Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Let's look at some real humanitarian catastrophes (Zvi)

From Zvi:

Iraqi civilians murdered in 2010:
* Jun 2010: 353
* May 2010: 370
* Apr 2010: 376

* first 6 months of 2010: 1965
* 2009: 4645
* 2008: 9221
* 2007: 24599
* 2006: 27767
...

Remember that as the UN investigates Israel for having soldiers who are not willing to be beaten to death by jihadi paramilitaries disguised as "peace activists." There has never been a UN investigation of the brutal terrorist slaughter of literally thousands civilians in Iraq by terrorists trained in Syria and armed by Iran. Why not? A former Iraqi defense minister referred to the Syrian border as the Gate of Darkness. But who cares about thousands of dead Iraqis? The UN needs to spend its time conducting MULTIPLE investigations of Israel, because a bunch of paramilitaries attacked Israeli soldiers.

In a similar vein, 4.3 million southern Sudanese need food aid, according to the UN. The World Food Program needs 500 million dollars, it says, to feed starving Sudanese.

Remember that the next time you read about someone making massive efforts to send wholly unnecessary supplies to Gaza.

"One Mean Jewish Settler"

Silke, in a comment to my last post about the real life of so-called "settlers," linked to an excellent post from a new blog called West Bank to West End.

Here's a small part:

The paradox is that some people only seem to like you once you become mean. A good case in point is the groups of German journalists, politicians and lecturers who are brought to Israel by their government and after having met a wide range of Israeli leaders and experts, come to Maale Adumim to meet settler Judah Ben-Yosef.

I began working for the German government (occasionally) about four years ago. I had no illusions that after two weeks of careful brain-washing by Arab spokesmen and far worse the Israeli Left wing, my two hours wouldn’t go a long way towards changing many minds. I am a chess player, so I defined for myself what I considered to be three realistic, realizable goals:

To physically show them the size of a 40,000 man strong city. I hoped this would go some way to denting the stereotype of the two tents, a goat and a flag Jewish settlement.

To demonstrate that historically Maale Adumim has never been part of any kind of Palestinian or Arab state, that nobody besides us and a few 13th century monks have ever lived here and that geographically there are plenty of other barren mountaintops.

To demonstrate that we are not all religious Right-wing fanatics (like me) but that the population of Maale Adumim contains a cross-section of Israeli citizens Religious, Secular and others; new immigrants and old-timers, Right, Center and even some Left-wingers.

My main objective is to try to dent stereotypes. I believe that when an intelligent person realizes that many of the stereotypes he’s been sold are incorrect, he or she may begin to question them all. This might lead to researching the subject more thoroughly, which in turn even affect some change in opinions.

In many ways it’s the first few minutes that will determine to what extent the tour influences each person. They all look out the windows and see a picturesque, peaceful, modern, well-run Western city. This sight is invariably the exact antithesis of everything they’ve been taught to expect. When stereotyping clashes with reality there is an immediate state of shock, or even crises. In very broad terms one can talk about three characteristic responses:

Some choose to look in the directions of the surrounding mountains rather than at the city. They will henceforth prefer to focus on the “bigger picture” having understood that they know precious little about the “details”

There are those who honestly seem to believe that Maale Adumim is some kind of clever scam that the Israeli government is running to trick visitors like themselves. “Everything here looks fine, but what about the real settlers? Why aren’t you all carrying guns? Is that a Bible?”

Occasionally I come across intellectually honest individuals who absorb what they are being told and ask questions not to try to catch me out, but because they really want to know. Surprisingly, two groups that stand out in this category are journalists from former East Germany and a group of German, Moslem journalists and lecturers.

Read the whole thing.

The Other Side: The Jews of Judea and Samaria

Israel Matzav links to a video that appears to be the beginning of an entire series about the "settlers," the Jews who live in Judea and Samaria. The video series is meant to show how these people really live and think, in contrast with how they are portrayed in the media.

Here is part 1, interviewing a grandmother who lives in Bet El who doesn't quite fit the profile of a wild-eyed, gun-toting, Arab-hating settler living on a caravan on a mountaintop that we are so used to seeing:

Libya imposing restrictions on local Palestinians

Libya has implemented a program of taxing all of its Palestinian Arab residents.

According to Al Jazeera (Arabic), Palestinian Arabs in Libya are now forced to pay an annual fee of up to $1550, and they have to endure a host of new humiliations as well.

PalArabs have been banned from working in various jobs, including education. Relatives cannot visit them. Those who own cars are being taxed for more money than their monthly salaries. Travel documents are expiring and not being renewed, yet the Arab League does not allow Palestinian Arabs from obtaining passports from the countries they have lived in all their lives.

Residents note bitterly that all this is happening while Libya made a big show of sending a ship of aid to Gaza.

All of this is in contradiction with Libyan Law #10 of 1998 which was supposed to grant somewhat equal rights to Palestinian Arabs in that country.

(h/t Ali for help with translation)

Gaza power plant shuts down - again, not because of Israel

Once again, Gazans are forced to suffer:

A day after Gaza's sole power plant shut down, the Palestinian Authority said it would deduct 25 percent from salaries to cover rising electricity bills.

Palestinian media Sunday reported the Palestinian Ministry of Finance would reassess the situation in September.

On Saturday, power plant officials in Gaza said the shutdown was due to a fuel shortage caused by the Palestinian Authority's refusal to ship sufficient fuel into the coastal enclave for the latest crisis.

Palestinian media said the latest shutdown is the third since January.

A Gaza Power Authority statement said it held Ramallah's finance ministry accountable, because "the government in Ramallah has not paid for industrial diesel, as agreed with the delegation of independent figures who visited Gaza recently," Maan reported.

AP adds:

Gaza's rulers, the militant Islamic group Hamas, are meant to collect utility bills and send the cash to their rivals, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which use it to buy the fuel.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib says Hamas isn't sending enough money, and on average, they were receiving only $1.3 million a month from the distribution company, while they were paying $9 million for the fuel.

"We need some transparency here. There has to be some kind of audit," Khatib said.

Yet reporters never seem to blame the Palestinian Arab leadership for Gaza's woes. That seems to be exclusively Israel's fault.

Hating Israel more important to Arabs than Jerusalem is (updated)

How important is Jerusalem to Arabs?

While we are bombarded with propaganda about how central Jerusalem is to Muslims and Arabs, one of the striking ironies of the Middle East is that the Arabs who have an opportunity to visit Jerusalem are actively discouraged from doing so.

A few months ago, the Egyptian head of Al Azhar University stated that even though there is no political obstacle stopping Egyptians from visiting Jerusalem, he refuses to do so.

At about the same time, the Egyptian Olympic soccer team announced plans to play a friendly match with a Palestinian Arab team near Jerusalem - and then were forced to cancel that trip, under heavy criticism from Egypt for even considering doing something like this - even to help Palestinian Arab morale.

Soon thereafter, a popular Saudi TV preacher announced that he would broadcast a show from Jerusalem - and then he also quickly changed his mind under withering criticism from his colleagues.

Now, a Jordanian trade union has announced that Jordanians should not visit Jerusalem, even for religious purposes. Such visits, they say, fall under unacceptable "normalization" and should be fought against.

All of these proposed trips were to either be pilgrimages to Muslim holy places, or to help out Palestinian Arabs who feel isolated from even the Arab world. Yet the hatred of Israel is so acute that nothing can trump it.

While Jews will jump through hoops to visit holy places in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, Arabs are ostracized for considering doing the same for their supposedly third-holiest spot.

In fact, the one group of Arabs whose love of Jerusalem is enough for them to ignore this pressure aren't Muslims at all, but Christian Arabs who will travel from Egypt and Jordan to be in Jerusalem during Easter - even at the price of being punished back home by their employers and neighbors.

The greatest irony is that Palestinian Arabs would welcome any visit from their erstwhile "brethren." So it is not only that hating Israel is more important than the holiness of Jerusalem, but it is more important than helping Palestinian Arabs as well.

UPDATE: The Islamonazism blog points out that an Egyptian minister is indeed calling on all Muslims to visit Jerusalem - but to make Israel look bad:

Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq called on Muslims worldwide to visit Jerusalem and assert its Islamic identity.

In an interview with the Arab daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat, Zaqzouq attacked the traditional Arab policy of tourism boycott against the Jewish state. He warned Israel’s building in the city could smother Islamic sites.

"I say to those who insist on not visiting [Jerusalem] before its liberation: my worst fear is that you will have nothing to visit after Israel realizes its plans in Jerusalem and elsewhere,” Zaqzouq was quoted as saying.

Zaqzouq said his tactic of urging a worldwide conversion on Jerusalem could be used to expose any subsequent Israeli hypocrisy, should the Israeli government refuse to grant them entry permits. He said Muslims could then turn to the international community claiming religious discrimination.

"This would produce powerful leverage, in lieu of the current negative Islamic boycott," Zaqzouq said. "We are wrong to define Jerusalem as a Palestinian issue. Rather, it is a purely Islamic issue concerning 1.5 billion Muslims."

According to official data issued by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, only 1,870 Egyptians entered Israel in the first six months of this year. In comparison, some 77,000 Israeli traveled to Egypt during the same period.

"There are two sources of pressure preventing Egyptians from traveling to Israel," Sobhy Essaila, a researcher at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies told The Media Line. "The first is social and peer pressure placed on any individual wishing to travel to Israel. The second is the notion that the Egyptian security keeps a record of anyone traveling there."

Essaila denied that the Egyptian security apparatus outwardly pressured Egyptians not to travel to Israel, but the simple fact that they were being monitored put people off any visit. He added that traveling to Israel was regarded as a form of normalization which was widely rejected by the average Egyptian.

Recent clashes between Hamas and Islamic Jihad

Palestine Press Agency reports on a number of recent incidents showing increasing friction between Hamas and the Islamic Jihad movement, its largest rival in Gaza, as well as other Islamist movements.

While they usually cooperate, Islamic Jihad is more extreme than Hamas and has sworn to continue shooting rockets at Israel.

Last Thursday there was an armed confrontation between Hamas and Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades. Apparently, members of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades were mocking Islamic Jihad members and they retaliated by shooting. Hamas struck back, and someone ended up in the hospital after being shot in the legs.

Both groups are downplaying the incident.

Even people with academic robes can lie.

In an article at European Voice, entitled "The Gaza Prison,"current Oxford chancellor( also the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former European commissioner for external affairs) Chris Patten parrots lies about Israel and Gaza. Here's just one paragraph:

When I was in Gaza before the Second Intifada, there were many examples of entrepreneurial activity – factories and farms. Most of that has been stamped out. As the assault on Gaza ended in 2009, Israeli military bulldozers flattened factories. The imposition of a border zone has gobbled up 29% of the strip's agricultural land.

This single paragraph illustrates everything wrong about how Gaza is portrayed by purportedly well-meaning, educated people. It contains not only Palestinian Arab lies that Patten swallows whole, but also a lie that he himself wants to push.

Patten waxes eloquent about Gaza's economy before the second intifada (that he helpfully capitalizes, indicating perhaps a bit of approval for that spree of terror.) Then he states how bad it is now - implying that it is because of Israeli actions in 2009.

This is a lie.

The Gazan economy went south as a direct result of the intifada, not because of Israeli actions. There are two major reasons that 34% of Gazans are unemployed today. One is because Israeli companies pulled out of Gaza in the wake of the wave of terror that came out of Gaza starting in 2001 - including many attacks on the factories themselves. The Erez Industrial Zone limped along for a couple of years but finally had to shut down.

The other is that Hamas violently took over Gaza in 2007.

A chart of unemployment in Gaza from 1999-2006 shows clearly the effects of the first:

	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006
Unemployment in Gaza	17	19.5	34.1	38.1	29.2	35.4	30.3	34.8

I don't have the detailed breakdown of unemployment since then, but between 2006 and today the rate had increased to over 40% - around the time of Hamas' takeover of Gaza - and is now back down to 34%, the same level it was at the start of the intifada.

In other words, the blame for Gaza's economic woes should go to the terrorist organiations that operate out of, and now run, Gaza. And the implication that Israel purposefully "stamped out" Gaza's industries is not only a lie, but a calumny.

Where did Patten get the information that Israel viciously and wantonly "flattened factories" at the end of Operation Cast Lead? While Goldstone claimed that there was no military purpose for Israel's damaging the Al Badr flour mill and the Sawfeary chicken farms, the IDF disputes both those accounts - and even Goldstone didn't claim that Israel worked to flatten factories after the fighting was largely over. The idea that Israel maliciously flattened factories in Gaza is a lie. This is a product of a fevered imagination, not what one would expect from a leader of an institution of higher learning who should know the difference between facts and propaganda he was fed during his visit to Gaza.

Finally, the supposed "fact" that Israel's buffer zone in Gaza - one whose purpose Patten is mysteriously silent about - takes up 29% of Gaza's agricultural land is also an easily proven lie.

What could cause a respected British academic and former diplomat believe - and propagate - lies about Israel? How much is his own willingness to believe those who lie to him, and how much is his desire to spread his own versions of these easily debunked lies? Perhaps most importantly, why is Patten silent on any possible reason that Israel might have to treat the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as a less-than-friendly territory?

Putting these questions together indicates that Patten is not just clueless, but malicious. It is more than sickening that a person in such a position of prestige has no qualms about writing such a shoddy and transparent piece of anti-Israel propaganda.

(h/t Paula from Philosémitisme Blog)

UPDATE: R-MEW has some background on Patten:

The ICG is led by former EU Commissioner for External Relations and current Oxford University Chancellor, Chris Patten, along with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour. Patten you may recall, rejected an inquiry in 2003 into the diversion of European taxpayer funds to finance Palestinian suicide bombers because he "needed an investigation like a hole in the head". In recent years, Patten's Oxford has been the recipient of over $300 million in donations from the Saudis. Arbour is famous for having originally endorsed the wildly antisemitic and oxymoronic Arab Charter of Human Rights while with the UN.

But I thought that "settlers" stole all the water!

From Ma'an:

Palestinian Authority police have dispersed two fights in the southern West Bank city of Hebron and the nearby Nuba village, detaining 15 suspected of involvement.

Police said a fight broke out at a public swimming pool, where suspects used clubs and pelted one another with stones. Five sustained various injuries, and five others were detained.

You mean, Hebron - the town of 70,000 Arabs held hostage by a few hundred Jews - has a swimming pool? But I thought that the settlers stole all the water of the West Bank for their own wasteful swimming pools and the poor Palestinian Arabs had none to drink, let alone swim in!

Here's a photo of a pool in Hebron that I somehow managed to find last year when the BBC had written a story about how Palestinian Arab water was all taken by evil Israelis.

And that is hardly the only swimming pool in the territories.

Recalibrating the "humanitarian crisis in Gaza" meme

For literally decades, we have been hearing about how Gaza was suffering from a "humanitarian crisis." Back in December 2007, a full year before the Gaza war, I enumerated how this "crisis" had been spoken about since at least 1993!

No one is saying that Gaza is a paradise. However, it not nearly as bad as it has been portrayed, and years of skewed and misleading coverage from NGOs and reporters with an agenda have succeeded in giving the world a very inaccurate picture of Gaza. As a result, Gaza has gotten much more attention, and much more money, than the tens of millions of people who really need it and who really are ignored.

In the wake of bloggers noticing Gaza's gourmet restaurants, spas, luxury hotels, the new mall, water parks and other resorts, the media has finally started to give a more nuanced view of Gaza. In this unintentionally funny piece in Slate, a clueless reporter is shocked that Gaza really isn't like sub-Saharan Africa:

GAZA CITY—Aid officials in Gaza all recite the same statistics: "44 percent unemployment [actually, 34%, we cannot expect a Slate reporter to actually check the facts, can we? -EoZ], 80 percent food-aid dependent, and 60 percent living on less than $2 a day." It sounds like a script they've grown tired of delivering to passing journalists.

After multiple rounds of similar briefings, I'm staring at Kamla Joudah's parlor in Nuseirat refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The warm beige tones of the furniture reflect the heat, and the walls gleam. The frequently cut power is on today, so the fan whirls. Tea and coffee are brought out on a small tray.

Kamla catches me appraising her home. "What are you looking at?" she asks, with some pique.
"Your house," I reply, "It's very nice."

She looks at me quizzically, "This is not Darfur," she snaps. The family members in the room burst out laughing as I blush.

The oft-recited statistics paint a bleak picture of life in the territory. But Gaza is a lot more complicated than the numbers suggest.

Comments like Kamla's are common here; everyone I speak to insists the coastal enclave is nothing like Somalia, Bangladesh, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. And people are indignant that I suggested it might be in the same league as those places.

Notice that the reporter went to what should be the worst place in Gaza - a refugee camp. Many Gazans live in their own houses, outside the camps. Her astonishment was at how good the worst part of Gaza was.

Yet journalists do not want to admit their part in this massive deception. Instead, they move the goalposts so that the "humanitarian crisis" is redefined to be a lot less crisis-like:

"There is food in Gaza. It's not a humanitarian crisis. There is no hunger, there is no starvation, but there is a crisis of another nature," says Mahmoud Daher, a World Health Organization official in Gaza, who was expressing his personal views, not those of his organization.

As Daher explains, the blockade has dramatically altered the standard of living for Palestinians in the territory. In three years, he assesses, Gazans have lost 20 years of economic development. And in that decline lies the root of the crisis in Gaza as he sees it.

"Inability to access quality care is a crisis, inability for people to produce and have access to jobs is a crisis, inability of people to get the quality of education that they are used to is a crisis, and above all [it is] a crisis of dignity—a crisis of humanity," Daher tells me.

Um, not exactly the same as starvation, is it? No flies buzzing around kids with distended stomachs and vacant stares. Instead, Gaza has to worry about the next 20,000 laptops that UNRWA is distributing to their kids.

The reporter doesn't ask about how Hamas is getting its money, or what restrictions on movement are from the Gaza de facto government. She doesn't ask about the flotillas bringing expired medicines to garner headlines. She doesn't ask about why the blockade exists to begin with. No, for her, Gaza seems to have sprung into existence in January 2009, and while she is shocked that her journalist colleagues have misled her since then, she needs to write an article about how bad things are, and that's what she'll do.

But she will not ask the basic questions: if Gaza is not so bad off, then shouldn't the billions it is receiving be better spent elsewhere? Shouldn't more of the burden for Gaza fall to their fellow oil-rich Arabs, rather than Westerners who should be putting their money in places like Bangladesh and the Congo? Why are the "human rights" activists so fixated on a territory whose poorest citizens are the envy not only of many Africans but even of poor Arabs in other countries?

(h/t Silke, who gave me a very nice compliment over at CiFWatch. Thanks!)

More on Arab sexual harassment of female "peace activists"

A few weeks ago I blogged about an attempted rape of an American "peace activist" in the territories, and the pressure to hush it up.

JoeSettler at The Muqata has uncovered more facts - including that this has been a known phenomenon among the anti-Israel community for a while, to the point that they even held a workshop about it on how women activists should deal with the apparently inevitable fact of their being harassed or attacked while being hosted by their Arab friends.

The cognitive dissonance of these supposedly progressive activists working to help a very regressive society somehow doesn't seem to take hold.

Just another week in the 62-year old siege of the Jewish state

It is worthwhile to step back and notice the events of the week:

A rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza, hitting a rehabilitation center. (Another attempted firing of a rocket exploded prematurely.)

Five or six rockets were fired from the Sinai towards Israel, killing a Jordanian.

And snipers from the Lebanese Army killed an Israeli officer and wounded another.

All of these attacks were unprovoked. All of them were intended to kill Israelis.

In other words, here was just another week when Israel was fired upon from all directions. Not a terribly atypical week, either.

With all of the insults that are hurled at the State of Israel every hour of every day permeating the media, it is easy to forget that Israel really is a nation surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who want to see it disappear; and some of them are motivated to actually do something to help that process along.

The question isn't how can Israel act as bad as people say it does - the question is how come it doesn't! How can a tiny nation, literally surrounded by enemies, manage to keep its collective sanity and morality? How come there isn't martial law? How come Egypt has been in an official state of emergency for almost the entire time since 1967, and Israel isn't? How can Israel remain an oasis of Western values and of liberal standards when in such a constant state of alert against attacks from all directions?

Some people don't believe in miracles. But it is hard to look at Israel and think it is anything but.

Three lighter Gulf stories

From Gulf News:

A Saudi groom was slapped by his mother on his wedding night when he tried , in a romantic Cinderella-inspired touch, to put a shoe on his bride’s foot.

“The shocked mother was so infuriated by the sight of her son helping the bride wear her shoe that she slapped him amid the laughter of the women guests,” Okaz daily reported on Thursday.
“The groom had reportedly agreed with his bride that she walks into the reception hall wearing only one shoe and that her sister would carry the second shoe. The plan was that he would later take the shoe and put it on the bride’s foot in front of the guests. His family was not told about the perceived romantic gesture,” the newspaper said.

However, the groom’s mother became so upset that she hit and insulted him on the grounds that he did not behave as “a genuine traditional oriental man.”

The groom eventually left the reception hall in Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia and took his bride to the airport to fly to Malaysia for their honeymoon, the paper said.

In a separate incident in the same city, angry wedding guests left the reception hall after the families of the bride and groom screened a short film “that failed to respect privacy.”

According to Okaz, the short clip highlighted the different stages of the lives of both the bride and the groom, from their early years throughout school and adolescence, and ended with the couple hugging and exchanging a kiss.

However, some guests were shocked, charging that the clip was not acceptable and that it was inspired by movies screened on private television channels.

An attempt by a group of Gulf national women to enforce a dress code led a British tourist to strip down to her bikini at Dubai Mall.

A group of Gulf national women recently tried to enforce a dress code morally acceptable to them by distributing leaflets to women they found to be dressed inappropriately, a Dubai Mall official said.

A British tourist who was approached objected to the gesture and stripped down to a bikini she was wearing underneath in defiance.

Who knew Arabs read Mad magazine?

I just saw this cartoon in Al Quds al Arabi, about the many people in Lebanon recently accused of being Israeli spies:

(For those who don't understand my headline, see here.)

Latest Zionist outrage: Destroying fake graves!

Palestine Today reports on an outraged statement by the Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation, claiming that on Wednesday night, Israel bulldozed dozens of ancient Islamic graves in the Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem, calling it a "heinous crime."

Can you imagine? Jews destroying Muslim graves? How low can they go?

However, there seems to be another side to this story. From Arutz-7:

Following the exclusive Arutz Sheva report Wednesday morning that Muslims were enlarging the Mamilla cemetery with fake tombs, authorities removed the tombs by Wednesday evening.

Dozens of false tombs were “planted” just west of the cemetery, on land that is part of Independence Park (Gan HaAtzmaut) at city center. There were no graves beneath the tombs.

The fake tombs were removed by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israel Lands Authority.

A municipality employee told Arutz Sheva that the faux graves were apparently part of a plan to have the Muslim Waqf submit a demand for the additional land to be placed under Muslim ownership.

The Wednesday report included video of the fake graves.

Here was the statement from the Jerusalem mayor's office:

The Jerusalem Municipality located the illegal activity at the site yesterday. The Municipality has contacted the Israel Lands Authority as the owner of the land to return things to their former state. The Municipality will not allow extremist elements to act illegally to change the status quo.