Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Fact: Palestinian Arabs lie.

Avid Editor in the comments alerts me to a ridiculously biased BBC report quoting those ever-present "eyewitnesses" to the IDF supposedly clinically executing civilians. The most patently absurd claim in the article was perhaps this one:

On Monday morning, he said the family heard an announcement over a loudspeaker.
"The Israeli army was saying: 'This is the Israeli Defence Forces, we are asking all the people to leave their homes and go to the school. Ladies first, then men.'
"We decided to send the women first, two by two," he said.
First to step outside was the wife of his cousin, Rawhiya al-Najar, 48.
"The army was about 15 metres (50 feet) away from the house or less. They shot her in the head," he said.
The woman's daughter was shot in the thigh but crawled back inside the house, he said.

So the IDF, able to destroy the entire building in five seconds, in the middle of battling Hamas terrorists, decided instead to kill the women and children first, in single file?

Apparently, the Palestinian Arabs have discovered that any claims they make can get headlines if they call B'Tselem. B'Tselem, of course, decides that it should act as morally as possible, by maliciously spreading unverifiable and absurdly over-the-top lies:

B'tselem said it had been unable to corroborate the testimony it had received, but felt it should be made public.

So, let's look at the trustworthiness of Palestinian Arab civilians when making such claims in just the past year:

September, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" reported seeing a settler shoot a boy at point blank range 20 times. It turns out he had been killed by a grenade, and no Israelis were involved.

July, 2008: A Hamas work accident levels a house and kills 7. "Eyewitnesses" said it was an Israeli airstrike.

June, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" say that Zionist settlers release wild pigs to destroy their crops.

February, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" reported that an explosion in the Bureij camp that killed 8 was caused by Israeli airstrikes, but it was an work accident.

Honest Reporting has many more examples of "eyewitnesses" who are found to have made up the entire story.

In all of these cases (besides the wild pigs) the false claims were loudly parroted by the media, and any corrections - if they occurred at all - would be days later.

And just last week we saw a Gazan family start screaming how they "have no food" as soon as they saw a reporter, who saw plenty of food right there with them.

One would think that after years of lie after lie after lie from "eyewitnesses," verified to be false often by Palestinian Arab sources themselves, that they would start to catch on to the fact that PalArabs know the game and play reporters as patsies.

Journalists, of course, have a vested interest in a "good story," especially with a human component. The idea that people would lie to their faces is distasteful and it implies that they cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, so they are reluctant to correct mistakes.

NGOs have a much greater vested interest in furthering their agendas, regardless of facts, as we see from B'tselem here (at least they admit that the stories aren't verified - many other "human rights" organizations have no problem making up the lies themselves.)

What could it take for the media to wake up and start looking at Palestinian Arab claims with the same skepticism that they would give Western politicians?

Morning news roundup

Terrorist lie of the day - The Palestinian Resistance Committees claim to have tunneled into Israel and blown up a tank, killing soldiers. Uh-huh.

What's in a name? - Anti-semitic graffiti was scrawled on a church in England, including profanity. The reason? The church is called the Zion Baptist Church! So, naturally, out of all the explicit anti-semitism that has been seen in the UK since the Gaza op started, this is the first one the Muslim community condemned.

UNRWA terrorists? Shocking! - Fox News has a report on the many terrorist connections that UNRWA has had over the years, as well as their utterly inadequate methods to stop terrorists from being employed there. (Pretty much, they ask their employees nicely not to do anything naughty. And they check them against a list of Al Qaeda members.)

Arab unity - An emergency summit of the Arab League in Qatar over Gaza does not look likely, as they could not get a quorum of countries to attend.

Photo-photo-photo-photo-photo...op - Apparently, an IDF soldier accidentally left a used, single-use rocket launcher behind in Gaza. This huge victory for terrorists is commemorated with no fewer than twenty pictures taken by saraya.ps and shown on the Islamic Jihad news site PalToday.

"Free Gaza" turns around, starts lying campaign

Last time the Free Gaza freaks tried to reach Gaza in their worldwide publicity tour, they claimed that they were surrounded by a half-dozen Zionist warships who opened fire at them and then deliberately rammed their boat three times. None of those claims were ever verified by any of the journalists on board and no video was ever produced that corroborated the stories. Their public statements started backing off from the claims of being shot at with machine guns but they never admitted lying.

This time, they took repeated Israeli warnings that they will be stopped by "any means possible" as a threat to kill them. From their website:

The Israeli navy today threatened to kill unarmed civilians aboard a mercy ship on its way to deliver medical supplies and doctors to besieged Gaza.

As before, we can be sure that there will be no audio of these supposed threats ever released by the 17 journalists on board the boat, and that this lie will be quickly spread through the moonbat media outlets.

One more lie: in a recent newsletter, they said:

Once we set sail, we do not plan on turning back. We will stay at sea, insisting on access to Gaza, until we succeed or Israel gravely attacks or arrests us.

Fun Gaza fact

In the 2006 elections that swept Hamas into office, a higher percentage of women voted for Hamas than men, 44% to 42%.

Housewives preferred Hamas 47% to 42%.

Hamas: the party of Palestinian Arab soccer moms.

ICRC president inflates Gaza's population density

We've long ago dismissed the old canard that "Gaza is the most crowded place on Earth."

Well, the ICRC president evidently just went really overboard. From Ma'an:

Kellenberger also said that the ICRC has “no evidence” of the use of white phosphorus, a chemical weapon that causes severe burning used in populated areas. On Tuesday a Red Cross official in Geneva told the Associated Press that it is “pretty clear” that Israel had used the weapon in Gaza, but said there was no evidence that this use violated international law.

Answering a question about the alleged use of white phosphorus, Kellenberger highlighted that Gaza is approximately three times more densely populated than Manhattan, making it more difficult to use certain weapons without harming civilians.

Whoa! Three times the density of Manhattan???

Let's do the math - again.

Population

Area (km2)

Density

Pop/km2

Gaza

1,500,202

360

4,167

Manhattan

1,537,195

58.8

26,143

If Gaza had three times Manhattan's population density - 78,428 people per square kilometer - it would contain over 28 million people!

Let's say that Kellenberger only meant Gaza City, not the larger Gaza Strip. Guess what? Even Gaza City only has a population density of 6,834 per square kilometer, about a quarter of Manhattan's.

Free Gaza Movement allows dozens to die!

The FG moonbats have fixed their generator and started sailing again towards Gaza, where the Israeli navy will probably stop them sometime tomorrow.

According to their press release, they are bringing in "essential parts for ventilators, which will allow the only burn center in the Gaza Strip, at Shifa Hospital, to double its capacity."

Let's assume that the Free Gaza hypocrites really did uniquely identify a pressing need for Shifa Hospital, that the Red Cross and WHO and UNRWA are somehow not aware of or are ignoring.

Let's further assume that the doubling of Shifa's capacity will save tens of lives, especially since we must also assume that certain Norwegian and Arab doctors are accurate in stating categorically that Israel is burning Gazans with white phosphorus munitions, something that the Red Cross says is not happening.

If all these things are true, then the Free Gaza terror-supporters are purposefully putting Gazans in danger, because instead of coordinating with any number of NGOs, or Jordan, or Tunisia, or Brazil or Greece or Qatar or Egypt to bring these much-needed parts into Gaza as quickly as possible, they have consciously decided to deprive Gazans of these ventilators in order to have a showdown at sea with the Israeli navy instead.

How many Gazans will be permanently disfigured or will die because of this decision by the Free Gaza to delay the delivery of these "essential" parts?

Of course, all this is true only if you assume that the Free Gaza movement is telling the truth.

Defeating Hamas

Jeffrey Goldberg writes a very interesting op-ed in the New York Times today, proving the utter inability of Hamas to ever moderate: (h/t Daily Alert and EBoZ)

In the summer of 2006, Nizar Rayyan, a member of the Hamas ruling elite and an unblushing executioner, who was killed two weeks ago, told this journalist, "First we must deal with the Muslims who speak of a peace process and then we will deal with you." As the Gaza war moves to a cease-fire, a crucial question will inevitably arise: Should Israel (and by extension, the U.S.) try to engage Hamas? But the question is unmoored from certain political and theological realities.

Advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of listening, I haven't heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is insincere. Like Hizbullah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. I asked Rayyan: Could you agree to anything more than a tactical cease-fire with Israel? I felt slightly ridiculous asking: A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks at Camp David. Rayyan answered that a long-term cease-fire would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of Islam to eradicate Israel.

The article is quite good until the conclusion:

There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.

The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation. Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness.

Goldberg, who is quite knowledgeable on facts, allows his biases to cloud his analysis.

He is engaging in a straw-man argument when he says that some Israelis think that militarily defeating Hamas will somehow moderate the group. No one thinks that Hamas members will suddenly accept Israel; their very existence is founded on the idea of destroying Israel. Goldberg simply doesn't see the true argument for bombing Hamas:

Defeating militarily Hamas would make them irrelevant in the Arab world.

People in general naturally gravitate towards the perceived "winner" in any confrontation. And Arabs tend to associate military might with winning (as opposed to, for example, human rights records or economic power.)

In 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Arab world as a whole embraced Al Qaeda. Al Jazeera put his heroic silhouette on its backdrop of news stories, Arabs throughout the world cheered the attacks, and Arab pride was at the highest it had been since Saladin. Arabs and Muslims voluntarily went to Afghanistan to fight the weak, shamed Westerners.

Today, al-Qaeda is more of an embarrassment. Sure, there are still many Arabs who are ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda's goals, but they have been muted in the mainstream Arab world, and publicly looked down upon. No one volunteers to fight with the mujahadeen nowadays. The reason is because a much more powerful force came in and turned the impression of Al Qaeda from a seemingly invincible and brilliant force into a small group of people who spend more time hiding in caves than attacking the hated West.

As much as the Arab world continues to hate the United States and its allies, they respect and fear them much more now than they did in 2001. Al Qaeda no longer represents the ideal for average Arabs that it did then.

In the Arab world, raw power is the path to respect.

Goldgerg's argument would imply that Al Qaeda is winning because its leaders have not moderated.

Hamas is the same as Al Qaeda. The ideology, methods and goals are identical. And the path to victory is the same as well - a combination of raw power and the resultant "peer pressure" that makes the Arab world turn against them.

Hamas will never be pragmatic, but ordinary Arabs are. They know that aligning with the winning side is smarter than the alternative. Pragmatism as an Arab philosophy is not as attractive as the idea of an ascendant Islamic ummah taking on and defeating the world, but it is a good bit better than being looked upon as a defeated, shamed people. The very name "Hamas" needs to evoke embarrassment when heard by Arabs.

That is how to win.

IDF stops Iranian ship (for real this time)

From JPost:

The Navy intercepted an Iranian ship loaded with medicine, food and clothing destined for Gaza, the IDF said Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the boat docked in Port Said, Egypt, but the Egyptians refused to allow it to unload its cargo. Nevertheless, at midnight Tuesday, the boat left Port Said and tried to go to Gaza.

A Navy Sa'ar 4.5 class ship intercepted the Iranian boat and transmitted a clear message on Channel 16 - the international communication line for ships - that it would not allow it to enter the waters around Gaza.

On Wednesday morning, when it was 30 miles off the Gaza coast, the Iranian boat again tried to move towards the Strip, and the Navy again intercepted it, the army said. It then returned to el-Arish, in Egypt, and two Egyptian boats prevented it from docking there.

Since that time, the boat has been sitting 30 miles off the coast of Gaza and has been closely tracked by the Israeli navy.

Israel has been coordinating all activity regarding the Iranian boat with the Egyptians.

The simplest way to sanction Iran - call its bluff

Last week, Iran claimed it was banning "companies in which the Zionists have any shares."

So I humbly suggest to my Israeli readers to buy exactly one share of companies that Iran heavily depends on, and publicize that fact.

Some examples include Linde, BASF, Lurgi, Krupp, Siemens, ZF Friedrichshafen, Mercedes, Volkswagen and MAN.

If the world isn't taking the sanctions against Iran seriously, maybe Iran can be forced to do it itself!

PalArab press roundup Jan 14 2009

Islamic Jihad mouthpiece Palestine Today quotes those famous "informed sources" that 46 IDF soldiers were killed so far, and helpfully adds that Israel only admits to 24 of them. Does anyone think that the count of Gazan civilians dead might be just as accurate?

There is outrage that Israel bombed a cemetery. Of course, Hamas would never consider shooting rockets from a cemetery, right?

The moderate, Holocaust denying president of the PA stated that Israel intends to "eliminate the Palestinian people from Gaza." Are accusations of genocide more acceptable when a "moderate peace partner" says them?

Arab attacks synagogue guard in Germany

From eNews 2.0:

A Palestinian man with an iron bar attacked a guard outside a Berlin synagogue on Tuesday, knocking him to the ground before the assailant could be restrained, German police said.

The other guards outside the synagogue caught the attacker. The assailant and another guard suffered minor injuries in the scuffle, while the guard hit with the bar was taken to hospital for treatment.

The old synagogue in Oranienburger Strasse, a central Berlin street, is a tourist attraction and has guards permanently standing outside and searching visitors because of the danger of attack by neo-Nazis.

Meanwhile, German police apologized for entering a private home and ripping down an Israeli flag from the window in order to appease a mob of some 10,000 Arab protesters. (Video of the incident can be seen here.)

The secret life of terrorists

The New York Times writes another decent story about Hamas members in Gaza. Some highlights (h/t EBoZ):

In a different part of town, another young fighter and his wife were getting ready to go see her brother, 20, who had been wounded in southwest Gaza City two nights ago while bringing food to fighters. The fighter, 27, in dark jeans and Timberland-style boots, swaggered with words about Islam and duty to his people. Hamas is doctrinally opposed to Israel’s right to exist.
“It’s either victory while alive, or martyrdom,” he said. “Both ways are victory.”
His wife, in a white head scarf, agreed.
“Two days ago, he was very tired and he didn’t want to leave the house,” she said. “I told him you have to leave, you have a responsibility.”
But the sight of her brother unconscious in the hospital bed seemed to jolt the couple into an alternate reality, one where they were vulnerable and afraid. The man’s eyes glistened with tears as he asked the doctor question after question.
Back outside, the woman regained her composure.
“I prefer you as a martyr,” she said to her husband.
“What if I am injured?” he asked.
She repeated her preference for death.

We do need to respect different cultures. You see, in some places, when a woman says she wants her husband to die, that would be considered alarming, but in Gaza it is praiseworthy! Who are we to say that one way is better than another?

He took up the accusation that Hamas fighters hid behind civilians. Fighters, in a way, are both, he argued, and are accepted by many residents as defenders. People bring them food, he said. Sometimes they oppose rockets being launched nearby, but often they do not.
“I’m a civilian, and I’m a fighter,” he said.
The fighter who wore glasses argued that the Israeli forces had pressed them into such a small territory that civilians were just about everywhere, so it was hard not to operate near them.
“Where do we go?” he asked. “There are no other places.”

The fact that they had huge caches of weapons in their own homes and in mosques and schools has nothing to do with it, of course. It's all Israel's fault for pushing them into the cities - that they were already in.

Senior fighters are mostly in hiding, the fighters said. Many have not moved for days, staying in basements or bunkers. With limited access to phone networks, in part because of fear that signals will draw missile fire, some have been cut off altogether during the military operation, and sit alone.

Leaving the bravery to the wives of their fighters.

Today's named deaths in Gaza, plus a "child"

Ma'an actually names some of the people who were killed today in Gaza. Out of the 27 people named, 22 were known "militants" and two are ambiguous. All were men.

If we exclude the two who are unclear, this means that 88% of those named were confirmed terrorists.

One in particular is of interest: Muhammad Nader Abu Sha’ban, aged 17. He was fighting at the time he was killed, but there is no doubt that Gazan doctors will count him as a child civilian, not as a "militant."

Over the years, a significant number of the "children" that Israel has killed in various operations have been 16 or 17, far out of proportion to what one would expect in a normal distribution - and a great number of them were engaged in violent actions at the time they were killed.

Over half of the "child" victims in Gaza over the past year have been 15 or older. There is no reason to think that this number is any different now.

Keep that in mind every time someone quotes a statistic on how many children the IDF killed. Many if not most of them are very likely to have hardly been innocent.

Our long nightmare is over. The Weblog Awards are done.

After a week that seemed like it would never end, with some blogs punctuating every posting with "vote for me!" spam, the voting for the 2008 Weblog Awards are finally over.

My category of Best Middle East/Africa Blog got contaminated with thousands of people who voted against "neocon" or "moonbat" blogs rather than for any blogs, which meant that my category had more votes cast than almost every other - some 39,000 votes cast. Not that my ignominious placement of 6th place would have improved any without the outside help!

Anyway, I do thank those who voted for me; my blog received triple the votes it did in 2006.

The war against Starbucks

The Gaza operation is hitting one company more than any other: Starbucks.

A campaign has quickly spread throughout the Arab and Muslim world via email and Facebook to boycott certain American companies that are rumored to send profits to Israel:

The rumors circulated via email, on social networking sites like Facebook and conspiracy websites: top American companies are donating profits to Israel in support of the war in Gaza and consumers should boycott them.

The online campaigns call for a boycott of several major U.S.-based companies like McDonalds, the coffee chain Starbucks, Pizza Hut and cigarette maker Phillip Morris, though most of the companies have explicitly denied the rumors on their websites and in interviews.

“Let's stop using American and British products for just one month. The U.S. will lose 8.6 billion daily if we stop using its products for only one month,” read one email being circulated in Arabic. “As a true Muslim do that. Tell your family, friends, and neighbors and stop for one month.”

According to the Saudi Gazette, the campaign is working:

Saudi Gazette visited American restaurants such as Burger King, McDonalds, Hardies, KFC and Starbucks and found them almost deserted. These food outlets were invariably crowded prior to the recent boycott call.

A huge drop in customers at such places is perceptible. “In the last three weeks, the number of customers has dropped by about 25 percent,” said a Starbucks employee requesting anonymity.
“The customers think that buying one cup of coffee will help in killing a Palestinian child,” he said.

This being the Muslim world, of course, such campaigns cannot remain peaceful for long. From This is London:

TRADERS told today how pro-Palestinian demonstrators caused hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage when they ransacked businesses near the Israeli Embassy.

The policing bill for Saturday's protest has topped more than £1million. Three officers and 20 demonstrators were injured.

An angry mob targeted shops and cafés in Kensington High Street, looting and smashing windows as violence flared during the rally.

Starbucks bore the brunt of the vandalism as masked protesters ripped out fittings and equipment after clashes with riot police.

And it was not an isolated incident. In Lebanon:

About a hundred demonstrators have converged on west Beirut's branch of the Starbucks coffee shop and closed it down in protest over the IDF operation in Gaza.

Protesters are justifying their actions by claiming that the Starbucks corporation' owner donates money to the Israeli military. Protesters raised a Palestinian flag over the shop and wrote on its window "Jewish favorite coffee."

Starbucks was forced to put a statement on their website:

Rumors that Starbucks Coffee Company and its management support Israel are unequivocally false.

Starbucks is a publicly traded company with stores in 49 countries. Though our thousands of partners (employees) and business associates around the globe have diverse views and share many beliefs about a wide range of topics, our primary focus remains to deliver the best customer experience possible. Starbucks is a non-political organization and does not support political causes. Further, the political preferences of a Starbucks partner at any level have absolutely no bearing on Starbucks company policies.

I don't drink coffee, but I hear that Starbucks' iced tea is kosher. Might be a good time to check it out.