Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, June 13, 2010

IDF Powerpoint summary of flotilla history

Here is a PowerPoint presentation created by the IDF, which I converted to video. You might need to watch it in hi-def (and use the pause button a lot) to read it all :

Here is it in Scribd:

Summary of Flotilla - Final Version

(h/t Joel)

Israel eases restrictions on Gaza; Hamas increases them

Israel is today allowing, for the first time in years, cars to be imported to Gaza over Israeli crossings, for the use of Gaza's water treatment authorities.

It also is allowing a greater variety of items into Gaza, like ketchup, mayonnaise, and sewing materials.

Meanwhile, Hamas not only is stopping many of the new goods from entering, but it is also feeling more emboldened to tighten its restrictions on its political opponents.

According to Fatah, Hamas arrested 16 Fatah members this morning, a marked increase in such arrests over the past few months.

Hamas is confident that the world won't notice what it is doing.

German TV exposes IHH for what it is

Barry Rubin summarizes:

The three German leftist activists interviewed claimed all participants were from humanitarian organizations and talked about all the fun they'd had. They had no interest in knowing that they were being used.

The show then contrasts this with material about the extremism of the IHH, which organized the trip. Those about to depart on the ship—who shortly thereafter would be attacking the arriving Israeli soldiers—chanted, “Oh, you Jews.…the army of the prophet Muhamad will return–just like in Kaibar [where Jewish men were massacred and women and children forcibly converted and sold into slavery]....Intifada until victory!”

For the militants, this was a revolutionary act, a raid, not a humanitarian mission. Of course, the vast majority of those on the ships were just trying to do a good deed, but they were not the ones who determined that the outcome would be a violent confrontation.

Mete Cubukcu, editor-in-chief of NTV, one of Turkey’s largest television networks, explains how the IHH, which organized and led the flotilla, is linked to radical groups and Jihad fighters, including those who murdered a beloved Armenian journalist.

Then there’s the interview with IHH and flotilla leader Yildrim on board the Mavi Marmara (3:40). He says they know Israel will stop the ship and that when this happens, there will be huge demonstrations throughout the world.

The show then interviews Michael Kiefer, a left-wing expert on Islam from Erfurt University. He says that the Turks on board were not peace activists as this term is understood in the West, but people advocating violence and revolutionary activity.

What's most ironic is that many of the Turks on the ship were from the IHH and an extremist nationalist group, the BBP. Three years ago, the left-wing party to which the three German participants belonged applied to the German government to label these groups as “racist” with a “propensity for violence and totalitarian structures based on the führer principle” equivalent to a German neo-Nazi movement.

When asked by a German television reporter: “You seem not to have bothered from the outset about who would travel with you,” Annette Groth, the left-wing member of parliament who was on the ship angrily ended the conversation. She and her colleagues didn't want to know how they'd served as human shields for violent groups acting in support of a terrorist, racist group, Hamas.

Those in the media who continue to cover up or ignore these facts should be asked why, to paraphrase the German reporter's question to Groth, "You seem not to have bothered by the nature of the extremists, terrorists, and antisemitic groups for whom you're making propaganda.

Why Hamas doesn't allow new foods into Gaza

Firas Press reports that Hamas is refusing to allow shipments into Gaza of cheese, milk, juices, detergents, soft drinks and biscuits - items that up until now had been restricted.

The reason? According to the article, factory owners are pressuring the de facto Hamas government not to allow these items in. because those imports would compete with their factories, hurting the Gaza economy and (they say) forcing them to lay off workers.

My guess is that taxes going to prop up the Hamas government has something to do with this as well...

Peace-activist helps Israelis soldier. Or doesn't he?

In an Italian newspaper a picture of an Israeli soldier and an activist was shown, which I had not seen before. The picture was taken by photographer Sefik Dinc. It clearly shows how well the Israeli soldiers were being treated when they came on board of the ship:

I wanted to see if I could retrieve more pictures or this pictures in an uncropped version (as the size shows it's obviously cropped for the website), and I found this:

Another interesting photograph is on page 5:

Its caption reads:

"Exclusive. Activists on the 'Mavi Marmara' ship in the international waters of the Mediterranean sea as it headed for the blockaded Gaza Strip just before the arrival of the Israeli commando."

They sure were prepared.

(unfortunately I cannot reach the large photographs, nor can I register. So you'll have to do it with this.)

UPDATE: Reader Iva notes that the first photo is from an Italian website of 3 different news papers and it mentions that the photos would be published the next day by an Italian weekly OGGI. Iva was able to log in and provide us with a better resolution picture:

Caption: Israeli solder gets hit with a stick(pole)

Palestinians gather outside an electrical appliances store in Gaza City, to watch a live televised broadcast of the opening match of the World Cup soccer tournament between South Africa and Mexico in Johannesburg, South Africa, Friday June 11, 2010.

Palestinians sit in their tent as they watch the opening match of the World Cup 2010 taking place in South Africa, on June 11, 2010, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip. There [sic] home was destroyed during one of the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip:

and a foreigner behind his netbook in Gaza:

Mmm, perhaps Flotilla only wanted to bring them some Vuvuzela's?

UPDATE: Btw, I thought the people in Gaza had no televisions. At least that's what Anne de Jong (Dutch passenger on one of the boats of Flotilla tries to let us believe:

Turkish Journalist Who Took Cropped Pictures Hanging Out with Terrorists

Little Green Footballs has more information on the Turkish journalist who took the cropped pictures:

Adem Ozkose’s connections to Islamists go quite a bit deeper than this. A reader in London emailed a link to the following article about Ozkose published last month at Turkish media site haber5.com: Haber5.com - Gerçek ve Özgürlükçü - Son haberler | Adem Özköse’nin kitapları yolda…

It turns out that Ozkose, as well as working for the Turkish ‘Real Life’ magazine and helping IHH try to run the Gaza blockade, is also a writer of Islamist books with at least one publisher deal and possibly more.

And the article at haber5.com is accompanied by the following picture, showing Adem Ozkose with two of his associates.

Here’s Ozkose interviewing a Hamas spokesman, and openly expressing his support for jihad: Mehraba.com » Özköse Gazze’yi ve Hamas’ı anlattı. (Google Translation.)

Accompanied by this photo:

Here’s Ozkose with a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, spreading the message: “Insurgents who kill civilians is not a killer.”

Accompanied by this photo:

Here’s Ozkose with a very sympathetic article about the Taliban: “The Taliban won the hearts of the Afghan people.”

Accompanied by the following photos:

And here’s Ozkose interviewing Umm Nidal — a Palestinian mother and Hamas parliament member whose three sons were killed while murdering Israeli civilians, some of them children — and treating her as a heroine: “I thank God that seven Israeli soldiers kill Muhammad as my other two sons were killed.”

Accompanied by this photo and translated caption:

It would have been normal if these meetings were part of objective reporting, but it is not. As LGF notes that in all of the cases

the articles written by Ozkose are not merely reporting on terrorist groups — these articles are promoting the jihadist ideology.

Can you expect honest reporting from such a guy?

AP doesn't even try to match the caption to the picture

Here's a picture of a Gazan family going for a ride along the Mediterranean:

How do you think AP captions it?

A Palestinian family rides on a motorcycle at the Gaza City port in Gaza City, Friday, June 11, 2010. Gaza has been mired in poverty for decades, but the embargo by Israel deepened the misery, erasing tens of thousands of jobs and preventing repair of damage from the Israeli offensive.

When one thinks "poverty," this is the exact picture that comes to mind.

By the way, the only time since at least the 1940s that Gaza was not so poverty-stricken was when Israel occupied it. So when wire services complain about how Israeli policies are responsible for Gaza's poverty, are they really advocating that Israel go back in and rebuild farms, greenhouses and an industrial park that were regular targets of terrorists? After all, a great number of Gazans' jobs were working for either Israelis in Gaza or for Israeli factories in Gaza. They lost those jobs not because of the embargo but because Israel withdrew from Gaza and the terror only increased.

Notice also that Hamas actions are not blamed at all for Gazan poverty.

Friday linkdump

The Weekly Standard claims that the US will support an anti-Israel resolution in the UN next week, calling for an international investigation of the flotilla raid. No word on an international probe and war crimes trial for the people responsible for the deaths of 23 civilians killed by a US drone in Afghanistan in February. (UPDATE: The White House denies the story.)

Thousands held a pro-Israel rally in Finland. Finland only has 1500 Jews, total.

The "democratically elected" PA government (well, almost half of them, anyway) decided to postpone local elections indefinitely.

A new study shows that, wow, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews really do all come from the same place in the Middle East. So much for the Khazar theory and Shlomo Sand. The study can be found here, but you have to pay to get the details.

You won't find any articles in the Arab press about Israelis saving Arab lives. And because it happens every day, you won't see too many from Israel either. This one is heartwarming.

Great analysis by Walter Russell Mead.

More on Hamas' siege of Gaza

After pressure from President Obama, discussions have accelerated between Israel, the Quartet, the EU, the PA and Egypt to see if the Rafah crossing can be re-opened under a variation of the rules that were in place before Hamas' coup in Gaza.

These included an international team of European observers called EUBAM-Rafah, PA officers manning the crossing, and cameras that Israel kept an eye on from Kerem Shalom. Israel was never happy with the level of inspections, though.

After the coup, EUBAM went into paid hibernation, waiting to become relevant again and doing the occasional lecture to the PA to justify their paychecks.

How does Hamas look at these attempts to ease the restrictions on movement of people and goods into Gaza?

Why, they are spitting mad, of course.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri lashed out at the PA and Egypt, saying that they were using the Rafah issue as a pretext to weaken Hamas and facilitate the ultimate takeover of Gaza by Fatah.

Gee, do you get the impression that Hamas is more interested in staying in power and having complete control over all of Gaza's crossings than they are in the welfare of the people of Gaza?

More details on why Egypt is banning marriage to Israeli Jewish women

Al Masry al-Youm goes into an interesting detail of the justification for Egypt's new law that bans Egyptian men from marrying Israeli Jews (and, just maybe, Jews altogether):

The higher court's final--and irreversible--June 5 ruling is designed, according to Nabil el-Wahash, the lawyer who first raised the case, to protect Egypt's national security and prevent a new generation of Egyptians "disloyal to Egypt and the Arab world."

The case stems from the fact that, in Judaic tradition, religion is passed down through the mother, thus rendering Jewish all children born to Jewish mothers. Since, under Israeli state law, all Jews are eligible to become citizens of Israel--the self-proclaimed "Jewish state"--the offspring of Egyptian men married to Israeli women could theoretically apply for Israeli citizenship, which would oblige them to temporarily serve in the Israeli military. Seeing this as a potential conflict of interest, the Egyptian judiciary upheld the ruling to strip Egyptian men married to Jewish-Israeli women of their citizenship.

Under Egypt's citizenship law, three crimes can lead to the forfeiture of one's citizenship: if he or she is found to pose a threat to national security; is guilty of treason; or if he or she is a Zionist, explained Hafez Abu Saeda, head of the Cairo-based Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.

Discrimination aside, critics of the law say it contains a number of loopholes, including, among other things, the question of Egyptian men marrying Jewish women not carrying Israeli passports. With Jews anywhere in the world eligible to become Israeli citizens, might a new law be enacted to strip the citizenship of all Egyptian men married to Jewish women, Israeli or otherwise?

While this remains highly unlikely, Egypt and Israel remain neighbors--officially at peace since 1979--so Israeli women are therefore set to remain a common factor in Egyptian-Jewish marriages.

The logic of this law is exactly the same as a law that would outlaw Jews from living in Egypt.

Notice that Egypt has a law that makes being a "Zionist" a reason to strip someone of their citizenship. This means that even three decades after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, Egypt still does not fundamentally accept the right of Israel to exist - because that is what Zionism is.

I wonder if Jordan has a similar law.

(The article also quotes the highly exaggerated figure that some 30,000 Egyptians are married to Israeli Jews - a figure that was pretty much plucked out of thin air, and is probably exaggerated by one or two orders of magnitude.)

Israeli plot to steal water from the Nile revealed!

Al Masry al-Youm reports:

The ruling National Democratic Party's policies secretariat has reportedly received a confidential memorandum from a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs detailing Israeli designs to gain access to the waters of the Nile River in exchange for completing construction of the Gongli Canal project in southern Sudan.

It is estimated that, when complete, the Gongli Canal project would increase Sudan's and Egypt's annual share of Nile water by between 10 billion and 15 billion cubic meters. According to the memorandum, Israel plans to ask for half of these amounts, for which it is prepared to pay US$0.1 per cubic meter.

According to these charges, Israeli expertise can increase the amount of fresh water available to Egypt and Sudan by a huge amount. In exchange, Israel wants to pay low rates to buy some of this water that would not exist without Israeli help.

Egypt would lose nothing, and would gain enormously. Yet the NDP would rather deny their own citizens access to water in order to keep Israelis from getting water!

How's that for hate?

Not only hat, but the NDP is so confident that this idea - of Israelis helping Egyptians and Sudanese get billions more cubic meters of fresh water - is abhorrent to average Egyptian that it leaks this alleged plan as a scandal!

Here is how Palestine Today illustrates the reported water plan - a stereotypical Jew cutting the veins of Egypt in the shape of the Nile river basin.

This is the difference between Arabs and Israelis in a nutshell. Israel keeps trying to find win-win solutions, things that would benefit everyone in the region. This is how they approach the peace process, relations with Arabs, and relations with the rest of the world. They will constantly seek solutions that not only help themselves but everyone else as well.

To Arabs, however, everything involving Israel is a zero-sum game, and if Israel gains anything, then, by definition, the Arabs lose.

This is no exaggeration - in fact, some Arabs will happily admit this fact.

The natural outcome from all this is that Arabs will hurt their own people in order to hurt Israel, and when Israel helps Arabs that is considered a defeat for the Arab nation - because this is what Israelis want to do. Peace itself is considered a loss for Arab honor!

Zionism itself was meant to be a win-win - where the Arabs of Palestine would be enriched and all boats would rise with the huge economic and social benefits that accompany the Jewish return to their homeland. Arab leaders and intellectuals couldn't think in those terms, because being helped by the hated Jews is an affront to their honor. (The ordinary citizens generally had no such problems, and remain today the main victims of their leaders' intransigence and dedication to the zero-sum game.)

The contrast between the two worldviews cannot be starker. One is enlightened and progressive, seeking solutions to problems; the other is primitive and archaic, preferring to exacerbate their own problems in order to inflict damage on a hated enemy.

And Israel has to figure out how to live in a region where "lose-lose" is considered, perversely, a victory.

Egyptian delegation upset Hamas served Israeli food

Palestine Press Agency reports on an argument that broke out between an Egyptian delegation to Gaza and their Hamas hosts.

Ismail Haniyeh hosted a fancy luncheon for the Egyptians, members of a parliamentary delegation to help reconcile Hamas with Fatah.

When the Egyptians saw that some of the food on the table was labeled "Made in Israel," they became upset. One exclaimed, "By Allah, shame on you."

The Council has Spoken

Once again, I am honored to have had a post nominated for the weekly Watcher of Weasel awards. (And once again, I lost.)

I had posted so much in the past week, I had to click on the link to remember what the nominated post was about. It just goes to show that sometimes, the posts that one doesn't think are very important end up making waves, and vice versa - posts that I think would go viral instead go nowhere.

Thanks to Snapped Shot for nominating me!

Newest videos shed more light on Mavi Marmara raid (part 2)

The Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center showed once again how closely aligned it is with the IDF, as it has posted two videos and one transcript of interrogations with the captain and the chief officer of the Mavi Marmara.

Here is their synopsis:

1. The videotaped statements of two Mavi Marmara crew members show that preparations for a violent confrontation with IDF forces were put in motion about two hours before the boarding began, when the Israeli Navy hailed the ship and told it to halt.

2. According to the statements, the atmosphere aboard the Mavi Marmara was tense and the crew noticed a gathering on the main deck. When they checked the upper deck they discovered that IHH operatives were cutting the ship’s railings with metal disks they had brought with them into lengths suitable to be used as clubs. The crew members said the activities worried them and that they tried to stop the operatives but were unsuccessful.

I put the two videos together; the captain is speaking English and the chief officer is subtitled:

Here's the transcript from the chief officer:

Statement: I was on the bridge after dark, before anything happened, the third captain and I were sent in the direction of the life boats, where there were a lot of people and a lot of noise. The captain told me something was happening down there, there are noises, go see what’s going on. There were a lot of people. I told the third captain, you are more senior than I, come with me.”

Q: When did that happen?

A: Around eight o’clock, I don’t know exactly when, but around eight. I went down the stairs with the third captain. We saw a senior person [from IHH]

Q: Who?

A: That guy.

Q: What guy?

A: That guy. Maybe the third captain knows his name.

Q: The guy from IHH?

A: Yes, from IHH.

Q: Whose name does he know? The name of the guy from IHH who cut the railings?

A: No, the third captain knows him from IHH. We [the third captain and I] went together, we saw a lot of people milling around and we asked what was going on.

Q: Did you see them cutting [the railings]?

A: They [the iron rods] were already cut. It was all over.

Q: Who did the cutting?

A: I didn’t see.

Q: Who was holding the disk?

A: The disks were lying in a corner of the stairs and the senior guy [apparently a reference to Bülent Yildirim] was next to them.

Q: The senior guy from IHH?

A: Yes.

Q: Who did the disks belong to?

A: I don’t know, they didn’t belong to the ship. We don’t have equipment like that on board. On deck there were metal poles with clips for cables, when I got there they had been cut.

Q: When did this happen?

A: When it was getting dark. I asked one of them who cut the poles, and he said he didn’t know.

Q: Was the man you asked a crew member?

A: No.

Q: Did he belong to IHH?

A: Of course.

Q: You seem to be saying that the people from IHH were in control of the ship. Did the crew need their permission to move around the ship?

A: Definitely, they [i.e. IHH operatives] didn’t let people they didn’t know move around.

Q: Did they prevent anyone they didn’t know from moving freely around the ship?

A: Yes, definitely.

Q: And was that from the first moment they went up on deck?

A: Yes, definitely.

Q: How did the IHH operatives communicate with one another?

A: When they [the IHH operatives] got on board in Istanbul they brought walkie-talkies with them. They were handed out to the IHH operatives and the crew.

Q: Did you [the crew] get them as well?

A: Yes, each one worked on a different frequency.

Q: I don’t understand, they didn’t let the passengers and crew go from one deck to another?

A: They could go anywhere except to the control center they set up on the bridge.

Q: How many IHH operatives were there on the upper deck.

A: Forty.

Q: The same forty all the time or did they change?

A: More of less the same forty.

Q: You’re referring to the group that joined the ship in Istanbul?

A: yes.

So it seems more and more clear that most of the passengers of the Marmara didn't know what the IHH plans were and possibly wouldn't have approved; yet they must have known that the IHH had taken control of the ship and was calling the shots - co-opting the European and American flotilla organizers.

It also appears that the passenger/witnesses have closed ranks around IHH, not willing to say anything bad about a group that had violent intent. Keep in mind that the crew here is saying that the IHH was already cutting iron bars and chains at nightfall; they say two hours before the IDF was visible but probably some 6-8 hours before the helicopters arrived (at around 4 AM.)

This brings up the question of, if the boats already saw the passengers with the chains and iron bars from the boat, why the first wave of soldiers still came only armed with paintball guns.

(h/t OR)