Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Ma'an job posting

Title: English Editor
Department: Ma'an News Department - English Desk
Place of work: Ma'an News Agency, Bethlehem, Palestine
Immediate supervisor: English Desk Manager
Academic Background: Bachelor's Degree
Professional Experience: Minimum 1 year editing/news writing experience/ Masters degree
Job Description:
· Edit news stories for English website
· Prepare, rewrite and edit copy
· Check stories for legal and ethical concerns
· Write articles occasionally
· Proofread articles
· Monitor other news sources, such as press releases, telephone contacts, radio, television, wire services and other reporters
· Verify facts, dates and statistics using standard reference sources
· Deal with telephone calls and emails from members of the public
· Edit other English language communications for Ma’an
· Network as needed
Required Competencies:
· English Language – native speaker
· Impeccable writing and editing skills
· Demonstrable experience of journalism
· Willingness to work in a conflict zone
· Ability to work under pressure in a fast-moving news environment
· Strong news sense
· Ability to work as part of a team
· Strong ability to prioritize
· Strong organizational skills
· Willingness to work flexible hours
Desired Competencies:
· Written and/or spoken Arabic
· Previous experience of working in a newsroom
· Knowledge of Middle East history and politics, especially Palestine
· Knowledge of other European languages and/or Hebrew

Any Jewish bloggers who live near Bethlehem want to apply? I'm certain that a progressive organization like Ma'an has an equal-employment policy, the matter of their religion wouldn't be an issue at all; they already know Hebrew, already know the politics of the area and they already live "in a war zone" so Ma'an doesn't have to worry about paying relocation.

Arab official confirms Gaza engineers visited Israeli water plant

Despite Hamas' heated denials, the director of the Gaza Water Authority confirmed IDF Army Radio reports that Gazan engineers visited Israel two months ago to learn more about water treatment.

The visit was coordinated by the World Bank in an effort to transfer expertise in water treatment to Gaza. The engineers visited an Israeli water-treatment plant in Rishon LeTzion.

The director says that his organization is not connected to Hamas and acts independently, getting its revenue directly from the people served.

Hamas had claimed that the report was a sheer fabrication by Israel, "designed to tarnish the reputation of Hamas and its institutions."

Kidnapping in Sinai?

Yesterday, Israel issued an urgent warning to some 35,000 (or maybe 550) vacationing Israelis to leave the Sinai immediately, as they were in danger of being kidnapped.

Egypt responded harshly, saying that the threat was exaggerated and meant to harm the Egyptian tourism industry. (This is typical - the Arab idea that every Israeli action is purely meant to harm Arabs.)

Firas Press is reporting that there was a kidnapping of an Israeli in the Sinai today but that military censor stopped publications of that report. No details were given. JPost mentioned rumors to that effect but said that there was no concrete evidence of a kidnapping.

90% of Hamas budget from Iran?

An interview with Hamas MP Jamal Nassar about Hamas' cash crisis included something not mentioned in the English Al Arabiya article I quoted yesterday.

According to him, 90% of the revenues of the Gaza government is from "foreign contributions."

Hamas' budget this year is $540 million, meaning that Iran (and Syria, h/t Zvi) allocates the bulk of that amount annually to the terrorist organization.

Saudi clerics define and condemn "terrorism" - but....

From Al Arabiya:

Saudi Arabia's supreme religious body, the Senior Clerics Council, issued a Fatwa on Monday defining the term “terrorism.”
While defining terrorism as a whole the Senior Ulema Council decided that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 in the United States were indeed terrorist attacks.
The reason it has taken years to define terrorism was because of the difficulty to separate from liberation or independence movements.

Included in the definition of terrorist acts in the new fatwa are, “targeting of public resources, hijacking of airplanes, blowing up buildings and also al-Mofsdon fe al-Ard (to do mischief on earth)," according to the London-based newspaper Asharq Alawsat.

All 20 members of the council met under the chairmanship of the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al al-Sheikh and all signed the final version of the fatwa.

The council members based the fatwa on religious texts from Quran and the Sunnah that all criminalize financial support for terrorism as well as any theoretical or intellectual material that attempts to legitimize it.

The council's fatwa does not only cover Saudi Arabia or the Islamic countries but defines terrorism in the whole world.

While it is very nice for the wise Saudi clerics to admit that 9/11 was an act of terror, there are some unanswered questions that this story brings up.

Namely, are Palestinian Arab suicide bombers or rocket launchers also terrorists? How about Iraqi suicide bombers? Did the scholars include "liberation movements" in their definition or not?

According to at least one Arab source, they seem to have either sidestepped or hushed up the answers to those questions. From El Khabar, an Algerian newspaper:

The Saudi Arabian scholars did not reveal whether the resistance operations in Palestine and Lebanon against Israel fall within this definition, or whether the same description covers the activities of the forces of the Iraqi resistance...

It will be interesting in the coming days to see if there is any reaction, pro or con, from the terrorists. That will clear up the answer!

Galloway group attacked by Muslims

Irony:

George Galloway's entourage has been attacked by "students" of a controversial Muslim leader, the politician's spokesman has said.
The Respect party candidate for Poplar and Limehouse was campaigning in Watney Market, east London, when three men allegedly abused and lunged at him.
The spokesman said that the trio pushed members of the group and would have attacked Mr Galloway if they could.
Police arrested and bailed three men on suspicion of behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
The alleged incident took place at about 1500 BST on Saturday. No one was injured.
Mr Galloway's spokesman said: "There were three characters who were shouting abuse.
"They were shouting 'kafir' [a derogatory word for non-believer], which is very insulting, and that Mr Galloway deserved to die.
"They were very aggressive and then they lunged forward towards Mr Galloway.
"I would certainly consider it an attack."
The spokesman said that the men barged and pushed other members of the entourage and, had they not been in the way, he believes Mr Galloway would have been assaulted.
He said: "It was their intention to have physical contact.
"Their ire is directed at us because we have Muslims involved in the campaign, and they don't think Muslims should play a part in democracy.

h/t Jawa Report

Model Zionist

It's been a while since I gratuitously posted pictures of beautiful women, while tenuously finding a connection between them and the themes of this blog.

So...meet Alanna Drasin:

From The Justice, the student newspaper at Brandeis University:

Alanna Drasin '13 is a midyear from Beverly Hills, California. While the 5-foot, 9-inch, slender, long haired brunette Politics major may appear to be a normal first-year who just happens to have impeccable style, she in fact has made her own part-time career out of fashion modeling for American Apparel and other companies. At Brandeis, Drasin is involved with the Sundeis film festival and is an active member of the Brandeis Zionist Alliance.

Honor killing in Gaza

A woman who was murdered yesterday in Gaza was he apparent victim of an "honor killing," according to PCHR:

At approximately 11:50 on Monday, 12 April 2010, the body of Sherin Khamis Zayed (al-‘Attar), 32, was brought to Martyr Kamal ‘Edwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, as she was hit by several bullets to the head and the chest. The chief of police in Beit Lahia town, Sameh al-Sultan, told a PCHR fieldworker that the police opened an investigation into the incident and arrested a number of the victim’s relatives, including her father. The father told the police that five masked gunmen raided his house on Monday morning and pulled his daughter outside the house and fired at her. Data provided by the police indicates that this crime was committed allegedly to “maintain family honor.”

In a related story, PA police announced that they managed to crack a three-year old "family honor" murder, where a man killed his brother for reasons of honor. (That usually means that the victim was gay, or raped.)

Hamas police also arrested two people for the murder of a 65-year old woman last year.

Earthquake fears in Tehran

From AFP:

At least five million Tehran residents need to relocate elsewhere because Iran's capital sits on several fault lines and is threatened by earthquakes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday.

"We cannot order people to evacuate the city... but provisions have to be made. At least five million should leave Tehran so it is less crowded and more manageable in case of an incident," Mehr news agency quoted him as saying.
Tehran province has nearly 14 million inhabitants, eight million of whom live in the city which straddles several fault lines. Experts warn that a strong quake in Tehran could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

"We cannot predict when an earthquake will happen. But if anything happens to Tehran province's 13.8 million residents how can we manage that?" he asked.

Ahmadinejad always has plan B: start a war to hasten the Mahdi's return, and he will fix everything!

More financial woes for Hamas

Al Arabiya has more about Hamas' financial woes that I mentioned yesterday:

Hamas has begun taxing Gaza street vendors and shopkeepers, raising speculation the ruling Islamist group is in a financial crisis fuelled partly by Egypt's building of a border wall to stop smuggling tunnels.

Experts said on Monday that perhaps only a few dozen of the hundreds of tunnels are still functional as a result of the steel wall being pounded deep into the ground along the 14-km (8-mile)-long frontier.
For Gaza's Hamas government, which takes a cut from Palestinian merchants who move items ranging from cars to fuel to food along the subterranean route, that means lower revenues in an impoverished enclave under an Israeli-led blockade.

Weapons, and it is widely believed cash, also come in via the tunnels.
"There is a real financial crisis," Palestinian economist Omar Shaban said.

The Hamas administration, he said, employed 34,000 people in the Gaza Strip and had put much of its liquidity into the purchase of buildings and land.

"The crisis may also indicate either a lack of foreign financial support, Arab and Islamic, or a difficulty to get that support into the territory for some reasons," Shaban said.

For the first time since Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from the rival Fatah movement of Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007, it has begun to collect taxes from street merchants and small business owners.

"They asked me to pay 1,100 shekels ($290) a month. How much did I earn to give them what they asked for?" asked the owner of a shop selling falafel (fried chickpea) snacks.

"Instead, I asked them to take the store and pay me the 1,100 shekels every month. It would be a better deal for me," he joked.
A Hamas lawmaker confirmed that the Islamist group ruling Gaza was facing a financial "crisis" because of Egypt's moves to seal its border and a boycott by local banks.

"The government is facing a crisis," MP Jamal Nassar said in a statement. "The siege on the (Hamas-run) Palestinian government has been tightened recently and because of this it has been unable to bring in funds from abroad."

Neo-Nazi site returns again to Google AdWords

As I reported a few times last year, Google AdWords has resumed once again accepting ads from NSM88 Records, a purveyor of neo-Nazi and "white power" paraphernalia.

It seems that they have scaled back on selling the most egregiously racist items, such as this one:

This may be the reason that Google no longer considers them offensive enough to ban from advertising.

But they still have lovely items like this one:

Which they claim is anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish.

They also sell a full reproduction of Julius Streicher's edition of Der Sturmer that accuses Jews of ritual murder, a few Holocaust denial books, and other virulently anti-semitic books from the Nazi era translated into English.

Google must consider Jew-hatred acceptable but black hatred to be over the line.

HRW's former "military expert" Marc Garlasco would also feel at home with the many "militaria collectables" they have for sale, which all center on Nazi-era items, just like Garlasco's collection.

Complaints to Google should be sent here, and the URL of the offending ad is http://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=CSfLDxFDES7neJ5aYlQeJxdzMApTzxnXY-4mxCIHd9gcIABABIMm4rQtQzt--lgdgyZ7yirSk2A_IAQGqBBlP0Hl8kFUQvermac_LZwV5nAexgkvoLV85&sig=AGiWqtz9fXFzkxN6FPfzFMjE7APX2FblfA&q=http://nsm88records.com/theshop/product_info.php%3Fproducts_id%3D1664 .

Gaza power woes continue - but not because of Israel

Gaza experienced blackouts over the weekend as money to pay for fuel for the power plants ran out again.

The Gaza Electricity Company transferred 3 million US dollars to the Palestinian Authority treasury in Ramallah on Sunday, after Palestinian factions met to discuss the means to bring an end to blackouts experienced across the Gaza Strip.

The sole power generator in the Gaza Strip was completely closed down on Saturday, the head of the electric company announced , following a day of unheeded warnings that a humanitarian crisis was at hand.

Shortly after the announcement, both the PA and the Gaza government launched accusations at each other over responsibility for Gaza's ongoing fuel shortage, with Hamas alleging the Ramallah-based leadership had used EU funds intended for diesel transfers to increase civil servants' salaries.

Some Gaza residents have discovered power inverters as a better alternative to dangerous gasoline-powered generators that many have been using. The power inverters can be connected to car batteries of they can be charged during the times that electricity is available, or even with solar panels, to provide electricity when needed.

"Siege" news: Wood and aluminum for Gaza

Palestine Press Agency and Ma'an report that Israel plans to resume shipments of wood and aluminum to Gaza, with the first shipment of wood scheduled for Thursday.

It is unclear whether that this is related to Hamas' recent reported actions to stop other terror groups from attacking Israel, or rather if this is in response to US pressure.

Another news item says that Hamas has allowed its own government engineers to visit Israel to learn more about maintenance and repair for Gaza's waste treatment plants. Hamas denied the story as just more rumors meant to destroy its reputation.

UK KFC tries to please Muslims, fails badly

From News of the World:

[KFC], Britain's second biggest fast food chain hoped to woo the Islamic market by opening 86 trial outlets selling halal-only meat - that's from animals slaughtered under strict religious guidelines.
But KFC's target diners insist the chickens are not being killed in the right way and say they will stay away.
And furious non-Muslim customers have set up Facebook groups protesting that the trial branches, which also ban pork, have dropped their favourite bacon-topped Big Daddy burger from menus.
Groups with names such as "Against the KFC Halal Trial" and "No Halal at Colne KFC" - referring to a branch in the Lancs town - are rapidly attracting members. For meat to be halal, the animal must be alive when its throat is cut as a verse from the Koran is recited.
KFC insists their methods meet the approval of the Halal Food Society. But Islamic leaders disagree, saying the pre-stunning of animals in the chain's mechanical process means a third are already dead at the point of slaughter.
And the fact the prayer is played over a speaker means each bird it not blessed individually as it is killed.
They have now threatened to warn the UK's 2.4million Muslims not to eat KFC meat, and will meet with the fast food giant on Wednesday to question how it is killing chickens sold as halal.
Imam Yusuf Shabbir of the Lancashire Council of Mosques said: "If KFC confirms to us that it has no intention of changing the mechanical method of slaughter we will advise members of the Muslim community this."
But a KFC spokesman said: "We've worked with animal welfare organisations and the Halal Food Authority to ensure our processes fully comply.
"And wherever possible we've made sure our trial stores are near non- halal restaurants, to provide customers with a choice."

Mads Gilbert and his love of terrorists

From the Norway, Israel and the Jews blog (h/t Zvi):

NRK journalist Øyvor Bakke hosts the program ”Middagselskapet” (The Dinner Party), where the guest is invited to present three people he or she would have liked to invite to a dinner party. On April 9^th the guest of the evening was Mads Gilbert, a maoist physician who became famous when he covered the 2009/2010 war between Hamas and Israel from the safe spot of Shifa hospital, where Gilbert served as a NORWAC doctor and which Hamas fighters used as a base. See the clip on NRK.

Mr.Gilbert’s imaginary guests turned out to be Charlie Chaplin, Author of “The elegance of the Hedgehog” Muriel Barbery and Abu Jihad, who masterminded the worst terrorist act in Israel’s history in which 37 civilians were murdered in a bus hijacking led by Dalal Mughrabi in 1978. Program host Øyvor Bakke does not bat an eyelid at Gilbert’s dream-cast of guests, but introduces Abu Jihad to her audience with the words: “Next man out is what must say is… a powerful man…”

The following then ensues:
Øyvor Bakke: Abu Jihad as he is also known is a powerful political figure…

Mads Gilbert: Yes, and I would love to invite him… and it might as well have been a woman from the Palestinian liberation movement or from one of the other liberation struggles in the third world, against occupation, against colonization. Abu Jihad was a special person in the Palestinian struggle, he was a great teacher, a philosopher, he was an analyst, he was very knowledgeable about language, culture, and so forth, knew the Palestinian history inside out, and many Palestinians still say today that if Abu Jihad had been alive we would have had a different situation. He was liquidated by the Israelis in 1988 in Tripoli. The Israelis call him a terrorist, and that brings us into the interesting discussion, the liberator of one is the terrorist on another. The Palestinians say that the Israelis are the terrorists, while the Israelis say that it is the Palestinians who are the terrorists…

Øyvor Bakke: Is it true that you have met with him?

Mads Gilbert: I met Abu Jihad in Lebanon in 1981, while we were there with the first surgical team from the Palestine Committee… it was a significant meeting.

Øyvor Bakke: What was he like?
Mads Gilbert: The silent type, wise, very dignified, very.. in many ways a representative for the Arab culture but also for Palestinian pride… a listener, and at the same time an inexhaustible source of knowledge, so I learned a lot from that, it was not a long meeting, a couple of hours, but it was… it stuck.

Abu Jihad was, of course, the person behind the Savoy Hotel murder of 8 Israeli civilians and the Coastal Road Massacre where 35 civilians were killed.

Gilbert has been on the record for supporting terrorism for a long time, however. After 9/11, he told a Norwegian newspaper that he would have supported the attacks as a legitimate reaction to US actions in the Middle East.

Zvi adds:

And yet he gets face time in he media to fabricate blood libels about Israel, with nobody mentioning his long-time worship of - and collaboration with - people who live to slaughter civilians. He was responsible for making the claim that among Gazan casualties, women and children comprised 25% of the dead and 45% of the wounded. [He also said that over 90% were civilians. - EoZ]
A doctor who is a radical extremist who knowingly encourages terrorist attacks against innocent civilians must NOT be granted automatic credibility in the press. When someone like Gilbert is used as a supposedly professional "witness for the prosecution," the press has an absolute responsibility to identify their prior sociopathic statements, their prior demands that doctors practice politics during conflicts (rather than focusing on life-saving and truth), and their claims that medicine is mostly politics. Politicians are judged in an entirely different light than doctors. The press has a responsibility to identify someone who begs to be judged as a politician.

Radovan Karadzic was a psychiatrist before he becae a mass murderer and war criminal. Josef Mengele was a doctor. Just because someone is a doctor does not mean that they are professionals who are above lying, or that they have any moral authority whatsoever.
When Gilbert was subsequently criticized as a propagandist and politician by journalists, Norwegian FM Store has come to Gilbert's defense. This says a lot about Store and the Norwegian government as a whole.