Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Summing up Hamas (MEMRI)

MEMRI put together this great compilation of Hamas leaders' statements showing their hatred for Israel, Jews, Christians and Americans.

More on the jihadists' joy at dead civilians

From the NYT (h/t EBoZ):

The emergency room in Shifa Hospital is never calm, but on Thursday, the 13th day of Israel’s assault on Gaza, this place of gore and despair was also a lesson in the way ordinary people are squeezed between suicidal fighters and a military behemoth.

...One [patient] was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a big smile.
“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting,” he told the doctors and anyone else who would listen.
He was told that there were more serious cases than his and that he needed to wait his turn. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.
“Why are you so happy?” a reporter asked. “Look around you. Don’t you see the misery that you are helping to cause?”
A girl who looked about 18 was screaming from pain as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded was looking around helplessly. A man had a head injury, with parts of his brain coming out. He was on a stretcher, his family wailing at his side.
“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.
“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”

This recalls not only this posting I wrote yesterday but also a YNet report from Tuesday (h/t Henrik):

s the Israeli operation in Gaza wears on it appears Hamas has relinquished any visage of a socio-political party, abandoning its claim to govern the residents of Gaza in favor of engaging in open war at their expense.

...Civilians are simply used as cannon fodder or human shields. Reports out of Gaza say residents who attempted to flee their homes in the northern area of the Strip were forced to go back at gunpoint, by Hamas men.

The organization is presumably interested in increasing civilian casualties in order to give rise to international pressure against Israel. Arab media reported that in an IDF strike on a UN school 30 civilians were killed, but there is no legitimate way to prove gunmen were among those killed as Hamas tends to bury these bodies quickly, thus eliminating evidence in Israel's favor.

Other civilian complaints state that Hamas gunmen pull children along with them "by the ears" from place to place, fearing that if they don't have a child with them they will be fair game to the IDF. Others hide in civilian homes and stairwells, UNRWA ambulances, and mosques.

In other reported cases Hamas gunmen hold civilians hostage in alleyways in order to provide themselves with a living barricade to ward off IDF forces.

These reports lead to the assumption that Hamas is attempting to exacerbate the atmosphere of a humanitarian crisis in the Strip, as this may promote an international ceasefire initiative. In any case the reports clearly show that the residents of Gaza have fallen prey to Hamas as well as the IDF.

Despite this, no authoritative anti-Hamas sentiments have been heard from the Gazans. However Palestinian sources claim that grievances against the group are voiced in secret. The animosity towards Israel has not disappeared, say the sources, but it is now accompanied by bitterness towards the organization many are dubbing Iranian in its extremism.

The jihadists are explicit not only in their cynical endangerment of civilians but also in their desire to see more of their people get killed, as long as the international community blames Israel.

Free Gaza calls for a "third intifada"

At the end of a long email detailing in horrific detail every death and injury in Gaza that she could detail, Free Gaza member Ewa Jasieiwcz ends off with this:

The third Intifada being urged now has to be our intifada too. As Israel
steps up its destruction of the Palestinian people, we need to step up our
reconstruction of our resistance, our movements, of our communities in our
own counties, where so many of us live in alienation and isolation. We
need to be the third intifada – people here need more and say repeatedly
that they need more than the demonstrations, because they are not stopping
the killing here. Demonstrations alone, are not stopping the killing here.

There are concrete steps that people can take, learning from the lessons
of the first Intifada and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign
to dismantle the South African Apartheid regime. Strategies of popular
resistance, strikes, occupations, direct actions. From the streets into
the offices, factories and headquarters is where we need to take this
fight, to the heart of decision-makers that are supposedly making
decisions on our behalf and the companies making a killing out of the
occupation. The third intifada needs to be a global intifada.

I suppose that she can argue that she is speaking purely about a non-violent "intifada", but when she uses that word is it clear what she means - a return to the types of terror attacks that started this whole problem.

What is notable about her advice is that she doesn't even consider the advice that many of her fellow Arabs are espousing, even after two weeks. From The National (UAE):

Regardless of the outcome of the barbaric Israeli Operation Cast Lead, one thing is certain; it is high time for Hamas to step down as the keeper of Gaza. This is where people will object and remind us that they were democratically elected. My answer to that is: Yes, but they are incompetent.

Ewa would never suggest that Hamas stop firing rockets, or that it should re-unify with the PA. No, her advice is to do everything possible to hurt Israel rather than stop terror.

Just going to show yet again what a bunch of hypocrites the "Free Gaza" movement is.

Another dreaded Open Thread

I'm going to be in meetings much of the day, so if anyone sees a cool link, place it in the comments.

As far as the Weblog Awards go, now that the category has become politicized there are tons of votes going towards beating the other guy. 86% of the voting is now for the top three in the running and the rest of us are fighting for crumbs.

And what am I going to do, dis Martin Kramer to try to catch up to him? The dude has more initials after his name than I have letters in mine, and from adding up all his impressive work experience on his resume he must be like 103 years old. I can't start attacking him for fun, he's more Elder than the Elder.

Fundametally Freund is uncomfortably close, but he dedicates his life to charity - also not a fun target, even if he only posts once every three days.

Nope, as much as I want to make it fun, I can't find a good blog to start a feud with. Oh well.

PalArab press roundup Jan 8 2009

Islamic Jihad admitted that four of its members were killed today. These admissions have been rare.

Palestine Today refers to the Katyusha rockets shot from Lebanon this morning to Nahariya as being fired to "occupied territory."

When The Jerusalem Post, Yediot Aharonot and Arutz-7 reported on Hamas' policy to execute and injure Fatah members during this war, Hamas ignored it. But now that Ha'aretz' Amira Hass has written that between forty and eighty Fatah members have been executed, Hamas had to respond. So it forced a very scared Fatah leader in Gaza to deny that Hamas was killing and injuring Fatah members and their families.

Meanwhile, Firas Press goes into detail on one such instance, where a dedicated Fatah member who swore to continue in the ways of his martyred father in fighting Israel was ironically murdered by Hamas, which also shot the legs of his entire family.

Firas Press reminds us that, according to Hamas, PA President Mahmoud Abbas' term ends tomorrow, and Hamas will not recognize any Fatah member as his successor.

Palestine Today doesn't only love gruesome pictures of martyrs - they try really hard to find dead Israelis, too. But the best they could do was a photo essay showing grieving soldiers burying one of their friends, titling it "Zionist soldiers crying and screaming as they buried their dead."

A Firas Press writer strongly condemns Hamas for this war, blaming it for breaking the unity of Palestinian Arabs and acting selfishly as opposed to the interests of the people. The writer compares Hams to Hezbollah in Lebanon, also breaking from the Lebanese government to an adventure that was disastrous to the people of Lebanon.

(A UAE editorial also slams Hamas as "incompetent.")

Egypt's official Al-Ahram newspaper kept up the war of words between Hassan Nasrallah and Egypt, saying that while Egypt works quietly towards a truce in Gaza, Nasrallah is screaming from his underground hiding place that Gaza will be a graveyard for the Zionist invaders without doing anything to help. The writer sarcastically notes that Hezbollah is "bravely" confronting the occupation from their satellite channels. The editorial ended with a veiled threat towards Hezbollah, reminding them that they are still a group of fighters while Egypt has an entire army.

Terrorists brag about causing Gaza civilians to die

The video I posted earlier on Wednesday, showing some Gazans shooting a 120mm mortar towards Israel from the middle of a tree-lined street in Jabalya, was notable for something else (noticed by a commenter): the shooters were dressed like civilians.

No masks (although the Arab TV station that recorded it helpfully obscured their faces,) no guns, no uniforms - just a couple of regular looking guys.

This is a deliberate strategy by the terrorists. Not only are they hiding behind civilians, they are hiding as civilians.

The PCHR for Tuesday counted deaths as it does every day (the English version is not yet available.) It claimed that out of 83 deaths on Tuesday (of which they counted 27 in the UNRWA school), 80 of them were "unarmed civilians."

This makes it sound like the IDF has astoundingly bad aim.

But to understand it, one can read between the lines of this gloating article from the Islamic Jihad mouthpiece Palestine Today:

There is no visibility of the men of the resistance in the streets of the [Gaza] strip. No one sees their means of transportation, and even light weapons can no longer be seen with people publicly in the Gaza Strip. The resistance completely disappeared. Anti-aircraft artillery fires on the aircraft without them knowing the location. The whereabouts of rockets launched from the heart of the strip cannot be seen or known.

According to medical sources, the number of martyrs and wounded of the elements of the Palestinian resistance are few in comparison to the number of civilian martyrs who were killed since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, except for the large number of Palestinian policemen who were martyred on the first day of the war in Gaza.

Abu Mohammed - one of the field commanders in the Jerusalem Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine - said: "The goal is to take the "energy of concealment," to mislead the occupation aircraft and its agents [collaborators.]

In other words, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have made an official tactic out of using civilians as human shields and out of shooting at Israel as civilians. They are proud that the number of apparent (and real) civilian casualties has increased in recent days.

Their war policy is to violate the Geneva Conventions brazenly and officially. Their aim is to maximize the number of civilians killed in Gaza.

The video shows this policy in action. If Israel manages to hit the rocket shooters, they get counted as "civilians," and any bystanders on that street who get killed are icing on the cake for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Since the dead are "martyrs" anyway, they can justify this sick and cynical use of their own people as just another shortcut to Paradise, and each dead civilian is a victory for them, each dead body a literal prize to be photographed and shown off ad infinitum on Arab websites and TV networks.

We've always known this, but they have not usually been as forthcoming about it as this article indicates.

Do explosions look like this?

One can browse wire-service photos of explosions during the first week of Cast Lead, but none of them looks like this one from AP:

(click to enlarge)

Mere Rhetoric and Snapped Shot (and others) have been looking at it, wondering if it is Photoshopped.

I don't see too much motivation for a photographer (Adel Hana, whose pictures have been reproduced on this blog a few times, including for staging photos and for selling pictures to Islamic Jihad) to enhance an explosion, which is impressive enough already.

But the flying debris makes no sense to me.

It is too high, it is too large, and appears to be way too close to the camera. It also all seems to be on the same plane relative to the camera - not in the sphere that debris should be if it was equally blown in all directions.

Snapped Shot is trying to get hold of Hana to get a larger original.

Arab world fears return of Gaza settlements

AFP wrote an interesting story about the reaction of former Gaza residents to Operation Cast Lead:

NITZAN, Israel - Like most of her neighbours, Galit Kakoun dreams of returning to the Gaza Strip which until three years ago was home to 8,000 Jewish settlers like her.

Her reminiscences of the good old days were interrupted by a siren warning of incoming rocket fire from Gaza, 15 kilometers (10 miles) away from her bew home in the small community of Nitzan.

Residents rushed to a shelter and barely made it to safety before a dull thud was heard outside.

For the former Gaza settlers, the rocket underlined what they believe was the error of Israel forcing them to leave Gaza in the summer of 2005. Israel withdrew all of its ground forces from the densely populated territory and handed it over to the Palestinians.

"The current situation never would have existed if we had stayed at home," said Orit Berger, 34, who had lived in Gaza's Gush Katif settlement bloc since the age of three.

"Now Hamas is stronger than it was then," she said.

Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007 and Israel says the offensive it launched on December 27 is aimed at wiping out the Hamas movement's ability to fire rockets on southern Israel.

Israeli authorities insist hostilities will end only when they have achieved their goals.

That, said Berger, would be repeating the mistake of 2005.

In this community of 3,000 where wooden signs bear the names of former Gaza settlements, many neighbours share her views.

"We were told: "You have to give up your home, your life in Gush Katif to give peace a chance," said Deborah Neor, her voice dripping with irony.

"Now we have left. And the Palestinians, what are they doing with this chance?" the 52-year-old geography teacher asked.

The I-told-you-so argument is also popular in Nitzan, close to the port city of Ashkelon.

"We knew it, we said at the time that if we leave, rockets would soon fall on Ashkelon and Ashdod," said Gush Katzion veteran Mauria Bentolila, 57. "We gave it all up for nothing."

Even as the toll from the Israeli offensive spirals with Palestinian medics reporting at least 660 dead, many in Nitzan dream of returning to Gaza, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war.

"I am sure we will return," said Kakoun, a 39-year-old mother of four. But she keeps her optimism in check. "If not me, at least my children."

Anat Yaakov, 49, has more ambitious hopes for the impoverished Palestinian territory of 1.5 million that is one of the most crowded places on Earth.

"I believe we will return, but only if the Gaza Strip becomes a fully fledged Israeli territory and not a series of settlements."

Not a bad article, but what I find interesting is where it can be found.

I could only find this story published in two places: The Khaleej (UAE) Times and the Arabic al-Arabiya (without attribution to AFP.) A third wildly inaccurate story, written by an Arab for Alternet, takes for granted that Israel plans to re-occupy Gaza.

This indicates that the Arab public is not nearly as afraid about nor as upset over Gazans being killed as it is about the hated Jews controlling any additional territory. Even the slightest whiff of an idea that Gush Katif would be rebuilt is enough for the collective antennae of the Arab world to twitch. There is also a little irony involved in that this story is sympathetic to Jews who were expelled from their homes, a narrative that the Palestinian Arabs feel that they should own completely.

As I've mentioned before, this fear should be exploited by Israel. When Israel's leaders say that they have no intention of re-occupying Gaza, they are taking their best bargaining chip off the table. Even if it is a bluff, or even if all they end up doing is a symbolic capture of a few square meters, the Arab world would be far more afraid of an "expansionist" Israel taking their land than by a measly few hundred killed, something Arabs do to each other much more effectively and brutally than those genocidal Zionists.

Rocket fire would stop, and many lives would be saved, if the immediate consequence of rocket fire would be a border adjustment, no matter how small.

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.