Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, May 22, 2008

The dangers of "peace" with Syria

As I mentioned yesterday, during the NORPAC trip to Washington a congressman asked my group what we thought of the news about the negotiations between Israel and Syria.

My answer, after stressing that this was not NORPAC's position, was that I was extremely skeptical about the sincerity of Syria in wanting peace. I pointed out that the Syrian border was the quietest of all Israel's borders and the borders where Israel made compromises for "peace" were the ones where there was the least peace. I mentioned the possibility that Iran is really behind this "peace" offer, and if Syria could gain the Golan through negotiations then it effectively puts Iran's troops at Israel's doorstep, giving them a huge advantage in conventional warfare, let alone speaking about their unconventional warfare aspirations.

My brother EBoZ added that with Iran sponsoring Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, this would surround Israel with its most implacable foe.

Another member of my group pointed out that Arabs look at Israel as an aberration in the Middle East, and that they are very patient because in their view Israel will simply not exist in the long term. Indeed, I added, the internal Arabic press considers the sixty years of Israel's existence to be similar to the Crusades, when the Muslims ultimately regained control of Jerusalem and other areas.

The congressman seemed a little surprised but had no other comments.

Soccer Dad pointed out to me a YNet article saying that there is no way that the two sides will agree and to "relax." While he says that he thought the article was too optimistic, he recalls how previous negotiations over Syria (especially under Netanyahu) have broken down in the past over Syria's intransigence.

Perhaps. But the most uncomfortable part of yesterday's events in Washington came when former Knesset member and minister Dan Meridor, in the midst of a rousing Zionist speech and after hearing many senators and congressmen talking about their support of new versions of the Syria Accountability Act, stated as fact that Israel would have to make painful concessions to Syria (without mentioning it by name.)

This was greeted with complete silence and at least two "boos."

Jordanian media against freedom of speech

From Arab News:

A coalition of Jordanian media outlets, professional syndicates and political parties plan to launch a national campaign on June 10 for the boycott of Danish and Dutch products to protest anti-Islam moves in the two European countries, organizers said yesterday.

The campaign, entitled “The Messenger Unites Us,” came into existence after a dozen of Danish papers reprinted blasphemous cartoons in February.

The controversial pictures were originally printed by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, sparking a spate of protests across the Arab and Islamic worlds. Dutch products were recently added to a list of blacklisted Danish goods after Dutch MP Geert Wilders released a short anti-Islam film on the Internet in March.

...
He pointed out that the campaign would include highway billboards, posters, printed T-shirts, bumper stickers and the like “to inform consumers not only to boycott foods but anything associated with Denmark and the Netherlands such as airlines and shipping agencies.”

Campaign organizers also decided to institute legal action against those involved in “demeaning the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him),” arguing that their behavior violated the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and several articles of the Jordanian Penal Code.

So if the Jordanian media themselves support persecuting people exercising freedom of speech, how much can you trust what they publish as being the truth?

Today we really had a "Zionist-Occupied Government"

Today, I am attending the annual NORPAC mission to Washington. Some 900 committed Zionists came down to speak to virtually every Senate and Congress office, sometimes to the congress members themselves and sometimes to their aides.

Before and after the meetings we are hearing speeches from some of Israel's best friends on the Hill. Most of them sound more pro-Israel than Kadima.

My group had three meetings. The first two were with aides, who politely listen and take notes about the specific legislation we are asking them to support.

The third meeting was with a Representative of a western state who was very friendly. His first question to us was to ask my opinion of the Syrian/Israeli talks reported this morning.

It is a very empowering feeling to be able to have a conversation with a member of the US House of Representatives about a topic you feel strongly about.

The halls of Congress were filled with yarmulka-wearing advocates for Israel today. The leaders just announced that because of our visits today the sponsor of one of the bills we are backing got many phone calls from people we met asking to co-sponsor the bill (one to make it harder for Iran to get foreign investments.)

It has been a long day but it is a rewarding experience, knowing that we can make a difference.

When detente is better than "peace"

Israel and Syria have started "peace" talks in Turkey.

At the moment, Syria's stance against Israel is entirely passive-aggressive. Everything that it has been doing - arming Hezbollah, building a nuclear weapons site, hosting terror groups - has a veneer of deniability, no matter how implausible. Which means that any agreement to stop those activities is essentially unenforceable, because they cannot be officially monitored.

On the other hand, the Syrian/Israel border has been Israel's quietest border since 1973. Israel's annexation of the Golan was perhaps the best move Israel has ever done for its own security, and military experts are unanimous as to the huge strategic importance of the Golan to Israel.

In other words, Israel's "illegal occupation" of the Golan has created more real peace than any number of compromises that Israel has made for what the world calls "peace."

Any embarkation of negotiations - or indeed, and change of a status quo - needs to be preceded by a calculation of the upside versus the downside. There is no way that Syria will agree to a peace agreement without getting the Golan back, placing much of Israel's population - not to mention its water supply - at great risk.

What's the upside? Is there any realistic chance that Syria would ditch its Iranian sponsor, abandon Hezbollah, stop incitement against Israel and become friends with the US?

If Syria wanted to get into the US orbit, it could do it without the Golan, and Syria has no threats from Israel as long as it doesn't make any aggressive moves. Today's detente is better than any other realistic scenario.

This is yet another folly where the pursuit of a "peace process" is antithetical to real peace.

Palestinian Arab news roundup

Lots of stuff going on in the Palestinian Arab press tonight...

Mostly from Firas Press:

There are rumors that Hamas was planning to hold a demonstration, shoot a Qasssam rocket into the crowd, blame Israel and use the situation to open Rafah. The Popular Committees nixed the idea.

An AP report is elaborated on where Palestinian Arabs are reluctant to embrace Bin Laden's support. Hamas considers Al-Qaeda "too extreme" for them, which is funny because recently Al Qaeda criticized Hamas for being too extreme as well. Either way, even Hamas realizes that making Bin Laden a hero is bad PR.

Also in Gaza,Fatah's terror arm, the Al Aqsa Brigades, claim to have found an Israeli spy device (with American parts) meant to video, and possibly remotely explode, terrorists. It looks a bit crude to me.

Speaking of spies, Islamic Jihad claims to have broken up a major spy ring, arresting many "collaborators." The self-death count may rise yet again. They used this opportunity to appeal to the ones they haven't yet found to repent or else, Allah forbid, they would be punished in this world and the next.

Hamas is planning a mass demonstration - and possibly an attempt to break down the fence - at the Karni crossing on Thursday. It is possible that this is the demonstration that they considered shooting a Qassam at.

Also, Ma'an reports that a Fatah-linked group claimed responsibility for the bombing attempt that happened yesterday at the Huwara checkpoint where a 16-year old was shot when he was found to have explosives strapped on. The other Palestinian Arab media don't believe the story altogether, preferring to tell themselves that Israel just shoots teenagers at checkpoints for no reason.

Worse than honor killing?

The Saudi-based Arab News describes a truly horrific story, where a family kicked their young mentally handicapped daughter for reasons of "honor," leaving her homeless - and then raped a year later.

And they still won't help her:

Neighbors of Maryam, an 18-year-old girl who was raped in a pedestrian tunnel here recently, are claiming that her family will not take her back because of the stigma associated with victims of sex crimes. Maryam’s family would not speak to Arab News.
Meanwhile, local police claim they have no cause to investigate the crime or find the perpetrators unless they receive complaints from the victim or her family.
“We cannot do anything about the alleged sexual assault that she suffered so long as we do not receive a formal complaint from her or her relatives,” Makkah police spokesman Maj. Abdul Mohsen Al-Mayman told Arab News yesterday.
Maryam was admitted to the King Abdul Aziz Hospital a few days ago for treatment of trauma resulting from sexual assault. She is currently under the custody of local health officials. A doctor at the hospital confirmed that the young woman was undergoing treatment at the hospital and that she is thought to be suffering from mental problems.
“As we cannot keep her in the hospital any longer, we plan to send her to the Taif Mental Health Hospital or hand her over to the Social Care Department. Her case is compounded because she has developed some mental disturbances besides being mentally retarded,” the doctor said, pointing out that the hospital has only eight beds for women patients who are on long-term care.
According to one neighbor, who did not want to be named, the family kicked the girl out 18 months ago on suspicion of being involved with a boy.
Since then, locals say she has been homeless and has showed signs of mental problems.
Describing the case of Maryam as not uncommon, the doctor appealed to charitable organizations to make sufficient shelters for homeless women like her.

With "honor killings" the torture ends. Maryam can only look forward to more abuse.

Tomorrow, EoZ and the Zionist Lobby visit Congress

Sorry that blogging has been light; it looks like Real Life will be intruding quite a bit over the next month or so.

Tomorrow, I plan to join some 900 other Zionist Jews to visit almost every single member of Congress or their aides with NORPAC, a pro-Israel political action committee. I've never done it before, but both EBoZ and OBoZ tell me that it is very enlightening and gratifying. I understand that one can learn more about how the government works from a single trip like this than from years of study.

It will be a very full day and I hope to blog about it afterwards.

PalArabs glorify intrafada violence, but MSM blames the Jews

The Australian writes about the latest photo-sharing craze in the territories:

A POPULAR pastime in Gaza is swapping gruesome footage of dead or dying victims of the Strip's incessant violence.

The images used to be almost exclusive legacies of clashes with Israeli forces but last year that changed. Now being far more keenly traded are snapshots of Palestinian fratricide, gruesome images taken by "militia-cams' that record scenes for posterity.

Spend any time near the emergency ward of Gaza's Shifa Hospital and security staff or ward workers will offer a look at their mobile phones, which they'll quickly switch to video mode to show images of victims of intra-Palestinian clashes being wheeled in agony from ambulances.

Sit in a town square for more than five minutes and you'll be quickly encircled by youths clamouring to outdo each other with images of death and mayhem.

A veritable library of the "intrafada" now exists in Gaza among militias and clans. Most were added during 2007, when the numbers of intra-Palestinian deaths jumped by 800 per cent - from 55 to 439 - almost all of the deaths in Gaza.

Images of men being tossed from the towers trade particularly well, as does a sequence of a Fatah youth leaping from behind a corner to shoot a rifle at entrenched Hamas men nearby. He hadn't levelled his weapon before being shot through the chest.

...Writing last month in The Jerusalem Post, Bassam Eid from the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said, "Because Palestinians are accustomed to seeing weapons and are also exposed to verbal and physical abuse of the military occupation, verbal disagreements easily turn into fist fights and sometimes even escalate into gang or family feuds. Growing up in a spiral of violence means that individuals find it harder to determine the limits of aggression."

Of course, it has to be Israel's fault somehow, as if centuries of intra-Arab fighting never occurred before the Zionists came on the scene.

The trade in gruesome photos is not limited to kids trading them like baseball cards. The mainstream Palestinian Arab newspapers and terrorist websites delight in showing dismembered bodies - here's the latest collection of victims of Hamas terror in Firas Press, and it is not close to the most gruesome.

Yet this celebration of death is, of course, the Jews' fault.

(h/t EBoZ)

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!