Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 01, 2010

Fox Business pushing investment in Syria

Fox Business Network is spending a week in Syria, trying to convince businesses that Syria is the next big place to invest.

See here and here.

Later this week they plan to visit the PA as well.

Bizarre Mabhouh sideshow

Muhammed Nasser, one of the Hamas members who some reported (apparently mistakenly) as having been arrested in Syria as a potential collaborator in his assassination, has just muddied the waters a little more.

Nasser is saying that Mabhouh was being tracked by Arab national intelligence agencies who fear the growth of Islamist movements. He says that Mabhouh would complain to him about how they are following him, "haunting him day and night."

The commenters at Firas Press are astonished that a Hamas leader would say anything to deflect the blame towards Israel.

In general, the rumors about Mabhouh are now far outstripping the facts that are being reported in the Arab press.

Hamas claims yesterday's bomb was no big deal

The large blast that I mentioned yesterday in the Shati camp in Gaza was just a big misunderstanding, according to Hamas.

It wasn't aimed at any Hamas leader or anything like that. Just that a youth, unaffiliated with any of the many militant groups in Gaza, decided to put together his own bomb and it exploded prematurely...but caused no damage or injuries.

Because any kid in Gaza can pick up some TNT and explode a bomb large enough to force entire blocks to be cordoned off, and yet not get hurt or cause any damage.

The original story mentioned that the Hamas police kept everyone - including reporters -away from the site.

A perfectly rational explanation!

How PalArab press translates an AFP article

AFP reports on Purim in Hebron, and Palestine Press Agency translates it to Arabic. Some of the interesting differences, with the Arabic in italics:

"The Tomb of the Patriarchs is all we have," declared rabbi Baruch Marzel, who heads the 600 Jewish settlers installed in an enclave in the heart of the Palestinian city. "If we do not have rights to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, (then) we do not have the right to be a nation."
Said Rabbi Baruch Marzel, leader of the 600 Jewish settlers living in Hebron, told AFP that "Tomb of the Patriarchs is all we have... If we do not have the right in the Ibrahimi Mosque, we would have no right to be a nation."
Amazingly, there were no disturbances aside from occasional volleys of stones thrown by small groups of Palestinian youths.
There was no incident yesterday with the exception throwing some stones at Palestinians.

PalPress also quoted this part of the AFP article:

But Abdelaziz, a 49-year-old grocer watching the procession go by, was hard-pressed to conceal his disgust.

"They make fun of us each year. They are even happier than the previous years because of the announcement by Netanyahu," he seethed.

"It is a provocation," said Adnan al-Jaabar, an 18-year-old Palestinian. "The sanctuary is ours, not the Israelis'."

Gaza tunnels on sale!

Palestine Today reports that Gaza is suffering a glut of smuggled items, so much so that Rafah tunnels are closing down as the demand is now outstripped by supply.

You can now buy a smuggling tunnel itself for $20,000, down from the $150,000 it cost during the heyday of smuggling.

The industry, which used to employ 10,000 workers, is down to a mere thousand, according to the article. And the wages for a successful shipment has gone down from 100 shekels to 40.

The tunnel owners are also wanting to sell because Egypt has stepped up its destruction of the tunnels, and they fear that the new Egyptian wall will close all of them fairly shortly anyway.

From Ma'an:

A 19-year-old rabbit raiser in Jenin said he was "shocked and terrified" when his newest animal gave birth to what he described as a tiny baby elephant on Sunday.

Muhammad Alawna raises rabbits as a hobby on his small farm north of Jenin, and works construction in Israel during the week.

“I was concerned when I saw a black baby elephant next to nine white baby rabbits," Alawna told Ma'an, adding that the creature died only five hours after it was born. He said he was baffled as to how the elephant was produced.

The mother rabbit, Alawna explained, is a Dutch breed which he bought six months ago from a farmer in the northern West Bank village of Jaba in Jenin district.

I haven't yet figured out the Mossad connection, but you just know that they are behind this somehow.

Open Purim thread

No time to post.

A freilichen Purim!

Report of large explosion near Hamas leader's home

More evidence of Hamas infighting....

Palestine Press Agency is reporting that a large explosion occurred Saturday night in the Shati refugee camp.

Witnesses said it targeted Abu Anas Hammoudeh, one of the top leaders of the Qassam Brigades in the Shati refugee camp west of Gaza.

Sources in Gaza said that the secrity forces of Hamas on Thursday arrested two members of the armed wing of Hamas against the backdrop of bombings that rocked a few days ago near the house of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh story beach camp west of Gaza.

Arab News insanity

Arab News published a ridiculous article,that stated in part:

Check this out. Here's a story of two countries from the Middle East. One is an ancient civilization with a rich history that goes back five thousand years. It's a functioning democracy with free elections held at regular intervals.

It's a huge country of 70 million people. It has remained within its borders and hasn't attacked any country in the last 100 years. It is pursuing a nuclear power program, which it insists is for peaceful purposes.
The second country also claims to be a democracy. In this democracy though you get citizenship and voting rights not on the basis of your origins even if you were born in this land but on your ancestry. This country was founded on the land stolen and forcibly taken from its original inhabitants. It has fought at least three wars and is locked in permanent conflict with its neighbors on all sides. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and other state-of-the-art killing machines. It pursues assassination as a state policy and regularly sends death squads around the world to take out people it doesn't like.
Which country do you think is a real threat to world peace? The first country that has no history of aggression or the second state that has killed tens of thousands of innocent people in wars of aggression against neighbors and in cold-blooded executions?
And no prizes, dear readers, for guessing that the two countries in question are Iran and Israel.
If anyone had any doubts about the evil and criminal nature of the State of Israel, they should have been cleared after what happened in Dubai.

I wrote as a comment:

Let's see..."Peaceful" Iran is a state sponsor of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups; it has used its Syrian proxy to try to turn Lebanon into a Shiite state, it develops "peaceful" missiles that can reach most of Europe, and it is working overtime to build nuclear weapons-something that even the IAEA is belatedly admitting, it was involved in a war only a couple of decades ago that killed more Arab civilians than Israel could dream of, and its "free elections" were proven to be a sham only a few months ago.

Oh, and it is headed by a group of messianic nutcases who are itching to do whatever it takes to bring the Mahdi back.

I guess the author forgot to mention those things. Instead he believes that the killing of a known terrorist leader is much worse than anything Iran has done.

The previous times I wrote comments on Arab News they didn't get published, but I can always hope...

Arab papers jumping on the passport bandwagon

Kuwait's Al Rai newspaper is reporting that the assassins of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, killed in Syria in 2008, used fake passports as well.

According to the paper, quoted by Palestine Today, Mughniyeh's killers had passports from Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

In my experience, Kuwaiti news scoops of this nature are rarely confirmed and are often fictional. The "analysis" that follows pretty much proves it.

Using peerless logic, the paper then asserts that this is proof that European governments work together with the Mossad and provide the Israelis with necessary paperwork.

The logic gets more bizarre as the claim is then made that the reason that Israel doesn't use US passports is because it doesn't want to embarrass its American ally when it gets caught, and it shows how much contempt Israel has for Europeans.

What's in a name?

The New York Times' Ethan Bronner reports, in an article about a dispute between Jerusalem's mayor and Jerusalem Arabs:

[N]o utterance escapes politics. All labels and names here are contested. The mayor calls the neighborhood not by its Arabic name of Al Bustan but by a Hebrew one — Gan Hamelech, or the King’s Garden, a reference to the spot some believe King David wrote psalms.

The implication is that the Arabic term for the neighborhood is the ancient, correct one, and that the Hebrew name has been retrofitted to erase Arab history.

But as the My Right Word blog notes, the truth is the exact opposite. Bustan is the Arabic word for garden or grove. The place name is Biblical. It was the Arabs who stole the name and Arabicized it, not the other way around.

10,000 tons of apples from Israel to Syria

Palestine Press Agency reports that the ICRC will be transferring 10,000 tons of apples from Israel's Golan Heights to Syria next week.

This has been an annual occurrence, as Israel has been selling their surplus apple crops to Syria since 2005, where the apples are often resold to Gulf states at a profit.

Druze communities in the Golan, which Syria considers occupied, grow most of these apples. And Syria supplies water to at least one of the Druze border towns for free.

MK Ayoub Kara, the deputy minister for the development of the Negev and Galilee, has suggested that these arrangements be increased. He suggests that if Syria would supply water to more Druze villages, more apples could be grown and the annual export could be increased tenfold.

"The two countries' economic interests will return the sides to the negotiating table, and from economic peace we will also reach true peace," said Kara.

Deputy Minister Kara is a member of that extremist, hawkish, racist political party known as the Likud.

He is also Druze.

New resources for college students

The annual hatefest known as "Israel Apartheid Week" is almost upon us. CAMERA has set up a very useful site that demolishes the claims of the Israel-haters and shows them to be anything but peaceful.

Also, check out this video about the "anti-Zionist" Jew-hatred on college campuses.

(h/t Jack)

Israel selling Iran booby-trapped material for nukes?

Palestine Today quotes French media as saying that Israel has set up dummy companies in Europe to sell components that could be used in the manufacture of nuclear bombs.

The purpose of these front companies is to take orders from Iran, ship them fake components, and when the Iranians open up the shipments ....boom.

According to this unconfirmed report, some Iranian experts were already killed in this manner.

I could not find the original source.

Islam's three tombs of Abraham

The New York Times, on November 9, 1902, had an interesting article, about two tombs of Abraham - and neither one was in Hebron:

Edward James Banks wrote a book in 1912 about his adventures in Babylon and he includes his attempts to excavate under the Tomb of Abraham in the village of Tel Ibrahim, and why he was stymied:

Tell Ibrahim, the Biblical Cutha, for which I had sought permission to excavate, is one of the ruins suggesting the crescent and star ; the temple is the star, but the crescent is very irregular. A canal bed, some three hundred feet wide, separates them. We rode up the steep slope of the temple mound and dismounted on the summit by the little tomb of Abraham. It was because of the sanctity of this tomb that permission to excavate here was denied me. Visible from the tomb are the date palms bordering the shores of the Euphrates, and over beyond them is Ibrahim Khalil, and there stands another sacred tomb of Abraham. The tomb is by no means impressive. The building, measuring about thirty by fifteen feet, is constructed of the square, Babylonian bricks from the ruins beneath it, and surmounted by a conical dome. The doorway, leading to the antechamber, has been partly walled up. The dust on the floor had long been undisturbed, for pilgrims seldom visit the place. The inner chamber, lighted by a small opening in the dome, contains only a plaster mound to mark the grave ; on it were lying a fragment of a marble slab, a broken earthen pot, and a faded green rag torn from the turban of some pious pilgrim. Rassam claims that while excavating at Tell Ibrahim, he rebuilt the tomb ; had he been less zealous, this one of the many sacred graves of Abraham would probably have been forgotten by now.

Ibrahim Kallil, the other site of a tomb of Abraham in present-day Iraq, was also mentioned in a much earlier travelogue by Claudius James Rich who visited there in 1811.

We arrived at the Birs about half-past eleven. There are vestiges of mounds all round it to a considerable extent, and the country is also traversed by canals in every direction. The soil round the Birs was sandy. To the north of it runs a canal called Hindia, dug for the use of Mesjid Ali, by order, and at the expense of, Shujah ud Doulah. Close to the Birs, or at about a hundred yards from it, and parallel to its southern front, is a high mound, almost equal in size to that of the Kasr. On the top of it are two koubbehs, or places of prayer. The one is called Ibrahim Khalil, where they show his burialplace, which is under ground, exactly in the style of Am ran Ibn Ali. The natives tell you that it was here that Abraham was thrown into the fire by Nimrod. This tomb has been lately repaired.

So it appears that the Arabs and Muslims have had a number of places they venerated as the burial places of Abraham, not only the one in Hebron.

It appears likely that the main reason they only talk about the Hebron tomb nowadays is because it also happens to be a place that Jews worship.