Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, December 20, 2008

50,000 liters of fuel for Gaza up in smoke

A tanker containing an astonishing 50,000 liters of fuel, meant to be smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, exploded in El Arish. The explosion destroyed four homes.

I'm sure it is Israel's fault, somehow.

Weekly Bilin protesters now throw shoes

From Ma'an:

Four Israeli soldiers were reported injured along with eight protesters and two journalists at an anti-wall demonstration in the West Bank village of Bil’in, near Ramallah.

A statement from the protest group claimed that demonstrators marched after Friday prayers, carrying Palestinian flags and banners calling for an end to the Israeli occupation. During the event, two journalists were injured by rubber-coated bullets along with six others, the group claimed.

Meanwhile, Israeli sources were reporting on Friday afternoon that four soldiers had been injured during the same event, although the reports were non-specific.

When soldiers fired teargas canisters toward the crowd, participants reportedly began throwing shoes toward the Israeli army stationed behind cement blocks.

It's nice to see this shoe thing catch on. (It appears doubtful that the shoes are what caused the Israeli soldiers to be injured; usually that comes much faster projectiles.)

Let's make a deal: let the PalArabs change the payload of Qassams, mortars and Grad rockets to be shoes instead of explosives, and Israelis will pretend to be highly humiliated.

Egypt: "We have to keep out Gazans for their own good"

A telling interview:

[Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Husam Zaki,] responding to the recent calls from Lebanon and Egypt to open the Rafah crossing, said that the decision was not one under Israeli control, but rather an Egyptian decision that took into account the best interests of Gazans.

Zaki defended Egypt’s policy saying that by opening the Gaza Strip crossing Egypt would allow Israel to wash their hand of Gaza, and the burden of the occupation would fall on Egypt.

Foisting the consequences of the Israeli occupation and siege of Gaza onto Egypt would put the issue of Palestinian autonomy in Gaza at an impasse. The only result of opening Rafah would be an end to the Palestinian cause, Zaki said.

You see? Gazans would want to fan out and live throughout the Arab world if they are given half a chance (40% said so in a recent poll.) If Egypt would open the border, they would inundate Egypt and want to become citizens, just like any other Arabs can become citizens. Gaza would no longer be an Israeli problem but rather an Arab problem, one that Arabs are extraordinarily capable of solving - and completely unwilling to.

Even after decades of indoctrination and forced nationalism, a large percentage of Gazans would not want to stay to live in "Palestine." They are Arabs, they are Muslims, they are members of their tribes and families - but they still do not identify strongly as "Palestinians," and the rest of the Arab world knows it.

So the Arab world has been telling themselves this twisted idea that their systematic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs is really for their own good - to keep them "united"and to keep the cause alive. Because the only thing that keeps it alive is keeping it a problem and forcing Palestinian Arabs to live as second-class citizens in the Arab world, often still in so-called "refugee camps."

The subtext from the Arabs is that they know what is better for "Palestinians" than the PalArabs know themselves. This is astonishingly insulting, but no one complains about it because the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs subscribe to the same twisted mentality themselves. The losers, as always, are the actual Palestinian Arabs who have been forced to stay in their situation by their "helpful" Arab brethren.

The Arab states that fund the Clinton Foundation

From the NYT:

The governments of Saudi Arabia and Norway, the Dubai Foundation and the business moguls Bill Gates, Stephen Bing, Haim Saban and Robert L. Johnson are among the biggest financial backers of former President Bill Clinton’s foundation over the last decade, according to a complete donor list published for the first time Thursday morning.

Here are the names of nations that have given money to the foundation, with the amounts they gave:

$10,000,001 to $25,000,000
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

$5,000,001 to $10,000,000
Government of Norway

$1,000,001 to $5,000,000
Dubai Foundation
Friends of Saudi Arabia
State of Kuwait
State of Qatar
The Sultanate of Oman

There are many other donors, of course, but in terms of donors that specifically represent countries, Arab states are heavily over-represented.

It will be remembered that a significant portion of The Carter Center donors also represent specifically Arab interests.

Surprise! 60% of British Muslim schools linked to extremists

From the Daily Telegraph:

Britain's Muslim schools have been sharply criticised in a controversial draft report commissioned by a leading think tank which suggests that over 60 per cent of them are linked to potentially dangerous Islamic fundamentalists.
An early version of the report, entitled When Worlds Collide, alleges that of the 133 Muslim primary and secondary schools it surveyed, 82 (61.6 per cent) have connections or direct affiliations to fundamentalists. The 133 schools are in the private sector but supposedly subject to Ofsted inspection.

The report also claims that some of these schools teach "repugnant" beliefs about the wickedness of Western society and Jews.
Perhaps the most alarming finding of the draft I've seen is that so many of these schools (including ones with no connections to political extremism) are bricking up their pupils behind a wall of Koranic injunctions and Sharia law.

The schools known as Darul Ulooms, which base their curriculum on a seventeenth-century Indian teaching system, include very few secular subjects, claims the report. It says: "Their aim is not to prepare pupils for life in the wider world, but to give them the tools for a more limited existence inside the Muslim enclaves."

The consequences for bright Muslim British girls are absolutely dire. Lively intellects are being destroyed and brilliant careers cut off before they can begin. To quote the report again: “Every year, an incalculable number of Muslim teenagers and young women are lost to the wider world that informs their citizenship.”

Multiculturalism is a one-way street.

PalArab poll results

The JMCC took some recent polls of the Palestinian Arab territories. While most of the raw results are not available on their site, there were some interesting results reported:

A plurality in both the West Bank and Gaza did not want the "truce" renewed, saying that it did not serve their "national interests."

Fatah is trusted more than Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza, by a wide margin. This is perhaps the best refutation for those who claim that Israel's actions are radicalizing Gazans.

On the other hand, Haniyeh is slightly trusted more than Abbas by Gazans. Even so, even in Gaza more would would vote for Abbas than Haniyeh in elections.

"Only" 6.9% of Palestinian Arabs feel that husbands have the right to beat their wives. Keep in mind that half of those polled were women, so the percentage of men who feel this way is probably closer to 13-14%.

Similarly, 41% say that a husband is not obligated to tell his wife that he is marrying another. Almost certainly a great majority of men feel this way.

A majority of PalArabs feel that women wearing the hijab should be mandatory. In Gaza 65% answered that way while in the West Bank it was 47.6%.

55.1% of respondents said that Islamic Sharia law must be the sole source for legislation, while 40.1% said it should be a source of legislation. Only 2.4% felt that sharia law should have nothing to do with civil law.

Yet only a bare majority regularly pray in mosques.

Today's PalArab news

All of the terror groups in Gaza rejected Jimmy Carter's suggestion to continue the fake "calm." Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and the DFLP met on Tuesday night to coordinate their terror activities with each other, and to annex other armed forces, including Fatah.

Which means that when the next Free Gaza boat, due on Saturday, arrives, when they meet Hamas leaders it is the same as if they are meeting the leaders of every terror group in Gaza. They'll be smiling, though, during the photo-ops.

Rafah's smugglers have doubled and tripled the price of disposable diapers, bringing accusations of price gouging and market manipulation.

The truth about the "truce"

I just went back and noted on my November "cease fire" calendar the days during November and the end of October that Israel allowed goods to enter Gaza.

The world has a short memory and seems to think that Israel has been starving Gazans for months. Israel's Foreign Ministry, however, keeps track (usually on a weekly basis) of the goods that were sent into Gaza. For example:

The week of September 7-12, 2008
299 trucks unloaded goods at Sufa crossing.
390 trucks unloaded goods at Karni crossing.
Over 19,655 tons of goods were delivered to the Gaza Strip, including about 2442 tons of cement, and the rest humanitarian aid such as food, medicines, agricultural equipment, and school supplies.
Erez crossing: 97 patients and escorts crossed into Israel for medical treatment.

Fuel (Nahal Oz):
121,000 liters of gasoline
1,199,920 liters of diesel fuel for transportation
2,509,610 liters of heavy diesel fuel for the power station
1,228 tons of cooking gas

In the early days of the truce, when there was still sporadic rocket fire, Israel would routinely close the crossings for a day after every rocket and reopen the crossings the next day. During September and October, when rocket fire virtually ceased, Israel shipped goods almost every weekday except for Jewish holidays. The aid that was shipped was of a much greater variety and quantity than was shipped before the "truce." Looking at the numbers, one can see that each truck from Israel contains between 10 and 20 tons of aid. (Compare the one ton of aid that the Free Gaza freaks say they brought on their last ship to the 5000 tons of aid Israel sent through in December, even in the midst of the rocket barrages.)

In other words, Israel kept to its terms of the truce; increasing the amount of goods to Gaza and only stopping them when rocket fire resumed. Hamas and their useful idiot Western friends are pretending that the current limits on aid are something new, when in fact this has been Israeli policy throughout the six months of the so-called cease-fire.

The cause and effect is clear and consistent: when rockets aren't being shot, Gazans get aid. It is as simple as that, and these facts are documented. Those "peace activists" who pretend to care about Gazans and yet stay silent about the rockets care neither about Gazan lives nor about peace.

The tattered, fake "cease fire" officially ends on Friday.

The extraordinary intelligence of the PalArab press

Today, a Qassam missile injured three people in Sderot, among a barrage of at least 24 missiles today.

The PA-based Firas Press identified the victims as....soldiers.

Since the Israeli press didn't say that the injured were soldiers, one wonders what made Firas come to that conclusion. They must have embedded reporters in Sderot.

Or maybe they are simply a tiny bit embarrassed that their people purposefully target civilians, and would rather pretend that this is an honorable wartime battle rather than a terror attack whose targets are women and children.

Nah, they're not anti-semitic

From MEMRI:

Filmgoers Walk Out on Film that is "Too Favorable to the Jews"
Tunisian filmgoers walked out 30 minutes into the film "A Secret," which deals with a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied France, claiming that it was "too favorable to the Jews." Filmgoers told aljazeera.net, the website of the Al-Jazeera satellite TV station, that they wondered why Europe was so favorable to the Jews, and France in particular, whose president they described as the "pro-Jewish Sarkozy."

The Tunisian organizer of the festival, Ibrahim Al-Latif, blamed the European delegation, which was responsible for the choice of films. One young filmgoer told aljazeera.net that the decision to screen "A Secret" led some people "to feel that the European delegation, which oversees the festival, is under Jewish control."(1)

Al-Sabah: Opening with the Film Was Not Appropriate Given the Criminal Siege on Gaza
An article by Muhsin Al-Zaghlawi in the mainstream Tunisian Al-Sabah daily opined that "not only was the timing of the opening of the festival wrong, as it came together with the tightening of the criminal Israeli siege on Gaza and the unprecedented worsening of Palestinian suffering, but also the opening film chosen by the organizers… was not appropriate in the view of many observers…

"A large number of the Tunisian public present at the opening were surprised by the events [related in] the film, and its melodramatic narrative, which emphasized the tragic aspect of these events. The film tried to show the Jews as though they were the only people in history who have been subjected to injustice and against whom were committed crimes and massacres. Thus some of them decided to walk out of the film and leave the area, in plain view of the guests and the organizers…

"[This was an act of] protest… against the Tunisian and European panel who organized the festival, who did not make a good choice – if we are to assume that their intentions were good – and shocked the festival's public, right at the opening, with a politicized film that, regardless of its content, does damage to the festival's orientation, and comes close to removing it from its general cultural-artistic framework and brings it into a maze of [political] instrumentalism that is far from innocent.

"The oppressive Israeli siege underway these days against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which is an [ominous] herald of a humanitarian disaster, is an event that must necessarily cast a shadow on any festival – cultural, intellectual, or other – taking place anywhere. The festival's organizers… should have taken this into account, and not given a film dealing with the Jews' historical tragedy in the Holocaust the honor of opening the festival… especially since the criminal Israeli siege against the Gaza Strip is now at its ugliest and most inhumane."(2)

Opposition Paper: The Zionist Entity Exploits Any Occasion to Remind the World of the Holocaust
A similar article appeared on November 28, 2008, in Al-Watan, the official organ of the opposition Unionist Democratic Union party.

"In these days, when voices have risen to break the siege on Gaza, the 15th annual European film festival in Tunis opens with a film that 'deals with… the tragic situation of the Jews in the Second World War, through [the lives of] Jewish families in France, and [deals with] the victims of the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis…'

"It is well known that the Zionist entity and the Jewish lobbies, which are spread throughout the entire world, always try to exploit any occasion and any stage, no matter how trivial, to 'remind' [the world] of the oppression suffered by the Jews, especially during the Second World War at the hands of the Nazis, in an attempt to cover up the crimes that the Zionist entity is perpetrating in the occupied Palestinian lands. These are crimes that destroy everything: forests of olive trees, houses, the tyrannical siege [whose victims reach] the point of death, the air raids, the assassinations, and so on.

"What is being perpetrated in Gaza is a true crime by any measure or standard, but nonetheless the world looks on and 'monitors' [the situation]. And in Tunisia, with the [full] knowledge of the Ministry of Culture, a film is being shown about the oppression of the Jews told through 'the story of a child in search of his identity' – whereas the children of Gaza, because of the siege, can't find milk or anything to allay their hunger…"(3)

Even though Arabs will strenuously argue that they are not anti-semitic, and that they can distinguish between Jews and Zionists, a film that has nothing to do with Israel is decried as a Zionist plot to distract the world from Gaza. To their minds, any sympathy for Jews is forbidden, ostensibly because of "Gaza" (this week's excuse for naked Jew-hatred.)

Another Fateh.net blog starts!

I just found out about someone else (besides me) who started their own blog on the fateh.net domain, Destroy.fateh.net.

Check it out!

Latest on that Egyptian/Israeli peace

The Los Angeles Times has an article about how much most Egyptians hate Israel:

It has been a tough peace for Ali Salem. His plays don't have a stage. Intellectuals shun him; the writers union refuses to pay his pension. He sits in a cafe window, typing on his laptop and defending his choice long ago to cross the border into Israel and make friends.

Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, but that treaty remains as agitating to Egyptian artists and intellectuals as a sliver of glass beneath the skin. Most of them don't accept it, and those who do are often vilified, their artistic voices muffled by condemnation.

"Producers are afraid to come near me," said Salem, who in 1994 drove his car across Israel and wrote what critics considered a sympathetic book about the journey. "I anticipated there would be a strong reaction, but I didn't expect it would be so mean. It's hard and this is the wound."

Salem, a columnist for Al Hayat newspaper and a co-founder of the Cairo Peace Movement, added: "Peace is the right idea. But Egyptian intellectuals are afraid and can't get rid of their ancient fears. They still think Israel and the U.S. will inflict something bad upon us."

Occasionally, an artist unwittingly becomes the target of screeds and opinion page vitriol. Filmmaker Nadia Kamel’s recent documentary about her mother's Jewish roots was attacked as a call to "normalize" relations with Israel. Opera singer Gaber Beltagui had his membership in the musicians union suspended in 2007 when he sang at the 100th anniversary of a Cairo synagogue.

"How can he go sing at a synagogue while they [Israelis] are killing our sons?" Mounir Wasseemy, the head of the Musical Artists' Syndicate, said, denouncing Beltagui. "What glory was he seeking?"

The handshake between Al Azhar Sheikh Tantawi and Shimon Peres is still reverberating, and Egyptian officials are trying to make sure that no one ever sees any similar photo-ops:

Egyptian security officials are reported to have prevented a top Israeli defence official from meeting the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, in Cairo. The local daily, al-Misr al-Youm, said that Amos Gilad, advisor to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, had sought to meet Moussa (photo) while both were passing through the airport.

Security officials were apparently trying to avoid a repeat of the recent controversy when Egyptian cleric Sheikh Mohammad Sayyid Tantawi shook hands with Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Which makes this cartoon even more amazing, not only for its truth but because it was printed in an Egyptian newspaper:

The bald man is an ultra-conservative Muslim character in this daily comic strip (who does not know that "Brother Levy" is Jewish.)

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.