Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Saudi Best Wife Award

Here's another great "human interest" story in the Arab News that shows, subconsciously, how twisted Arab society is:

TABUK, 27 August 2007 — A man here recently stated that if there was a Best Wife award in the country, his first wife would win it. The reason is that his wife is exceptionally wise and understanding, he said.

When he informed her that he wanted to take a second wife a couple of weeks ago, she took the initiative and found a pretty girl willing to be his second wife, Al-Riyadh newspaper reported yesterday. The first wife also made all the necessary arrangements for the wedding in a matter of days. The man was deeply impressed by her desire to make him happy, even if it meant sharing him with another woman.

Her enthusiasm didn’t stop there; at the wedding reception she welcomed guests and then danced with them. And finally she led the bride to the decorated car and seated her beside the bridegroom and wished them a blissful night.

After their departure she told her friends who were shocked at her behavior, that you cannot stop a man if he wants to marry again. “He will do it with or without our knowledge. So it is better that I cooperate with him and allow him do it with my knowledge and under my supervision, thus minimizing the harm.”

What a gal!

A PLO co-founder dies

From Ma'an:

A member of the Arab Nationalist Movement's liaison department, Ahmad Mahmoud Al-Jamal, died on Saturday.

Al-Jamal was born in 1940 in the Palestinian village of Lubya. He was one of the founders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Al-Jamal worked in the PLO's Damascus-based office until his death.

If the PLO is the "sole representative of the Palestinian (Arab) people," and if the West is so hot on saying that it is "moderate," why are its offices in Damascus?

Freedom of the press, PalArab-style (IX)

The series continues....
From AP via Jpost:

Hamas militiamen tried to arrest a prominent Palestinian journalist late Saturday, but left the scene at the urging of Hamas political leaders after a group of reporters blocked the force from entering the man's home.

The attempted arrest of Agence France Press reporter Sakher Abu El Oun came a day after Hamas beat a group of journalists covering a demonstration protesting the Islamic militant group's rule in the Gaza Strip. Abu El Oun, who heads the Gaza journalists' union, harshly criticized the Hamas crackdown.

About 15 Hamas security men arrived at his home late Saturday, saying they had orders to arrest him. Abu El Oun called some colleagues, who rushed to the scene and formed a human chain around the home.

Within minutes, officials from the office of deposed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a top Hamas official in Gaza, arrived to end the standoff. The officials persuaded the militiamen to leave, calling the incident a "misunderstanding."

"Everything has been settled and freedom of speech and journalism is respected," said Taher Nunu, a spokesman for Haniyeh.

AFP did not immediately comment.

The CNN/Amanpour trifecta

Once I read Seraphic Secret's account of Part 3 of CNN's Moral Equivalence Festival, I realized that I had to read the transcript for myself and join the party.

"Now, God's Christian warriors -- the religious right in America."

Even though we knew this is what the Christian part would be about, it is still amazing to think that the honchos at CNN cannot see a gaping, huge, gigantic difference between the Taliban and Jerry Falwell.

Would it even be conceivable that CNN would mention the Christian Phalangists who massacred Palestinian Arabs in Sabra and Shatila as examples of "Christian warriors?" Because, you know, they actually committed mass murder?

AMANPOUR: And from the beginning, there was controversy...

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Go home! Go home!

AMANPOUR: ...as Falwell thrust religion into politics. His mission was to change America.

Hate to break it to ya, Christiane, but the Founding Fathers invoked God a hell of a lot as well. Perhaps it was people like Amanpour who changed America?

Dorms are either male or female. At this Liberty, there is no freedom to go astray.

Damn - just like the Taliban!

AMANPOUR: Suddenly, conservative Christians had become a political force...

Just like the Taliban!

AMANPOUR: This bombing at a Birmingham clinic killed a police guard. In the mid '90s, from Boston to Florida, angry zealots murdered seven people -- three of them doctors. The violence not only frightened a number of abortion clinics into closing, it also caused a public backlash.

This is the crux of the show. Two hours about seven deaths. The rest is just filler because, since CNN can't do a special of more than two hours and that's what they had to give the Muslim "warriors" in order to pack mention of some 0.2% of Muslim terrorist deaths in that time period, they have to of course give two hours to each other major religion. Amanpour is itching to talk about these admittedly horrific murders because, to her, people who aren't feminist secularists are indistinguishable from the Taliban.

She's not after a body count - that's too crass. The underlying philosophy is just the same - don't you see it? Are you blind?

AMANPOUR: And so the courts became the new battleground over the unborn. But year after year, the religious right lost every Supreme Court decision on abortion. Falwell and others were determined to reverse that, using their political clout to make sure new justices passed the Christian conservative abortion litmus test.

So secularists who vote for those who are pro-abortion and who will help pro-abortion Supreme Court justices are OK. But if you are on the other side of the political process using the exact same litmus test, it is Evil.

AMANPOUR: At issue -- the public display of the Ten Commandments inside a county courthouse. Staver lost in a 5-4 ruling.

But there's nothing in the bible that would say to Staver thou shalt not litigate again. And so, way down on the Suwannee River, Dixie County, Florida has become the dean's new battleground over the Ten Commandments.

This six-ton granite monument carved by the local gravestone salesman sits on the courthouse steps. It is a clear example of what the Supreme Court has disallowed -- a standalone monument on government property with an obvious religious message -- love God and keep his commandments.

Evidently, Amanpour has never actually read the Ten Commandments.

AMANPOUR: The Supreme Court has become ground zero in this combat between law and religion -- the final word on God's place in public life.

Evidently, despite her eight months of research on religion, she still doesn't understand that at least two of her major religions are actually based on legal mechanisms. She is saying that law is automatically opposed to religion and vice-versa - an astonishingly stupid statement.

But let's cut her a little slack. She has two hours to kill.

AMANPOUR (voice-over): "In God We Trust" is part of the American dialogue. And yet, the religious right would have you believe there's no mention of God anywhere in our public sphere. It's on the currency.
...But they also play the victim somewhat. Are they victimized?

This show sort of proves it!

Next comes an entire section dealing with John Hagee, who is not only a devout Christian, which is obscene enough, but he also supports Israel! How far from the CNN studios can you get?

The rest of the show is really, really boring. Stuff about creationism, politics, who knows what.

And then comes this:

AMANPOUR: On campus, students must follow a strict set of rules.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good morning.

AMANPOUR: No secular music or television. No "R"-rated movies. No alcohol. No drugs. No dating.

(on camera) When I, you know, read that women have to wear skirts of a certain length. And guys aren't allowed to, you know, go on the Internet, unsupervised. And I think, you know, totalitarian regimes.

LUCE: No. It's about learning to have disciplines that communicate purity. You know? The skirts' length are to keep guys from -- you know, any man on the planet can be distracted. And we don't want to unintentionally create distraction.

AMANPOUR: But, Ron, that's what the Taliban said.

So she is comparing a private college, where people go voluntarily and submit to the rules voluntarily, with - of course - the Taliban!

As I mentioned in my commentary on part 2, Amanpour puts all religions together as equally evil and threatening. Not so much for their actions as to what they believe - that's what threatens her. She is so insecure in her own beliefs that she treats those who believe differently as a mortal threat, and she cannot distinguish at all between religions.

Her vapidity is all there in black and white, thanks to CNN Transcripts!

Guest poster Sophia on the CNN "religious warriors" sham

Sophia wrote a great comment on the CNN miniseries this week that deserves its own post:

=====================================================
I have watched all three segments, practically fell asleep during the third (on "Christian Warriors"; was very interested by the second, and was deeply disturbed by the first, which showed Jews as extremists, ugly, rich, and manipulative, not to mention violent, thieving, and bad.

On the other hand, we had uber WASPs Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush, James Baker, Charles Percy and John Mearscheimer - people deeply involved in big business and international politics - explaining how the sneaky, pushy, manipulative Joos run the US. The term "more powerful than Foggy Bottom" was actually used by Amanpour, as were these statements:

"6,000 miles away, in New York, defiance comes dressed in diamonds... God's Jewish Warriors in America...

"With a smile and a song, they ignore their government's policies."

This came packaged with references to "illegal" settlements and of course, Meir Kahane.

This cartoon was maybe a high point:

http://www.coxandforkum.com/arch...ves/ 000785.html

C & F seem interested to discover that they are presented as part of a Jewish conspiracy, go figure.

http://www.coxandforkum.com/arch...ves/ 001180.html

CNN did manage to scrounge up some hapless fools who had prepared a bomb, but fortunately were arrested by Israeli police before they could set it off. Their target was a Palestinian girl's school - an abominable thing to even contemplate. However rather than attributing this nauseating plot to Judaism it would have been more to the point to metnion the attack that didn't fail: the one that killed 26 Israeli schoolchildren at Ma'alot in 1974, and wounded 60 other people.

Baruch Goldman was prominently featured of course, along with a conspirator who had had designs on the Dome of the Rock, but fortunately was caught and imprisoned and has since renounced violence.

It is interesting to note that one can practically count all these "warriors" on one hand - was this mentioned? NO. There was no discussion of Judaism, no tender scene of a Jewish mother or wife with her family, as there were in both the Muslim and Christian segments.

Not mentioned at all was the REAL destruction of Jewish holy sites, nor the fact that following the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank & East Jerusalem in 1948, Jews were forbidden even to worship in Hebron or at the Kotel.

However, Sabra and Shatilla sneaked in; though Amanpour did mention that it was a Lebanese Christian job, merely invoking Sabra and Shatilla cast yet another pall on the Jewish people. For the fact of the matter is, we have always been collectively responsible even for things we didn't actually do. And I fear this program will merely incite more hatred and misunderstanding, rather than build a bridge as Amanpour stated she wanted to do in the case of the Islamic "warriors".

In contrast, even the most extreme Muslims were given a human face. Interesting aspects of Shia theocracy were investigated. There was no real investigation of Saudi Arabian extremism, however, though Qutb was mentioned, and his aversion to American materialism; of course Muslim Brotherhood was discussed but in the context of a "moderate", mainstream political party oppressed by the Egyptian government.

There was a Palestinian suicide terrorist prominently featured but even he was given a warmly human face: he had hoped to be an artist, and turned to terror after witnessing an Israeli raid that killed a young girl who died in his arms.

No such humanity was granted G*d's Jewish Warriors. No such context, no discussion of the fear and hardship confronting Israel and the Jewish people; even the security barrier was mocked - Amanpour did interview an Israeli lawyer who works for Palestinians affected by the barrier, as well as a Palestinian man who had to move when the Western Wall plaza was constructed. His sad plight was detailed at length and horrible bulldozers were prominently featured.

No. No humanity, no context, no history was granted G*d's Jewish Warriors.

And that is very great shame.

Oh, this is so tempting....

ArabicNews.com is for sale.

Should I make an offer?

Understated headline of the day

From The Australian:

"A nuclear-armed Iran would not be good"

I love the smell of "work accidents" in the morning

Ma'an says:

A member of Hamas' Qassam Brigades was killed, and another four were injured, in an aerial attack from an Israeli military helicopter near Car's Market in Gaza City at midnight on Thursday.

The car in which the five Qassam Brigades activists were travelling was shelled.

According to Palestinian medical sources, ambulances evacuated the corpse of 20-year-old Ahed Said Ahmad Abu Jabal and the four wounded Palestinians to Ash Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

The Israeli forces have denied shelling a Palestinian car in Gaza City.

AP has it slightly differently:

An explosion ripped through a car east of Gaza City late Thursday, witnesses said, and hospital officials said one person was killed and another was seriously wounded.

Hamas security officials said Israel fired a surface-to-surface missile at a group of Hamas fighters, killing one and wounding an unspecified number of other fighters, including one who was seriously hurt.

The Israeli army, which customarily acknowledges its air and ground operations against Palestinian militants, denied involvement in its initial response. Some blasts that do not involve the military are caused by explosive devices intended for use against Israel that go off prematurely.

This reminds me of an old Dry Bones strip from the 1970s or 80s - I wish I could find it - where an Arab terrorist, reading a newspaper, says something like, "Hey look! There was a gas explosion in Tel Aviv, killing some kids! Fatima, call a press conference to take responsibility! We Palestinians have to keep up on the news."

The 2007 PalArab self-death count is now at 510.

UPDATE: A PalArab shot and killed in a "family quarrel" during a wedding in the West Bank. 511.

"Shmuel of Arabia "

From the Jewish Journal, by David Suissa

...Rav [Shmuel] Miller has more than stories. He's an expert in Arabic. He can learn Torah in Arabic, and often does. In the pristine shul that he built in his backyard, he teaches his sons and others how to study Jewish texts in Arabic. If it were up to him, there'd be many more Jews learning Arabic.

It's not obvious why this Jewish man would have a passion for a language that today is too often associated with suicide bombers and radical Islamists. Here is a French Orthodox rabbi who has studied at the top yeshivas in Europe; an expert in Talmud, philosophy and mysticism; a lover of Jews, Torah and the Hebrew language; a sofer who writes mezuzahs and Torah scrolls in perfect Hebrew calligraphy; and yet, when the subject of Arabic comes up, his eyes light up like he's one of the kids at the Munchies candy store on Saturday night.

I know the emotional arguments. I've been hearing them for years from my parents, aunts, uncles and their friends who grew up in Morocco. They have nostalgia for the past. They love Arabic music, and they're crazy about the language. It's a little like my Ashkenazic friends who wax about the joys of Yiddish. There are words in the Judeo-Arab dialect spoken by my parents that light up the heart like no word in French or English can.

I remember this one word I was particularly fond of: "Shlemto." If one of her kids would do something wrong, my mother would use that word to convey that "I really love this kid, but I really wish he wouldn't do that, but at the same time, I want everyone to know how much I still love him even when he does something that really annoys me."

That's with one word. There are many others.

In the Morocco that I remember, Arabic was the daily language of emotion.

But what about for Rav Miller, a rabbi who was born and raised in France? His first language is French, then Hebrew. Where does his mad love for Arabic come from?

If you see him, you get some clues. There's a regal, Lawrence of Arabia quality to him. Short beard. Piercing eyes. Always upright. He looks like he'd fit right in with the romantic mystics of the Middle Ages.

But beyond that, after hanging out with him for the better part of a year since I moved to the hood, and seeing him give classes at my place on everything from the patriarchs to Spinoza, I have a simpler explanation for his Arabian passions.

He loves Arabic because he loves Judaism.

Take his love affair with Maimonides. He wanted to read "The Guide to the Perplexed" in the language in which it was written, so he studied it in Arabic. He says this gave him a deeper, "more palpable" understanding of Jewish ideas. For example, the word in Arabic that Maimonides uses for the Hebrew daat (knowledge) is eidrak, which refers to a knowledge that you "apprehend" or "take in." It is a union between the modrak, the one who understands, and the modrik, the one who is understood. Whereas the Hebrew daat denotes something external and impersonal, the Arab eidrak defines a knowledge that is more personal and contemplative, one that ultimately becomes part of you.

Similarly, by studying Rabbi Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari in the original Arabic, Rav Miller got a more subtle take on the problematic notion that Jews are the "chosen people." Looked at superficially, the idea of being "chosen" can easily offend other groups by suggesting racial superiority. In Arabic, however, the notion of the Hebrew segula (chosen) is more layered. The Arab term khassuss speaks to a one-to-one intimacy with God. In the original Arabic text of Rabbi Halevi, Jews are more likely to be the "particular, singular, private" people, rather than the more blunt "chosen" people. It's about intimacy, not superiority.

How's that for a disconnect? The language of Osama bin Laden and Hamas can teach the Jews some important subtleties about their own faith.

That does take a little getting used to.

Maybe that's why Rav Miller has no illusions about Arabic classes ever catching on in the Jewish world. Of course, that won't stop him from continuing to give his own classes to his inner circle, and from spending long nights poring through ancient Arab texts written by Jewish sages.

Sounds like a neat person!

A simple test to see who is most dangerous

Tonight's last installment of CNN's series of moral equivalency, which I do not plan to watch, prompts a question to determine who among the religious zealots are the most dangerous:

Are Muslims who walk through any Jewish or Christian "hotbeds" of "extremism" taking their lives into their hands? Can a Muslim walk, in full religious attire, unmolested through Boro Park, Brooklyn or in Bnei Brak? Can he walk though Rome?

Are Christians or Jews who walk through neighborhoods in Gaza or Iraqi cities or Riyadh doing anything that might endanger their lives?

If religious people are in danger of being killed by people of other religions simply because of who they are, it seems a pretty sure bet that the would-be killers are the dangerous ones.

Today's Honest Reporting is quite good

Check out today's Honest Reporting communique.

Especially good are links to Dore Gold's demolition of Walt and Mearsheimer, as well as the Forward's description of their dishonesty.

1960: Pakistan's leader criticizes the Muslim world

Here's a remarkable article from Time from November 21, 1960:

To non-Moslems, Arab leaders often seem more interested in bemoaning lost glories and nursing old grudges than in attacking the problems of the day. Last week Pakistan's Moslem President Mohammed Ayub Khan arrived in Cairo and throwing away a diplomatically phrased set speech, delivered the sharpest criticisms of Moslems by a Moslem heard in many a year.
Ayub spoke plainly on his view of the long-festering problem of refugees along the Israeli border, where more than a million Palestinians—those who fled or were ejected by Israel, and the children born to them since—still inhabit squalid detention camps in Jordan, Syria and the Gaza Strip. The Arabs have let the U.N. look after them, arguing that to provide the refugees with permanent homes and jobs would seem to be acquiescing in the existence of Israel. Ayub remarked pointedly that after partition, his own Pakistan made room for 9,000,000 Moslem refugees from India, and did it without asking or expecting outside help in shouldering the cost.
Moslems should ask themselves, said Ayub Khan, why "all over the world the Moslem communities are the most backward and most uneducated." He answered his own question: Because the Islamic culture let slip its "earlier dynamism," relapsed into "conformism, superficiality and superstition." Said Ayub Khan: "The kingdoms and crowns which the Moslems have lost in the course of history are far less important than the kingdom of the free and searching mind, which they have lost through intellectual stagnation."
Sharing the platform with him, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser as usual blamed all the Moslem world's problems on "imperialists." Ayub disagreed. Parliamentary government failed in Egypt and Pakistan, he said bluntly, "through no fault of that system. I say, it was our fault. We were not yet ready."

The Muslim world is in no better shape today than it was 47 years ago, and Muslim leaders with Ayub Khan's perception remain diminishingly rare.

Amanpour and CNN on Islamic terror

Again, I didn't watch the show, so I cannot comment on editing and music and such. From the transcript it appears to be much better than I hoped, and it seems to be properly eschew justifications and rationalizations for the most part.

A couple of points:

Karen Armstrong, "religious historian," comes off consistently as an apologist for Islamic terror and as the true voice of moral equivalence between Islam and other religions. Christiane Amanpour is much more critical of Islam than Armstrong.

Amanpour is injecting more of her own editorializing, far more explicitly, than she did in the Jewish episode. She seems more offended by Islamic misogyny and discrimination against women than by the terrorists murdering thousands of innocents. The section on women in Islam takes up too much time given that there are so many real topics about Islamic terror that can be covered.

It is nice to see that the final segment was about Palestinian Arab jihadist terror, but that section again seemed short compared to the feminist sections.

In the end, what Amanpour seems to be saying with this series is that all religion is bad, which is the wrong message.

And while this episode for the most part seems to have been properly critical (it did pull some punches when interviewing an American Muslim woman who did the usual apologetic definition of "jihad") the very fact that it is only one of three shows about religious violence ends up diluting the message unacceptably.

According to one website that keeps statistics, the number of people killed by Islamic terror has been 4134 - in just the past two months. The total this year is over 15,000. In other words, the equivalent of a 9/11 occurs every couple of months.

To compare the terrorism done by Jews and Christians in the name of religion to that of Muslims, even implicitly, is obscene.

Oddly enough, Saudi style

The Saudi-based Arab News tries really hard to be a moderate voice in an extremist society. But often it doesn't even realize that its own biases are still quite a bit to the edge.

Here's a story from Arab News which is meant to be funny:

The Bizarre Files: Man Divorces Wife Over Plate of Spaghetti

MADINAH — A Saudi man divorced his wife because she gave a plate of spaghetti to their neighbor. According to a local newspaper report the husband found out his wife dared to give away food to a non-family member when the neighbor came to return the plate. Angry about the gross infraction of house rules, the man took the plate and reportedly broke it over his wife’s head. After assaulting his wife with a piece of flatware, the husband declared an end to their 8-year marriage. A Madinah court recently finalized the divorce. That’ll teach a woman to be kind to her neighbor!

While it is indeed funny to read about a man divorcing a woman over spaghetti, for some reason the fact that the husband assaulted his wife at least twice - which turns this story from comedy to tragedy -is treated as just par for the course.

Fatah officer: "Thanks to US training we killed 1000 Israelis"

From the New York Sun, another eye-opening article by the only journalist who actually interviews Palestinian Arab terrorists :

By AARON KLEIN
Special to the Sun

RAMALLAH -- American-run programs that train Fatah militias were instrumental in the "success" of the Palestinian intifada that began in 2000, a senior Fatah militant told The New York Sun.

"I do not think that the operations of the Palestinian resistance would have been so successful and would have killed more than one thousand Israelis since 2000 and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without these [American] trainings," a senior officer of President Abbas's Force 17 Presidential Guard unit, Abu Yousuf, said.

America has longstanding training programs at a base in the West Bank city of Jericho for members of Force 17, which serves as de facto police units in the West Bank, and for another major Fatah security force, the Preventative Security Services.

This weekend diplomatic security officials announced that the State Department will begin training Force 17 again this year in an effort to bolster Mr. Abbas against Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip in June when the terror group easily defeated American-backed Fatah forces in the territory.
...
Many members of Force 17 and the Preventative Security Services also openly serve in Fatah's declared "military wing," Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which took credit along with the Islamic Jihad terror group for every suicide bombing in Israel between 2005 and 2006. The Brigades is responsible for more terrorism from the West Bank than any other Palestinian Arab organization.

Abu Yousuf, the Force 17 officer, received American training in Jericho in 1999 as a member of the Preventative Security Services. He is a chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Ramallah, where he is accused of participating in anti- Israel terrorism, including recent shootings, attacks against Israeli forces operating in the city, and a shooting attack in northern Samaria in December 2000 that killed the leader of the ultranationalist Kahane Chai organization, Benyamin Kahane.

After the Kahane murder, Mr. Yousuf was extended refuge by Yasser Arafat to live in the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader's Ramallah compound, widely known as the Muqata. Mr. Yousuf still lives in the compound.

Prime Minister Olmert last month granted Mr. Yousuf amnesty along with 178 other Brigades leaders reportedly in a gesture to Mr. Abbas.

Speaking during an interview for the upcoming book "Schmoozing with Terrorists," Mr. Yousuf said his American trainings were instrumental in attacks on Israelis. "All the methods and techniques that we studied in these trainings, we applied them against the Israelis," he said.

"We sniped at Israeli settlers and soldiers. We broke into settlements and Israeli army bases and posts. We collected information on the movements of soldiers and settlers. We collected information about the best timing to infiltrate our bombers inside Israel. We used weapons and we produced explosives, and of course the trainings we received from the Americans and the Europeans were a great help to the resistance."

Mr. Yousuf said the training included both intelligence and military tactics.

"In the intelligence part, we learned collection of information regarding suspected persons, how to follow suspected guys, how to infiltrate organizations and penetrate cells of groups that we were working on and how to prevent attacks and to steal in places," he said.

"On the military level, we received trainings on the use of weapons, all kind of weapons and explosives. We received sniping trainings, work of special units especially as part as what they call the fight against terror. We learned how to put siege, how to break into places where our enemies closed themselves in, how to oppress protest movements, demonstrations, and other activities of opposition."

Mr. Yousuf seemed to anticipate criticism for speaking publicly about the training. He's not "talking about U.S. training in order to irritate the Americans or the Israelis and not in order to create provocations," he said. "I'm just telling you the truth."