Thursday, September 20, 2007
Elder of Ziyon
Thursday, September 20, 2007Elder of ZiyonYNet seems to be mistaken; it is not 40% that have been raped but 40% that have been victims of "inappropriate touching":Yousra, the queen of the silver screen in the Arab world, is not only a beauty but also a highly opinionated actress who views her status as a springboard for conveying social messages. Every year during the Ramadan fast, the peak season for TV viewing in the Arab world, Yousra pushes urgent social issues to the forefront...
"A Case of Public Opinion," the latest Ramadan series, has become the talk of the town even before being aired in 22 Arab countries. Ratings are sky high; no one dares miss the show. This time the queen of the screen from Cairo chose to focus on a topic that Arab society has insisted on burying deep underground: Violent rape and sexual abuse .
The series recounts the story of three young female doctors who work in a respectable hospital in the heart of Cairo; the three are summoned in the middle of the night to treat an urgent case. As they race to the destination from a remote neighborhood, drugged thugs pounce on them from behind the shadows. They are attacked and raped, including the doctor whose pregnancy is very obvious. They weep, cut and bruised, while three knife cuts are evident on the cheek of the department head, portrayed by Yousra.
Ahead of the broadcasts, one of the human rights organizations in Egypt held a referendum among tens of thousands of women. The findings were shocking: 40 percent of respondents admitted that they had been raped and forced to remain silent. An additional 10 percent revealed that they are forced to deal with sexual harassment in the workplace. If they open their mouths, they will lose their jobs.
In a "Case of Public Opinion", the marriage of the star doctor is falling apart. Her husband insists on ignoring the facts, and the legal authorities remove the complaint against one of the rapists, the son of a senior government minister. Even the fate of her two colleagues plays against them, when the hospital director hints that "if they don't shut up, they will be fired."
Results from our preliminary research efforts (conducted entirely on a volunteer basis) show that sexual harassment is not only a persistent threat to some women, but that it is a widespread issue for all of Egyptian society. Survey results attest that harassment is not limited by age or social class, but hinders the progress of women across demographics. Service workers, housewives and professionals alike all report experiencing sexual harassment. The most common form is inappropriate touching (40% of all respondents), followed by verbal harassment (38%). 30% of respondents reported being harassed on a daily basis and another 12% are harassed almost daily. Only 12% of respondents approached police when harassed, expressing a complete lack of confidence in Egypt's police and legal system to protect them from harassers.Al Jazeera adds:
Many Egyptian women have stories, usually branded as "shameful" and "embarrassing", of public harassment and even outright sexual assault in public.Apparently, the honor of women is not quite as important in Arab societies as they have been claiming.
...In October 2006, Wael Abbas, a human rights activist, captured video images of throngs of men pulling scarves off veiled women and ganging up on two or three women at a time in downtown Cairo.
One picture even showed a group of girls taking sanctuary in a downtown store, crowds of men waiting at the door as a number of police officers seemed unable to contain the pandemonium.
Thursday, September 20, 2007Elder of Ziyon
media bias
Thursday, September 20, 2007Elder of ZiyonAt Vanguard News Network (sorry, I won't link to it), the headline is " SURPRISE! Bush Picks KIKE for Attorney General!". (One comment was "Ashkenazim Talmudic serpentilic creature from the black pit of the Lord of Darkness. Put a black brim hat on his head and a long black beard on his face and you will see him as he truly is.")Michael B. Mukasey married Susan Bernstock Saroff in July 1974. They were married by Rabbi Judah Nadich, the first adviser on Jewish Affairs to General Dwight Eisenhower, the commander of the U.S. forces in Europe. Nadich involved in the displaced person (DP) camps and requested that the Jewish DPs have their own camps and receive preferable treatment in such things as food and emmigration to the United States.
See: Judah Nadich (1912 — 2007)
Susan is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Bernstock. Her marriage with Mr. Saroff had ended in divorce.
According to obits in the New York Times, Michael Bernard Mukasey was born in, or about 1941 to Albert Mukasey and his wife, the former Mae Fischer. He has a sister named Rhoda Eckstein, who evidently married a Norbert Eckstein.
Albert Mukasey died in September 1972 and Mae Fischer Mukasey died in February 1975.
"Was the nomination of Jew Michael Mukasey a taunting message to White Christians (like the middle finger)?"
Given that all of the defendants are Muslims and most of the defense lawyers are Jews, the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 10 others on terrorism charges has all along had a strange-bedfellows quality. And there was a rare moment of conflict involving religion at the trial last week when the defendants were out of the courtroom on a regular break so they could perform their afternoon Muslim prayers.Sounds exactly right - allow them to practice their religion properly but don't allow them to use religion to bully everyone else.
With the jury out of the courtroom, Judge Michael B. Mukasey took the bench and, clearly annoyed, announced that a problem had arisen. It seems, the judge said, that the marshals had summoned the defendants in the middle of their prayers and, feeling insulted, they "took the position" that "they are either starting all over, or don't want to come out, or whatever."
"I take the position," the judge said through clenched teeth, "that anybody who isn't in here in five minutes is voluntarily absenting himself. We're going to go ahead without them." And to make up for the lost time, he said, he would sit a bit later than usual.
Judge Mukasey generally is low-key, soft-spoken, kindly, but he clearly wants the trial to move along, and he is impatient when legal arguments, or what he sees as small complaints about the prison conditions of the defendants, slow things down. He frequently cuts lawyers off in mid-sentence and tells them to sit down, or answers a request with a curt "no," offering no explanation.
On the afternoon the defendants refused to return to court before their prayers were finished, Lynne Stewart, the lawyer for Mr. Abdel Rahman, pleaded with the judge to take into account that it is now Ramadan, the monthlong holiday during which Muslims take no food from before dawn until after nightfall.
"I don't care what it is," Judge Mukasey snapped. "I gave a 20-minute break."
Ms. Stewart: "I don't think if someone said, 'I don't care if it's Passover or not,' you would take that very kindly. I wouldn't take it so . . . "
Judge Mukasey interrupted: "Take it kindly or not, they were given 20 minutes. That's ample time. They were to be back here in 20 minutes, or we will go ahead without them. That's the way it is going to get done."
Ms. Stewart: "Judge . . . "
Judge Mukasey: "Period."
A little later, another lawyer, Anthony Ricco, passed along to the judge a request by the defendants to discuss the issue, but Judge Mukasey refused. "I'm not talking to them," he said. Still, he seemed to soften, and when every lawyer on the case promised to talk to the defendants over the weekend and let them know that they had to follow the judge's schedule, he relented in his insistence on proceeding without the defendants. A few minutes later, the 11 men, most of them carrying prayer rugs in their manacled hands, walked back into the courtroom.
The implication is that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs lived in the area for generations, and this is simply false. A great percentage, perhaps as high as half, moved into Palestine after the Zionists started building a thriving economy in the late 19th century.
Today there are millions of Palestinians living in exile from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations.
Many still suffer the legacy of their dispossession: destitution, penury, insecurity.Because they are stuck in "refugee" camps by their Arab "brethren."
Palestinian historians, and some Israelis, call 1948 a clear example of ethnic cleansing - perpetrated by the Haganah (later the Israeli Defence Forces) and armed Jewish gangs.The BBC does not admit that any impartial historians support the "official Israeli history" which implies that it is lying propaganda, while the far-left Israeli historians and Palestinian Arab historians are not spun that way at all. It is clear who the BBC believes.
Official Israeli history, by contrast, says most Palestinian refugees left to avoid a war instigated by neighbouring Arab states, though it admits a "handful" of expulsions and unauthorised killings.
What is undisputed is that the refugees' fate is excluded from most Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts because, given a right of return, their numbers endanger the future of the world's only Jewish state.Note how the BBC accepts Badil's numbers without question. Also there is a sleight-of-hand here where the BBC, like Badil, is not differentiating between "refugees" and "displaced persons," lumping the PalArabs who moved within Israel after 1948 or the Jordanian citizens who moved to Jordan in 1967 - who are citizens of their countries - together with the dwindling refugee numbers and their ever-increasing descendants. The only purpose in doing this is the exaggerate the problem, not to illuminate it.
The issue of the refugees is therefore seen by many Israelis as an existential one.
Four million UN-registered Palestinian refugees trace origins to the 1948 exodus; 750,000 people belong to families displaced in 1967 - many for the second time.
Palestinian advocacy group Badil says another million and a half hail from pre-1948 Palestine but were not UN-registered, while an additional 274,000 were internally displaced inside Israel after 1948, and 150,000 were displaced in the occupied territories after 1967.
That makes more than six million people, one of the biggest displaced populations in the world.
Israel steadfastly argues that all refugees - and it disputes the numbers - should relinquish any aspirations to return to what is now its territory, and instead be absorbed by Arab host countries or by a future Palestinian state.The BBC doesn't bother to report Israel's count, because they accept the Palestinian Arab narrative and reject Israel's.
It disavows moral responsibility by arguing that 800,000 Mizrahi Jews were displaced from Arab countries between 1945 and 1956 (most of whom settled in Israel) and insists Palestinians left willingly.The exact text is "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date..." Since they have not shown the desire to live in peace with Jews, this shows that the BBC's interpretation is incorrect.
But that view is at odds with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Resolution 194 asserts the refugees' unconditional right of return to live at peace in their old homes or to receive compensation for their losses.
Here the BBC seems to be advocating Israel's destruction, by saying that the descendants of Palestinian Arabs do have the right to move back to pre-1948 towns that no longer exist while Israel does not have the right to determine who can become a citizen.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of their cause, the practicality of return and questions of moral justice, in Mid-East diplomacy the refugees' fate has been largely ignored.
This has been achieved by a dual process pegging all solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict to the 1967 war, and discounting the events of 1948 as an element of the conflict.
Israel has effectively deployed a number of arguments to justify this, such as saying that it is the only Jewish state, the refuge of Jews from around the world, while there are 22 Arab countries where the refugees could go.Notice how the BBC consistently parrots the Palestinian Arab viewpoints as being factual and without attribution, while the Israeli viewpoints are always attributed to Israel and thus implying that they are biased.
It also points out that UN General Assembly resolutions have no force under international law and says the unassimilated refugee population has been held hostage by frontline Arab states waiting for Israel's destruction.
The diplomatic focus on 1967 has been advantageous for Israel: territory occupied at that time is regarded as the entire problem, and solutions can therefore be limited to dividing up that land.
This is problematic for Palestinians, however, because it sidelines the Nakba, the "catastrophe" of 1948 - an issue that for them lies at the heart of the conflict.
Palestinians accuse Israel of a kind of "Nakba-denial", absolving itself of liability, but thereby condemning itself to perpetual conflict with its Arab neighbours.Again, it is clear who the BBC believes, and again it doesn't consider the idea that non-Zionist historians may believe the Zionist narrative. It is consistently pushing the revisionist historian viewpoint as the truth - and it simply isn't.
Israel vigorously denies such a characterisation. Zionist historians justify what happened in 1948 by saying the new Jewish state was threatened with annihilation by the invading Arab armies.
But some of Israel's "new", or revisionist, historians argue that its founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, exaggerated the Arab threat, in order to implement a covert plan to expel Palestinian civilians and grab as much of the former Palestine as possible.
Demography - the need to have a large majority of Jews to sustain a Jewish state - has certainly been a key concern for Israel since its foundation.To its credit, the BBC does not seem to refer to current PalArabs as "refugees" but it still assumes that somehow, uniquely in the world, descendants of a single refugee population has the right to move back to the country of its ancestors no matter how long after they leave. The concept that they should be absorbed by their host countries, as refugees have been for millennia, is not on the BBC radar because they wholly swallow the lie that Palestinian Arabs deserve to move to a country that the vast majority have never lived in.
Under a 1947 UN-sanctioned plan to partition Palestine, Israel would have been established on 55% of the former territory, and without a significant transfer of population the Jews in that territory would have scarcely exceeded the Arab population there.
The 1948 war ended with Israel in control of 78% of the former Palestine, with a Jewish-Arab ratio of 6:1.
The equation brought security for Jewish Israelis, but emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns of 700,000 inhabitants - the kernel of the Palestinian refugee problem today.
With the justification of not wanting to jeopardise its Jewish majority, Israel has kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants out of negotiations on a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
But for most Palestinians, their fate remains an open wound, unless there is a Middle East peace deal that acknowledges what happened to the refugees.
Thursday, September 20, 2007Elder of ZiyonAcademic fraud, archaeology
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of Ziyon
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of Ziyonarchaeology, Temple MountNo one really cares. But that puts me in an elite group: It includes two of Israel's most prominent Jerusalem archaeologists (Gaby Barkay and Eilat Mazar) — and me.I wrote to the Prime Minister's office (prime.minister'soffice@it.pmo.gov.il) and received a very inadequate reply:
Meanwhile, the Muslim Waqf goes on tearing up Jerusalem's Temple Mount, where once the Jewish Temple stood. The week before last, they hit an ancient wall that might be the foundation of a wall from the Second Temple complex built by Herod the Great.
It's an old/new story. For the past 35 years the Muslim religious authority known as the Waqf, to whom Israel has been given custody of the Temple Mount, has been periodically digging it up — illegally. (That's the Israel Supreme Court's characterization.) Several years ago, for example, the Waqf used mechanical equipment to dig a huge hole for a wide stairway down to a greatly expanded underground mosque, dumping hundreds of tons of dirt from the mount into the adjacent Kidron Valley.
When Zachi Zweig, a graduate student of Barkay's, started looking for antiquities in the Waqf dump, the Israel Antiquities Authority had Zweig arrested for digging without a permit. Since then, Barkay has obtained the permit and, with Zweig, they have engaged in a multi-year project sifting this archaeologically rich dump. They have found thousands of ancient artifacts going back 3000 years, including a seal impression of a probable brother of someone mentioned in the Bible.
Now the Waqf wants to lay new telephone and electric lines on the mount. Under Israeli law, in an area that might contain antiquities, the trench must be excavated by professional archaeologists. (The same holds true for construction: Such areas must first be professionally excavated, most often by the Israel Antiquities Authority.) The Waqf simply ignores this law, however. A few weeks ago they began digging a utilities trench almost five feet deep, often going down to bedrock. Worse still, the workmen were using mechanical equipment — anathema to any professional archaeologist in such a site.
It's certainly all right for the Waqf to lay new telephone and electrical lines. But there would seem to be no reason why the trench could not first be excavated by professional archaeologists who dig by hand and with great care to document the context of all discoveries — no reason except the Waqf's unwillingness to recognize Israeli law.
On July 18, 2007, I published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, headed "Biblical Destruction," protesting the Waqf excavation. It has had no effect. Since then, the excavation has been extensively expanded.
Observers have reported seeing numerous antiquities in the excavated dirt and in the trench, including mosaic tesserae, a quantity of pottery vessels (some of which had been freshly broken by the tractor scoop) and carefully carved and decorated building stones typical of the Second Temple period. Last week, as I said earlier, the excavation hit part of an unusually wide wall that has now been destroyed. It could well have been part of the Temple complex.
Barkay and Mazar continue to protest vehemently and publicly. But they have mostly been met with silence. The archaeological community as such has not raised its voice. Each archaeologist is concerned with his or her own dig, not someone else's violation of the antiquities law. And why jeopardize a career by making trouble when all the well-known political names and faces remain silent? Yes, a few newspaper articles have appeared, but nothing serious. The Antiquities Authority has been queried on several occasions about this violation of Israel's antiquities laws — on Judaism's holiest site — but the response has always been the same: "No comment."
This thundering silence perhaps explains why the Israeli embassy in Washington has not provided any account or explanation of this depredation on the Temple Mount. Why raise questions and create a problem when nobody really cares?
We acknowledge receipt of your recent e-mail to the Prime Minister's Office regarding excavations on the Temple Mount.To which I replied:
Please be assured that the Israeli Antiquities Authority is closely following the work being carried out on the Temple Mount, and is ensuring that there is no damage to any antiquities unearthed.
Thank you for writing to express your concern.
I'm sorry, but this is not an acceptable answer. The very fact that bulldozers are being used in the holiest part of the planet shows that politics is trumping archaeology, not to mention Judaism.You can also write to the Israel Antiquities Authority here.
It is shameful that the Jewish state cares more about Muslim reaction to careful excavations than Jewish concerns over much more sensitive desecrations that are being carried out now.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of Ziyon
ack in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"
I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: While I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is hesperophobia.
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]
Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.
I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.
Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.
So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.
What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example — are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?
And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.
Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism. It was in part all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of Ziyon
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of ZiyonIsrael declared the Gaza Strip a "hostile entity" on Wednesday, clearing the way for shutting off basic supplies to the Hamas-run territory in revenge for rocket fire.The elephant in the room is, why doesn't Egypt supply the electricity and water to their Arab brethren in Gaza? Why is it a "declaration of war" for Israel to reduce services to its enemies but when Egypt refuses to provide them to begin with it doesn't mean anything?Take a wild guess.The Western-shunned Islamist movement slammed the decision as "collective punishment" for the 1.5 million residents of the impoverished territory, one of the world's most densely populated places. (see here - EoZ)
A senior UN official also said the move was against international law, while the United States said it had received assurance from Israel that it would not affect the humanitarian situation in the territory.
"Following extensive legal consulations, Israel has decided to declare Gaza as a hostile entity, with all the international implications," a senior Israeli official told AFP after a meeting of Israel's powerful security cabinet.
An official statement said the unanimous decision would affect supplies of electricity and fuel to the impoverished territory, where Hamas seized control three months ago. Israel provides Gaza with the majority of both.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of ZiyonA Scottish college student who prosecutors said became an aspiring suicide bomber after scouring extremist Islamic sites on the Internet was convicted of terrorism offenses Monday.So that's what they are calling it nowadays!A jury at Glasgow's High Court found Mohammed Atif Siddique, 21, guilty of four terrorism offenses and also of causing a disturbance by telling fellow students he planned to become a suicide bomber.
Prosecutors said during the four-week trial that Siddique was watched by security agents for several months before he was arrested in April 2006 as he tried to board a flight from Glasgow to Lahore, Pakistan.
Siddique, from the town of Clackmannanshire in central Scotland, had stored and posted guides to bomb-making, guns and explosives on a network of Web sites, prosecutors said.
Defense lawyer Aamer Anwar claimed Siddique was merely conducting research into his religion and was the victim of heightened sensitivity fed by terror attacks.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of ZiyonPresse source revealed Palestinian official disclosed that the number of Jewish rabbis mediate between Hamas and the Israeli government to bring calm to ensure cessation of Palestinian resistance from the Gaza Strip against the Israeli army to stop its operations in the sector.The rabbi, Menachem Froman, is certainly unusual. While he himself is a founder of Gush Emunim and he is rabbi of the settlement of Tekoa, he has met with many Hamas and Fatah leaders over the years, including Sheikh Yassin and Yasir Arafat. On the other hand he is a strong opponent of "disengagement" and even moved his family to Gush Katif beforehand. He says that he would rather live in Tekoa under Arab rule if Israel gives it away.
The source said the newspaper "Middle East", published today, that the rabbis group, headed by Menachem Fromn, initiated contacts with the government official Ismail Haniya article and suggested it be transferred suggestions mutual calm between Israel and Hamas, provided that the successful prevention of resistance movements Hamas from launching any attack from Gaza Strip.
The source pointed out that Fromn already contacted the Deputy Minister of the Israeli army, General Vilnai and careful presentation of the mediation efforts, with the latter expressed enthusiasm for the idea, said the source, adding that there was an effort Palestinians and Israelis because expands under which authorities will be required to take a position on the truce, specifically clergy and religious institution in Gaza, and not only the position of resistance movements.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007Elder of ZiyonDozens of Syrian military officers and Iranian engineers were killed about two months ago in an a chemical weapons accident, Jane's Magazine reported Monday, revealing new details on the incident which took place in a secret weapons facility.My, my, Syrians and Iranians have been busy!
According to the report by the British magazine, the explosion occurred early in the morning on July 26, in a factory in the city of Halab, as the officers were attempting to mount a chemical warhead with mustard gas on a Scud-C missile.
A fire which started in the missile's engine led to an explosion near a storage location of chemical substances. The blast spread lethal chemical agents, including mustard gas, VX gas and sarin nerve gas, which are considered extremely toxic and are banned for use according to international treaties.
Jane's Magazine reports that the explosion killed 15 Syrian officers and dozens of Iranian engineers who were in the facility. Dozens of people were injured.
The incident was reported at the time by Syria's official news agency, but the report only included information on the Syrian casualties and did not mention the Iranian representatives.
The Syrian report also claimed that the explosion was caused by a "heat wave" in the country, although the blast took place at around 4:30 am, and that the Syrian government rejected the possibility of sabotage.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007Elder of Ziyon
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PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
