Friday, July 11, 2008

  • Friday, July 11, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Even though the "truce" was broken at least five times this week, Israel has not suspended sending supplies to Gaza. Firas Press reports that 146 trucks went through the Sufa and Karni crossings yesterday, including food, paper products, and building materials.

Also, today Al Aqsa Brigades said they shot a rocket to Israel, but they said that this wasn't a cease-fire violation, just a reaction to Israeli activities in the West Bank. Not quite sure what the difference is.
  • Friday, July 11, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Here is a list of Palestinian Arab violations of the "cease fire" that I am aware of since June 19, with links.

(I have no idea why there is so much white space below this; I simply couldn't debug it.)

R = Rockets

M = Mortars

S = Shooting


































































































June



192021




CeaseFire

22232425262728


3R, 1M
2R2M2M
2930July 12345

2R

1R

6789101112

1M, 1S 1M
2R1M1R
13
1415 16171819
2M





20212223242526







A Hamas member was killed in an "internal explosion" this morning.

Egypt found another large cache of ammunition and explosives in the Sinai already packaged up to be smuggled to Gaza.

Hamas abducted two Fatah members in southern Gaza and three others in Beit Hanoun.

Fatah denied that the Al Aqsa Brigades shot two Qassams at Israel yesterday, as opposed to the Al Aqsa Brigades who actually took responsibility. This is how Fatah maintains deniability - every statement attributed to Al Aqsa is just some people who are pretending to be Al Aqsa, you see.

Hamas and Fatah are meanwhile increasing their rhetoric about each other; each accusing the other of collaborating with Israel and saying how the others' actions help the Zionist enemy. Mahmoud Abbas called Khaled Meshaal a "liar."

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 108.
  • Friday, July 11, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
The official Israeli report on "journalist" Mohammed Omer's allegations of brutality is here (h/t Soccer Dad.)
Mr. Mohammed Omer al-Mughaier (hereinafter "the Complainant") arrived at the Allenby Crossing on Thursday, 26 July 2008. Due to suspicion that he had been in contact with hostile elements and had been asked by them to deliver items to Judea and Samaria, both he and his baggage were searched. In contradiction to his claims, at no time was the Complainant subjected to either physical or mental violence.

The investigation revealed that the search of his baggage was conducted in the presence of four people and not eight, as he noted. The search was conducted, according to regulations, in a public place and in the view and presence of the Complainant.

The body search, which took several minutes, took place in the presence of two security personnel (a policeman and an ISA official) and was conducted according to the relevant regulations. The Complainant's claims to the effect that he was threatened at gunpoint are baseless.

Regarding the Complainant's collapse, as it were, it should be noted that the paramedic who attended to him found no evidence of a physical cause of collapse. The Complainant's behaviour raises doubts as to the sincerity of the situation. In any event, the Complainant was sent to an infirmary and an ambulance was ordered for him.

As to the Complainant's allegation that he was compelled to stand on his feet for twelve hours, we point out that according to our records, the Complainant arrived at the Allenby Crossing at approximately 11:00, and the entire incident ended at approximately 14:00. Thus, this claim is also baseless.

We should point out that there are numerous additional contradictions in the Complainant's allegations. For example, in the media he reported that he was humiliated, stripped and that a gun was held to his head. And yet, in his complaint filed with the IDF Spokesperson, the Complainant claimed that two uniformed personnel sprayed his face [and nothing about a gun - EoZ]

In conclusion, the Complainant's grievances were investigated and found to be without foundation. At no time was the Complainant subjected to either physical or mental violence; he was treated fairly. We can only regret that his allegations received publicity and a platform without being properly investigated.
Omer didn't claim to have stood up for 12 hours in Pilger's report; but he did say:
I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror."
This is not a description of facts; this is a fantasy of a fanatic Israel-basher tailored to an audience of those who will believe anything evil about Israel.

Honest Reporting (UK) notes:
As in many previous cases (see HonestReporting's "The Big Lies" interactive presentation for some of the most infamous), a Palestinian claim has been taken at face value by a media keen to fit the story to a preconceived narrative that portrays Israel as a serial human rights abuser.
Soccer Dad notes that calling Omer a "journalist" is stretching it; he is a propagandist who will vilify Israel on the flimsiest testimony.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

  • Thursday, July 10, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
This example is small, but telling.

Saudi Arabia's Arab News states:
Israeli soldiers kill unarmed Palestinian lad
A 17-year-old boy who crossed into Israel in search of work was killed by Israeli troops yesterday.
Ma'an says:
The Israeli army killed a Palestinian on Thursday near the Kissufim crossing southeast of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

Medical sources from Al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza named the dead man as 18 year-old Salim Jum'a Hamidi from the village of Az-Zawaydeh in the central Gaza Strip.

Local sources in the Gaza Strip believe he was attempting to cross the border into Israel to look for work, and maintain that he was a civilian.
Al Jazeera is the most accurate of the Arab news sources:
Israeli troops have shot dead an unarmed Palestinian man in the Gaza Strip, marking the first fatality there since a truce between Israel and Palestinian armed groups took effect three weeks ago.

"At around 3 o'clock an army force identified a suspicious person crossing the fence from Gaza into Israel near Kissufim," an Israeli army spokesman said on Thursday.

"The force called on him to stop and fired warning shots but he did not stop and the soldiers fired at him and killed him. When they approached his body they saw he was unarmed," the spokesman said.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is linked to the Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said the man was one of its members.

Muawiya Hassanin, head of Gaza's emergency services, said the man was Salim Jumaa al-Hamedi, aged 18.
So now we know an 18-year old member of a recognized terror group attempted to infiltrate Israel, and Israel stopped him after warning him. The only truce violation here is from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades who seem to have cynically used the young man as live bait to force an Israeli reaction. It is not a breach of the truce for Israel to kill someone who is attempting to break into Israel, apparently for violent purposes, at 3 AM.

The Arab News, whose publication time is midnight Saudi time, had 15 hours to get the story right, and completely fabricated the age of the man as well as calling him a civilian after the Al Aqsa Brigades already claimed him as a fellow terrorist. This disregard for facts has been a consistent pattern with Arab News.

Ma'an English has a more subtle way to show its bias. It will report the initial, unreliable Arab accounts of any event fairly early (this story had a timestamp of 9:33 AM) and it will never correct it, even after other Arab sources admit that the initial facts are wrong. Moreover, it will even leave that story as its main headline all day, even after it adds other stories much later (as of now, it has articles written as late as 22:04 on its front page, but the main headline is still the inaccurate and uncorrected 9:33 story.)

Such is the state of the English-language Arab press - a combination of lies and purposeful omissions. In this case, Al Jazeera has shown that for all its problems it is usually more reliable and careful about reporting facts.
I won't be able to blog during the day, but check out these posts by David Bogner and Richard Landes. And while you are at The Augean Stables site, see Richard's nice commentary on a recent posting of mine.
  • Thursday, July 10, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
AP:
A Palestinian health official said two Palestinians have been killed Thursday in the collapse of a smuggling tunnel under the Gaza-Egypt border.

Health Ministry official Moawiya Hassanain said that five people were pulled out of the tunnel alive.

Local residents say the tunnel was used for smuggling drugs and fuel into Gaza.
Isn't it strange that while Hamas brags that it is still smuggling weapons and explosives into Gaza, every specific tunnel mentioned in the Western press is supposedly only for food or fuel?

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 107. Some reports say that there are still missing people.

In other peaceful PalArab news, a charity building in Rafah was blown up by those ever-present "mysterious gunmen."

There are also reports that Egypt has presented Hamas with video evidence that it was Hamas gunmen, not desperate sick people, who stormed the Rafah border a few days ago.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
In a recent interview by the Petra news agency in Jordan, King Abdullah answered an interesting question:
Q: Another very hot topic around town is the Jordan Festival and the fact that a company called PUBLICIS is organizing the event. Some are saying that PUBLICIS has close ties with Israel. The minister of tourism and antiquities has denied that. Many are still calling for a boycott. It is important that we hear directly from you what the truth is.

A: I recently discussed this issue with the prime minister; PUBLICIS is not the company that is organizing the Jordan Festival. It is another company called Visiteurs Du Soir.

Today, Arab artists are contemplating canceling their performances and Arab tourists who were planning on visiting Jordan are canceling their trips. The government is now wasting its valuable time and resources trying to do damage control. All this because some so-called journalists are too careless and incompetent to do their basic work; it is shameful. This is a case study on how to shoot yourself in the foot, on how to be irresponsible, on how to do a massive disservice to your country and your people and on how to stop our development. Indeed, our worst enemies lie within. Should Jordan's future be held hostage to rumors and gossip? And should false information be the reference for our Jordanian press? Should we remain silent until the truth becomes the victim of irresponsible journalism?

Let us assume for a moment that it is in fact PUBLICIS that is helping to organize the event. In fact, I cannot think of a major company that does not do business with Israel. If all these companies are off-limits then we are in deep trouble. For example, Intel whose chips power 80 per cent of computers around the world has billions of dollars of investments in Israel; its closest competitor AMD also has large investments in Israel. Does that mean we should throw our computers away? This is nonsense. If we follow this line of thought, then we will be doing the best service to Israel. All it has to do is use the best technology and best talent in the world and automatically it would be off-limits to us.
This was a good answer, but it reveals a bit more than Abdullah intended.

It is good in the sense that it is refreshing for an Arab leader to acknowledge that the weapon of the Arab boycott against Israel has been, and will remain, counterproductive for all Arabs.

But notice how Abdullah frames it: "If we follow this line of thought, then we will be doing the best service to Israel. All it has to do is use the best technology and best talent in the world and automatically it would be off-limits to us." The assumption made here is that Israel considers Jordan to be a mortal enemy and only wishes for it to fail economically, which would be "the best service to Israel."

Even the most pragmatic Arab leader, and the one who most desires peace with Israel, still regards the Arab/Israeli conflict to be a zero-sum game where if one side gains, the other side loses and vice-versa.

Why on earth would Israel want Jordan to fail? Jordan, and specifically the Hashemite dynasty that rules Jordan, has been Israel's most reliable Arab neighbor for most of its history. Israel wants Jordan to thrive, and it wants all its neighbors to act more like Jordan does. If Jordan would have maintained its claim on the West Bank, 99% of WB Palestinian Arabs would now be living productive lives as full Jordanian citizens and there would be far less terror coming from the West Bank.

The only reason that Abdullah could possibly think that Israel wants Jordan to fail is if he, for all his positive attributes, is still projecting the deep Arab hatred of Israel onto Israel itself. He may be practical about Israel but he will never, ever truly accept its existence as a state with the same rights as his own. He still wants Israel to disappear, so he assumes that the feeling is mutual.

And if Israel's best friend in the Arab world thinks this way, the chances for a lasting peace are, unfortunately, infinitesimal.
  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday, 3 mortars were fired from Gaza to Israel in what I believe was the seventh violation of the "calm" from Gaza (at least six mortar/rocket attacks and one shooting.)

Unlike previous times during the "cease fire," however, Israel didn't close the crossings from Gaza today in response.

On the contrary - today Israel allowed nearly 200 Gaza businessmen to enter Israel and the West Bank, according to Palestine Press Agency.

Israel also allowed the Sufa crossing to open and is now allowing material for school uniforms to enter Gaza.

Now for a trip down memory lane.

June 21:
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev told Israel National News Saturday night, "The understandings with the Egyptians specifically state that there will be no hostile fire from any group into Israel, and there will be an end to the arms smuggling and the arms buildup.

"Anyone who says otherwise is either unfamiliar with the understandings or deliberately trying to undermine them," he said.

June 24:
"This is a blatant violation of the calm, and we will weigh options," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said after the rockets struck.


July 1:
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday warned that his country will make forceful response if Palestinian militants continue to violate the Gaza Strip ceasefire.

Israel has shown some patience with the ceasefire violations, while this should not be perceived as weakness, local daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted him as saying at a conference.

"Should the lull not be maintained, we will respond with full force," he was quoted as saying. "Nobody will shy away from the need to retaliate harshly."

July 8:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said recently that a truce "cannot be enforced in full immediately, and therefore Israel has and will show patience; but that patience should not be misconstrued as weakness. If the ceasefire is violated, we will know how to react."

Notice a trend?
  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday it was announced that the international community has paid $920 million to the PA in the past six months.

The PA has already admitted that 58% of its budget is spent in Gaza, despite the international sanctions against the terror group Hamas that controls it.

So the world has supplied Hamas with over a half billion dollars so far this year. Even if Hamas doesn't get it directly, it benefits mightily, allowing it to gain revenue from "taxes" as well as direct theft, not to mention making sure that none of the money that Hamas gets from other sources needs to be used for helping the people it has control over.

Hamas may gain more monetarily from international largesse than from Iran.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Jordan Times:
"Islam will defeat terrorism" was the title of an international conference that organised in Moscow last week by the “Fund for Support of Islamic Culture, Science and Education”.
Whew, that's a relief. Let's look at the details:
The final statement of the conference, issued at the end of two days of intensive, but cordial, deliberations by participants representing Islamic cultural and interfaith institutions and organisations from all over the world, affirmed the need to emphasise the sanctity of all people’s dignity, their life and their property, warning that any violation of these rights constitutes a grave religious sin, as well as a heinous human crime.
Translated into terms the Western audience might understand:
"Dignity" - if a Muslim is insulted, he is justified in killing you.
"Property" - if a Muslim ever owned property it belongs to Muslims forever, and anyone else who says he owns it may be killed. Think Spain (Andalusia).

Paradoxically, this statement is much more easily used to justify terrorism than to combat it. Of course, since they didn't bother to define exactly what "terrorism" means, saying that Islam is against terrorism is fairly meaningless.
The statement confirmed other significant principles, such as: 1) “peace and justice are basic standards for governing relations between individuals and societies, and war according to Islam is a state dictated only by the occurrence of aggression or injustice, and should cease with the disappearance of such causes”;
This means that the definition of "justice" and "injustice" is purely Islamic, and Islam will refuse to accept anyone else's definitions. Again, the result can easily be the support of what any sane person would call terrorism. The word "justice" is the most-used keyword against everything Israel does, because all actions are viewed through a lens that cannot accept - on an ideological level - the existence of a Jewish state on what is perceived as Islamic lands. Israel's very existence, in Islamic terms, is pure "injustice." It is not only a short journey from there to terror against Israeli civilians - it is a logical next step.
2) “Islam is a religion of life, peace, healthy environment, development and coexistence amongst all people”;
As we have seen in the past, Islamic conceptions of "coexistence" is usually "Islam will dominate, dhimmi religions will be tolerated as second class, infidels will be erased from the planet."
3) Islam does, in clear and absolute terms, reject and condemn terrorism, those who finance and support it and those who tend to exploit its horrifying consequences for their purposes and interests.
And as the article goes on to say:
In fact, many participants’ statements rightly included condemnation of terror, as well as virtuous calls for eliminating such evil from our world. They described terror as the pestilence of the time or as a barbaric human epidemic. But most were referring to terror as an abstract phenomenon, with the ambiguity allowing unrestricted opportunity for anyone to apply the condemnation to his own “terrorist enemies”.

But defining terrorism has never been an easy matter, and therefore it would be unrealistic to expect the Moscow meeting to accomplish what others for decades have failed to achieve. And despite the vagueness, the underlying objective was to distance a modern version of Islam not only from terror, but also from providing advocates of violence and terror with religious justification for their evil actions.

Unfortunately, the conference attendees' final statements could be used exactly for such justification.

Until Muslims realize the inherent contradictions between their stated stand against terror and the details that can be used to justify it, they will continue to be rightly blamed for not doing enough to fight true terror from a purely Islamic ideological/religious perspective.

OBL's justifications for his fatwa against the United States that led to 9/11 fit exactly into the statements that came out of this conference that supposedly preaches moderation. He felt that since US troops were on sacred Saudi territory and that the US was not treating Muslims with proper dignity.

It is not too heartening to see an Islamic "anti-terror" conference whose statements can be used to support the most heinous acts of terror.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Another "news"story that illuminates far more about the mental state of the writers than about any real facts, courtesy of AlterInfo.net (it was on uruknet as well):
In a dispatch posted at 6:55pm Baghdad time Saturday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that 55 "Israeli" companies were now working in Iraq under assumed names.

Yaqen reported that the Zionist firms operate in a variety of fields, including infrastructure and marketing. The Zionist Mossad secret police agency had established the Kurdish Lending Bank with its headquarters in as-Sulaymaniyah in the US-founded Kurdish separatist enclave in northern Iraq.

The report indicated that the Kurdish Lending Bank had a secret mission of purchasing vast tracts of agricultural land, oil fields, and residential areas in the vicinity of the cities of al-Mawsil and Kirkuk, both oil-rich cities in northern Iraq. The massive land purchases facilitate the effort by the US-backed Kurdish separatist Peshmergah militia to expel Arab and Turkoman residents of northern Iraq so that the oil-rich area can be annexed to the Kurdish separatist state under US and Zionist hegemony.
So the Mossad is in the banking industry and those wily Jews are buying sacred Arab land, which means (in Arabspeak) that they are stealing it.

Now you know!
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Arab News:
A news website in Saudi Arabia reported this week that “angry reactions hit the Saudi streets at the new extra charge under the name the Sept. 11 Security Charge” being imposed by British Midland International (BMI) on Saudi tourists traveling to London.

This is downright humiliation as the increase in the price of air tickets is only imposed on Saudi citizens,” the website quoted a number of Saudis as saying. It added that the move “has serious implications and that it destroys all the roads being built to maintain links with these people after 9/11.”

The website, sabq.com, said that some observers in the Kingdom believed that the charge might have been imposed for reasons other than those announced, namely to counter the steady increase in oil prices. “If this is the reason, it is also meant to punish Saudis since Saudi Arabia is the largest oil exporting country.”

Robert Lickley, commercial development manager for BMI in Saudi Arabia, explained to Arab News yesterday the exact cause of the problem. It too involved a website — this time BMI’s own booking page. “It is a requirement by law that notification of a 9/11 surcharge is put on the ticket of every Internet booking made for flights originating from the United States,” he said, adding that in updating their website, the information concerning the 9/11 surcharge had been carried across to the BMI site that included information and booking forms for the rest of the airline’s network.

“It was a simple clerical error, and when we discovered it, we corrected it immediately,” Lickley said. “However, the error was online for sufficient time that a number of observant Saudis saw it.”

What they were unaware of was that the 9/11 surcharge information is on every Internet ticket for every airline flight originating in the US, he said.

“There are absolutely no special surcharges for flights to or from Saudi Arabia,” Lickley said.

Security surcharges have been a fact of life on all airlines and therefore on ticket prices for several years. They are not specific to any group or nation and help meet the cost of tightened security for airlines since 9/11.
Isn't it interesting that all of British Midland's customers worldwide saw the surcharge, but only the Saudis assumed that it was directed at them alone?

Do you think that perhaps they are a tad sensitive that their wonderful kingdom spawned most of the 9/11 hijackers?

Finally, notice the irony as the Saudis claim to be the victims of bias at the exact same time they refer to all Westerners as "these people."

If the Saudis had any sense of true responsibility, they would have offered to pay the entire cost of the 9/11 surcharge and save millions of travelers the money that they have to spend now because of the culture of hate that Saudi Wahhabi ideology has wrought.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From JTA:
On the first day of class at a new kosher cooking school in Brooklyn, 22-year-old Erica Zimmerman carefully slices raw potatoes into a stainless steel bowl.

Zimmerman, a student at New York University, says she’s always been interested in cooking, but as an observant Jew only wanted a kosher school. Why learn to cook food she'd never be able to eat?

That limited her options.

“The only kosher cooking school is in Israel, and I can’t take off a year to go,” she says. “Then I heard about this new school on Facebook, and I jumped at the opportunity.”

On Monday, the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts opened in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush.

The six-week, $4,500 intensive course, run in cooperation with the continuing education department of Kingsborough Community College, is the only professional kosher cooking school in North America.

According to director Jesse Blondel and founder Elka Pinson, it is the only one in the world besides the Jerusalem Culinary Institute, a 5-year-old school in Israel.

Pinson, whose husband runs a housewares store on Coney Island Avenue, the main shopping street in the neighborhood, has been dreaming of establishing such a school for years. Last year she took over the top floor of the shop and advertised for a chef/teacher on craigslist.

Blondel, a 26-year-old Brooklyn native, responded. The kitchen manager at the Culinary Center of New York, he was seeking a new position. Organizing and directing a new cooking school seemed just the ticket.

“I realized there isn’t any other kosher cooking school, I’m Jewish, and I grew up not far from here,” he says.

Pinson and Blondel opened negotiations with Kingsborough, and ironed out the details in May. That left little more than a month to set up the room, build the curriculum and advertise for students.

Thirteen people showed up this week for class. On the first day, they sit around a large steel table intently watching chef Mark D’Alessandro, the school’s main teacher, demonstrate the finer techniques of chopping vegetables.

Holding up half an onion, D'Alessandro shows how to place it on the cutting board and dice it finely by making several horizontal slices before chopping vertically with his chef’s knife.

“There’s no machine that can do that for you?” one student asks anxiously.

D’Alessandro looks at her balefully.

“That’s the second time my heart has been broken,” he says to muffled laughter.

All of the students keep kosher to one degree or another. The class is about evenly split by gender, and range from a 16-year-old boy to a grandmother in her 60s.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Firas actually allowed my comment.

So far, the only response is "Here they are heroes you sons of conquest, not those who hand in their weapons to the Zionists"

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