Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Today's Walt/Mearsheimer lie

From JPost, on a W/M talk at MIT:

"A critically important issue when talking about America's terrorism problem is the matter of how US support for Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians relates to what happened on September 11," said Mearsheimer, who played the role of attack dog, while Walt set the stage.
Mearsheimer suggested that the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the "most powerfully recurrent in [Osama] Bin Laden's speeches," who, he said, had been deeply concerned about the plight of the Palestinians since he was a young man. He said that Bin Laden's concern had been reflected in his public statements throughout the 1990's - "well before 9-11." Citing the 9-11 Commission report, Mearsheimer and Walt argued that Bin Laden wanted to make sure the attackers struck Congress because it is "the most important source of support for Israel in the United States," adding that Bin Laden twice tried to move up the dates of the attacks because of events involving Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt went on to argue that 9-11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences in the United States as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favoring Israel. "Its hard to imagine more compelling evidence of the role US support for Israel played in the 9-11 attacks," said Mearsheimer.
"In short, the present relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is helping to fuel America's terrorism problem," he went on to say.

I addressed the purposeful misreading of the 9/11 Commission Report, that time by Walt, last year. The 9/11 Commission emphatically said that OBL's animosity towards the US was at best only peripherally affected by US support of Israel.

Notice also Mearsheimer's sleight of hand - by saying that OBL was "deeply concerned" about Palestinian Arabs he is implying that this was his main motivation for 9/11. This logic is flawed - would they say that OBL's fighting the Soviets was also motivated by his "deep concern" for Palestine?

Most of all, Bin Laden's own statements make it clear that his concern for US support of Israel is almost an afterthought. Two fatwas from the 1990s can be found online calling on Muslims to kill all Americans. The 1996 fatwa is named "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places" which makes it abundantly clear that it is American troops on holy Muslim soil that got his panties in a bunch, not its support for Israel - he buries that reason in the long text. And his 1998 fatwa spelled out his major three reasons to kill Americans, and support for Israel was a distant third:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have formerly debated the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.

The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.

Obviously OBL and his like-minded Islamists hate Israel with a passion. But they also hate America - possibly even more - for reasons quite independent of Israel, as OBL's words make clear. These "academics" once again fall into a trap of creating a theory to begin with and then finding facts to support that theory afterwards, ignoring any counter-evidence. This is not scholarship.

In short, Walt and Mearsheimer are liars when they say that support for Israel is the major reason for Islamic terror against America. Anyone who reads the entire OBL fatwas would see that clearly - but W/M know that most people won't bother. And the inconvenient facts that terror attacks in the UK, France and elsewhere cannot be so neatly explained by their absurd theory are just not going to be mentioned.

Tunnel collapse in Gaza - another mega-attack thwarted?

From Ma'an:

Gaza – Ma'an – A tunnel collapsed in the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday, injuring a number of people.

The casualties are believed to have suffocated in the incident, according to Mu'awiya Hassanain, the director of emergency and ambulance department in the Palestinian ministry of health.

Tunnels on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt are frequently used for smuggling goods, particularly weapons into Gaza from Egypt.

The last sentence seems irrelevant. The Al-Bureij camp is in central Gaza, far from the border with Egypt.

It is, however, relatively close to the Israeli security border in Gaza (see here for a huge detailed map.)

The most obvious explanation is that a large effort was underway to tunnel under the border to attack Israeli civilians, or to attempt to kidnap another Israeli soldier. Judging from the map, it could easily have been a mile long.

Imagine what Gazans could accomplish if they put their energy, creativity and talents to purposes other than killing Jews?

cross-posted to Yourish

Lakewood attacker screamed "Jew! Jew!" - WCBS

More details on the attack:

LAKEWOOD, N.J. (CBS) ―
A New Jersey rabbi on his way to synagogue was brutally beaten with a baseball bat just steps from his home and left a bloody mess on the ground, police say, and many believe he was targeted because of his religion.

Gauze and rubber gloves still litter the ground where 53-year-old Lakewood rabbi Mordechai Moskowitz was savagely attacked with an aluminum bat. His face and head were so badly damaged that the paramedic who responded was his own nephew and didn't even recognize him.

"You wouldn't recognize him. It doesn't look like him, like anything like he used to look," said another one of Moskowitz's nephews, Moshe Rotberg.

Rotberg spent all night at the hospital with his uncle, who had to be placed into a medicated coma because of his condition.

"This was totally instigated by somebody's either sickness or hate," said Rotberg.

Moskowitz was attacked under the darkness of night in the middle of Princeton Avenue near 12th Street in Lakewood. While he was being attacked, residents tell CBS 2 they heard his attacker yelling at him.

"He started screaming, 'Jew! Jew! Jew!' Every time he hit him with the bat he banged and screamed 'Jew' again," said a neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous.

Lakewood police say they have no evidence that the attack was a hate or bias crime, but were able to find the baseball bat used and have a description of the attacker.

The suspect is being described as a black male, 30- to 40-years-old, clean shaven, wearing a dark plaid shirt and dark baggy pants. He is described as being approx. 5-foot-10 to 6-feet tall. He was last seen running south on Princeton Avenue.

Meanwhile, the principal at Lakewood Cheder School where Moskowitz teaches third grade says the children there are anxious for their favorite teacher to come back.

"They know that he was wounded, that he was in the hospital. I think most of them knew he was beaten. We're just hoping and praying for him that he should recover quickly," said Lakewood Cheder School Rabbi Yehuda Pirutinsky.

Moskowitz remains in critical condition at the Jersey Shore University Medical Center.

And more, which contradicts the story above:

Six people saw the attack on Mordechai Moskowitz, 53, of Lakewood, just before 8 p.m. Tuesday, at Princeton Avenue and Carey Street, police said. Neighbors said he was heading to a synagogue on Squankum Road, said Detective Lt. Joseph Isnardi.

Witnesses told police they did not see or hear any apparent reason for the attack, Isnardi said. There was no evidence to classify the assault as a bias crime, police said Wednesday, and nothing was stolen from Moskowitz.

The victim's nephew, Moshe Rothberg, said he did not believe his uncle was targeted because of his religion. However, he said he was eager to see what police uncover.

Isnardi said Moskowitz is conscious and able to speak.

Rothberg, of Lakewood, said his family was comforted by more than three dozen people who came to Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, where Moskowitz was taken Tuesday night.

Another college newspaper article blaming Israel for all evil

The author of this article, for the Daily Campus of the University of Connecticut, takes pains to appear objective in his brief history of the Arab/Israeli conflict - but he really tries to demonize Israel as much as possible.

Here was my reply:

It is literally impossible to describe the conflict in such a small space, but that doesn't mean that George Maynard has the right to be extraordinarily selective in some facts and wrong in others.

This history completely ignores Arab attacks against Jews in Palestine that started as early as the 1880s and continued through pogroms in 1921, 1929, and 1936-39. This context is critical in understanding why Palestinian Jews even armed themselves to begin with.

In 1967, Israel had very few arms from the US - they was mostly from France - and Maynard again chooses to ignore the extreme rhetoric and daily threats to destroy Israel by Egypt's Nasser and other Arab leaders. He also ignores Nasser expelling the UN troops from Sinai and closing the Straits of Tiran from Israeli ships, an act of war. It is also disingenuous to refer to the West Bank in 1967 as "Palestinian territories" as Jordan had annexed them, with Palestinian Arab approval, around 1950. And his characterization of Israel somehow "causing" Jordan to join the war is laughably biased - Israel warned Jordan repeatedly not to attack and Nasser lied to King Hussein that he was winning the war to bring him in.

UN Resolution 242 does not call for Israel to withdraw from all the territories.

It is fascinating that Egypt and Syria's sneak attack on Yom Kippur, 1973 doesn't rate a mention in this history. Neither does Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, giving up the Sinai, with its oil fields and air fields and dismantling settlements, all for peace. Perhaps these events don't put Israel into a bad enough light for Mr. Maynard?

This "history" goes on and on - ignoring the constant Palestinian Arab terror attacks against Israel as well as the West in the 1970s, the Palestinian attacks from Lebanon that sparked the first Lebanon war, mischaracterizing Camp David and the beginnings of the intifada, and generally whitewashing Palestinian Arab crimes while twisting history for his own purposes.

It would be far more accurate to say that for nearly a century, Jews have attempted to live in peace with their Arab neighbors and the Arabs have been a bit less amenable.

For a series I am working on about the history of Palestinian Arabs, see my blog entry here: http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2007/05/psychological-history-of-palestinian.html

If you can find any errors of fact in there, I would be most happy to correct it.

It takes time to correct articles like this, and the number of people who read it is probably tiny, but it is far worse to leave them unanswered.

My Qassam numbers are very low

The IDF just announced that since Hamas' takeover in Gaza there have been about 350 rocket attacks and 650 mortar attacks against Israel.

My count of Qassam rockets, looking only at articles I happen to catch in the Israeli press, is roughly half this number in that time period.

Which means that not only do Israelis have to worry about rockets coming at the rate of nearly 3 a day, but also that the attacks happen so often that many do not even get into the news.

Misoziony, hate speech and freedom

Continuing on my musings of misoziony...

If we accept at face value the claim that the rabid misoziony of Israel-bashers is not motivated by Jew-hatred, would it still qualify as hate speech?

To wit: Yesterday there were protests at Columbia University supporting a black professor who saw a noose hung on her office door. It is obvious that this was a purposeful act of hate, a veiled threat of violence and a purposeful evocation of historic lynchings of blacks.

Why isn't anyone considering this free speech? Why is such an act not protected as is offensive art or flag burning is?

The answer seems to be that there is a visceral horror at the pure racism that this event evokes. We have become conditioned to treat racism and selected other types of bigotry against ethnic or religious groups as reprehensible.

Now, there is no doubt that if someone left a sign on her door saying "death to blacks" or, more likely, a worse word this would also be considered beyond the pale and a clear example of hate speech. So would "death to Arabs" or "death to Italians" or "death to Jews" (at least in America.)

Would "death to America" or "death to Israel" qualify?

A quick Google on "death to..." various countries found that the vast majority of references were to Israel and America, with a fair number for the UK and Canada, a few for Western European countries and a smattering for Arab countries. Practically all of the links referred to Arabs and Muslims saying these words. (For example, there was an uptick of "Death to Denmark" references in the wake of the Mohammed cartoon kerfuffle.)

It is a fair bet that when Arabs say "death to..." some nation, they are advocating actual deaths of human beings, not an abstract concept. The fact they celebrate actual deaths of Israelis and Americans would seem to prove that point (notwithstanding that Sami al-Arian claimed otherwise.)

Is this hate speech? Is the hatred of a nation - and its people - as reprehensible as the hatred of an ethnic or religious group?

Last year, Salt Lake City allowed a "death to Israel" rally to take place. The same words can be heard at leftist rallies across the nation, by people who wholeheartedly support Palestinian Arab "resistance" - meaning terror against Israeli civilians.

Saying "death to Israel" is not just an expression; it is a call for mass murder and it is just as bigoted and hateful as any threats against any group. The question is, why is it so easily tolerated as free speech when equivalent expressions against other groups are considered disgusting hate speech?

Ohio Statehouse to host pro-Hamas activist

From FrontPage:

The Ohio State Capitol in Columbus will be the setting for a curious convocation later this month when it hosts an event featuring several well-known Islamic extremists as part of an “interfaith” conference entitled, “The Many Faces of Islam”. The conference, which is to be held in the atrium of the Statehouse on Sunday, October 28^th, will feature two well-known speakers with multiple connections to the HAMAS international terrorist organization, a host of convicted terrorist leaders, and colleagues who fled the US to avoid prosecution on terrorism-related charges. The event is sponsored by the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio.
One of the featured speakers at the conference will be Anisa Abd El Fattah, the chair of the National Association of Muslim American Women based in Columbus....
As one of the foremost spokesman for HAMAS in the US, Fattah has published a litany of screeds denouncing “Zionism” and promoting violence against Israeli civilians. A letter to the editor she had published last month in the Columbus Dispatch (“Israelis in Gaza aren’t civilians”), Fattah indicated that any Israeli man, woman or child in Gaza was fair game for terror attacks: “There are no Israeli civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There are only illegal Jewish settlers, who, by Israeli law, are also citizen-soldiers. They are heavily armed with fully automatic weapons.”

In a May 2006 article, “Condemning Zionism is crucial to world peace”, Fattah rages against Israel, arguing that Zionism is an “evil and racist ideology that not only directly contrasts everything we profess to stand for as a country, but that also violates every relevant divine, human rights, or other law, including our own laws, as well as every norm of decency known to the human species.” She concludes her article by adding that Zionism was attempting “to expand into Sudan through Darfur”, and thus, responsible for the genocidal violence there, rather than the Islamic government in Khartoum.

An April 2006 article by Fattah, “A Religious History of Justice and Palestine”, begins with her pronouncement that “[t]he racist and colonizing legacy of the Zionist Christian Church, and the Synagogue continues into the 21^st Century…”.

This is one of the featured speakers at the “interfaith” conference at the Ohio State Capitol.

Read the whole thing, plus followups by the same author, Patrick Poole.

More details on Lakewood beating

From the Asbury Park Press:

LAKEWOOD — Police have released a composite sketch of the man being sought in the attack on a third-grade Orthodox school teacher Tuesday night.

The investigation into the attack of Mordechai Moskowitz, 53, of Lakewood, is being conducted by Lakewood Police Detectives Greg Staffordsmith and Steve Wexler, along with Investigator Carlos Trujillo-Tovar from the Ocean County Prosecutors Office.

Police are asking the public to call if they have any information or saw anything out of the ordinary about 8 p.m. Tuesday on Princeton Avenue, Isnardi said.

The first comment on the article is somewhat less than sympathetic towards the Orthodox Jews of Lakewood:

It's terrible that this man was almost killed. That being said, why should anyone from outside of the orthodox cult get involved in solving this crime?. I doubt any of them would do likewise. The orthodox want nothing to do with Lakewood outside of their own interests (segregated housing, segregated schools, welfare, etc.)

UPDATE here.

EUdiots show their love for terrorists again

From JPost:

Calling Gaza a "prison" and a "ghetto," European Union parliamentarians harshly condemned Israeli actions there in a special session held in Brussels on Wednesday.

During the hour-long, heated debate in advance of a Thursday vote on a resolution, parliamentarians, as well as EU officials, called on Israel to open the Gaza borders to alleviate the growing humanitarian crisis in the impoverished area where 1.1 million of the 1.4 m. population are dependent on the international donations for basic food supplies.

In one of the more impassioned speeches, Belgian MEP Veronique De Keyser called Gaza a "ghetto" where "people are dying little by little with cameras trained on them."

While the IDF is working on a proposal to close the borders between Gaza and Israel in favor of Egyptian crossings, EU parliamentarians called on Israel to find a solution to the problem.

In particular, it urged Israel to live up to its commitment to ensure pedestrian passage at Rafah and full commercial movement in Karni.

The Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in June forced the closure of the main commercial crossing into Israel at Karni and the pedestrian one into Egypt at Rafah. The third major crossing into Israel at Erez has been opened for limited pedestrian traffic.

Since June, the IDF, along with the United Nations, has worked to bring basic supplies, agricultural products and limited goods into the area through alternative crossings at Sufa and Kerem Shalom.

Among the stumbling blocks to opening the crossing have been continued mortar attacks by Hamas on the passages and the absence of a viable plan to replace the Fatah personnel who had manned the Gaza borders on the Palestinian side.

In a more measured speech than some of the others, Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs Manuel Antunes Lobo attacked Israel's decision last month to declare Gaza a "hostile territory" and said that such a move "exacerbated" an already bad situation.

"The European Union recognizes Israel's legitimate right of self defense but asks Israel to carefully consider the consequences of its decision." He added that "access and movement" agreements regarding the borders need to still be respected even in the current situation.

The EU, he said, remains committed to helping out the Palestinians financially both in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2006, it gave out €688 million in humanitarian assistance and this year it has already shelled out €425m., he said.

EU Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that the border closures had forced the suspension of important water and sanitation projects.

But even as she took spoke of the EU's continued financial commitment to the Palestinians, she called on the Arab states - who have not contributed in the same way we did - to step up and "do their part in the future."

One British MEP, Chris Davies, said it should be Israel and not EU taxpayers who should foot the bill to solve the Palestinian humanitarian crisis.

"What does it have to do with the EU? Gaza is an Israeli prison camp. It is the Israelis who should be responsible. They are the ones that keep them in misery," said Davis.

The level of EU depravity and hypocrisy stays pegged at 11 on a scale of 10.

They pay lip service to Israel's security needs but do not blame Hamas for anything that is happening in Gaza. They say that all responsibility for Gaza is Israel's, not their Arab brethren who they admit contribute next to nothing to solve the "humanitarian crisis." They blame the closing of Karni on Israel and do not acknowledge the terrorist attacks at that border crossing.

The hypocrisy really hits home when they blame Israel for Rafah being closed. Somehow, Egypt manages to open it for wanted terrorists to travel to Gaza and the EU which is supposed to monitor it disappears.

So it is Israel's fault that the Rafah (and Karni) agreement stipulations have been abrogated by Hamas' takeover of the Strip?

So the EU can insist that Israel negotiate with a group sworn to destroy it?

So when a people democratically elect terrorists, they must eb shielded from the consequences?

So Egypt has no responsibility for Gaza, and only Israel does?

So the EU cannot deign to mention weapons smuggling, Hamas/Fatah civil war, religious coercion, torture and all the other things that make life in Gaza hell that are quire independent of Israel?

These moral midgets love to stand up and accuse Israel of crimes - and their use of the word "ghetto" is no accident as they try so label Israel as being Nazis without actually saying it - when they have histories of colonization whose associated atrocities have dwarfed anything Israel could dream of.

Perhaps most tellingly, they promote the stereotype of Arabs as savages, saying that the Arab people cannot possibly be expected to take care of their own, or to act like human beings. No, only Israel is responsible for taking care of the poor animals, in th EU's twisted and bigoted viewpoint. The very idea of Arab responsibility for their role in creating and prolonging a fake "refugee" problem is never to be mentioned - and the idea that somehow Palestinian Arabs have the ability to fix their own messes is not even entertained.

Gaza is not sub-Saharan Africa, and PalArab children are not sitting with distended stomachs and fleas begging for a morsel of bread. Gazans are educated and clothed and fed; they have cars and houses and designer clothes and the Internet. A billion dollars a year flows into Gaza legally, who knows how much more smuggled in suitcases from Saudi and Iranian petrodollars. Gaza could have turned into a Singapore or a Hong Kong if the Arabs had the ability to take responsibility for themselves rather than spend their entire existence whining that somehow they deserve more and more Western support. Gazans have created a successful industry of building rockets and tunnels - efforts that could have been building real businesses where they could export their wonderful goods to Europe itself.

This is the ultimate irony: a group of politically correct Europeans saying, in effect, that Gazans are less than human and must be treated as if they are all mentally ill.

Arabs taking responsibility for their own actions? Mon Dieu!

Speaking of free speech....

One rarely finds the same people who agitate for "free speech" to allow, say, neo-Nazi messages to be broadcast on TV, to be nearly as concerned when a US ally does this:

A Jordanian security court has sentenced former Jordanian MP Ahmad Al-'Abadi to two years in prison for criticizing the royal family in speeches before U.S. Congressmen.
Al-'Abadi's wife called the sentence a political move aimed at distancing her husband from the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Source: Al-Jarida, Kuwait, October 10, 2007

Yes, our friends the Jordanians jail people who say things that tick them off.

Perhaps it is just me, but this seems to be a teensy bit greater violation of free speech than forcing any media to give space and time to any crackpot's ravings. Yet not a single English-language news source mentions this story.

The disastrous idea of "land swap"

Palestinian Arab negotiators are flocking to wire service reporters to float ideas, and today another one came up - the idea of a "land swap" where PalArabs get the same number of square kilometers from Israel that Israel keeps from settlements.

Once again, we have a situation that would sound reasonable if both sides were reasonable, and it utterly disastrous once one understands the Arab psyche.

People tend to forget that before the Six Day War, Israel's borders were just armistice lines. The Arab world did not accept those borders as being anything close to final and they were using military, terrorist and diplomatic ways to try to shrink the Jewish state.

After 1967 and especially after 1973, however, the Arab attitude changed. Once they saw that they could not defeat Israel militarily they dedicated their efforts to get back the land - and the honor - that they lost. Sadat famously said that he'd rather go to war than lose a single grain of sand of the Sinai, and the entire existence of the PLO is largely due to Arab governments using them to get the West Bank away from Jewish control. While they never truly gave up on the idea of Israel's destruction, their more immediate concern was to get back the 1967 losses and that forced them to implicitly recognize the Green Line as being meaningful. In other words, 1967 and 1973 allowed Israel to solidify its hold on the 1949 borders to the point that the world accepted them far more than they did before 1967.

A land swap would smash the idea of the 1949 Green Line as a border of Israel, and it would bring Israel back to its pre-1967 situation, in more was than one. The Arab world would still consider the settlements to be Arab land - there is no question about that - and now they would also gain leverage on 1949 Israeli lands, which haven't been on the table in decades. Every point of contact has the potential of becoming another Shebaa Farms, another excuse to whittle Israel down, another set of terror attacks coupled with impassioned pleas against the intransigent Israelis refusing to give only a couple of kilometers here and there of ancient Arab land - and Westerners believing them. They will insist on a land corridor between Gaza and the West Bank, cutting Israel in half, and that corridor will have to grow in width year after year.

The Green Line was an impossible border for Israel to live securely, and moving it towards the West - allowing even more of Israel to be in rocket range - is not only stupid militarily and from a security point of view, but it will open the doors for the entire Arab world to again believe that they can drive the Jews into the sea.

cross-posted at Yourish

No-man's land: the difference between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs

The AP quotes Abbas' demands:

In a television interview, Abbas said the Palestinians want to establish a state on 6,205 square kilometers (2,400 square miles) of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was the first time he has given a precise number for the amount of land he is seeking.

"We have 6,205 square kilometers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip," Abbas told Palestine TV. "We want it as it is."

According to Palestinian negotiating documents obtained by The Associated Press, the Palestinian demands include all of the Gaza Strip, West Bank, east Jerusalem and small areas along the West Bank frontier that were considered no-man's land before the 1967 war.

Let's talk about those small areas:

Two Bay Area visionaries have teamed up to turn a Jerusalem battlefield into a peace park.

San Francisco environmentalist and philanthropist Richard Goldman, the man behind the Goldman Environmental Prize known as the "Green Nobel," and celebrated landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, designer of the FDR Memorial in Washington and the new Sigmund Stern Grove, will receive a special award in June for their part in creating a 1 1/2-mile promenade linking East and West Jerusalem.

The promenade was built across Government Hill Ridge, a mountainside in southern Jerusalem that was no-man's land between Jordan and Israel from 1948 to 1967.

According to the New Testament, this was the Hill of Evil Counsel, where 2,000 years ago Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver on the eve of the crucifixion. More recently, it was where the Six Day War erupted in Jerusalem in 1967.

Thanks to Goldman and Halprin, the site is today a vast, tranquil park with a picture-postcard view that is shared by Muslims, Jews and Christians from across the city and around the world.

The Haas Promenade -- named in honor of Goldman's parents-in-law of the Levi Strauss family, and designed by Halprin -- was completed in 1987. It allows visitors to enjoy a spectacular view of the ancient Old City of Jerusalem, the surrounding biblical landscape and the new neighborhoods of East and West Jerusalem across a park with more than a mile of twisting pathways among olive trees and shrubbery.

The same team extended the park to create the Goldman Promenade, which was opened in 2002. This smaller path meanders eastward through a forest of Jerusalem pines toward an observation point overlooking the Judean Desert, the Dead Sea and the Mountains of Moab in Jordan.

Rather than "Judaizing" Jerusalem, as the Arabs always claim, these Jews worked with the Israeli government to build a beautiful park and promenade for all of Jerusalem to enjoy - Arabs, Jews and Christians.

Now, Mahmoud Abbas, that man of peace, not only wants all of East Jerusalem - not only does he want the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, not only does he want the Western Wall of the Temple Mount - but he is also "demanding" an area that was never even Jordanian.

An area that Jews cultivated and beautified for all of mankind - he wants to take away so it could become another Arab slum. He would prefer to see it turn into another Hamastan rather than let the hated Jews control it.

In the mind of even the most "moderate" Palestinian Arab, Jews must be restored to their rightful, second-class dhimmi status by any means possible. Negotiations, terror false promises of peace - they are all the same as long as the end result is that Jews control less land in the Middle East.

The contrast between Abbas' bigotry and extremism, and Israel's desire to compromise and find solutions for everybody, has never been more striking. His demand for an area that was never "Palestinian" on any map proves yet again that the goal of Fatah is identical with the goals of Hamas - not to gain "Palestinian" Arab lands but to take away land from Jews.

From 1948 to 1967, Palestinian Arabs didn't care when they were under Jordanian or Egyptian rule. their desire for a state was close to non-existent, and their efforts were aimed towards taking away Jewish land, not establishing a "Palestinian" Arab state. And this has not changed one bit.

The international community, cowed by fears of Arab terror, are more than willing to convince themselves that yet another Arab state in part of Western Palestine will help keep bombs out of their cities for a few years. It is that fear, rather than any real desire for truth of justice, that fuels the relentless pressure on Israel to keep on conceding more and more land over and over again in exchange for worthless promises that usually get broken within months. Annapolis is yet another exercise in this chapter of the vast effectiveness of terrorism in accomplishing its goals.

And the diabolical brilliance of Yasir Arafat was in his starting his major terror campaigns against Western airplanes - and then stopping to concentrate only on Israel. He understood that continuing to directly confront the West would bring his downfall, but to offer the West a deal where they only have to sacrifice Israel to mollify the terrorists was an irresistable offer to a world that has no love for Jews to begin with.

Denying reality to promote misoziony

Here's a useful place to use the word I coined yesterday.

A few days ago, the Iranian ambassador to Chile showed up at the launch party of a book about Hashomer Hatzair and he chatted a bit with the Israeli ambassador:

Shortly after the beginning of their conversation, Jalali leaned over and whispered: "I have to tell you something, but don't be offended, it's nothing personal. We are forbidden from speaking with Israeli diplomats."

How does Iran react to this horrible breach of Iranian etiquette? By denying that it ever happened:

An informed source at Foreign Ministry on Tuesday denied certain media reports that Iran's ambassador to Santiago, Chile, had held talks with a Zionist regime diplomat.
The source told IRNA that the news has been published by a daily based in the occupied lands.
He said such propaganda raised by the Zionist media was not something new and authenticity of such claims has never been confirmed.

This is not the first time this has occurred - only last month we saw very similar circumstances:

Officials from Israel and Iran put aside political animosity Tuesday to work together in using Israeli forensics expertise to identify their dead from the crash of a jetliner on a Thai resort island.
"It's human nature to help in solving this problem as soon as possible," Safdar Shafiee said at the Iranian Embassy in Bangkok after shaking hands with Yaki Oved, head representative of Israeli police in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
"In situations like this, you forget the division," Oved said. "The main thing is to help. You don't think about the politics."

And the Iranian reaction?

Iran's envoy to Thailand has denied the allegations that Iranian and Israeli teams had cooperated to identify the Thai plane crash's victims.

Mohsen Pak Aeen said that the Iranian team received help from Thai experts, Iranian and Thai travel agencies and Iranian nationals living in Thailand to identify the crash victims.

Pak Aeen added there was no contact between the Iranian consulate in Phuket and Israeli nationals.

This is pure misoziony - the seething hatred of all things Israeli causes Iranians to deny events that were witnessed by dozens of people. (It is so pathological that they cannot bring themselves to say the word "Israel.")

The inherent irrationality of misoziony discredits anything that Iran says - yet it is so strong that they hate Israel more than they value their own credibility.

Jew severely beaten in Lakewood

From the Star Ledger:

An Orthodox Jewish man was hit on the head with a baseball bat in Lakewood last night, leaving him with life-threatening injuries as authorities searched for suspects, police said.
The unidentified beating victim, who appeared to be in his mid-20s, was found lying unconscious in the street on Princeton Avenue, near 12th Street, about 8 p.m., Lt. Michael Mooney said. Mooney added injuries appeared to be life-threatening.

Police responded to the scene on reports of a man down.

Although the victim was dressed in Orthodox Jewish clothing, police are not treating the incident as a bias crime at this point because they have no suspects or motive, Mooney said.

A baseball bat was found near the victim, and K-9 units were being used in the search.

Egypt: Shalit in "good condition." How do they know?

From AFP:

An Israeli soldier held by Gaza militants for more than 15 months is in good condition, Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman was quoted as telling an Israeli minister today.
"Gilad Shalit is in good condition. He feels well and has even gained some weight because he does not do any exercise," Suleiman told Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai who held one-day talks in Cairo yesterday, one of his senior aides said.

Since the Red Cross is not permitted to visit Shalit, the only ways that Suleiman can know this is:

- He believes what Hamas says, showing that Egypt is hardly an honest broker.

- Shalit is in Egypt and Egypt is complicit.

- Suleiman has gone to Gaza to see him.

In any of these cases it seems to indicate that Egypt tilts more towards Hamas terrorists than to Israel.