Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The cluelessness of the FGM moonbats

The photos from the latest Gaza Moonbat Publicity Tour are now available. They prove, as if it still needs proving, how clueless these self-proclaimed "human rights activists" are.

Here are some of the pictures, the clueless FGM captions, and the captions that they should have used:

"These strawberries should be on sale in Europe"
There is a surplus of fruit and vegetables in Gaza, ensuring that no one is starving.

"A former setelment" [sic]
There are still fences around former Israeli settlements, ensuring that ordinary residents of Gaza don't benefot from them at all. Many are now terrorist training camps.

"Settlements had the best land"
There is nothing stopping Gazans from building farms that are just as productive as those the Israelis built up in Gaza. But even after the Israelis abandoned the land that they worked so hard on, the Palestinian Arab leaders keep their population living in crowded cities and do not allow them to build new communities.

"Our constant police escort"

Even though we tell the world how peaceful and wonderful Gazans are, and how much we respect the leaders of Hamas, we had no freedom of movement nor the ability to find out anything on our own about how ordinary Gazans feel. We were used for propaganda purposes by terrorist groups during our entire trip who used force to make sure that we don't do anything they wouldn't like.

"Lubna and Prime Minister Ismail Haniya"
Our brainwashing is so complete that we regard the leader of a terrorist organization, responsible for the deaths and injuries of hundreds of Israelis, as a respectible human being. After all, he is wearing a suit and tie and he treats us, his useful idiots, with seeming respect while he laughs at us behind our backs. The explicit anti-semitism in the Hamas charter does not bother us in the least, and even if it did, we wouldn't dare mention it to Haniyeh because, deep down, we are afraid of him too. We'd rather stay on his side.

"There was a building boom after Oslo"

When Palestinian Arabs stop their terror attacks, there is an immediate benefit to them economically, and there always has been. The Intifada was the worst thing to happen to our friends the Palestinian Arabs as it destroyed their economy and their livelihoods, which were dependent on trade with and jobs from Israel and from Israeli settlers in Gaza. Now they are again led by thugs and murderers, whom they continue to cheer. But we will not criticize the terror attacks to our gracious hosts or to the world. We pretend to be against all forms of violence but in fact we wholeheartedly support what terrorists euphemistically call the "resistance."

I have yet to find a single statement on the Free Gaza website condemning Qassam rocket attacks that was actually made by Free Gaza members (they will repeoduce B'Tselem documents that mention the Qassams negatively, but our "peace activist" friends are only for certain kinds of peace.

The Syrian snake eating girls

Two years ago there was a minor kerfuffle in Miami when the Israeli Consul General in Miami sent out a flyer, apparently without authorization from Israel's Foreign Ministry:

Members of the Miami Jewish community were shocked last week to receive an official email from the city’s Israeli Consulate featuring an academic article describing Syrian "barbarism and cruelty," authored by the Consul General Dr. Yitzhak Ben Gad.

The essay, which Ben Gad sent without approval and which directly counters Israel’s official stance, demonizes Syria by graphically describing barbaric scenes which its author claims are typical Syrian practices: girls slaying snakes with their teeth and soldiers strangling puppies to drink their blood.

He alleges that at the time Syrian television showed adolescent girls training with the Ba’ath party militia caressing snakes while Assad and senior party members gazed at them approvingly. Ben Gad embellishes a graphic scene in which the girls bite the snakes and skin them with their teeth, blood dripping down their chins, and then the Syrian militiamen drink the blood. We certainly live in tough surroundings, the Consul General writes, as Syrians are well known for their barbarity.

The Foreign Ministry’s response avowed unequivocally that Ben Gad’s racist line contradicted Israel’s official stance. “If anyone else in the world raised such accusations against Israelis, people would decry them as anti-Semitic attacks. Israel’s line of publicity generally employs positive and updated messages and shuns demonization,” the ministry said.

A little searching finds corroboration of at least part of the story. From Time in 1983:

At graduation ceremonies for the "Revolutionary Youth" group, teen-age girls still demonstrate their newly acquired survival skills by biting live snakes behind the head to kill them and then cooking the reptiles over a campfire, to the delight of guests.

I remember seeing such a video many years ago on a Sunday morning Christian TV show, showing Syrian girls biting snakes in celebration of an anniversary of the 1973 war in front of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, but had never been able to find any video on line.

Until now: (Warning: very disturbing. You only need to see the first two minutes. )

The greatest insult

If Martians decided that the biggest insult would be to call people "Mercurians," and if a Martian then went right up to you and called you a "hot-blooded, two-eyed Mercurian fleej," while curling one of his antennae in disgust, would it matter to you? Would you be filled with rage and decide to destroy Mars in retaliation? Chances are that you would laugh it off as if the insulter was a child.

Now imagine your Martian would-be tormenter returns to his home planet and starts bragging to his pals,"You should have seen that Earthling! He was stunned! He didn't know what hit him!" while his compatriots give him a series of high-threes.

But as they monitor the Earth TV transmissions, they see that the hated five-fingered newscasters look at the incident as a minor, laughable act of a deranged Martian rather than being deeply insulted.

The Martians, of course, need to let the Earthlings know how badly they lost this skirmish and how they should be ashamed to be in the same solar system as their much-superior antagonists. So they write op-eds in Earthling-language Martian media, that might sound something like this:

Bush made a light-hearted remark, a joke even, as the second shoe sailed by, just past his head — "It’s a size ten!" — in part to ease the tension, in part to reduce the gravity of someone throwing anything at the President of the United States, but in large part because he had no idea how deeply he was being insulted.
If the man had thrown a stone or even a grenade — the former more dangerous than a shoe, the latter potentially lethal, it would have been a more respectful gesture; an attack on the president's physical safety but not on his honor.

There are two parties to every insult - the insulter and the insulted. For an insult to be effective, the person who is being insulted is the one who needs to realize it, not the insulter.

The Arab world is so psyched about the shoe thrower, utterly uncomprehending that the West looks at them as if they are mentally deficient to make such a big deal over this. And since they are emotionally attached to the idea of dishonoring their greatest satanic enemy, they are desperately trying to let all of us know that we should be deeply shamed. Because what kind of a victory is it when the loser doesn't know he lost?

The paradox is that it is their very obsession with this incident that proves that they are the losers; that to the Arab world, symbolism is more important than reality. The fact that Americans don't feel shame over this incident is in fact much more shameful for the would-be victors, because it shows them that what they consider victories don't gain them a single thing in the real world, except a momentary imaginary boost of self-esteem.

On the difficulty of posting a comment on Al Jazeera

I just saw a stupid article in Al Jizz, once again trying to make Jews look like Nazis and Gazans look like Jews.

So I tried to write a quick comment:

Genocide? Are you crazy?

Last I checked, Gaza's population was still increasing.

I read the Palestinian Arab press daily and have yet to find a single example of a person who starved to death. In fact, the UNDP director just stated explicitly that "This is not a humanitarian crisis. It's an economic crisis, a political crisis, but it's not a humanitarian crisis. People aren't starving."

Before you throw around terms like "genocide" make sure you have a clue what the word actually means. More Jews were killed daily during the Holocaust than Palestinian Arabs that have been killed in years. To even hint at equating the two shows nothing but pure anti-semitism.

Al Jazeera's algorithm rejected the posting because it contained the following words:

genocide crazy arab undp starving before jews arabs

It looks like commenters can't even use words that Al Jazeera's columnists use!

Today's PalArab news

A "military court" in Gaza sentenced a man to death for "collaboration" with Israel. Human Rights Watch just came out with a report decrying the 11 people sentenced to death in the West Bank and Gaza this year, not including this latest example, most of them for the same "crime."

Islamic Jihad again reiterated it has no interest in maintaining a "truce" with Israel. Of course, they have been ignoring the truce for a month and a half now.

There are reports that Jimmy Carter was giving political advice to Hamas leaders in Damascus, suggesting that if they just stop rockets for two more months that they'd have a more pliant government to deal with in Israel. Don't worry about Israeli threats to invade Gaza; they are just election propaganda, Carter said.

Another Hamas raid at al-Azhar University, attacking female students while in class.

Three stories from Saudi Arabia

Saudi women who get international scholarships have problems getting and staying married to Saudi men:

“Most men prefer young docile girls and with this kind of prevalent marital environment, traveling abroad for married women is an idea that many are still not used to. Not to forget that a man’s ego also plays a role; he might not tolerate the idea if his wife becomes more successful, his male superiority might get affected...

"Most of these women don’t get married easily, since they are used to receiving respect and being treated at par with men abroad, and so their level of tolerance to any type of ill-treatment is low. Its hard for them to find men who would treat them the way they are used to.”

In a possibly related story, monkeys terrorize a girls' school in Saudi Arabia.

A group of monkeys has been wreaking havoc on Al-Ajer Intermediate and Secondary School for Girls in Tandaha in eastern Khamis Mushayt. The monkey scare has forced panicky students and teachers to stay away from the school altogether.
The school’s principal has sought the help of municipal authorities to restore order after piles of monkey waste were found in the school’s courtyard a day after the initial attack on Saturday.

Saudi Arabia just opened its first movie theatre in 30 years!

After a long wait of 30 years, public cinema is back in Saudi Arabia. Using the occasion of Eid Al-Adha, Rowad Media and Kawthar Foundation and Production screened a show for the public at the King Abdul Aziz Cultural Center in Abraq Al-Raghama, attended by a large number of interested men and women who watched the comedy film “Manahi.”

The 2008 Splodie Awards

It is time for the much-anticipated Second Annual Splodie Awards, where we honor the best of the year's "work accidents" and other self-inflicted deaths in the peaceful Palestinian Arab areas.

Without further ado...

Best house explosion: A house exploded in Gaza on February 15th, killing an Islamic Jihad member and his entire family of 8. Apparently, the house was also the site of a missile factory, as eyewitnesses saw debris from the huge explosion that looked like Qassam rockets. Which just goes to show - sometimes, they really are home-made rockets!

Almost as bad as sand in your swimsuit: A beachfront Hamas training area was rocked by an explosion on March 20, killing two Hamas members. Hamas claimed that it was merely two really, really bad cases of sunburn for the vacationing jihadists.

Best place for Farfour the Mouse to play: On May 11, a Hamas member who was trying to bring some explosives to Israel exploded at the Gaza border fence. The Hamas press release said that he had been killed in the "playground of death" while preparing for a Jihad mission. Well, the UN does complain that Gaza doesn't have enough playgrounds.

Second best house explosion: In June, around 7 Hamas members attained paradise when the house of the Hamouda family in Beit Hanoun blew up. Unless there is a clause in a hadith somewhere that you don't get into heaven unless you kill some Jews. Boy, that would suck, wouldn't it?

The pen is mightier than the sword award: In October of 2007, Reuters credulously reported that Hamas was building a "media city" at the site of the former Israeli community of Ganei Tal in Gaza. They even showed a picture of a building being built there. Well, in July, a large explosion destroyed a building in that same community, killing two Hamas members. It must have been those highly-combustible 8mm tapes.

True truce award: Right after the "calm" started with Israel, a Hamas member was killed and his 17-year old brother severely injured when a bomb they were preparing blew up a bit earlier than intended. It was a moderate bomb, though, so Israel had no need to be concerned.

Best solution to the Gaza overpopulation problem: Hamas decided that the best way to train for urban battles was to

use live fire - and missiles - in a residential neighborhood of Gaza City. Residents panicked and many houses were damaged. But, Gaza is so crowded, what choice does Hamas have? Anyone who complains must be a collaborator, anyway. (A similar live-fire exercise did kill a civilian a couple of months later.)

Bada bing, bada boom award: A senior Hamas member, along with four others, were fragged at an explosion at the El Hilal Cafe. They were warned not to criticize the soup. It is, after all, a matter of honor.

Cyber warfare award: One of those nests of evil and vice, an Internet cafe, was targeted by a very religious and moral man who couldn't stand the idea of something so vile in the middle of the beautiful place known as Gaza. He managed to blow it up, thank Allah. Unfortunately, he was still inside, giving a new meaning to the phrase "distributed computing."

"Can you dig it? Um, no": A smuggling tunnel collapsed in Rafah in August, killing 5, and another one a week later killing 6 more. At least they had a really good accidental death plan from their employer.

The dead can't complain award: A bus filled with happy Hamas supporters took exception to the Islamic Jihad member who asked them not to sing when they were passing a funeral home. So they killed him. But they were very respectful about it.

Best bomb disposal of the year: A bomb was discovered near Gaza City and the Hamas police were called in to defuse it. The explosives expert carefully transported the device to the police station. There, surrounded by other explosives and weapons, he managed to detonate the bomb, killing himself and wounding others, as well as causing secondary explosions. I guess that Hamas experts have much more experience building bombs than dismantling them.

(Last year's awards can be seen here.)

Iranians calling to assassinate Mubarak

This goes a little beyond "regime change..."

From MEMRI:

Iran's attacks and accusations against Egypt and Saudi Arabia have recently intensified. In early December, Iran's leading conservative government dailies Kayhan and Jomhouri-ye Eslami accused the Egyptian and Saudi regimes of treason, and called on their peoples to topple their regimes. Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari, who is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, praised Khaled Islambouli, the assassin of the late Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat, and called to follow his example. At the same time, student demonstrations were held in Tehran, during which protesters called for killing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and threw firebombs at the Egyptian interest office.

Kayhan editor Shari'atmadari wrote in Kayhan's December 2, 2008 editorial: "...The absence of [Sadat's assassin] the martyr Khaled Islambouli, God bless his soul, is sorely felt. Many more should follow his example. "

And, since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a sign from an anti-Egypt rally from Iran's FARS news agency:

Not much subtle about that.

Links!

I'm going to be traveling this week and posts will be sporadic. To help tide you over, check out:

Dr. Nasrallah! at Judeopundit

On the Road Again and What medical crisis? at Backspin

Severe human rights violations in Gaza from ZioNation

Where's Waldo, Islamic edition (h/t Israellycool)

The Energizer ...Rabbi? at Daled Amos

Daled Amos also weighs in on the NYT and defining terror

CAMERA notices some anti-semitism in the London Times' coverage of Mumbai

Iran's brain drain at Pajamas Media

This morning's peaceful PalArab news

Israel started releasing some 250 Palestinian Arab prisoners today, including people from Gaza. Hamas and Islamic Jihad welcomed these confidence-building measures and promised to reduce rockets and other terror attacks.

Just kidding. They said that this prisoner release was proof of the effectiveness of the "resistance" and that they would work to intensify those actions.

Israel today opened the crossing points to Gaza for about 100 trucks of goods - 26 for UNRWA, 24 for the "private sector", and some 40 trucks filled with wheat and other food and many more filled with fuel. This despite yesterday's Qassam and mortar attacks.

Hamas abducted three children in the Jabalya camp, the oldest of whom was 13, including two brothers. Witnesses say that the boys were thrown into a car while playing and driven away.

Another person died from the collapse of a smuggling tunnel. About twelve were injured in a fire in another tunnel.

The Palestinian Arab press is ecstatic over the Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush yesterday. Videos of the event are all over, and jokes about it are being repeated. For example:

President Bush asked President Abbas and journalists accompanying him to come to the White House on Friday without shoes.

The security services raided shoe factories in Hebron in the West Bank after the discovery of a shoe store near the Press Syndicate, and the journalist union denies the union/warehouse relationship.

The Union of Italian footwear manufacturers sent a letter of protest to the Iraqi government and will sue the journalist because his throwing their shoes was an insult to them.

[This is in the format of terrorist press releases - EoZ] In an official statement, the Hebron Shoe Association congratulates the successful operation in Iraq...

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 219.

Carnival barking

I have been remiss in mentioning the carnivals that have linked to stories of mine lately.

This weekend saw Soccer Dad's Shiny Happy Dhimmi #5 which linked to this post of mine.

Haveil Havalim #196, at the former site of Jack's Shack, includes a link to this.

And while it isn't a carnival, Sultan Knish's Friday Afternoon Roundup included links to two posts of mine.

Check them out!

Cash in Gaza: Cause and effect

Last week Israel started transferring cash to Gaza so that the PA could pay salaries. Supposedly none would go to Hamas.

And now, Hamas suddenly has cash!

Ma'an reports that Hamas distributed some $130,000 in cash to the needy over the weekend.

But, of course, none of Hamas' newfound cash could possibly go towards rockets and explosives, could it?

Iran's creative reaction to its economic crisis

The Globe and Mail reports:

Of the Middle East's oil producers, Iran, OPEC's second-largest producer, is the hardest hit of all. With daily production of about 2.5 million barrels, Iran loses about $1-billion a year for every dollar drop in the price of oil.

As oil goes, so go Mr. Ahmadinejad's political fortunes. And while his vaunted nuclear program is not immediately threatened, those in the West who seek to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons should gain considerable economic leverage as a result of the financial crisis.

As recently as last month, Mr. Ahmadinejad put on a brave face, boasting that Iran was capable of enduring oil prices as low as $5 a barrel. But last week the Iranian President was forced to admit his government will have to come up with a new budget, based on more realistic price estimates.

With inflation at about 30 per cent and unemployment at 10 per cent, Mr. Ahmadinejad has run out of political options, says David Menashri, chair of modern Iranian studies at Tel Aviv University. "Thirty-per-cent inflation is a terrible hardship for someone on a fixed income," he said, noting that "800,000 people are added to Iran's work force every year; the government can find jobs for only about half of them."

So Iran came up with a creative way to slow down its losses - close all markets for a brand new "holiday":

All markets in Iran will be closed on Monday as a protest to the crimes of the Zionist regime in the Gaza Strip.

Releasing a statement on Saturday, the Basij department of the merchants’ union announced the merchants will close their shops on Monday throughout the country to show their resentment to Israel over its brutal measures in Gaza.

It isn't clear how closing markets will help Gazans, or Iranians, but it does save a day of expenses in an economy that is heavily subsidized by the government.

NYT: Jews in Judea/Samaria cannot be victims of terror

In an otherwise halfway decent article about the use of the word "terrorism" by the media in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, we see this sickening unofficial decision by the New York Times:

James Bennet, now the editor of The Atlantic, was The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2001 through 2004. After his return, he wrote a two-page memo to Chira on the use of “terrorism” and “terrorist” that is still cited by editors, though the paper has no formal policy on the terms. His memo said it was easy to call certain egregious acts terrorism “and have the whole world agree with you.” The problem, he said, was where to stop before every stone-throwing Palestinian was called a terrorist and the paper was making a political statement.
Bennet wrote that he initially avoided the word terrorism altogether and thought it more useful to describe an attack in as vivid detail as possible so readers could decide their own labels. But he came to believe that never using the word “felt so morally neutral as to be a little sickening. The calculated bombing of students in a university cafeteria, or of families gathered in an ice-cream parlor, cries out to be called what it is,” he wrote.
The memo said he settled on a rough rule: He would use the words, when they fit, to describe attacks within Israel’s 1948 borders but not in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, which Israel and the Palestinians have been contending over since Israel took them in 1967. When a gunman infiltrated a settlement and killed a 5-year-old girl in her bed, Bennet did not call it terrorism. “All I could do was default to my first approach and describe the attack and the victims as vividly as I could.”

Now, why would victims of terror in the disputed territories be considered any less human than those within the Green Line?

Certainly the terrorists don't make such distinctions between Jews on either side of the line. Certainly the victims are just as "civilian" on both sides of the line. And certainly mainstream Arab thought considers Israel to be occupying Arab land equally on both sides of the line, although they might be more willing to temporarily accept an Israel that gets diminishingly smaller with each passing year and decade.

If you define terror by its perpetrators, there is no difference. If you define it by the victims, there is no difference.

The only possible reason is that the New York Times feels that Jewish women and children who live on the eastern side of an arbitrary armistice line, to a small extent, deserve to be attacked. It appears that the NYT holds that terrorists have more justification when they attack Jews who live in un-politically correct portions of the Land of Israel.

So while the august Newspaper of Record wrings its hands over the use of the word "terror" in a way that makes a political judgment, they have just justified doing exactly that.

(h/t Backspin)

Morning links (updated)

Some really good stuff out there this morning:

Anti-Christian persecution by Palestinian Arabs, in the Jerusalem Post (h/t Backspin)

Bookmark this one, from the Globe and Mail: (also h/t Backspin:)

In fact, coupled with a large surplus of fruit and vegetables intended for markets in Israel, the vast majority of people here aren't wanting for food.
Reports that as many as 50 per cent of children are suffering from malnutrition are exaggerations, says Khaled Abdel Shaafi, director the United Nations Development Program.

"This is not a humanitarian crisis," he said. "It's an economic crisis, a political crisis, but it's not a humanitarian crisis. People aren't starving."

Sultan Knish asks "What does being Pro-Israel mean, anyway?"

A scholarly paper on the role of blogs in the 2006 Lebanon War "fauxtography" scandal, specifically discussing Little Green Footballs.

'Iranian ship to Gaza has hidden agenda' from the Jerusalem Post

Hamas mocks Gilad Shalit in rally at Haaretz

And, in an unintentionally telling headline from the Arab Times of Kuwait, we see Iranians chant ‘death to Israel’ (and 'death to America') in support of Gaza Palestinians. Notice that supporting Gazans, in the Arab and Muslim mindset, necessarily means the destruction of Israel.