PA threatens Arabs who want real peace

Ami Isseroff has, pretty much single-handedly, written an encyclopedia of everything related to Israel and the Middle East conflict and put it on-line, along with news, a blog, and who knows what else. Although the sites are difficult to navigate, there is an enormous trove of information an reference material there.

Isseroff is a centrist. He wants a two-state solution. He desperately wants peace. He is in contact with the Palestinian Arab "peace camp."

Which is why his latest post is worth reading:

It hurts me to admit this. As a Zionist, I really wish that the much hoped-for peace was really just around the corner. I wish that Israel could give up a few square meters of real estate and obtain peace. I know it will not happen. I am compelled to admit that by every indication, the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that begin this week will be a farcical charade. They cannot be saved by any amount of Israeli concessions. ...

One certain indication that the peace talks must fail is the flood of mail that I have gotten of late from Palestinian peace and dialog groups, and from every Palestinian or other Arab who ever spoke out for peace or sanity. They beg me to remove this or that article or section from a Web site where they are quoted as advocating peace with Israel or coexistence. They say - not for publication - that they are subject to a reign of terror: Emails; Hints; Phone calls in the night; Officials of the '"clean-as-a-whistle" "moderate" "not-like-Arafat" Palestinian National Authority telling them they had better toe the line - or it will be bad for their organization or their personal health.

My Palestinian and Arab friends and others who have asked me to remove their Web pages and demanded that I be silent about it, can be thankful that I do not follow their wishes: Speaking out is the only way to expose state terror. My advice to all those who are threatened is to speak out, loud and clear. But it is their decision. I will not name names. I can only decide what is right for myself.

Everyone who is in any way active in peace and dialog has to have heard echoes of the whisper campaign. The Palestinian youth orchestra that was dismantled because it played for Israeli Holocaust survivors, the One Voice event that was canceled because of death threats, are public manifestations of the same terror. All this happened not in Hamas - ruled Gaza, but, embarrassingly, in the West Bank, ruled by the "moderate" Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority, Israel's "peace partners." The people who are terrorized into begging me to remove their names, their articles and their organizations from any Web site that has the remotest connection with Israel, all are from the West Bank, the land of the Palestinian National Authority, not Gaza. Think about what this means.

This is one of the most under-reported stories out there. The PA is not close to moderate by any objective measure - in fact, they are far more intransigent than any Israeli government in history. Yet the media chooses to highlight how "moderate" they are  in order to fulfill what they believe is a greater good of promoting a mythical "peace." The result is that stories like these are ignored or minimized, and the PA is presented as a moderate government in opposition to the right-wing, hard-line Likud.

Centrist Zionists know the facts, and they yearn for a two-state solution anyway. Yet they are not willing to give up anything close to what the PA is demanding, knowing that on the ground, such concessions would lead to disaster. These simple facts are not reported at all.

Peace - real peace - cannot be built on lies and obfuscation. The ugly reality of the so-called "moderates" of Fatah and the PA needs to be exposed. When the media doesn't do its job, it is not serving the cause of peace - it is instead endangering many, many lives.

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Islamists in Jordan call for teaching schoolkids to hate Jews

Al Quds al Arabi reports that the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, which is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, has called on Jordanian schools to add more incitement in their textbooks against Jews and Israel.

In 2006/2007, Jordanian schools started teaching a little bit about Jewish history, and this is regarded as unacceptable.

The announcement calls for a return to the curriculum that Jordanian textbooks have had until then  (and that were used in Palestinian Arab schools as well) where the Jews were regarded as dishonest and corrupt. The IAF also calls for schools to teach about Israeli threats to Jordan, the true face of "world Zionism" (which means world Jewry) and alleged Jewish destruction of Muslim holy places.

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Correction: Algerian ship arrived in El Arish Thursday

Last Sunday I noted that the "blockade busting ship" that the media said was headed for Gaza - and that I said was headed for El Arish - never seemed to make it. I had assumed that it had arrived without any fanfare.

Well, it turns out it was just delayed. The ship arrived yesterday afternoon - in El Arish, naturally.

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al-Zahar says terrorism unrelated to negotiations

Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar, trying to publicly distance the Hamas Gaza leadership and the al-Qassam Brigades, bizarrely claimed that the two terror attacks this week in the West Bank were not related to the resumption of negotiations in Washington this week.

This despite the fact that the al Qassam Brigades made that exact link.

Zahar said that Hamas has no interest in stopping the negotiations, although it is skeptical about the results and will not accept any compromise with Israel.

He stopped short of saying that the attacks were a coincidence; just that the Al Qassam Brigades happened to take the opportunity to kill Jews when it presented itself. He also claimed that it was a reflection of the "pressure" that Palestinian Arabs suffer in the West Bank, as if things have not been improving steadily there for the past few years.

The article seems to imply that Zahar is trying to forestall any Israeli retaliation in Gaza itself. Or maybe he's just trying to make sure that he is not personally targeted by a drone missile.

Arab leaders have proven time and time again their ability to lie effortlessly. The question is, why does the media still take anything they say at face value?

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Tomorrow is al-Quds Day!

Tomorrow is the last Friday of Ramadan, and therefore it is time for the annual al Quds Day, a holiday declared by the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in 1979.

Officially, the holiday is meant to strengthen Islamic ties to Jerusalem and show solidarity with Palestinian Arabs.

In reality, it is just an excuse to bash Israel and the Western world.

There are lots of Iranian news articles about the day, and some of them reveal the festival's real theme.

The Head of Iran's Parliamentary Commission on Foreign Policy and National Security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said "the key issue for Palestine is to revive the memories of the Zionists' atrocities." Not a state, not Jerusalem, but the key issue is to talk about "Zionists' atrocities." How's that for incitement?

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, realizing that inter-Muslim unity is a myth, blames their discord on the West and "called for an epic turn-out on al-Quds day to foil world power's plot to sow discord among Muslims."

Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri said that Quds Day "appears to pave the way for the collapse of Israel and its allies, namely the US and Britain."

The Iranian foreign ministry said that they "hoped for high demo turnout in the demonstrations in a bid to disappoint the Zionist enemy."

Sorry, but nothing that they can do can disappoint us. One cannot be disappointed in people who are already beneath contempt.

But since the topic has come up, here is my annual Quds Day video:

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Fareed Zakaria a bit inconsistent on religious tolerance

Recently, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria publicly returned an award that he had received five years ago from the Anti-Defamation League called the Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. He was upset that the ADL had publicly urged the Muslim community in New York to consider moving the proposed mosque/Islamic community center near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center to another location where the sensitivity of families of the victims would be respected.

Zakaria's argument is that the people behind the proposed building are moderate Muslims whose views should be supported. He was unclear on how their views cannot be supported from a few blocks further away, or even how the entire controversy had already made it impossible for most Americans to be able to listen objectively to these supposedly moderate Muslims - something that would have been accomplished very well had they publicly acknowledged the pain that the chosen site was causing.

Zakaria's viewpoint, as flawed as it is, is legitimate. He is taking an absolutist position on freedom of religion and that can be considered an admirable position in the abstract.

Recently he said something interesting on CNN. At the end of a segment where he discussed the restoration of a synagogue in Beirut, Zakaria said (from Big Journalism:)

So why did this nation, often teetering on the brink of religious hostilities and hostilities with Israel, restore a Jewish house of worship? To show that Lebanon is an open and tolerant country.

And indeed, the project is said to have found support in many parts of the community, not just from the few remaining Jews there, but also Christians and Muslims and Hezbollah. Yes, Hezbollah — the one that the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Hezbollah’s view on the renovation goes like this. “We respect divine religions, including the Jewish religion. The problem is with Israel’s occupation of Arab lands … not with the Jews.” Food for thought.

To the uninitiated, this might sound consistent with his position on the Islamic center - freedom of religion for all.

Others have pointed out the incongruity of Hezbollah's calls to destroy the Jewish state with its supposed respect for Judaism as a "divine religion." Others have also pointed out the small fact that there is a reason why the Jewish community in Lebanon has almost disappeared, and that this reason is rather contradictory to the soothing words being said in English by a Hezbollah spokesman. One can also mention that the very idea that the Jewish people, alone among all nations, have no rights of self-determination is an inherently anti-semitic position.

Yet if Zakaria had done a tiny amount of homework he would have seen that Hezbollah and its leader really are pure anti-semites completely out of the context of Israel.

Remember the Buenos Aries bombing of a Jewish community center? 86 people were killed, and Hezbollah together with its Iranian allies was behind it.

Moreover, Nasrallah said "If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide". (Lebanon Daily Star, Oct. 23, 2002)

Also in 2002 he said

If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.

And MEMRI quotes him as calling Jews "grandsons of apes and pigs" and "Allah's most cowardly and greedy creatures."

(Quotes are from CAMERA.)

Is Zakaria so naive as to think that Hezbollah's public support for a synagogue that will have no worshippers to serve a community that fled religious persecution is an example of religious tolerance? Doesn't all evidence seem to support the idea rather that Hezbollah holds  Jews must remain, at best, second-class citizens, dhimmis under Islamic rule?

For Zakaria to quote this Hezbollah official and ignore the massive amounts of evidence of clear anti-semitism on the part of Hezbollah's leadership indicates that Zakaria's position on religious intolerance is not quite as clear cut as his denunciation of the ADL would indicate.

(h/t Joel for the original Big Journalism link)

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Hamas Gaza "refugee" group denounces UNRWA

Hamas paper Palestine Times has an article about "The Committee on the Affairs of Palestinian Refugees" and its problems with UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip.

Among their problems:

- The creation of a UNRWA Women's Committee meant to foster equal rights between men and women is really meant to end chastity and purity.

- UNRWA sometimes sponsors trips for students where they are in danger of meeting Jews and Zionists.

- UNRWA schools were rumored to have taught about the Holocaust which teaches students to sympathize with Jews

- Some schools have more females than males, causing them to have more female teachers than male teachers

- UNRWA salaries are too high

- UNRWA's services have decreased as their budget gets stretched.

It seems that the more that Arabs complain about UNRWA, the more that UNRWA defends them.

(h/t Ali)

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Saeb Erekat: "I am a liar" (video)

Over the past few days, Israelis have been inundated with a slick advertising campaign, financed by the US and created by the left wing "Geneva Initiative," to convince them that the current government does not want peace and that Palestinian Arabs do.

Here is my take on one of the commercials, starring everyone's favorite liar, Saeb Erekat.

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Hamas takes credit for Ramallah shooting, promises more

The front page of the Al Qassam Brigades website shows this new picture:

The words say "No running away from the 'Flood of Fire' " - which is what they named yesterday's attack near Hebron. The road sign shows the sign for "Bani Naim" which is the Arab village near that attack, and the question mark indicates that more such attacks are to come.

In the article where they take credit for the Ramallah attack today, they say explicitly that "Flood of Fire" is meant to be a series of attacks, not a single operation.They also say that "this operation will not be the last." Moreover, they have choice words about the "wimps" of the PA and their attempts to capture them.

(h/t Ali for translation)

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New shooting attack; 2 injured (updated)

From YNet:

The Magen David Adom emergency services' spokesman said Wednesday that two people were injured, apparently after being shot, at the Rimonim junction in Binyamin.

MDA teams are on their way to the scene. No further details are currently available.

My Right Word:

New Shooting Incident Reported; 2 Injured

On the road between Kochav HaShachar and Rimonim.


UPDATE 23:42


One critical; one light.

The car went off the road into a deep ditch.

Helicopter transport to hospital.

23:49

The car was traveling between Rimonim Junction and Kochav Yaakov (which would be close to Route 60. The critical wounded is having emergency respiration applied.

Maariv also says one in critical condition.

See the usual Israeli blogs (Israellycool, My Right Word, The Muqata) for updates - I will not be near a computer.

UPDATE: One was moderately injured, the other lightly:

IDF Central Command Spokesman Peter Lerner, who arrived at the site of Wednesday's attack, said the shooting victims managed to get out of the vehicle and flee the scene.

"The wounded came out of the vehicle and ran away to the wadi, where they waited for fear that they would be killed," he said. "Later they climbed back and called for help…the army, Shin Bet, and police have launched an investigation into the incident, yet at this moment there are no leads."

The attackers apparently fired at the Israeli car from a passing vehicle, he said.

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Miracle (Allah) ear, 2010 edition

Back in 2007, I had a story about a Palestinian arab baby born with an ear that resembled the Arabic word Allah:

For reference:

At the time there was a spate of similar sightings - in fish, in British ice-cream cone logos, honeycombs, tsunami wave patterns, and clouds.

Well, according to PalTimes,we now have another PalArab kid with the Miracle-Ear:

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Libya releasing jihadists from prison

This little story seems to have slipped under the wire....

Libya freed 37 prisoners late on Tuesday, including at least one former detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, who had been jailed for links to radical Islamist groups but have since renounced violence.

The prisoners were kissed and hugged by waiting relatives when they walked out of the Abu Salim prison near Tripoli, in the latest in a series of releases designed to draw a line under radical Islamist violence in Libya.

"These releases come in the context of national reconciliation and social peace," said Mohamed al Allagi, chairman of the human rights committee of the Gaddafi Foundation, the charity which helped organise the release.

The charity is headed by Saif al-Islam, a reform-minded son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi who some analysts say could eventually succeed his father.

Saif al-Islam has campaigned for reconciliation with Islamists who promise to lay down their arms.

More than 700 prisoners accused of having ties to Islamist militant groups have now been released under the reconciliation programme, but over 300 are still behind bars, according to figures given by Libyan officials.

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Fayyad: Two-thirds of pledges for 2010 not paid

Palestine Press Agency quotes the Wafa PA agency interview with Salam Fayyad.

It the interview, he says that paying PA salaries should not be affected by their budget crisis, but he reveals that out of the $1.8 billion pledged by the international community to prop up the PA this year, only $605 million have been paid so far.

He reiterated that he intends to make the PA self-sufficient, and of course blames Israel for their financial problems.

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Anti-semitic, anti-Christian Iranian Ramadan TV series

From Terrorism-Info:

1. The series "The Christ" (Al-sayid al-masih in Arabic) was broadcast at the beginning of August 2010 in Lebanon both by Al-Manar TV, Hezbollah's satellite channel, and the Shi’ite Lebanese channel NBN-TV, affiliated with the Amal movement and Nabih Berri. It was broadcast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a time when the rate of television viewing is particularly high in the Muslim world. It was also broadcast by the Iranian Arabic-language channel Al-Kawthar TV.

2. The Christian community in Lebanon strongly protested the program, and after broadcasting the first few episodes Al-Manar TV and NBN TV were forced to announce they were taking the series off the air. Despite the storm raised by the broadcasts in Lebanon, the Iranian channel Al-Kawthar TV continued airing it.

...5. Produced in Iran in 2008, the series tells the story of the life of Jesus. The plot of the story shows the Muslim point of view that he was a prophet, but not the most important one (that distinction is reserved for Muhammad). In addition, according to Islam, there is no foundation for the Holy Trinity.

...7. In addition to the offensive treatment of Jesus, in the first two episodes there are clear examples of anti-Semitism. The Jews are depicted as conspirators, liars, traitors, cowards, evil, ugly greedy and Satanic. The Jewish residents of Jerusalem are represented as crooked merchants.

Jews in the series: A Jew informs on plotters againt the Roman authorities

Jews in the series: Jews counterfeit coins to build the next Temple.

Jesus calls the Jewish priests "sons of snakes" several times (the snake is a familiar anti-Semitic motif).

A priest says the Israelites have sunk to the depths.

The Jews are worried by Jesus' success, and one says, "This may destroy our profits."

Jesus again calls the Jews "sons of snakes."

Jesus to his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee:
"Among the Israelites are many devils who stir up terrible civil wars."

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Joel)

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Monday's NYT bias

This is the reason I don't read the Western media - because when I do, I can't stop myself from fisking it, and that takes time.

Boker Tov Boulder pointed to an NYT article on Monday:

As preparations intensify for a Palestinian-Israeli summit meeting in Washington on Thursday, the crude outlines of a Palestinian state are emerging in the West Bank, with increasingly reliable security forces, a more disciplined government and a growing sense among ordinary citizens that they can count on basic services.

Personal checks, long shunned as being unredeemable, are now widely accepted. Traffic tickets are issued and paid, movie theaters are opening and public parks are packed with families late into the summer nights. Economic growth in the first quarter of this year was 11 percent over the same period in 2009, the International Monetary Fund says.

“I’ve never seen Nablus so alive,” Caesar Darwazeh, who owns a photography studio, said on Sunday night as throngs of people enjoyed balloons and popcorn, a four-wagon train taking merrymakers through the streets.

Sounds pretty good, right? Netanyahu's plan to create an "economic peace" is paying dividends and Palestinian Arabs are doing well.

Then comes the "but...."

Of course, the West Bank remains occupied by Israel. It is filled with scores of Israeli settlements, some 10,000 Israeli troops and numerous roadblocks and checkpoints that render true ordinary life impossible for the area’s 2.5 million Palestinians.

Hold on - weren't we just reading about "true ordinary life"? Isn't "true ordinary life" the ability to go to the park, to the movies, write checks, have businesses, raise families?

Some 96% of Palestinian Arabs were living in Areas A and B, under PA administrative control. Most are under PA security control as well. How exactly is Israel making their lives impossible?

Is it because of checkpoints, of which many have been dismantled? Does this mean that the thousands of commuters who are stuck for 45 minute delays every day at the bridges and tunnels of New York are not living "true ordinary lives?"

The Times does not say. It is simply a fact: even though their lives are pretty darn good, they are not good enough. They are not indistinguishable from people living in Long Island, which appears to be the reference point.

(Even though a large number of Arab towns visible from the highway actually do look pretty good. Some of their mansions would put those Long Island towns to shame.)

And if they are going to mention the 10,000 Israeli troops stationed in the West bank, why don't they mention how many PA security forces are there? The number was about 15,000 in 2004, far more than what was agreed upon during Oslo. No, context is not exactly what the NYT is going for. 

Here we see the NYT describe in detail why things are good, then declare that things are really bad without giving any examples of how this "occupation" is hurting them - especially for the majority living in Area A, which by any real definition cannot be considered "occupied."

Seems a wee bit biased.

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