Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 04, 2009

Those evil Israelis, helping the Jordanian economy

YNet reports:

Jordanian sources claim that the export of some 500 tons of cucumbers to Israel in November has resulted in a spike in local cucumber prices.

The As-Sabeel weekly quoted Jordanian sources as saying that local merchants and middlemen purchased the produce at local vegetable markets in order to sell it to Israel at relatively steep prices.

Jordanian farmers say that during the transition period between autumn and winter, when cucumber harvests are unstable, Israeli merchants are willing to pay more (3.5-4 dinars, or $5-6.50) for every five-kilogram (10 pound) box of cucumbers.

Meanwhile, say the sources, the export of cucumbers to Israel has spurred an increase in local cucumber prices to a level of 0.7-0.9 dinars, or $1-1.30 per kilo.

Jordanian farmers told As-Sabeel that they had decided to export cucumbers to Israel despite protests from organizations opposed to the normalization of ties with the Jewish state because they could not sell them to other markets in Syria and the Gulf states.

So local Jordanian farmers found a customer for their products that are willing to pay a premium for them. In any other context, this would be considered a good thing, and a boon to the local economy. Yet since the customer happens to be Israel, their resultant greed is not blamed on the farmers themselves but on Israel for being willing to pay more for Jordanian goods!

In 1999, Jordanian farmers produced 74,000 tons of cucumbers, so the idea that selling a mere 500 tons to Israel would force the local market price to rise that dramatically is not likely.

It is worth mentioning that Jordanian cucumber farmers protested government regulations last year that forced them to lower their prices, to the point of threatening to destroy their cucumber crops rather than adhere to the regulations.

Hamas:"UNRWA aid should have no strings attached"

I mentioned the other day about UNRWA's budget shortfall, how it is partially the fault of Arab states that never paid their already pitifully small pledges to UNRWA, and that if the West truly wants to solve the "refugee" problem, it should shame the Arabs into shouldering their own responsibilities for the issue.

Hamas, predictably, has a different take on the issue.

Commenting on the UNRWA budget crisis, Hamas' minister of refugee affairs Hussam Ahmed says the the UNRWA budget deficit is a political issue, and that UNRWA is trying to use it to impose a political agenda on Palestinian Arabs.

He said "We are against the policy of Arabization of UNRWA because it pushes the international community to abandon its responsibilities towards refugees, and support towards making the refugee issue an Arab issue and not an international one."

Ahmed further said that since the "international community" (meaning the Western world) is responsible for the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes Picot agreement and the 1947 partition plan, then it is wholly responsible for the "refugees" and must pay them forever, without ever asking for anything in return.

It is almost as if he is worried that the West would one day do exactly as I suggested. Which is the best proof that it would work.

Cute kids with guns

The Sun (UK) has an expose of how Al Qaeda affiliates poses babies and small children with real weapons to make recruitment videos:

A TINY girl aged barely two sucks her fingers in childish innocence - while grasping an AK-47 assault rifle almost as big as her.
The tot, in full Muslim dress, was made to pose with the weapon dubbed the "Widowmaker" as part of a sickening propaganda stunt staged by extremists of the Islamic Jihad Union, linked to al-Qaeda.
The group - who target British and US troops from lairs on the Afghan border with Pakistan - also pictured the girl and five other toddlers with heavy weapons in front of a black Islamic flag.

The Sun had a similar expose four years ago, that time from Iraq.

Even so, you have to give credit to Palestinian Arabs for being the trendsetters in this arena. Even though it is commonplace nowadays to see pictures such as this one of a Palestinian Arab kid hanging out with a gun and his mentors,

they have been inculcating their kids with a love of violence for decades. Just check out this LIFE magazine

cover from June, 1970:

"Civilians" - the video

The video of the research that I and my co-bloggers did on the PCHR's lies about Gaza.

Turkish "analyst" says Jews ready to buy up Dubai

Palestine Today has an article that quotes a Turkish businessman as saying that Jewish money is ready to pounce on Dubai.

Someone named Orkhan Goksel says that he has warned since 2007 that Dubai would sink into debt, that Jewish banks would take over the country (since, as everyone knows, most of the banks are Jewish anyway) and - within a short period of time afterwards - Dubai will become a part of Israel.

He predicts that this will all occur by 2015.

(I have no idea why there are so many stories about anti-semitism today.)

Gaza kids enjoying 'Eid

Palestine Today has a photo essay of Gaza children enjoying 'Eid.

A majority of the pictures shows kids with toy guns:

Among the pictures was this unintentionally ironic shot:

Academic anti-semitism in the Ukraine

From Ha'aretz:

Stories appearing on several Ukrainian Web sites claim Israel has brought around some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the country over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.

The claim, which was made by a Ukrainian philosophy professor and author at a pseudo-academic conference in Kiev five days ago, is the latest expression of a wave of anti-Semitism in the country.

Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism have become a major motif of the presidential election campaign in Ukraine, with some figures making anti-Semitic statements and others condemning them. Some candidates, including a Jew and someone whose rivals claim is Jewish, blame a third rival - Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko - for bringing anti-Semitism into the race.

"Ukraine's political system is a parody of democracy," Russia's Chief Rabbi, Berel Lazar, said.

Vyacheslav Gudin told the estimated 300 attendees of the Kiev conference a detailed story about a Ukrainian man's fruitless search for 15 children who had been adopted in Israel. The children, Gudin said, had clearly been taken by Israeli medical centers, where they were used for "spare parts." Gudin said it was essential that all Ukrainians be made aware of the genocide Israel was perpetrating.

The conference, some of whose participants belong to a Slavic-rights movement, also featured two professors who presented a book blaming "the Zionists" for the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s as well as the country's current condition.

Those explosive Iranian tires

From YNet:

A tire explosion, not a terrorist attack, caused a blast that ripped through an Iranian bus in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Thursday, the Syrian interior minister said.
"The bus entered a petrol station to have one of its tires inflated and the tire exploded," Said Sammour said in a statement to state-run Syrian TV, adding that the bus driver and two gas station workers were killed when a tire they were pumping air into exploded.

Hezbollah's al-Manar television station reported that security apparatus investigating the blast did not find any traces of explosives at the scene

"Body parts are still scattered around the bus," one of the witnesses told Reuters. Several more people were wounded in the explosion in the Sayyeda Zainab area in Damascus.
The witnesses said the rear part of the bus was ripped opened. Buildings around the scene of the blast sustained damage and glass from broken windows littered the street.

Either Iranian tires are routinely made out of Semtex or someone is not being entirely truthful.

Anti-semitism in England, personified

An email correspondent forwarded me this video.

As he described it:

On Tuesday night a group of Jews and Christians protested outside Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church at the PSC’s Carol Service, with Caryl Churchill, author of the antisemitic play “Seven Jewish Children”.

The vicar of the Church, Simon Perry, buys into the PSC’s propaganda. He is onrecord as supporting the event and believes “people here would endorse the PSC”. He supports a boycott of Israeli goods and fails to see anything antisemitic about “Seven Jewish Children”.

Here is a pretty scary video of what happened outside the church:

The video features a nice-looking gentlemen who believes that Jews are parasites and Judaism has no place in England.

EoZ, Arabic matchmaker?

I just saw that a couple of people found me from a link on the site bentelhalal.maktoob.com.

It is an Arabic-language Muslim dating site.

Apparently, someone put a link to my blog on his or her profile.

I wish I could figure out who!

Iran bans makeup for women on TV

From Al Arabiya:

Women appearing in television programs will not be allowed to wear make-up because it is against Islamic law, or sharia, media on Wednesday quoted the head of Iran’s state television as saying.

"Make-up by women during television programs is illegal and against Islamic sharia law ... There should not be a single case of a woman wearing make-up during a program," Ezatollah Zarghami was quoted as saying by the reformist Etemad newspaper.

Zarghami, a former member of the elite Revolutionary Guards who has been re-appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also ordered that women guests should "preferably" be hosted by women.

Speaking at a conference of network directors, he also called for cutting down on music during programs and urged his staff to take a cue from Western action movies, which have "excellent and calm music."

Egypt catches another Hamas cache of terror weapons

Palestine Press Agency reports that Egyptian security forces caught a cache of weapons and explosives being smuggled to Hamas in Gaza.

It included suicide bomb belts and hand grenades.

Anti-Zionist Film Festival!

I mentioned recently that I saw an ad in Palestine Today that used this graphic:

At the time, the link didn't work so I wasn't sure what the ad was exactly for.

Now I know: it is a request for submissions to the Second Annual "Epic of Resistance" Film Festival, to be held in February in Beirut (click to enlarge):

And the sponsor of this festival is an Iranian Arabic-language TV station, called Al-Kawthar TV.

The content of all submitted works should be about "Anti-Zionist Resistance". Films that are not related to the topic of program would not be participated in the Festival.

Unfortunately, I cannot find last year's winners online.

Maybe I will submit an old Tom and Jerry cartoon and tell them that it is an allegory.

Work accident! (updated)

Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades announces the death of a "martyr":

Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas movement, mourned at dawn on Thursday [sic] December 2nd, 2009, one of her members who was martyred while performing a jihadi task in An-Nuseirat camp in the middle of Gaza strip.

The Brigades confirmed in a military communiqué issued on Thursday December 2nd, 2009, the martyrdom of the mujahed Yasser Sabri Radi was during their duty in the middle of Gaza Strip, noting that the mujahed was martyred after a long path of jihad and sacrifice for the sake of their beloved Palestine.

In English, this means that Mr. Radi blew himself up. (There is also a chance that he was accidentally, or purposefully, shot to death by an esteemed terrorist colleague.)

Bring out the candies!

UPDATE: Reports indicate that he was killed in a tunnel collapse.

But he wasn't killed in Rafah, but rather in central Gaza. Which means either he was working on a weapons bunker, on secret tunnels between buildings in Gaza or on a tunnel to attack/kidnap Israelis in Israel.

Shame is the best weapon

From Ma'an:

The UNRWA budget will reach zero by the New Year and threaten the regular payment of salaries for UNRWA workers as well as the level of services for refugees, the organization’s media consultant Adnan Abu Hasana said Tuesday from Gaza.

Large international donors are not paying what they used to, the number of individuals depending on UNRWA services are increasing, and several Arab states have failed to follow-through on aid pledges, the spokesman said.

...Additionally, Abu Hasana said, Arab countries have not fulfilled their commitments to the League of Arab States, which pledged to pay 8% of UNRWA’s budget. The official added that last year the Arab League was only able to transfer payments amounting to 1% of the UNRWA budget.

I am no fan of UNRWA. However, most of the world feels that giving Arabs of Palestinian descent welfare forever while not pressuring Arab states to give them citizenship is a good thing. Given that, how can the Arab states justify their reprehensible role in withholding funds for their fellow Arabs?

Here are the top nation-donors to UNRWA's General Fund in 2008:

1	EC	139,685,831
2	USA	95,726,691
3	Sweden	40,645,161
4	UK	37,498,826
5	Norway	27,574,498
6	Netherlands	23,328,149
7	Canada	16,763,476
8	Denmark	15,005,168
9	Italy	14,749,262
10	France	12,655,279
11	Switzerland	11,069,216
12	Germany	10,680,660
13	Spain	10,349,288
14	Japan	8,516,725
15	Ireland	5,919,003
16	Finland	4,672,897
17	Luxembourg	4,569,763
18	Australia	3,764,130
19	Belgium	3,009,532
20	Kuwait	2,499,958

Yes, Luxembourg gives nearly twice the money to UNRWA than any Arab country does.

So Arab nations deliberately keep their Palestinian Arab brethren stateless, and they don't even pretend to help the "refugees" - most of whom were born and will die in their host Arab nations.

With all the pressure that the EU and US like to put on Israel, why is there none to demand that Arab states step up to help solve the problem that they created? Why does the West not call out the Arabs on their hypocrisy of pretending to be in solidarity with the "Palestinian cause" while doing everything they can to perpetuate it?

Here is a beautiful example of where the West could use the honor/shame dynamic of Arab and Muslim countries to everyone's advantage. Sweden or the UK or even the UN could publicly chide Arab states for their complicity in Palestinian Arab misery, and the chart above is Exhibit A. If the West is so anti-Islam, why does it pay for 99% of the budget of the major organization that keeps these Arabs alive? More importantly, why do Arabs not even pay 87% of the pittance they pledge?

Why, in short, is the welfare of the Palestinian Arabs exclusively a Western problem?

Shame the rich Gulf states into paying at least half of the UNRWA budget. Create a ten or twenty year plan to take away the "refugee" status of Arabs born in Arab states and integrate them into their surrounding Arab society, and shame the Arab states into naturalizing the people that have been their "guests" for decades.

The weapon of shame costs nothing and would have better results than six decades of Western welfare. It would help the West, and it would help the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs who would happily become citizens of Arab countries. More importantly, using shame would nullify the usual self-serving Arab arguments for keeping Palestinian Arabs in misery. It exposes their hypocrisy and helps the very people who everyone agrees needs help.

There is no downside, except for the hypocrites who want to keep Palestinian Arabs in misery as pawns against Israel.