Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 09, 2010

Honor/shame and Saudi child abuse

By Khalaf al-Harby, in the Saudi-based Arab News, and article that would be considered "Islamophobic" if it had been written by a Westerner:

Two studies have been issued on the issue of child abuse in the last two months. The first one, conducted in the United States, claims one in six children would be subjected to sexual abuse.

The second study, conducted in Saudi Arabia by Dr. Nura Al-Suwaiyan, director of the family safety program at the National Guard Hospital, revealed one in four children is abused in the Kingdom.

This clearly shows that children are far more likely to be molested in the Kingdom than in the United States!

I know that such a result will shock many of us who believe that we are living in utopia, while American society is devoid of any ethical values. These people will reject the results of these studies or at least doubt the credibility of the researchers. They are dreaming. They are determined to provide a picture of our society as one that is completely flawless.

As it is useless to talk to these dreamers, I will address citizens with a more realistic outlook in our society and tell them that child abuse rates in the US will come down with time, while it will increase in our society.

The reason for this is the way each country deals with the problem. From a legal point of view, while sexual harassment against children in the US is considered a heinous crime, we look at it as a mistake or a wrongdoing, not as a crime, unless the child has been raped.

The child molester in America is considered a dangerous criminal while for us he is a man who committed a mistake that does not necessarily entail informing the police!

In the US, there is a detailed description of child harassment. Showing a pornographic picture to a child or talking to him about sex in the US is considered molestation, while in the Kingdom sexual harassment cannot be considered abuse unless actual sex act has taken place.

From a social point of view, it is a duty of parents and adults in America who notice their children being abused to inform police, but in our society parents would feel ashamed to tell officers if their son or daughter has been molested!

The Americans can confront this problem because they know that they are human beings and hence liable to make mistakes, while those in Saudi Arabia are unable to deal with this problem because they want to adhere to the imaginary idea that we are the purest society in the whole world.

This is a classic example of the differences between an shame culture and a guilt culture.

According to the writer, Saudis are too ashamed to tackle the problem because their honor would be besmirched by association. Of course they love their children, but personal honor is in some ways more important. In other words, the primary concern is based on others' perceptions of reality, not on reality itself.

A classic overview of these concepts can be seen in the 2005 posting by Dr. Sanity.

The good news is that before the Internet, it would have been inconceivable that such an article would have been published in Saudi Arabia. At least some of the better parts of Western culture are slowly seeping in, much to the consternation of the traditionalists who are believe that the negative influences of Western culture are far more pronounced than its positives.

The fact that such an article can be written in The Arab News (and apparently Okaz, the Saudi news agency) is a step in the right direction, but unfortunately the number of those who can write such articles are dwarfed by those who need to read them.

The mindset of an honor/shame culture will not disappear, but the ability to use it for everyone's good is there. In this case, simply publicizing the fact of prevalent Saudi child sexual abuse can be made more shameful than the benefits of hushing it up. And shaming Arabs is probably the best way the West can get them to do what is for everyone's benefit - and not only in this particular example.

(h/t Arthur G in the message board)

Lee Smith reviews JCPA's book on defensible borders

From Tablet:

The book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace is a collection published this year under the auspices of the JCPA with essays about security and diplomacy by leading figures in Israel’s security establishment, like Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, former head of IDF intelligence, and Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan, former IDF deputy chief of staff and a former national security adviser to Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. The volume’s findings represent a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, and the fact that Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon—former IDF chief of staff and currently the vice prime minister—wrote the introduction is evidence that the ideas have won approval at the highest political levels.

The book pushes three common ideas, some likely to add to the friction between Washington and Jerusalem: First, Israel, must not withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines; second, Israel needs defensible borders; third, Israel must rely on itself to defend itself and not on foreign forces as proposed by U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones, who has talked openly about replacing the IDF with international forces in the West Bank.

The insistence that Israel must retain the ability to defend its own borders—a basic attribute of national sovereignty—is the least controversial element of Gold’s blueprint. The issue is not merely the inglorious record of U.N. peacekeeping forces—from Sinai to Bosnia and Lebanon—but also the fact that the international community rarely sends its blue helmets into the middle of a real shooting war, which is what the West Bank would become if an IDF withdrawal left Hamas and Fatah at each other’s throats and eager to gain credit for launching terror attacks on Israel.

The concept of defensible borders is closely tied to the drawing of 1949 armistice lines, commonly and incorrectly known as the 1967 borders. As [Dore] Gold explains in his contribution to the volume, successive U.S. administrations since Lyndon Johnson’s have all recognized the danger in Israel withdrawing to those borders. George Shultz, one of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of State, explained that “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders,” and the Clinton Administration reaffirmed the Reagan White House’s concept of defensible borders. However, it was during Clinton’s Camp David negotiations that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned the idea of defensible borders in the hope of a radical breakthrough with Yasser Arafat. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada and peace nowhere in the offing, the George W. Bush Administration pledged not to hold the Israelis to the Clinton parameters and returned to the traditional U.S. position. “It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” reads an April 14, 2004 letter from Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Gold, who was not officially in the Sharon government, was nonetheless employed in a number of missions and prepared Sharon’s presentation to Bush on the significance of defensible borders during their first meeting, in 2001. Gold sat in the Roosevelt Room as Sharon entered the Oval Office with the index cards Gold had written. “Years later, when Sharon completed negotiations over the Bush letter in 2004,” says Gold, “he instructed his team in Washington to call me in Jerusalem to say we got defensible borders into the letter.”

Even as the Bush letter applied regardless of who sat in the White House (it won wide bipartisan approval in the House and Senate, with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel voting in favor), the Obama Administration has not yet clearly signaled if it intends to accept the commitments of its predecessor. Insofar as Israel sees the letter as “the foundation for the United States to accept new construction in the Jewish settlements that encircle Jerusalem,” it is yet another source of contention between Netanyahu and Obama.

Perhaps even more daunting is the prospect of any Israeli government having to explain to the Obama White House that many of the land swaps from Camp David are not plausible in the context of defensible borders. In other words, everyone in Washington who believes that they know what Israel’s vision of a final settlement looks like is in for a surprise. Israel will have to retain security control over the Jordan rift valley, which means not just the river bank but the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. It is important to remember that the West Bank overlooks Israel’s coastal plain and 70 percent of the country’s population. If the Hamas rockets fired from Gaza were launched from the West Bank on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it could bring Israel to its knees, disrupting the country’s economic and social life on a massive scale and shutting down Ben Gurion Airport. Moreover, Islamist militants from all around the region would attempt to transit through Jordan into the West Bank to launch attacks against the Zionist entity, destabilizing the Hashemite Kingdom.

“The concepts in this book are very close to last Knesset speech of Rabin, given thirty days before he was assassinated,” says Gold. The rhetorical point is clear enough: For all the nostalgia in the United States for a visionary statesman like Rabin, a warrior and also a man of peace, he also articulated most clearly Israel’s need for defensible borders and said nothing about land swaps. If those ideas have been lost in the last 20 years, the Israelis are also to blame. “A lot of Israel’s biggest mistakes is that Israeli diplomats put forward plans and pushed it back to the military,” says Gold. “For instance, Oslo began with two academics, and later representatives of the Foreign Ministry came in. When it became official, that’s when the army came in, at the end. I strongly believe we have to reverse the sequence—to lay out Israel’s security needs and then come out with diplomatic process to protect them.”

The problem is that the Israeli government has already publicly supported the non-viable two-state solution based on 1949 armistice lines with minor land swaps. Each publicly floated Israeli concession, even when not reciprocated by the other side and not implemented, becomes a new basis for further concessions down the line.

It is no surprise that Abbas' precondition for direct talks is to take the previous Israeli maximalist offer, previously rejected, as a starting point for the next round:

Erekat said: "We do not object to moving to direct negotiations if Israel agrees to negotiate from where these stopped under the government of (former prime minister) Ehud Olmert..., and if it stops the settlement activity, including natural growth, in the West Bank and Jerusalem and we receive a positive Israeli response to the security and borders issues.

As Dennis Ross noted concerning the 2001 negotiations,

I do believe that Camp David broke the taboos and the Clinton ideas reflected the best judgment of what was possible between the two sides in terms of their essential needs, but the Clinton ideas were, as I put it, the roof, not the ceiling, the roof. They were not the floor, they were not the ceiling, they were the roof. They were the best that could be done. Anybody who thinks that you start at that point is, I think, not realistic. It may be that is where you will end up, but things are going to have to change pretty dramatically to get back to that point.

Since then, of course, Abbas' party waged a long terror war against Israel and now expects to be able to reset the clock and get not only what Israel naively offered while there was some measure of goodwill but far more.

As far as I can tell, Israel has never articulated clearly to the US why the game has changed post-intifada and why the Camp David offer does not come close to fulfilling Israel's security needs in the light of the very real chance that Hamas could (democratically or militarily) take over the West Bank.

Israel also needs to focus on what is best for the Palestinian Arabs themselves, not the false rhetoric that their leaders spout. The fact is that the worst part of living under PA rule today is checkpoints and a poor economy that is heavily dependent on foreign aid to stay afloat. The problems facing the Palestinian Arabs do not include Jerusalem, nor settlements (some 96% of Palestinian Arabs live in Areas A and B, under PA civil control.) The anti-Israel agitators exaggerate the (admittedly) real problems of a few of the 4% - problems like access to land - but the entire debate has been hijacked by those who ignore the fact that, as Abbas himself said, "in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life."

There is no crisis, and no ticking clock that is forcing the US to impose a peace agreement. Any statement to the contrary reflects Palestinian Arab politics but not reality. Israel needs to change the debate to what will help real Palestinian Arabs, including those living in other Arab countries.

Because when there is a divergence between what people really need and what their leaders say they want, the leaders are frauds and need to be exposed as such.

Hezbollah upset at Octavia Nasr's removal

From AP:

The Lebanese militant Hezbollah has denounced CNN's decision to fire a Middle East editor for posting a note on Twitter expressing admiration for the country's late top Shiite cleric.

Octavia Nasr later apologized for her tweet in which she described Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah as "one of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot." But CNN officials said her credibility had been compromised.

Hezbollah's spokesman Ibrahim Moussawi says CNN's decision amounts to "intellectual terrorism" and reflects the West's "double standards" in dealing with the Mideast.

He said in a statement issued on Friday that the decision to fire Nasr - a Lebanese who worked for CNN for two decades - exposes America's false claims regarding freedom of expression.

Our liberal friends at Hezbollah are concerned about freedom of expression!

Why, it seems only a few years ago that they were making sure that journalists in Lebanon were only reporting what Hezbollah allowed them to:

...One senior British journalist last week let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to be distorted.

“CNN senior international correspondent” Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hizbullah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hizbullah’s “press officer” and that Hizbullah have “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations.”

When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program “Reliable Sources,” Robertson acknowledged that Hizbullah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hizbullah “had control of the situation,” Robertson said. “They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath.”

Robertson added that Hizbullah has “very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access into those areas. You don’t get in there without their permission. We didn’t have enough time to see if perhaps there was somebody there who was, you know, a taxi driver by day, and a Hizbullah fighter by night.”

Yet “Reliable Sources,” presented by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hizbullah.

Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon, Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton, casually mentioned in the middle of a posting: “To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.”

Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled viewers with selected footage from Beirut. NBC’s Richard Engel, CBS’s Elizabeth Palmer, and a host of European and other networks, were also taken around the damaged areas by Hizbullah minders. Palmer commented on her report that “Hizbullah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see.”

Hmm. Hezbollah is very protective of its image and threatens those who report anything different from the official Hezbollah narrative. They carefully watch journalists' reports and retaliate against those who don't toe the line, and they reward journalists who do their bidding.

And Hezbollah is upset that Octavia Nasr no longer works for CNN.

What does that say about Nasr's objectivity?

Three Palestine Today photos

Palestine Today consistently illustrates stories about Israelis with photos of chassidic Jews.

This photo accompanied a story today about increased Jewish immigration to Israel:

This photo illustrated a story about Israeli warnings about threats of kidnapping Israelis worldwide:

I guess that they want to make sure their readers associate all Israelis with their usual anti-semitic caricature:

Interestingly, Palestine Today illustrated a story about Gilad Shalit with a photo of him that I had not seen anywhere else:

Rafah smugglers sneak 48 cars into Gaza

On Wednesday, a parade of cars decorated so as to celebrate a wedding procession went through the streets of Egyptian Rafah, complete with singing women and children.

They drove right up to a new, large smuggling tunnel and 48 of them managed to drive through the tunnel to Gaza. Police who normally check all cars in the area for smuggling materials allowed the procession to go through. Police only became suspicious after a gunfight broke out between competing smugglers, stopping the procession.

The cars included new BMWs, Hyundais and Kias.

Latest Latma

Has some cute moments, especially the intro, but the featured soccer skit must have had too many inside jokes for me:

Shwarma fight!

In Aleppo, Syria, a kid went to the Farooj shwarma shop to get one of their signature dishes. Upon receiving the delicacy, however, he complained to the owner that he did not get the proper amount of meat in his wrap.

The owner of the shop, insulted, struck the customer.

The kid wasn't happy, and called his clan to intervene on his behalf.

The Farooj shop owner, in turn, called in his own clan reinforcements.

The resulting shwarma clash escalated at the site of the shop, with one participant seriously injured from being hit by a blunt object and the storefront window smashed. Police had to be called in to stop the fighting, and they stayed on the scene for hours to ensure that the families wouldn't start up the fight again.

I like shwarma, but somehow it doesn't make me quite so passionate.

(h/t Ali for translation help)

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: