Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Elder gets copied again

This time, my story on the "belly dancer torture" got picked up by Israel Today.

Unfortunately, they didn't credit me.

On the plus side, it is nice to know that reporters do occasionally read this blog and the stories get more circulation, even if they don't want to admit it.

Egypt finds 7 more Gaza tunnels, with American weapons

Palestine Press Agency (recently restored after a hacking attack) reports that Egypt has discovered seven more smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Hamastan in Gaza.

Egyptian police arrested two men who were found in the tunnels.

In addition, they found American-manufactured weapons and ammunition. They traced these to the multinational peacekeeping forces in the Sinai, and they are investigating the apparent theft.

UPDATE: Police in Rafah shot and killed a suspected drug dealer. Our 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 70.

Today's Palestinian Arab lie (#54,213)

Just because it caught my eye...

Ramzy Baroud, who writes obsessively anti-Israel pieces in many left-wing publications, just wrote another screed, and I noticed it contained this quote:

When Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, compared Palestinians in a Jerusalem Post interview (August 2000) to “crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more,” he was hardly diverting from a consistent Zionist tradition that equated Palestinians with animals and vermin.

Sure enough, throughout the Internet one will find this quote by Barak in a supposed August 2000 interview with the Jerusalem Post. See, for example, Wikiquote on Ehud Barak.

So, did Barak really say that?

Two minutes of research in the Jerusalem Post archives finds this:

Tibi is acting like the scorpion on the turtle's back, in the well- known story: The scorpion promises the turtle not to sting him if he carries him over the river. In the middle of the river, the scorpion stings the turtle, and says proudly: "It's a matter of character. "Jews are the turtle that brought Tibi to the Knesset, to Kol Yisrael, and to television. A high-ranking source close to [Ehud Barak] has said that if an agreement is not reached, the Palestinians will be like crocodiles: "the more you feed them, the hungrier they get."

This is quite different than the quote that supposed Palestinian Arab "scholars" bandy about as fact. In fact, this quote - not by Barak - was meant to push Israel towards compromise with Palestinian Arabs, not to insult them.

It is not worth fisking someone like Baroud, as he is simply not that important. But this just shows, yet again, that the truth is not on the Arab side, and they know that if they make stuff up that their audience will willingly believe it anyway.

Hamas attacks mosque; no one reports it

I mentioned over the weekend that Hamas thugs attacked and trashed a mosque in Jabalya, injuring many. More details have emerged from PCHR:

Gunmen belonging to Izzedeen El-Qassam Battalions and members of the Police raided Imam Mohammad Naser El-Deen El-Albani Mosque in Jabalia refugee camp two days ago. They took control of the mosque after expelling its caretakers, beating several of them.

At approximately 15:45 on Saturday, 17 May, masked gunmen headed to the Imam Mohammad Naser El-Deen El-Albani Mosque in Bloc 5 of Jabalia refugee camp. A vehicle carrying Izzedeen El-Qassam Battalions gunmen and two police cars accompanied the masked gunmen. The gunmen entered the mosque and demanded that the Imam, Abd El-Halim Abdallah Awad, and the Director of the Kitab and Sunna Association, Ashraf Wadi, to leave the mosque and stop managing it under order from Hamas. After a discussion between both parties, Wadi went to the police station in Jabalia refugee camp and submitted a complaint against the gunmen. Then he returned to the mosque. Several Hamas supporters gathered inside the mosque and started to perform afternoon (Aser) prayers. The gunmen used their gun butts to attack Wadi and Awad and other members of the Kitab and Sunna Associations. Then they threw them out of the mosque. Several neighbors, including women, gathered to protest what was happening inside the mosque. The gunmen beat several women.

Imam Awad took the remaining members of the Association out of the mosque through a door connecting the mosque to his nearby house. The gunmen destroyed part of the wall separating the roofs of the house and the mosque. The whole episode resulted in the injury of more than 20 people with bruises.

It is noted that the Imam Mohammad Naser El-Deen El-Albani Mosque was established by the Kitab and Sunna Association, which is a benevolent society of the Salafi movement.

Two days later there is not one story about this in the English-language press. Not even Maan's English edition mentioned it.

Isn't it strange that an attack like this - which caused severe damage to the mosque - gets ignored?

The story is newsworthy by any real standard. We have irony that an Islamic movement is attacking mosques, we see that Muslims routinely see mosques as political and military objectives while they insist that Westerners treat them strictly as religious sites, we can only imagine how many Korans were damaged and destroyed in the carnage. All of these are the types of "hooks" that reporters routinely use to make stories more interesting to their readers, and even though there are daily attacks by Hamas against Gazans that might be considered too boring to make it into the news, this attack does not fit that category.

The reason is obvious. Hamas threatens, arrests and injures reporters who do not report things to their liking. All reporters left in Gaza are Muslims who live there and who are biased anyway against Israel but are scared of Hamas. As a result, reporters are reluctant to report, the news gets skewed towards the terrorist point of view, and this percolates throughout the entire mainstream media and into the hearts and minds of ordinary readers.

News organizations are supposed to report the news, and if they cannot do so they should tell their consumers why. They should not just choose to ignore stories that would get a huge amount of coverage in any other context.

Nahal Oz diary

April 29: Fatah shoots two mortars at the Nahal Oz crossing, where Gazans get most of their fuel.
April 30: Islamic Jihad shoots four mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 2: The PRC shells Nahal Oz.
May 2: The DFLP shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 4: Israel ships fuel through Nahal Oz.
May 5: The Abu Ala Reesh Brigades shoots a mortar at Nahal Oz; Hamas shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz
May 9: Islamic Jihad shoots four mortars at Nahal Oz
May 10: Hamas shoots at least one mortar at Nahal Oz.
May 12: Israel ships fuel to Gaza through Nahal Oz.
May 15: Hamas shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 15: Islamic Jihad shoots five mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 16: The DFLP shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 19: Israel ships fuel through Nahal Oz.

As far as the two other major crossings into Gaza:

The Sufa crossing was attacked on May 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19.

The Kerem Shalom crossing was attacked on April 29, May 5, 11 and 14.

Just something for "human rights" groups to keep in mind as they demand that Israel supply Gaza with all its needs.

Just another peaceful day in Hamastan

Firas Press published some photos of Hamas' greatest hits, including the obligatory tortured dead bodies.

Here's an interesting picture that shows what a Gazan might see on a typical day in his neighborhood.

(They did not caption it so I don't know when this picture was taken.)

Iraqis freak over Israelis saving their lives

From the Jerusalem Post last week:

The Iraqi parliament is angry over reports that an organization in the capital has been sending Iraqi children for medical treatment in Israel.

A parliament statement confirmed reports about this enterprise, even though government sources previously said it was untrue, according to Al-Jazeera.

The statement, released by the parliament's Health and Environment Committee, said the activities of this organization, which is operating out of Baghdad's Green Zone, was harmful both to the Iraqi people and to the government, since there are no diplomatic relations with Israel at any level, and this practice is a violation of the Arab League's boycott policy of Israel.

The committee demanded the government investigate the matter and take the necessary legal measures against the organization, if the allegations prove to be accurate.

A source at the Iraqi Health Ministry told Al-Jazeera the organization included Iraqi and American medical doctors and that it worked in conjunction with an Israeli organization.

The Iraqi Health Ministry insisted it had no knowledge of this organization's operations and that all the sick people the ministry sent outside of Iraq for treatment were sent through legal channels.

Chances are pretty good that the organization they are all upset about is called Save a Child's Heart, which I blogged about last year.

According to SACH statistics, they have helped some 42 Iraqi children in the past few years, as well as many hundreds of others from around the world, many from the PA-administered areas.

Well, you can understand how the Iraqis would be upset at an Israeli organization trying to save their children's lives. It is obviously a well-hidden land grab, not to mention a way to get Zionist spies into Iraq.

Those sneaky Jews, always trying to save Arab lives!

Saudi Arabia's 1937 threat to Great Britain over Palestine

In 1937, Col H.R.P. Dickson, former British Political Agent in Kuwait, was granted an interview or audience with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and they discussed Palestine. Dickson transcribed the king's words into a report.

This report (reproduced here from the invaluable MidEast Web site)shows the real problem that the Arab world had with Jews moving to the area, and it had nothing to do with "Zionism" - it was pure bigotry against Jews.

It is notable that the Arabs would not dare to say these words in their official statements even then; they always pretended to Westerners that their problems with Zionism were strictly political. Here the mask falls off as Ibn Saud attempts to appeal to Christian anti-semitism in order to gain an ally against the "accursed and stiffnecked" Jews.

Notice also how the king, hardly in the position of power that Saudi Arabia enjoys nowadays, still effectively uses threats against the United Kingdom to get them to fall in line with the racist policies of the Arabs:

'O Dickson when will your London Government realize that we Arabs by our very nature can be bought body and soul by an act of kindness and vice versa become implacable enemies for all time of those who treat us harshly or deal unjustly with us.

Today we and our subjects are deeply troubled over this Palestine question, and the cause of our disquiet and anxiety is the strange attitude of your British Government, and the still more strange hypnotic influence which the Jews, a race accursed by God according to His Holy Book, and destined to final destruction and eternal damnation hereafter, appear to wield over them and the English people generally.

'God's Holy Book (the Qur'an) contains God's own word and divine ordinance, and we commend to His Majesty's government to read and carefully peruse that portion which deals with the Jews and especially what is to be their fate in the end. For God's words are unalterable and must be.

'We Arabs believe implicitly in God's revealed word and we know that God is faithful. We care for nothing else in this world but our believe in the One God, His Prophet and our Honour, everything else matters nothing at all, not even death, nor are we afraid of hardship, hunger, lack of this worlds goods etc, etc. and we are quite content to eat camel's meat and dates to the end of our days, provided we hold to the above three things.

'Our hatred for the Jews dates from God's condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa (Jesus Christ), and their subsequent rejection later of His chosen Prophet. It is beyond our understanding how your Government, representing the first Christian power in the world today, can wish to assist and reward these very same Jews who maltreated your Isa (Jesus).

''We Arabs have been the traditional friends of Great Britain for many years, and I, Bin Sa'ud, in particular have been your Government's firm friend all my life, what madness then is this which is leading on our Government to destroy this friendship of centuries, all for the sake of an accursed and stiffnecked race which has always bitten the hand of everyone who has helped it since the world began.

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.