Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Today's PalArab news (7/11/2010)

A ship from Libya headed towards Gaza left Greece last night, filled with food that Gaza does not seem to be lacking. Israel Matzav notices that the "charity" that is running the ship once received some $200,000 from - the Obama administration.

Hamas' amnesty program for "collaborators" ended over the weekend, and they claim to have gotten many key spies to turn themselves in. Some are wondering what will happen now if anyone else decides to "repent" after the deadline...

The new head of Al Azhar University in Cairo said that he would not repeat the mistakes of his late predecessor, and would not consider shaking hands with Shimon Peres or meeting with any delegation of rabbis.

It is not only UNRWA and Hamas running summer camps in Gaza. Islamic Jihad has a system of 51 camps for kids 11-16, where they "prepare a generation armed with faith and awareness that is capable of carrying burdens and challenges."

Al Qaeda takes a page from Hamas playbook

From NYT (h/t Soccer Dad):

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia recently issued a fatwa telling its fighters to marry the widows of those who have fallen.

In Diyala Province east of Baghdad, the fatwa has produced about 70 marriages in a little more than three weeks, according to members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and their relatives and associates. They spoke to an Iraqi reporter conducting interviews for The New York Times.

While Diyala is one of the group’s last remaining strongholds, the mere fact that so many people would rush headlong into marriages to strangers seemed to reflect how far the American military and the Iraqi government remain from their goal of eliminating the organization.

Some members say they are taking third or fourth wives, but many new husbands are from among the group’s most dedicated fighters — confirmed bachelors previously wedded only to the work of killing invaders and their Iraqi allies.

After Cast Lead, Hamas actually offered $3000 to anyone who would marry a wife of a "martyr,", and at least some took advantage of this program - using these women as second or third wives - in a mass wedding last July.

Can't these women just go the old fashioned way and meet the mujaheed of their dreams from a Muslim dating site?

Collective punishment in Nablus!

From Ma'an:

Palestinian Authority forces imposed a curfew in the northern West Bank village of Salem in the Nablus district after a man was killed overnight, police said.

Locals said Issa Ahid, 30, sustained critical wounds after being stabbed several times with a sharp object. The victim was taken to the Rafedia Hospital, where he died of his injuries.

PA security forces deployed in the village shortly after the incident occurred, placing movement restrictions on residents while investigations were underway, locals said.

After only a single incident, and entire village is forced to suffer from inhumane collective punishment. People cannot freely move in and out of their community because of the harsh, repressive measures taken in the name of "security."

We can be sure that activists will be all over this case of human rights abuses done by the Palestinian Authority security forces. After all, we know how inhuman such punishments are, especially when applied so capriciously. How dare they make so many people suffer!

Obviously the murder was an excuse to repress these people, yearning to be free.

Right?

Gilbert Achcar - another bogus scholar

The Washington Post has a very short review of a book called "The Arabs and the Holocaust - The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives," by Lebanese historian Gilbert Achcar:

Gilbert Achcar probes the differing views of Arabs and Israelis over the migration of Holocaust survivors to the Middle East after World War II. While Israeli narratives center on Jewish expulsion and genocide in Europe, Palestinians and other Arabs speak of the "grievous catastrophe" associated with the establishment of a Jewish homeland: the forced departure of Arabs from Palestinian territories and the subsequent wars.

Achcar, a professor of development studies and international relations in London, carefully examines the long history of Arab-Jewish conflict back through the 19th century, illuminating the range of opinions -- whether Zionist, ultra-nationalist, liberal or anti-Semitic. He points out that, by World War I, opposition to Zionism was central to Palestinian identity and Arab nationalistic consciousness. Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, saw Jewish settlement during that period as another form of European colonization. However, early confrontations between Arab peasants and Jewish settlers were not xenophobic or anti-Jewish, Achcar writes, but a predictable outcome of the expulsion of farmers from their lands. Achcar doesn't shy away from the contemporary debate. He argues that the Palestinians are engaged in "the last major anticolonial struggle."

The statement about the early confrontations being because of expulsion of farmers is simply not true. A Christian travelogue of Palestine written in 1874 mentions "Men in Palestine call their fellows 'Jew,' as the very lowest of all possible words of abuse." The first attack of Arabs towards Zionist Jews was in 1886 at Petah Tikva, which was built on former swampland and did not displace anyone.

One gets the impression that Achcar is not being quite as honest and objective as a historian should be.

Well, it turns out that he is even worse than that. A preview of his book is available at Google Books, and I noticed this section:

The book preview did not let me look up the endnote citation, but an Internet search showed that this quote is all over the most virulently anti-semitic sites as proof of Zionist callousness towards the victims of the Holocaust. Most of those sites mindlessly copy the citation from a book by Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, attributing it to someone named "Yvon Gelbner."

It turns out that there is no "Yvon Gelbner" but the quote actually came from a work by Yoav Gelber, a professor at the University of Haifa. I emailed him about the quote, and here is his response:

The quotation is correct and it was said by Ben Gurion at Mapai's Center on 7 December 1938 (Labour Party Archives, 23/38). The English translation is somewhat kinky.
However, when I published it, I did it in its context, which those who quote me omit.

The background is the Kristallnacht in Germany and the British restrictions on immigration to Palestine. No one thought at the time on the Holocaust, including BG. A movement spread in the Yishuv at the time, calling to let German Jewish children enter Palestine regardless of immigration quotas, to be adopted by Yishuv families who would care for them until their parents arrived in the future. The demand had appeal and to counter it and remove the pressure from Palestine, the British proposed to bring to England 25000 Jewish children from Germany. Mapai's Center held a debate on how to relate to the British proposition. BG was vehemently opoosed to it and said these words in the heat of the discussion. As far as I remember (it's more than 25 years since I wrote it), most members backed BG's position.

I hope this helps to clarify things.

This is echoed by CAMERA, which demolishes the claims made by some - including, as we see here, Achbar - that Ben Gurion was indifferent towards the fate of European Jewry:

The Ben Gurion quote is taken from comments he made to Mapai's central committee on December 7, 1938. This followed Britain's decision to deny entrance into Palestine of 10,000 German Jewish orphans in the wake of Kristallnacht, instead offering them asylum within Great Britain. It was almost a year before the Nazis launched World War II and several years before the Final Solution (to annihilate the Jews) was methodically implemented. While Ben Gurion believed that Germany's anti-Jewish policies would necessitate creating a safe haven for numerous Jewish refugees that no other country was willing to accept, he had no way of predicting the enormity of what was to follow.

The British offer to accept several thousand children appeared to be a gesture of conscience allowing Britain to close the doors of Palestine — not only to those German orphans, but to future refugees as well. Ben Gurion had recently witnessed the results of the international Evian conference, which had been convened in July 1938 to address the growing Jewish refugee problem, and knew that other countries were also unwilling to accept hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. He believed that only a Jewish homeland would be able to properly absorb these Jews. Thus Ben Gurion stated that "our concern is not only the personal interest of these children, but the historic interest of the Jewish people" (translation from the stenographic records by Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Holocaust, Harcourt Brace & Co. 1996, p. 47).

According to the records of the Mapai meeting, Yitzchak Ben Zvi immediately clarified Ben Gurion's brusque remark, explaining "ten thousand children are a small part of Germany's [Jewish] children...They [the British] don't intend to save Germany's Jews, and certainly not all of them. The moment the Jewish State Plan [the Peel plan] was shelved, the possibility of complete rescue of Germany's Jews was shelved with it." (ibid. p. 48)

There is ample evidence ... that Ben Gurion viewed the rescue of Jews as paramount. As early as 1936, Ben Gurion told Palestine's high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, that "had there been the possiblity of bringing Poland's Jews to the United States or Argentina, we would have done so regardless of our Zionist beliefs. But the world was closed to us. And had there also not been room for us in Palestine, our people would have had only one way out: to commit suicide" (Ben Gurion, Memoirs, p.3:105, cited in Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Holocaust, pp xlix, 110). And in November 1941, Ben Gurion argued that "the supremely important thing now is salvage, and nation-building is incidental" (Teveth, ibid. p.xlviii).

It was only in November 1942 that the Yishuv became aware of the systematic slaughter of Jews. The Zionist leadership established a rescue committee and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the rescue mission. Ben Gurion made his priorities clear at a September 1943 fund-raising meeting of the Mobilization and Rescue Appeal in Jerusalem where he hailed the Allies' invasion of Europe for "first of all, and foremost, the saving of Jews, then the saving of the Yishuv, and finally and thirdly the saving of Zionism" (cited in Teveth, p. 143). He emphasized the importance of funding the rescue mission, saying:

We must do whatever is humanly possible...to extend material aid to those working on rescue operations in order to save [those who] can still be saved, to delay the calamity as far as it can be delayed. [And we must] do it immediately, to the best of our ability. I hesitate to say - since the matter is so serious - that we shall do our utmost; we are flesh and blood and cannot do the maximum, but we shall do what we can. (quoted in Friling, Tuvia, Arrows in the Dark, University of Wisconsin Press 2003)

It is bad enough that Achcar is twisting Ben Gurion's words and misrepresenting his thoughts, when the truth is so easily accessible to any serious historian. What is more troubling is the fact that he used that specific quote to begin with: either he found it on his own and twisted it out of context himself, or he had seen it at one of the many purely anti-semitic websites that have loads of similar quotes and misquotes from Zionist and Jewish leaders and attempted to put a scholarly sheen on it. If it is the former, then he is a sham as a historian; if it is the latter, then he spends time reading and believing anti-semitic propaganda.

How many other so-called scholars place indefensible falsehoods in their texts, turning what should be history into pure propaganda?

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.