Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, May 07, 2010

Egypt's steel wall folly

From the BBC (and I saw these claims in the PalArab press earlier this week):

"Every problem has a solution. The Egyptian steel barrier was a problem but we found a solution," says Mohammed, a grimy-faced Gazan tunnel digger who didn't want to give his real name.

Mohammed, covered in dust and dirt, is in the process of digging a 750m (2,460ft) smuggling tunnel from Gaza into Egypt. He says he's been digging it for 18 months.

As he hauls up a plastic container of sand with an electric winch from the metre-wide tunnel shaft, he says the new underground Egyptian barrier aimed at stopping smuggling is a "joke."

"We just cut through it using high-powered oxygen fuelled blow torches," he says.

According to Egypt it is made of bomb-proof, super-strength steel and is costing millions of dollars to build.

Mohammed smiles when he hears this.

"We pay around a $1,000 (£665) for a man with an oxygen-fuelled cutter to come and break through it. It takes up to three weeks to cut through but we get there in the end," he says.

Mohammed says the steel barrier is 5-10cm (2-4in) thick.

The BBC spoke to one man in Gaza employed to cut through the barrier. He said he could cut a metre-square hole through it in less than a day.

This news will be embarrassing for Egypt's government.

Encouraged by the United States which gives millions of dollars in military aid to Egypt every year, it says it is trying to crack down on smuggling into Gaza.

The BBC asked the Egyptian government to comment on the fact that Gazans were already cutting through the barrier. The government has not yet responded.

This is very believable.

Safes in the US are rated as to how secure they are. Underwriters Laboratories certifies safes with different degrees of security.

For example, a TL-30 safe has been tested that it would take 30 minutes to break in with tools such as diamond grinding wheels, high-speed drills with pressure applying devices, or common hand tools such as hammers, chisels, saws, and carbide-tip drills. A TRTL-30 rating adds a torch to the tools.

That's it - 30 minutes to break into the best commercial safes.

The reason that safes are secure is because during those 30 minutes, alarms could go off, cameras could find the burglars, a security guard could notice them, or any number of other defenses could be activated. But to get through the steel is only a matter of patience, time and tools. A steel barrier doesn't keep the bad guys out - it only slows them down.

If Egypt really spent millions on this barrier, they should have added sensors to determine when and where the wall is being breached. Otherwise they only bought a little time and in a few months things will be back to normal in Rafah.

Joseph Massad loves the word "colonialism"

Joseph Massad, the anti-gay and virtually anti-semitic Columbia University professor whose hatred of Israel is legendary, has written another screed for Al Ahram that exposes his faulty methods of reasoning.

I wrote a critique of one of his previous articles in 2007 where he argued that Israel was inherently racist. Yet an analysis of that article showed that he never really defined what racism was - effectively, his argument was an argument by repetition. In that article, he used the word "racist" or "racism" over thirty times. It was nothing more than proof by assertion, with many straw-man arguments to buttress his nonexistent proof.

Now, he has a new article in Al Ahram, where he talks about Israel's "colonialism." In this case he must have shattered a record of overuse of a word, employing it over sixty times in the course of the article. Even more absurdly, he bases the article on this phrase: Colonialism is peace; anti-colonialism is war, as being Israel's policy - using variants of that phrase some seven times.

Again, it is a gigantic straw-man argument, because he again assumes that Israel is by definition colonialist and he never bothers to define exactly how. Just as he did with the racism charge, he states it as a fact first and his "proof" is just by repeating it ad nauseum.

Israel is not a colonialist state using any reasonable definition of colonialism. As I have written previously, Israel is by definition anti-colonialist:

Arabs feel that Zionism has the same effect as colonialism, therefore they conclude that the two are functionally identical.

However, Zionism is more like anti-colonialism: it is a national liberation movement, with the nation being the Jewish nation. Zionism's 's intent is not to rule over others nor to subjugate others. The vast majority of early Zionists wanted to re-build the Jewish national home in the same place that the original home was, the biblical Land of Israel. Judaism had maintained a strong emotional tie with ancient Israel; daily prayers long for a return to Zion;Jews annually mourn for the destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem; and not only Jews had maintained a continuous presence in their original homeland, but Jews had returned there in much smaller numbers throughout the ages.

Definitionally, they two aren't even close. The Zionists didn't want to offer allegiance to the British Empire, they wanted to be independent of it. The colonialist requirement for a "metropole", or mother country, doesn't exist in Zionism.

The Arab motivation to apply the colonialist label to Zionism purposefully ignores the definitions or goals of the Jewish national liberation movement and instead tries to fuzz the definition so that the metropole is the entire Western world. Israel indeed has the hallmarks of a modern, Western nation and more closely identifies with the West and the ideals of democracy and liberalism than with the Arab world. And in more recent decades, when the word "colonialism" has turned into a dirty word, the Arabs have been keen on using it as a weapon against Israel among the nations that have the most colonial guilt.

Massad and those like him know all of this, of course - but they love misusing the words "colonialism" and "racism" to score points with the West. It is a libel that gains currency by dint of repetition, not by the merits of the argument.

And no one knows more about repetition than Joseph Massad.

Hamas cash crisis: Salaries cut this month

Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas has halved the salaries of many of its employees in an effort to stem its growing cash crisis.

According to the story, Hamas will continue to pay the salaries of those who make less than 1500 shekels a month, but it will halve the salaries of those earning more than 4000 shekels a month.

This is the second month in a row that Hamas has not been able to pay its workers their full salaries. Hamas pays some 32,000 workers.

Hamas is now being forced to admit, despite earlier denials, that there is a cash crisis in Gaza, mostly because of Egypt's (belated) crackdown on illegal money transfers.

The article states that Egypt has been specifically targeting tunnels that had been used for cash, weapons and people smuggling, but not prioritizing tunnels that bring goods into Gaza.

Egypt's crackdown is due to anger that Hamas refuses to sign an Egyptian-brokered reconciliation document with Fatah. That split has caused the Arab world to lose much of its interest in Palestinian Arab issues, even as the West increases pressure on the "peace process."

UNRWA Secretary-General violates his own policies

UNRWA has policies that apply to its staff, listed in their Area Staff Regulations publication. These policies include:

REGULATION 1.4
Staff members shall conduct themselves at all times in a manner befitting their status as employees of the Agency. They shall not engage in any activity that is incompatible with the proper discharge of their duties with the Agency. They shall avoid any action and in particular any kind of public pronouncement which may adversely reflect on their status, or on the integrity, independence and impartiality which are required by that status. While they are not expected to give up their national sentiments or their political and religious convictions, they shall at all times bear in mind the reserve and tact incumbent upon them by reason of their employment with the Agency.

REGULATION 1.7
Staff members may exercise the right to vote but shall not engage in any political activity which is inconsistent with or might reflect upon the independence and impartiality required by their status.

Previous UNRWA head Karen Abu-Zayd has said "UNRWA is not involved in the political sphere," and indeed politics is not part of its mandate.

Of course, this is all a lie.

The latest example comes from John Ging, UNRWA Secretary-General, who on Wednesday said he supported the Free Gaza flotilla of ships that will be sailing towards Gaza later this month:

Ging, speaking with a Norwegian newspaper earlier in the week, urged the world to send ships to the shores of Gaza, saying "We believe that Israel will not intercept these vessels because the sea is open, and human rights organizations have been successful in similar previous operations proving that breaking the siege of Gaza is possible."

Urging nations to send ships to Gaza is as political a statement as any. He is advocating doing something against Israeli (and Egyptian) policies. He is saying that shipments to Gaza require no oversight as to their contents, something that the EU has disagreed with in the past by setting up the EUBAM monitoring station in Rafah before the Hamas coup. He is also evidently advocating the ability of Iran or Syria to freely ship weapons to Gaza, as opposed to the clandestine shipments they are already doing.

In addition, he is characterizing Free Gaza as a "human rights organization" which is again a lie - it is purely a political organization dedicated to pressuring Israel. In fact, Free Gaza has explicitly said that it is against sending humanitarian aid to Gaza and against UNRWA's style of aid by cooperating with Israel! They stated that they would rather spend money pressuring Israel than on goods for Gazans. This is not a human rights organization - they only exist for a political purpose.

UNRWA is not impartial at all, and John Ging has just proven it again.

If you do a search for "Western Wall" in the AP Images website, you will see approximately 200 images taken over the past year.

The caption in virtually all of these pictures says that the Western Wall is "Judaism's holiest site."

This is wrong.

Judaism's holiest site is the Temple Mount, the exact spot where Muslims built a mosque where the Temples used to stand.

Write to AP to correct this falsehood: info@ap.org

Boycott this kangaroo!

From Daylife/Reuters:

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.