Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 09, 2009

Saudi Vice, episode 30: That old black magic

After a two-year trial, a Madina court sentenced a Lebanese man, 47, to death Monday for practicing black magic.

The court held 10 hearing sessions to review the list of charges presented by the general prosecutor including using black magic, fraud, and breaking up marriages, which the man admitted.

The man, who had appeared on satellite channels practicing black magic, was caught red-handed in a hotel room in the Central Area in Madina two years ago with herbs, talismans, and some papers with strange drawings and writings.

The man has the right to appeal the sentence within 33 days. The Court of Cassations will review the sentence for approval.

I couldn't find anything in amnesty International about this specific type of sentence in Saudi Arabia, although it does mention

Saudi Arabian judges have wide discretion and can hand down death sentences for vaguely-worded and non-violent offences. Some migrant workers are reported to have even been unaware that they had been sentenced to death until the very morning of their execution.

See how efficient the Muttawa is? Too bad their Facebook page isn't more popular. Could be because they censor anyone who insults them (the heckler I mentioned this morning has disappeared from their Facebook wall.)

Lance Burton, stay out of the Middle East!

Firas Press has a regular feature where people send in cute pictures of their kids to be published.

This one is a first, though. The parents took a picture of Yasir Arafat, eating some hummus (not sure if Lebanon complained when he ate it,) and stuck pictures of their kids next to him to make it appear a little like he was eating his meal with them.

If I was the boy, I'd be nervous....

I guess I'm wrong then

Just saw this in The Dissident Voice:

In the extended interview (not broadcast on Comedy Central but available on The Daily Show website) with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer, [Jon] Stewart made up to twenty factual errors. These can be broadly grouped into about half a dozen myths: Jews “returned” to Palestine after 2,000 years in exile; Israel provided a haven for Jews suffering persecution in Muslim countries; Iran is developing nuclear weapons, with which it wants to “wipe Israel off the map”; Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism, mainly due to Arab anti-Semitism; both sides are equally to blame for the conflict; and Palestinians can’t agree among themselves, so you can hardly blame Israel for not making peace with them. Many of these myths – all of which serve Zionist interests well – are so transparently false that it is hardly necessary to debunk them all here.

Well, you can't argue with that sterling logic!

Arafat poison probe oh-so-close

Nasser al-Kidwa, Yasir Arafat's nephew who has been trying mightily since April to prove that Arafat was poisoned by evil Zionists, took the opportunity of the fifth anniversary of the old fart's death to announce...that he doesn't quite have the evidence yet.

But he's almost there!

He expects to obtain evidence soon to confirm that the Palestinian leader was poisoned.

Kidwa, who is currently chairing the ' Arafat Foundation,' said in a press conference held Sunday that 'his death is not normal and the reason most likely is a poison, but we have no definitive evidence yet'.

He said "The case will not be solved until we have evidence that he was poisoned."

Sounds like Richard Goldstone took some lessons of objective fact-finding from Nasser al-Kidwa.

Saudi Vice Squad on Facebook!

From al-Arabiya:

A group of Saudi's launched a group on a popular social networking website called The Facebook Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and have so far to attracted more than 500 members.

The group, named after the kingdom's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice also known as the religious police, aims to introduce people to the religious police, the London-based al-Hayat reported Friday.
The group's administrators have set several conditions for membership, including, no foul language or slandering officials, only serious topics open for discussion and posters should be tolerant and open-minded.

If members insult Islam they will be allowed three warnings before they are deleted from the group.

Many Saudis were keen to join the group and a large portion of members praised the role the committee plays in the Saudi society and the way they protect citizens and imposes order.

The group has only 12 members at the moment, not 500, and at least one person (Betty Boopah) is mercilessly heckling them, all in Arabic.

Hamas blocks IFJ meeting on Ethical Journalism

Palestine Press Agency reports that the International Federation of Journalists scheduled a videoconference meeting on the topic of Ethical Journalism, a worldwide initiative that the IFJ has been pushing.

The videoconference was to have included journalists in Ramallah and Gaza, where dozens of journalists had gathered.

After the Gaza journalists arrived, the venue's management apologized and told them that Hamas stopped the transmission.

Who would have thought that Hamas would feel threatened by ethical journalism?

Meanwhile, Israel's journalist federation seems to be on its way back to re-joining the IFJ after the IFJ expelled them over the summer, when the IFJ may have been acting for political reasons.

October rocket calendar

Q=Qassam (may include Katyusha-style rockets)
QS=Qassam landing short in Gaza
M=Mortar
(G)=Grad (included in Qassam count, not consistent yet)

MS=Mortar landing short
P - unnamed "projectiles"
(Paren) indicates unconfirmed Palestinian claims

K=Katyushas from Lebanon

October 2009

Where did the day go? open thread

Don't you just hate it when real life intrudes on blogging time?

I'll sleep on that weighty question.

Illegal Palestinian Arab immigration to Europe

Last week, a boat carrying illegal immigrants bound for Europe sank off the coast of Turkey - and at least four of the dead were Palestinian Arabs. From Haber:

BODRUM (A.A) - 06.11.2009 - Death toll reached six, including a Turkish citizen and three children, after a boat carrying illegal immigrants capsized off the Aegean coast of Turkey late Thursday, Turkish authorities said.
Coast guard and rescue teams recovered bodies of an Afghan illegal immigrant and a baby off Bodrum on Friday, officials said.
The Europe-bound boat was carrying illegal migrants from Palestine when it capsized off Bodrum's Akyarlar coast late Thursday. Four bodies were found earlier, while one was reported missing. Coast guard is still searching for the missing woman.
The number of immigrants rescued was reported 13 early on Friday.

The story of Palestinian Arabs risking their lives to illegally immigrate to Europe is one that gets swept under the rug. If it is mentioned at all it is assumed that Israeli policies are forcing this to happen, as this sickening Independent report said in 2007:

Sixty-five years ago, the rickety boats fighting through the towering waves of the Mediterranean towards a new home were crammed with Jews escaping Nazi persecution. Today the boats are plying in the opposite direction, towards Europe, and increasingly their cargo is Palestinians - fleeing the living hell of Palestine.

Go down a few paragraphs and you will see the "hell" that the Palestinian Arabs were escaping was not Israeli "occupation" but rather daily life under the PA:

Later Abdelsiih Mohammed Ecsim (as the authorities recorded his name), a boy who marked his 14th birthday during the crossing, said through a Palestinian interpreter, "It was dark, I was shaking with fear - but only at the end, before that I was shaking with cold."

"I ran away from Ramallah," he went on, "that's where my parents live. At Ramallah I went to school in the morning and worked as a bricklayer in the afternoon." By his reckoning the sea journey took nine days. With the other Palestinians he had fled his home town by lorry, hidden under tarpaulins, driving for many hours before arriving in some kind of reception centre, where they were joined by Sudanese from the Darfur region.

So while the Independent is comparing life in Ramallah with European death camps, it is clear that a lot of Palestinian Arabs really don't want to live in Palestine to begin with.

These are not isolated cases. According to Frontex, an organization that monitors Europe's borders,

The 1st phase of operation Poseidon 2007 took place on 15 May – 3 June 2007. During the sea part of the operation 910 illegal immigrants were intercepted, 194 forged or falsified travel documents were detected, 88 illegal immigrants were diverted to the country of departure and 13 facilitators were arrested. Main nationalities of illegal migrants identified during the operation were: Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Albania.

As for the land part of the operation, during this phase there were 70 refusals of entry at border crossing points, with the highest at the Bulgarian green border. Moreover there were 52 administrative offences at the border crossing points. At the green borders, 657 illegal migrants were apprehended. The main apprehensions took place at the Turkish-Greek border and the Albanian-Greek border. The main nationalities of those apprehended were Albanian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Afghan and Georgian.

Europol describes the phenomenon of illegal immigration into Europe and accurately describes the fact that people choose to make such a move more because off the "pull" of a better life rather than the "push" of how bad their lives are now:

The reasons why migrants leave their home countries are commonly referred to as ‘push factors’ and can include conflicts, dissolution and/or disintegration of multicultural states, natural disasters or other environmental problems, discrimination, political instability or poor economic situations. Although poverty, conflict and disasters are all powerful push factors, they tend to cause local or regional migration, not international facilitated illegal immigration. Poor and war-torn states are less interesting for the facilitators of illegal immigration since people in these states usually cannot pay the huge fees these facilitators demand.

Paired with the push factors are the so called ‘pull factors’, those criteria that make a destination country attractive to a prospective migrant. These factors may include the need for a labour force, a positive economic situation, democratic governance with political and social stability, and various historical or cultural links between the source and destination country, but especially the presence of large communities from the source countries in the destination countries.

The economy in the West Bank is as attractive as the economy in most Arab countries. They aren't being "pushed" out by horrendous living conditions - if they were, they would tend to want to move to neighboring states.

The answer can be seen in an Arabic Palestine Press Agency article about this tragedy:

Turkey is an important route of illegal migration from Asia to Europe because of the refusal of Arab states to absorb them. The illegal immigrants come from Africa and the Middle East, especially Palestinians.

A combination of their statuses of perpetual statelessness, forced on them by their Arab brethren (which makes living in other Arab countries no more attractive than staying put,) and the possibility of financial success in Europe, cause them to want to leave.

This is enormously embarrassing to Palestinian Arab leaders. They want to push the myth of a deep, historic connection between their people and Palestine, when in fact historically Arabs moved freely between all lands in the Middle East in response to economic and social conditions. The small but significant number who risk it all to leave their supposed homeland is not proof of how bad their lives are. By any reasonable standard, West Bank Arabs have better living conditions than the majority of the Arab world and the world at large. Rather, this is proof that even after years of indoctrination with a made-up history of specifically "Palestinian" culture and yearning, many just don't feel any emotional ties with the land.

It also shows that if Arab countries would stop their discriminatory policies against Palestinian Arabs - the only group of Arabs that cannot become naturalized citizens in Arab countries - that a flood of Palestinian Arabs would happily trade their mythical dreams of "Palestine" for the opportunity to resettle and start their lives anew among their own people.

As a result, tragic stories like this one tend to be minimized and ignored by Palestinian Arab leaders themselves. If the world sees how much Palestinian Arabs want to leave their beloved homeland, it will start to question why a state will solve anything.

The question might also arise of why no "diaspora" Palestinian Arabs are risking their lives to move to Palestine.

A small terrorist get-together

This picture was taken at an Islamic Jihad festival that took place in Damascus over the weekend. It was yet another gathering to honor the anniversary of the death of its founder, Fathi Shakaki.

I'm not great at recognizing faces, but we certainly have Khaled Meshal of Hamas there, as well as Ziad Nakhala of Islamic Jihad. It seems that there are also some PFLP leaders there as well.

That's what I call a target-rich environment!

Just something to keep in mind the next time someone claims that the different terrorist groups hate each other and don't cooperate.

Obama's Rabin speech justifies terror

Am I the only person who finds this sentence outrageous?

Remarking on Rabin's quest for peace during his life, U.S. President Barack Obama said in a video message that "Israelis will not find true security while the Palestinians are gripped by hopelessness and despair."

No one is saying that anyone should live in "hopelessness and despair" but the clear implication is that as long as Palestinian Arabs are pissed off, Israelis need to watch their backs.

People are responsible for their own happiness. Like it or not, not everyone gets everything they want. Plenty of Jews have very good reasons to want to gain back control of biblical Judea and Samaria and are frustrated that they cannot do that - but can anyone imagine Obama saying that as long as Jews are "frustrated and angered" by their inability to freely visit, say, Joseph's Tomb or the Temple Mount, that Palestinian Arabs will never have security?

Or would Obama say that US citizens cannot find true security while native Americans live in squalor and despair, or that Turks cannot find security while Armenians are stateless?

This is liberalism run amok, where the for one's happiness is found not from within but is rather the responsibility of the Western world. Where personal responsibility simply doesn't exist, and where terror is justifiable.

It is an attitude like this that gives cover to terrorists and their apologists, as they play on this insane thought process and use it as ammunition to blackmail the West into giving in to their ever-increasing demands. I have not seen the entire speech and perhaps there was a context there, but the fact that the leader of the free world said that sentence is incredibly frightening.

And that one sentence is already being quoted in the headlines of the Palestinian Arabic media.

Arab report: Extremists use sex to recruit suicide bombers

Al Arabiya is presenting an Arabic language TV show about suicide bombers tonight. In the show, they reveal that terrorist leaders explicitly use the lure of sex in Paradise as a means to recruit young men:

An analysis of the content of SMS messages sent by the bombers before they blew themselves up showed that more than 80% of the suicide bombers mention a wish to meet virgins as one of the reasons that compel them to carry out these operations.

[One man interviewed] said they refers to a button that, once pressed and activating the bomb, will come nymphs welcoming him to heaven. While there is another beautiful girl waiting for him that has prepared for him a buffet full of food and drink.

Psychologists say that the content that appears in the tapes clearly reflects on the way in which [terrorists] recruit, selecting young people and placing them in isolation for long periods in the mountains, exposing them to physical training and teaching violent extremist ideas about women, which would aggravate their sexual frustrations, and ultimately promise a legitimate means to unload this repression as a sure way to get them to implement what the organization's leaders tell them without discussion.

Lebanese school bans Anne Frank

From AFP:

Anne Frank's diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the militant group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism.
The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of "The Diary of Anne Frank" were included in the textbook used by a private English-language school in western Beirut.
Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews.
"What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted," said the report aired last week and also published on the station's website.
It questioned how long Lebanon would "remain an open arena for the Zionist invasion of education."
A member of the school board, Jimmy Shoufani, told AFP the school dropped the textbook from its curriculum after the controversy erupted. He asked that the school not be identified.
Hezbollah officials could not reached for comment.
In the Al-Manar report, party MP Hussein Hajj Hassan had criticized the school for showing poor judgement in picking out its textbooks.
"These respected, established schools are teaching the so-called tragedy this girl lived, and yet they are ashamed to teach the tragedy of the Lebanese people, the tragedy of the Palestinian people... the tragedy of the people of the south under the hands of Zionist occupation," he told Al-Manar.

But Allah forbid you should call them anti-semitic. They love Jews! Just as long as the Jews are dead or subjugated into silence.

Notice also how a private school in Lebanon must do what Hezbollah says, giving Islamic fundamentalists effective absolute power over the entire country just by using threats.

Erekat: Compromise is not "realistic"

From Palestine Press Agency:

Dr. Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said that the option of two countries on the borders of June 1967 is the only realistic option of making peace in the Middle East.

In other words, the idea of compromise is anathema. The idea of any Jews living in the West Bank is unrealistic. The idea that a single Jew should remain in the Old City is horrendous and an obstacle to "peace." The very thought that Jews should have free access to their holy places or be able to live in towns on the east side of a border that Arabs rejected before 1967 is simply not "realistic" and therefore must be shot down.

Thus spoke the "moderate."

Erekat stressed that the shortest way to peace is ending the Israeli occupation that began in 1967, and away from a state with provisional borders and a long-term interim agreements.

Because we all remember how peaceful things were between Arabs and Jews before 1967!

Palestinian Arabs are unique in international law

The Guardian says that accused Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hassan was "the son of Palestinians from a village near Jerusalem."

The New York Times says, "His mother’s obituary, in The Roanoke Times in 2001, said she was born in Palestine in 1952."

This got me to wondering about a contradiction in the standard pro-Palestinian Arab narrative that the world has swallowed whole.

We all "know" that Israel is considered the legal occupier of the West Bank. It was declared as such by the UN and the ICJ, among others.

The definition of occupation, however, is straightforward:

"Military occupation occurs when a belligerent state invades the territory of another state with the intention of holding the territory at least temporarily."

The original definition from the Hague Conventions of 1907 states:

Military authority over the territory of the hostile state

Art. 42. Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

The question that remains murky is, what is the state that Israel is occupying? It cannot be Jordan, because Jordan relinquished control in 1988, and the international community never recognized Jordan's annexation of the West Bank. It seems clear, from the aforementioned sources, that this "state" is "Palestine."

In other words, according to the UN and the ICJ, there is a legal entity called "Palestine" and it has existed since at least 1967, probably since 1948. This is remarkable in itself that international law is implicitly recognizing a state that was never declared or recognized. As a matter of fact, it may be against international law to prematurely recognize a state (note 26.)

(The ICJ takes the position that the intent of the Fourth Geneva Convention is not only between High Contracting Parties and that the intent of the drafters was to protect civilians even if they were not in a state beforehand. This is probably true: the Fourth Geneva Convention is specifically concerned with civilians. The advisory opinion is being extended way beyond treatment of civilians - the responsibility of which Israel voluntarily accepted in 1967 - and into the legal status of the territories themselves. That isn't defined by Geneva, but by the Hague. This brings up an entire other set of anomalies as Israel ceded day to day control of large parts of the territories to the PA, as a strict reading of "occupation" would imply that Israel has a much greater responsibility over West Bank Palestinian affairs than it exercises now, a position that would horrify the UN and ICJ.)

If we ignore these anomalies and assume that there is a legal entity called Palestine that is under occupation, then we come up to another problem: the definition of "refugees."

We have discussed a number of times in the past how Palestinian Arab "refugees" are the only ones in the world whose definition includes the descendants of the original people who fled a war. The UNRWA's operational definition has somehow become the legal definition.

But this definition has another dimension of exceptionalism: if one considers the West Bank to be legally "Palestine," then the original "refugees" who are there would normally be considered "internally displaced persons." After all, they just moved from one part of "Palestine" to another - if one accepts that "Palestine" is "occupied."

This analysis shows that the only way for the worldview of "occupation" and "refugees" to both be accurate and not contradictory is to redefine both words to accommodate a specific circumstance. To say that normal legal terms must be redefined for Palestinian Arabs - and only Palestinian Arabs - is to make a mockery of the idea of law itself.