Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Hamas declares obscenity to be "natural"

After today's terror attack of a Palestinian Arab literally butchering a 13-year old boy with an axe, Hamas announced:

"This attack was committed in the framework of the resistance," Ayman Taha said. "This is a reaction to the continuing occupation and the continued building of settlements."

"This is a natural reaction," he said, "especially against the backdrop of Israel attacks. We are a people occupied, and it is our right to defend ourselves and to act in every way and with every means at our disposal in order to defend ourselves."

This is not the first time that Hamas labeled terror attacks against innocent civilians to be "natural." They said it after an 86-year old Jewish man was murdered in Gilo, they said it after a Jewish woman was murdered with a bulldozer, they said it after many teens were massacred in their school.

In fact, Hamas believes that any attack against Jews is natural. When terrorists bragged about raping Jewish women as "revenge" against the Jews, Hamas didn't say a word against it. It is literally impossible to imagine a scenario where Hamas and other Palestinian Arab terror groups would condemn any attack that can possibly be claimed to be against Zionists worldwide.

Hamas has redefined any obscenity to be natural - if it is done by Arabs.

The labeling of heinous, disgusting crimes as "natural" is, in many ways, worse than the terror itself. It creates a mentality, already embraced by many in the West, that terrorism (disguised as "defense" or "resistance") is a human right, and that there is nothing that could be remotely considered immoral if the victims happen to be Jews who live in the Middle East. It is enshrining hate and it needs to be deplored, not with mealy mouthed official condemnations, but as an indictment of the entire Palestinian Arab mindset that glorifies obscenity. Israel should pronounce Hamas and their supporters not just to be "terrorists" but to be a vile, sickening bunch of animals who do not deserve any consideration, let alone respect, and who have - with their own words - dehumanized themselves.

Israel needs to emphasize that the most loathesome people are heroes in the twisted Palestinian Arab culture and that to even entertain the idea of negotiating with people like that is beyond absurd.

Brave Palestinian Arab axes Jewish boy to death

A Palestinian Arab man attacked Jews with an axe in Bat Ayin, killing a 13 year old boy and injuring a 7-year old. The terrorist escaped to a neighboring Arab village, where the peace-loving residents will hide their latest hero. Israel Matzav is liveblogging it.

There is zero chance that any Palestinian Arab will publicly show disgust at this act of deliberately attacking and murdering children. There is zero chance that the Arab village will hand this murderous scum over to any authorities. There is a 100% chance that this attack will be praised or, at the least, justified by the mainstream Palestinian Arab society and media. There is a 100% chance that multiple terror groups will vie for the honor of taking credit for this attack - in fact, that has already happened, with both Fatah and Islamic Jihad claiming responsibility.

As horrible as Qassam rockets aimed at civilians are, and as disgusting and deadly as suicide bombers are, there is something even more viscerally reprehensible at the thought of a man taking an axe and deliberately attacking children with it. Given the history of the Arab world celebrating Samir Kuntar, who similarly murdered a four year old girl by bashing her head in after murdering her father, this depravity is considered heroic and worthy of emulation. If the murderer gets caught, there will be summer camps in Ramallah named after him next year.

At this time, only Palestine Today is reporting this story in Arabic, referring to the dead boy as a "settler." And the entire world considers "settlers" to be subhuman already.

The Elder of Ziyon Haggadah

The Elder of Ziyon Haggadah for 5769/2009 is ready and available for download.

It contains the full Haggadah text, including English (except for Nirtzah.) It includes dozens of commentaries that I found on the Internet, almost all from a religious-Zionist perspective. Many of the commentaries assume that the audience is religious, so there are many transliterations of Hebrew words that I did not translate. I did not write anything original; I just compiled and edited it, pretty quickly.

The Haggadah is in PDF format, suitable for printing. It is 61 pages long and looks pretty decent when printed two-sided on a color printer.

To download it, click here and then click on the Download button.

חג שמח!

Hamas, Fatah fight over "Al Quds" celebrations

From Ma'an:

Palestinian division has overshadowed events celebrating Al-Quds Capital of Arab Culture 2009; celebrations are disparate, scattered and above all dominated by the factions hosting them.

Nowhere is this more apparent these days than in the two launches of Al-Quds Cultural events; on 17 March in Gaza, and on the 21st in the West Bank.

While only a few days separate the festivities the impact of the division spreads far beyond the immediate audiences and on to the viewers in other Arab nations who wish to share in the celebration of a great Arab Capital.

Each side has a multi-million dollar budget, allocated to figures close to the Palestinian Authority and de facto government offices. In the West Bank Dr Rafiq Al-Husseini, advisor to the President, controls a five million US dollar budget, while in Gaza member of the de facto government’s minister’s council Dr Atallah Abu Al-Sabeh controls the close to two million dollars allocated to the Al-Quds events.

For his part Abu As-Sabeh in Gaza described local events as “strong and successful,” but said that the internal division was palpable at each show.

“It looks like the shows in Gaza and the West Bank are competing with each other,” he said, “and that does no good for the audiences at home and abroad.”

“I just hope this does not reflect badly on Jerusalem,” he added.

Don't worry, Abu. Jerusalem will remain the most beautiful city in the world under Jewish control no matter how many Arabs fight each other over their claims.

Notice that millions of dollars of Western aid is going into these purely political events to make Jerusalem, Judenrein.

By the way, a good indication of the violence-loving psychology of Palestinian Arabs can be seen by the what they name their terrorist rockets after: Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Fatah's rocket is called the Al-Aqsa and Islamic Jihad calls theirs the Al-Quds.

Can you imagine, say, Spanish bombs called "Vaticans" or Italian rockets called "Bethlehems"? For normal people, their holy sites stand for peace, not war; for Palestinian Arabs, holiness is war.

April Islamic Fools open thread

There are no shortage of Muslim myths that are appropriate on April Fool's Day, like
"Yasser Arafat was poisoned by evil Joooz" or "Palestinians are suffering from a genocide."

Here's one from Iraq:

James Hider, the Middle East correspondent for the London Times and a self-confessed arachnophobe, was covering the U.S. Marines' campaign in Fallujah where he heard reports that the city's preachers would boost the Islamic fighters' morale with tales that Allah had sent in legions of “chair-sized arachnids, whose poisoned hairs could make a human body turn blue and explode in a shower of corrupted blood.” Oh, and the spiders also scream along at 40 kms an hour.

And don't forget Gaza's "Angels from Allah."

See also MEMRI's Top Conspiracy Theories of 2006 and the links there for earlier ones.

Meanwhile, post anything interesting you might have seen while surfing today...

Ain't got no time

...to blog.

Still working on the Elder Haggadah; hope to have that ready soon.

Palestinian "journalist"'s unfair advantage

One of the most prolific - and hateful - Palestinian Arab journalists is Khaled Amayreh, who we've quoted before as calling the PA "Zionist proxy scum!" He breathes bile, often at the "Palestine Think Tank" site.

One recent article compares the Palestinian Arab children's orchestra who played for Holocaust survivors in Israel to Holocaust victims forced to play music for Nazis. The pure hatred he feels for all things Israeli and Jewish is palpable.

Another from today calls the new Israeli government

an extremist coalition of war criminals, pathological liars, racist thugs (both of the Hitlerian and Stalinist styles), and hateful religious maniacs who inhale and exhale hatred 24 hours per day.

...I am, of course, in no way suggesting that the previous Israeli government was less nefarious than the new one. The previous government of the evil trio Olmert, Livni and Barak had all the hallmarks of a Zionist Third Reich.

But from looking at his website, I can see how he knows so much. You see, Khaled Amayreh has an advantage as a journalist that allows him to see the truth and to dismiss any Zionist propaganda.

He can read minds!

Right below where he calls himself a "peace activist" on his "About Us" page, he writes that his interests include "outer space and parapsychology."

People who are interested in astronomy do not refer to their interests as "outer space," which means that Amayreh not only believes in mind reading and telekinesis, but he probably has a direct connection to aliens and flying saucers as well!

This explains his deep knowledge of the facts as well as his devotion to truth. His main source is Zrfgpl from the planet Zyrkle-8, who happens to also be a rabid anti-semite.

Saudi women's advocacy group folds

From the Arab News:

A proposal to establish a first-of-its-kind organization to support women’s rights in Saudi Arabia has been dropped shattering the hopes of Saudi women for an official organization that would fight for their rights.
“We failed to obtain official approval to operate legally,” said Sulaiman Al-Salman, the man who came up with the idea to establish the society, Ansar Al-Mar’ah (Supporters of Women).
Al-Salman said he has been in constant conflict with the Ministry of Social Affairs to gain approval, adding that the ministry’s rejection has frustrated the group’s determination and that group members have, as a result, lost interest.
“I recently called members for a meeting, but no one showed up apart from one member who said he would be willing to join again once the society gets approved,” he said. “I realized that I was the only one working for this goal, all alone. So I decided to break it up,” he said.
He added that Ansar Al-Mar’ah does not enjoy support in some official circles because it includes members of both genders.

Support for women in the sharia state of Saudi Arabia seems to be a bit...lacking.

Iranian logic

One of the most often-used arguments in favor of anti-semitism is that since there is such a long history of persecution of Jews, the Jews must have done something really evil to deserve it.

In normal enlightened societies where racism and bigotry are frowned upon, the haters are the ones who are put on the defensive. But in the twisted world of the bigots, the innocents who are persecuted are the ones who must prove they shouldn't be hated, an impossible task.

In today's world, the two major recent recipient groups of unbridled hate are "Zionists" and Americans. And just like classic anti-semitism, the haters are arguing that their hate is justified because everyone else is doing it.

From the Los Angeles Times, in part of a response by an advisor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Obama's Persian New Year's greetings:

In all corners of the world, it is worth noting, the only flags being set ablaze belong to the U.S. and the occupying Zionist regime.

See? Because Muslims have a love of burning flags, then the nations whose flags are burned must all be evil! QED!

I would add that the major targets of shoe-throwing incidents have been Israelis and Americans as well. The author can feel free to use that argument next time.

Birkat HaChamah, 1897

Via Daled Amos, an article from the April 8, 1897 New York Times:

The mental picture of a European rabbi who barely knows English explaining to an Irish New York cop about Birkat HaChamah is really amusing.

Birkat HaChamah will be observed on April 8 this year.

PalArabs support the "peace process" - and terror

A recent poll of Palestinian Arabs from the PCPSR shows what would appear to be a contradiction.

61.9% say they support the peace process while less than 20% oppose it. Yet 54.2% of Palestinian Arabs also support terror attacks against civilians in Israel, while only 42.7% oppose terror.

In Gaza, the seeming incongruity is even starker: 66.9% support terror attacks and 31.6% oppose - but 73.3% support the peace process, with only 15.5% opposing!

How can the Palestinian Arabs support peace and terror at the same time?

The answer is, of course, that they can't, and don't. They aren't in favor of peace - they are in favor of a "peace process." There is a big difference between the two, a difference that the West refuses to acknowledge.

Peace is the acceptance of the other party's rights and the desire to live and work together.
The "peace process," on the other hand, is a Trojan horse meant to weaken Israel for an ultimate attack to destroy the Jewish state.

The idea of using "peace" as a method of winning land that couldn't be conquered has been part and parcel of Arab thought since 1977, and it remains ingrained among Palestinian Arabs today. They have seen that the combination of terror attacks and fake peace overtures has gotten them effective control of Gaza and much of the West Bank, and this is a formula that they will not give up as long as the West pressures Israel to accept illusory "peace."

The "peace process" and real peace are antithetical.

UNRWA teachers overwhelmingly support Hamas

From JPost:

Hamas supporters scored a victory in elections for the school teachers' union of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that were held in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.

The results showed that Hamas won all 11 seats of the teachers' union.

The Hamas victory means that Hamas supporters will continue to control UNRWA-run schools and other academic institutions throughout the Gaza Strip. Hamas has controlled the UNRWA teachers' union for the past 16 years.

Some 10,100 UNRWA workers participated in the election, with the turnout being estimated at more than 97 percent.

The voting was conducted at UNRWA's main headquarters in the Gaza Strip.

Just a small reminder that, no matter what UNRWA says, the people who teach at UNRWA schools support terrorism.

Arabs sick of Palestinian issue

From Ma'an:

The results of the Arab Summit in Doha were unrealistic and lacked any practical measures to ensure goals are met, said Palestine’s Islamic resistance movement Hamas on Tuesday.

A special statement from Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum said the summit failed to deal with the Palestinian issue, and neglected the suffering of Gazans following Israel’s three week war on the Strip.

“We were expecting that this summit would be different than the other summits and put practical steps to protect the Palestinian territories, especially Jerusalem and to help Gazans; but it is all the same,” Barhoum’s statement read.

The focus of the Arab summit turned to Sudan's President Omar Al-Beshir, who was strongly supported by Arab states against the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hauge. Al-Beshir stands accused of committing war crimes in Darfur.

Xinhua adds:

For the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the Arab summit only called on Israel to lift its siege on the territory. Hamas had hoped that the Arabs would do more than calls to overcome the blockade.
"We were hoping the Arab leaders would move to lift the siege by acts, not by words," Barhoum added. "We also hoped they would use their pressure cards against the Zionist occupation."

All together now:

"Awwwwwww!"

In recent years, Arab countries seem to be sick and tired of Palestinian Arabs. While they keep saying that it is their highest priority, in reality they only use the issue to blame their own problems on Israel and shield themselves from criticism. Decades of incessant whining and, worse, demands from the Palestinian Arabs have turned them off, and the Hamas/Fatah infighting has accelerated their anger. They'll tell the world that the Palestinian issue must be fixed before any other unrelated Arab problems, but privately they don't give a damn.

Yet the West has not yet picked up on this, as clueless Europeans and Americans keep insisting that fixing the unfixable Palestinian Arab problem is a magic key to solving all the problems of the Middle East.

Doha, where the only solidarity the Arabs had was to show support for a genocidal dictator, proves otherwise.

UPDATE: This post from last year shows even more conclusively that Arabs do not consider Palestinians to be a good investment.

Wild Saudi women let loose in all-girl coffee shops

From the Saudi Gazette:

Women’s coffee shops are no longer just meeting places for friends or refuges for a moment’s escape from the daily routine. Instead, according to some, they have become the haunts of university students and schoolgirls playing truant to indulge themselves in smoking shisha pipes and cigarettes, with women using the locations as impromptu job agencies, and matchmakers seeking willing bribes. Behind the walls of women’s coffee shops, some say, all sorts of things go on.

Salwan Abdullah, a 24-year-old university student, recalls the first time she was invited by a student friend to go to an all-female coffee shop. “I had no idea of what went on in these places, and when we entered the room was crowded with university students and girls from secondary and intermediate school. The air was full of smoke from shisha pipes and cigarettes. There were married and single girls, and women matchmakers going round asking girls if they were looking for husbands and if so what sort of features they were looking for.”

“I saw the same thing in another café during school exam time,” Salwan continued. “I saw girls in school uniform, no more than 14 years old, going into the bathrooms to change into jeans and T-shirts and putting on make-up they’d hidden in their school bags along with their cigarettes.”

“Girls have become more and more daring in coffee shops,” said university student Khuloud. “I once saw two girls among a group smoking shisha and laughing out loud as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and I could tell from their eyes that they were proud of it.”

Sara, a science student at King Abdulaziz University, described some of the behavior she saw in coffee shops as “incredible.”

“It goes completely against our ethics,” she said. “In one of the larger coffee shops I saw girls dressed very immodestly, acting as if they were young male teenagers, drinking coffee and tea, and there was a special place for listening to music which had been turned into some sort of place for dancing and showing off their bodies. Families need to keep an eye on this and prevent this sort of behavior in our conservative society.”

Smoking? Dancing? Make-up? Jeans? Acting like boys?

What could make Saudi girls want to act like this?

It couldn't possibly be living in a society where they are forced, 24 hours a a day, to avoid accidentally being seen by any man, could it?

No...it must be that they are simply immoral.

Money doesn't buy influence from Arabs

Diplomats are addicted to the idea of "influence." The thinking goes that they can influence how other entities act by dangling carrots or threatening with sticks. In recent times, sticks have gone out of fashion and the carrots have proliferated, but either way, the thinking is that by offering positive incentives, intransigent parties can become more malleable. Likewise, by offering a steady stream of positive incentives, the implicit threat of withdrawing them can likewise influence parties to act in more acceptable ways.

In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the entire carrot idea is not only ineffective, but it is derided as a perfect example of Western stupidity. It is as if both the scientists and the laboratory rats are convinced that each one has conditioned the other one to behave in the way they want. Paying off a party who is already resentful or hateful does not tend to make them change their minds nearly as much as it is supposed.

A perfect example of this comes from an Al Ahram article from last week, talking about the wisdom of Camp David from Egypt's perspective by countering arguments of those who were opposed. The last section has this very instructive section (h/t Judeopundit):

The last charge against the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty that I would like to address here is that which maintains that it turned Egypt into a US dependency. The contention could only come from someone who is not quite mentally stable, or that has never read history, or that does not know the true nature of Egypt, the Egyptian people and the Egyptian government. Clearly, no rational person would fail to take the world's sole superpower into account. But all that country's economic and political clout has not prevented Egypt from casting its vote contrary to that of the US in 83 per cent of issues that came to a vote in the UN (compare this to Israel's record of voting with the US in 87 per cent of the cases). History is full of instances of Egypt's ability to stand firm in the face of US demands. Cairo refused to cooperate with the American attack against Libya in the 1980s and it refused to exert pressure on the Palestinians during the negotiations that took place in the 1990s. Indeed, Egypt, which signed a peace agreement with Israel, has been the foremost obstacle to the rush to normalisation with the Hebrew state, keeping normalisation as a major card in the negotiating process between the Arabs and Israel, in perpetual defiance of Washington's wishes. Nor is it a secret that all the "advice" given by Washington regarding domestic change was not heeded. In fact, those who hold that Egypt is a US dependency would do well to study the entire chapter of the past eight years when Cairo was at constant loggerheads with the Bush administration. Moreover, even then Egypt remained the largest recipient of arms and money from Washington apart from Israel. This was the product of wisdom and skill...

Egypt has been playing the US, accepting billions of dollars of aid while not changing its policies towards US interests one iota. All of the benefits of the Egyptian/Israeli peace treaty, as enumerated by the author in the rest of the article, would be just as effective without US largesse.

In other words, all the billions of dollars given by the US to Egypt, ostensibly to influence that country, have gone to waste.

Washington's influence over Israel is not predicated on aid money but on shared interests and a deep friendship. That is what makes a reliable ally. And as we see from this article, Egypt is anything but.