Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Erratic schedule open thread

Going to a conference tomorrow for a couple of days; blogging will likely be light.

This whole month will be erratic, come to think of it.

Oh well. Carry on.

Mural of Israeli NBA player defaced with swastika

From CBS Sacramento:

Sacramento police are investigating the vandalism to a mural of Sacramento Kings' player Omri Casspi as a hate crime, and the mural's artist says it has been vandalized before.

Passersby said they were caught off guard when they noticed a swastika had been scratched between the Jewish athlete's eyes on the mural on 16th Street and R Street. It also appeared as though someone had tried to scratch the symbol away.

"It's weird to think there are people like that still out there," said Ravina Bhan.

With no surveillance cameras aimed at the mural, police don't know when the vandalism took place. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, even though the swastika was drawn incorrectly.

Huge dropoff in Gulf aid for PA this year

From Reuters:

The United Arab Emirates has donated $42 million (27 million pounds) to the Palestinian Authority, boosting support for President Mahmoud Abbas' cash-strapped government as it embarks on direct peace talks with Israel, Arab officials said on Friday.

An Arab source in Washington said the donation, which was confirmed by a Palestinian government spokesman, was made after repeated calls by senior U.S. officials for more Arab support to help build Palestinian government capacity.
...

The Palestinian Authority's main Arab donors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have contributed considerably less this year than they have annually since 2007.

So far, the Saudis have donated $30.6 million until August, compared to $241.1 million in the same period in 2009. The new donation by the UAE, the world's third-largest oil exporter, is its first this year -- it gave $173.9 million in 2009.

That means that Saudi Arabia slashed its support for the PA by 87% this year, and the UAE by 75%.

Earlier this year, UNRWA mentioned that Arab nations have paid less that 20% of their pledges to that organization, a miniscule 1.5% of the UNRWA budget.

So apparently it is not just the PA that Arab nations don't care about, but Palestinian Arabs altogether.

Shouldn't people in the US and Europe be wondering why Arabs care less about their fellow Arabs than the West does?

Palestinian Arabs in Europe against peace talks

Over twenty Palestinian Arab organizations in Europe have signed a letter criticizing Mahmoud Abbas' negotiating with Israel, saying that he will sell out on Jerusalem and the "right of return" without representing them.

They claim that Abbas is covering up the Zionist killing of Palestinian Arabs, the Judaizing of Jerusalem, and the creation of ghettos for Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, as well as collaborating with the Israelis.

The letter concluded that the "Palestinian people" will certainly not tolerate any such moves.

Groups that signed the letter included The General Secretariat of the Conference of Palestinians in Europe, Palestinian Return Centre, London, Palestinian Doctors in Europe, the Association of Palestinian Engineers in Europe, the Association of Palestinian Women in Europe, The Denmark Palestinian Forum, Britain Palestinian Forum, the Palestinian Center for Justice, the Palestinian Assembly of Italy, the Austrian Association of Palestine, the Palestinian Forum of the Netherlands, , the Palestinian Forum of France, the Association of Germany of the Right of Return, the Palestinian Assembly of the Netherlands, Sweden Palestinian Engineers Association, Union of Palestinian Artists in Sweden, Union of Palestinian Teachers in Sweden, and the Palestinian Assembly - Ireland.

Palestinian Arabs who live in Europe have traditionally been far more ideologically hawkish than the ones who live in the West Bank.

The war between Hamas and Fatah gets religious

In recent weeks, PA's Minister of Religious Endowments Mahmoud Habash has become Fatah's point man on fighting Hamas from a religious Islamic perspective.

Last week he railed against Hamas' compliments of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, saying that Knomeini had said things that were against Islam.

Yesterday Habash called on Hamas to repent for its coup in Gaza on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr and again slammed Iran for meddling in Palestinian affairs via Hamas.

Hamas recently criticized Habash for politicizing the mosques in the West Bank and for allegedly closing pro-Hamas mosques on the first day of the Eid festival.

Jewish plot to corrupt the Koran revealed!

From YNet:

Algeria ordered thousands of Koran books whose covers bear a Jewish symbol to be removed from shelves.

Algerians who had already purchased the books decorated with a Star of David were urged to return them to stores in exchange for another Koran or their money back.

According to the Algerian government, the symbol on the cover "is not in keeping with the general ethics of the state".

The United Arab Emirates-based Al-Bayan quoted an official from the Algerian Ministry of Religious Affairs as saying that a private businessman had imported the books from Egypt, and that censoring authorities were accusing him of "disrupting public order".

Members of parliament also expressed outrage, placing blame on the religious affairs minister and threatening to outlaw individual importation of the holy book.

Some commenters at Islam Today are convinced that this was a Zionist - or Jewish - plot.

I need to remind the Quran Division back at the International Zionist Web HQ not to be so damn obvious.

(By the way, Islamic art has historically used the six-pointed star. Here is a tile pattern from Persia in the 13th-14th centuries.

And here is a detail from a decoration of a mosque in Lahore, Pakistan.)

Shana tova u'metuka!

As usual this time of year, my most popular post is not recent, but this one from 2008, because when people are Googling for "Shana Tova U'Metuka" or "שנה טובה ומתוקה" my post from that year still comes out near the top. (And I did design that apple and honey-dripper from scratch, unlike this year...) For those who reach this page to find out what it means, the translation is simply "A good and sweet year." Some 12% of the blog hits today are for that post, and that number is increasing.

I wish all of my readers a happy and sweet New Year. May we all be written in the Book of Life, and enjoy a year of health, a year of prosperity, a year of joy, and a year of peace.

I will not be blogging until Sunday or so.

Sarah Palin holds like Rabbi Eliezer

There is a disagreement in the Talmud whether the world was created in the Hebrew month of Tishrei or Nisan.* Rabbi Yehoshua says Tishrei and Rabbi Eliezer says Nisan. (Tr. Rosh Hashanah 10b-11a)

Sarah Palin, in her Rosh Hashanah message, holds like R' Eliezer:

As Jewish families gather to celebrate the New Year and a new beginning marking the Day of Creation, I want to join them in praying for a good and sweet year ahead. This day marks the beginning of a period of reflection and repentance. It is a time to remember our responsibilities to our families, our communities, our country, and our world.

Glad she cleared that up!

It's a nice message, by the way. Here's the rest:

This is also a time to remember who we are as Americans and our responsibilities to help our friends and allies as they seek peace and security. The people of Israel have overcome so many challenges, taken so many risks, and made so many sacrifices in the pursuit of peace and a better life for their children. This New Year begins with a new hope for peace, but the threats to Israel – and to us – have not gone away.

These are challenging times as Iran continues to work on building a nuclear weapon, Hamas attacks innocents on the eve of peace talks, enemies refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and even in Europe and the United States we hear voices from those trying to delegitimize Israel.

To our Jewish friends and neighbors on this Rosh Hashanah, may you be inscribed in the Book of Life. And for our friends in Israel, know that the American people will continue to stand with you in this New Year as you strive for peace and security.

Shanah tovah u'metukah.
- Sarah Palin

(*To be precise, the world would have been created in either Elul or Adar; Man would have been created on the first of Tishrei or Nisan.)

High tech Rosh Hashana greetings

Just saw this cute graphic at an Israeli apps site (detail):

Israel cultivating ties with Berbers?

A few Moroccan newspapers, including Maraya Press, are reporting that Israel is cultivating contacts with the native Berbers of North Africa.

Quoting a study at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the articles claim that Israeli influence is causing the Berbers to call for normalization with Israel and some of them want to coordinate with Israel "against the Arabs."

According to the quoted study, Israel believes that the biggest obstacles to making diplomatic progress in North Africa are the Islamic movements there and the Berbers can act as a political counterweight to them, especially in Morocco and Algeria.

If I understand them correctly, the articles claim that Israel will ask the US to economically reward Morocco for its economic relations with Israel and use that as leverage to push other African states to want to cooperate more with the Jewish state.

There is a long history of Berber Jews in North Africa, although most left in the 1950s and 60s.

Leading Arab-American demolishes pro-Hamas Left

An article by Hussein Ibish in Now Lebanon:

With the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, numerous voices in the United States have been urging the inclusion of Hamas in international diplomacy, a focus on Palestinian unity, or some formal American outreach to the Palestinian Islamist group.

There are many different ways of arriving at such a position. One is to allege, as MJ Rosenberg of Media Matters has, that without Hamas there is no chance of any Palestinian leadership being able to deliver on a peace agreement. This ignores the extent to which Hamas’ appeal relies on cynicism and despair about peace, and the likely surge of legitimation for any leadership that can secure independence for the Palestinians.

Another assumes that Hamas is somehow more “authentic” than the Palestine Liberation Organization because it is a violent revolutionary group. Some have transferred sympathy for left-wing revolutionaries of the past to this ultra right-wing fundamentalist organization precisely because it is violent and revolutionary. The preposterous assertion of Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, that both Hamas and Hezbollah are part of the “global left” is only true if the left is reduced to those militantly opposed to the status quo, in which case almost all religious fanatics and almost everyone on the extreme right would be perfectly valid candidates for inclusion.

A third begins by emphasizing democracy, and confusing democracy with elections only (though elections are a sine qua non of democracy), without due attention to the need for transparent, accountable institutions. George Washington University professor Nathan Brown has recently argued that because there have been no Palestinian elections in years so that terms in office have expired, there are two equally illegitimate and authoritarian Palestinian Authorities, one in Ramallah and the other in Gaza.

Arguments assuming that elections alone are what matter and that ignore why there can be no elections (Hamas is blocking them because it rightly fears the results), and that also ignore differences in legitimacy and repression between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas rule in Gaza, invariably end up becoming a brief for Hamas’ aspirations within Palestinian society. They also make Hamas at least co-equal with the PLO as a legitimate international representative of the Palestinian people.

Harvard professor Stephen Walt recently suggested that if peace negotiations fail, “Hamas will be in a strong position” to lead “a Palestinian campaign for political rights within [a] single state, based on well-established norms of justice and democracy.” Walt doesn’t seem to understand what Hamas is, what it believes in, what it opposes, or the implications of its regional affiliations. The idea that Hamas might become a civil-rights movement for international standards of justice and democracy is simply laughable.

It was particularly ridiculous given that Walt and others were expressing similarly naïve or disingenuous opinions either right before, or in Walt’s case right after, Hamas showed its true colors once again by attempting to sabotage the current peace negotiations – which the organization fears might succeed in ending the conflict before it can unseat the PLO. This Hamas did by murdering four Israeli settlers in a drive-by shooting; it claimed “full responsibility” for the killings, called them “heroic,” vowed to repeat the crime (and tried to the very next day), and declared all Israeli settlers to be “legitimate military targets.”

If this didn’t cut through the fog of the “constructive ambiguity” employed by Hamas leaders through a relentless pattern of contradictory statements designed to appeal simultaneously to hard-core Islamists and Western sympathizers, I can’t imagine what will. Actions are the surest test of any ideology, not a mountain of contradictory rhetoric.

Ibish is hardly pro-Israel, but it is increasingly difficult to find people on the left who are willing to denounce Hamas for who they are and what they represent.

Erekat apologizes for seeming to apologize to Jews

Predictably, Saeb Erekat is in hot water with Palestinian Arabs over making his deceptive video for the Geneva Initiative where he pretends to be more peaceful than he is while addressing the Israeli people.

As we've seen before, Erekat (along with other PA officials) is a master at saying the exact opposite things in English and Arabic.

In the video, he starts off by saying, "“Shalom to you in Israel, I know we have disappointed you, I know we have been unable to deliver peace for the last 19 years."

Palestinian Arabs thought that this sounded way too close to being an apology, and they criticized him heavily.

So how does Erekat justify his words? He says that, even though this message was broadcast to the Israeli people and he used the word "we," he was only talking on behalf of both Israeli and Palestinian Arab negotiators, not on behalf of anyone else:

Unfortunately, my words are being interpreted as being said on behalf of the Palestinians to the Israeli people, which completely contradicts what I meant and what I believe. This interpretation is flawed and inconsistent with the operative part of my speech. I was talking to a negotiator and meant that we as negotiators, the Palestinians and Israelis alike, have disappointed [our people] as we have not been able to reach an agreement to end the conflict, despite the long years of negotiations.

I never thought for one moment to apologize to the Israelis on behalf of the Palestinian people, a people who suffer daily from the various policies of occupation and displacement and humiliation and [who themselves are] deserving of an apology.

I'm sure that the Geneva Initiative will issue a clarifying press release.

Israelis hack Saudi TV during Ramadan?

Palestine Today has a report that the "Mossad" had hacked into Saudi satellite channel MBC1 during a popular Ramadan TV show.

According to the article, in the middle of the show a woman with Israeli features came on the air and said in English, "We love peace, we are a people of peace..." a number of times during the 9th and 10th of Ramadan.

Well, how else can they send Rosh Hashanah greetings to Saudi Arabia?

The 9/11 conspiracy evidence that the "Truthers" ignore

This story comes from Jonathan Alter, writing in a Newsweek "web exclusive," on October 12, 2001.

This week, I went to Brooklyn in search of an “urban myth” about the World Trade Center assault. Was word of the attack on the street before Sept. 11? What I found out was chilling—this story is no myth.

...The story I was looking for had circulated less widely and in more general form. It recounted the story of a kid who bragged around school before the attacks that the World Trade Center was going to be destroyed. On Oct. 11, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, an aggressive young reporter for The New York Journal News of Westchester County, N.Y., published an article that tracked the story to New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. Shapiro identified a teacher who witnessed a freshman in her class saying the week prior to the World Trade Center attacks: “Do you see those two buildings? They won’t be standing there next week.”

“This is the only case we know of where someone said the World Trade Center was coming down prior to it happening,” a police source told me.

...Since Sept. 11, hundreds of calls have poured into the local police precinct, but real incidents have been few. ...

It’s that context that makes the story of the Pakistani freshman so strange. I can’t tell you who filled in the details for me; the heat is on, and the FBI is particularly jumpy. Both teacher and student have, with the help of the school, successfully ducked all efforts to contact them. But here’s what I’ve pieced together:

On Sept. 6—five days before the attack—Antoinette DiLorenzo, who teaches English as a second language to a class of Pakistani immigrants, led a class discussion about world events. She asked a freshman (his name has been withheld): “What are you looking at?” The youth was peering out the third-floor window toward lower Manhattan. After he made the remark about the World Trade Center not being there next week, the teacher didn’t immediately think much of it, though it stuck in her mind.

On Sept. 11, school was canceled after the attack and again the following day. On Thursday, Sept. 13, a clearly agitated DiLorenzo, saying she had been afraid to come forward, reported the incident to the principal’s office. “It scared the hell out of everyone,” according to a source at the school.

The police and FBI were alerted and 12 NYPD officers entered the school and secured DiLorenzo’s classroom for three hours, locking the doors with the students inside. While the students were brought lunch and a movie and told to be calm, the youth in question and his older brother, a sophomore, were taken to be interrogated by the FBI, stationed at the police precinct nearby.

DiLorenzo, the key to the believability of this story, was also questioned. She was described by school officials as having a superb and unblemished record in the New York school system. A police source described her as “100 percent credible.”

Moreover, according to police, the youth confirmed having made the Sept. 6 statement about the towers. At the moment he did so, his older brother elbowed him, said he had been “kidding,” and the youth in question agreed. The younger brother seemed upset and said he was “having a bad day.” When asked why, he said that his father was supposed to come back from Pakistan that day. Further details of the interrogation are unclear, in part because the FBI is not discussing it.

...So what to make of all of this? There is no doubt in my mind that the story is true. But what does it mean?

There are only three possibilities. One, the youth was clairvoyant. Two, the youth, knowing about the 1993 bombing, was just venting anger in a particularly timely way. Three, word of the attack on the World Trade Center was rumored in his neighborhood and he heard about it.
Investigators don’t know what to believe. “It’s creepy,” one told me before I got on the subway to go back to the office. “But what the hell are we going to do about it now?”

There have been thousands of articles, webpages, even movies about how 9/11 was a conspiracy by the US, or Zionists, or whoever. The evidence is laughable and the methods these "truthers" use of "just asking questions" would cast doubt on any historic event, including World War II.

Here, however, we have an incontrovertible fact: a high school kid from a Muslim community said to his classroom that the World Trade Center would not be there a week later.

Jonathen Alter is not the only reporter to cover this story. The person he mentioned, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, wrote more about it a year later. He says that the boy was not Pakistani - but Palestinian (the original article had mistakenly said Pakistani, according to Shapiro):

Many people believed this story was nothing more than an urban legend when they first heard it. Everyone has heard similar stories in the wake of such a disaster. Despite the almost unbelievable circumstances of the story, I was able to confirm it last October while working as a crime reporter for the Journal News, a New York-based Gannett newspaper. Catie Marshall, a spokeswoman for the New York City Board of Education, confirmed that school officials reported the incident to police and that the matter since had been taken over by the FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force [FBI-JTTF].

...After federal agents questioned DiLorenzo, police detectives questioned her fourth-period class to see if anyone else had heard the boy's comments. Once the detectives were finished, the boy and his brother were taken to 62nd Precinct headquarters, where two investigators with the FBI-JTTF questioned them for several hours. Their father, who was visiting Palestinian relatives in Israel at the time of the attacks, was scheduled to fly home Sept. 11 on a commercial airliner, but he was delayed when all flights to the United States were grounded.

Shapiro then goes into some second-hand information. While not quite as credible, it is enough to raise eyebrows:

During my continued investigation I learned that the FBI-JTTF was investigating two other students in the New York metropolitan area for the same reason.

On Sept. 10, 2001, a sixth-grade student of Middle Eastern descent in Jersey City, N.J., said something that alarmed his teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. "Essentially, he warned her to stay away from lower Manhattan because something bad was going to happen," said Sgt. Edgar Martinez, deputy director of police services for the Jersey City Police Department. Initially, the Jersey City rumor was met with some controversy. The New York Times called it an unsubstantiated rumor, and both the Daily News and the Jersey City Journal quoted a board-of-education official who denied that the boy had made any reference to the Sept. 11 attacks at all. Despite their reports, Martinez said the FBI-JTTF took over the matter for further investigation.

On Sept. 11, NYPD school-safety officers interrogated a Middle Eastern boy at Health Opportunities High School in the Bronx who had made similar comments that alarmed his teacher. Catie Marshall said the boy told his peers something as the school was being evacuated on Sept. 11.

"He warned them not to ride any city buses because he had been told at his mosque the week before to stay off all public transportation for a while," said one NYPD officer from the investigating 40th Precinct. "He said it wouldn't be safe." The FBI-JTTF since has taken over the matter.

One New Utrecht official told me that of the 509 Arab-American students who attend the school, many have come forward with their own stories about having prior knowledge. "Kids are telling us that the attacks didn't surprise them," she told me. "This was a nicely protected little secret that circulated in the community around here. I guess they were talking about it among themselves, but they didn't share it with us - at least not before the attacks."

According to students, many of their Arab-American peers were seen taking photographs of the crumbling twin towers from New Utrecht on Sept. 11. "Don't you think it's strange so many of them happened to take their cameras to school that particular day?" one student asked me.

Shapiro is a freelancer, and he could not find any media outlet that would be willing to pay him to mount a proper investigation. It could be because the media outlets he contacted didn't think it was credible - although the story of the New Utrecht boy was confirmed. The more likely reason is that no one wanted to touch this story because of what it might reveal.

Shapiro goes on:

I don't have the resources to continue an ongoing investigation into who had prior knowledge of the attacks - but I am sure someone out there does. Many things have happened since I broke my first story. On Nov. 9, 2001, my sources informed me that the same boy who predicted the attacks told school officials there would be a plane crash on Nov. 12. I decided to inform an FBI agent I knew who told me that, without specific information, there was little they could do.

Once again, the boy's prophecy came true. Three minutes after American Airlines Flight 587 took off from JFK International Airport to the Dominican Republic, its tail snapped off and both engines fell from its wings, dooming the plane to crash in Belle Harbor, located in the Rockaway section of Queens. None of the 260 people aboard survived. To date, authorities suspect the crash was an accident. I'm not so sure.

Recently I learned the investigation into the New Utrecht incident had been closed because authorities were "unable to obtain any further viable information that would explain what really happened." School sources tell me DiLorenzo has "stood firm" on her account of the boy's comments.

There's a story out there - and it needs to be covered.

The official investigation into Flight 587 said that it was human error that caused the crash, but there is some controversy about that.

Perhaps there is an innocent explanation for the incident, and the others are just unsubstantiated rumors. It is interesting that in Al Qaeda's list of 18 successful terror attacks, 17 are generally known to have been their handiwork and the 18th is Flight 587, supposedly taken down with a shoe bomb identical to Richard Reid's terror attempt one month later.

If the evidence pans out, this means that there was at least one set of Arabs or Muslims in America who had foreknowledge of 9/11 and who did not lift a finger to save the lives of thousands. If Arab teenagers knew about the attack, it means that this group was sizable.

There are problems with assuming this was a larger conspiracy of silence. It was by no means certain that the towers would actually fall down - even Bin Laden was surprised by that - yet the teen predicted that the towers would no longer be there. We would also have to assume that the police and FBI simply gave up when they couldn't get any answers from the Muslim community in Brooklyn.

In the end, this is a story not only of what appears to be a case of foreknowledge, but more importantly it looks like it is a story that was known - and purposefully dropped by the media. Nine years later, the leads have grown cold, but the media at the time seem to have actively refused to research the incident further, perhaps fearful of the backlash against Arabs and Muslims that could result from such a sensationalist story being confirmed. Remember, President Bush bent over backwards to limit any backlash against Muslims; in such an environment, it is easy to see how the media would stay away from this story.

Palestinian Arab "apartheid" against - Palestinian Arabs

I had missed this story in Pajamas Media:

Depending upon whose estimate you read, there are some twenty or thirty thousand “refugees” in the Balata refugee camp outside of Nablus. Balata is simultaneously the most populous and smallest of the Palestinian refugee camps — its growing population is confined to one square kilometer, making it one of the most densely populated and miserable places on the planet.

Any regime with an ounce of compassion would have shut Balata down and integrated its people into the surrounding community. Balata is a place without hope, a quagmire of despair, where the day-to-day misery of its inhabitants is partially ameliorated by Western charities and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), while inadvertently building a culture of dependence.

Balata’s creation could ostensibly be laid at Israel’s doorstep, but its perpetuation cannot. The current residents of Balata are only refugees by a crude reworking of the meaning of the term. They themselves have fled from nothing, and sought refuge from nothing. They are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the people who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war.

If you want to use the term “apartheid” to characterize some aspect of Middle East politics, then Balata is a good place to apply it. It is the Palestinian Authority’s answer to Soweto.

The PA does not permit the children of Balata to go to local schools. It does not permit the people of Balata to build outside the one square kilometer. The people of Balata are prevented from voting in local elections, and the PA provides none of the funds for the necessary infrastructure of the camp — including sewers and roads.

Balata and the other refugee camps are showcases of contrived misery. They are Potemkin villages in reverse. Naïve peace activists and unsophisticated Western clergy are led through such camps to witness the refugee drama, with Israel conveniently and prominently cast in the role of villain.

I had no idea that Balata "refugees," fully within the PA's jurisdiction, had few of the rights of PA citizens.

Some 16 years after Oslo, the PA is finally in the process of building its first town from scratch. (Compare that with the amount of building that happened in Israel between 1948-1964!) But even that town is being built by a developer to attract Palestinian Arab yuppies, not at all to help out the "refugees" who are in their own land and yet treated as second-class citizens. The people of Balata will continue to rot because they are more useful that way.

(h/t It's Complicated, a new blog by an EoZ reader.)