Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Today's PalArab press

A Fatah member who was tortured in Hamas prisons writes to Firas Press, saying that Hamas torture was even worse than Israel's. "We stood, blindfolded, even during prayers, flogging, humiliation and insults, without pity or mercy, without water or food or medicine, and complained he will get one of us following the strike in the same place him in pain..."

An Arab analysis of why Jordan started talking to Hamas concludes that Jordan wants more influence with the Palestinian Arabs in bringing about a truce between Fatah and Hamas as well as Jordan wanting to influence Hamas to dissuade the Muslim Brotherhood from acting against Jordanian interests. Meanwhile, Hamas is nervous about a Syrian peace treaty with Israel that might force it out of Syria and wants to re-open its office in Amman.

Bahrain's king, in London, called on Jews who left Bahrain to return either as citizens, investors or tourists. Bahrain's Jewish community is tiny but enjoys good relations with Bahrain's Arabs, and Bahrain is the only Gulf country with a synagogue.

A week ago Egypt opened up the Rafah crossing for a VIP - Sheikh Yassin's son. Yesterday, it opened it up for another VIP: Mahmoud Zahhar's son. Meanwhile, there are reports that Gaza still has hundreds of Egyptians who cannot cross Rafah into Egypt.

Mahmoud Zahhar himself rejected any dialogue with Fatah, claiming that Abbas is under the "robe of America" and that any dialogue is useless until Bush, Olmert and Abbas are out of office. (Hamas has previously said that it will not recognize Abbas' presidency after this year, citing the PA's own laws.)

On the "goodwill gesture" front, Israel decided to re-open the Kerem Shalom crossing for the first time in four months after a deadly terror attack there. Also, Israel decided to allow some prisoners with "blood on their hands" to be released. Goodwill gestures on the Palestinian Arab side includes a 16-year old boy with bombs who tried to go through the Huwara checkpoint.

Saudi Vice, episode 19: Sacrilegious sister

The lives of the prestigious members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are not easy. All day they have to be on the alert, patrolling the streets of Saudi Arabia with an eagle eyes, tuned in the slightest hint of impropriety among the thankful Saudi populace.

But sometimes, the whiff of vice hits too close to home, and the results can be tragic.

In this case, one of our heroes, an upstanding member of the Muttawa, found out a terrible secret that his sister had been keeping from him:

She had converted to Christianity.

The woman, named Fatma Al-Matairi, confided in her brother about her terrible secret, secure in the knowledge that he would be understanding and supportive.

Little did the 26-year old know that her brother, as a member of the Commission, has a much higher moral code than just brotherhood and support. Converting to Christianity is blasphemy, and is punishable by death.

So he killed her.

Now, Saudi Arabia has one less blasphemer, and our hero can sleep well knowing he did the right thing.

UPDATE: It appears that it was her father that was a member of the Muttawa, and he cut out her tongue before burning her to death.

Quotable Quntar

Samir Kuntar, that child-murderer and hero of all Palestinian Arabs and Lebanese, just gave forth some more of his wisdom.

According to Aafaq.org, a relatively liberal Arab website based in Washington, DC, he said "Sadat's assassination was an excellent job and I hope to see more similar assassinations."

Calling for the assassination of Arab leaders may sour those leaders on him a little bit.

Open thread

The comment boards have been active lately but often the topic strays from the original post, so here is a place for people to discuss whatever is on their minds. I will ask my commenters to stick to the topic when commenting on posts, and use open threads otherwise.

Thanks!

Guess who's confiscating land?

There was a large rally in the town of Mughraqa, south of Gaza City, protesting Hamas' confiscating of land that belonged to the people of Gaza, some of it for generations.

The article is a little hard to decipher but it does mention a law that makes it illegal to sell land to non-Muslims.

As far as I can tell, none of the towns abandoned by Israel three years ago has ever been given to Gazans to build houses or apartments. Instead, Hamas uses at least some of them for military training and has shot rockets to Israel from them.

Today's PalArab news

The peaceful Fatah Al Aqsa Brigades in Gaza threatened to blow up the "calm" because Israel temporarily closed a couple of crossings - in response to rocket fire over the past few days.

Hamas leader Zahhar, in an amazing display of logic, said that those who shot the rocket yesterday (which landed in the center of Sderot) are "collaborators" with Israel. With friends like those....

Some Jewish Hebron residents were accused of saying derogatory things about Islam. When Arabs complained to the Israeli police, they were shocked to find out that the depraved Israelis don't have a law making insulting the Prophet illegal.

Windows were shattered at Al Quds University in Gaza because Hamas was practicing weapons and explosives training nearby, causing students to evacuate.

There was a huge explosion in Gaza City Sunday evening that has still not yet been explained.

No word yet on further casualties or finding the missing people from the two tunnel collapses over the past couple of days. Last I heard some five men were still missing.

Chief Palestinian Arab Liar Saeb Erekat denies a Haaretz report of a detailed "peace" plan that Olmert was reported to offer that includes 93% of the West Bank plus additional land in the Negev adjacent to Gaza. Erekat said, all of West Bank or nothing. Another PalArab spokesman said the same thing, that not one Jew can remain in the West Bank (and all the "refugees" must return to destroy Israel) for there to be "peace."

Hamas asked Gazans to call the police if any masked men pretending to be security forces try to confiscate their property or harass them. It is unclear how the citizens would know if the masked men harassing them are from Hamas or are imposters. (h/t Israellycool)

Video of Hamas leader's Christian son

Fox News interviewed Masab Yousef, the son of a West Bank Hamas leader who converted to Christianity and moved to California. Here's the video:

Pavlov and the Terrorists (Golden Oldie)

As my four year blogoversary approaches, I continue to look for interesting older articles that most of you haven't seen. (In fact, three years ago this blog had not yet hit 10,000 total visitors.)

Here is one of my better old postings, from July 25, 2005:

Pavlov and the Terrorists

Why do Palestinian leaders and press lie? Why did Palestinians switch from hijacking airplanes to package bombs to suicide bombs? Why did they seem to accept Camp David and then turn around and start the second intifada?

In short, why do Palestinian terrorists act so seemingly irrationally?

This question has been asked in various ways thousands of times over the decades. And in many cases, I have looked at these questions from a goal-oriented approach: if the Palestinian goal is to have an independent Palestinian state, none of the actions make sense. If the goal is the destruction of Israel, then all of their actions are consistent.

But one can also look at the problem, especially some of the specifics, with a behavioral approach. In short, actions that are rewarded tend to be repeated, while actions that cost more than their rewards tend to be abandoned.

As has been noted, Palestinian spokespeople and press lie continuously. Just to give two examples from the past week: they described the two murdered grandparents as "settlers" and they claimed that "witnesses" saw Gaza settlers kill a 12-year old Palestinian boy when it was later proved that it was Palestinians themselves who killed him.

If Israel's spokespeople lied, you can be sure that the world media would not hesitate to call them on it - and rightfully so. Israel's government and army have volumes of information on their websites and even a single purposeful error would make them useless.

But Palestinian media, even their English websites, are so full of holes that they are a joke. Their spokespeople have lied so often that they are completely unreliable. Yet the Western press continues to quote them seriously, without so much as a single caveat that they are known to have made up facts out of thin air in the past.

In short, lying works for Palestinians. It is rewarded with news stories that either never get retracted or get corrected so silently that the damage can never be undone. When a behavior is rewarded, it gets repeated; this is simple behavioral psychology.

On the flip side of the coin, Palestinian terrorists first made headlines with their famous series of airplane hijackings in the 1970s. For a while it got them rewarded with world press, and free publicity for their cause of destroying Israel. But soon, the reward turned into a punishment as the world governments who they wanted sympathy from turned against them. So they started their diplomatic offensive and abandoned explicit international terror, because the rewards had dried up.

For a while there, Israel could claim to have won the intifada war against Palestinian terrorists - Israel's building of the fence combined with pro-active targeted killings against terror leaders curtailed terror attacks dramatically. Terror leaders were in hiding and even the Palestinian people were turning against them in some circumstances.

But now, Israel has turned a punishment into a reward. The retreat from Gaza is the biggest reward that Palestinians could have asked for - it directly gives them a piece of what they always wanted, control over land that Jews had control over. No amount of doubletalk can deny that the Palestinian terrorists perceive that they are now being rewarded for terror. And as in countless other situations, the reward ensures that the behavior that caused the reward will continue.

The only way to stop terror, whether in Tel Aviv or London or Egypt, is to ensure that the cost is higher than the reward. "Proportional" and "measured"responses do not punish terror, it needs to be disproportionate and immediate.

This is how you train a dog, and this is how you train terrorists.

More Islamic science - Radiation from Mecca seen from space

It would be easy to say that the story I posted yesterday of the Muslim rumor that Apollo astronauts heard the Muslim call to prayer on the moon as being a bit unfair; that beliefs like these are not widespread and that one cannot blame a large number of people for the beliefs of an ignorant minority.

But what if you saw that Saudi Arabia TV had an Egyptian scientist saying similar things, in 2005?

From MEMRI TV:

The following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Center. Al-Majd TV aired this interview on January 16, 2005
Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: The centrality [of Mecca] has been proven scientifically. How? When they traveled to outer space and took pictures of the earth, they saw that it is a dark, hanging sphere. The man said, "Earth is a dark hanging sphere – who hung it?"

Interviewer: Who said that?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: [Neil] Armstrong. Armstrong was basically trying to say: Allah is the one who hung it. They discovered that Earth emits radiation, and they wrote about this on the web. They left the item there for 21 days, and then they made it disappear.

Interviewer: Why did they make it disappear?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: There was intent there…

Interviewer: So it may be said that this suppression of information was significant.

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It was very significant, since…the Ka'ba [in Mecca]… They said it emits radiation. This radiation is short-wave.

When they discovered this radiation, they started to zoom in, and they found that it emanates from Mecca – and, to be precise, from the Ka'ba.

Interviewer: My God!!

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It was said…

Interviewer: Does this radiation have an effect?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: They found that this radiation is infinite. When they reached Mars and began to take pictures, they found that the radiation continues beyond. They said that the wavelength known to us… or rather the shortness of the wavelength known to us… This radiation had a special characteristic: It is infinite, and I believe that the reason is that this radiation connects the [earthly] Ka'ba with the celestial Ka'ba.

Imagine that you are the North Pole and I am the South Pole – in the middle there's what is called the magnetic equilibrium zone. If you place a compass there, the needle won't move.

Interviewer: You mean that the pull is equal from both sides?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: Yes, and that's why it's called zero-magnetism zone, since the magnetic force has no effect there. That's why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier, and is less affected by Earth's gravity. That's why when you circle the Ka'ba, you get charged with energy.

Interviewer: Allah be praised.

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: Yes, this is a fact.
This is a scientific fact…
Interviewer: Because you are distant from…

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: Earth's magnetic fields have no effect on you in this case.

There's a study that proves that the black basalt rocks in Mecca are the oldest rocks in the world. This is the truth.

Interviewer: The oldest rocks? Yes. Has this been proved scientifically?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It's been scientifically proven, and the study has been published.

Interviewer: They took basalt rocks from Mecca…

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: …Basalt rocks from Mecca, and investigated the places where they were formed.

In the British Museum there are three pieces of the black stone [from the Ka'ba] …and they said that this rock didn't come from our solar system.

Another sick Saudi marriage

It seems to be a daily event:

UNAIZAH: In order to settle his debts, a Saudi father here married his eight-year-old daughter to a man in his 50s, who already has two wives, a local newspaper reported yesterday.
Details of the case came to light when the mother of the girl took it to the court calling for an abrogation of the marriage contract. The mother, who is estranged from the father, urged all concerned parties and the National Society for Human Rights to support her in canceling the marriage.
“This is an unmatched marriage, which will deprive our daughter of her childhood,” the mother said.
A source at the court said this is not the first case of its kind.
A court in Asir is currently considering a similar case in which a man married his 10-year-old daughter to a man in his 70s for SR170,000.

Legal child slavery, prostitution and rape.

Saudi married off his three little girls to old men

From Arab News:

The Wadi Bin-Hasheel court has postponed the trial of a Saudi father who married his 10-year-old daughter to a man in his 70s, as the bride and bridegroom failed to appear in court, Al-Madinah newspaper reported yesterday. The trial is now set for Sept. 10, as only the girl’s father, her divorced mother and her uncle attended the hearing. The judge ordered the police to bring the girl and her husband to the next session.

The newspaper said the girl’s uncle, who filed the case against the father, has refused all offers of mediation to drop the case, and said he would continue until justice was done.

The father had earlier married two of his young daughters to elderly men. A judge in the Grand Court of Riyadh divorced the first, who was 12, while the second ran away with her mother to a women’s shelter in Riyadh.

This does not appear to be the same as last month's story about the 64-year old man marrying a 10 year old in the Hail province. In that case, the father married the girl off on a dare.

I guess it isn't surprising that the girl gets to be raped nightly by her "husband" while the courts wait to see if the blissful newlyweds show up to the next hearing.

What a difference a couple of years makes

Russia, 2006: "One cannot justify the continued destruction by Israel of the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and in Palestinian territory"

Russia, 2008: "Our goal was not to harm civilians, and to the best of my knowledge, we only hit military installations. But like they say, war is war – and it could be that civilians were hurt, this also happens in Israel's military operations in Gaza, for example. "

It's 1947 again! Arabs demand "binational state" - or else

YNet:

A top negotiator said on Sunday Palestinians may demand to become part of a binational state with Israel, if the Jewish state continued to reject the borders they propose for a separate country.

Ahmed Qurei, who heads Palestinian negotiators in US-brokered talks with Israel, told Fatah party loyalists behind closed doors that a two-state solution could be achieved only if Israel met their demands to withdraw from all occupied land.

"The Palestinian leadership has been working on establishing a Palestinian state within the '67 borders," Qurei said, referring to land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that Israel captured in a 1967 war, which Palestinians seek for a state.

"If Israel continues to oppose making this a reality, then the Palestinian demand for the Palestinian people and its leadership (would be) one state, a binational state," he added at the meeting held in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Isn't it interesting that Palestinian Arabs, who supposedly are so desperate for their own independent state, keep acting as if they can "demand" everything they want with no concessions on their part from israel? One would think that they have won a war or something. But, no. All they have is the ever-present threat of terror and the continuing absence of any desire for real peace and compromise, as their list of "demands" keeps including things that Israel cannot and never will accept, no matter how left-wing the government is.

As Ami Isseroff notes:

The "1967 borders" were negotiated as armistice lines with Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Along the frontier with Jordan, they reflected no justice or demographic realities. They reflected the achievements of the Trans-Jordan Legion, made possible by arms and officers supplied by the British, in order to further their imperialist designs in the Middle East. No Arab country, and no Palestinian Arab group ever recognized or honored these borders while they existed. These borders, in the version of the Palestinian authority, put East Jerusalem in "Palestinian" territory. But officially, Jerusalem was to have been internationalized. As that was never implemented, owing to Arab and British opposition, Jerusalem is a subject for negotiation. It is unimaginable that Israel would agree to surrender all national rights to the old city of Jerusalem and environs. The Palestinian claim to Jerusalem seems to be based on the fact that no Jews lived there before 1967. Evidently, the Palestinians think the world has a short memory, and it might be so. The Jewish community of Jerusalem, which had lived there for hundreds for years, was forcibly "ethnically cleansed" from Jerusalem by a series of racist pogroms, culminating in the removal of the remaining Jewish population when the Jewish quarter was conquered by the British officered Trans-Jordan Legion in the Israel War of Independence (see The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem).

It is also noteworthy that the Arabs have made this demand before.

As the UN was arguing over what to do with Palestine in 1947, the Arab solution was simple: a single Arab state, period. As partition came closer to reality, the Arab counter-offer stayed the same, along with some words about how much they would protect the Jewish minority in this state. But this is only as long as Jews remain the minority - because they were adamant that no Jews would ever be allowed to immigrate.

Note all of the verbiage meant to assuage Western concerns that this would be another Arab state where the Jews would be delegated to permanent dhimmi status.

This was all a sham, of course, a last-ditch effort to stop a Jewish state from ever being created. The fact that the new Palestine would be pre-defined as "Arab" shows that democracy was the last thing on Arab minds.

And five days later, as it became clear that the world saw that the Arabs weren't serious about planning to treat the Jews fairly, the Arabs proved them right. Jamal Husseini gave an implicit threat against Jews in Arab countries if a Jewish state would exist:

On the same day, Egypt made the threat a bit more explicit, couching it in terms like "we of course want to protect our Jews, but if a Jewish state turns into reality, well, we cannot be responsible for what our hot-headed people do:"

Qurei is following in the exact footsteps of his Arab forefathers - not accepting compromise and threatening to kill Jews if he doesn't get exactly what he demands.

Today's PalArab news

Mahmoud Darwish was the leading Palestinian Arab poet who died over the weekend. His burial is being politicized as some of his friends are demanding that he be buried in pre-1967 Israel, not Ramallah.

Fatah is mulling abandoning Gaza altogether. If they do, will they still be sending 58% of their budget to Gaza?

Palestine Today is reporting on secret European talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia about the common threat from Iran - including Israel offering advice on Saudi defenses and intelligence cooperation.

A long standing feud between two families in Beit Lahia is apparently over as they decided to have two members get married. We'll see how well the ceremony goes before passing judgment.

Tunnel collapses!

Yesterday there was a tunnel collapse between Rafah and Egypt. Initial reports claimed 6 dead; the latest reports say there are 3 dead and seven still missing, so I am adjusting the self-death count accordingly until we hear more.

But meanwhile there was another tunnel collapse this morning, killing a 22-year old who was in the process of digging it.

On August 1, five were killed in a major collapse but I didn't count them because of Ha'aretz reports that Egypt had caused the collapse. Yet in reports about yesterday's tunnel collapse in Palestinian Arab media they did not refer to the earlier collapse as being the fault of Egypt, although they have accused Egypt of pumping poison gas in the tunnels in the past.

The tunnel industry is booming, and a Gaza man even stocked his zoo with animals smuggled under the border, including lions and monkeys that were drugged and dragged through tunnels (not to mention "frilly underwear.") Meanwhile, demand for goods that Israel has allowed into Gaza has been reduced greatly, while more exotic items are coming daily.

Which begs the question: if Gazans are still dying daily because of the "siege" (the latest claim in PalArabic media is about 230 dead since last year), why are they not smuggling sick people into Egypt?

I guess their lives aren't worth as much to Gazans as having a couple of monkeys in a dusty zoo.

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is downwardly adjusted for now to 147.

UPDATE: A second dead man from today's collapse, possibly the two are a father and son. 148.