A minor example of how credible Palestinian Arab "eyewitnesses" are

The story about the IDF soldiers dancing in Hebron exploded in the days since it was first mentioned on blogs. It has been shown on the news worldwide and it has received both praise and insults.


One interesting part of the story came from YNet's interview with an Arab who says she witnessed the dance:

Naoul Sultan and her daughter Rima remember the dance performed by six Nahal fighters outside their home in the West Bank city of Hebron very well. Several days later, the dance – to the music of "Tik Tok" by American singer Kesha – was posted on the internet and got thousands of views on YouTube and other websites.

"We heard a strange noise and ran to the window immediately to see what was going on," Naoul recounts. "We were surprised to see a group of soldiers dancing in different positions in the broad plaza of Jabel Rahma Street. It was around 4:30 am. We were amazed. The soldiers were singing out loud a song we never heard before and dancing with their rifles in their hands."

Naoul says she realized from the very beginning that the soldiers were shooting a video clip. She says the photographer was standing on a fence near her house and shooting a video of the dancing soldiers. "I was angry, but I just looked out my window and was silent. I don't talk to them."

However, YNet Hebrew (print edition only) just interviewed the soldiers involved in the video, and their description of how it was recorded is at odds with Naoul's:

It all began one evening when they sat down and started thinking how to bid farewell from the guys in the company. "We talked about it until we came up with the idea of making a satire out of the whole thing, just for laughs", one of the soldiers says. "We thought of all kinds of things that we could do, but they all looked too extreme to us. It's a custom to leave something behind after one leaves his company. We were really havnig a hard time in Hebron so we wanted to do some thing for laughs. You have to understand that service in Hebron is really hard. We were their twice. So we came up with all kinds of ideas, and than we thought about the dance. We downloaded the song to our cell phones and one of the soldiers came up with the moves. We practiced for a few minutes. It wasn't that complicated. We agreed on some codes that will help us remeber the moves because we had to do it without the song in the background."

And then the soldiers went on patrol. "We decided to do it late, around seven in the evening, and in a deserted area so no one can see us. It's important to emphesize it wasn't in the Casbah. It was spontaneous. One soldier stood near the guarding post and filmed it with his cell phone. The commander who stood on the left side shouted out the codes, and everyone did the moves according to the codes. We did it in one take", the soldiers said yesterday.

After the shoot they attached the song to the video and prepared the film to show it to the soldiers in the platoon.

The soldiers' description is more consistent with the video - it is light outside, and the music was clearly edited in afterwards.

I suppose it is possible that Naoul witnessed a different set of soldiers dancing at another time, and indeed the earlier YNet article mentions that others had seen soldiers singing and dancing in the past.

(h/t Islamonazism blog)

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The Elder gets results (maybe)

Mediaite reports that Octavia Nasr is leaving CNN:

In the latest case of new media (or oversharing) gone wrong, CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs Octavia Nasr is leaving the company following the controversy caused by her tweet in praise of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah

Mediaite has the internal memo, which says “we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised.”

Nasr tweeted this weekend: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

After a blog post expanding on her position, CNN promised the issue was “serious” and would “be dealt with accordingly.” That’s apparently her exit from CNN. Here’s an internal memo obtained by Mediaite:

From Parisa Khosravi – SVP CNN International Newsgathering

I had a conversation with Octavia this morning and I want to share with you that we have decided that she will be leaving the company. As you know, her tweet over the weekend created a wide reaction. As she has stated in her blog on CNN.com, she fully accepts that she should not have made such a simplistic comment without any context whatsoever. However, at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.

As a colleague and friend we’re going to miss seeing Octavia everyday. She has been an extremely dedicated and committed part of our team. We thank Octavia for all of her hard work and we certainly wish her all the best.

Parisa.

My posting about the tweet(at 6:49 AM EDT Sunday) may have been the first one from a blog about this, after a tip from DeJerusalem via email. (Backspin also gave DeJerusalem a hat tip a couple of hours later.)

That's two high-profile people I helped to get fired this year for their impolitic comments and activities.

The thing is, getting people fired is not at all a goal. Changing real attitudes is. HRW has not changed a bit in the wake of the Garlasco affair - they simply were practicing damage control. (In fact, Garlasco seems to have been among the least problematic of HRW's employees.)

CNN at least seems to have acted responsibly in quickly addressing the issue. We don't know if CNN would have acted that way had they become aware of Nasr's tweet without the publicity. That would indicate whether this was a case of truly keeping CNN as objective as possible or of simply keeping up the appearance that it is so.

(Richard Landes and The Augean Stables reviews Nasr's on-air, anti-Israel career.)

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Fatah says Hamas lying: they don't have to recognize Israel

Fatah spokesman Osama Qawasmi blames Hamas for the impasse in reconciliation talks. Nothing new there - both sides have been blaming each other for years now.

One statement he made was interesting, though. He said that Hamas is stating that the reason they cannot sign the reconciliation document is because Fatah is requiring them to recognize Israel as part of the deal.

Fatah responds that this is a pure fabrication. After all, why should Hamas be required to abide by existing agreements to rejoin the PA?

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How liberalism and Zionism reinforce each other (Gil Troy)

From the New York Jewish Week (excerpts):

...The increasingly popular claim that Zionism and liberalism are incompatible misreads contemporary Israeli politics, modern Zionism and liberalism itself.

Zionism, like Americanism, is a form of liberal nationalism, one of the world’s most constructive, successful ideologies. Liberalism and Zionism remain not just compatible but mutually reinforcing....

While Israelis quarrel about how to achieve peace, the systematic campaign to delegitimize Israel combined with Israel’s continuing control over millions of Palestinians has helped make Israel politically poisonous to many liberals.

Back in 1975, when the Soviet-Third World alliance in the United Nations labeled Zionism racism, the mainstream American liberal establishment denounced the UN, not Israel. UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that this “terrible lie” assaulting democracy and decency would enter like a toxin into the bloodstream of international discourse. Subsequently, the Soviet Union collapsed. The UN repealed the resolution in 1991. But the poison persists.

Israel remains the only nation on probation, with its legitimacy seemingly contingent on good behavior. Exaggerating Israel’s rightward shift and concluding that the state never belonged in the Middle East internalizes the relentless attacks rejecting its right to exist.

Treating support for Israel as a right-wing phenomenon ignores the longstanding calls for a “big tent” Zionism spanning right and left, and overlooks the common sources that spawned liberalism and Zionism. Both movements stemmed from the Enlightenment, with central values rooted in the Bible. Zionism and liberalism are intertwined with that sometimes ennobling, sometimes cruel, but defining modern movement — nationalism....

Like Americanism, Zionism has never been static or monolithic. Zionism’s founders were charmingly, creatively, fragmented. Labor Zionists battled Revisionist Zionists. Cultural Zionists combated Political Zionists. Today, Religious Zionism and settler Zionism flourish alongside multicultural Zionism, eco-Zionism, entrepreneurial Zionism, feminist Zionism, and two-state-solution Zionism.

Those on the left who so demonize Zionism and romanticize Palestinianism to the point that they ignore Hamas’ violence against Palestinians and Israelis, violate liberalism’s core commitments to individual liberty and fair, rational conclusions. Progressives should delight in the vitality of Israel’s democracy, the vigor of its press, the power of its courts, the creativity of its universities, the dynamism of its population, the brashness of its many patriotic critics, the rights of its minorities, the freedom and equality so many of its citizens enjoy.

The Jewish and liberal traditions of development through disputation thrive in Israel, analyzing shortcomings, advancing reforms. Nevertheless, Israel, facing serious challenges, stumbles, like every nation-state, like all human creations. While criticizing Israel’s faults, without pulling any punches, also reaffirming the historic, harmonic convergence between liberalism and Zionism can help redeem Zionism — and liberalism.

Read the whole thing.

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Does supporting terrorism make America safer?

Thaddeus Russell, writing in The Daily Beast, asks what he considers a provocative and uncomfortable question: Does Israel make America safer?

It is another article in the mold of Walt and Mearsheimer, arguing for a "realist" foreign policy where all decisions are made by actuaries rather than morality.

The premise, while seductive on the surface, is ridiculous. Russell tries to draw a causal relationship between political Muslim terror against Americans and US support for Israel. He declares, as really his main evidence for his thesis,

[N]ot one American died at the hands of a politically motivated Arab or Muslim until June 5, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death by Sirhan Sirhan. The killing came shortly after President Lyndon Johnson declared that the U.S. would become Israel’s major sponsor, and Kennedy announced that if elected president he would supply Israel with whatever weapons it needed so that the Jewish state “can protect itself” against its Arab neighbors.

Here we see both the problem of declaring facts that are not true and the problem of inferring causality where none exists.

First, for the facts. A quick browsing through history finds that 35 Americans were killed in the Barbary Wars in the early 1800s- by Muslims.

Americans were killed in a massacre of Christians in Turkey in 1909:

An American missionary was killed in Persia in 1904:

Americans were among those killed in Hebron in 1929:

Americans (and Canadians) were killed in the 1948 war.

All of those were political killings.

Ah, but perhaps he only includes Americans killed on American territory? In that case, there must have been numerous Arab terrorist attacks against France before 1967, because of the French support for Israel during the 1950s and 1960s, correct? Yet...there weren't any.

Here's where we see that Russell uses the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, the assumption that an event that comes after another was caused by that event.

The fact that Palestinian Arab terrorism became globalized after 1967 - where the victims were throughout the West, not just the US - had nothing to do with sudden US support for Israel and everything to do with a decision made by the Palestinian Arab leadership to gain worldwide attention for their cause. The US was not the only target of the 1970s PLO terror spree - it was the West, and planes were hijacked from the UK, Switzerland and France as well as from Israel and the US.

Russell mentions that the US has given some $100 billion to Israel since 1967 - I don't think the amount is quite that high, but let's go with it. He mentions that this is one-third of all foreign aid given by the US. Now, compare how much American has spent on NATO since the 1950s. Real numbers are hard to come by, but $100 billion is in the ballpark of what America spends annually in Europe to defend an enemy that no longer exists. (It may be much higher.) Since it falls under the gargantuan defense budget and not the foreign aid budget, it is not as easy to see those numbers in context, but in reality, US support for Israel is miniscule compared with the benefit it receives by having a reliable ally on the ground in that region - without risking American troops. Throwing around numbers like "$100 billion" (spread out over 43 years) in an article like this is not meant to illuminate but to damn.

Russell comes dangerously close to a major misrepresentation of truth in this paragraph:

In 1998, the World Islamic Front confirmed the forgotten fears of Forrestal, Marshall, and Kennan by issuing a fatwa “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military” for grievances including U.S. support of “the Jews' petty state” and “its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.” Three years later, two leaders of the organization, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden, followed their own edict.

Although he puts in a small caveat in the following paragraph, he doesn't address the fact that Israel was not close to the top of Bin Laden's concerns in his famous fatwa (written in 1996, not 1998), whose very title was "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places."

If there are more than one duty to be carried out, then the most important one should receive priority. Clearly after Belief (Imaan) there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land [Saudi Arabia]. No other priority, except Belief, could be considered before it; the people of knowledge, Ibn Taymiyyah, stated: "to fight in defence of religion and Belief is a collective duty; there is no other duty after Belief than fighting the enemy who is corrupting the life and the religion. There is no preconditions for this duty and the enemy should be fought with one best abilities. (ref: supplement of Fatawa). If it is not possible to push back the enemy except by the collective movement of the Muslim people, then there is a duty on the Muslims to ignore the minor differences among themselves; the ill effect of ignoring these differences, at a given period of time, is much less than the ill effect of the occupation of the Muslims' land by the main Kufr. Ibn Taymiyyah had explained this issue and emphasised the importance of dealing with the major threat on the expense of the minor one. He described the situation of the Muslims and the Mujahideen and stated that even the military personnel who are not practising Islam are not exempted from the duty of Jihad against the enemy.

Do these words make it sound that Israel's disappearance from the world stage would have forestalled 9/11, as Russell strongly suggesting?

These are merely a specific criticisms of a flawed article, written by a historian who should know better. The real problem is more fundamental - the thesis that American foreign policy should be based on the fear rather than leadership.

Let us construct a hypothetical but plausible scenario. Let's say that Israel never existed and a pan-Arab, Muslim state existed across northern Africa and Arabia. Now, the Muslims want to avenge the "tragedy of Andalusia" and start a terror attack spree against Spain in order to gain their occupied land back. Since the US is a staunch supporter of Spain, terror attacks also target American interests.

Should America abandon Spain?

According to the realists' logic, the answer is most assuredly in the affirmative. Americans are dying because Spain is a target, therefore withdraw support for Spain and save American lives.

And if the Muslim fanatics target Austria or Italy next, for similar historic reasons, then logic would dictate that they would be the next allies to be abandoned.

This is not realism - this is surrender to an enemy that will be emboldened by a show of such weakness.

The article is not meant to illmuminate but to obscure facts, in order to pressure the US to withdraw support for an ally that shares its values. One gets the impression that the ultimate goal has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with hate - subsumed under a pseudo-scholarly visage.

(h/t Zach, especially the Latin :) )


UPDATE: Sultan Knish goes through many other examples of politically-motivated Muslim murder of Americans before 1969. You will learn a lot.

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Mother of baby saved by Israelis wants him to murder them

Ha'aretz reports on a documentary by Channel 10 reporter Shlomi Eldar about a Palestinian Arab baby with a rare disease being treated in Israel.

In Sheba's pediatric hemato-oncology department was Mohammed Abu Mustafa, a four-and-a-half-month-old Palestinian infant. Protruding from his tiny body were pipes attached to big machines. His breathing was labored.

"His days may be numbered. He is suffering from a genetic defect that is causing the failure of his immune system," said the baby's mother, Raida, from the Gaza Strip, when she emerged from the isolation room. "I had two daughters in Gaza," she continued, her black eyes shimmering. "Both died because of immune deficiency. In Gaza I was told all the time that there is no treatment for this and that he is doomed to die. The problem now is how to pay for the [bone marrow] transplant. There is no funding."

"I got to her after all the attempts to find a donation for the transplant had failed," [Eldar] relates. "I understood that I was the baby's last hope, but I didn't give it much of a chance. At the time, Qassam rockets falling on Sderot opened every newscast. In that situation, I didn't believe that anyone would be willing to give a shekel for a Palestinian infant."

He was wrong. Hours after the news item about Mohammed was broadcast, the hospital switchboard was jammed with callers. An Israeli Jew whose son died during his military service donated $55,000, and for the first time the Abu Mustafa family began to feel hopeful. Only then did Eldar grasp the full dramatic potential of the story. He told his editor, Tali Ben Ovadia, that he wanted to continue accompanying the family.

...Nevertheless, this idyllic situation developed into a deep crisis that led to the severance of the relations and what appeared to be the end of the filming. From an innocent conversation about religious holidays, Raida Abu Mustafa launched into a painful monologue about the culture of the shahids - the martyrs - and admitted, during the complex transplant process, that she would like to see her son perpetrate a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem.

"Jerusalem is ours," she declared. "We are all for Jerusalem, the whole nation, not just a million, all of us. Do you understand what that means - all of us?"

She also explained to Eldar exactly what she had in mind. "For us, death is a natural thing. We are not frightened of death. From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem. We feel we have the right to it. You're free to be angry, so be angry."

And Eldar was angry. "Then why are you fighting to save your son's life, if you say that death is a usual thing for your people?" he lashes out in one of the most dramatic moments in the film.

"It is a regular thing," she smiles at him. "Life is not precious. Life is precious, but not for us. For us, life is nothing, not worth a thing. That is why we have so many suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. None of us, not even the children, are afraid of death. It is natural for us. After Mohammed gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shahid. If it's for Jerusalem, then there's no problem. For you it is hard, I know; with us, there are cries of rejoicing and happiness when someone falls as a shahid. For us a shahid is a tremendous thing."

That was enough to drain Eldar's motivation and dissolve all the compassion he had felt for Raida and Mohammed.

"It was an absolutely terrible rift," he recalls. "After I saw how intensely she fought for her son's life, I could not accept what she said. I had seen her standing for hours, caressing him, warming him up, kissing him. At the time I also had an infant of Mohammed's age at home. I couldn't understand where it came from in her. I was devastated. It was all so paradoxical, too, because just as she was talking about the shahids, two Jewish women entered the room and brought her toys and a stroller as presents."

Raida's confession was totally at odds with Eldar's perception of her until then: "The whole time I accompanied her, I saw a caring mother who was at her baby's bedside night and day. She didn't eat, she lost weight and she cried. I myself saw to it that she ate. I saw her faint when she was informed there was a small chance her son would get well. I saw her when she was told there was no longer a chance, and she stood there and caressed Mohammed, with tears, as though parting from him.

"So I was unable to explain how on the one hand, she fought for her child's life, but at the same time told me that his life is not precious. I never believed I would hear that from her. That's why I decided to stop shooting. I had come to tell a lovely story, not a story about a mother who destines her son to be a shahid."

What did you feel when she said that to you?

"That I had been betrayed, that it was a knife in the back. I didn't want to see Raida any more. It also drove me to greater despair. I asked myself, 'Well, is that the conclusion that comes from this story?' But in the end I started filming again. Why? I don't have a good answer; I think it was from curiosity. I wanted to solve the mystery for myself."

(h/t Islamonazism blog)

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IDF still investigating whether IHH activists brought weapons onboard

One of the open questions from the Mavi Marmara incident was whether we would definitively say that the IHH militants had their own live weapons. Certainly the soldiers who were on the ship said, at the time, that they were being fired upon with live weapons, and we had already heard that there were bullet casings on board that did not match any IDF-issued weapons.

The JPost mentions today that "forensics experts were currently examining the origins of bullet casings found on the Mavi Marmara that did not come from any of the IDF-issued weapons used by the naval commandos."

However, before any definitive accusations are made, the IDF is still checking to ensure that none of the soldiers on board had brought with them any non-IDF weapons that could account for the casings, according to a Hebrew YNet article.

(h/t Islamo-Nazism blog)

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Conspiracies

I am not an advocate of conspiracy theories. Practically none of them stand up to the slightest fact-checking, not to mention human nature - the chances that elaborate secrets can be kept hidden for long periods of time in an open society is next to nil.

On the other hand, there are occasionally situations where a smaller set of actors, with similar agendas, will happily cooperate on an enterprise and keep their cooperation hidden in order to maximize the effect of their efforts.

Yesterday we saw this happen - twice.

It is no secret that most of the world regards Jewish people living in the ancient land of Israel that coincides with territories won in a defensive war against Jordan as perhaps an example of ultimate evil, and therefore ethnically cleansing these people from the homes they have lived in (often for generations) is not only moral but obligatory. The set of circumstances that made the idea of a Judenrein Judea and Samaria a worldwide moral imperative is a combination of Israeli government stupidity and a brilliant Arab anti-Israel strategy, but nonetheless it is there and even well-meaning people have bought into the idea that somehow the settlements are the obstacle to peace - conveniently forgetting that there was certainly no peace in the anomalous 19 years before 1967, there was no peace in the years before 1948, and there would not be a permanent peace after another Arab state is established as long as Israel exists. They also tend to forget or ignore that the idea that a Palestinian Arab state must include essentially100% of the West Bank and must include Jerusalem is a wholly artificial construct that is only given currency by its repetition, not by any objective facts.

Binyamin Netanyahu's schedule to meet with President Obama was known for a number of weeks. His traditional support for settlements is also well-known - both for its explicitness in the past as well as for its tepidness in the present. His visit in America is a tempting time to release "new information" that is skewed for the single purpose not of illuminating truths but of facilitating the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

The most obvious one was from B'Tselem. They released another of their reports that claim that some percentage of settlement land is privately owned by Arabs. They've released these in the past, and the facts are usually found to be quite inaccurate in the following months, but the reports make a splash when they occur.

What was interesting about the B'Tselem press release was that it was released on Monday but "embargoed" until Netanyahu was already in Washington:

     Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 16:55:55 +0200

     From: "Sarit Michaeli" <Saritm@btselem.org>

  Subject: Press release - embargo tomorrow, 6 July -  Official data: 

One-fifth of settlements' built-up area is private Palestinian land

Press release - Not for publication until 6:00 A.M. on 6 July 2010

Army and Civil Administration data:

One-fifth of settlements' built-up area is private Palestinian land

Settlements control 42 percent of West Bank land area

Even more interesting is that news organizations - who are trained to scoop the competition - were more than willing to go along with the embargo and not to release the B'Tselem details until it would make the most "splash."

Embargoed press releases are common for product announcements, but for a purported news story they have only one purpose, and it has nothing to do with news and everything to do with advancing a political agenda. You know that if Apple would embargo a news story about the features of its latest gizmo, the details would be leaked immediately - yet the media by and large held off in order to adhere to the agenda that they share with B'Tselem.

Another example was from a more respected institution, the New York Times. They published an astonishingly long article about the US tax-exempt status of various West Bank Jewish institutions:

A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

Items that are meant to save Jewish lives from Arab terror are defined by the New York Times as legally, and by implication morally, "questionable."

This article must have taken weeks or months to put together (even though it is hardly news - the facts were well-known and anti-Zionists have been harping on this for years, ignoring the many other charities with tax-exempt status that are not congruent with official US government policy.) Yet the NYT also obviously timed the article to be published on this same day.

This is not how an organization dedicated to reporting the news acts - it is how an agenda-driven organization acts. Ignoring the dubious premise of the article itself, it betrays the thinking of an organization that is serving as a political actor, not as an unbiased source for news.

And this is more than troubling, no matter how you feel about settlements.

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Zionist attitudes towards Arabs in the wake of the Balfour Declaration

The World Zionist Organization published a book of speeches made by Zionist leaders immediately after the Balfour Declaration, called "Great Britain, Palestine and the Jews." Since the Internet is so filled with (usually bogus) statements of how Zionists were hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Arabs, I thought that it is worthwhile to publish the words of Nahum Sokolow, then secretary general of the World Zionist Congress and as mainstream and important a Zionist leader as any at the time.

We appreciate deeply the important remarks offered by our distinguished friend Sir Mark Sykes on the subject of the relations between the Jews, the Arabs, and the Armenians. My reply to these remarks is: We are Zionists—not only Zionists for ourselves, but also for the Arabs and the Armenians as well. Zionism means faithfulness to one's own old country, to one's own old home. Zionism means consciousness of a nation. Can we Jews be ignorant of the fact that the Arab nation is a noble nation which has been persecuted? Is not the co-operation between the Arabs and ourselves, the Jews, in the Middle Ages for civilisation and for true culture written in our hearts and deep-rooted in our conscience? Our membership of the Semitic race, our title to a place in the civilisation of the world and to influence the world and take our share in the development of civilisation, have always been emphasised. If racial kinship really counts, if great associations exist which must serve as a foundation for the future, these associations exist between us and the Arabs. I believe in the logic of these facts. In the principle of nationality lies the certainty of our justice. There lies also the certainty of our brotherhood with the Arabs and the Armenians. We look most hopefully to the happy days when these three nations will create—in fact they have already created in the consciousness of some of their leaders—an entente cordiale in the countries of the Near East which have been neglected for so long.

We are not going to take away anvbody's property or to prejudice anybody's rights. We are going to find the land which is available and to settle down wherever there is room, and to live in the best relations with our neighbours—to live and to let the others live. Palestine is not yet a populated, civilised, prosperous country. We are going to make it so by investing our means, our energies, and our intelligence. I was glad to hear that some of your speakers had been to Palestine. They have seen how the country looks. You may have read in The Times that one of its correspondents described the hills of Judaea as roadless, barren hills. But they were not always roadless and barren. In old times these hills were covered with terraces. Now the Jews have again gone there and have rebuilt some of these terraces. If there is anything left of civilisation, of modern agriculture, and of industry in the country it is due to the efforts of that handful of Jewish settlers working under the most difficult conditions.

I would like to say also a few words on the religious question. I had the honour to speak on this question to some representatives of the Church of England and to the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope. (Applause.) I made to them a statement, which I can repeat to you here. We Zionists hate the word toleration, and Sir Mark Sykes really struck the very point when he condemned the word. We don't like mere toleration by non-Jews, and we don't want them to be tolerated. We know that Palestine is full of sanctuaries and of holy places, holy to the Christian world, holy to Islam, holy to ourselves. Are we blind not to see that there are these places of worship and of veneration? Palestine is the very place where religious conflicts should disappear. There we should meet as brethren, and there we should learn to love each other, not merely to tolerate each other. (Applause.) I declared this to the representatives of the great Churches and I can repeat it here.

Also, in an earlier rally, the crowds heard from two Arabs who felt that the Balfour Declaration would be a precursor to kickstart a similar Arab nationalist movement:

Shahk Ismail Abdul-al-akki then addressed the meeting. He spoke in Arabic, and his speech was translated by Mr. I. Sieff, who mentioned that the speaker was under sentence of death by the Turkish Government for having joined the Arab national movement. Shahk Ismail said he desired to tender deep gratitude to the British nation and the British Government for affording his countrymen and himself help and asylum in their hour of persecution. His country was held in chains by the Turks, who were supplied with German gold, and he looked with confidence to England and France to deliver them from bondage, as he believed in the ultimate good over evil, and was confident in the victory of the Allies. He not only spoke as an Arab, but as a "Moslem" Arab, having studied five years in Theological Schools and being granted a Degree, and it was the duty of every Moslem to participate in the movement for the liberation of their countrymen. The meeting was to celebrate the great act of the British Government in recognising the aspirations of the Jewish people, and he appealed to them not to forget in the days of their happiness that...

An Armenian leader echoed the same sentiments concerning an independent Armenia that could have been heralded by a similar declaration - that never came.

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Khaled Meshal's ringtone is a soap-opera theme (corrected)

In an interview with Al Arabiya, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal's cell phone rang.

The ringtone was the theme song of the popular Turkish soap opera that was translated into Arabic as "Noor."

He's a real man's man.

(I've blogged about how wildly popular Noor was in the past. Wikipedia says that it is going to become a feature film.)

Correction: It was Meshal's son's phone, not his. (h/t Ali)

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Hamas leader spells out the phased plan to destroy Israel

From MEMRI:

Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: "We have liberated Gaza, but have we recognized Israel? Have we given up our lands occupied in 1948? We demand the liberation of the West Bank, and the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital – but without recognizing [Israel]. This is the key – without recognizing the Israeli enemy on a single inch of land. 

"This is our plan for this stage – to liberate the West Bank and Gaza, without recognizing Israel’s right to a single inch of land, and without giving up the Right of Return for a single Palestinian refugee.
[...]
"Our plan for this stage is to liberate any inch of Palestinian land, and to establish a state on it. Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy. "

"As for the issue of a referendum – [the Palestinian Authority] is ready to impose its position on people by force. Whoever wants to hold a referendum, and believes that he can get all of Palestine for the Palestinians, can hold a referendum, but will not give up the platform of resistance, and the plan to liberate Palestine in its entirety. This is unequivocal.
[...]
"If we could liberate the Negev now, we would continue [our military activity], but our capabilities dictate that after we got rid of the Israeli presence in Gaza, we must finish off the remnants of that occupation, and move on to the West Bank."

Source: Al-Wafd, Egypt, June 23, 2010

This is strikingly similar to Yasir Arafat's "phased plan" to destroy Israel in stages, formulated in 1974:

The Liberation Organization will employ all means, and first and foremost armed struggle, to liberate Palestinian territory and to establish the independent combatant national authority for the people over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated. This will require further changes being effected in the balance of power in favour of our people and their struggle.

The Liberation Organization will struggle against any proposal for a Palestinian entity the price of which is recognition, peace, secure frontiers, renunciation of national rights and the deprival of our people of their right to return and their right to self-determination on the soil of their homeland.

Arafat (and other leaders)  referred to this plan often even after Oslo.

But just as an unrepentant Fatah-dominated PLO is now considered a peace partner for Israel today, some are now calling Hamas a similarly pragmatic potential peace partner.

Yet the facts belie the idea that either of them are interested in peace. The Fatah platform from last year as well as the current PA leadership explicitly reject the idea of Palestinian Arab resettlement in Arab countries, and any eventual West Bank state cannot accommodate all of the "refugees." The clear intent is to push the "right of return" on day one after any Palestinian Arab state is declared, using the successful formula of incessantly using the language of human rights to negate any Jewish rights to the historic Jewish homeland.

The only difference between Hamas and Fatah is that Hamas is more honest.

(h/t Jed for YouTube link)

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Notable links

Podhoretz on NYT's latest (interestingly timed) revelation.

CSM on how US efforts to separate Syria from Hezbollah are boomeranging.

Yaakov Lozowick notices a telling statement.

YNet reports on Iran's officially approved haircuts for men.

Moshe Arens on Egypt and Jordan's fear of Palestinian Arabs on their border.

Israel smartly decided to use an existing international agreement to define the list of items not allowed into Gaza.

Pajamas Media discusses the "peace index" that I had written about today.

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IDF indicts soldiers over Cast Lead

The IDF has just come out with a press release:

The IDF Military Advocate General, Maj. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, has decided to take legal action regarding a number of incidents that occurred during Operation Cast Lead, following his examination of the findings from the investigations carried out through a number of different channels.

The Military Advocate General has decided to indict a number of officers and soldiers for their conduct during the operation. In one case, an IDF officer at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel was summoned to a disciplinary hearing for having deviated from military directives pertaining to the prohibition on the use of civilians for operational activity. In a second case, the Military Advocate General indicted an IDF Staff Sergeant for manslaughter. In a third case, the Military Advocate General ordered a criminal investigation following his review of a field investigation in order to clarify the circumstances of a specific incident. In a fourth case, disciplinary action was taken against an IDF Captain for his failed professional judgment in authorizing an attack against a terror operative.

In accordance with the Chief of the General Staff’s commitment on the matter, an ongoing, comprehensive process of examination has been carried out within the IDF since the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead, in order to study claims made by various individuals and organizations regarding IDF conduct during the operation.

Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi ordered an examination of IDF conduct, and the ethical aspects thereof, in full confidence of the moral justness of the IDF, its officers and soldiers, as well as of the IDF’s ability to examine any incident, to draw the necessary conclusions, and to take legal action as necessary. More than 150 incidents have been examined and nearly 50 investigations have been launched by the Military Police Criminal Investigations Division since the operation’s conclusion.

The four incidents include the Al Maqadama Mosque incident, where the IDF confirms that it targeted a terrorist outside the mosque (as we now know, he was with a number of other terrorists as well, who were hit.) Even so, the IDF says that procedures were not properly adhered to.

Similarly, indictment concerning the complaint by Majdi Abed-Rabbo that he was used as a human shield includes the interesting fact that, according to IDF soldiers at the scene, he had asked the IDF soldiers if he could go to speak to the militants inside his house in order to minimize the chances for his house next door being destroyed if there was a battle. According to IDF rules, the battalion commander should not have allowed it to happen.

There is also an indictment on an apparent case of a soldier firing on a group with a white flag as well as an air-strike on the Al Samouni residence.

These investigations are nightmarishly complex, but from reading this release one gets the impression that the IDF takes them very seriously, even as the world accuses them of whitewashing any deviations from protocol.

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"Honor killing" in Gaza

Firas Press reports that a 21-year old man killed and buried his 20-year old sister for reasons of "family honor" in the northern Gaza strip.

He confessed to the crime. Police are still looking for the body.

By my count, this is the eleventh woman murdered this year in the territories.

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Global Peace Index again ranks Israel close to last

Once again, Vision of Humanity compiled the Global Peace Index, which defines "peace" in bizarre ways - and, of course, ranks Israel close to last among all countries.

This year, Israel's position changed from 141 out of 144 countries to 144 out of 149, which they say is an improvement of two places.

The US is ranked 85th, on the lower half of the scale. 

While Israel is ranked as more peaceful than Somalia, Iraq and Pakistan, it falls below the Congo, Lebanon and even Yemen, with its ongoing multiple conflicts.

As with previous years, the "experts" who compiled this list create a flawed methodology that pretends to be objective but is filled with estimates that they pretty much make up.

The most notable change in individual scores was Israel's ranking for "disrespect for human rights." Unlike most of the qualitative scores, they actually give a specific definition of what each score means in this category. This is how they define the rankings:

• Level 1: Countries under a secure rule of law. People are not imprisoned for their views and torture is rare or exceptional.

• Level 2: There is a limited amount of imprisonment for non-violent political activity. However, few persons are affected and torture and beatings are exceptional. Politically motivated murder is rare.

• Level 3: There is extensive political imprisonment, or a recent history of such imprisonment. Execution or other political murders and brutality may be common. Unlimited detention, with or without a trial, for political views is accepted.

• Level 4: Civil and political rights violations have expanded to large numbers of the population. Murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life. In spite of its generality, on this level political terror affects those who interest themselves in politics or ideas.

• Level 5: Terror has expanded to the whole population. The leaders of these societies place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue personal or ideological goals.

Now, the worst one can say about Israel - even including the territories as part of Israel, as this survey appears to do without actually saying so - is Level 2. (If you consider assassinations of terrorist leaders to be "politically motivated murder," you might be able to argue that Israel was a Level 3 in previous years, but I am unaware of any targeted assassinations in 2009.)  There is no way that you can say that in Israel "murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life" (level 4) or that it ranks as the worst in the world in disrespect for human rights, with the government terrorizing the entire population (level 5).

Yet Israel is ranked as Level 5 - worse than the 4 it received in previous years. (For comparison, Syria, Yemen and Iran are rated as to getting a 4, Egypt and Saudi Arabia a 3.5, Libya a 3. North Korea was one of the few countries besides Israel to be rated a 5.)

They mention this in the text, and give the reason for the score - without referring to their own definition:

There was also a substantial fall in the level of respect for human rights to a score of 5, although this indicator refers to 2008 and so includes the incursion of the Israel Defence Force into Gaza – a conflict that resulted in an estimated 1,417 Palestinian casualties (official Israeli sources put the death toll at 1,166) and 13 Israeli fatalities.

Is this objective science? Of course not. Many of the indicators they rank countries on (such as electoral process, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, civil liberties, corruption perceptions, freedom of the press) are "qualitative assessments" made either by the Economist Intelligence Unit or other "experts."

Rankings like these  are only as good as the data that is used, and when a large percentage of that data is subjective, then the conclusions cannot be anything but deeply flawed. If anything, these results reflect the cumulative effect of years of worldwide demonization of Israel affecting the supposed impartiality of the experts whose opinions form the backbone of this index.

Not to mention the assumption that countries that, for example, export weapons are by definition less peaceful than countries that don't. Syria doesn't have a very big weapons industry; Israel does - and that is just one reason why Syria, with its repressive military government and explicit support for terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, is ranked at 115, way above Israel. Not only is the data bad, but the very assumptions behind the data are wrong.

Not that this stops the media from referring to this Peace Index as an authoritative source.

(See also my post about this from last year.)

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