Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Run of the mill stupidity from NPR

NPR interviews a Gaza expert, Lawrence Wright, about the easing of the closure and background info.

It is not nearly as bad an interview as it could be, but the bias and wishful thinking is typical and needs to be exposed:

In June 2006, a young Israeli solider named Gilad Shalit was abducted from a crossing called Kerem Shalom in southwestern Israel. And since then, he's been held captive. The Israelis surrounded the strip and sealed off the borders and went rummaging through the residential areas looking for him. Four hundred Gazans were killed in the next several months, and the Israelis said they weren't going to leave until they had recaptured Gilad Shalit. But by November [2006], it became pretty obvious that that wasn't going to happen.

Yes, about 400 Gazans were killed in Operation Summer Rains - and two thirds of them were militants.(Actually, another couple of hundred of Gazans were violently killed from mid-2006 - by other Gazans. This bit of context is missing.)

The funniest part of the interview, though, is this one:

Right now I think we have a very ripe moment for change in the relationship between Israel and Gaza in particular. Suddenly the Israelis announce that they are easing the blockade. Well, it would be a good time for Hamas to respond and a great way to do that would be to release Gilad Shalit unconditionally. It would, I think, make a huge impression on the world community and I think it would provide face-saving for the Israeli authorities and also a powerful incentive to respond in kind. That would be the most ideal outcome of this entire flotilla episode.

Yeah, wouldn't that be swell? Wouldn't it be just keen if Israeli confidence-building measures were ever reciprocated by Arabs, rather than being used as a reason to harden their positions because of perceived Israeli weakness?

The fact that soneone who actually spent time in Gaza still believes that Western-style logic might be appealing to Hamas' leadership shows indicates how badly real analysis is being impacted by wishful thinking. Anyone who has spent a half hour looking at the history of the region knows that goodwill gestures are never voluntarily reciprocated by Arabs. They make concessions when their backs are against the wall, not when they have just gained a victory.

But, just for fun, so a quick search to see if any Arab or Arab sympathizer has given the slightest indication hat Israel's announced easing of the blockade is appreciated or even desirable. On the contrary, every single statement I have seen is that it is meaningless, that without a full lifting of the closure it is a joke, that Gazans should have no restrictions whatoever on importing concrete or iron - or, if anyone would bother to ask these people, weapons.

The Fatah/Hamas drama continues....

I have been staying away from blogging about the interminable reconciliation negotiations between Fatah and Hamas, mostly because it has followed the same pattern for years: a spurt of rumors that an agreement is close and then the crushing realization that nothing has changed.

This pattern was repeated this week again, when there was a flurry of hope and rumors that an agreement was "thisclose" to being signed. Then, Hamas speaker Aziz Dweik publicly said that negotiations hit a "dead-end."

But never fear, because Ma'an's editor assures us that there are serious back-channel negotiations, but the window of opportunity is quickly closing...

Sorry, but it closed when Hamas took over Gaza. There is no way they will relinquish a de facto Islamic state to Fatah, and the only way there will be a "reconciliation" is if Hamas manages to take over the West Bank too.

Today's anti-semitic cartoon from Palestine Today

Palestine Today again shows us its universal symbol for Israel - the one inspired by the Third Reich's propaganda.

Details on Morocco terror cell

Asharq al-Awsat gives more details on the terror cell that Morocco discovered and dismantled this week.

The leader of the cell was a Palestinian Arab named Yahya al-Hindi. He completed his jihadist training, including weapons and explosives training, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He tried to enter Morocco five times. The first four times he was denied entry, but then he married a Moroccan woman to make it in successfully in May, 2009.

He managed to build a terror cell of eleven members from different areas of the country.

Authorities in Rabat believe that he thought that Morocco was a great place to recruit members of his cell because of its many anti-Israel rallies held there (euphemistically referred to as "Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.")

His Palestinian origins are not expected to hurt the relationship between Morocco and the PA.

"The Maryam ship does not exist"

Asharq al-Awsat reports that the Lebanese Minister of Transportation says there is no ship named the "Maryam" registered in a port in Lebanon, although there is a ship called the Julia that is being renamed to the "Naji al-Ali."

The Maryam is supposed to be the ship that would take women towards Gaza, while the Naji al-Ali is the ship that was supposed to take "journalists." Both of them are really organized by Hezbollah with Iranian help, and the "journalists" were mostly members of Hezbollah as well.

The "Julia" is docked at the Lebanese port of Tripoli. Yesterday, it sat in port with a couple of people performing repairs - no sign of activists and no sign of loading any aid. Lebanese army troops prevented people from getting closer.

According to a newspaper source, the Naji al Ali can only accommodate some 16 people, including 7 crew, not close to the 50 journalists that they claimed would be on board. The boat is registered in Bolivia.

Either way, it is certain that the boats' departures are not imminent, and that the organizers did not do all of the necessary groundwork for the voyages.

(UPDATE - I made a mistake in the original translation; I thought the Julia was the Maryam.)

Saudi Vice, episode 30: A great way to start a marriage

A young man in the town of Al Jouf, Saudi Arabia, apparently had some compromising pictures of a young lady. It is unclear how he came to gain these photos - at times, men cajole women to take pictures of themselves and send them over email; other times men take the pictures themselves during an illicit relationship.

As is often the case, the man attempted to blackmail this woman, threatening to expose these pictures unless she does what he wanted.

The courageous young woman called up our heroes at the Muttawa, also known as the Hai'a, otherwise known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, to take appropriate action against this blackmailer.

The Hai'a jumped into action, meeting the young man and interrogating him.

But instead of arresting him, they arranged a different kind of punishment: the young man and lady are now going to get married.

The article in the Saudi Gazette unfortunately doesn't mention how ecstatic the woman must be to have a chance to spend the rest of her life with a man who tried to blackmail her, nor whether he already has a wife or three. However, we can be sure that the Commission is very happy over its new role as a matchmaker, and will attempt to convince other young women of the advantages of marrying those who had heretofore just been using them.

Good job!

UNHRC-Man: The Superhero for Our Time

From Al Masry al-Youm:

Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the death of former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad's and the nomination of his son Bashar for presidency, a number of Syrian human rights researchers backed by Freedom House have released a report on the situation of citizens forcibly disappeared within the country's prisons.

Around 17,000 were lost in the Tadmur Prison Massacre in 1980. Sixteen thousand others are thought to have been systematically killed, according to the report, which further details how more than a million Syrians have suffered government discrimination and penal measures due to their links with the missing persons. Women, the report says, became the main victims of the disappearances.

Among those targeted were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, communists, Palestinian organizations, Jordanians, Lebanese, and some Iraqis, the report says.

Quick! Call UNHRC-Man! He'll know what to do!

Jordanian wants to stay in prison to watch World Cup

Firas Press quotes the Jordanian Addustour newspaper about a soccer fan who asked to stay in prison for the duration of the World Cup.

Apparently, the tournament is being shown for free in Jordan's prisons, and he would have to pay to see it on the outside.

He asked his father not to do anything to help get him out of jail for the duration.

Morris trashes Karsh - but admits that he is largely right

Benny Morris has, unsurprisingly, trashed the Ephraim Karsh book "Palestine Betrayed" I reviewed recently.

Writing in The National Interest Online, Morris takes Karsh to task for getting a large number of facts wrong about he War of Independence, which Morris has written about extensively.

Morris' main objection, apart from the factual errors, is the one-sidedness of Karsh's work. Reality is messy, and Karsh does not allow for nuance. This is a valid objection, especially in respect to Karsh's continuous citations of Zionists' benign intent towards Arabs in the land, something totally at odds with the standard new historian narrative where Israel is portrayed as the villain. From my perspective, I looked at Karsh as a needed counterbalance to the new orthodoxy of Israel's history, an added dimension to the topic but not a comprehensive history on its own - which is clearly isn't.

Speaking for myself, admittedly from the single source of the Palestine Post archives, I think that Karsh accurately portrays the mindset of the mainstream Zionists. I've seen many contemporaneous editorials in the Palestine Post and none of them that I have seen showed the antipathy towards Arabs that the current conventional wisdom assumes. To be sure, the newspaper was not enamored of Arab terrorists - but it was equally scathing towards the Irgun. The general tone, which I think reflects liberal Zionist thinking at the time, was one of peaceful co-existence and of improving the Arabs' standards of living.

Any historian can take outlier data and twist it to look like the norm, and readers must take the historians at their word that what they are writing reflect reality. The only way to get an idea of people's mindsets is by reading a lot of what they were writing - not just the cherry-picked quotes but the entire context as well as the seemingly unimportant and irrelevant writings. Morris is certainly more honest, and has less of an agenda, than most of the other "new historians."

I found this comment by Morris to be most interesting, though. After chiding Karsh on his unorthodox use of footnotes that make it near-impossible to check sources, something which bothered me as well, he writes:

But most historians probably won’t bother to work out these interminable referential puzzles if only because they will have been put off, long before, by the palpable one-sidedness of Karsh’s narrative. All too often it gives off the smell of shop-soiled propaganda. And, let me quickly note, I say this despite the fact that I am in almost complete agreement with Karsh’s political conclusions (which in some way emerge naturally and, I feel, irrefutably from the history) and in some measure with his history as well.

So while Morris feels compelled to point out Karsh's mistakes - and he should - he admits that Karsh's larger themes are accurate, even as they are biased. This is a striking comment given that Morris has been in Karsh's crosshairs for a long time.

UN news service propagates a lie

IRIN, the UN's humanitarian news service, puts together a "factbox" on Palestinian "refugees."

It has the usual distortions that we are all used to (like saying that UN Resolution 194 gives Palestinian Arabs the right to return, without mentioning the important caveat there and all the other sections of that document that were vehemently rejected by the Arabs and accepted by Israel.) It also uncritically accepts the definition of "refugee" that is unique to Palestinian Arabs alone and no one else, that guarantees that the "refugee" population will grow in perpetuity.

One small part of the article shows how a lie can take hold. It says that "Estimates vary greatly on the annual rate of new displacements, but Palestinian sources cite up to 20,000 newly displaced persons per year. Reasons for new displacement include Israel’s construction of a separation barrier in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the construction of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, the revocation of residency rights and house demolitions. "

20,000 people losing their homes every year? When a dozen people who built an illegal structure are forced to move out it generates international headlines for months. The idea that there are 20,000 cases like that every year is an insane fiction.

Yet the UN has no problem citing it as an authoritative statistic, without mentioning any other source that might put the number at closer to, say, 200.

Some news items from the PalArab press

Palestine Today quotes Russian news agency RIA Novosti as saying that Israel had the opportunity to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah twice in recent months and held off, for fears of igniting a wider conflict. (I couldn't find that story at RIA.)

PA president Abbas is incensed at Hamas' demand that he coordinate any visit to Gaza with them. He says thathe is the president and can visit his people any time he wants. Well, Hamas treated his loyalists with a little less than respect three years ago, by slaughtering them, but maybe he'd be treated better.

Iran is planning a blockade-busting ship to sail this Sunday. It will have 1100 tons of "aid." The world seems to have forgotten another recent Iranian ship, filled with the type of aid that Hamas desires. And another ship from Iran that was filled with "aid" going directly to Hamas.

Meanwhile, smugglers in Rafah are upset over Israeli plans to ease the closure, saying that they will go out of business. The prices of consumer goods have plummeted in the past couple of days because of Israel's announcement of easing the closure - Egyptian soda has gone down by 30%, and 40-inch flat screen TVs have been reduced from $2000 to about $1200. At the same time, factory owners are asking Hamas not to allow Israel to send in soda, biscuits and ice cream because that would undercut their own pricing and put them out of business as well.

Arafat tells us his goal, in English.

While I am mentioning Middle East News Watch, here is a video they put on YouTube showing the goals of the greatest proponent of Palestinian Arab nationalism. Helpfully, he says it in English:

If Arafat himself was not interested in a specifically Palestinian Arab state except as a means to destroy Israel, why should we think that any other Arab leader has any different goals?

(The person next to Arafat is Uri Avnery, in his first meeting with Arafat. Do you think he objected, or that he even mentions this in his writings as a purported "peace activist"?)

Hamas war profiteering (Middle East News Watch)

Middle East News Watch took some news reports about Hamas from CNN and Al Jazeera, removed the gratuitous references to Israel as the source of all evil, and came up with a real news story of the type you are not likely to see or notice in the flotsam of anti-Israel bias:

It just goes to show that the facts are out there but it requires a lot of digging to find them.

Today's staged photo and bias by AP

Here is a classic case of AP not only staging a photo, but of implying that it shows something that it does not, and as a bonus throwing in some very skewed facts as background:

A Palestinian child walks near rubble in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, Monday, June 21, 2010. Jerusalem's mayor, Nir Barkat, pressed ahead Monday with a contentious plan to raze 22 Palestinian homes, that were illegally built, to make room for a tourist center that Palestinians fear would tighten Israel's grip on the city's contested eastern sector. The contested site, called al-Bustan, is a section of the larger neighborhood of Silwan, which is home to some 50,000 Palestinians and 70 Jewish families.

First of all, the photo itself. Did the photographer just happen to find a Palestinian child playing in some rubble in Jerusalem, or did she direct him to go there? Hard to say, but of course many photographs from wire services involve the photographer telling the subjects where to stand or where to look.

Secondly, is this rubble of a Palestinian Arab home demolished by Israel? If it is, was the home built legally? Maybe it was a garage built illegally next to a home that is still there? Or maybe it has nothing to do with any demolition altogether? AP needed a photo to illustrate a story about Israel's plans to demolish illegally built homes - where the Jerusalem municipality cooperated with the residents in those plans:

Back in March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had pressured Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to hold up the plan so authorities could consult with Palestinians who would lose their homes — a delay that appeared to be aimed at fending off criticism from the U.S.

"Now, after fine-tuning the plan and seeking more cooperation with the residents as far as their needs and improving the quality of their lives, the municipality is ready to submit the plans for the first stage of approval," said Barkat's spokesman, Stephan Miller, before the city's planning commission agreed to the plan.

So the picture does not illustrate anything at all to do with the story, but its very existence is meant to give the reader a visceral disgust at Israeli actions.

Thirdly, the background, where it mentions that Arab residents outnumber Jewish residents of Silwan by such a large number. Assuming the facts are true, notice the attempt to make the numbers even more lopsided: 50,000 people to 70 families: each Jewish family in Silwan could easily have, conservatively, six members (probably more), but AP doesn't want to say "50,000 to 450" because that extra order of magnitude makes it look that much worse, and it makes the idea of evicting Jews out of their legal homes much more palatable since there appear to be so few of them.

Fourthly, the choice of background facts that AP used. It could have mentioned that Jerusalem also approved the building of hundreds of Arab homes in Silwan; or that the word "Silwan" comes from the Greek "Siloam" which comes from the Hebrew Shiloah, or that Yemeni Jews had built many stone homes there in the 19th century and were chased out by the 1936-9 Arab riots - and their homes taken over by Arabs.

Any of those facts would also have been accurate background information, but they would not have fit the narrative that AP wants its readers to accept.

These are just examples of bias in the photo caption. The accompanying article has much worse distortions and omissions, such as the fact that the Jerusalem municipality is at the same time legalizing some 723 Arab homes!

(By the way, the photographer herself, Tara Todras-Whitehill, does not seem to be guilty of bias - she has some very nice and sympathetic photos of Jews in Israel in her portfolio.)

h/t Callie

The UNHRC should be abolished (Joo-Liz and Zvi)

Two good comments on my post about UN Watch, first from Joo-Liz:

I have heard Hillel Neuer speak at a campus visit last year, and he firmly believes in the work that he does.

As he put it, the UNGA has the "Power of the Purse" (finances/aid/budgeting), the UNSC has the "Power of the Boots" (actual interventions), and the UNHRC has the "Power of 'Name and Shame'".

To open societies that are used to criticism, free press, and that are constantly held to account, the power granted to the UNHRC seems rather impotent, but to despotic regimes that systematically shutdown opposition voices, it is a truly frightening thing.

The whole hi-jacking of the Human Rights Council by all the human rights abusers is a strategic alliance on their parts, to prevent the power of the Council from being turned against them. To that end, he described a whole litany of outrageous activities being carried out, including the use of GONGOs (Government-Operated NGOs) and numerous other deceptive tactics... most notably from our perspective -- the stacking of the agenda against Israel and the West so that there quite literally isn't enough time in the working schedule each year to deal with any of the other abuses occurring around the world.

I think from that perspective, every opportunity he has to speak to the council and call them out on their hypocrisy is beneficial. Especially when later publicized on YouTube and with press releases like these.

And from Zvi:

The UNHRC should be abolished.

The idea that a human rights body (UNHRC) may have membership rules that permit the world's most repressive regimes to be seated as decision-making members is absurd.

The UNHRC includes some of the world's worst abusers of human rights. The following list includes Freedom House scores (2-14, with 2 being "free" and 14 representing the world's most repressive dictatorships):

Libya: 14
Saudi Arabia: 13
Cuba: 13
China: 13
Cameroon: 12
...

A so-called human rights council that seats Libya, Saudi Arabia and Cuba as members is a fraud perpetrated upon the people of the world.

The UN does perform some valid functions, its political structure clearly renders it incapable of performing as a human rights policeman. It has demonstrated this through two iterations of "human rights councils," both of which have been hijacked by blocs of anti-Israel countries and reduced to political attack dogs that serve no useful human rights function.

The UN is the wrong forum for identifying and dealing with human rights abuses. Repressive dictatorships, frequently acting as a bloc and intimidating less interested countries, use the UNHRC to prevent criticism of their own actions and advance anti-democratic agendas such as suppression of free speech (under the guise of combating Islamophobia) or preventing Israel from defending its citizens. The UN provides a false aura of respectability and impartiality that makes such activities dangerous.

The UNHRC should be abolished. If democratic nations that support human rights wish to create a truly authoritative Human Rights Commission, they are always free to do so, just as they have created other democracy-only organizations in the past (the EU being an example). But such an organization MUST include strict rules that allow ONLY countries meeting some basic level of respect for human rights to participate. Such an organization will not be perfect (we see EU members attacking Israel every day, even when they have their "facts" wrong), but there is at least a ghost of a chance that it will address anti-Uzbek pogroms in Kyrgyzstan, genocide in the Sudan, the starvation of Yemenis, extreme levels of religious repression in Saudi Arabia, North Korea's systematic starvation of its people and so on. Such an organization will have much more moral authority than the UNHRC. The countries that comprise it will at least have a clue what due process means, even if some of them are still dodgy, and they will have less invested in protecting themselves from investigation and more invested in addressing the rights of people around the world. They will be countries that practice human rights at home.

The UNHRC will never, ever act against extreme human rights abuses. Instead, it will perform its primary task: distracting everyone from real problems by attacking Israel. Western countries should refuse to play this vicious little game anymore.

The UNHRC should be abolished.