Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Boycott this kangaroo!

A kangaroo is released into an enclosure at the zoo in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, May 6, 2010, after it was transferred from a zoo in Jerusalem. Two kangaroos were transferred on Thursday from the Israeli zoo to the Qalqilya zoo as part of continued cooperation between the two, Palestinian veterinarian Sami Khader said.

I hope that the zoo clearly notifies all visitors that this kangaroo is Zionist, so that innocent Palestinian Arab children aren't forced to accidentally support the zoo that allowed itself to become the recipient of an animal from the Zionist enemy. The kangaroo itself should be branded with a large Star of David, allowing Arab boycotters the choice not to go to that collaborator zoo.

The Fifth Holiest Site in Islam

We are often told that the Al Aqsa Mosque is the "third holiest site in Islam."

Well, even today, this is only true for Sunni Muslims.

Shiite Muslims place Jerusalem as number five, behind the mosques in Mecca, Medina, Najaf and Karbalah. And Sufi Muslims have a completely different list.

Calling Jerusalem the "fifth holiest site in Shiite Islam" doesn't quite have the same ring, though.

(As far as I can tell, the "Ibrahimi Mosque" (Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron is not even on the radar of either Muslim sect as being a top mosque, and of course the mosque that may have existed near Rachel's Tomb has only been considered important in the past few years. )

Allah has a lawyer

I just got this spam email:

i am Mrs. Bintu Mahmud. Please contact my lawyer Ramli Sariman (email address provided) for a very important thing ALLAH wants you to do for Him. May ALLAH be with you always.

I'm impressed - any lawyer would be proud to have Allah for a client!

My guess is that he's advising Him to keep His mouth shut.

Kuwait censoring news stories on Iranian spies

From the LA Times Babylon & Beyond blog:

A report by the Kuwaiti Al-Qabas newspaper last weekend claiming that the country's security services had dismantled a spy cell allegedly working for Iran's Revolutionary Guard has sparked a ruckus in the Kuwaiti parliament, raised diplomatic tensions and triggered rampant speculation in the Persian Gulf media.
Now, in an attempt to calm the situation, Kuwait has banned any more media reporting on the alleged spy cell.

On Thursday, the Kuwaiti English-language newspaper Kuwait Times reported that Public Attorney Hamed Al-Othman had issued a decision forbidding any more publication of news on the issue.
The report, which has not been verified by officials, has created multiple political headaches for the Kuwaiti government. Several Kuwaiti lawmakers, including Mohammad Hayef, a hard-line Islamist, called for the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador and pressed the government to speak out on the spy allegations.
Predictably, Iranians were outraged. The Iranian Embassy in Kuwait strongly denied the media report, and a high-ranking official dismissed the allegations as a "Zionist plot" to tarnish the image of the Revolutionary Guard.
"The claim about identification and discovery of a spy web in Kuwait is in line with the [enemy] project to spread IRGC-phobia in the region," the Revolutionary Guard's public relations head, Gen. Ramezan Sharif, told the semi-official Iranian news agency Fars.

I guess IRGC-phobia is a specialized case of Iranophobia.

Algerians upset at Jewish soccer player

Algerians are upset at how their nation has been hiring many non-Algerians to play football for their national team, skirting the normal naturalization requirements to become citizens instantly.

Things came to a head when Raïs M'Bohli, goalkeeper for a Bulgarian team, bragged in an interview that he received his Algerian passport in five minutes while the average person takes 15 months to get one.

The thing is, M'Bolhi's mother is Algerian (his father is Congolese.) He was raised in France. But the Algerians aren't happy - because his mother is apparently Jewish.

As Palestine Today writes,

[Problems] that plague Algerian society and threaten its Arab and Islamic roots and identity, such as the marriage of thousands of Algerian Muslim, Jews and Christians in Europe, and the granting of Algerian nationality to each dog just to [be successful in] the World Cup. Algerian officials are challenging the feelings of 35 million citizens, many of of whom live below the poverty line, by profligacy and wasting people's money to import players that have nothing to do, either closely or from afar, with Algeria.

The article goes on to say that many Arabs in Algerian chat boards are very upset, and the autotranslation ends with these enigmatic but clearly bigoted words:

The sacrifice of local players and is called the scheme aimed to eliminate the identity of the Algerian people, in which case the maximum was boiling in him to the ranks of the Jewish vegetables.

A run on the bank in Gaza

More monetary woes in Gaza:

Hundreds of Gaza residents started lining up outside the Ar-Rimal branch of the Arab Bank in Thursday morning, the day after an announcement by the administration that two of the three Gaza Strip branches would close.

In a statement, the bank announced that "in light of worsening conditions under which the Bank is called upon to operate in Gaza and after having recently reduced the number of its staff there, it has also decided to close two of its three branches."

In response, the PA Ministry of Economy, told Ma'an that it imposed the largest fine in the ministry's history on the bank, for failing to obtain ministry approval for the closures under Article 49 of the Monetary Authority law and Article 10 of the Banking law.

The PA issued a statement mid-morning on Thursday, assuring all customers that the bank would continue to operate and would be stabilized as part of the Palestinian banking system.

Not exactly the FDIC, is it?

Abbas: "There is no difference between us and Hamas"

In an interview with Asharq Al Awsat, given while he was in China, Mahmoud Abbas (referred to consistently as Abu Mazen, his nom de guerre in Arabic) said that there is no difference between Fatah and Hamas:

When you talk about Hamas in Gaza, it is against the firing of rockets and other missiles, and when you talk about a state within the 1967 ... So, what's the difference between us and them? There is no difference. The question is no longer political or ideological or intellectual or anything else, the question is: Why do they not accept the reconciliation, in the face of the Gaza Strip deteriorating daily not monthly, socially and economically. We regret that they are smuggling weapons and explosives and assembled in the West Bank. Why punish those who fire rockets in Gaza, when we collect their weapons and explosives and equipment in the West Bank?!

Daily we discover their weapons storehouses [in the West Bank.] Large quantities! Every day, we put our hands on the arms. If you say you are committed to the truce, and punish those who fire rockets and accuses them of violating the national consensus [in Gaza], why is this a correct attitude [from Hamas' perspective] in Gaza and not in the West Bank?

This is mostly meant to put pressure on Hamas for an agreement, but Abbas knows very well that Hamas does not accept the Green Line. He is using the normal Fatah argument that Hamas is hypocritical when it tries to stop rockets while saying it is a resistance movement.

An American flag is raised in Gaza

International aid workers in Gaza came up with the idea to stage a mock World Cup tournament, with different "countries" being represented. The goal was, as usual, to highlight the "siege" where Gazans cannot freely travel to the real World Cup matches.

One of the teams symbolized the US:

Bystanders chuckled on Wednesday as the American flag was raised to great fanfare over the Gaza City football stadium, when the country's team challenged the Serbians to a mock World Cup match.

The American team, made mostly of aid workers from Al-Maghazi-area American workers, was set to face off with the Serbian team, from the Az-Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, and onlookers marveled at the verve with which game patrons cheered as the American flag was hoisted above the pitch.

The excitement for the American team was largely based on its high-profile aid workers, all from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) office, who conceived of and sponsored the games. Wearing jersey number 20 is the director of one of the Gaza branches of the program.

UNDP teamed up with the Palestinian Football Association and put together 16 different national teams, pulling in Palestinian ringers from across the Strip, and including aid workers from the different countries to play under their flags.

Speaking with Ma'an ahead of the match, players on the team said the Gaza World Cup was "meant as a message to the international community that the people of Gaza want to live in peace with the world, that they want football and not war."

Rami Hamdan, who also plays in the American team, said that while he was ecstatic to play alongside the UNDP workers, his excitement for the stars and stripes stops at current US foreign policy. "We distinguish between the U.S. government and the American people, and we believe that the American people are different than their administration," he added.

I guess that Obama's overtures to the Arab world have not made any impact. Time for him to redouble his efforts to make them like him better.

Filming the match for Al-Jazeera, Ayman Muhy Ad-Din, was smiling. "Just like Palestinians to create this kind of joy in the middle of a tragedy," he said, adding that the match was a good opportunity to let the world know about the suffering in Gaza.

But - it wasn't Palestinian Arabs who came up with this idea, it was international aid workers! Here' a great example where Al Jazeera is fully doing propaganda, not news.

And here's the proof that these games are not simply to create joy in Gaza but for pure propaganda purposes:

On the closing day, when one team triumphs over all the others, they will be handed the Gaza World Cup, a hand made sculpture crafted out of the twisted iron of demolished homes in Gaza.

“The western media had a big role in distorting the true picture of the Palestinians and do not focus on the positive side of the Palestinians,” the Al-Jazeera correspondent said, hoping footage from the match would make its way from the Arabic to English station of his news station, and from there to the living rooms of the western world.

The first commenter on the article is actually on the American team and wasn't happy with this article, which again indicates that truth is hardly what this tournament is about:

Patrick / Gaza
I'm sorry who were the UNDP players on the American team? Answer -- there weren't any. Next time ask us on the American team who we are and you might learn more than you're being fed by some of the sponsors.

Now we are up to 32 Dubai assassins!

From the WSJ:

DUBAI—Officials in the United Arab Emirates identified five new suspects in their probe of the January killing of a top Hamas operative, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The new names bring to 32 the number of people identified by Dubai police as wanted in their probe of the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room on Jan. 19.
International law-enforcement officials have praised Dubai's police work in the case.

32 people to kill one guy!

For all the praise that Dubai's police chief is basking in, I still would love to know why he hasn't released the video taken outside Mabhouh's room, where a hotel camera was directly pointing.

I just made this video to ask that very question:

Here's a little anti-semitism disguised as anti-Zionism

CBS has a story on their website about how Catholics feel about the sex scandals in the Catholic Church, with most saying it doesn't affect their faith but upset at how the Vatican is handling it.

One of the commenters said:

Unfortunately even Catholics seem to be misinformed about this. It's not surprising given the convergence of Zionist and homosexual interests playing against the Church.

Got that? The Zionists, together with their gay friends, are working to take down the church!

Somewhere in an office building in Tel Aviv, some sabras are working assiduously to destroy the Catholic Church so Israel can presumably fulfill its expansionist designs on Rome.

Jew-haters are so used to reflexively substituting "Zionist" for "Jew"when they speak in public forums that the results are sometimes comical.

New Blogger feature gives more layout flexibility

Blogger is now testing a new feature where you have much more control over the look of your blog through a graphical interface.

Go to draft.blogger.com, go to your blog, choose Layout and then click on "Template Designer." You have much more control over the layout, and you can test your changes instantly.

It doesn't quite do what I want to do with this blog, but it is a nice feature that can make the CSS-challenged amongst us create beautiful (and probably very ugly) blogs.

Consider this an open thread....and check out my tweets, as I add interesting articles from others a few times a day.

PalArab boycott of Israeli goods grows

While officially the PA is only boycotting "settlement" products, there have been more public calls for Palestinian Arabs to boycott all Israeli goods.

Ma'an Arabic reports that a boycott organization was at a Nablus shopping area today, exhorting people not to buy Israeli products.

They said that every shekel that goes to the Israeli economy goes towards a bulldozer to destroy an Arab house or a bullet to kill an Arab child.

More interestingly, the article mentioned "public anger" at Arabs who actually shop in shopping malls of the settlements. This sounds a lot like the 1930s Arab boycott - will these activists start to threaten those who actually want to buy Israeli goods?

It also mentioned calls for Palestinian Arab authorities "to intensify their efforts to curb the invasion of Israeli goods and settlement goods to our markets to Palestine, because of the lack of border crossings between the Palestinian communities and settlements."

(Which sounds like the relationship between Jews and Arabs who live near each other in the West Bank is not so bad, if they regularly trade goods and shop. That almost sounds like....peace! But that is crazy talk, because we all know that peace is what the leaders say it is, not how ordinary people act.

(One Israeli in the West Bank once told me that Jews in his town used to regularly go to Nablus for their shopping and banking before the first intifada, because it was closer than Jerusalem and convenient. Post Oslo, of course, such ideas are heresy to the people who are invested in the "peace process.")

Anyway, the article ends off with the claim that many Palestinian Arab housewives are not ensuring that their homes are not polluted with any Israeli food, drink or cleaning products. How long before it gets expanded to include "Jewish" and "Zionist" products like Pepsi?

Pat Buchanan publishes Neturei Karta

How can you say that Pat Buchanan is an anti-semite?

After all, his website happily publishes screeds from the Neturei Karta, and who is more Jewish-looking than they are?

The linkage myth

Lee Smith writes in Tablet:

The one uncontroversial fact about the Middle East is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is inextricably linked to every other problem in the region. Known as “linkage,” this is the one idea that has won the support of a broad consensus of U.S. congressmen, senators, diplomats, former presidents, and their foreign-policy advisers, seconded by journalists, Washington policy analysts, almost every American who has ever watched a Sunday morning news roundtable, and the Obama Administration, from National Security Adviser James Jones to the president himself: “If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process,” candidate Obama said on Meet the Press in the spring of 2008, “then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as a way to stir up mischief in the region.”

...
Having written a book that describes the Middle East in terms of a clash of Arab civilizations, I give no credence to the notion that the Arab-Israeli arena is the region’s defining issue. Rather, it is one among many conflicts that plague this conflict-prone area, and so I see the Arabic-speaking regions in terms of intra-Arab clashes, or an Arab cold war, where regional actors—not just nation states, but also regimes and their domestic rivals, in addition to competing sectarian groups—are warring with each other at varying levels of intensity. There is the Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fatah that has cooled for the time being; in Lebanon, Hezbollah has routed the pro-democracy March 14 forces; the Houthi rebellion taking place on the Saudi-Yemen border is effectively a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians; in Syria, the ruling Alawite minority simultaneously fears the country’s Sunni majority even as it uses Sunni militants to advance its interests in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories; and in Iraq, Sunnis and Shia seem to be poised for a continuation of the civil war that will ensue after the U.S. withdrawal. That’s the real Middle East, where the Arabs’ fight for power among themselves takes priority over whether or not Washington negotiators have the percentages right in proffered land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nonetheless, I can hardly help but recognize the central role that U.S. Middle East policy has given to the belief that, from the Persian Gulf all the way to Western North Africa, a region encompassing many thousands of tribes and clans, dozens of languages and dialects, ethnicities and religious confessions, the Arab-Israeli issue is the key factor in determining the happiness of over 300 million Arabs and an additional 1.3 billion Muslims outside of the Arabic-speaking regions. Where does such an extraordinary idea come from? The answer is the Arabs—who might be expected, in the U.S. view of the world, to give us an honest account of what is bothering them. However, this would ignore the fact that interested parties do not always disclose the entire truth of their situation, especially when they have a stake in doing otherwise.
...
Nor apparently can the Americans admit that linkage was just a strategic instrument that leveraged the Arab narrative to the advantage of the United States. The further U.S. policymaking gets from the origins of the myth, the more magical and enticing it has become. The myth of linkage has grown to such legendary proportions at this point that it is the extent of the current White House’s Middle East policy. We have no other strategy to stop the Iranian nuclear program but linkage. Movement on the peace process, the Obama Administration believes, will get the Arab regimes to help us with Iran. The problem is that the Arabs will not help us with Iran. They want us to deal with Iran ourselves, but if we keep forcing the issue of linkage they have no choice but to go along with the ruse that everything is linked to the Arab-Israeli crisis. After all, it’s their narrative, and they can’t disown it now.

In reality, the reason the Obama Administration, Gates, and Petraeus are pushing linkage into overdrive is that there is no Iran strategy, and nothing—not even linkage—is going to stop the Iranians. They are telling the Arabs that they are going to do what they can about the Palestinian question, because they are not going to do anything about Iran. That’s the Arabs’ consolation prize for being an American ally. What a cruel joke fate has played at the expense of Arabs, who have been talking out of both sides of their mouth about the Palestinians and linkage for almost a century, a myth that came to link the fate of the Americans to that of the Arabs, and theirs to ours. Since we have no other policy than a magic trick, the Arabs have no choice but to pretend to believe it’s real.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t EBoZ)

UN ambassador: US supports Fayyad plan

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice spoke at the Arab American Institute's Kahlil Gibran Awards in Washington on April 21st.

Some of what she said appears to be contradictory.

First she stated:

First, let there be no doubt: President Obama and all of us in his Administration are determined to reach a comprehensive peace in the Middle East—central to which is a two-state solution. President Obama has defined this goal as a vital U.S. interest. Now, none of us need to be reminded that this is very tough work. But we believe that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree to an outcome that ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and Israel’s goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israel’s security requirements.

Israelis and Palestinians, as well as all those interested in peace, need to confront a basic reality: the status quo has neither produced long-term security nor served their interests. All parties must accept their share of responsibility for reaching a comprehensive peace that will benefit the entire region and the world. Our efforts must be driven from both above and below. That’s why the United States is focused on two mutually reinforcing tracks: resuming negotiations between the parties, and helping develop the institutions of a future Palestinian state. We strongly endorse the Palestinian Authority’s two-year state-building plan and are doing all we can to support it.

Contrast this with the next paragraph:

It is also important that the parties fulfill their Roadmap obligations. Unilateral actions taken by either party cannot be allowed to prejudge the outcome of negotiations and will not be recognized by the international community. Our position remains clear: we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. Israel should also halt evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority should continue to make every effort to ensure security, to reform its institutions of governance, and to take strong, consistent action to end all forms of incitement.

The only unilateral action that she decries are those that are done by Israel.

Yet the two year state-building plan that she says the US endorses is meant to culminate in the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian Arab state - in direct contradiction with the Road Map (not to mention Oslo and all other agreements.) It also includes building in Area C which would be a unilateral move that violates Oslo.

She didn't say a word against those, nor am I aware of any White House statement that says that the Fayyad plan is unacceptable due to its unilateral nature.

Perhaps when she says that the US is against unilateral actions, she only means by one side.