Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 02, 2009

The back door to "Palestinian unity"

Even if the Hamas/PA negotiations are successful, and even if Hamas agrees in some symbolic way to avoid explicit support for terror attacks, and even if they manage to convince the EU and the UN that the combined entity is willing to adhere to existing PA commitments...

...there is still an easy way for terrorists to continue to attack Israel with impunity.

Today, Islamic Jihad announced that they will not take part in any potential "national unity" government. Similarly we have supposedly new organizations like Palestinian Hizbollah Brigades whose entire stated purpose is to continue terror when the more mainstream groups have public truces.

We have seen in the past that members freely go between the terror groups and that attacks are often jointly executed. Similarly, we have seen Palestinian Arab leaders pretend to be helpless when these "rogue" groups continue their attacks, as they aim to gain Western sympathy and aid while they can clandestinely support the all-important "resistance." Hamas might have had little patience for the Al Aqsa Brigades after their Gaza coup, but they are quite happy to allow Islamic Jihad to control many dunams of land in the densely-populated Strip purely for terror training.

It is an old playbook, and it is one we can expect to see again and again as long as gullible Westerners continue to believe their own wishful thinking more than the ugly facts.

Would you call this...disproportionate?

Representatives of dozens of countries are meeting in Egypt to donate billions of dollars to rebuild Gaza.

At exactly the same time, none of them seem to have a problem with the fact that rockets continue to be shot from Gaza every day, and it is only a matter of time before these billions of dollars get destroyed in a new Israeli operation.

One would think that perhaps they would notice that billions of dollars would be better spent on disarming Hamas, or relocating Gazans to other Arab countries, or pressuring Egypt to annex Gaza and paying them to take care of Hamas, or any other solution that would:

a) Be permanent
b) Actually help people for longer than a few months

Yet somehow they are fixated on the idea that Hamas' existence as an entity singlemindedly dedicated to Israel's destruction is only a minor problem that can be papered over with cash.

Stealth Conflicts has a neat graphic representing the relative death tolls of recent conflicts in the world. I modified it to show three conflicts at once: (h/t Backspin)

Yet if a similar graphic would be shown on how much money the world has spent on these three conflicts, you could probably just swap the Israel-Palestine and DRC labels and it would still be pretty accurate.

In the case of Palestinian Arabs, history shows that throwing money at the issue is the best way to perpetuate it. Right now in Gaza all the parties are jockeying for position to control the huge influx that is forthcoming from well-meaning and ultimately stupid Westerners.

One thing is certain: all that money will not help a single Gazan for more than a short period of time, but it will help the Gaza terror groups hold onto their power.

Evil Zionist Settler Pigs - part 5

Ma'an breathlessly reports:

Dozens of pigs belonging to Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian young man from the village of An-Nasarieyah, north of the West Bank city of Nablus, on Sunday.

Palestinian medical sources said that Ayman Ibrahim Hamdan, 25, was transferred to Rafidia Hospital in the city after being bitten by one of the pigs.

Hamadan told Ma’an that dozens of pigs unleashed by the Israeli settlers of the illegal settlement of Al-Hamra adjacent to the village had attacked him while he was in his farm in the village.

Once again, the diabolical and fanatically Jewish settlers have been shown to raise and domesticate wild pigs for one reason and one reason only - to attack Palestinian Arabs. Apparently, their hatred for Arabs is so all-consuming that they will spend years breeding animals that have no value whatsoever in a Jewish state, just to have them cause slight damage to Arab crops every few months.

Now, that's dedication!

We have previously seen these highly intelligent and trained pigs selectively attack Arab tomatoes, farmers, and garbagemen. We have also seen that the Jews managed to herd the pigs onto the Arab side of the West Bank fence.

Stop Lindsay Lohan's Conversion!

No!!!!

Lindsay Lohan is converting to Judaism in a bid to prove her devotion to Jewish girlfriend Samantha Ronson.
Although raised a Catholic, the 22-year-old star announced she was planning to change her faith on her Facebook page.
After jetting into London last week, Lindsay joined girlfriend Samantha at the Bar Mitzvah of the DJ's half-brother Joshua Ronson at the Westminster Synagogue on Saturday.
Showing her seriousness about converting, Lindsay had also visited the synagogue the day before with Samantha and her designer sister Charlotte.
Entering the synagogue, a photographer asked Lindsay if she was switching religions, to which she replied: 'I'm trying.'
Updating her Facebook status this week, Lindsay wrote 'I'm converting'.

No. G-d Almighty, no. On behalf of all right-thinking Jews everywhere, we must do everything necessary to stop this spoiled, bubbleheaded, moronic bimbo from becoming anything like what a Martian could accidentally and fleetingly think was close to something vaguely similar to a religion barely resembling Judaism.

In the name of all that is holy, this must be stopped.

We don't want her. We don't want to see any newspaper articles that mention "Lohan" and "Jewish" in the same paragraph. Hell, we don't want those terms mentioned in the same encyclopedia. Jews don't need to see the inevitable 2010 article saying "The hard-partying 'Freaky Friday' star who recently converted to Judaism was arrested for reckless driving, disorderly conduct and cocaine possession."

It is time to act.

I am hereby announcing the formation of the Please Stay a Shiksa fund.

I am kicking off a fundraiser to pay any cleric from any other religion a significant amount of money if you can convince Lohan to join your religion instead of Judaism. That's right - you make her a Confucian or a Rastafarian, and you can get big bucks.

Bonuses if you can take all the shallow, airhead Hollywood Kabbalists along with her. Once one goes, the rest should be pretty easy, as their capacity for independent thought was never too high to begin with.

I'm seeding the Please Stay a Shiksa fund with my own pledge of $250.

For those who agree, I implore you to contribute what you can to this vital cause.

UPDATE: From LGF:
Iron Bill:

As the self appointed spokesman for sane Catholics, I would like to convey the following message to my Jewish brothers and sisters: You are welcome to take her.

(As we speak the Vatican is appropriating money from the "Take The Shiksa Fund." This fund was previously used to direct Madonna towards Kabbalah)

EoZ:

Vatican, huh?

Perhaps we can pool our resources....

Jones:

First Madonna, now LL. Haven't the Jews suffered enough?

"Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse"

It is no secret that in the Holy Land, rain is a blessing from God and has been that way since Biblical times. But this year this blessing seems to be peculiarly biased.

In Israel, the torrential rains and even snow that is pouring down this weekend is being greeted with great joy. The parched Kinneret rose eight inches so far with much needed fresh water, and farmers finally have reason to smile after a very dry winter.

But this weekend's rain has not been such a blessing for Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Five were killed as a smuggling tunnel collapsed on their heads; 170 homes were flooded in the West Bank; Gazan officials were concerned about residents in tents being exposed to the rain.

Even more remarkably, a rocket that was fired from Gaza to Israel this evening did not cause any damage to the house it landed next to - because it landed in mud from the rain.

But far be it for me to say that Palestinian Arabs don't also have Allah on their side. After all, last week an Arab carpenter from Tulkarem found a piece of wood whose damage by beetles formed the word Mohammed at the angle he cut it.

The Lord indeed seems to work in mysterious ways.

Update on "City Wire" hate speech

I had mentioned some pure anti-semitism on The City Wire, a news site indexed by Google News, by someone named "Terrible Tommy." It appears that those specific articles have been removed, both from Google and from City Wire. City Wire seems also to have removed Terrible Tommy's blog on the site, although some of his hate is still there - including Holocaust denial and justification for Holocaust denial.

It appears that TT found out about this "censorship" because he tried to post an article called "CENSORED!!! - POWER OF THE JEW MEDIA" an hour ago, only to see it removed immediately from the website. Google's cache still has the headline. If I am the JEW MEDIA he is referring to, then I am honored!

Mission (partially) accomplished!

Roger Cohen calling a kettle black

Nuance is wonderful - when you get to choose what is nuanced and what is absolute.

Roger Cohen responds to critics of his column about how wonderful life is for the Jews of Iran. (I can't say he actually answers any of the questions those critics brought up, but he has plenty of indignation for them.) He lets us know that it is wrong, very wrong, to see things as being black and white:

But the equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures.

I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one - the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.

Does anyone find it the slightest bit disingenuous to see Cohen blaming the US for being "one dimensional" on Iran, when Iranian newspapers and officials openly wish for the destruction of America?

But Cohen's clear lens to the world, of moral relativism and shades of grey, gets strangely distorted when the topic comes up of whom he considers truly evil:

It's worth recalling that hateful, ultra-nationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand, may find a place in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Funny how all the nuance so suddenly disappears!

Cohen doesn't manage in his column to find an answer to this letter in the NYT:

To the Editor:
I was a 9-year-old girl living in Tehran when my family fled to America as a result of the Islamic Revolution. We didn’t leave Iran because of the weather, but because of a second-class existence transformed into a nightmare of religious persecution, which the few remaining Jews that Roger Cohen found have sadly internalized and accepted.
For Mr. Cohen to suggest that Iranian Jews have anything close to religious freedom or free expression in Iran is to discredit the long history of Muslim oppression and to deny the experience of generations of Jews who locked themselves in their homes during the Ashura holidays lest they become the target of the frenzied Shiite masses who filled the streets, or who cringed when they were called a word meaning dirty and impure and told to wait at the end of the line to draw water.
What about the Jewish schools and institutions that were systematically shut down after the Islamic Revolution? Or the fact that while Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are free to shout “Death to Israel,” Iranian Jews are forced to?
We must never forget the true history of Jews under Muslim regimes — my history.

Double-Dealing Durban

From Anne Bayefsky in Forbes:

Barack Obama just added double-dealing to his foreign policy repertoire. On Friday, administration officials led many Jewish leaders to believe that it had decided to boycott the United Nation's "anti-racism" conference known as Durban II. At the same time, however, human rights organizations were being led to believe that the administration was not pulling out and was looking for a way to "re-engage."

Durban II, scheduled for Geneva in April, is the U.N.'s attempt at a rerun of the 2001 global anti-Semitic hate fest held in Durban, South Africa.

After sowing confusion over the phone lines, the State Department chose late Friday night to put the real deal in print. Their release reads: "the current text of the draft outcome document is not salvageable," and "the United States will not ... participate in a conference based on this text," but we will "re-engage if a document that meets [our] criteria becomes the basis for deliberations." A new version must be: "shorter," "not reaffirm in toto the flawed 2001 Durban Declaration," "not single out any one country or conflict," and "not embrace the troubling concept of "defamation of religion."

And by the way, it continued, the U.S. will "participate" for the first time in the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Thus giving legitimacy to the most prominent anti-Israel NGO in the world.

All of this leaves the American people not knowing whether they're coming or going.

It does open a window, however, into Obama's gerrymandering. On one phone line with Assistant Secretary of State Karen Stewart were Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.N. Foundation, the UNA-USA Association and the Arab American Institute, among others. On the other line with National Security Council member Samantha Power were Jewish organizations. The dangerous message was that an Arab advocacy group does human rights, while Jewish organizations do Jews.

It also shows that "human rights" organizations would prefer to see the US participate in a festival of hate against Jews.

Read the whole thing. It is beyond scary.

Garden-variety anti-semitism

Citizen journalism definitely has its downsides.

I just came across an article in something called The City Wire where the Jewish ownership of media companies is detailed. It was written by an anonymous writer called "Terrible Tommy" who, by sheer coincidence, also is big on pushing the USS Liberty as an Israeli conspiracy to kill Americans.

The article looked familiar to me. Sure enough, it was actually written by none other than David Duke, even though it was presented as original.

This sort of thing has been increasing a great deal lately. It used to be relatively rare to see outright anti-semitism in "news" sites indexed by Google - The People's Voice and Uruknet were exceptions. But now, this sort of thing is visible more and more.

Clearly, Jew-hatred is becoming more fashionable and more acceptable. The haters are no longer embarrassed to spout their vitriol in public, and they don't find the need to hide behind "anti-Zionism" as much as they did only a year ago.

UPDATE: It looks like that article and some other of Terrible Tommy's hate has been deleted from City Wire.

Another Hamas front group, plus other PalArab news

Two rockets fired this morning were claimed by the "Palestine Hizbollah" group. That group started in October, about a month before the "lull" ended, claiming that they would not respect any cease fire and castigating the groups that "abandoned resistance." Interestingly, they refrained from firing rockets until the lull ended in November. And now that there are daily rocket attacks against Israel, they have been the only group to claim responsibility for any of them.

Clearly, this group is a front. Their first operation was jointly claimed with Islamic Jihad - when Hamas was claiming that they were still holding by the "lull." But during the Gaza operation, it became clear that Islamic Jihad and the other major terror groups in Gaza had strong operational ties with Hamas, so it became harder for Hamas to claim that any rocket fire after the "unilateral cease fire" had nothing to do with them.

Hence, a new terror group pops up, at a very convenient time for Hamas. It is clear that rockets such as the improved Grads fired yesterday - that penetrated a fortified school in Ashkelon, and in all likelihood was aimed at exactly that target - were smuggled in by Hamas, which owns the weapons tunnels and which rules Gaza pretty comprehensively. Yet credulous people believe that Hamas is holding its end of the cease fire bargain.

In other news, a 40 year old man was abducted, tortured and killed in Gaza.

5 were killed in another tunnel collapse. Recent rains were blamed.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 46.

PalArab news roundup 2-28-09

The PLO called a general strike on Friday to protest reports that Israel was going to demolish 90 houses in Jerusalem. How exactly these strikes hurt Jews and help Arabs is just as unclear as it was in the 1930s.

A young man was strangled to death in either an honor killing or some sort of revenge killing in Gaza City.

Another man was killed in a tunnel collapse under Rafah.

Abu Marzouq, an exiled Hamas leader based out of Damascus, entered Gaza on Thursday, apparently with Israeli permission.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is at 40.

(For some reason I am having problems with Google Translate and cannot get to any Arabic websites.)

The water in the State Department

Remember when Condoleeza Rice was a hawk? When Condi was National Security Advisor she was pretty consistent in her rhetoric against terror, in her support of Israel and her impatience for Arab coddling of terrorism.

Then, once she became Secretary of State, she seemed to come down with State Department disease - an unremitting hostility towards Israel, and a single-minded notion that more pressure on Israel is the best way for achieving the nirvana of Middle East peace.

A large number of Secretaries of State throughout the years have spent a significant part of their time trying to pressure Israel, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. They will make empty declarations of demands for the Arabs (The PA must do X) but their pressure on Israel always comes with an implicit threat, that the US' friendliness to Israel (or aid) is on the line.

Now, we have a feeling of deja vu, as Hillary Clinton moves from her job as a senator cheerleader for Israel to another Secretary of State who seems to believe that Israel is the only side that has to make any concrete, permanent moves for peace.

What happens at State that causes these changes to occur?

The reason is that it is almost a part of the job description. The State Department is tasked with forging and maintaining friendly relations with other nations around the world. It is impolitic to alienate nations unless necessary.

And when this is one's mandate, the calculus changes from "doing what is right" to "doing what will please the most nations." It is a simple calculus that 20-odd Arab League members representing hundreds of millions of people are more important - within the State Department's defined mandate - than Israel is.

The Arab nations, whose members hate the US anyway, have nothing to lose by placing Israel on the front of their agendas when talking with State Department officials. And the State Department, desperate to make inroads in the Arab world, will listen to them and identify with these agendas. After all, if a mere statement that Israel must do X will make dozens of nations a little bit happier, isn't it worth it?

The State Department's job is not to moralize. Even though they will come out with occasional reports on human rights, the department is focused on building relationships.

Another of the State Department's jobs is to protect American citizens worldwide, and when a single slip of the tongue can cause Arabs to riot and kidnap Americans the department will do everything necessary to avoid such an outcome.

It isn't that the water at State is tainted with anti-Zionist cooties. This is literally a part of the job. And Israel, as always, needs to do what's best for her own people in the long run, whether it is at odds with State or succumbing to pressure.

Law and Order, Palestinian Arab style

According to a report in Palestine Today, a man was on trial in a courtroom in Ramallah for murder.

One of the witnesses against him was testifying, and during the testimony raised a gun and pointed it at the accused.

The court officers jumped on the witness, causing a general ruckus ... during which the accused murderer escaped.

Always time to learn

At a wedding I attended this week, I saw this during the bedeken (veiling of the bride):

You have to admire the dedication of people who learn Daf Yomi!

New Elder video site

After my banning from YouTube, I have placed most of my videos on NMA-TV, a conservative video hosting site run by Heritage New Media Partners. A few others are hosted on LiveLeak; when I get a chance I will upload those to NMA-TV as well.

I know I'm missing some, so I'm still looking to fill the gaps.