Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

PA attacks non-violent Muslim sect

From Makor Rishon (Hebrew), via Daily Alert:

The Ahmadi Muslim sect, founded in 1889 in India, now numbers tens of millions of believers, mostly living outside the Arab world. “We believe in a tolerant, friendly and rational Islam,” says Muhammad Sharif, head of the Ahmadis in Israel. Former Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna notes that among this community there is “no incitement, violence, or feeling the need to conquer the whole world.”

Yet members of the sect who live in the Palestinian Authority have been suffering from incessant persecution, confiscation of property, and physical violence during the past year. Muhammad Jaabri, 46, of Hebron, a married father of four, explains: “They have repeatedly written threats and curses on the walls of my house. They’ve burned my car twice, thrown rocks at my windows.” A month ago Jaabri was attacked by a group of radical religious youth near his home. “They beat me with clubs, and I was in the hospital for days.” After his release, “I went to the police to file a complaint and they sent me to PA security service investigators, where I was beaten again and jailed.”

Muhammad Alawi, 34, from Tulkarm, was summoned to a PA Sharia court with his wife, who is not from an Ahmadi family, where she was ordered to leave her husband and return with her three children to her own family, who had initiated the legal proceedings.

The Ahmadiyyahs are an interesting Muslim sect. Supposedly, they are the ones to have translated the Koran into Yiddish - a very surreal sight (click to enlarge):

Gaza hospital, owed millions by the PA, closes maternity ward

From Ma'an:

A hospital in the northern Gaza Strip warned Wednesday that it was forced to shut down its maternity ward over an insurance dispute with the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry, a statement read.

The Al-Awda Hospital in the Jabaliya area north of Gaza City said the move placed approximately 7,000 pregnant women with insurance at risk. The hospital said the women all currently receive treatment at the hospital on a yearly basis.

The statement said the closure was the result of "the PA Ministry of Health's ignorance toward accumulating debt, which has reached $2 million. This money is considered a significant part of the operational budget of the hospital, representing 40 percent of its monthly income."

With the millions owning the hospital in claimed public health insurance dollars, the hospital said it would no longer be able to operate if they were not reimbursed.

Notice that the infrastructure of Gaza is still largely financed by the PA, although they have zero political influence there. Hamas is free to pour all its Iranian and Syrian money into weapons and building a terror infrastructure, without any concern about actually taking responsibility for the citizens of the strip.

Meanwhile, some 60% of the PA budget is going to indirectly propping up Hamas' terror statelet. The hospital in this case doesn't even consider going to Hamas for the money to keep it going.

The PA and the Western world that funds it are somehow hoping that by continuing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, it will maintain some sort of influence and the ability to dictate terms of a conciliation. This is a fantasy. The break between Fatah and Hamas is all but complete.

The only chance that the PA would have of gaining control of Gaza would be to cut off the funds that are helping Hamas rule. (This would also help solve the PA's own monetary woes.)

They won't dare do it because it would cause short-term harm to Gazans, yet that is the only way to get Hamas to even think about compromise. No Western politician would publicly advocate or endorse such a move and HRW and Amnesty would go nuts. However, if anyone wants to actually solve the problem of Hamastan, that is the only way (short of pressuring Egypt to annex the territory and naturalize the citizens, which would be ideal.)

Journalism ethics, PalArab style

From Ma'an:

Extremists desecrated a Quran in West Jerusalem on Monday, a Palestinian from Bethlehem said Tuesday.

Bethlehem University student Muhammad Munir claims a group of Israeli Jews tore pages out of the Muslim holy book on Jaffa street.

Munir said he saw the incident while walking from work to his home in Wadi Al-Joz.

"I found papers on the ground. At the beginning I thought they were ordinary papers, but when I looked at them I saw that they included text from the holy Quran and pedestrians were stepping on them," he said.

Munir said he spent 10 minutes collecting the papers while bystanders insulted him and one kicked him.

Once again, Ma'an publishes a story based on a single "witness" without the slightest shred of proof. Do we have photos of the torn pages, or of Munir's injuries?

Of course not. This story fits in with Ma'an's tradition of publishing even the most absurd claims (like Jews raising wild boars and setting them loose to antagonize Arab farmers) as fact.

In this case, the story is already picked up by Hamas' AlQassam website and it will spread from there into, possibly, violent riots. People might even get killed because of this irresponsible "journalism."

But when the point of your journalism has little to do with the truth, it all makes sense.

The mythical Arab village of "Tel ar-Rabi"

Ma'an News has an article about the violent fantasy video of Palestinian Arabs ethnically cleansing Tel Aviv of Jews. It includes this curious part:

Gaza native Muhammad Al-Amrity says he and his friend Ayman Hijazi made the film. It was inspired by a dream he had of his family that originates in Tel Ar-Rabi, which became Tel Aviv. "I tried to go back to my city in the dream."

Was there ever an Arab village named "Tel ar-Rabi" that the Jews Judaized with the imperialist name of Tel Aviv?

Here is a map of the area of Jaffa from a guidebook published in 1906 by Karl Baedeker three years before Tel Aviv was founded. (The original edition of the guidebook was published in the late 1800s, but I do not know in which edition this map was first published. The identical map can be found in the 1912 edition.)

To the northeast of Jaffa, where Tel Aviv is now, the map shows a large section of sand dunes ("sandhills") by the coast, with a section called simply "vineyards" a bit inland. And, in fact, Jews purchased that land from the al-Jabali family - the area was known as "Karm al-Jabali," which literally means the al-Jabali vineyards (in Hebrew, Kerem Jabali) in 1905.

Needless to say, there is no mention of "Tel ar-Rabi" in this map nor in the fairly exhaustive Baedeker guidebook itself. Neither is it mentioned in an entire book written by rabid anti-Zionist Mark LeVine who tries, unsuccessfully, to prove that Tel Aviv was built on top of Arab-owned land.

The entire idea of an Arab town or village that was obliterated by Tel Aviv fits in nicely with the Arab narrative of violent Jewish colonialism, but it is simply another lie that gets promulgated in the Arab media and, from there, excites the imaginations of the anti-Israel crowd in the West.

And notice the very name of the fictional village is chosen to make it sound like Jews humiliated Arabs by naming their town Tel Aviv, a name that in fact came from the original Hebrew translation of Herzl's Altneuland, taken from Ezekiel 3:15.

Krazy Ken O'Keefe gets closer to revealing his kike-hatred

Ken O'Keefe, the lunatic who is trying to extend his fifteen minutes of fame from the Mavi Marmara, is interviewed in the ultra-left Baltimore Chronicle, where he gets a little closer to revealing his true feelings about the Elders who rule the world (thank you, thank you.)

Some excerpts:

The world is full of illusions that are used by the rich and powerful to manipulate and control the people. Those who really control the governments are those powerful few who control the banking systems, the major multi-national corporations and, of course, the mass media.

These powerful people and entities have key strategic needs in order to maintain power:

They must keep the people ignorant and disempowered.

They must keep the people divided. They conquer by dividing the people, never giving people the chance to unite; constantly fostering war by pitting the masses against each other

This system has been controlled by the same families for millennia, and people have been manipulated into a collective state of insanity throughout. Over the course of this tragic situation, empires have come and gone, each one giving way to the next. America is simply the latest in that repeating pattern, and it will fall like all empires do. However, the powers behind it, those controlling the banking, the governments and the propaganda, they will remain in place and prop up the next empire and the pattern will repeat.

The powers themselves remain hidden, with many layers of separation between themselves and the people, and an intricate and complex legal system to protect and hide them.

The Zionist project has been invested in heavily, and the powers that be will not relinquish it lightly.

Israel's primary function is to maintain perpetual conflict in the Middle East. Soon enough, Israel will be spreading this conflict on a global level. I have no doubt that the pending attack on Iran is intended to take us straight into World War III, with a regional nuclear war very likely. This is quite obviously a disaster to any sane human being. However, to those who see their power threatened by the spreading of truth, 9-11, Zionism, the banking system, etc, this is a very necessary act to help them maintain their grip of control over peoples of the world. This 'divide and conquer' strategy has served them well for millennia.

So who are these mysterious powers that rule the world, control banking, control the media, use prime ministers and presidents as puppets for their bidding, and who happen to be heavily invested in the "Zionist project"?

Hmmm. That's a toughie.

Zvi on Jewish refugees, the West Bank and the PA's games

Zvi commented:

Jewish Refugees

The Jews who "left by choice" were motivated by pogroms, riots, theft and violence, together with a rising tide of demonization of Jews and a series of murders in various Arab countries, together with the knowledge that Arab nationalist movements used Nazi propaganda and had Nazi advisors. Jews in the region had every reason to fear what was coming. Given the subsequent history of many of the Arab governments, it is crystal clear that only the flight of most of the Jews from the Arab world prevented even more extreme repression or annihilation.

The claim that the Jews "left by choice" neglects to point out the nature of the choice. The evidence of the Shoah - then very recent - showed that it was smarter to get out before they had to watch their kids' blood running in the streets.

This year, in 2010, the last Jews of Yemen have not been expelled from Yemen either. But only a particularly cruel sort of madman would insist that they remain there as Islamist threats and violence against them grow more and more terrifying.

The claim that Jews from the Arab countries would be granted any kind of mass right of return - to anything other than a temporary "stay of genocide" - is simply not credible at this point in history. The heavily funded and promoted Anti-Semitism industry in the Arab world has worked for decades to indelibly poison those populations. For at least the next 100 years, and probably much longer, the toxin will be far too dangerous for any significant Jewish presence to exist in those lands. Hatred, demonization and conspiracy theories take a long time to wipe out, even with wisely designed democratic systems and general goodwill toward Jews, all of which are lacking in Arab countries.

In addition, society abhors a vacuum as much as nature does. Non-Jews have replaced the Jews of Iraq, Libya, etc., and there are too many Arabs with incentives to commit acts of violence against any Jewish returnees - whom they would see as a direct competitive threat. Arab Muslims in Iraq, who continue to slaughter each other in a bloody power game and in a bloody campaign of massacres, would unite to slaughter returning Jews.

No person has a right to require that an Israeli Jew whose parents helped to build the democratic State of Israel that he must go back to be obliterated in Iraq or Algeria. No person has a right, based on idealistic notions that ignore the facts on the ground, to pretend that it is possible to roll anything back to 1948 or 1967.

Sanity

The only reasonable approach is to adopt the same model used by most nations throughout most of history: accept that wars happened, and that an exchange of populations happened, get over it and live in the present rather than trying to inhabit an imaginary past or an ideal world. There will be no "right of return" for Arabs who left Israel in 1948 - not to Israel, at any rate. If someone else wants to grant Arabs a "right of return" to its own sovereign territory, then they have every right to do so.

The sovereign state of Israel took up the challenge of relieving and mainstreaming the Jewish refugees from the Arab world, a challenge that no other country was willing to meet. It continues to do so to this day, providing the only reliable haven in a world that sees Jews fleeing from places like Yemen. Mizrahi Jewish refugees and their descendents were granted Israeli citizenship decades ago, have contributed to the construction of the State of Israel and have an absolute right to remain in Israel and in territories that Israel annexed during a decades-long defensive war in which its neighbors tried repeatedly to annihilate it.

The grandchildren of the Arabs who left what is now Israel back in 1948 - however brief or long their stay in "Palestine" and whatever their reason for leaving - have rights too. They have an absolute right to be sworn in as citizens in the Arab countries in which they and their parents were born. If a Palestinian leadership, with sovereignty established through a final peace agreement, decides to grant these people a "right of return" to territories that the Palestinians hold as a sovereign state, then that is a Palestinian prerogative. But the "Palestinian" Arabs abroad nevertheless have a right to stay exactly where they are if they wish to do so.

The West Bank

Over the almost two decades since Oslo I, it has become quite clear that the settlements are simply one of many (invalid) excuses for Arab violence and intransigence - no more, no less. The western press has piled on, as have pontificating demagogues and talking heads, but this does not make the excuse any more meaningful.

The West Bank is not Occupied; it is formally Disputed. There is a difference. A disputed territory is one to which multiple parties may have a claim, and there is no law that forbids a government from allowing populations to move into disputed territories. Were there such a law, would the Palestinians entering the West Bank with Arafat in the 1990s not have been in violation? After all, if there were such a law, then neither side should have been bringing populations into a Disputed territory.

Regarding Disputed territories, here is a list of disputed territories around the world (there are an awful lot of them). You have heard of Korea, Kosovo, Taiwan, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar and South Ossetia, but there are many more. And guess what? Virtually every government that holds any substantial disputed territory either allows or actively encourages "settlement" of that territory.

Can you imagine telling South Korea (or North Korea, for that matter - the whole peninsula is Disputed) that it can't establish a town, or expand an existing one?
How about telling India that it can't build anything in Jammu and Kashmir because that will change the facts on the ground in a way that could prejudice future negotiations?
How about telling the British that they can't build anything in the Falklands, or Gibraltar? Hint: the UK is now exploring for oil off the Falklands.
How about telling Taiwan that it can't build anything?
What about telling Russia that nothing can be built in South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh?

Why is it only Israelis who are not allowed to exist normally?

Let's please stop repeating the "conventional wisdom" that the West Bank is "Occupied." Conventional wisdom is wrong.

Is the PA Serious?

Settlement blocs like Maale Adumim are expected to be part of a trade. Everyone involved knows this; various proposals exist. Lieberman, for instance, proposed turning over some of the largely-Arab areas of Israel to the PA in exchange, together with their populations - who don't accept a Zionist country anyway - if those people want to remain on their land. Again, the Arab leadership needs to get over it and stop pretending that the last 40 years never happened. Israel is pretty much expecting to have to trade some territory for these settlement blocs. There has been little expansion of anything outside of these blocs recently.

The Palestinians need to stop playing image/power/revenge games and start trying to close a deal. The thing that will end the expansion of settlements forever is a real, meaningful, implemented and permanent peace agreement, one that defines a national border.

Anyone who is serious about ending the expansion of settlements would push hard to conclude a treaty that would define a workable national border. Any person who claims to want an end to the growth of settlements should be hammering on the PA's door, demanding that they stop playing games and start pursuing a real agreement. The fact that Abbas would rather play stupid PR games about settlements rather than hastening that day shows that he simply is not serious.

So, using this metric to measure the how serious Abbas and his cronies are about resolving the disputed status of the West Bank and Gaza, we find that they are not serious at all. What is more, they have never been serious. They have run away from every single opportunity to negotiate a peace that would end the growth of settlements.

Every single opportunity.

Guardian excises Jews from Bible story

A great pickup by Omri from Mere Rhetoric (via email), quoting The Guardian:

Religious tourists in Europe already have the Vatican, Lourdes and Fatima. But the developers behind an amusement park proposed for Mallorca believe they need the attraction of the Holy Land – the continent's very first Christian theme park.

The €10m development is to be built on seven hectares (17 acres) that include the former municipal rubbish dump at Capdepera, in the north of the island, if the plans presented to the town hall come to fruition.

The park will offer visitors everything from the last supper to "live resurrections" in a rolling programme of shows repeated through the day.

...With a cast of extras in the costumes of Romans and early Palestinians, the park advertises itself as "a place where everyone can learn about the origins of spirituality".

Yes, Jesus and his neighbors were all "early Palestinians" who gave the world the origins of spirituality. I guess that the Jewish imperialist dogs only invaded the area around 1948 to unfairly punish the innocent native Palestinian descendants of Jesus' disciples.

But, to be fair, I'm pretty sure that the Guardian would consider Judas to be a Jew.

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips comments on this as well.

Hilarious Photoshop in Al-Ahram

When President Obama met in the White House with Netanyahu, Abbas, King Abdullah and Mubarak, there were a number of pictures of them walking together like this one:

But when Egypt's al-Ahram published the picture, guess who they put in front?

(h/t The Arabist via Elliott)

PalArab TV: Praying Jews are "sin and filth"

From Palestinian Media Watch:

PA TV documentary shows visuals of Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem:

PA TV narrator: "They [Israelis] know for certain that our [Palestinian] roots are deeper than their false history. We, from the balcony of our home, look out over [Islamic] holiness and on sin and filth [Jews praying at the Western Wall]."

Note: the program was broadcast on the Jewish New Year.

Credit where credit is due: Jordanian Muslims give flowers to church

Al Arabiya reports that a group of Jordanian Muslims, in response to the brouhaha over the threatened buring of the Koran in Florida, responded by giving a wreath of flowers to the Church of Annunciation in Amman to indicate that not all Muslims are filled with rage.

This is in severe contrast with the violent protests that we have seen in recent days in Iran, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Gaza.

RAND Corporation tries to make some money from peace talks

There's a relatively new web page called "Friends of the ARC" that tries to recruit people to support an expansive idea for a rail and highway link between cities in the West Bank and to Gaza to encourage economic and population growth. The site has videos and papers about the plan.

The website is even sponsoring an essay contest for college students to prepare a "policy brief" to President Obama as to why he should be pushing the concept of the "ARC" in the current round of negotiations.

The ARC concept was created by the RAND Corporation together with an urban design company. Its implementation is estimated by RAND to be some $9 billion. While the Friends of the ARC website doesn't explicitly say that they are associated with RAND, it hardly looks like a grassroots organization.

The ARC itself sounds really great for "Palestine." It has a small problem that it cuts an existing nation in half, but that is clearly not an obstacle to peace according to RAND.

Besides that, it was first proposed back in 2005. The initial recommendations of creating transit hubs within existing cities are relatively inexpensive and not dependent on a final peace agreement - yet the PA has done nothing over these years to implement any of these ideas.

On the flip aide, RAND is not pushing for rich Gulf states to finance this vision - it is lobbying the US.

It looks like some major players are smelling where Western money is going to be going, hell-bent on pushing a "peace process" whether it actually makes sense or not. So besides the known incentives of Israelis and Palestinian Arabs in supporting or changing the "peace process" agenda, we also have major corporations salivating over getting some of the inevitable Western money that will pour into trying to give incentive for Arabs not to wage more terror wars.

This additional factor in pushing the "peace" agenda forward might be worthwhile to watch.

UN General Assembly President's anti-Israel bias

From the UN News Centre:

General Assembly President Ali Treki expressed profound concern today at what he called the desecration of the ancient Muslim cemetery of Mamilla in Jerusalem.

In a note released by his spokesperson, Dr. Treki said he was “alarmed by the intent of erecting secular projects on the site of this holy sanctuary, which is the burial place of venerated religious figures for more than 14 centuries.”

The note added that the General Assembly President “believes that this would constitute a sacrilegious and provocative act against the spirit of peace as well as dialogue among civilizations and religions.”

We have discussed the Mamilla cemetery before: how the Arabs have been placing fake graves there, how a previous Arab leader treated this "venerated" cemetery as a cesspool, how the Supreme Muslim Council had planned to build an office park directly on top of the cemetery, and how the Israeli Supreme Court listened to the arguments of those opposed to the construction and ruled against them based on sound legal and historic reasoning.

Yet the UNGA president ignores all of this and flatly declares Israeli moves a "desecration."

The Libyan diplomat has shown yet again why the UN is a joke. Even so, this statement should be protested at the highest levels and the UN should be held accountable for supporting such a blatantly biased and misinformed statement.

An example of how the NYT reports the news

This is a minor but telling example of the laziness of reporters.

An article by Robert Worth in the New York Times:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a fiery address on Monday accusing the United States government of orchestrating desecrations of the Koran by right-wing American Christian groups last weekend, Iranian state news agencies reported.

The speech appeared to be part of an effort by Iran’s hard-line leaders to amplify Muslim outrage over scattered gestures to burn or tear pages of the Koran, in the wake of the threat — later withdrawn — by Terry Jones, a Florida pastor, to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In Tehran, about 1,000 protesters chanting “Death to America” and “U.S. pastor must be killed” clashed with the police and threw stones at the Swiss Embassy, Reuters reported. The Swiss have handled American interests in Iran ever since the United States severed diplomatic relations with Tehran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

After Iran’s state-owned Press TV ran reports about Koran desecrations in the United States, India blocked local cable operators from broadcasting the station in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where angry anti-American protests have taken place in recent days.

In his speech, Ayatollah Khamenei said “the leaders of the global arrogance” — a code for the United States among Iranian conservatives — had engineered the plot to desecrate the Koran, Press TV and other agencies reported. He added that “Zionist think tanks which hold the most influence in the United States government and its security and military organizations” were also involved.

In the fifth paragraph, Worth says that Khamanei "added" that Zionists were also, parenthetically, behind the Koran burning incident.

Where did he get this from? The esteemed reporter relied completely on the translation and context provided by Iran's PressTV, which said:

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has condemned the desecration of the Holy Quran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US.

"Without a doubt, the leaders of the global arrogance engineered [this plot] and [were in charge of] the command room of these atrocities," the Leader said.

Ayatollah Khamenei added that "Zionist think-tanks which hold the most influence on the US government and its security and military organizations" were among the accomplices in the scenario.

Iran's ISNA reported on the speech as well. Here was their description:

The Islamic Revolution Leader said in a message to the Iranian nation and the entire Islamic Ummah that the Zionist circles within the US administration are the main conspirators of the sacrilege.

"The abhorrent and disgusting desecration of the Holy Quran took place in the US under protection of the American police. It is bitter and great event which cannot be regarded as a practice done by several idiots and lackeys. But, is a calculated action by the circles which have launched propaganda to promote Islamophobia and anti-Islamic campaign and have resorted to several hundred methods and thousands propaganda means to fight Islam and Quran," Ayatollah Khamenei said.

"It is another ring from the disgraceful chain which began by apostate Salman Rushdie's treason and followed by the dastardly Danish caricaturist and tens of anti-Islam movies produced in Hollywood."

"It has reached the current abhorrent play. What or who are behind the shameful moves? Study of the villain process of criminal events taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Pakistan leaves no doubt that designing such schemes and the think-tanks are in the hands of the leaders of hegemonic system and Zionists who have the most influence on the US government and its security and military organs and on the British and several other European governments as well," Islamic Revolution Leader said.

In this case, the "Zionist" influence is at least on par with (and probably indistinguishable from) the US leaders accused of being behind the Terry Jones incident.

The Gulf Times provides a little more context:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday called the plan to burn the Qur’an “an insane and hateful” act and blamed “the Zionists working within the American government” for masterminding it.

“With deceiving and half-empty words, the leaders of the American regime cannot acquit themselves of ... accompanying this ugly act,” Khamenei was quoted as saying by state television.

“To prove its claim of not being involved ... the American government should appropriately punish the main figures behind this great crime,” he added.

Top Iranian officials have issued harsh criticism over the issue, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even saying the US pastor’s bid to burn the holy book was a “Zionist plot” that would lead to the speedy “annihilation” of Israel.

“Zionists and their supporters are on their way to collapse and dissolution and such last-ditch actions will not save them, but multiply the pace of their fall and annihilation,” state television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying on Friday.

The Friday statement by Ahmadinejad primarily blaming "Zionists" was never reported by the New York Times.

Robert Worth read a single source - Iran's English-language PressTV - and used that as the basis of his report. He apparently did not spend any time to double-check whether the PressTV account was accurate, what the original speech said in Farsi, what the larger political context was (the Gulf Times article properly spoke about how two top Iranian clerics called on anyone desecrating the Koran to be killed, for example. Another quote that would have provided context is here.) While the words he quoted were abhorrent already, Worth could have spent thirty minutes more to have written a more accurate article showing the insane hate that spews out of Iranian political and religious leaders on a daily basis.

Instead, he grabbed a single source, wrote a poor piece that downplayed what Khamenei said and ignored what everyone else said on the matter.

In this section of the article, Worth did no original research, nor did he even make an effort to even verify his single source. (He added an unrelated three paragraphs about a new Iranian crackdown on dissidents which surely should have been its own article, but blame for that lies with the NYT editors, not with Worth.)

This is not reporting. This is the mindless copying of material that has already been edited by someone else and made to fit in an already-existing narrative.

And the New York Times represents the best in American journalism today.

Unless Israel criminalizes pistachio ice cream, there will be no peace

The Palestinian Arab negotiators have successfully created a linkage in the collective minds of the world that simply doesn't exist.

Here's the latest example:

The chief Palestinian negotiator said Monday there are no "half solutions" in the dispute over construction of Israeli settlements.

"Either there is a halt to settlement building or there is not," Saeb Erekat told reporters in Sharm el-Sheikh. "We hope that if the Israeli government is given the choice of either peace or settlements, it will choose peace. If it chooses any kind of settlement building, this means that it has destroyed the whole peace process and it would be fully responsible for that."

For years, the only building permits that Israel has allowed in Judea and Samaria were within the existing boundaries of the towns there. In other words, no additional disputed land is being affected by any new buildings or extensions.

There is no relationship between any building that is done within existing settlements and peace. It is a complete fiction. The linkage only exists due to its incessant repetition, but it has no basis in reality. It has an aura of believability, because building in these communities is being represented as a physical expansion, but that is quite simply a lie.

The settlements are a red herring, a propaganda ploy on the part of the Arabs and their anti-Israel allies. The goal is the same as it was in 1921 and 1929 and 1948 and 1967, just the words and tactics have changed.

So the next time that you read about how any building in settlements endangers peace, just mentally substitute "building in settlements" with "allowing pistachio ice cream to be sold." They both make exactly the same amount of sense.

The latest Latma seems appropriate:

Follow-up on "Mossad hack" of Saudi TV (UPDATE: Solved!)

Last week I mentioned a rumor going around the Arab world that Israelis hacked the popular Saudi MBC network to broadcast messages of peace, using an Israeli-looking woman.

Firas Press got a screenshot:

The subtitle says "Our presence on Earth means happiness for you."

One of the commenters thinks that is was actually an ad for a show on a sister MBC network, called MBC Action. It looks like MBC Action mostly plays American shows.

But if she is either Israeli, Jewish or a celebrity, I'm sure that some reader of this blog will recognize her....

(h/t Ali for translation)

UPDATE: The woman is from the TV series "V" about extra-terrestrials who come to Earth. Note the tagline: "We are of peace. Always."

(h/t to the many who recognized her.)