Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Mufti's hotel

The Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem, that was legally purchased by Irving Moskowitz decades ago and has now caused such an issue as the US considers it a "settlement," was once owned by the infamously anti-semitic Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husayni.

Since Husayni was an avid supporter of Hitler and was complicit in the Holocaust, Avigdor Lieberman wants Israel to distribute photos of Husayni with Hitler to blunt criticism of Israel's allowing the hotel to be turned into apartments where Jews could live.

It is unclear if the Mufti ever lived at the site, but it is indeed ironic that a building once owned by someone who wanted to make Jerusalem and all of Palestine Judenrein is the one that the State Department wants so badly to be - Judenrein.

And don't forget how much Hitler liked the Mufti, especially when he saw his Aryan features:

Notice the last line.

Irritating Blogger changes

Google has just made some changes to Blogger that are bugging me.

While I used to be able to search, access and edit any of my previous posts from within the Edit screen, now I am limited to my most recent 5000 posts. I have lost edit access to any post from my first 15 months of blogging, including being able to tag the posts appropriately. (For example, I recently tagged all my book reviews, but couldn't tag my review of the sixth Harry Potter book.)

Also, the search engine at the top of the page has changed from "find every match and list it in reverse chronological order" to "find best match." Which is sometimes better, but I could do a Google relevance search from Google. Sometimes I am looking for a specific post from a certain time period and now I can't find it anymore.

Oh, well.

Case study in hate: The Guardian looks at Moskowitz

The Guardian is nothing if not consistent.

It has an article on Jewish American millionaire Irving Moskowitz and makes it sound like he is victimizing poor Mexican Americans, leeching money out of them to send to evil Israeli settlers. The language is unbelievably misleading:

For the winning punters chancing their luck at Hawaiian Gardens' charity bingo hall in the heart of one of California's poorest towns, the big prize is $500. The losers walk away with little more than an assurance that their dollars are destined for a good cause.
But the real winners and losers live many thousands of miles away, where the profits from the nightly ritual of numbers-calling fund what critics describe as a form of ethnic cleansing by extremist organisations.
Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the old city, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.

Doesn't that make it sound like all of Moskowitz' money goes towards settlers and displacing Arabs? (As if the legal purchase of land in the West Bank is somehow evil.) You have to really parse the sentence hard to see that the Guardian isn't really saying that...they just want you to believe it.

The Guardian then goes on to the oldest trick in the book - finding a critic that they can quote extensively, ignoring anyone who can speak on Moskowitz' behalf. And the critic they found was a goldmine - a rabbi named Haim Dov Beliak, who as far as I can tell has no congregation (he used to be a rabbi of a conservative synagogue but his name is no longer on their website).

Beilak has been a severe critic of Moskowitz and of Israeli attempts to defend itself for a long time - he was against the Gaza operation, for example. He runs StopMoskowitz.org, a website that seems to have been inactive for years.

The website claims that the bulk of Moskowitz' money goes towards what it characterizes as "hard right" or "self-serving" organizations with only a tiny amount given to what it considers real charities. This is apparently where the Guardian gets its information from.

Charities that Beliak says are "hard right" include Bar Ilan University, the Zionist Organization of America, the National Council of Young Israel, a bunch of American yeshivas and Orthodox synagogues (as well as some Christian charities.)

Charities that he considers "self serving" include millions given to the local Little League, hospitals, scholarship programs and food banks for the area around the bingo hall.

In other words, the Guardian is trusting a wacked-out anti-Zionist "rabbi"'s lies to say that most of Moskowitz' dollars are going towards what Beliak calls "militants."

His foundation does give plenty to Jews in Judea and Samaria, no doubt, including many schools and charities there. But to the Guardian's readers, any money given to Israel altogether is considered evil:

But tax returns show that the bulk of the donations go to what the foundation describes as "charitable support" to an array of organisations in Israel.

Including such horrible places as Magen Dovid Adom.

The Arab media has jumped all over this, because this story is tailor-made for them - not only is an American Jew funding such horrible things as girls' schools in Kiryat Arba, but he made his money with a forbidden activity in Islam - gambling!

Time to dismantle UNRWA

The UNRWA is an organization that is dedicated to perpetuating the misery of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants forever. It does not act to resettle them, as the UNHCR does; it creates its own definition of "refugee" that is at odds with the definition of refugee for everyone else besides non-Jews who happened to live in Palestine in 1946-48, and it works hard to ensure that many Palestinian Arabs remain in camps rather than integrate into the countries in which they had been born.

A tiny number of Palestinian Arabs do end up under the aegis of the UNHCR rather than UNRWA, notably those who were kicked out of Iraq. Slovakia just agreed to accept nearly a hundred of them temporarily while permanent homes are found elsewhere. Arab nations, of course, have no interest in resettling them - although hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees did flee to Jordan and Syria, the ones whose ancestors lived in Palestine are not accepted.

The UNHCR, which is the UN organization that is responsible for every real refugee on the planet, just announced that because of a budget shortfall they wil not be able to extend medical care to some 600 Iraqi families in Jordan.

What are the budgets for the two refugee agencies, the one for Palestinian Arabs and the one for everyone else? As far as I can tell, the annual UNHCR budget is between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, and the annual UNRWA budget is about a half-billion dollars (possibly higher this year with extra appeals.)

However, the UNHCR is responsible for nearly 33 million people. UNRWA says that 4.6 million "refugees" fit under their definition but in fact there are less than two million registered "refugees" that take advantage of their services.

Which means that UNHCR's spends something less than $45 per refugee, while the UNRWA spends over five times that amount per fake Palestinian Arab "refugee."

If the world really cares about Palestinian Arab refugees, a number of tasks are way past due:

Discard the definition of "refugee" that guides UNRWA, immediately reducing the number of Palestinian Arab refugees from millions to the relatively few who were displaced in 1948.

Shame Arab countries into stopping their enforced discrimination against Arabs of Palestinian origin and start naturalizing the millions of Arabs who were born in their countries.

Dismantle UNRWA altogether, and place the few remaining real Palestinian Arab refugees under the umbrella of UNHCR where they can be resettled.

Take the bloated UNRWA budget, which now runs schools, medical clinics and other wonderful services that the real refugees of the planet cannot take advantage of, and re-allocate it to people who really need it.

The only reason this has not happened, and the only reason the number of "refugees" keeps increasing over six decades after the war that displaced them, is because of a lie - the idea that this is necessary to maintain Palestinian Arab "unity." If they are naturally unified, they don't need their brethren to oppress them to maintain that unity; if they aren't so unified then the entire idea of Palestinian Arab nationalism is a lie that is artificially maintained to pressure Israel.

The only way to find out would be to stop the endemic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs in the Arab world, allow them to become normal citizens - and see how many take advantage of that offer. In Lebanon, a number of loopholes have popped open through the years that tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs took advantage of to become citizens, and then those loopholes were shut tight. Imagine how many would jump at the opportunity to become Arab citizens if they could?

Palestinian "SATs"

The biggest story in all the Palestinian Arab papers is that the results of the Tawjihi secondary school exams have been released.

According to Ma'an,

The exams are administered once a year, and comprise tests on a variety of different subjects, including English, Arabic, Science, Math, Religion (students can choose Islam or Christianity), Palestinian History, Geography, Biology, Physics, Industry and Agriculture.

It is interesting that a passing grade is only 51%. Even with that seemingly low threshold, out of 86,824 students registered for the exams, only 47,469 passed (55%), with only 27,724 passing in the humanities sections and 12,611 passing in the sciences.(Apparently, you only have to pass in one or the other in order to go on to college.)

I don't know, but do these results sound like a reason to celebrate? I suppose it is possible that the exams are really hard, but to craft an exam where students are only expected to know barely half of the answers seems strange.

Yet celebrate they did. Mahmoud Abbas congratulated the students who passed (and said "better luck next year" for those who didn't - you are allowed to take the exams 9 times). Massive gunfire and "fireworks" were heard in Gaza, scaring some residents.

Rachel Corrie propaganda at SF Jewish Film Festival

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is allowing virulently anti-Israel groups to present a film there that canonizes Rachel Corrie. The groups include the Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee, which both call for divestment from Israel and love to participate in rallies that equate Zionism with Nazism. Cindy Corrie, fervent ISM supporter, will be speaking there as well.

And the San Francisco Jewish Federation continues to fund this festival.

The SFJFF justifies this event with the usual ultra-liberal platitudes that the film looks at all viewpoints, that it must present all sides of a story, blah blah blah. Demonizing Israel is not even trendy anymore in SF; it is de rigueur.

(I find it ironic that a Jewish film festival is scheduled during the Nine Days of mourning for the destruction of the Temples, when attending movies is highly inappropriate for religious Jews. And the Rachel Corrie video is being shown on Shabbat!)

If I would have known about this a few months ago, I would have submitted my own Rachel Corrie film to be screened. After all, it is controversial (banned by YouTube!) , at least as accurate, and almost certainly far more entertaining. If they want to be cutting edge and controversial, my film would fit the bill much more than another tired Israel-bashing fest.

Details about the problems at the festival and who you can contact can be found here.

Another airhead going Jewish?

Only a couple of months ago, Lindsay Lohan said she wanted to convert to Judaism. Now, Britney Spears is said to be going the same, um, derech.

Apparently, Kabbalah is no longer the "in" thing, not to mention that people in Hollywood think that becoming a Jew is a great career move.

Why do these airhead shiksas always wait until they are the punchlines to Conan jokes before they decide to join the Chosen People? And why do we have to be the ones chosen?

Don't they realize that the easiest way to turn off their Jewish significant others is to change from an irresistible shiksa into a JAP?

What-ever.

Anyway, Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker channels Britney's diary as she goes through the arduous process of becoming a yiddishe mamma(ry.)

Shalom, Diary:
I think Rabbi Pearlstein is really pissed at me. Today in Jewish class he was going through the Halakha, which I thought was the Jewish word for Hannah Montana but turns out to be like a whole bunch of boring laws about days of the week and pork and shit, and I was like, “Rabbi P., is there any way you could break this down into a bunch of tweets? I’ll read it on my phone on the way to rehearsal.” He got so mad those curls on the sides of his head started shaking. (I don’t know why he won’t let my stylist snip them off. They’re not a good look for him, K.?)

The story has a happy ending, though.

Ma'an proves its boar case by quoting itself

Ma'an has yet another of its articles about wild boars in the West Bank, but this one is a little bit more even-handed:

Salfit residents have continuously complained about the boars, which they say are not indigenous to the area, attacking residents and crops in the northern West Bank districts. Last February 53-year-old Hikmat Abdul Mu'ti from the town of Beit Rima was hospitalized after suffering "deep wounds," according to medics at Yasser Arafat Hospital in Salfit city.

Boars have been causing problems inside Israel, as well. Israel's Nature and Parks Authority instituted a massive cull in the northern Haifa region in May, following complaints similar to the Palestinians' in Salfit.

But you know that they can't report on the pigs without blaming the Jews somehow:

Environmentalists cite Israel's West Bank wall as a potential cause for the buildup of wild pigs in Salfit, as in recent years their annual migration toward the Galilee has been disrupted.

But...I thought they weren't indigenous to the area. Could it be that the residents of Salfit are being less than honest?

No matter. We have other bacon to fry:

Some Salfit residents claim that the wild boars have escaped or were released intentionally from nearby Israeli settlements such as Ariel, although pigs are generally considered unclean in Judaism, as well as Islam. The only known Jewish-run pig farm in the region, the Institute for Animal Research, operates inside Israel at the Negev kibbutz of Lahav.

Still others insist that they have witnessed the pigs being unloaded from trucks by settlers. Mohammad Hassan last month told a Land Research Center field researcher he saw settlers release some in the Al-Ashara region of the Salfit-area village of Iskaka.

Now comes the funny part:

The Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ) also reports that settlers from Ariel "frequently" release wild boars into the area, causing economic damage and even physical attacks on people. The organization stated that there were four reported cases where children were injured by the animals.

Who is the ARIJ? Well, they have a very nice web page and they have a number of projects in the territories. So I looked at the last couple of their newsletters to see what they have to say about the boars. Here's one of them:

Boars set free by Israeli settlers damaged sheep barns and beehives in the northern West Bank village of Salem, east of Nablus. Boars attacked three homes and sheep barns, owned by Theib and Ziad Hasan, as well as 32 beehives owned by Taha Hamdan. The boars also attacked a car owned by
Baha’ Hussein on his way out of the village. Maannews (May 3, 2009).

In fact, at least for the past few months, every single story in ARIJ that said that settlers released boars was a direct quote from Ma'an itself!

Ma'an finally realized that its incessant insistence that the boars were raised by evil Jewish settlers made no sense, and it tried to craft this story to include the criticisms. But it is still invested in the idea of Jewish-owned pigs that it quotes a seemingly impartial scientific sounding organization that insists that Jewish settlers frequently release the pigs - an organization that gets all its boar information from the previous months of Ma'an lies!

The perfect feedback loop!

Another Hamas terrorist killed "on a Jihad mission"

The Al Qassam Brigades website mentions another Hamas member who accidentally got offed while training to kill Jews, this time in Gaza City.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 119.

Jordanian criminals disguising themselves as Muslim women

Al-Arabiya (Arabic) reports on a relatively new phenomenon - Jordanian criminals are disguising themselves with hijabs and niqabs to do various crimes.

The crimes include "robbery, theft, sorcery and sexual abuse."

The crimes have reportedly been inspired by robberies in Great Britain done by men disguising themselves in niqabs.

For the past few years there have been increasing reports of men with veils snatching purses, abducting women and holding up banks and stores.

They also go into apartment houses, ask around to verify that no men are around and then force themselves in and steal items.

Training for the Saudi Vice Squad

From the Saudi Gazette:

The British Council in Riyadh has begun teaching English to members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Hai’a) as part of ongoing training to improve the organization’s skills in communication and dialogue.

Hai’a spokesman Abdul Mohsen Al-Qaffari said that the six-level course would help improve staff competence in their work.

The Hai’a office in the Eastern Province also plans to hold a five-day course on issues related to black magic and those who practice it for 25 of its members.

Because when you are in the Muttawa, you have to be prepared for anything: English-speakers and practitioners of black magic.

12 year old Saudi girl divorces her husband, 37

From the Saudi Gazette:

A Shariah Court in the Eastern Province has permitted the divorce of a 12-year-old girl from her 37-year-old husband after her siblings filed a complaint stating that their father married her off without their consent.

A judicial source said the 12-year-old’s siblings objected to the union on the grounds of her age as well as “other reasons related to marriage”, and that when the husband was summoned he agreed to the divorce at the request of the girl’s family.

I wonder how long she was married to her pedophile husband before this.

Open thread plus

It looks like I will not be able to post much today, and there is lots of leftover flotsam in the comments from yesterday's freak show, so feel free to discuss amongst yourselves the major issues of Life, the Universe and Everything.

And also check out Barry Rubin, who has been on an incredible tear lately.

Today's PalArab news 7-20-09

The Fatah infighting continues. A special session of the PLO Executive Committee met on Saturday to condemn Farouk Kaddoumi for his accusations that Mahmoud Abbas plotted to assassinate Arafat, but the session was clearly put together only by Kaddoumi's enemies. Meanwhile, four armed factions of Fatah, including the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and a group of Israeli Arabs, declared their support for Kaddoumi. Dov Weisglass, who attended all the Sharon/Abbas meetings, says the entire episode was made up by Kaddoumi, and Suha Arafat is also upset because blaming Abbas takes away the responsibility from Arafat's real killers - Israel.

Palestine Press Agency quotes a US magazine as giving out specific details on how Israel would strike Iran, along with operational windows for the strike and where the IDF is practicing. Hard to say whether the articles, in Global Politician, are legit or not.

Egypt seized a half ton of explosives and ten mortars on their way to Gaza.

Two Gazans, including a 17-year old, were killed in a smuggling tunnel collapse.

The PA shot and wounded two Hamas members in the West Bank. Their neighbors in the Al-Jalazoun camp tried to protect the Hamas members from arrest.

A group of Israeli Arabs demanded that the Israel compensate them for damage done by wild boars. They didn't seem to blame "settlers," apparently boars inside the Green Line have different masters than those on the outside.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 118.

What is the goal of foreign policy?

Today was an extraordinary day for the blog, as my posting about how Iranian prison guards rape women before their execution was featured on Yahoo news story pages for much of the day, and the headline apparently attracted some 20,000 people to view the article.

As one could expect from such an influx of people, I received a lot of comments, and the quality of most of them were about what one would expect. There were many people who refused to believe the story, calling it a Zionist or Jewish conspiracy against Islam (even though the story was not about Islam, but Iran.) Some believed that this was a perfect opportunity to bring in lies about the Talmud. Others got into flamewars.

One commenter, "marie," dropped by another thread and said something that encapsulates much that is wrong with how Westerners tend to think nowadays. In response to my musings on Obama's naivete in trying to force Israel to abandon historic Jerusalem, she wrote:

Keep building settlements retards...that will get the palestinians to love you!

Notwithstanding the humor that results when someone who fancies herself an "intellectual" calls others "retards" as a rhetorical point, this comment struck me as emblematic of today's Western liberal thinking.

Is the point of foreign policy to make your enemy love you?

It appears that the foreign policies of many Western nations in recent decades has been built around just that desire.

The Western nations, wracked with guilt over colonialism and hegemony, believe that they deserve to be hated, and as a result they must bend over backwards to be loved by those they have wronged. It never works, of course, but that is just proof that they need to try harder.

In the case of Israel, the West thinks of Israel as a proxy for all their sins, the intellectual Jew imposing his will on the unwashed Arabs. The fact that Zionism is not a colonialist movement but rather a national restoration movement is lost on those who feel that guilt. To them, the Jews symbolize what they hate about themselves and their past evils, and the Arabs are symbolic of the put-upon aboriginal peoples forever sullied by European colonialism.

So to them, only one side is guilty - the "white" side.

Asking both sides to compromise is not how peace can come, according to this thinking. The Jews are guilty of the original Western sin and must pay for it. Forcing the Jews to pay for the sins of the British and French and Portuguese and Spanish is a way to displace the feelings of guilt over their own past injustices.

To this way of thinking, only the enemy can decide when enough concessions are made. The enemy - the pure, innocent victims - have complete veto power over every peace plan because this is not a negotiation: it is a capitulation, and admission of guilt, a plea for forgiveness. If you are not forgiven then you have not done a good enough job of penance, and the proof is - because you have not yet been forgiven.

The enemy - such a loaded term, we should say the "negotiating partner" - cannot be expected to compromise, ever. Only one side has the onus of guilt, and the non-Westerners are presumed innocent. Any crimes they commit must be looked at through the prism of the much more obscene Western sins.

Marie has stumbled upon the exact problem - the fact that many on the West hate themselves and the only penance is to gain forgiveness from those we think we have wronged. We must do whatever is needed to make them love us, and only then can we love ourselves.

Israel must also be forced to adhere to this formula. Every terror act is justified because it is a reaction to Israel's original sin of existing. Every defensive move Israel chooses to do is a painful reminder of its hostile, "colonialist" origins.

This is the subtext behind today's liberal attitudes to foreign policy. It is rooted in this deep sense of self-hate drenched in guilt. And this hate is projected into Israel, the lightning rod for all of the West's sins.