Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Earth will be destroyed if Jews want to live in Jerusalem

The hyperbole about the importance of the Israeli-Arab conflict grows daily, which is no mean feat.

Just today we read that Mideast tensions could spark a "catastrophe":

Russia's president said Tuesday that Israeli-Arab tensions threaten to draw the Middle East into a new catastrophe, adding Moscow's weight to a diplomatic push to ease antagonism between Israel and Syria.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, whose country has been building up its influence as a Middle East mediator, pledged its assistance in pushing the region toward peace.

“Tensions in the Middle East threaten to lead to a new explosion or even a catastrophe,” he said.

But that's bush league talk next to Turkish PM Erdogan, who implied that Israel is out to destroy Jerusalem:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that those who tried to destroy Jerusalem would never be able to destroy the brotherhood and solidarity there, and Islamic world and Muslims would defy all attacks, threats and dark scenarios against Jerusalem, APA reports quoting turkishny.com web-page.

He added that those, who attempted to destroy Jerusalem, would only destroy the Middle East; they were not able to destroy the brotherhood and solidarity there.

Erdogan said that Jerusalem was common heritage of all humanity and holy place of over two billion Muslims. He added that Jerusalem was a holy place for Christians and Jewish people too.

That's so nice of him!

(Has the Muslim population doubled in the past year or so?)

Arabic websites had him going further:

"Do not forget that if Jerusalem is burned, Palestine would burn; if Palestine burns,, the Middle East would burn; and if the Middle East would burn then the world would burn."

Whew! All because some Jews want to live in their own capital city, the existence of the entire world is threatened!

If that doesn't prove how important Jews are, what does?

And the bizarre thing is that a large part of the world believes this nonsense.

Abbas plays games with the PLO

The JCPA Hebrew site notices something interesting from Al Quds al Arabi.

Over the weekend there were a number of news outlets that reported:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to U.S.-mediated indirect talks with Israel after receiving Palestine Liberation Organization approval that cleared the way for the first negotiations in 17 months.

However, Al Quds al Arabi noticed that the PLO meeting did not have the required quorum. Seven senior members did not attend. According to the PLO's own laws, there was no approval.

That didn't stop serial liar Saeb Erekat from announcing that the PLO approved the talks.

The game, as Pinchas Inbari at JCPA points out, is that Abbas will try to extract major concessions from Israel while pretending to agree to a couple of minor concessions himself - but the PLO will not approve them. At that point it will be too late for Israel to go back on its promises, which will have been publicized widely.

(h/t Daled Amos)

Fatah in unification talks with other terrorists

From Ma'an:

As independent figures unveiled a new unity plan in Gaza, leaders of the Fatah, and leftist parties held a consultation meeting in Abu Dis on Tuesday afternoon to talk about political harmony.

Representing the leftists were senior officials from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with the latter party hosting the meeting at their headquarters in the Palestinian municipality of Jerusalem.

The PFLP is on the State Department's list of foreign terror organizations, as is Fatah's own Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades and Hamas.

The DFLP dropped off the list in 1999 because of the "absence of terrorist activity, as defined by relevant law...during the past two years." But they enthusiastically participated in Hamas' Operation Oil Stain, later called the Battle of the Criterion, known to the West as Operation Cast Lead.

Birds of a feather....

If the policy of the State Department is to drop terrorist groups that haven't done any attacks for two years, then what terror attacks have I missed from Kach/Kahane Chai, which is still on the list?

Imagine the outcry if the State Department decided to remove the lone Jewish group from that list using their own criteria!

Ancient "Palestine" in Syria?

From JPost:

The great kingdom of 'Palestine' once existed within Syrian and Turkish boundaries, Professor J.P Dessel of the University of Tennessee claimed in a statement released on Tuesday.

The professor, who is a member of the Tell Tayinat archeological digs in Turkey, and who presided at the Haifa University Ancient East Research Conference, asserted that the commonwealth was located between the cities of Aleppo, Hama and Antakya and the Turkish-Syrian border in the 12th and 11th centuries BC.

The significance of this find, which was being discussed in a special meeting, is that the ancient Philistine empire was not limited to the lands of Canaan.

Following the collapse of the Hittite dynasty in the 13th century BC, smaller states sprung up in areas that were previously under Hittite rule, one of which was Palestine. In his lecture, Dessel explained that this was concluded from new-found evidence which was unearthed in the Tell Tayinat excavations.

Hittite hieroglyphics were found on the Antakya site reading "Palestine." Similar hieroglyphics were found in the cities of Aleppo and Hama.

"This is a significant discovery which shows that the Philistines did not just hold land in Israel, but in Syria as well," Haifa University Professor Gershon Glil, the conference coordinator, said.

Since "Palestine" was a word made up by the Romans some 1400 years after this kingdom supposedly existed, either the Hittites had clairvoyance or our esteemed archaeologists are making a basic mistake of mixing up Philistines and "Palestine." Of course, Philistines were not Arabs and have nothing to do with the people who call themselves "Palestinian" today.

I couldn't possibly consider the idea that a professor would purposefully mislead people for political purposes by saying "Palestine" when he really mean "Philistina." No, of course not.

But, as Gentile Warrior points out, if Palestinian Arabs want to claim parts of Syria as their ancient land, are the Syrians going to stop their illegal occupation of "Palestine"?

Real organ theft in Egypt

Here are cases of real organ theft:

An Egyptian doctor, operating on a five-month old baby for a hernia, has been accused of stealing the baby's left testicle.

When confronted, he said he did it for scientific research.

Another Egyptian doctor has been accused to stealing the kidney of another patient in order to make it available for the doctor's younger brother.

Egypt seizes more Hamas arms, explosives

Ma'an (Arabic only) reports that Egyptian authorities have seized two more caches of arms and explosives near the Rafah border with Gaza.

One cache, which included anti-tank mines, was discovered in a graveyard some 3 km from the border. The other was found in a nearby warehouse, and Egyptian authorities have been increasing monitoring of Sinai warehouses.

These sorts of stories have not been making it into the English-language media very often, although they are regular events.

Threatened Arab boycott upsets Europeans

From Ha'aretz:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Tuesday said he plans to attend the Mediterranean Union summit in Barcelona next month, despite threats that Arab states would boycott if he is present at the meeting, Israel Radio reported.
Arab countries are threatening to boycott the June meeting of leaders of Mediterranean countries if Lieberman attends.
The threat to boycott the Barcelona summit, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also scheduled to attend, was initiated by Egypt and Syria. They have informed both their Spanish hosts and France, which co-chairs the sponsoring organization, the Union for the Mediterranean, that Arab leaders will stay away if Lieberman shows up.
The Union for the Mediterranean was established in July 2008 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in an effort to promote economic, scientific and cultural projects among countries bordering the Mediterranean. Egypt co-chairs the organization with France. The summit was scheduled for June 8 in Barcelona by virtue of Spain's rotating presidency of the European Union.
Netanyahu has already confirmed his attendance, and Lieberman had been expected to join him.
European diplomats told Haaretz that the threat to boycott the summit constitutes an intensification of the boycott Arab countries have imposed on contact with the Israeli foreign minister, given that Netanyahu, not Lieberman, is heading the Israeli delegation. They added that there is disappointment and even anger in Europe over the Arab countries' stance.
Senior Israeli officials confirmed the threat of a boycott. "The Arabs are not prepared to be in the same room with Lieberman, or to take the risk that they would have to be photographed with him or shake his hand," said one.
The feeling at the Foreign Ministry is that the Arab threat could lead to the summit either being canceled entirely or convening at a lower level, with officials of ambassadorial rank only. If this is the result, it would be seen as a humiliation not only for Spain and France, but for the European Union as a whole.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Porn movies being shot in house owned by Bin Ladens

From the Daily Star (UK):

OSAMA bin Laden’s family is making a fortune in America renting out a $26million Bel Air mansion to adult movie makers.

At least five porn films have been made in the nine-bed, ten-bathroom luxury home once owned by Wizard Of Oz producer Arthur Freed.

Neighbours in one of the world’s most glam gated communities include Liz Taylor and Avril Lavigne.

But they will not have seen Ibrahim Muhammad bin Laden, an older brother of the al-Qaida leader, who is named as owner of the luxury Bel Air Road property in land registry files.

He and his family fled America after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Records reveal Ibrahim to be the third owner of the Mediterranean-style home since the death in 1973 of triple Oscar winner Freed, who also produced 50s classics Singin’ In The Rain and Show Boat.

The films now being made there include last year’s porn flick Educating Alli, starring Alektra Blue.

It was one of at least five hardcore DVDs shot there by porn studio Wicked Pictures.

When will we be seeing jihadi porn?

A brief guide to some Palestinian Arab surnames (updated)

Here are some popular Palestinian Arab surnames, and their meaning in English:

al-Masri - the Egyptian
al-Mughrabi - the Moroccan
al-Djazair - the Algerian
al-Yamani - the Yemeni
al-Afghani - the Afghan
al-Turki - the Turk
al-Hindi - the Indian
al-Hourani - the Hauranite (from southern Syria)
al-Kurdi - the Kurd
al-Ajami - the Iranian
al-Shami- the Syrian
Khamis - Bahrain
al-Araj- part of Morocco
Halabi - Aleppo, Syria
Bardawil - named after a lake in Egypt

I have yet to hear of anyone with the surname "al-Filastini."

Here are the semi-naked women of Al Aqsa!

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation was complaining about Zionist desecrating part of the Al Aqsa compound (actually, south of the Temple Mount) with noisy concerts and semi-naked women. The story was picked up by other Arab media outlets as well.

It turns out that they published pictures of these unspeakable desecrations on their iaqsa.com website. Prepare to be shocked!

If you squint very hard and liberally use your imagination, you can almost see the half-naked women. It helps if you are foaming at the mouth at the time with anger.

By the way, there is an Arab school on the Temple Mount itself where Muslim kids play ball on the holiest site in the world. Jews walking respectfully around the site of the Temple is an unspeakable desecration, but kids playing games are fine - since they are Muslim.

PalArab paranoia personified

Dipping my toes into the cesspool of ultra-left publications, I see an article written by a "Dr. Salim Nazzal" about the "naqba." It is similar to articles of this type written hundreds of times before, by Israel-haters to their receptive audiences, where fact-checking is unheard of in the face of their Truth.

This paragraph stood out for its sheer idiocy:

In the behavior psychology theory we learnt that in order to understand what a group (Zionists in this case) are doing now, we have to know what they had previously planned to do. Such actions are goal directed behavior and can only be accounted for if we know who set the goal, and for what purpose.

The answer is simple; Zionist Jews said clearly that they planned while they were still in their Eastern European homelands to murder and expel Palestinians, while the native Palestinians were not even aware of what these Zionist Jews were planning.

Since Dr. Nazzal is acting as a amateur psychologist for all Zionists, I will do the same to him (as I suspect that my qualifications are at least as relevant as his.)

The idea that Zionism is a movement that is, foremost, meant to murder and expel natives from their land is a perfect example of Palestinian Arab paranoia.

The World Health Organization says that a person has a paranoid personality disorder if he displays three of the following attributes:

1. excessive sensitivity to setbacks and rebuffs;
2. tendency to bear grudges persistently, i.e. refusal to forgive insults and injuries or slights;
3. suspiciousness and a pervasive tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous;
4. a combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation;
5. recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding sexual fidelity of spouse or sexual partner;
6. tendency to experience excessive self-importance, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude;
7. preoccupation with unsubstantiated "conspiratorial" explanations of events both immediate to the patient and in the world at large.
All of the bolded items are prevalent in Palestinian Arab society, and the essay by Dr. Nizzal is a prime example of this condition. (Number 5 may or may not be prevalent, but that is not relevant here.)

While I think that these criteria broadly describe the Palestinian Arab public, in Dr. Nizzal's case it also applies particularly to him. In another essay he wrote for Palestine Think Tank he betrays his own personal paranoia, which may be tragic from a mental health perspective but I must confess I find it amusing.

At the beginning I got “strange” e-mails which hinted towards assassination and the like. The Zionist character in these e-mails was obvious. I simply paid no attention. I know Zionists fear the voice of the victims.

The intimidation e-mails never stopped. And each time I changed my e-mail they continued to try to intimidate me in the new e-mail and sent viruses almost all the time my computer is on.
The same thing happened regarding my phone and my cell phone, where I used to get unknown phone calls at night very often. I had to change them and keep their numbers secret. My lawyer advised me to keep all suspicious e-mails as evidence for the police in case my lawyer takes the case to court.

Last summer I went with my family to Cyprus to spend one week vacation. I found out that they are following me even there. I did not believe myself unless I was sure of that. When we came home to Norway I found that the roses in the garden were cut and thrown on the ground, and a tree was half cut by a knife to be easily seen. Under the tree there was a lighter which I had never seen before. The lighter was obviously put there as a symbol of fire.

I informed the Norwegian police, and the Norwegian intelligence service. I also informed the academic circles, and the media in Norway and the world stating clearing that Zionists were behind this. I made it clear that if they aim to stop my voice they will for sure fail. My voice is the voice of the children I saw with their bodies torn out by the Israeli F16. My voice is the voice of all Palestinians who long to go back home and to be free and to live in peace. My voice is trying to convey the story of my nation who did no wrong to anybody, but who paid heavily with 61 years of the pain of exile, 41 years of occupation and injustice.
One month ago I decided to stop writing articles because I needed time to work on a book. I am a historian in the first place and not a political analyst. But I was anxious that if I stopped writing they might think they had scared me.

Here we have it all - the feeling of self-importance, the delusions that Zionists care so much about this bozo that they are spending all their time harassing him with phony phone calls and computer viruses and following him on vacation.

The guy is nuts, but he - an educated man! - represents an entire culture that shares the same paranoid delusions.

The fact that Palestine Think Tank publishes these delusions as if they are real shows how "normal" this kind of thinking is considered in PalArab circles.

Islamists unsuccessful in banning Elton John from Morocco

From AFP:

Morocco's main Islamist opposition party has called for gay singer Elton John to be banned from performing at a festival in Rabat later this month, a party leader said Friday.
"We categorically reject the appearance of this singer because there is a risk of encouraging homosexuality in Morocco," the head of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) parliamentary group, Mustapha Ramid, told AFP.
"The problem is not with the singer himself but the image he has in society," another leading party member, Lahcen Daoudi, added.
"Moroccan society has a negative perception of this singer and we must take it into consideration."

Unlike in Egypt, where the musicians union were the ones who decided to ban him, these Moroccan Islamists were not successful:

[Elton John will perform in] Morocco this month despite calls from the country's main Islamic party for the gay star to be banned, organizers said Monday.

Artistic director Aziz Daki told AFP that cancelling the concert on the grounds of John's homosexuality would "undermine the respect of privacy" and "breach certain values that the international Mawazine festival is based on."

I heard that the Islamists tried to compromise with the singer, asking him to change the lyrics to "Saturday Night's Alright for Jihad."

They already liked "Rocket Man."

Al Azhar leader rejects PalArab sheikh call to visit J'lem

Al Masry al-Youm reports that the habitually lying, inciting and Jew-hating Sheikh Tayser Tamimi of Jerusalem has called on Arab Muslim and Christian leaders to visit Jerusalem to combat nefarious Zionist plans to Judaize the Jewish capital city. Tamimi even added a new accusation: the Jews are now using chemicals to eat away at the walls of the Al Aqsa mosque, causing it to disintegrate from the inside! (I wonder who the collaborators are that painted the walls of the mosque with this caustic chemical.) Anyway, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, new head of the prestigious Al Azhar university, rejected Tamimi's call out of hand:

I refuse to visit Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque at the moment and I call on Muslims not to visit and obtain an Israeli visa, because that means supporting Israeli occupation and the recognition of its legitimacy.

The irony that an Egyptian sheikh is saying he knows what is better for Palestinian Arabs than the PalArabs themselves is seemingly lost.

The influence of Judaism on modern European political thought

Yoram Hazony has a fascinating post about a new book by Eric Nelson, called
The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought.

Hazony writes:

Almost everyone who’s ever written on the birth of modernity has recognized that the 17th century was the crucible in which modern ideas, science and political institutions were born. Less familiar is the fact that this same period was also a time of spectacularly intense Christian interest in the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Talmud, and later rabbinic sources. This is not just a matter of a few collectors of linguistic relics studying Hebrew. The effort to retrieve Jewish learning and traditions was a massive undertaking whose effects were felt, directly or indirectly, across the European intellectual landscape. An indication of what was happening is the astonishing effort at translation of rabbinic sources into languages accessible to Christians—an effort that, by century’s end, had led to the translation and publication in Latin of 15 tractates of the Talmud, the Mishnah, a range of Midrashic compilations, the Targums of Onkelos and Yonatan, rabbinic works by Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Ezra, David Kimchi (Radak), Levi ben Gershon (Ralbag), Abravanel and others, as well as the Zohar and other kabbalistic texts. An index of Christian works interpreting this ocean of newly translated Jewish sources, compiled in 1694, includes an amazing 1,300 titles, many of them published time and again all over Europe.

In the spring of 2001, my Shalem colleague Ofir Haivry returned to Jerusalem from a trip to London carrying a crate filled with photocopies of the huge folio pages of John Selden’s masterpiece, The Law of Nature and the Nations According to the Learning of the Hebrews (1640). I had encountered the political Hebraism of the 17th century before in pioneering works by the political theorists Michael Walzer and Daniel Elazar, and I had received letters from Ofir on the subject.[3] But nothing I had read really prepared me for what was in that crate. Selden’s The Law of Nature is 700 pages long. It is a work of the scope of Hobbes’ Leviathan, published eleven years before Hobbes’ work. The entire text is in Latin. And yet on nearly every page one finds—Hebrew. Not just a word or a phrase here and there, as in Locke. But entire paragraphs of biblical and Talmudic Hebrew, as well as Aramaic, followed by discussion that refers to famous medieval rabbinic figures constantly and at length. What was this all about? Who could possibly have written such a work? Who could possibly have been interested in reading it?

As I learned about it, my surprise only grew deeper. John Selden was in his day perhaps the most important political and legal theorist in England (“the law-book of the judges of England,” as the poet Ben Jonson called him). Yet Selden chose to publish most of his ideas in the form of a series of massive commentaries on the social and political ideas of the Talmud. Selden’s works sought to retrieve the political thought of the rabbis and apply them to pressing questions of early modern political theory such as the concept of a national tradition, the proper relationship between church and state, the theory of marriage contracts (especially pressing as Protestants broke with Catholic traditions on the subject), and much else. In particular, Selden’s The Law of Nature seeks to develop a political theory capable of undergirding the ongoing refusal of the English to abandon their national system of law, the Common Law, in favor of the putatively universal Roman Law being aggressively promoted on the Continent. Relying on the Jewish legal system as a prototype, and on rabbinic political theories as a crucial ally, Selden seeks to show that only a world constituted of independent nations, each with its own particular legal tradition, can be the basis for mankind’s search for that which is ultimately just and true. The rabbinic “Laws of the Sons of Noah,” which serve as the Talmudic version of a universal natural law, are taken by Selden to be the best approximation of a natural law available to mankind.

Hazony wrote about this at length in an article in Azure a couple of years ago. And he highly recommends the book by Nelson.

Israel joins the OECD

From YNet:

The Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) accepted Israel into its ranks Monday during a vote, as its 32nd member.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, currently in China, received an unofficial message from the organization, and an official statement will be made in Paris in the afternoon. The official invitation is to be handed to Steinitz at a convention of the OECD's finance ministers in Paris at the end of the month. Slovenia and Estonia were also accepted as members Monday. "The significance of this is huge and that is why, as a matter of fact, I decided to treat it as a top priority 10 months ago and enter into a special program to introduce Israel into the organization at a peak time," Steinitz told Israel Radio.
"It is the most respectable international club a small state like Israel can be accepted into," he added. "From what we know about other states, in the years following the acceptance there is a rise of billions of dollars in foreign investments in the state accepted."
Steinitz said Israel was being accepted into the club responsible for dictating the world's financial guidelines. "There is also a political gain here. We are receiving a stamp of approval… that Israel belongs to the world's most advanced and developed countries, and not just financially – in civil rights, a clean and independent court system, regulations, equality, and steps to eliminate discrimination," he said.

Some people were not happy about this. From Daylife:

Pro-Palestinian activists hold a banner reading 'Israel Criminal: OEDC accomplice' after entering the loby of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEDC) headquarters on May 6, 2010 in Paris to protest against the agreement signed earlier this year regarding Israel, on track to join the organisation.

The caption shows yet again that the press has a problem distinguishing between "pro-Palestinian" (which is a vanishingly small movement) and "anti-Israel" (which is quite large.) I could not find a single banner from this group in Daylife that even mentions "Palestine." No, the protesters' obsession is not to create a Palestinian Arab state but to destroy a Jewish state. Which, incidentally, has been the position of the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves since they first appeared on the scene in the ancient times of the 1920s.