Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Islamist territorial goals, illustrated

Recently, radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir held a rally in Gaza, drawing hundreds of people.

One of the speakers had an interesting presentation:

Now, it is well known that Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for the establishment of a unified Islamic caliphate. But what exactly would its borders be?

It seems we have the answer:

Greece, Spain, Albania, Romania, all appear to be Muslim territory according to HuT.

Not to mention China.

"Moderate" Fatah doesn't recognize Israel, supports terror

From YNet:

As the Fatah movement prepares for its upcoming leadership convention, a senior group member says the event will be used to display Fatah's commitment to the armed struggle against Israel.

Preparations for the convention, scheduled for August 4, are in full force at this time. During a series of preliminary meetings ahead of the event, senior Fatah official Rafik al-Natsheh said that the group will not be recognizing Israel.

'We will maintain the resistance option in all its forms and we will not recognize Israel," he said. "Not only don't we demand that anyone recognize Israel; we don't recognize Israel ourselves. However, the Palestinian Authority government is required to do it, or else it will not be able to serve the Palestinian people."

"I am certain that we will hinder all the traitors who wish to remove the resistance option from the movement's charter," Natsheh added.

The Palestinian Authority (as it stands today) is dominated by Fatah, that "moderate" alternative to Hamas.

al-Natsheh is admitting that the PA has to pretend to have peaceful intentions for political reasons, but in reality there is no change - Fatah is just as radical as Hamas, albeit less religious.

Fatah's constitution still calls for:

Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.

The only way to change that would be during this upcoming conference. That doesn't look likely.

Some people, including Israelis, tend to say that the Fatah charter is irrelevant since it is subsumed under the PLO which has recognized Israel. But if Fatah is so irrelevant, why is this upcoming Fatah conference considered such a big deal to Mahmoud Abbas (who is the leader of Fatah as well)? Would it not be reasonable to ask him if Fatah is irrelevant?

Saudi Vice, episode 28: Don't brag about sex

Mazen Abdul Jawad is a hip, modern kind of Arab guy. He is macho and proud of it. So proud, that we went on Lebanese TV to brag about his sexual conquests. As Arab News reports:

Mazen Abdul Jawad appeared on the program last week in a red button-down shirt and open collar bragging in graphic detail about his sexual conquests.
In the segment, Abdul Jawad talks about having slept with a neighbor when he was only 14 and how this got him interested in sex. After discussing sex and foreplay in graphic detail and providing a recipe for an aphrodisiac, Abdul Jawad is seen getting into his vehicle at night on a Jeddah street.
“It all starts with turning my Bluetooth on while cruising around in my car,” he tells the camera.

Our heroes, the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, sprang into action. How dare a Saudi man go on TV and brag about the women he scored with?

Ahmad Qasim Al-Ghamdi, director of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for Makkah, told Arab News that speaking so openly about vice is a punishable offense and that everyone involved with the broadcast is culpable.

“It is wrong to host people on television to speak publicly about vice and issues against our religion,” he said. “The program presents anomalies and deviancy in society that are unacceptable and immoral and should be punished according to Shariah.”

For Abdul Jawad to be punished on the basis of admitting to pre-marital sex he would have to confess in a court-approved manner.

However, speaking publicly about vice is also a punishable offense. Both offenses are subject to lashing and/or jail time at the discretion of the court.

The world is a little safer now, thanks to our heroes at the Muttawa!

Prominent Christian attacked in Gaza

Palestine Press Agency reports that Constantine Dabbagh, executive director in Gaza of the Middle East Council of Churches Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees, was attacked along with his wife on Tuesday morning in his house.

The three masked intruders handcuffed the 70-year old man and his wife, ransacked his house looking for "radio transmitters and gold."

Islamic shari'a finance in trouble

Since the economic downturn, fans of Islamic shari'a-compatible investments have been touting that their financial institutions are immune to the problems that have plagued Western banks, and that their funds are inherently more secure.

Well, you can flush that idea down the toilet:

For the first time since the initial issuance of a Sukuk bond in Malaysia in 2001, cases of payments being defaulted on have occurred in the USA, Kuwait, and Malaysia. There are five legal cases that involve the default on payment of Sukuk [so far]. There are also some Sukuk cases that involve technical failures that are expected to develop into cases of legal default at any moment. Therefore the legal risk surrounding this type of [financial] bond – that falls under the provisions of Islamic Shariaa law – is beginning to become apparent.

And another article:

KUALA LUMPUR, July 16 — First defaults of sukuk are set to expose the vulnerabilities of Islamic finance, with most investors expected to have no better legal redress than conventional bondholders as underlying assets have not been truly transferred to them.

The current financial and economic crisis is a first for the US$1 trillion (RM3.5 trillion) Islamic finance industry, which over the past few years has been spoilt by cheap oil money, and legal provisions and protection clauses in sukuk worth billions of dollars are being tested for the first time.

Islamic bonds, or sukuk, are structured as profit-sharing or rental agreements and their returns are derived from underlying assets. Islamic finance caters to investors who would like to avoid paying or earning interest, prohibited by Islamic law.

Kuwait’s Investment Dar said in May it had defaulted on a US$100 million sukuk registered in Bahrain and in the United States a court case is ongoing on the East Cameron Partners Sukuk by bankrupt Texas-based East Cameron Gas Company.

Despite its earlier billing as a safer alternative to traditional banking due to its requirement for assets to underpin deals, Islamic bondholders may not have any more legal safeguards than conventional counterparts in case of default.

With rare exceptions, sukuk issuers have created special purpose vehicles (SPV) to pool assets underlying the issue, but they have not been securitized for a true sale to investors.

“Secular, non-Sharia courts upholding those structures are more likely to consider sukuk holders to have contractual rights as opposed to proprietary rights and as a result rank them as creditors rather than equity holders,” said Muneer Khan, partner and head of Islamic finance at law firm Simmons and Simmons.

So the idea that investors in Islamic bonds have real assets in their name, as opposed to paper, is pretty much a fiction.(This also means that the idea that the investors in these bonds are not receiving interest is probably also a fiction, but I am neither a financial nor a shari'a expert.)

Hamas invested in American strip clubs?

Firas Press quotes Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan with some news that I cannot verify anywhere else. And Kuwaiti newspapers have been less than reliable in their "scoops."

But it's to good not to share:

Two weeks ago, an American court sentenced a number of Palestinians to prison terms ranging from 15 years to 65 years the on charges of fraudulently collecting more than 60 million dollars under the guise of helping those affected by the war in the Gaza Strip.

The first defendant in this case is the half-brother of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, and the second defendant is the son-in-law Abu Marzouk, a senior leader in the movement itself, and the third defendant is the representative of Hamas in the Yemen!!

Interestingly, part of this money was in banks within the Cayman Islands. The bulk of it was invested in the purchase of cafes and restaurants within the United States, including a building in Minneapolis that has on its ground floor one of the most famous striptease clubs "Alstervtiz"(?) in the state of Minnesota near the U.S. border with Canada.

When the judge asked the first defendant how he could invest Muslim charity monies into strip clubs when that is against Islamic law, Meshal's half-brother said that "necessities permit taboos."

Even though it is probably not true, it shows that Hamas' prestige has gone way down for stories like these to be made up and spread to begin with.

Deference

From all accounts, Barack Obama went to Saudi Arabia last month asking for some specific symbolic concessions - and was rebuffed:

Mr. Obama, officials said, was frustrated by his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, when he met with King Abdullah and failed to extract any meaningful gestures toward Israel to revive the peace process.

But two sources, one a former U.S. official who recently traveled there and one a current official speaking anonymously, say the meeting did not go well from Obama's perspective....

Sources say Obama was hoping to persuade the king to be ready to show reciprocal gestures to Israel, which Washington has been pushing to halt settlements with the goal of advancing regional peace and the creation of a Palestinian state.

"The more time goes by, the more the Saudi meeting was a watershed event," said the former U.S. official who recently traveled to Riyadh. "It was the first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of persuasion."

Another official, speaking not for attribution, said last month that the 85-year-old Saudi monarch had launched a tirade during Obama's long meeting in Riyadh, and that other Saudi officials had later apologized to the U.S. president for the king's behavior.

The Obama administration pushed back hard on those allegations about the meeting, and said furthermore that the sources could not know what went on. "It was a very small group of folks who planned that trip," a White House official said, disputing every aspect of the accounts. "The Saudi addition came on late."

Assuming that it is true, it would hardly be the first time that an Arab ally told the United States to drop dead. It happens all the time. Egypt reacted furiously to Congressional moves to tie US aid to Egyptian cooperation on weapons smuggling, Saudi Arabia told President Bush that it had no intention to increase oil production during last year's gasoline crisis, Lebanon rejected Condi Rice when she asked the government to treat Hezbollah as a terror group in 2002, saying that Hezb was a perfectly fine resistance organization that happened to have an independent army on its territory.

And all of these disagreements were handled quietly. No one ever seriously suggested that these serial rebuffs of US requests and demands were going to affect the relationship between the countries. The Saudi kerfuffle is being strenuously downplayed and denied by the Obama administration.

Only when Israel - a true ally, not an ally of convenience - disagrees with the US, does everybody freak out. People are demanding that Israel be punished, that aid be jeopardized, that Israel's intransigence is endangering the entire region. Mahmoud Abbas, who has added new demands before deigning to negotiate with Israel (demands he never made before,) is not vilified at all for his intransigence. No, only Israel's government - the supposedly right wing obstructionist racist government that has done more for Palestinian Arabs in four months than the dovish peace-loving Kadima did in years - gets slammed for attempting to keep a status quo that has existed since 1967.

There is something seriously wrong when real friends get treated worse than fake friends, let alone enemies.

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!