Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 03, 2008

Reuters loves Hamas

Hamas fighters battle on inspired by God

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - Abu Mohammed picked up his rifle, said farewell to his wife and six children and went out to face the Israeli tanks, helicopter gunships and missile-firing airborne drones.

"Being unable to defeat Israel is no reason to surrender," the Hamas fighter said with a smile as he headed to the Gaza Strip's front line last Saturday, ignoring pleas from his family to stay.

"My children and wife are very dear to me," he said. "But reward in Heaven and the homeland are dearer."

The 38-year-old furniture salesman says he is not afraid to die for the cause of destroying Israel and forging a Palestinian state on all Israel's territory, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

To Israel and its allies, Abu Mohammed and his comrades are Jew-hating terrorists. But Abu Mohammed sees himself on a mission from God to rescue his people from 60 years of misery as refugees since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.

Though that conviction may, in some, mingle with bravado and self-interest, it does make Hamas an enemy to be reckoned with, for all that Israel's hi-tech army easily outguns their rifles, home-made rockets and, if they choose, their suicide bomb belts.

Abu Mohammed survived, though he broke a bone in his hand diving for cover. The rocket fire resumed and Hamas and its fellow Islamist allies vowed to battle on, despite losing close to 60 fighters. Estimates vary but there may be 20,000 or more Abu Mohammeds left to continue the war in Gaza alone.

Islam forbids suicide, but rewards "martyrdom" with glory in this world and paradise in the next. For the 1.5 million Palestinians in the slums and refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, the question of why one of their compatriots would sacrifice his or her life to kill Israelis needs little soul-searching.

"An Islamist fighter has two motives: a religious motive -- God's reward; and a social motive -- appreciation from the people he is defending," explained Fadel Abu Heen, a prominent Gaza psychiatrist.

And religion was the stronger motivation for Islamist fighters. "That is what makes them braver and more aggressive fighters than others," he said.

Older than most of his fellow combatants, Abu Mohammed said his family had fled to Gaza from a village nearby in 1948.

"We have the right to all of Palestine," he said in his three-room, one-storey house in Gaza City.

"If we are dead before we can liberate our land, then we did not give up. We have to set an example to our children that weakness is not an excuse for not putting up a fight."

Hamas leaders have offered a long-term truce with Israel in return for a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem -- terms Israel is unwilling to accept, preferring to negotiate with Hamas's secular enemies in the Fatah faction, which dominates the larger West Bank.

Reuters has outdone itself in lionizing Hamas terrorists. Anti-religion when that religion happens to be Judaism or Christianity, Reuters is all of a sudden quite objective when reporting on the Islamic beliefs of destroying the Jewish dhimmis.

The headline didn't even have scare quotes, as Reuters is reporting an established fact - that Hamas is inspired by God.

Unreal.

(h/t Callie)

Do the Palestinian Arabs want an independent state?

The world media often portray Palestinian Arab terror as a manifestation of their desire for "independence." It is perhaps natural that, in the Western world, such calls are met with sympathy, as independence is often used as a synonym for "freedom."

The only problem is that the desire for independence is not very strong among Palestinian Arabs.

In the 2006 PA elections, Hamas won a plurality of the vote and a majority of the seats in the PA parliament. Hamas, like all Islamist movements, does not call for Palestinian Arab independence, rather it calls for a pan-Arab Islamic 'ummah. Israel's existence on what Hamas considers holy Muslim land is the biggest obstacle to such unified Muslim nation; as such its first job is to eliminate Israel. But the point isn't to establish a state there except as perhaps an interim step; its goal, as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, is to overthrow all secularist Arab governments to create a large Islamic nation. This is what it calls "nationalism" in its charter.

On the other side of the spectrum, the recent death of George Habash gave us all a reminder that the goal of his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was, for most of its existence, dedicated to socialist pan-Arabism, not to Palestinian Arab nationalism.

As recently as two weeks ago, the perennial threat of Palestinian Arabs unilaterally declaring independence was brought up by DFLP head Yasser Abd Rabbo, but Abbas' reaction to the idea is instructive:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ruled out on Wednesday any unilateral declaration of statehood in the near future, responding to an aide's call to take the step if peace talks with Israel continued to falter.
"We will pursue negotiations in order to reach a peace agreement during 2008 that includes the settlement of all final status issues including Jerusalem," Abbas said in a statement.
"But if we cannot achieve that, and we reach a deadlock, we will go back to our Arab nation to take the necessary decision at the highest level," he said, without mentioning any options.

It will be remembered that the PLO at its inception was not interested in an independent Palestinian Arab state either, and of course during the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank there was essentially no interest in an independent Palestinian Arab state on Arab territory (except for the factions that advocated the overthrow of Jordan.) The 1968 Palestinian National Charter pointedly did not call for an independent state, rather "self-determination." Abbas is continuing on in that tradition by saying that even a unilateral declaration of independence can only be taken with approval of the larger "Arab nation," a mythical construct that most Arab nations pretend allegiance to in their own constitutions, and his words today are echoes of those in that 1968 Charter.

While the tactics have changed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that even current calls for an independent Palestinian Arab state are not so much for the ideals of freedom and independence as for a stage towards the destruction of Israel. And if you add together the votes tallied for various parties in the 2006 PA elections, it appears that a majority of Palestinian Arabs themselves voted for parties that do not advocate - or only recently pretend to advocate - an independent Palestinian Arab state.

And even those who would disagree with this analysis must admit that Gazans have overwhelmingly supported the anti-nationalist goals of Hamas, and the current escalation of hostilities from Gaza are purely meant to hurt Israel, not to advance the cause of Palestinian Arab independence nor to build an independent state.

Arab media feeding inciteful lies

The Palestine Press Agency reported two interesting items today:

UNRWA commissioner general "Karen Abu Zayd" demands effective international intervention to put a stop to "bloody violence" in Gaza

Pope calls for an unconditional cessation of military operations in Gaza

By saying "in Gaza", the "news" agency is making it sound like the Pope and Abu-Zayd condemned Israel only, thereby justifying Qassam and Grad rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. (Of course, both the pope and Abu-Zayd condemned both sides equally.)

Similarly, even English-language Arab media tends to overlook condemnations of public figures of Qassam and Grad rockets and only mention condemnations of Israel. From Bahrain's Gulf Daily News:

European Union president Slovenia condemned Israel's attacks as disproportionate and violating international law.

(Of course, even Reuters gets in on the act, headlining only condemnations of Israel and burying the same people condemning rocket attacks in the text of the article.)

Another example of absurd media bias in Arab sources is this article from Ma'an:

A Palestinian student was killed on Monday morning after Israeli forces opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in the West Bank against the Israeli mass killings in the Gaza Strip.

Of course, the "peaceful" demonstration included hundreds of peaceful rock throwers and a Jewish citizen felt so threatened that he first fired in the air, then at the legs of his attackers.

Sderot mayor injured by Qassam?

Both Ma'an (Arabic) and Palestine Press Agency are quoting Israeli sources that Sderot mayor Eli Moyal was slightly injured by a Qassam rocket Sunday night.

Palestine Press reader comments are praising Allah, and Hamas, for this news. Nothing yet in the Israeli English press yet.

Schools open in Gaza tomorrow

Ma'an Arabic reports that "Teachers Association and staff in the public sector in the Gaza Strip called on all staff and teachers go tomorrow morning Monday, 3/3/2008 to duty in all provinces of Gaza and the West Bank."

It's almost as if they don't expect any indiscriminate and disproportionate rockets of the evil, genocidal, Nazi Zionists to be fired at their schools and endanger their lives while kids are in class.

Al-Jazeera: Egypt to open Rafah to treat injured

From PalPress (autotranslated):

The "Al-Jazeera" channel published the news this afternoon that Egyptian authorities decided to allow the opening of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egyptian territories to receive the wounded of escalating Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip and to import medicines and medical equipment to hospitals [in Gaza.].

This news, if true, will not be publicized very much. The claims that Gaza hospitals are overcrowded and that there is a shortage of medicines is much more dramatic.

Neither will the media remind their consumers that Hamas in recent months has, at least twice, confiscated medicines meant for Gaza hospitals.

Islamic Jihad claims to have Israeli body parts

The ghoulish terrorists of Islamic Jihad's "Al-Quds Brigades" claim to have body parts of Israeli soldiers: (autotranslated from Palpress)

The Al-Quds Brigades military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, it retains limbs Israeli soldiers detonated an explosive device in them yesterday evening Saturday thorn in the south east of the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip.

The military statement issued by the Palace Agency has received "Palestine Press," a copy of the news this morning, the troops were able late in the evening yesterday, Saturday, from blowing up an explosive anti-personnel mines weighing 10 kilogrammes special Israeli force infiltrated one of the houses in the area east of the town of Rafah thorn .

The statement pointed out that the Israeli forces penetrated enhanced in the region and arrived at the scene after the bombing charge, and affirmed that the elements found parts of the remains of members of the Special Force is holding now.

For his part, the spokesman Abu Ahmad Al-Quds Brigades in a telephone conversation with a local radio, the news and said that the Israeli forces spent most of dawn hours they are searching for the remains of soldiers on the walls and trees, and that the Al-Quds Brigades will offer these parts and body parts in a timely manner after improvement security conditions in the sector.

Arab News and Der Stürmer: Disturbing Parallels

In yet another example of the obscene "Zionists=Nazis" mantras so often used by anti-semites, the Arab News has printed an op-ed called "Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Disturbing Parallels." Using methods that a fifth-grader could use to make "disturbing parallels" between, say, butterflies and rabid dogs (Both have blood! Both have natural defenses! Both seem to move about randomly!) the author, one Steve Hutcheson, brings up pseudo-facts to make his case:

The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around the perimeter to prevent them leaving. So too have the Israelis through conflict and force pushed many of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now has a population density of 4,200 people per sq. km which is 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel which has 360 people per sq. km.

It is hardly worth showing the idiocy of this parallel, but just to mention one part: the population density in the Tel Aviv/Jaffa coastal corridor is some 6000 people per square kilometer, and if you exclude the Negev desert, Israel is indeed one of the most crowded places in the world. The Arabs have pushed the Jews into a tiny state - I guess Israel should start pushing towards Riyadh, since according to moral midgets like this, being crowded is reason to start shooting rockets indiscriminately at your neighbors.

Oh, also: the Warsaw Ghetto population density was not a measly 4,200 people/sq. km., but
110,800 - over 25 times the density of Gaza. Wow, that parallel really is disturbing!

The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and essential supplies. So too has the Israeli government stopped the flow of goods to the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza by limiting the convoys of supplies to a mere trickle.

Another idiot making the implicit - and libelous - claim that Israel is intending to starve the population of Gaza, even more so in his next paragraph:

The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day. So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements.

No, that's not what the UN report said - it said that the UN alone was providing (as of November) 61% of the food that Gaza needs, and it wasn't limited by Israeli sanctions on that number - rather by its budget. And, not surprisingly, the UNRWA budget gets next to nothing from Arab nations!

So it would be far more accurate to say that Arabs are starving Gazans. Not accurate, but more accurate that the Arab News is.

Of course, we have yet to hear about starving Gazans smuggling in food in their many tunnels from Egypt. Cigarettes and explosives seem to be a higher priority right now. Go figure.

The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way. So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance organizations, in particular Hamas, rebelled against their oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way or who they maim or kill in doing so.

Ah, so shooting rockets at civilians and sending suicide bombers to kill old ladies is just like the Jewish resistance to Nazis!

These lies, sickening parallels and justification for terror is just part of the mainstream Arab world's (and their leftist allies') viewpoints. Even pointing out the glaring lies and perverted morality in making such statements is difficult, as the idea of comparing the Holocaust victims with the Gazans - even while demolishing those comparisons - is literally nauseating.

But the thrill that Israel-bashing turds like Hutcheson gets from the idea of Jew-as-Nazi gets is too irresistible for them to pass up. And the relatively moderate Arab News - hardly a jihadist newspaper - supporting such drivel is an indication of just how far the Arab world is from reality.

PT Watch - database of rocket and mortar attacks

A new website called PTWatch keeps track of all terror attacks from Gaza towards Israel since Israel's withdrawal. Using mostly Arab sources, it is recording every "projectile" attack that the terrorists take credit for themselves, and whether the target was civilian or military - according to the terrorists themselves.

The author said he was inspired by my Qassam calendar (thanks!) but, unlike my static monthly calendars, PTWatch is a full database where you can query any date or date range. It includes mortars as well. For each attack he includes a link back to the (usually Arab) news source that documents it, far more effectively than my calendars do - I pretty much gave up on linking back to every attack every day and only link to the most "representative" article I can find.

Check it out!

Hamas kills PalArab baby with its own rocket

From JPost:

Hamas said the baby, Malak Karfaneh, was killed and three other civilians were wounded in an Israeli strike on Beit Hanun, a northern town where Palestinians often launch rockets at Israel. But local residents said one of those rockets fell short and landed in the area of the baby's house.

Which makes the known 2008 PalArab self-death count 27.

Pic of the satirical poster in the German art gallery

Here is the picture by the satirical group "Surrend" that forced a Berlin art gallery to shut down because of Islamic threats.

It shows the Kaaba in Saudi Arabia with the caption "Dummer Stein", meaning "Stupid Stone."

But what is more interesting is that it is part of a series of "Dummer" posters. The one next to it shows a Chassidic Jew and is called "Dummer Hat." For some reason, there were no death threats about that poster.

Snapped Shot shut down

The best place on the web for analyzing and critiquing news photography has been sent a "cease and desist" letter from AP, and the blogger (and blog-friend) Brian Ledbetter has agreed to take his Snapped Shot site down until the issue can be resolved.

As the Jawa Report mentions:

Since all of the AP images reprinted by Brian are criticisms of them, they clearly fall into the realm of "fair use".

This is a chilling development, as many other bloggers (myself included) often link to and reproduce wire service photos for criticism and comment. The Lebanon war "fauxtography" scandals, where many photos were found to have been Photoshopped, staged or otherwise deceptive, would not have come to light had it not been for bloggers like Brian.

It is a sad day for free speech.

Another side of the culture of death

One of the more obvious differences between how Palestinian Arabs act and how Westerners act is in how they treat, and think about, their own dead people.

When Roni Yechiyeh was murdered on Wednesday, the closest one could find to a picture of his body was this one, made by an Israeli photographer for Reuters:

Shoes lie beside the body of an Israeli killed after a rocket attack in the southern town of Sderot February 27, 2008.

The picture is meant to evoke sadness and loss. To show his face would be demeaning and painful to his family. With few exceptions, this is how Israeli victims are shown to the world by Israelis themselves.

On the other hand, the Arab press- and Arab photographers for the wire services - revel in showing bloody dead bodies. When a baby dies, his picture gets plastered on front pages (like this one in Ma'an today, I'm not going to reproduce it here.) There is no indication that the families of the victims are upset by this - it is as if a child being killed is cause for celebration, because it can be used as ammunition against Israel in the war of public relations.

The glee at which PalArab deaths are embraced can be seen from this rally, which in a normal culture would be characterized as child abuse:

A man carries a Palestinian boy during a protest against Israeli air strikes which killed Palestinian youth in Gaza February 29, 2008. An Israeli missile attack on Thursday killed four Palestinian youngsters playing football in the Gaza Strip, local medical workers said. The banner reads 'Help us Egyptian people'.REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA)

What the caption pointedly fails to describe is the red paint on the children's faces and clothing. This rally is meant to have Palestinian Arab children literally play dead, and causes them to associate death with a fun outing at another rally meant for Western consumption. Death is thrilling and pictures of death are titillating - the Palestinian Arab equivalent to pornography.

In short, Palestinian Arabs celebrate both Jewish and Arab civilian deaths, while Israelis mourn them. Death, which is described countless times by Palestinian Arabs themselves as reasons for celebration, is also a major propaganda victory.

And those PR victories, milked for all they are worth and more, give them all the more reason to celebrate.

Another member of the Zionist-controlled press

I just stumbled onto Tony Karon's blog. He works for Time magazine as a senior editor at TIME.com. While he takes pains to say that his opinions on his blog do not represent those of his employer, his opinions are, shall we say, a bit less than even-handed.

His blogroll includes Juan Cole and Richard Silverstein. He continuously describes anything but total love for Palestinian Arabs and anyone who is pro-Likud as "racist Zionist alte-kakkers". And he proudly brings out his Jewish bona-fides so prove to his leftist friends that, see, even Jews can be anti Israel with the best of you!

Having these opinions is his right, of course, as is his grating name-dropping. But it shows again that the American media and its leaders are hardly Zionist.