Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Comments on comments

I have been extraordinarily lucky that the number of rabidly anti-semitic and anti-Zionist comments have been a minimum at this blog. I see that other pro-Israel bloggers aren't as lucky.

But I do get to see quite a few ridiculous comments on my YouTube videos. Here are a few:

yahoodiekillers has made a comment on Hamas teaching children to kill Jews:
i love hitler for what he did for science, jews treatment of palestinians for the last 50 years makes me understand and love the guy even more.

ozpkiller:
Fuck israel anf fuck these people 2. I hope they destroy israel and then americans realize what the jew fucks been doing to are country and runs them out. Jews are destroying america but the media will not let you find that out cause there run by jews. Your taxes are going where??? israel. these people must be destroyed like hitler was trying to do.

goodhew6155:
Cool, kill all kikes, until the kikes leave Palestine,

arabs4lyfe:
this kid is a hero. kill all tthe jews

To be fair, there is no shortage of "kill all the Muslims" comments as well. Either way, I can appreciate that my readership is generally a bit higher class than YouTube's!

Open thread

While I try to get some real work done, and as I despair that my vote count in the Weblog Awards have gone from from 12% down to below 4%, here's a place for people to talk, and perhaps include links to things you guys have found interesting.

Another six Gazans killed - by Hamas

From YNet:

Six Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel have been executed in the past two days by Hamas security officers in the fighting zone in Jabalya, Ynet has learned.

Among the alleged collaborators were three brothers, one of whom attempted before his arrest to swallow a cell phone's SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card, which is believed to have documented his conversations with Israeli security officials.

In addition to the siblings, three other Palestinians were executed shortly after being seized on suspicion of collaborating with Israel and guiding the IDF forces, particularly Air Force warplanes, before the strikes.

Which means that the number of Arabs killed by Hamas since the war started is at least 50 (8 from 2008).

This is not counting the likely deaths from Hamas firing at IDF soldiers. (I recall a story a few days ago about 10 students killed in crossfire, sorry I did not bookmark it. If someone has that story please ping me.) It also doesn't count the two young sisters killed by an errant Qassam the day before Operation Cast Lead started.

It is not likely that you will find any newspapers keeping a count of the number of Arabs killed by Hamas, however. It is extremely likely that they are all included in the incessant counts of people supposedly killed by Israel.

My 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 43 (one of whom was in the West Bank.) These numbers are necessarily mostly from Israeli sources, as the Palestinian Arab media is very reluctant to speak about these except in very general terms, so I have had to loosen up my rules a little in deciding who is included. (This YNet article included their own verification, the earlier JPost article on 35 "collaborator" deaths didn't, which bothers me.) In reality, the numbers are probably higher.

UPDATE: I may have double-counted some; I'm adjusting accordingly.

Video: 120mm mortar shot from Jebalya

From Arab TV, terrorists shooting mortars from a city street. Notice that the shooters use the trees lining the wide street for cover.

Is Israel allowed to shoot back under the bizarre restrictions that the world community seems to require?

from the Israel Foreign Ministry website.

UPDATE: Naftali in the comments points out that the terrorists are not wearing fatigues, so if Israel kills them they would be considered "civilians."

Israel is following the "Powell Doctrine"

In 2001, an interesting event occurred in Gaza:

On April 17 (2001), Israeli military forces, after what was described in the press as fierce bombardment of Palestinian security positions in Gaza, took control of a square mile of territory in the Gaza Strip (territory that had been transferred to Palestinian control pursuant to the 1993 Oslo accords) and announced plans to hold it indefinitely as a buffer zone. The Israeli action was in response to a Palestinian mortar attack on Sederot, a town in Israel about four miles from the border with Gaza. The Israeli government explained its action as part of its ongoing effort to defend Israel from Palestinian violence.

United States Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a statement that said in part, "The hostilities last night in Gaza were precipitated by the provocative Palestinian mortar attacks on Israel. The Israeli response was excessive and disproportionate. We call upon both sides to respect the agreements they've signed." Shortly after Secretary Powell's statement was issued, the Israeli army announced that it was withdrawing from its positions in Gaza. The army withdrew, though it returned for 45 minutes the next day and destroyed a police station. The Israeli government denied that it had yielded to U.S. pressure to withdraw, but Israeli state radio and some others said the withdrawal was a response to U.S. pressure.

Powell's response at the time was a bit ironic.

Ten years earlier, in 1991, Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, articulated the US policy for getting involved in conflicts. Powell used this initially to justify the first Iraq war. This became known as the Powell Doctrine, and it is most interesting to revisit during Operation Cast Lead.

The doctrine is summarized as follows:

1) Military action should be used only as a last resort and only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target;
2) The force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy;
3) There must be strong support for the campaign by the general public; and
4) There must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict in which the military is engaged.

Perhaps the Powell Doctrine didn't apply to Israel in 2001, as that was the very start of the mortar and rocket attacks towards Israeli towns in the Negev and massive force may not have yet been considered a "last resort."

But while we do not yet know Israel's exit strategy, the first three points are exactly in line with what Israel is doing today. Israel already tried truces, diplomacy, "soft" persuasion, and very limited military action to no avail, and in fact over time the rocket attacks only got more serious - and everyone in Israel realizes that the status quo was wholly unacceptable.

Most notable is the second point, where the Powell doctrine states that disproportionate force is not only not discouraged, it is required!

I have not yet seen anyone try to argue that the Powell doctrine is illegal under international law even though it explicitly states that the force used must be disproportionate. It must be one of those international laws that are only selectively invoked, for a single nation.

What really happened at the UNRWA school?

Chris Gunness, UNRWA spokesman, said that the agency was "99.9% certain" that no terrorists were on the grounds of the UNRWA school that saw some 30 people die yesterday.

John Ging, director of the UNRWA in Gaza, says that there is no way that terrorists could have been there. How does he know? Because "U.N. staff members and Palestinian families in the school compound in the Jabaliya refugee camp had been screened for weapons."

The AP reported immediately after the explosions:

Two residents of the area who spoke by telephone said they saw a small group of militants firing mortar rounds from a street near the school, the Associated Press reported. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, the AP said. The residents said the two brothers were known to be low-level Hamas militants. They said a group of militants - one of them said four - were firing mortar shells from near the school.

The IDF says that "The information that we have is that there was the launching of a mortar from the school's yard towards one of our forces. Our forces retaliated but it turned out that the school was booby trapped and as a result of our retaliation, everything flared up. There were a lot of secondary explosions from which probably those people were wounded."

From the pictures of the school that have been published, and from statements, it does not appear that anyone is claiming that mortars were being shot from within the school nor that Israel shot back into the school building. And Ging is clearly lying when he says that no weapons are allowed into UNRWA schools, as the IDF showed video of mortars being shot from that same school in 2007. In addition, in at least one case a UNRWA teacher was also an Islamic Jihad terrorist. And it is hard to take seriously that idea that the UNRWA can stop heavily armed terrorists from doing whatever they want at their schools anyway, especially when the agency will never criticize Hamas; and most of its employees are Palestinian Arabs who know that they would be killed if they do anything against the wishes of Hamas. Beyond that, Hamas has shown that it uses schools to store weapons, as the IDF showed yet again yesterday.

At this time my guess is that the mortars were shot from either very close to the school or within the school compound, Israel automatically returned fire to that same spot, and some of that shrapnel caused secondary explosions from bombs or weapons that were inside the school compound, although I am not sure about the booby traps. The death total seems way too high for tank shells alone. Obviously the residents of Gaza are too afraid to give evidence that would implicate Hamas and similarly photographers are afraid to take pictures that would show any clear terrorist activity in the school or outside it. (Hamas has already shown no compunction about brutally murdering "collaborators" in the fog of war, that are in all likelihood being counted as deaths from the IDF.)

(It is also interesting that while the initial reports said 42-45 dead, the UN later said that it was 30 dead, but today's newspapers report the higher figure as fact. The casualty count from the war is certainly higher than the reality.)

Jeffrey Goldberg on Hamas kiddie death pr0n

From Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic:

...Wwe've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

This is the sort of thing that you can be sure that many reporters have seen in Gaza over the years...and don't bother to report.

Because getting a great picture of a dead kid is much more important than writing about Hamas' sick use of dead bodies as props.

Suburban Gaza

Here, from Google Maps, is Jabalya, the town in Gaza where Hamas just detonated booby traps at a UNRWA school, killing dozens and blaming Israel:

Here is a bit more detail of the section in the center (click to enlarge):

While parts of the town are certainly crowded, it looks like plenty of people are living in houses where there are lots of trees. This looks just like any suburban US community. (This is not the "refugee camp" next door, which certainly is more crowded than this. But the school was apparently in Jabalya, not the camp.)

"One of the most densely populated places on Earth."

See also my recent video on the same theme.

Al-Arabiya Arabic news roundup

Al-Arabiya in Arabic covers completely different stories than its English counterpart.

Some publicity-seeker named Jacob Bender led a "Jewish prayer service" at Al Azhar University for Palestinian Arab victims of the war, calling israeli actions a "crime against humanity." Somehow, I don't think he had a minyan.

Analysts are theorizing that Iran may be behind Hamas' decision to escalate, as a way of showing relevance as a regional superpower or of diverting attention from its nuclear program.

Gazans are supposedly getting constant automated phone calls from Israel saying that Hamas has been defeated, as part of psychological warfare. The article mentions that they are fearful when they get these calls.

Jordanian officials are getting more fearful that one result of this war would be that Jordan will be forced to take responsibility for the West Bank rather than there ever being a two-state solution. They do not want to rule another 3 million Palestinian Arabs.

An Egyptian court refused to grant a divorce to a Christian woman whose husband converted to Islam. Her argument was that since her marriage was done in a church and was predicated on Christian principles, her husband had effectively annuled the marriage by changing his religion. The Egyptian courts said that since, under sharia, a Muslim man can marry a Christian woman and since she was not being mistreated, they cannot force him to divorce her.

The link list again

The coverage in the blogosphere of Operation Cast Lead is excellent, and I want to urge all of you again to read those for the basic news and links to other good analysis:

Israellycool and The Muqata liveblogging the war itself, and Backspin liveblogging the media about the war.
Mere Rhetoric doing his snarky best at putting things in context.
Israel Matzav doing a comprehensive and amazing job.
Jack's Shack has been putting up fantastic, twice a day roundups of articles in the old media as well as new.
The Augean Stables skewers the mainstream media coverage and digs up amazing facts.
Yaacov Lozowick has great, instant, in-depth observations and analysis.
The IDF Spokesperson Blog has some good info as well.
Snapped Shot adds his own expertise in finding media bias, especially in photographs.
Plus the usual JBlogosphere suspects: Daled Amos, Meryl Yourish, Soccer Dad, Yid with Lid, Boker Tov Boulder, Oleh Girl....

It gets hard to find original things to post when everyone else is doing such a great job!

The Guardian publishes Hamas lies

Today, The Guardian published an op-ed by Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. Setting aside the incongruity of a Western newspaper publishing the words of a terrorist who shares the same murderous ideology as Al Qaeda and whose organization's charter is unapologetically anti-semitic, we are also treated to an article that is filled with real lies - not only the half-truths one would expect. For example:

For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start. Israel was required to open crossings to Gaza, and extend the truce to the West Bank.

Hamas violated the cease-fire agreement from the start by smuggling weapons continuously. This was the major reason why Israel never fully opened the crossings, although it eased the restrictions significantly. In addition, the cease-fire was meant for all terror groups, not just Hamas, and Hamas encouraged rocket attacks by Islamic Jihad and other groups since the beginning of November.

The West Bank was never part of the agreement, period.

It proceeded to tighten its deadly siege of Gaza, repeatedly cutting electricity and water supplies.

Israel did not cut electricity nor water during the six months.

The collective punishment did not halt, but accelerated - as did the assassinations and killings. Thirty Gazans were killed by Israeli fire and hundreds of patients died as a direct effect of the siege during the so-called ceasefire.

Both false. From the PCHR I count 22 alleged deaths in Gaza during that time period: 4 during the initial shaky couple of weeks when there were still rocket attacks, 6 during the operation in November to destroy the kidnapping tunnel, and the other 8 during the rocket barrages that followed - and nearly all of the 22 were terrorists. As far as the "hundreds of patients" dying, I followed that from the beginning and it was a complete fiction where doctors from Gaza would regularly announce that certain patients died because of the "siege" when pretty much all of them would have died anyway. Israel never blocked sick patients unless they also posed a security risk, and Israel allowed hundreds of patients from Gaza to be treated in Israel during that time, as well as before and after the "truce."

When this broken truce neared its end, we expressed our readiness for a new comprehensive truce in return for lifting the blockade and opening all Gaza border crossings, including Rafah. Our calls fell on deaf ears.

This one is an egregious lie. Hamas explicitly and repeatedly rejected the truce extension, as The Guardian itself reported.

No rockets have ever been fired from the West Bank.

Another lie. They have rarely been fired, but quite a few have been built there.

What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel's dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.

Another Arab fantasy.

Most of the rest of the article is obvious Hamas spin, but that is acceptable for an op-ed (if still reprehensible for a newspaper to allow a terrorist to write on its pages to begin with.)

What is not acceptable is including these lies. A casual reader would understand that the views are slanted but he would expect a major newspaper to vet out clear fabrications. Meshal just managed to spread unabashed falsehoods, which is far worse than just opinion.

This is simply unethical journalism on the part of the Guardian.

Overnight PalArab news roundup

I finally found confirmation that Hamas has been executing "collaborators" during this operation in the Palestinian Arab press, although they do not give any numbers nor do they say that the victims were exclusively Fatah as the earlier Jerusalem Post story indicated.

There is one specific report of Hamas executing a 76-year old Fatah member and injuring his son, a woman and child because the man didn't adhere to his "house arrest."

For the purposes of my counting of Palestinian Arab on Arab deaths (the "self-death count") there is of course no way to know how many civilians are being killed by Hamas during the urban fighting with Israel. It is fair guess that Hamas is not nearly as concerned about Gaza civilian deaths as Israel is, and more than likely that Hamas craves such deaths so it can blame Israel. For example, yesterday's Guardian said that ten children were killed in Hamas-IDF battles - but who actually killed them? Similarly, there were at least three separate instances of Qasssams falling short in Gaza, killing two children and injuring others, in the thre days before Cast Iron started. How many of the hundreds of missiles since then have also fallen short, killed people and then Israel was blamed? One possible example is this story from Maan about a girl who was injured by a "missile" supposedly from an air strike; but how probable was it to have been an errant Qassam? We'll never know for sure, but it seems to me that the chances for Qassams falling short increase dramatically when the people launching them are in a very big rush to shoot it and disappear as quickly as possible. For now, though, I am only adding one to the 2009 self-death count, raising it to 37.

Another Arab source has an intriguing report, that Israel warned Syria that if Hezbollah tried to open a second front against Israel. Israel will hold Syria responsible - and attack the Syrians. Syria typically uses proxies to do its dirty work, but it is deathly afraid of anything that might destabilize the regime, so this makes a lot of sense.

There are reports that Israel arrested an Iranian reporter in Jerusalem for not adhering to Israeli military censorship.

The polls are open!

You can now vote for this blog (or whomever you like) in the 2008 Weblog Awards in the Best Middle East or Africa Blog category.

You are allowed to vote once in 24 hours.

(I know I have no chance of winning, but my ego can use a boost every once in a while! And I certainly appreciate every vote!)

Is Israel winning the media war?

Backspin has solicited bloggers, asking how Israel is doing on the PR front.

The short answer is that Israel is doing a stellar job in the media war, and it is still losing.

For long-time critics of Israel's hasbara, this operation has been huge improvement. The Twitter page, the IDF Spokesperson's blog, the IsraelPolitik blog, the YouTube page, the pro-active sending of articulate spokespeople from across Israel's political spectrum to TV news and talk shows - all of these are way overdue and, more importantly, they have not made mistakes. On the contrary, Israel's PR is now releasing relevant videos the same day, not weeks later; they are answering questions and refuting false allegations in real time and not after the falsehoods have had the chance to dominate for three or five news cycles.

My only criticisms of Israel's PR efforts is relatively minor:

- The Foreign Ministry home page is still very poorly organized and hard to navigate. That should be the central repository of relevant materials, but as it is, it is much less useful.

- I would also love to retire my rocket calendar, and I knowI am undercounting - especially in regard to mortars and Grads. The Israeli government should have a searchable database with accurate information on Qassams, mortars, Grads, and variants like the "rocket mortars," plus all terror attacks, dates, injuries, victim names, pictures, and links. If I could do as much as I have done in minutes a day, they could do it right.

These quibbles notwithstanding, it has been incredible to see things done right. There is no doubt that Israel's current hasbara efforts have been effective and that they help fair-minded people understand what is going on. Personally, they also help free me up from spending time trying to counter basic arguments and going on to more creative ways of helping spread the truth.

Unfortunately, I cannot say that they are "winning," and in fact it is impossible to win at this time. The sheer number of rabidly anti-Israel news and Web 2.0 outlets and anti-Israel protests and letters to the editor - all parroting the same lies to their varied audiences - makes "winning" a most difficult proposition. A simple word search of the word "Zionist" in Google news unleashes a torrent of vitriol, anti-semitism and pure loathing. Nothing that Israel does can combat the sheer amount of hatred that exists.

I have no doubt that most European governments (and a fair number of Arab regimes) are privately very happy that Israel is going after Hamas, and they hope that this will become a great victory against Islamic terror. Yet most of the European heads of state are not going to publicly "take sides." The conditioning from years of ingrained bias makes support of Israel quite unpopular. They are hoping that Israel ignores the media-fueled hate and "international rpessure" and does what has to be done. But they cannot avoid being a part of that same pressure, which feeds the anti-Israel media, and continues the cycle.

That doesn't mean that Israel's hasbara efforts are useless. They are very effective, and admirable. But to say that Israel can "win" the PR war in one battle is very premature. It would take years of Israelis unapologetically stating their case, over and over again, without the dissent that causes such cheer in the Israel-bashing press, before anyone can consider thinking about a "victory."

Only when the environment is changed to where Zionists in major European cities can rally for Israel with no fear of being physically hurt by anti-semites, only when there are just as many passionately pro-Israel people on message boards and talkbacks as Israel-bashers, can we start talking about a PR win in the West.

Why would Israel want civilians to die?

For the many who are claiming either that Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians, or are actively targeting civilians, they are strangely silent on the question of - why?

There are many reasons why Israel would want a minimum of civilian casualties, or, ideally, none at all:

* Simple morality. Israelis never rejoice when enemy civilians are killed.
* Civilian casualties undermine the justness of the battle against terrorists.
* Civilian deaths add untold pressure on Israel to cut the operation short.

The only reasons ever given by Israel's critics to support their contention are easily discarded:

* The most common is the genocidal reason: "Israel wants to destroy all Palestinians so they can re-occupy Palestine/because they hate them/because they hate Goyim/because they want to rule the world." These people are beyond reason, of course, but the simple question they cannot answer is that if Israel wants to kill so many innocents, why is it doing such a poor job? Why did they wait so long? Why are there more Palestinian Arabs alive today then there were a week ago? This argument is most often a projection of the accusers' own feelings towards Jews.

* The "fairness" argument: "There is a 'large' number of Palestinian civilian casualties, which is much higher than the number of Israeli casualties. It is not fair.." This argument implies that Israel should wait until hundreds of Jews are purposefully dead before defending itself in a way that is likely to accidentally kill hundreds of civilians in the quest to stop the attacks, a manifestly stupid argument. A government's highest priority is the safety of its citizens, which is - for any country - a much higher moral priority than the safety of its enemy's citizens. Certainly Israel should do everything necessary to minimize enemy casualties - but not at the expense of its own people's lives. Once we establish the clear facts that Israel does not purposefully target civilians, and that it spends great amounts of time and money to minimize civilian casualties while still effectively trying to defeat the enemy, then that is all one can reasonably expect, and there is no moral concept of "fairness" in war any more than there is in any other field.

* The empirical evidence argument: This is a favorite of human-rights advocates, saying that they have evidence that Israel has a reckless disregard to human life, or uses weapons that are not calibrated to minimize civilian deaths (or are designed to maximize civilian deaths, as the case might be.) The problem here is that the arguers are no more privy to the minds of the generals than anyone else is, nor are they experts in war tactics, intelligence or strategy. Neither am I, but given the first three points mentioned above, and since it is clear that increased civilian casualties is counterproductive to the war effort, this "evidence" doesn't fit any possible motivation. This means that the premise must be false, and that there are some hitherto unknown reasons for that specific form of weapon at that place and at that time. It may be because of intelligence that the observers are not privy to; it may be because the "civilians" are really not civilian, or - very possibly - it could be a mistake, or which there are tragically many in the heat of battle.

The upshot is that unless someone can give a reason for the IDF to target or disregard civilian deaths that makes strategic sense, it is absurd to jump to the conclusion that it was the result of negligence or maliciousness a priori. That thinking does not fit the idea of a disciplined army; it does not fit with published IDF standards; it does not fit the psyche of the Israeli public; it does not fit the philosophy of the government. Beyond that, it is highly counterproductive to the success of any operation. It is, simply put, nonsensical.

It is frustrating, and insulting, for Israelis and admirers of Israel to see that these "human rights" advocates are so glib with accusing Israel of wanton disregard for human life. Anyone who does a modicum of research sees that the IDF and IAF calibrate the size of explosives to be the smallest necessary to take out a target, that they go to extraordinary lengths to inform civilians (via leaflets, phone calls, text messages, sound bombs - and inevitably terrorists) to leave an area that is going to be targeted, that major decisions like bombing places of worship go through an entire bureaucracy before being made. Not only that, when mistakes are made - as they inevitably are, especially when the enemy tries new tactics - the IDF will take that into account and do everything possible to ensure that they are not repeated.

The contrast to the terrorists cannot be starker - Hamas and its supporters are eager to kill as many civilians as possible, by their own tacit or explicit statements. Their motivation is stated daily in TV shows and weekly in mosques - to cleanse Palestine of the Jews (which they are generally careful to translate into English as "Zionists.") To give a small example, a poll last March showed that 84% of Palestinian Arabs, and some 91% of Gazans, supported the terror attack that massacred 8 students at Mercaz Harav.

Numbers like these are inconceivable among Israelis when referring to Palestinian Arab civilians, yet the "human rights" advocates are so even-handed as to assume that both sides have the same motivation to attack innocents.

But none of them can give a reason why.