Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

New blog to check out by Barry Rubin

Professor Barry Rubin, prolific author and Middle East expert, has a new blog where he is writing a large number of interesting posts.

I have no idea how he writes so fast.

Check it out!

Another Hamas victim succumbs

A Gaza man who was injured by Hamas during Cast Lead has succumbed to his wounds, increasing the self-death count for the year to 67.

Human Rights Watch just came out with a report accusing Hamas of murdering some 32 political opponents during Cast Lead.

Another "martyr" data point

When the Gaza operation ended, Hamas claimed to have lost 48 members in total.

At the moment, their Arabic website lists 138 Hamas members who were "martyred."

Their English website? Only 9.

Gaza fake civilian count keeps rising

PTWatch and Suzanne are doing a fantastic job finding more fake "civilians" from Gaza who were in fact terrorists. We are now up to 94 114 on our list, of whom 75 were identified as "civilian" and the rest as "policemen/civilian" by PCHR. Suzanne is now noticing "martyrs" listed on the Hamas Arabic site who were called "civilian" by PCHR.

Keep in mind that a great number of the remaining "civilians" are young men between 17 and 35, and many other terrorists are not publicly known. In fact, Hamas is still releasing the names of new "martyrs" a few times a month even now, as they try to balance hiding the number of losses they had with memorializing their "heroes."

It is also notable that at least 8 of the terrorists have been listed as "children" by PCHR (7 explicitly called "militants" by PCHR, one additional one identified from the Al Mezan list.)

More useful analysis can be done given the differing lists from Al Mezan and PCHR. Human shields can be identified if one carefully looks at the location of the terrorists killed and line them up with civilians killed at the same place. Similarly, children and wives with the same last name killed at the same place as known terrorists would indicate that they were being used as human shields, or at the very least they were endangered knowingly (as is the case of the family of Nizar Rayan.)

As this list grows, the utter mendacity of so-called "human rights organizations" in Gaza is proven over and over again. They knowingly lie in order to make Israel look as bad as possible.

70 years ago: The boats of unwanted Jews

On the eve of World War II, the Holocaust was already happening. Jews were being herded into concentration camps and the lucky ones managed to find ships on which they sailed to get out of the hellhole of Europe.

Only to be rebuffed everywhere they went.

Exactly 70 years ago, in April 1939, the SS Assimi and another ship tried to bring hundreds of refugees to Palestine, only to be stopped by the British and sent back out to sea.

After another 68 days at sea, the passengers managed to make it to Palestine to be arrested by the British (click to enlarge).

And they were the lucky ones.

Time magazine described the ships that were left without any ports:

The liner St. Louis left Hamburg one Sunday last month. Out into the grey waste of the Atlantic it carried its dismal cargo: 937 German-Jewish refugees bound for Cuba. The ten-year-old, oil-burning, 16,732-ton ship was scheduled to discharge its miserable company at Havana, proceed to New York to pick up passengers for a gay June cruise to the West Indies. The refugees were to remain in Cuba until they could enter the U. S. They were a typical group of the world's newest homeless wanderers: men in sports clothes who had paid as much as $480 for their passage; distraught women; doctors and lawyers who had lost their practices; men who had been in concentration camps. There were 500 women on board. There was Max Loewe, a lawyer, with his wife and two children. There were 150 other children, 106 of them under ten. In the strange, fear-ridden, hope-ridden atmosphere of refugee ships, compounded of anxiety, relief, tension, they waited, living until their voyage's end under the terrible shadow of the red & black swastika ensign that flew from the stern.
For 13 days the ship plowed south and west. In glistening Havana Harbor on a sweltering Saturday the engines stopped. Across the water the refugees could see Morro Castle and the heat-softened outlines of Havana, where many of them had relatives among Havana's 25,000 Jews. Ninety miles to the north lay the U. S. But the ship did not dock. The launches that approached it were ordered back by harbor police. To the refugees the stretch of water between ship and shore was as wide as the 4,600 miles the St. Louis had crossed.
Sunday passed and Monday. The ship lay motionless and silent in the sluggish swell. Twenty-nine passengers whose papers were in order were permitted to land. Remaining were 908 who had only provisional permits of the Cuban Immigration Department to land as passengers en route to the U. S.—and on May 5, nine days before the St. Louis sailed, hard-faced President Federico Laredo Bru had decreed that Cuba required specific permission of the Departments of State, Labor and the Treasury. Rumors spread as Tuesday passed without change, as New York representatives of Jewish relief agencies flew to Havana. The rumors whispered of a longstanding dispute between the Hamburg-American Line and the Cuban Government, of a growth of Cuban anti-Semitism due to the landing of 5,000 refugees in Havana during the past year. Lawyer Loewe slashed his wrists, leaped overboard. Another passenger took poison, was saved when crew members smashed in his stateroom door.
Thursday, President Laredo Bru gave his decision: Cuba did not want the St. Louis' Jews. The St. Louis had to leave promptly, or it would be towed out of the harbor by a gunboat. Her captain announced the ship would sail for Germany by way of Lisbon at 10 a. m. next morning. And as he had said that he feared mutiny or a wave of suicides if the refugees were returned, the St. Louis was followed out to sea by 26 police boats to pick up any other passengers who might fling themselves into the waters. Slowly the ship cruised off the coast of Florida, barely making way, sometimes steaming in aimless circles, until President Laredo Bru relented, 22 days after the St. Louis left Hamburg. He announced that they would be permitted to land temporarily on the Isle of Pines, ancient pirate hideout 50 miles south of Cuba. Next day, the refugees having failed to get the financial guarantees that President Laredo Bru had demanded, he changed his mind, again prohibited them from landing.
Meanwhile, in half-a-dozen harbors in the Western Hemisphere, off ports in the Mediterranean, the St. Louis drama was repeated. At Veracruz 327 refugees from Loyalist Spain were landed from the Flandre, 104 German Jews turned back. On the Taurus at Veracruz an exiled Jewish chemist, learning that he could not land, took poison, told the captain he would be dead in two minutes, died. In Buenos Aires, 200 Jewish refugees on the Caporte, the Monte Olivia, the Mendoza, were sent back to Germany.
Off the coast of Palestine the weirdest and most wretched drama of the homeless was taking place. There, outside the three-mile limit, a collection of jampacked, unseaworthy little tubs lay waiting for a chance to run cargoes of permitless refugees ashore. There were Greek sailing schooners like the Panagiya Correstrio, usually carrying three fishermen, with 180 below decks; tramps like the grimy, 320-ton Assimi, flying the flag of Panama, which hauled 270 German and Central European Jews for 36 days before British officials arrested its captain; cargo boats like those which, unable to run refugees into Palestine, abandoned 424 Danzig Jews on the Island of Crete, tried unsuccessfully to dump 1,100 on the small Greek Island of Dia.

The St. Louis was part of Hitler's justification for the Holocaust. From Wikipedia (uncited):

Hitler's propaganda ministry and the Nazi Party conceived a propaganda exercise which would demonstrate that Germany was not alone in its territorial exclusionary hostility towards Jews as a permanent minority within the political economy of their nation. The Nazis wanted to prove the “civilized world” agreed with their assertion that Jews constituted a “hidden hand” of influence on national and economic affairs. They meant to show that no other Western country would receive Jews as refugees.

On the surface, it would appear that the Nazis were allowing the Jewish refugees a new life in Havana. However, the Nazis were aware of rising Western anti-Semitism, and correctly surmised that Jews traveling on tourist visas (not immigrant visas, which none of the potential host countries would likely have issued them) would not be able to enter Cuba, since they were clearly political and social refugees. Furthermore, once they had been refused entry by Cuba and other Atlantic nations, the world would be forced to admit that there was, as the Nazis claimed, a “Jewish problem,” which Germany was trying to resolve “humanely.”

Since not one of the countries of the North Atlantic basin would allow the Jewish refugees entry, these countries could not morally object when Nazi Germany dealt with its own Jewish population as it saw fit.

Indeed, the US refused to allow passengers to disembark, just as Cuba had. The heroic captain of the St. Louis managed to find refuge for his passengers in Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

254 of them ended up being murdered by the Nazis; the rest were saved.

Iran's constitution: institutional bigotry?

Now that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again publicly called the idea of a Jewish state "racist," it is worthwhile to look again at Iran's bigoted and imperialist constitution.

It includes this explicit call to Islamize the entire world under a single Iranian-led government:

With due attention to the Islamic content of the Iranian Revolution, the Constitution provides the necessary basis for ensuring the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad. In particular, in the development of international relations, the Constitution will strive with other Islamic and popular movements to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community (in accordance with the Koranic verse "This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me" [21:92]), and to assure the continuation of the struggle for the liberation of all deprived and oppressed peoples in the world.

It requires that women stay at home, in the name of their so-called rights:

As a part of this process, it is only natural that women should benefit from a particularly large augmentation of their rights... [not equal - EoZ]

The family is the fundamental unit of society and the main center for the growth and edification of human being. Compatibility with respect to belief and ideal, which provides the primary basis for man's development and growth, is the main consideration in the establishment of a family. It is the duty of the Islamic government to provide the necessary facilities for the attainment of this goal. This view of the family unit delivers woman from being regarded as an object or instrument in the service of promoting consumerism and exploitation. Not only does woman recover thereby her momentous and precious function of motherhood, rearing of ideologically committed human beings, she also assumes a pioneering social role and becomes the fellow struggler of man in all vital areas of life. Given the weighty responsibilities that woman thus assumes, she is accorded in Islam great value and nobility.

It embraces a single religion:

The Islamic Republic is a system based on belief in:
1) the One God (as stated in the phrase "There is no god except Allah"), His exclusive sovereignty and right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands; 2) Divine revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth the laws;
3) the return to God in the Hereafter, and the constructive role of this belief in the course of man's ascent towards God...

All civil, penal financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations must be based on Islamic criteria. This principle applies absolutely and generally to all articles of the Constitution as well as to all other laws and regulations, and the wise persons of the Guardian Council are judges in this matter.

It is dependent on a bizarre messianic figure:

During the occultation of the Wali al-'Asr (may God hasten his reappearance), the leadership of the Ummah devolve upon the just and pious person, who is fully aware of the circumstances of his age, courageous, resourceful, and possessed of administrative ability, will assume the responsibilities of this office in accordance with Article 107.

It intends to subvert the Arab world to Shiite Islam:

In accordance with the sacred verse of the Koran "This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me" [21:92], all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran have the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.

It pretends to provide religious freedom - to three specific religions, under specific circumstances where they must practice in private only, and no other religions are tolerated:

Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized religious minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education.

And it explicitly prohibits freedom of the press:

Publications and the press have freedom of expression except when it is detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam or the rights of the public. The details of this exception will be specified by law.

To understand Iran, read its constitution. Such a reading proves that Iran is far guiltier of everything it accuses Israel of.

Abraham Lincoln born a Muslim?

Last month I mentioned a new film that intended to gain adherents to Islam, called "Quran Contemporary Connections," where the filmmaker supposedly asked impartial academics to examine Islam and they came up with startling insights like "polygamy is a blessing."

Well, the film-makers have come out with a new press release to try to keep the trickle of publicity flowing, and they have headlined it:

Abraham Lincoln was Born a Muslim, Says Film Maker
ATLANTA, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Barack Hussein Obama is not alone. The 16th President of The United States, Abraham Lincoln, was born a Muslim, says Faruq Masudi, producer and director of the new Islamic movie, Quran Contemporary Connections.

In a casting coup, Abraham Lincoln shares equal footage with luminaries of Islamic history like Saladin, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the former President of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed. What do they have in common?

Faruq Masudi said, "According to the Quran, everybody is born a Muslim. It is only by his own free will that a man chooses a different course for himself. In that Abraham Lincoln was not only a born Muslim but he chose to live by Islamic edicts like abolishing organized slavery; establishing equality of all human beings, democracy and accountability to God and Man; core Islamic concepts as propounded in the Holy Quran."

Don't forget polygamy, marrying nine year olds and chopping off hands for theft, things that Lincoln would no doubt have embraced, right?

Will their next press release say "Hitler born a Muslim"?

Michael Oren as new ambassador to US?

Al Quds picks up on a Maariv report (that I couldn't find) saying that the current Netanyahu government is pushing Michael Oren, prolific author and historian, as the Israeli Ambassador to the US.

That would be very cool.

PalArab "moderates" for violence

Ami Isseroff uncovers an amazing editorial at Ma'an:

It is always better when people are honest about their intentions. Therefore, among the (relatively) moderate Arab voices, Ramzy Baroud's article deploring nonviolence (that's right - not a typo) is outstanding.

Baroud, who has been fighting the good fight to drive the Jews into the sea, pulls no punches and leaves nobody with any illusions. In an editorial published by the European funded Maan News service, Baroud expresses his dismay regarding the world support for non-violence. Let's not decry murder, says Baroud.
In recent history, many advocates of non-violence have been celebrated as modern day icons. From Ghandi to King, songs are written in their honor, their life stories fill the pages of our children’s history volumes as noble examples of which everyone must aspire to emulate. Holidays are instituted in their honor and around the world; streets and boulevards carry their namesake.

Why is it that the “establishment” goes to such great lengths to lift up these individuals? Where are the holidays commemorating the life and sacrifices of Malcolm X, where are the stories of Crazy Horse or Geronimo?
Yes! Finally someone said it. Gandhi and King are terrible examples for Palestinian children, who are supposed to be learning to kill Jews. I mean, why is there a Martin Luther King Day, but there is no Genghis Kahn day? The Unibomber doesn't get his own commemoration day either. Why doesn't the world honor real heroes of murder and genocide like Osama Bin Laden or Heinrich Himmler If Baroud had his way they wouldn't honor wimps like King and Gandhi.

Read the whole thing.

Roger Cohen: What, Israel worry?

Roger Cohen's obsessiveness with idiocy continues unabated. Now he is trying to say that Israel's fears are irrational:

How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?

Yes, Israel is small — all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland — and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”

Cohen, and Carter, miss the point yet again.

Israel's concern isn't only for the nation to survive, but for its people to survive as well. Just because Qassam rockets and suicide bombings aren't an existential threat doesn't mean they are tolerable, because the quality of life is of paramount importance, not just "the state." The threat to Israel's people is an asymmetric threat from which the IDF's conventional strength becomes far less relevant. Ignoring that threat is rhetorical sophistry.

All the tanks in the world would not have saved the World Trade Center, and neither would have negotiations. Are annual 9/11's a manageable risk for the US? Are such fears irrational?

Cohen then papers over Israel's major legitimate existential fear:

Israel has the most dynamic and creative society in the region, one that does not convict American journalists in shameful secret trials, as Iran has just done with Roxana Saberi; it has never fought a war with Iran; and it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.

Besides Iran's attempts to overthrow and take over the Middle East via Hezbollah, via influencing Syria, through agents in Egypt and by sending weapons to and training Hamas, they have a little thing called a nuclear program. Persia didn't pursue these policies - but the Islamic Republic does. And Islamic fundamentalists have the irrationality that makes the concept of suicide bombing desirable.

Perhaps Iran wouldn't directly shoot nuclear bombs to Israel, but how much of a mental leap does one need to imagine them smuggling nukes to Hezbollah or Hamas? How absurd is it to think that Islamists would happily destroy themselves and their people to hurt or destroy Israel? Isn't that their entire modus operandi today?

Cohen goes on to his familiar meme that the existence of Jews living in Biblical Israel is the real threat to the Jewish state, not Iran nor terror nor rockets nor the threat of an Islamist takeover of "moderate" Arab countries. To Cohen, the Jews should only worry about Jews who actually care about their land. Get rid of them, and the threat to Israel would magically disappear, according to Cohen.

In Cohen's bizarre mindset, the only irrational people are the Jews for being fearful that the much more pragmatic Islamists and Arabs will do something - irrational. Nah, that would never happen!

"Imam for Peace" wants all Jews dead

PMW brings us another genocidal sermon from the pragmatists of Hamas:

"Who is it that is leading the world today in the vicious, all-encompassing war against Islam and Muslims? The answer is clear: it is the Jewish nation. It is the Jews who today are leading the all-encompassing war against Muslims...

We, the Muslims, know the nature of Jews the best, because the Holy Quran taught us. The prophetic traditions explained at length to Muslims the true nature of Jews... Their war and their hatred for Muhammad and Islam is in their souls, they are naturally disposed to it.

Israel today lives in the heart of Arab-Muslim territory, and it is a cancer that wants to rule the world. Know, my brothers! The Jews' expansion today brings the dissemination of an ancient thinking...

They argued with Allah's prophet Moses; they wanted to kill Allah's prophet Jesus, and wanted to murder Allah's prophet Muhammad...

The Jews want to destroy every inch ... Perhaps their famous book, which they deny [its authenticity] - known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but we call it, "The Protocols of the imbeciles of Zion" - in this book, my brothers, the Jews set down their plan to besiege the entire world by land, by air, and by sea - conceptually, economically, and its communications, as is happening today...

The Jews' grandeur today, and their ascent to the world's throne, is because America, with all of its power, is ruled by the Senate, I won't say 'American' but rather 'Jewish' [Senate] ... The time will come, by the will of Allah, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of this earth."

PMW notes that this preacher "participated in the Second World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace in 2006."

Good news for Binyomin Netanyahu - here's a Hamas member who recognizes Israel as the Jewish State!

Saudi Vice, episode 26: Blind Date

From the Saudi Gazette:

A first date turned into a disaster for a 40-year-old college teaching assistant who was arrested here Saturday for being in illegal seclusion (or Khalwa) with an unrelated woman, authorities said.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as the Hai’a, received a report of an unrelated couple inside a mall restaurant and rushed to the scene to investigate, a Hai’a official said.

When the Hai’a asked the man about his relationship with the woman, he showed them his family registry card, claiming that the woman was his wife.

The Hai’a officers then backed off, but they were not convinced. They kept a close eye on the couple.

The academic soon accompanied the woman to a mall gate. Noticing that she was preparing to leave the place on her own, the Hai’a officers stopped him and questioned his relationship with the woman once more.

That was when he admitted that she was his girlfriend.

The man was taken to the Hai’a office where he admitted that he was on his first date with the woman. He told the Hai’a officials that their relationship started through an Internet messenger service.

During the investigation, the man said that he had come all the way to Hail to meet up with woman as a first step toward marriage.

The man was then taken to a police station where he was detained. The woman was released.

Our heroes from the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice know how dangerous mall restaurants can be to the sanctity of women's virtue. Perhaps saying that khalwa means real seclusion is good enough for those Muslim posers in Dubai and Jordan, but our Saudi Muslim vice-cop heroes know that any man within twenty meters of a woman has the potential of ripping her clothes off and violating her right then and there.

And how do they know it? Because that's' what they fantasize about, 24/7!

Other episodes here.

Ahmadinejad: "Zionists control the world!"

More good news from Iran's president:

"Zionists impose their will for looting nations on the world by controlling the world's power centers."

The Iranian president further underlined that Zionists are controlling behavior of the western governments through propaganda and psychological warfare. "

From his mouth to God's ears.

Followup on Yemen "blasphemer" case

I mentioned on Friday about a group of Yemenis who burned the house and two cars of a man they accused of tearing a Quran. (No one seems to be concerned about the fates of any Qurans that might have been burned up in his house.)

Apparently, some of the vigilantes who set the fire were detained by Yemen police.

And this makes many Yemenis angry:

The Parliament on Saturday formed a committee to investigate burning and destroying a house for a man charged by his neighbors of tearing the Holy Quran and disgracing it.

Some MPs condemned incapacity of security authorities to fight vice in the country and focusing only on cracking down protests against any wrong doing or for demanding rights confiscated by powerful figures.

Last Wednesday, tens of people destroyed a house of a man in al-Hasaba zone of the capital Sana’a accused of tearing the Holy Quran. Four men were arrested over the incident.

MPs, politicians and social figures have condemned the detention of citizens over setting fire to the house and demanded their release and bring the man to justice.

That's right - the politicians aren't upset over the burning of a man's house by a mob, but over the possibility that he might have really torn a Quran and the detention of members of the mob!

By the way, since yesterday, the rumors now have added that the man's 75-year old mother ran a brothel. Yesterday she merely was accused of planning to replace a mosque with a nightclub.

Hamas shoots feet of Fatah members in Gaza

Things still aren't too peaceful between the Palestinian Arabs.

From Ma'an:

Unidentified gunmen affiliated with Hamas fired at three members of their rival Fatah party in the Jabaliya area of the northern Strip Thursday night, a Fatah spokesman said.

Fahmi Az-Za'arir said in a statement that the men were taken to Kamal A'dawan Hospital for treatment after being shot in the legs. They were identified as Khaled, Ismail, and Mus'ab Ad-Darduni, all from the same family.

According to Az-Za’arir the attackers drove off on a motorcycle toward the Al-Ihsan Mosque, “which is under the control of Hamas. “