Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Latest Israeli torture techniques: Belly dancers

Ma'an "reports":

Beatings and sexual humiliation are among the torments suffered by Palestinian detainees at an Israeli prison located near the West Bank city of Ramallah, new testimony from prisoners indicates.

Twenty-one-year-old Ramallah resident Sultan Abdullah Sulieman was recently released from the Ofer Prison, officially known as Incarceration Facility 386. In interviews with lawyers from the Palestinian Prisoners Society, he said that he spent forty days in solitary confinement in the facility.

Sulieman said that during one interrogation session, Israeli soldiers brought an "Iraqi girl" called "Nora" into the room. "Nora" danced "seductively" in front of Suleiman, moving close to him before moving away, he said.

The Arabic version reported by Palestine Today teases out more lurid details:

Sultan Sulaiman Abdullah (21 years) from Ramallah that the Ofer prison warders in the new style used in the investigation, where the girl who came and entered the prisoner during interrogation, sitting semi-naked in front of the captive and begin issuing the voices and gestures for tempting him and was approaching the degree of contact with her body and then his body.

Of course, this one person goes on to mention lots of other examples of torture, each of which sound as plausible as this one.

This article from 2004 listing Palestinian Arab prisoner demands interestingly didn't ask for a stop of such "torture."

Firas Press reports that Hamas attacked a mosque in Gaza, injuring 25 worshippers. They also attacked and damaged the house of the 70-year old Imam of the mosque. Here's a picture of the damage. One can imagine that many Korans were damaged or destroyed, but no one seems to be rioting over those.

Also, in a related incident, 20 were injured in the Jabalya camp as Hamas surrounded and attacked the house of the Shaban family.

They also arrested 45 people on Abu Hasira Street.

Just another peaceful day in the Islamic mini-state of Gaza.

They sound very angry. I think we should talk to them and let them get it off their chests.

Nakba illustration in Palestinian Arab newspaper

The Palestine Today website illustrates its "Nakba" coverage with this graphic:

Looks like they are truly interested in peace.

Dow Jones: Israel means business

Probably the most effective response to Ahmadinejad's claims that "The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals assume that by holding celebrations they can save the sinister Zionist regime from death and annihilation" - is anyone writing articles like this about Iran?

From Dow Jones:

Israel was born not only into war, carnage and controversy but also into shortage. Shorn of cash and goods, it had to ration meat, eggs and cooking oil through a coupon system that soon generated undernourishment, bread lines and a thriving black market.
Worse, lacking allies, trade partners and natural resources while swamped by poor immigrants, the Israeli economy was also burdened by its leaders' rigorous socialism. Central planning initially generated growth, but Israel's protectionist duties, sclerotic financial system, high labor costs, bloated public sector and exorbitant defense spending soon proved untenable. By the 1980s the stock market had collapsed, the major banks were nationalized, inflation hit 440% and foreign-currency reserves all but vanished.
As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday memories of this economic desolation seem exotic.
The shekel is now one of the strongest currencies in the world, inflation is 2.5%, last year's 5% growth was the developed world's highest for the fifth consecutive year, while unemployment slid to a 15-year low of 6.5%. While analogous in some ways to other economic miracles, Israel's is still politically, socially and culturally unique.
...
While the reforms of the 1980s stabilized the currency and began the retreat from socialism, these measures globalized Israel's economy. With the budget deficit shrinking within five years from 7% to 0.8% of GDP, and with the debt- to-GDP ratio reaching a 40-year-low of 81%, the global financial community began to understand that Israel means business.
Yet there were factors at play that transcended macro-economic policymaking.
One is, paradoxically, Israel's defense burden. Though in every other respect a liability, Israel's initial lack of arms suppliers compelled it to build its own military industry, which eventually climbed from manufacturing bullets to inventing submachine guns and finally developing tanks, battleships and fighter jets.
The arms industry -- led by aerospace giant Israel Air Industries -- not only became a major exporter, it also mass-produced technicians, engineers and inventors. In the late-1980s, when Israel was forced to cancel an overly ambitious fighter-jet project, thousands of suddenly-jobless engineers and programmers unwittingly launched the hi-tech start-up industry that soon became the darling of foreign investors.
Already then, well before any of them made his first million, Israeli techies came to epitomize the daring, mobility and originality that have historically been hallmarks of invention in general, and of Jewish commerce in particular.
Fortunately for Israel, all this coincided with the end of the Cold War.
First, huge parts of the world that had ostracized Israel, including Russia and China, suddenly traded with it, and nearby India and Turkey emerged as strategic trade partners. More importantly, a million immigrants thronged to Israel. These bought with them entrepreneurial energy, professional skills and a consumerist hunger that produced the world's largest per-capita rate of engineers and scientists, a massive retail expansion and a spectacular housing boom.
All these combined made the hi-tech industry take off. By last year its $32 billion in exports comprised half of all Israeli industrial exports. Meanwhile multinationals like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Motorola, Inc. (MOT) and Google, Inc. (GOOG) set up R&D centers in Israel, and foreign buyouts of companies like software developer Mirabilis by AOL, now owned by Time Warner Inc. (TWX), for $407 million in 1998; or printing-technology developer Indigo by HP for $719 million in 2002; or disc-on-key inventor M-Systems by SanDisk Corp. (SNDK) for $1.5 billion in 2006 -- have become so common that they are no longer front-page news.
Success was not exclusive to the technology sector. Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries (TEVA), Tnuva Food Industries, the largest dairy products manufacturer in Israel, food giant Strauss Group and Iscar Metalworking, are but some instances of multi-billion-dollar companies excelling in such traditional industries as pharmaceuticals, food production and machine-tool manufacturing. Yet unlike the typical hi-tech success story, they employ thousands and focus on manufacture rather than invention.
Fairly or not, they are not automatically associated with the high-tech entrepreneur who has become a teen-ager's role model and the stereotypical Jewish Mother's dream child, unseating the historic doctor and lawyer.
Sixty years on, Israel's GDP is scratching $200 billion, nearly six times its original, relative per-capita level, while skyscrapers crowd Tel Aviv, multilane thruways, tunnels, fast trains and spaghetti junctions crisscross the country, and some 80 malls, the first of which only opened in 1986, are brimming with customers, turnovers and luxuries -- probably the happiest, and starkest, contrast to 1949's bread lines.

On the other hand, here is a round-up of recent news stories about Iran's economy:

Tahmasb Mazaheri, director general of the National Bank of the Islamic Republic, defies the executive order of the Iranian president and refuses to decrease the interest rate. More here.
Abrar says capital drain from the Islamic Republic's banking system has increased upon Ahmadinejad’s executive order to decrease the interest rate.
Government to increase loans to public servants, members of the armed forces, and people from the rural areas.
Donya-ye Eqtesad assesses the effects of lowering of the interest rate by presidential decree as "alarming."
Kayhan supports the Ahmadinejad government's decision to decrease interest rates.
Iranian economist Ahmad Shakiba says inflation in Iranian economy is due to incompetent management of the oil income.
Donya-ye Eqtesad calls Iranian economic decision makers "half-educated."

Which "regime" wil die first?

The UN's Nakba obsession

YNet reports:

Israel is demanding that the UN strike the word 'Nakba' from its lexicon, this after the world body's spokeswoman uttered it, apparently by mistake, in a press briefing she held Thursday night.

'Nakba', or 'catastrophe', refers to the refugee flight of Palestinian Arabs that followed Israel's inception in 1948.

The spokeswoman told reporters that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to stress his support for the Palestinian people on Nakba Day".

I was unaware that Israel protested every time the UN uses the word Nakba. If so, a cottage industry can be set up within the government just to protest every time UN agencies use the word.

Here's one from the UN Department of Public Information, one from the UN Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and countless times on the UNRWA page.

Palestinian Muslims' respect for other religions

The top story at Firas Press regards the supposed American shooting of Korans in Iraq, with these photos, captioned "Another crime against Islam":

Muslims often say that they care about the sanctity of all the three "revealed" religions (carefully avoiding the fact that they have no such respect for Buddhism or Hinduism.)

Yet in the past day, Muslims attacked a synagogue in Sderot - a crime that the religious-based Islamic Jihad was happy to claim responsibility for, greatly exaggerating the damage.

And a Christian school in Gaza was attacked by Islamists with a bomb as well.

Yet I have yet to see any Arabs concerned about the sanctity of any Christian or Jewish holy books that have been damaged in many attacks - let alone people.

The respect given to other religions is, as always, rhetorical - yet the respect demanded is absolute, and backed up with threats.

A curious Ma'an cartoon

Ma'an Arabic's illustration accompanying its article about President Bush's address to the Knesset is, um, interesting:

I'm really at a loss in trying to understand the symbolism here - who is injecting the Arab? Presumably "America," given the stars and stripes. But with what? Why is the needle bent?

And, of course: Why the hearts?

The Arab cartoons about Jews are so much easier to understand:

Simple, to the point, and utterly false.

Four London synagogues vandalized

From JTA:

Four synagogues were vandalized in two London neighborhoods.

Dozens of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slogans were spray-painted Wednesday night on shops, pavements and walls outside the synagogues.

Residents of the Stamford Hill and Clapton Common neighborhoods were "shocked" Thursday to see some 40 slogans such as "Jihad to Israel" and "Jihad to Tel-Aviv," according to media reports.

A spokesperson for the Community Security Trust, which provides for the safety of British Jewry, said the community already was on high alert after receiving threats from supporters of the al-Qaida terrorist group.

Police said investigators were looking into footage from surveillance cameras and that forensic teams had recovered a canister of spray paint.

24dash.com adds:

Anti-Semitic incidents in the UK remain "far too high" and the number recorded last year was the second highest ever, a minister said today.

Cohesion minister Parmjit Dhanda said there were 547 incidents last year and the Government had to continue to work to "bear down" on the problem.

For the Tories, Paul Goodman said all forms of hate crime were "an unqualified and unmitigated evil."

Mr Goodman said that many different places of worship had been attacked in the UK. "But only one religious institution in Britain is under threat to such a degree that those who attend are advised not to linger outside after worship, namely the synagogue."

Labour's Andrew Dismore, whose Hendon constituency has the largest proportion of Jewish people, said the Jewish community lived, in effect, in a "permanent state of siege and underlying fear".

Mr Dismore added that it was unfair for parents to be asked to contribute to funding security at Jewish schools.

"It's a voluntary contribution, but Jewish parents are expected to pay towards the cost of making sure their children are secure in school," he said.

The only other British media source mentioning this current spate of British anti-semitism (according to Google News) is This Is London. Nothing from the BBC, Guardian (although they do mention a recent report on anti-semitism on campuses), Times or other major news outlets.

As opposed to "Islamophobia."

AFP's scare quotes - when is terror 'terror'?

AFP has an interesting, inconsistent policy of when it puts scare quotes around the word "terror."

When performed against Israel, of course, terror is the ambiguous "terror":

Bush vows to support Israel against 'terror'

Visiting US President George W. Bush vowed on Thursday to support Israel in battling "terror" groups as the nation marks its 60th anniversary still struggling to find peace with Arab neighbours.

And against India, terror is also in the eye of the beholder:

Some 216 people were wounded in what police said was the first "terror" attack in the Rajasthan state capital.

But attacks against the US - which probably pays much of AFP's bills - are definitely terror:

Since 1970, Las Vegas saw gambling revenues fall only once -- in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, when gaming revenues in 2002 were less than 1 percent lower than 2001.

The United States has poured nearly 40 billion dollars in aid to South Asia since the September 11 attacks but the terror threat from the region remains a top problem, a congressional hearing was told Wednesday.

The trial is the first in Europe over the CIA's so-called "extraordinary rendition" programme under which it has secretly transferred terror suspects to third countries known to practise torture.

Colombian paramilitaries to be tried by US for terror, drugs

Obama has disowned Wright, denounced the terror campaign of Weather Underground, and says that his not wearing a flag lapel pin does not make him any less patriotic.

The UK definition of terror is also OK by AFP, as the scare quotes are nowhere to be found:

Ditching the 10 percent lowest tax bracket infuriated Labour backbenchers, while Brown faces further clashes with them over plans to let police hold terror suspects for 42 days without charge.

China also gets to define terror its own way without challenge from AFP:

The reports came a day after a top Olympic security official said the military would be involved in anti-terror efforts, and government confirmation earlier this week that China had introduce more stringent visa requirements.

So does Zimbabwe's critics:

Pressure mounted on Zimbabwe Thursday to admit foreign observers to oversee a presidential election run-off amid fresh claims that pro-government militias were deliberately instilling terror.

As does the UN:

Canada has asked the United Nations to take one of its nationals off a list of terror suspects, a Sudanese-Canadian who has been blocked in Sudan for five years, his lawyer said Friday.

It appears that most countries have the right to call terror terror without the AFP's editorializing scare quotes, but attacks against medical clinics in Israel or simultaneous bombs in India don't make the cut.

But there is one other case where AFP uses the scare quotes as it does against Israel and India: Vietnam.

Three pro-democracy activists including an American were handed jail terms of up to nine months on "terrorism" charges in a trial held under tight security Tuesday.
The three, all linked to a US-based party banned in Vietnam, were accused of "inciting riots threatening the national security" of the communist country by distributing leaflets.

Yes, AFP considers Israel and India uses of the word "terror" to be as ambiguous as that of Vietnam's.

When a policy is applied inconsistently in different situations, but consistently against Israel and India, what does that say about AFP's editorial policies?

Palestinians claim Israel shot own rocket at Ashkelon

Firas Press has a bizarre article claiming that Israel must have shot the rocket at Ashkelon in order to gain sympathy while George Bush is visiting:

Informed sources in the Palestinian resistance said that the resistance had not fired a Palestinian rocket at the shopping center in Ashkelon. The source who refused to reveal his name said that the Israeli game is to enlist worldwide support and an omen of imminent invasion of Gaza outline Zionist Israel exists and create the world public opinion. For Kasaba, the source added that this drama it made up for Israel earn the approval of Bush's interests are not obvious to one of the Palestinian people at the same time stressing that the Palestinians had not fired any missiles at Ashkelon, warning data intriguers to adopt practical Palestinians until there is no excuse from the occupation to commit new massacres against the Palestinian people.

It is worth mentioning that Al-Quds Brigades have denied any missile launched at Ashkelon today as did Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades.

Although a number of press sources said that Islamic Jihad and the PRC both claimed responsibility, I have not seen those claims in the Islamic Jihad webpage, although they did praise the people who shot the rocket ("injuring of Zionist usurpers.") (I do not know the URL of any PRC webpage.) Firas did have a separate report of the PRC denying shooting the rocket.

This is quite strange.

My guess is that this is related to the brief kerfuffle that occurred last month when Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri chided Hamas for targeting women and children with their rockets, and Hamas denied doing so. Perhaps (as we saw yesterday) the Islamists are starting to get embarrassed by attacks that hurt clear non-combatants while at the same time they want to continue to make the lives of Jews in the Negev hell. Since that event, terrorist claims of responsibility for rocket attacks now claim to be aiming at military targets, even when they shell the crossings that provide them with food and fuel.

UPDATE: Or perhaps Firas is just incompetent. A PRC leader told YNet explicitly that his organization takes responsibility. And the PFLP is also reported to have claimed responsibility.

Al-Alam: Ashkelon is "occupied"

Iran's Al-Alam made very clear that it considers all of Israel to be "occupied" territory, as it gleefully reports on the latest terror attack in Ashkelon:

ASHKELON, Israel, May 14--A rocket fired from Gaza exploded in a shopping center in the occupied southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, wounding at least 30 people, rescue officials said.

The rocket ripped through the roof of the mall, causing a large chunk of the roof to collapse in a huge pile of rubble and twisted metal. Four windows were blown out of the side of the building.

A hospital official said a woman and her young daughter were seriously wounded, along with another child. Another woman was seriously wounded, and several other people were slightly wounded, said the official, Leah Malul of Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon.

Two Palestinian resistance groups, the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, claimed responsibility. Earlier Wednesday, five Palestinians were martyred in military operations by the Israeli regime in Gaza.

While activists have fired homemade retaliatory rockets into occupied border towns for several years, only recently have they gained the capability to target Ashkelon, a city of 110,000 people about 15 kilometers (nine miles) from the Gaza border.

With Iranian Grad rockets, of course.

The rocket attack came as Bush was wrapping up talks in occupied al-Quds with Zionist Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Israel's high-tech military has been unable to find a way to stop the crude rockets.

Iran stands quite behind its proxies in Gaza.

Ha'aretz reporter brags of his lack of objectivity

From The Nation, by Ha'aretz Arab apologist Akiva Eldar, preaching to the choir:

There are journalists, including some prominent and well-known ones, who learn about distant lands and foreign peoples from casual conversations with taxi drivers. A chance exchange with a Manhattan cabby last fall taught me a few things I did not know about my newspaper and myself. The Alexandria-born driver, a veteran of the Egyptian navy, revealed that my colleagues and I at Ha'aretz were not speaking into a void. After he discovered my identity, he adamantly refused to take any money from me. Abe said that he had been a loyal reader of mine for years, and this was his modest way of expressing his esteem for a journalist who charges him up on a weekly basis with some hope for peace in the region where he was born.

Among the thousands of hate-mail messages I receive from people on the Israeli right wing, and the venomous talkbacks that Jewish Americans submit through the Ha'aretz website, the occasional word of encouragement slips through from Arab readers, both from neighboring countries and from the West. At international conferences I get pats on the back from pragmatic Muslim intellectuals as well as from left-liberal Jews and non-Jews. But the Egyptian cabby's warm words were the most precious gift I have received over the three decades--half of Israel's age--during which I have written more than 2,000 articles.

The Israeli ambassador to a major European capital once told me that David Grossman, whose articles appear frequently in the local press, and myself were "ruining his job." He complained that every time he attacked Israel's critics for their "anti-Israeli" stances, as he put it, they would argue that our own articles were far more critical. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt cite me in their controversial book, The Israel Lobby, as one of the Israeli journalists whose criticism of the occupation is even sharper than their own.

The prominent Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in November 2000 (in a publication of the Israel Democracy Institute) that "there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the 'lynch test.'" These, he wrote, are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Arabs even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a mob in Ramallah. Barnea, who last year was awarded the Israel Prize for journalism, went on to argue that our support for the Palestinian position is absolute. He concluded, "They have a mission." I was honored to be mentioned as one of those journalists, alongside my fine colleagues Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

I admit to being guilty as charged. I am a journalist with a mission, and also no small amount of passion.

Even though we already knew that Ha'aretz purposefully reports only the news that conform to its ideological objectives and downplays the news that does not, this is still an astonishing admission from a news reporter.

The bravado of Israel's enemies

Iran's President Ahmadinejad's recent statements include, "The era of the Zionist literature and the Zionist political mechanism and the Zionist bullying policies has come to an end," "I just want to tell you that holding a birthday party for a dead person is of no use. These gatherings can not revive a corpse," and "The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals imagine that by holding celebrations ... they can save the Zionist regime from death."

Mahmoud al-Zahar said today, "The Palestinians and the Arabs have crushed the Jews' assumption of supremacy… The Zionist legend of invincibility has been destroyed. Now more than ever I tell you – will never recognize Israel… We will form the Palestinian state on all of Palestine's territories and the sun of liberty will burn the Zionists. To them I say – you will lose. You will leave and we will keep hounding you. The blood of our slain sons will haunt you forever."

These sorts of statements are nothing new, and we've been hearing variants since before Israel even existed. It is valuable to recognize what makes people say things like this.

Obviously, Israel is not going anywhere. While there are political threats to its borders and terrorist threats to its citizens, Israel's existence is in no doubt for the foreseeable future.

The biggest testimony to Israel's strength and self-assurance comes, ironically, from its own self-criticism. Only a people who are secure can look at their own faults and admit mistakes publicly, and no one admits mistakes - real or imagined - more publicly than Israelis do.

The Second Lebanon War is a case study in the difference between how Israelis look at themselves and how Israel's enemies look at it. From a military perspective, the war was a draw - Israel inflicted a great deal of damage on Hezbollah and the cease fire agreement drove Hezbollah north of the Litani, but it was not the crushing defeat that Israel desired nor was it enough to stop Hezbollah from re-arming quickly. But by no stretch of the imagination was Israel "defeated" unless your definition of defeat is very unrealistic.

Yet, Israel underwent much public self-criticism and self-evaluation after the war to learn from its mistakes.

Conversely, Israel's enemies celebrated their "victory," masking the loss of hundreds of Hezbollah fighters with huge banners across Lebanon .

This is not a reflection of reality - this is bravado.

People who act this way are fundamentally insecure. They cannot distinguish between putting up a brave front and real bravery.

They tell their people about their impending victories in an attempt to shore up their own delusions and to avoid any real self-examination, which would lead to despair. They surround themselves with people who will agree with their public posturing. They inflate events that are meaningless as long as they support their fantasies, and they ignore any evidence to the contrary.

A hallmark of this institutionalized bravado hiding insecurity is not only the lack of self-criticism but deliberate acts against those who dare criticize. Hence we see Iran's brutal attacks against dissidents, Hamas' threats against journalists, and Hezbollah's total censorship in areas under its control.

This bravado is so institutionalized in the psyches of its practitioners - and so much a part of the honor-shame mindset that helps spawn it - that they cannot understand that Israeli self-criticism is a reflection of its strength. To them, any criticism is shameful and only an utterly defeated people can admit mistakes. The more delusional actually start to believe that Israel is weak and they then start thinking they can defeat it.

The bigger the bluster, the weaker the core that the blusterers are trying to hide.

This does not mean that they aren't dangerous. Of course, they can - and do - inflict damage.

But their bravado is not an indication of their strength. On the contrary, it proves their weakness.

Egyptians freak over goalie's shirt logo

MEMRI blog translates from Al-Arabiya:

Many accusations have recently been leveled against 'Isam Al-Hadri, Egyptian national soccer team player and goalkeeper for the Swiss soccer club Syon, for agreeing to wear a club shirt with the logo of a company that makes alcoholic drinks.
Muhammad Rafat 'Uthman, instructor at Al-Azhar University and member of its Center for Islamic Research, said that it was forbidden for Al-Hadri to wear the shirt, and that if the club insisted that he do so he must break his contract and quit.

In contrast, liberal Egyptian thinker Gamal Al-Banna said that Al-Hadri should not be accused, because he had acted like a Muslim minority member should act within a non-Muslim majority.

As the picture above shows, the sponsor in question is the Giroud Winery. Everyone on the club has to wear this shirt, as Giroud is one of the sponsors of the club.

Today's Gaza news you won't read anywhere else

Lots happening today:

- Hamas took over a mosque east of the Jabalya camp, and confiscated the keys to its library.

- Hamas signed an agreement with the local Internet provider to stop any access to pornographic websites starting May 15th.

- Hamas forces surrounded the home of the Azzam family in Jabalya and forced its way in, injuring two men and causing a pregnant woman to miscarry.

- Hamas also stormed a kindergarten in Jabalya.

- There was a mysterious explosion at the Right to Life headquarters in Gaza, which appears to be a facility for children with Down's Syndrome.

- Hamas' leaders announced that all schools must be closed on Thursday in commemoration of "Nakba day."

- The Palestinian Health Ministry warned Gazans on the consequences of using cooking oil as replacements for diesel and petroleum in cars. Due to the fuel shortage many people have converted their cars to use cooking oil (causing some car exhausts in Gaza to smell like falafel), but the Ministry warned of health and environmental problems that this could cause. They also warned that using oil is bringing the price of cooking oil higher in Gaza, making it harder for everyone to afford food.