Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Egypt bans all Gaza aid convoys

Aid convoys bound for the Gaza Strip will now be banned from traveling across Egypt after activists this week clashed with police, the foreign minister said in remarks published on Saturday.
Ahmed Aboul Gheit told government newspaper Al-Ahram that members of one convoy led by British MP George Galloway committed “criminal” acts on Egyptian soil on their way to the blockaded Palestinian coastal enclave.
“Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory,” Aboul Gheit said.
“Members of the (Viva Palestina) convoy committed hostile acts, even criminal ones, on Egyptian territory,” the foreign minister added without elaborating.
On Tuesday night activists with the Viva Palestina convoy clashed with police in Egyptian the port town of El-Arish, 45 kilometers from the Gaza border.
Seven protesters were arrested during Tuesday’s clashes, but police swapped them for four policemen held by the activists.
A prosecutor in El-Arish later issued warrants for the arrest of seven activists, including two Britons and an American woman.

I have yet to see any comment from the Viva Palestina folks, the Free Gaza movement or Code Pink on this development.

When smuggling tunnels are a Jihad mission

Last September, Ma'an reported:

A Palestinian man was killed and four others were wounded by a powerful electric shock while they were working inside a smuggling tunnel under the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip overnight.

Medical officials at Abu Yousif An-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah told Ma’an the corpse of 19-year-old Amir Al-Ballishi arrived at the hospital with signs of an electric shock.

Some 200 smuggling tunnels are thought to exist under the Egypt-Gaza border. The tunnels are currently the only reliable means of importing goods into the Gaza Strip, and represent a lifeline for Palestinians there, who have lived under a strict Israeli-imposed siege for more than two years.

Just another case of poor Gazans being tragically killed while trying to bring in candies and soda from Egypt, right?

Well, Mr. Ballishi is now being lauded as a martyr by Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades, who describe the circumstances of his death as a "jihad mission."

Somehow, I don't think he was smuggling toys.

(h/t t34zakat via email)

Addameer keeps lying

Yaacov Lozowick notices that Addameer, the Palestinian Arab prisoners' right association, has recently started to claim that some 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967.

Sure enough, other websites are quoting Ala Jaradat from Addameer, saying that the number of Palestinians Arabs who have been imprisoned prisoners is at nearly 800,000.

Last summer, Addameer testified to the Goldstone Commission that the number of prisoners was at 750,000 since 1967 - a number that Goldstone quoted without any reservation.

In 2005, Addameer claimed there were 650,000 such prisoners.

Earlier in 2005, Addameer's number was 600,000, but they used the 650,000 number in 2004 as well.

As I showed a few months ago, these numbers are simply lies - and not just innocent lies, but lies on a massive scale. Addameer not only made up the initial numbers but they keep grossly inflating them, confident that their anti-Israel audience will lap them up without question. To think that an additional 50,000 Palestinian Arabs were imprisoned since the summer is to believe in Arabian Nights stories.

For Addameer's numbers to be accurate, Israel would be arresting some 10,000 people a month. Yet the PCHR says that the number of arrests was 23 last week, 26 the previous week, 23 the week before and 17 the week before that - for a total of less than 100 people a month.

Addameer is lying by a factor of a hundred!

And still no Western reporter has called them out on this transparent deception.

Addameer's website is not very forthcoming as to where it gets its money from. It does claim to work closely with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Do those organizations believe Addameer's fake numbers as well?

More on Scheuer and his opinions

I have been getting a lot of hits from my post about Michael Scheuer on C-SPAN (linked from Adam Holland's blog) and the video clip that I posted.

Some of the links are coming from places like David Duke's site, or like this comment from Canadian Spectator site that says

Note that elderofziyon.blogspot makes no effort to deny Israeli influence over American foreign policy, indicating that it is criticism of such control that must be deemed anti-Semitic.

This is a pretty good indication of the intelligence of the critics, as I did not call Scheuer an anti-semite, rather the caller that said that the US was "jewed" into Iraq and that Jews were spilling American blood for their interests.

However, it seems to be an appropriate time to talk a little about what Scheuer himself said, especially since some commenters are of the opinion that Scheuer's arguments have not been refuted. On C-SPAN, he had no problem with the caller's Jew-hatred, but the essence of his response was

Ultimately Israel is a country that is of no particular worth the United States....They have no resources we need. Their manpower is minimal. Their association with us is a negative for the United States. Now that's a fact.

Scheuer has stated similar opinions before. In other arguments, he often using the same terminology of proof by assertion, insisting that his opinions are facts. For example,

[O]ne of the reasons America is attacked by Islamists is because of Washington's unlimited and unqaulified [sic] support for Israel. This is a staemnt [sic] of fact, not opinion or analysis.

Scheuer's penchant for backing up his statements by simple assertion indicates that he knows himself that his arguments are tendentious.

As for his statement that it is a "fact" that Israel has no particular worth to the US, that is absurd. Israel has provided the US with peerless intelligence (most obviously during the Cold War, when Israeli analysis of downed MiG fighters and Soviet military capabilities helped the US tremendously.) Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor helped ensure that the US did not face a nuclear adversary during the Gulf War. Israeli inventions and innovations save US army lives, for example unmanned drones, active defense systems for military vehicles and medical inventions. Israeli use of US weapons in the field also help the US make their own weapons better.

Outside the military field, there is a good reason why Microsoft, Intel, Motorola, IBM and other high-tech superstars have R&D labs in Israel - because they see the value that Israel provides. The entire current generation of Intel microprocessors were designed in Israel. Doesn't that help the US?

To the other assertion of "fact" cited above, it is fantasy. Islamists don't hate America because of Israel - they hate Israel because it is a manifestation of America that is on their doorstep. The things they hate about Israel are exactly the same things they hate about America. If Israel didn't exist their hatred for the US would not decrease at all. There is a good reason why Israel is only considered the "little Satan."

Now, I didn't call Scheuer an anti-semite, because I had not researched other things he had said in the past. However, his hate of Israel and American Jews who support Israel indicates that this characterization would not be far off. At a debate with Alan Dershowitz, Scheuer said explicitly that American Jews led the US into war with Iraq (after Dershowitz said, accurately, that Jews on the whole opposed that war.)

Similarly, as Jeffrey Goldberg notes,

Scheuer is the man who once told an appropriately-shocked gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations that the Holocaust Museum is part of a clandestine Jewish operation to control American foreign policy: "Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity.

There are a lot more examples of how Scheuer chooses only Jews who support Israel as worthy of his hate, not to mention other interesting opinions he has.

In his defense, Scheuer did come up with this gem, that could prove his hatred for the Jewish State is more ecumenical:

I forthrightly damn, and pray that God damns, any American –– Jew, Catholic, Evangelical, Irish, German, Hindu, hermaphrodite, thespian, or otherwise – who flogs the insane idea that American and Israeli interests are one and the same.

Well, I'll be damned!

"Intransigent"

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority rejected US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for the resumption of peace talks without prerequisites, Agence France Presse and Israeli media reported on Saturday.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat stressed that peace talks can only be renewed on the condition that Israel realizes a settlement standstill across the West Bank and occupied east Jerusalem. "A resumption of peace talks requires the complete halt of settlements," Erekat told the AFP.

Negotiations, he added, could only be reinitiated from the point at which they were stopped in December 2008, when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. [when settlement activity was not a pre-condition - EoZ.]

It was announced on Friday that the US and Jordan would urge Palestinians and Israel to discuss Jerusalem and borders – issues that have been relegated to final status talks in previous negotiations. Meanwhile, President Mahmoud Abbas declared eight preconditions which must be met by Israel in order to bring the Palestinian side back to the negotiation table, including a total settlement freeze and Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders.

So Abbas is adding more and more pre-conditions before agreeing to peace talks.

Yet if you do a Google News search on the word "intransigent" in reference to the conflict, for some reason it is applied to Israel nearly exclusively. (Occasionally Hamas is thus described, but the PA is never labeled with that term in the mainstream media.) We've noticed similar words and phrases in the past that are exclusively associated with Israeli government - "hawkish," "right-wing," "hardliner," "extremist" - even though, objectively speaking, the Palestinian Arab positions and actions have been more extreme than the government of Israel's.

This is perhaps the most damaging part of the false narrative that the world swallows whole about the situation. When supposedly unbiased newspapers keep using these very biased terms in very biased ways, it is no surprise that an entire generation is growing up hating Israel and believing that the PA is being reasonable and "moderate" (a term that is never used for Menachem Begin or Ariel Sharon, both of whom made incredible concessions for peace.)

There is a cumulative effect of this use of language that, over the years, makes the conventional wisdom in the Middle East a sort of funhouse mirror reflection of the truth.

Israel has been losing the language war for way too long.

Terrorists trying to stop Gaza exports?

Yesterday, the Popular Resistance Committees took responsibility for some 12 mortars (Israel confirmed about 7 of them.) This is by far the biggest one-day total of projectiles fired from Gaza since the end of Cast Lead.

Why is there a sudden upsurge of mortar and rocket attacks on Israel?

The answer may be found in the choice of targets. For the first time since in many months, as far as I can recall, some of the mortars were shot at the Kerem Shalom crossing near the Egyptian border.

Before Cast Lead, the crossings were a regular target. Israel would always shut down crossings after these incidents for safety reasons.

Sure enough, in response to the attacks, the IDF did shut down Kerem Shalom.

Who did this hurt the most?

Israel has recently, without any fanfare, allowed semi-regular exports of strawberries and flowers from Gaza. Maybe it was because of the relatively small amount of rocket fire; maybe it was part of the Shalit negotiations, or maybe it was a deal that Israel made with Holland which has been supporting the Gaza farmers of those products.

Now that the crossings are closed again, piles of the crops that had been waiting at the crossing are going to waste.

Of course, Israel will be blamed for this, rather than the PRC. But it is hard to not conclude that the flower and strawberry exports were the real target of the terrorists.

It is also notable that the PRC is loosely aligned with Hamas, and has done a number of terror attacks with them. I have yet to see any word that Hamas has gone after the PRC for these attacks, as they have gone after some smaller groups in the past.

Israeli Arab town smashes hummus record

From AP:

Israel has taken the upper hand in a new kind of Mideast conflict, one fought with chickpeas instead of bullets.

A Guinness World Records adjudicator has confirmed that Israeli chefs in an Arab town outside Jerusalem now hold the world record for the biggest serving of hummus, the chickpea paste that is a staple and a near-religious obsession for many in the Middle East.

Jack Brockbank put the amount of hummus prepared by the chefs Friday at 9,017 pounds (4,090 kilograms).

The record doubles the previous one set in October by cooks in Lebanon.

Lebanon and Israel have officially been at war for decades. When the Lebanese chefs prepared their dish, they called it a move to reaffirm ownership of a food they say has been appropriated by Israelis.

According to Sky News, the record-breaking dish was created by a combination of Jewish and Arab Israelis, and the restaurant owner decided to go for this record to symbolize peace between Arabs and Jews. (The Sky News article says that Jews claim to have invented the dish, although I have never seen any such claims.)

The Israeli author of The Hummus Blog had responded to last year's Lebanese record by jokingly claiming to have created the world's smallest hummus dish, "since we Israelis were always pioneers in miniaturization."

British rape victim jailed in Dubai

From the Sun (UK):

A BRITISH woman on a break in Dubai went to police after being raped - but SHE was arrested for having illegal sex.
The 23-year-old Londoner was attacked by a waiter in a hotel toilet after celebrating her engagement to her boyfriend with drinks.
But after she admitted boozing and sharing a hotel room with her fiancé, cops in the strict Islamic state arrested her for "illegal drinking" outside licensed premises and having sex outside marriage.
Her 44-year-old fiancé, also from London, was charged with the same offences. And both were thrown in police cells by officers who paid little heed to the rape.
The devastated couple were last night understood to be on bail awaiting trial and have had their passports confiscated. They could be jailed for up to six years if found guilty of the illicit sex charge.
British embassy officials in the desert emirate are helping them.
A diplomatic source said: "There have been some truly appalling injustices in Dubai but this one tops the lot.
"A desperate, distressed rape victim went with her boyfriend to report the attack to police. And both wound up behind bars.
"The police and authorities in Dubai have shamed themselves by yet again displaying a breathtaking lack of compassion and humanity."
The ordeal of the rape victim, a pretty Muslim of Pakistani descent, began after she joyfully accepted a marriage proposal from her boyfriend during a three-day New Year break.
She admitted drinking too much afterwards as they celebrated at Dubai Marina's luxurious Address Hotel - and passed out in a ladies' loo.
The waiter is said to have followed her into the toilets and raped her while she was semi-conscious.
Her fiancé was initially unaware of the attack and helped her to their room, where they slept until the next day.
But the horror of the rape came back to her when she woke - and the pair went to Jebel Ali police station to report it.
Yet unsympathetic cops immediately quizzed them about breaking the emirate's severe decency rules, which contain elements of Sharia law.
Medics were said to have shunned rape case procedures - but made sure they obtained a blood sample from the woman to prove she had been drinking.
After being locked up, she told a cellmate she was terrified the rapist had made her pregnant or given her a sexually transmitted disease.
She was given access to proper medical checks and a morning-after pill only after an appeal from British embassy staff.
She and her fiancé spent several days behind bars before being freed.
The cellmate, held for alleged cheque fraud, said: "She's a British girl but a Muslim, so I think they were tougher on her because of that.
"She was trying to report the rape but soon realised the policemen were more interested in how often she has sex with her boyfriend.
"They even asked if she did just normal sex or anything else in bed."
Her attacker, who is understood to be Syrian, is believed to have denied rape.
He claimed the Briton consented but has also been charged with "illegal sex".
A spokesman for the Address Hotel said: "The matter is being investigated by the authorities."

Future Martyr

Firas Press has an ongoing feature where it republishes pictures of Palestinian Arab children sent in by their parents. Usually the pictures are just cute, but sometimes, the pictures are edited in ways similar to "martyr" posters.

Today's kid is definitely being set up by his parents to be a martyr, if only because he is wrapped in the flag of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades:

I happened to find the original background picture, from Reuters:

As far as I can tell, none of the commenters on the page have anything but praise for the picture.

Galloway deported from Egypt

Too funny: (h/t PTWatch)

Leader of the Viva Palestinan convoy and British MP George Galloway was deported from Egyptian soil moments after he set foot on it, crossing the border at Rafah from Gaza, organizers of the convoy said.

A statement from the group said Galloway and a colleague "were forcibly pushed into a van, refused exit and told that they were leaving the country," as they entered Egypt.

Egyptian security sources confirmed the decision to deport Galloway, saying officials had decided to bar the British MP from entering Egypt in the future and added the country would "also put all the convoy members on the black list after they leave." Officials were upset over the protests launched by the convoy, which spurred riots at the Rafah border, which lead to the death of an Egyptian police officer.

In a related story, Egypt is demanding that Hamas hand over the person who shot and killed an Egyptian guard during riots at the Rafah border over the convoy, and a "decent" apology.

PLO hypocrisy on "Right of Return"

Looking a little further at the PLO's official positions as mentioned in their Mission to the US website, we see this stunning piece of hypocrisy:

Refugees and the Right of Return

Palestinian refugees must be given the option to exercise their right of return (as well as receive compensation for their losses arising from their dispossession and displacement) though refugees may prefer other options such as: (i) resettlement in third countries, (ii) resettlement in a newly independent Palestine (even though they originate from that part of Palestine which became Israel) or (iii) normalization of their legal status in the host country where they currently reside. What is important is that individual refugees decide for themselves which option they prefer – a decision must not be imposed upon them.

If Option (iii) is on the table, then why does there have to be a Palestinian Arab state beforehand? The stateless Palestinian Arabs could simply choose to become residents of their host countries today!

There are two groups of people that prevent that from happening: Arab leaders and Palestinian Arab leaders, including the leader of the PLO today.

The Arab League specified in 1959 that Palestinian Arabs, alone among all Arabs, were excluded from becoming citizens of Arab countries (see page 144-145 here.)

And how does the PLO leader react to this obvious case of injustice and discrimination? By agreeing with it, of course. On at least three occasions in the past couple of years, Mahmoud Abbas confirmed that he does not want Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon to have the option of becoming full citizens of the country they were born in.

The only recognized Palestinian Arab leader has said many times that he does not want Palestinian "refugees" to have the option of becoming citizens in their host countries. Yet the PLO website lies, to a Western audience, by claiming that they want to give the refugees a choice as to where they want to live!

See also this article where we learn that Arafat had zero interest in helping out the "refugees." The only time that Palestinian Arab leaders show interest in the refugees is if they think that they can help destroy Israel - otherwise, they like to see them rot.

"Historic Palestine"

One of the well-worn memes of the anti-Israel crowd is that Israel is only offering 14%, or 12%, of "Historic Palestine" to the Palestinian Arabs. For example, here is a small sample of how the phrase has been used in recent days:

What remains to the Palestinians now is less than 14% of Historic Palestine, all of it as isolated Bantustans, shrinking ghettos, walls, fences, checkpoints with surly soldiers,and the perpetual encroachment of expanding illegal Israeli colonies.

[In 1948 Israel] stole 78% of historic Palestine as the first step toward seizing it all for exclusive Jewish use.

And the Guardian defines "historic Palestine" for us:

[Islamil Haniyeh's] defiant rhetoric celebrated the movement's 22nd year, pledged never to recognise Israel and claimed the whole of historic Palestine for the Palestinians. "Palestine from the sea to the river, we won't surrender it," he told the crowd.

So does the PLO on its new US Mission website:

The problem is that historical Palestine never looked like this, unless your concept of "history" starts after World War One. This is a historic map of the Western-designed British Mandate for Palestine since 1922 or so, not in any real sense "historic" (more properly, "historical.")

Here is what Palestine looked like in a few random maps from before the British Mandate:

The Negev region is almost never included, and significant parts of today's Jordan are. (Egypt claims that Eilat is part of its own historic land.) The Jordan River is never a boundary for any conception of Palestine before the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

In terms of "Historic Palestine," the 1948 armistice lines probably includes perhaps 30% or maybe 40% - certainly not 78%.

The question that no Palestinian Arab or supporter has yet answered is why their claims always coincide with the parts of Palestine that are under Jewish rule, and not the parts that are under Arab rule? Why did the PLO in 1964 explicitly exclude the West Bank from its desired nation? Why doesn't Hamas today say that parts of Jordan should be within the boundaries of the state they demand?

If "Palestine" is so important to them, why don't they claim it all? Why do they accept the arbitrary, imperialistic Western division of their "historic nation" as a basis of their supposedly ancient historic claims?

The answer is simple - they don't care about historic Palestine. They care about the ultimate destruction of any Jewish state on what they consider Arab or Muslim land. All of the rhetoric about "historic Palestine" is a lie that is meant to mislead the West.

From the Guardian link mentioned above, it is a lie that has been extraordinarily successful.

(See also my previous post on "Eastern Palestine".)

PLO spells out its positions on Jerusalem

For those who naively think that the PA "only" wants Israel to withdraw to the Green Line and then peace will reign supreme, the new "PLO Mission to the United States" website spells out otherwise.

This website is meant to portray a moderate front to Western audiences, but it is filled with half-lies and outright lies that would take a month of fisking to flesh out. Here is just what they say about Jerusalem:

Israel has no legal right to any part of East Jerusalem since East Jerusalem was part of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. East Jerusalem is part of the territory over which the indigenous Palestinian population shall exercise sovereignty upon Israeli withdrawal.

In 1967, there were no legally recognized "Palestinian territories" and Israel's acquisition of them in a defensive war with Jordan is not a legal "occupation" according to the only definition of occupation listed in international law, the 1907 Hague Conventions.

In conformity with international law and as stated in the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, all of Jerusalem (and not merely East Jerusalem) is the subject of permanent status negotiations.

The PLO here is formally stating that they want to go beyond the Green Line and claim a stake in the western part of Jerusalem as well. When Oslo says in 1993 that "Jerusalem" will be a part of the permanent status negotiations, the PLO is interpreting that as if all of Jerusalem is on the table - a gross misintepretation of the 1993 agreement, which is only saying that Jerusalem will be discussed at a later time, not that the western part is up for negotiations.

Jerusalem should be an open city. Within Jerusalem, irrespective of the resolution of the question of sovereignty, there should be no physical partition that would prevent the free circulation of persons within it.

Here is where they are solidifying their claim above - saying that they want full rights to allow terrorists to freely enter Jewish areas of the city, and beyond.

Palestine and Israel shall be committed to guaranteeing freedom of worship at and access to religious sites within Jerusalem. Both states will take all possible measures to protect such sites and preserve their dignity.

This is a joke meant as a sop to the West. The PLO officially does not want any Jewish access to Jewish holy sites in Hebron, Nablus and Bethlehem, and the only reason there is any access today is because of Israel's "illegal occupation," not because of any liberal thinking on the PLO's part. Jerusalem would be the same in short order if the PLO would convince the West of its "peaceful intentions." Moreover, the idea that the PLO would ever allow Jewish free access to the Temple Mount is beyond absurd.

The PLO is who Israel is officially negotiating with, not the PA, so this is not an extreme, splinter position. This is what the "moderate" Palestinian wing is demanding, in English.

In Arabic, you will still be hard-pressed to find a map of "Palestine" that shows Israel at all.

Muslims massacre 7 Coptic Christians in Egypt

From Time:

Three men in a car sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd of churchgoers in southern Egyptian as they left a midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas, killing at least seven people in a drive-by shooting, the church bishop and security officials said.

Muslims are fearful that Christians worldwide will riot and threaten their communities in retaliation for the massacre.

Just kidding!

Hamas terror training in Lebanon; Hezbollah upset

From Naharnet:

The explosion that rocked Beirut's southern suburbs over the weekend has reportedly took place during live ammunition training of Hamas members.
Pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, citing Lebanese sources, said Wednesday the blast occurred as Hamas members exercised with live ammunition in the basement of Hamas headquarters in Haret Hreik neighborhood in Dahiyeh.

Beirut media agreed that the explosion took place inside a room used by Hamas members in the basement of a building that houses Bank of Kuwait and the Arab World on the main road between Haret Hreik and Bir Abed.

Asharq al-Awsat said Hizbullah was displeased with Hamas.

It said Hizbullah has informed Hamas leadership that the Shiite group was "deeply dismayed at what had happened, particularly that training took place without the knowledge of the party and inside a residential building."

How dare Hamas store and test weapons in civilian areas in Lebanon? Hezbollah has the exclusive franchise on that business!