Administrivia/open thread

The last couple of days have been busy.

My post about the ungrateful PalArab mom in the Israeli hospital has been linked to from all over. A commenter points out, accurately, that the documentary about the story may have a slightly happier ending, but I think that the story stands on its own as an example of the incredible hatred that generations of Palestinian Arabs are being raised on. A similar story from 2002, linked to from DaTechGuy, illustrates it well.

I had the distinction of being on Memeorandum as a source for two posts simultaneously - one the aforementioned post, and the other was my criticism of Thaddeus Russell's plea for the US to cut off support for Israel. In other words, both those posts were referred to by a number of prominent blogs.

Over the past couple of weeks I had the privilege of having people email me quality articles that they wrote for which they didn't have a good outlet. I published articles written by Zach, Israelinurse, Adam Levick as well as commenter Zvi. Feel free to submit any original articles you might have been working on; I am happy to use my modest bully pulpit to publicize good material.

I haven't really been pushing the EoZ message board since I started it because I don't have the time to maintain it, and as a result it is sort of dying. It also now has a chat board, which might come in handy in the future, but for now I will let them both sit - if a critical mass of people decide it is a great place to trade information, it is there for you.

I saw that a group of Israel-bashers is coming out with an insta-book about the Mavi Marmara. Just for fun, I put together my posts on the topic and saw that they would span about 100 pages. I wish I had time to edit a similar book that was filled with, you know, facts, both from here and from other blogs and sources. Anyone want to volunteer? Self-publishing is pretty easy nowadays. (Slightly more difficult is getting an ISBN number but it is doable.)

You may have noticed that some of the Arabic articles I have been linking to were using the original Arabic URLs and not the Google Translate URLs. The reason is that I have been using Google Chrome more often, and it has a plug-in to do translation automatically. I find that even though it uses the same Google Translate, it keeps the format of the original page better and will translate some types of text that regular Google Translate doesn't.

Anyway, here's an open thread....

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The Istanbul Declaration and the Mavi Marmara (ITIC)

Brilliant research from ITIC:

1...The Gaza flotilla initiative was a step in implementing the jihadist "Istanbul Declaration," issued at a conference called "Gaza Victory" and held in Istanbul on February 14-15, 2009. The conference was attended by 200 Arab and European Sunni sheikhs and clerics as well as members of Hamas, and bore the signatures of 90 participants (See Appendix). According to a BBC reporter who attended the event, "speaker after speaker called for jihad against Israel in support of Hamas."²  

The Istanbul Declaration provided the ideological background for the future violent implementation of its decisions, as demonstrated by the flotilla to Gaza. The events have to be understood within a radical pan-Islamic context and the mindset of their proponents, and in light of the Istanbul Declaration and the 90 radical Muslim scholars and clerics who publicly sanctioned the legitimacy of Hamas and their support for its military actions.

The Istanbul Declaration affirmed "the obligation of the Islamic Nation to find a just reconciliation formula for the Palestinian people, who will be responsible for forming a legitimate authority that will fix norms and attend to legitimate and national rights, and will continue with jihad and resistance against the occupation until the liberation of all Palestine." It also affirmed "the obligation of the Islamic Nation to open permanently the crossings—all crossings—in and out of Palestine to allow all the Palestinians to satisfy their needs for money, clothing, food, medicine, weapons and other essentials, so that they can live and carry out jihad in the path of Almighty Allah." The Declaration also noted that "We affirm that the victory Allah accomplished by means of our brothers the Mujahidin, our defiant and steadfast kinsfolk in Gaza, was indeed achieved through His favor and help -- exalted be He! It was also achieved through fulfilling the religious obligation of jihad in His path." 

According to the Istanbul Declaration, there is an obligation for "the Islamic Nation to regard sending foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and preventing the smuggling of arms to Gaza as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the Nation." It continues, "This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways."³

The list of passengers on board the Mavi Marmara revealed the names of two conference participants who had signed the Istanbul Declaration. Their personal involvement in the flotilla demonstrated their commitment to the jihadist cause and their desire to represent themselves as models.

Muhammad Kazem Sawalha -- a fugitive, high-ranking former Hamas Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades commander in Judea and Samaria, currently residing and active in the UK (signature number 72).4 He was involved in launching the previous aid flotilla (Lifeline 3). At the time he noted that the next aid convoy would avoid an "unwanted confrontation" with the Egyptian authorities and that "the confrontation will be directly with the Zionist enemy itself on the high seas" (Al-Intiqad, Hezbollah's website, January 17, 2010). Sawalha, one of the prominent organizers of the flotilla, did not board the ship. Known to Israeli security services and wanted for his notorious Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades activities in Judea and Samaria in the past, it can be assumed he feared being arrested and tried in Israel.

A. Walid Al-Tabtabai -- a prominent Kuwaiti activist who is known to support armed resistance in Palestine and Iraq (signature number 88). At a press conference in Antalya the flotilla organizers asked all the participants to "write their wills." Following the press conference, Walid Al-Tabtabai reportedly "did not hesitate to write his will, in defiance of Israeli threats."5

B. Sheikh Muhammad al-Hazimi -- a member of the Yemeni Parliament and Al-Islah (the Yemini reform bloc) was photographed on the deck of the Mavi Marmara brandishing his large curved dagger (signature number 66).

Jihadist, peace activist - what's the difference, really, as long as you hate Israel?

It is notable that to date, the "anti-violence" Free Gaza movement has not said a word against the violence done by the IHH members aboard the Mavi Marmara. On the contrary, they have consistently defended it.

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British ambassador: "World needs more men like Fadlallah" (updated)

From the official British foreign office blog, by Frances Guy, Ambassador to the Republic of Lebanon, Beirut, on July 5, entitled "The passing of decent men":

One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious. People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most. It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own. I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most. Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims throughout the world. When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person. That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith. Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday. Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon's shores. I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right. If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples' lives will be truly blighted. The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.

As Con Coughlin points out,

One of Fadlallah’s last acts before he died was to issue a fatwa authorising the use of suicide bomb attacks. The mystery here is why he waited so long. For as a founder member of Hizbollah – he sat on the organisation’s ruling council – Fadlallah gave his personal approval to the massive suicide truck bomb attacks that levelled the American Embassy and Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, killing more than 300 people, including the then CIA station chief. Fadlallah gave his personal blessing to the suicide bombers before they left for their deadly mission.

Fadlallah also masterminded the hostage crisis in Lebanon in the mid-1980s. I remember interviewing him at his house in Beirut’s southern suburbs in 1985 at the height of Terry Waite’s mission to free the Americans then being held by Hizbollah on Iran’s orders (Fadlallah was a close friend of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s Islamic revolution.)

Fadlallah himself was charm personified during the interview, offering me sweet tea and offering his apologies that he could do nothing to release the hostages, but their prospects might improve if only the pesky Americans would stop trying to involve themselves in Lebanon’s affairs. But when I left one of his “bodyguards” insisted on seeing my passport. Later I discovered from a Lebanese friend that they were Hizbollah terrorists checking to see if I was an American. Had I been, I would have been carted off to a dank cell. I was lucky. Six months later my friend John McCarthy paid a similar visit to Sheikh Fadlallah, and was kidnapped the following day.

The miracle of Sheikh Fadlallah’s life is that he lived to a ripe old age and died in his bed. I, for one, will not miss his malign influence on the Middle East.

This is a lot worse than a CNN correspondent holding Fadlallah in high regard.

More on TheJC.
(h/t t34zakat and the JPost)

UPDATE: Good thing that I took a screenshot - because that blog entry is now gone.

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Lady Ashton to return to Gaza

Catherine Ashton, high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission, visited Gaza last March and left without gaining any insight. But, as with Nicholas Kristof,  her experience was enough to allow her to write a clueless editorial for the New York Times. 


She's scheduled to visit Gaza again later this month, so we can expect more of the same - from "fact-finders" who already "know" the facts before they arrive.

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HRW's subjectivity; or, MENA Behaving Badly (Israelinurse)

I received this article from Israelinurse via email:

---

Visitors to Jerusalem this month can pick up the latest free print edition of the English language magazine ‘This Week in Palestine’ from hotel lobbies and other points of distribution. In this June 2010 edition they will find a plethora of anti-Israel articles all of which reinforce the familiar narrative of Palestinians oppressed by Israelis, without any mention of Palestinian violence, the reasons for the construction of the anti-terrorist fence and checkpoints or the inter-factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah. The uninformed tourist’s heart will bleed after reading of children in Ramallah who have never had the opportunity to paddle in the Mediterranean Sea during the hot Middle East summer, but of course the various writers invariably neglect to mention that this is a result of the Oslo accords freely signed by Palestinian leaders and not just some spiteful action on the part of Israel.

Among the articles, most of which are designed to work at a purely emotional level and do not allow uncomfortable facts to distract from their message, is one entitled ‘Juthuruna’ http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=3128&ed=183&edid=183  by Nadia Barhoum.

“Some mornings we would wake up to shots from the IDF firing range, just a few hundred feet from my aunt’s home. We could see the soldiers, filing one behind the other, aiming at actual cut-outs of bodies with bull’s-eyes drawn across their chests. The sound of the shots was jarring at first, and then slowly became ‘adi, just background noise. I would strangely begin to feel this way about many other aspects of life there; I began to notice the normalization of occupation: waiting hours to get anywhere, identity cards being demanded at every crossing, and the look of worry on Amti’sface when she knew that anyone was going to travel beyond the village. We could not live as we wanted there.” 

 

Heart string-tugging propaganda aside, this piece takes on a more sinister aspect when one realises that Nadia Barhoum works  for Human Rights Watch in New York in its Middle East and North Africa division (MENA).

 By now we are more than familiar with HRW’s less than objective reports on subjects such as Jenin  , the anti-terrorist barrier, the 2006 Lebanon war and Operation Cast Lead. We are aware that the infamous Goldstone Report  contains over 30 citations from HRW publications and that in 2009 HRW went fundraising in Saudi Arabia   using an anti-Israel platform. Many, including HRW’s own founder Robert Bernstein,  are concerned  by the moral poverty displayed by HRW which discredits the entire field of human rights organizations.

Apparently HRW has learned nothing from the recent scandals which sullied its name because here we have yet another one of its employees displaying blatant, if totally unsurprising , pro-Palestinian bias. Assuming that the folks at HRW actually read Barhoum’s CV before they hired her, they would be familiar with the fact that she was an active member in ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ whilst at university and is on record as stating that the SJP’s “message . . . is to resist occupation and end the apartheid-like framework which is found in Palestine-Israel”. Not the sort of core stance conducive to the production of impartial, balanced reports upon the subject of the Israel/Palestine conflict, one would have thought. In fact, one has to take this train of thought one step further and try to imagine HRW hiring a known pro-Israel activist of any shade….

One may well ask if it actually matters that Nadia Barhoum has written a saccharine- sentimental article for ‘This Week in Palestine’, seeing as we are already familiar both with her personal political perspectives and those of the organization by which she is employed.  When one appreciates exactly where this tourist-aimed propaganda originates, one can see that it matters very much.  ‘This Week in Palestine’ is produced by the International Middle East Media Centre which was founded by the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People (PCR). The PCR was founded by Ghassan Andoni and its Director is George Rishmawi; both of whom are co-founders of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and indeed the PCR operates under the endorsement and guidance of the ISM . The ISM, as readers are aware, is one of the organizers of the ‘Free Gaza’ flotillas, including the last one which ended in bloodshed aboard the Mavi Marmara due to the inclusion among its participants of jihadist terror supporters seeking martyrdom.

So now we have the rather absurd and surreal situation in which Human Rights Watch has the gall to call for an ‘impartial investigation’ of the flotilla deaths whilst one of the employees in its Middle East division which issued the above statement co-operates with a publication linked to the organizers of that flotilla who have no qualms about welcoming into their ranks jihadists with a death wish and illegally transferring funds to a terrorist organization proscribed by the country out of which HRW operates.

HRW may well be within its rights to continue to weave its tangled web of anti-Israel propaganda, including the employment of staff with connections of various dubious shades and records of blatant anti-Israeli bias. Equally, the rest of the world is well within its rights to relate to HRW as the ridiculous joke it has become. The losers here are the unfortunate people in this world who really do need an impartial, fair and objective body to promote and protect their human rights because HRW’s record on Israel indicates without a shadow of a doubt that it no longer possesses the necessary qualities needed to be considered an apolitical human rights organization and therefore neither its reports nor demands can be granted credence.         

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Hezbollah's preparations for the next war - under the eyes of UNIFIL (updated)

YNet reports:

The Israeli Defense Forces revealed on Wednesday aerial photographs of sites at the village of al-Khiam in southern Lebanon, where the IDF suspects Hezbollah is storing various weapons and even operating headquarters and control centers.

The material presented by the military revealed that 23,000 residents live in the village where al-Khiam Detention Center was operating while the IDF controlled the safety zone in southern Lebanon.

The army noted that some 90 activists were operating in the village vicinity, most of them belonging to special forces that are preparing – as soon as they receive the order – to lie in wait for IDF forces, alongside a "welcome" of various demolition charges, anti-tank missiles and pits filled with explosives.

The information also revealed that hundreds of short-range mortar shells and rockets have been stored in al-Khiam, and as in the past, intentionally placed adjacent to public institutions, schools and medical facilities.

A military source told Ynet that the images from al-Khiam are not exclusive, and that similar operations were taking place in the entire area. "What you see in this village, you can see in all villages in southern Lebanon. There are some 20,000 activists whose job is, in fact, to act against IDF forces from within the village. When the time comes, they will give our forces a real fight," the source said.

The IDF blog gives more details:

...Hezbollah, in the four years since the Second Lebanon War, has turned over 100 villages in South Lebanon into military bases. These maps and the 3D clip illustrate how Hezbollah stores their weapons near schools, hospitals, and residential buildings in the village of al-Khiam. They follow similar tactics in villages across southern Lebanon, essentially using the residents as human shields, in gross violation of UN Resolution 1701. al-Khiam was used as a rocket launching site during the Second Lebanon war.

During the Second Lebanon war, Hezbollah stored their weapons in open areas for the most part, which enabled the IDF to locate and destroy their stores. In the four years since then, Hezbollah has pursued a tactic of moving their weapons into civilian villages, essentially institutionalizing the tactic of using human shields on a large scale.

Hezbollah Activity in South Lebanon Since the 2nd Lebanon War

This video indicates that Hezbollah is storing weapons near schools:


When I went on an IDF briefing for bloggers last December, we were shown a Lebanese village on the border that looked very typical, filled with houses - until the soldiers informed us that in the time they had been observing the village, they had never seen any children. And most of the vehicles that enter and exit the village were not normal family sedans, but large trucks. That village, at least, was simply a stage for Hezbollah.

All of this is happening directly under the gaze of UNIFIL "peacekeeperes" whose very job is to keep weapons out of southern Lebanon. It seems that they are falling short in their responsibilities.

UPDATE: As Zvi points out in the comments,

Al-Khiam us surrounded by farmland and hills. The center of the town is densely built up, and the arms bunker is almost precisely in the center. However, the town is quite narrow; only 500m from the center, the buildings trail off into farmland. Had Hezbollah placed the ammunition storage 500 meters to the west, for example, the ammunition storage would be out in the countryside and would present no danger to any civilians in the town. Instead, Hezbollah placed the ammunition storage bunker within a couple of hundred meters of two schools, directly in the center of the town.  

 The tallest building in the video, which Hezbollah snipers and anti-aircraft spotters would almost certainly use during the defense of the ammo bunker, stands between the ammo bunker and the school. If Hezbollah's defense of its ammo dump makes use of this building, then this building will become a valid military target. If HA tacticians plan to use this building, then a military target is actually much closer to the school than 130m - about 50m at most(?).

During the next war, this ammo store will still be right where it is now, and Israel will once again be forced to destroy this dump and, in doing so, risk damage to the nearby schools and the death of people in the surrounding civilian structures. Hezbollah is, with absolute deliberate cruelty, putting these people at risk, and is consequently guilty of war crimes. Again.

But we all know what happens when Hezbollah commits war crimes.

Absolutely nothing. 

Here it is from Google Satellite Maps:

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Freedom of the press, Hamas-style

Some of the items that Israel is now allowing into Gaza are Fatah-oriented newspapers like Al Hayat al-Jadida.

Hamas, however, decided to ban them.

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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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