imam after his sermon. Today they also attacked a mosque and its worshippers after services.

For some reason, the UN has been silent in these brazen attacks on religious institutions. Interestingly, attacks on mosques that are not known to be used in a military capacity, even when not in an international conflict, are considered "grave breaches" of international law according to the Geneva Conventions:

Acts of hostility towards places of worship in international conflicts are prohibited. Places of worship may not be used in support of the military effort, and they cannot be the objects of reprisals. (Protocol I, Art. 53)

These prohibitions also apply in non-international conflicts. (Protocol II, Art. 16)

If there is any doubt as to whether a place of worship is being used to help the military action, then it will be presumed not to be so used. (Protocol I, Art. 52, Sec. 3)

Attacks against places of worship are grave breaches against the Geneva Convention. (Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 4)

Evidently, international law is only important when certain people are perceived to have violated it, and not others.

News roundup

Too much news!

The US is thankfully starting to go after the Iranians stirring up trouble in Iraq. Iran is scaring the Arab world, which is fully expecting to eventually go to war, with Egypt's Mubarak explicitly condemning Iran. And Syria's role vis a vis Iran and fundamentalism may not be so clear-cut.

Israel is worrying about Egypt as well - a nation only one bullet away from becoming an Islamist military powerhouse (with billions in US weapons.)

The Israeli media, but no one else, has picked up on the hypocrisy of a world that rushes to condemn Israel for mistakenly killing Arab children and its silence when Arabs do it on purpose. Similarly, it has picked up on how human shields don't quite work against Hamas. Wonder why?

New synagogue in Jerusalem freaks out PalArabs

The PalArab media is freaking out over a synagogue being built in Jerusalem's Old City "just 50 meters from the Al Aqsa Mosque, which is itself already under threat."

Of course, the PA media is claiming it is on "stolen Palestinian land." According to the PalArabs and most of the civilized world, Jews aren't allowed to do anything in Jerusalem because for 19 years in the middle of the 20th century, for the first and only time in 3000 years, it was Judenrein.

You have to understand: it is justifiable that it only took the Arabs a few days to damage and destroy virtually every synagogue in Jerusalem in 1948, but it is a major crime for Jews to want to build one today.

Abbas lays out his "red lines." What are Olmert's?

For reasons I don't quite comprehend, the Palestinian Arabs are making the 37th anniversary of Fatah's being integrated with the PLO as a very big deal (or at least Fatah is.) During the celebrations (of the "revolution"), Mahmoud Abbas stressed his demands (autotranslated):

- Our priority to preserve the national unity and preventing and prohibiting internal fighting
-Want one authority and one speaks and struggling and negotiate on behalf of the people
-We do not accept and we will not accept unilateral exclusion and groupware
- The PLO is the political and legal umbrella of the National Authority
- We will not accept state with provisional borders
- We will not accept compromise on the issue of refugees
- We will not give up one inch of Jerusalem

Leaving aside for now that he is pretty much saying "we will remain stateless for decades or centuries if necessary, making our people miserable rather than even think of compromising for peace," can anyone even imagine what Olmert's "red lines" are?

A normal Israeli leader would be able to mimic some of Abbas' demands: no compromise on Jerusalem, no compromise on "refugees", no compromise on large settlement blocs. But what would the "leaders" of Israel today say are their red lines?

Sadly, I don't think there are any. People without conviction make poor leaders.

What does the US Army have against the Trophy?

NBC News reports on a story that is troubling on a number of levels:

WASHINGTON - In September, NBC News first reported on a fierce debate within the Pentagon over an Israeli-made system that shoots rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) out of the sky. The Army seems intent on killing the system, but officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense believe it can save American lives.

Over the last three years, U.S. commanders in Iraq have issued a series of urgent pleas for a system to counter RPGs — a favorite weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation (OFT) scoured the world for a solution and thought it found one in "Trophy," which was developed over the last decade in Israel.

Trophy works by scanning all directions and automatically detecting when an RPG is launched. The system then fires an interceptor — traveling hundreds of miles a minute — that destroys the RPG safely away from the vehicle.

OFT subjected Trophy to 30 tests and found it is "more than 98 percent" effective at killing RPGs. Officials then made plans to battle-test the system on some Stryker fighting vehicles headed to Iraq this year.

But the U.S. Army blocked that testing. Why? Pentagon sources tell NBC News — and internal Army documents seem to confirm — that Army officials consider Trophy a threat to their crown jewel, the $160 billion Future Combat System (FCS). Under FCS, the Army is paying Raytheon Co. $70 million to build an RPG-defense system from scratch.

In an interview with NBC News on June 26, 2006, an Army official said Trophy simply is not ready.

"The Army is opposed to deploying a system before we assure that it's safe, effective, suitable and supportable," said Col. Donald Kotchman. "Trophy is not there yet."

In letters to Congress since our first reports, the Army says that the best proof Trophy is not ready is that the "Israeli Defense Forces have yet to integrate and field Trophy."

To check out the Army's claims, we went back to Israel. We found that the Israeli military has indeed begun to integrate and field Trophy on tanks, buying at least 100 systems.

Brig. Gen. Amir Nir leads that effort. We asked him about claims that Trophy has not been sufficiently tested and that it's not ready to be deployed.

"It's the most mature, and it can do the job," he said. "We cannot afford waiting for the next generation."

This fall, after our first reports aired, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson gave Congress a laundry list of reasons the U.S. Army opposes Trophy.

Can Trophy handle attacks from every direction?
"From the standpoint of providing 360-degree coverage, we have issues," Sorenson told the Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 21, 2006.

What does Nir say? Will Trophy be able to engage targets from all directions?

"Yeah, 360 degrees," he says.

Can Trophy reload automatically?
"From the standpoint of an autoloader that's not yet developed, we have issues," said Sorenson before Congress.

Sorenson suggested that in the absence of an autoloader, soldiers would have to climb out of the vehicle and manually reload the system, perhaps under hostile fire?

We went to Trophy's manufacturer, Rafael, to see if there is an autoloader.

Col. Didi Ben Yoash, a reservist in the Israeli Defense Forces who works for Rafael, showed us one.

"Absolutely, this is an autoloader," he said.

How does he respond to U.S. Army claims that Trophy doesn't have an autoloader?

"Well, this is an autoloader," he said.

Gen. Nir also confimed to NBC that "the full system provides you the ability to reload automatically."

What’s the risk to troops when Trophy intercepts an RPG?
After our first report on Sept. 5, 2006, the Army told Congress it has "serious concerns over soldier safety."

What is the Israeli army's view of how much additional risk there is to the troops?

"As far as we tested, it added at most 1 percent," says Nir. "Not a significant risk."

In fact, the Israelis argue that Trophy, while not perfect, will provide much-needed protection for troops and save lives — the same conclusion reached by Trophy's backers in the Pentagon. They argue that Trophy should be fielded as an interim solution in response to U.S. commanders requests for help against RPGs. These officials believe that the troops cannot afford to wait while the U.S. Army and Raytheon perfect a longer-term solution.

We wanted to ask the U.S. Army about all this. Sorensen first agreed to an interview, then canceled it. The Army also refused to answer 29 specific questions we submitted.

The Army did give us two statements, one saying, in part: "The U.S. Army is dedicated to ensuring our soldiers deploy with the best force protection capability" and is working on a system to counter RPGs.

When will that system, being built by Raytheon, be ready?

The Army previously told us it could get it to the troops in four years, by 2011, but now declines to say whether it still is on course to meet that deadline.

Later this week on "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," Lisa Myers will continue her reporting on the Trophy weapons system. She'll reveal new internal Army documents that suggest the Army went even further than she previously reported to block Pentagon efforts to test Trophy.

I can imagine two reasons why the Army is against deploying Trophy. One is, as suggested, they want to give the business to Raytheon.

But beyond that, I think that there is a bit of hubris in the US Army where they do not want to use weapons not developed in the US, more specifically, where they were not heavily involved in the development. People naturally tend to prefer their own products and the Army doesn't just buy weapons, but it helps design them. This gives the generals a psychological stake in the results; their egos become part of the specs.

The problem is, of course, that it is possible that this egoism is resulting in the unnecessary deaths of US soldiers. The idea of waiting five or more years for a "perfect" system when a usable system is available today is simply immoral.