Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

AP promotes stereotypes of fanatic settlers acting illegally

I had just noticed this - but the Balfour Street blog beat me to it.

From AP via Al Arabiya:

In a spat last week, Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, which helps Palestinians harvest their olives in the West Bank, confronted [Erez] Ben-Saadon and accused him of using land owned by Palestinians.

Ben-Saadon said he was farming on land given to Jewish settlers by the Israeli military. He said he had no ownership papers -- but needed none.

"Our land deed is the Bible," Ben Saadon said.

This perfectly fits in with the meme of fanatic, religious settlers disregarding the law to grab land that belongs to Palestinian farmers - a meme that is so widespread as to be axiomatic among many.

Yet, Ha'aretz reported on this same incident last week - a bit differently:

Near Har Bracha, a verbal confrontation erupted yesterday between Jewish farmer Erez Ben Sa'adon and Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the head of Rabbis for Human Rights. Ascherman claimed Ben Sa'adon was harvesting olives that belonged to Palestinians from nearby Karyut. Ben Sa'adon, whose nearby vineyard had been destroyed by unidentified parties the previous night, said he had leased that plot for the past 12 years and the olives were his.

Civil Administration officials were called to resolve the dispute, and they summoned the mayor of Karyut - who admitted that the trees belonged to Ben Sa'adon.

It certainly looks like the AP reporter read the Ha'aretz story and purposefully omitted the part where Ben Sa'adon was proven to be the rightful owner of the olives, and Arik Ascherman proven wrong.

This is not an innocent mistake. This is AP being mendacious to adjust the facts to pre-determined conclusions.

(I sent messages to the author of the AP piece and to Erez Ben Saadon, asking for comment. I have yet to hear back from them.)

Tuesday afternoon quickies

From comments, emails and other various sources:

Secret Israeli-Arab study program sparks anger - YNet:

Academic normalization with Israel is very dangerous, since he sees it as an attempt to perform a "Zionistic brainwash".

UN Rep backs unilateral declaration of PalArab state - JPost:

United Nations Special Middle East Peace Negotiator Robert H. Serry told Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Tuesday that the UN will a support the declaration of an independent Palestinian state. Serry spoke to Fayyad while the two picked olives together near the West Bank village of Turmus'ayyeh, close to the Israeli settlement of Shiloh.

Hezbollah supply route revealed: (Now Lebanon)

According to “confidential reports,” the French Defense Ministry has information about Hezbollah’s arms supply route to Lebanon through Syria, French newspaper Le Figaro reported on Tuesday.

More pictures of that Turkish "peace activist" having fun with his Islamic Jihad friends and their weapons.

Terrorists who threw grenades near Western Wall praised as "heroic prisoners" by PA TV (PMW)

Qatar - deadbeat supporter of Palestinian Arabs

From Foreign Policy:

In the weeks following Operation Cast Lead, Israel's air and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 and 2009, the rich oil sheikdom of Qatar and other Persian Gulf governments vowed to dig deep into their desert robes to help Palestinians rebuild. Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, pledged $40 million in February, 2009, to fund humanitarian relief operations by five U.N. agencies, including $30 million for U.N. humanitarian operations in Gaza and an additional $10 million for a U.N. Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) set up to respond to humanitarian emergencies anywhere in the world. The office of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon greeted the pledge with effusive praise.

But the money has never arrived.

U.N. officials say that their repeated requests to Qatar to honor its commitment have been met with vague responses indicating that it is facing what it has described as "unforeseen circumstances." Steve O'Malley, the chief of the CERF secretariat, said simply: "We followed up with the Qataris and they are following up back in Doha."

The Qatari mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

Qatar's Gaza pledge illustrates one of the truisms about international aid: Faced with conflicts or natural disasters that capture the world's attention, states make generous pledges. But getting them to actually cut a check requires a sustained diplomatic effort by the United Nations. The problem has been particularly acute in the Arab world, where governments have consistently fallen short of their commitments to the Palestinians, according to U.N. officials.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which is responsible for assisting more than 4.7 million Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East, has been hit especially hard as a result of a global financial crisis.

The agency is facing an $80 million funding shortfall, and will not be able to pay salaries beyond November, according to UNRWA officials. The agency's largest donors -- the United States, Britain and the European Commission -- have continued to fund UNRWA, providing 95 percent of its operating budget, according to agency officials.

But they say efforts to convince Arab governments to meet their commitments have fallen short. "UNRWA faces an unprecedentedly serious financial situation this year," Andrew Whitley, the director of UNRWA's New York office, told Turtle Bay. "Certain donors have not kept up with their promises while others have been pressured to cut back because of the financial crisis."

"Our biggest donors have maintained, and in some cases increased, their contributions slightly," Whitley added. "But our efforts to broaden the donor base to non-traditional donors, particularly Arab governments, have not borne fruit."

In September, at a conference of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo, Filippo Grandi, UNRWA's commissioner general, said that Arab countries needed to address the crisis or they would face the prospect of greater political insecurity in the region.

We once again see how deep Arab commitment is to helping out Palestinian Arabs in their everyday lives.

It is paper-thin.

UNRWA distances itself from the truth

A couple of days ago, an outgoing UNRWA official said something that was actually useful, for once:

Andrew Whitley, due to soon leave his post as director of the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency’s New York office, told the National Council for US-Arab Relations’ annual conference that...Palestinians must start acknowledging that the refugees will almost certainly not be returning to Israel, so that they can improve their situation.

Palestinians have long maintained a “right of return” to Israel and the homes they – or their ancestors – fled during Israel’s 1948/49 War of Independence. The issue has been one of the most difficult to resolve in peace negotiations.

“If one doesn’t start a discussion soon with the refugees for them to consider what their own future might be – for them to start debating their own role in the societies where they are rather than being left in a state of limbo where they are helpless but preserve rather the cruel illusions that perhaps they will return one day to their homes – then we are storing up trouble for ourselves,” he declared.

Whitley acknowledged that few Palestinians or even officials in his own organization have been willing to publicly discuss the issue.

“We recognize, as I think most do, although it’s not a position that we publicly articulate, that the right of return is unlikely to be exercised to the territory of Israel to any significant or meaningful extent,” he said.

“It’s not a politically palatable issue, it’s not one that UNRWA publicly advocates, but nevertheless it’s a known contour to the issue.”

So how predictable was this? From UNRWA:

UNRWA unequivocally distances itself from the statements made by the Director of its office in New York, Andrew Whitley, at the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations in Washington on 22 October 2010. These statements in no way reflect the policies or positions of the Agency and are the personal views of Mr Whitley.

Because it is better to pretend a problem doesn't exist than to tackle it.

Amna Naseer, female professor of religion and philosophy at Al Azhar University, claims that the burqa is not an Islamic precept - but started out as Jewish law that was taken by ignorant Muslims.

She was speaking at a seminar held by the network of Egyptian human rights groups about the rights of women in monotheistic religions.

While Judaism teaches the importance of modesty, nowhere does Jewish law demand that women cover their faces. Apparently, Naseer - obviously against the burqa, as Al Azhar University altogether is - feels that associating it with Judaism will get Egyptians to abandon the practice.

In fact, the Talmud indicates that the face veil was an Arab custom that predates Islam (BT Shabbat 65a) and Jewish women in Arabia adhered to that local custom. (Rashi comments there that Arab women customarily cover their heads and faces, except for the eyes, and the garment was called "re'ul" or "re'ula" in Arabic.)

Do Gazans hate UNRWA this much?

The "Commission on the Rights of Refugees" in Gaza says they polled 2500 random Gazans who live in camps about what they thought of UNRWA.

Their results are fishy.

They say that :

85.8% of those polled are suspicious about how UNRWA teaches their kids about human rights;
87% say that teaching about human rights is like poisoning the kids' minds, and undermines the role of the Resistance;
79% think UNRWA is trying to normalize Arab relations with Israel;
70% demanded that UNRWA stop allowing kids to visit Western nations because it goes against their traditions;
80% think that mixing boys and girls in UNRWA programs cause social and ethical problems.

The complaints are not new, but I have serious doubts about the organization that created this poll. Googling the name in Arabic only finds this poll and nothing else.

It is possible that a conservative Islamic-oriented group asked very leading questions of people as they were leaving mosques (for example) creating both a self-selecting sample and a sample that would invariably answer questions the way the "pollsters" wanted them to.

It is also possible that this organization was created just to garner headlines for a fake poll to pressure UNRWA to change its policies.

Hamas: Israel booby-trapping cars imported to Gaza

From Ma'an:

The Hamas-led government in Gaza has warned officials and leaders of Palestinian factions to avoid buying the new cars that have been entering the Strip over the month, according to media reports late Monday.

"A note has been circulated to all concerned parties, warning them of the new cars the Israeli occupation has allowed in Gaza before they undergo special tests by security services," a Gaza security source said according to one report.

Gaza Interior Ministry spokesman Ihab Al-Ghussein confirmed the report, saying " ... it is still a possibility that the occupation fixes tracking devices to the cars or even booby-traps them."

So let's wait for ordinary Gazans to buy them and see if they get blown up!

By the way, it isn't cars that are booby trapped. It's coriander.

Saudi woman, 29, was in jail for disobeying her father

From Arab News:

Samar Badawi, the 29-year-old Saudi woman who was incarcerated for not obeying her guardian (mahram) following a lawsuit by her father, was freed Monday.

Samar has been in prison for seven months after her father filed a case against her accusing her of disobedience.

Abdullah Al-Othaim, the head of the District Court in Jeddah, told Arab News that a warrant stating that Samar Badawi is free has been issued.

“Samar’s uncle (from her father's side) will now take care of her, being now adjudged her male guardian,” he said.

Samar was sent to Briman Prison in Jeddah on April 4 after her father lodged a complaint against her accusing her of disobedience. The father filed the counter-suit after Samar had lodged a legal complaint accusing her father of preventing her from marrying. Samar is a divorced woman with one son.

Samar accused her father of abuse and fled her family home in 2008 to live in a shelter. Samar's mother is deceased. Samar fled the shelter last year after learning that her father had instituted the case against her.

Under Saudi law a woman who has no guardian or who is in dispute against her guardian becomes a ward of the state who can face imprisonment for refusing to stay in authorized women's shelters.

There's more in the article, but there is only so much bizarre 8th century thinking that the human brain can absorb at one time.

Here's a Turkish peace activist!

From YNet:

The Viva Palestina 5 ship carrying "peace activists," which docked at the al-Arish port recently, brought along not only humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, but also enthusiastic Turks who took advantage of the opportunity to visit local Islamic Jihad members.

n pictures obtained by Ynet, the Turks are seen holding weapons and rocket launchers. While their prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to blast Israel and demand an apology for "state terrorism," two of the guests put on the uniform of the al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad's military wing.

The pictures from the Turkish delegation's visit were put on the al-Quds Brigades website as part of the coverage of their visit.

During their visit to Gaza, the Turkish delegation members visited several Islamic Jihad posts. One of the guests was quoted as telling the group's gunmen that they are "a source of pride for all decent people in the Arab and Muslim world." He defined them as "the forefront of the struggle against the Zionists."

Doesn't he look like a peace activist?

(h/t Jed and Joel)

The Palestinian Arab plan for de-legitimizing Israel, 1968

In 1968, Israel was still considered the small - but admirable - survivor of a war meant to destroy, waged by the combined forces of much of the Arab world. Israeli were, to the Western world, the "good guys."

It would be a gross understatement to say that this has changed in the intervening years. The entire framework of how Israel is viewed has been turned completely around, by a very successful campaign of de-legitimization that has cumulatively paid off in spades since then.

The blueprint for this sea change in how the world views Israel was written in 1968.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, by Yehuda Lukacs, reproduces a number of hard to find documents about the conflict. On page 295 one can find the Palestine National Assembly Political Resolutions, 17 July, 1968.

This is a most illuminating document.

While parts of it are obviously dated, these resolutions give an eerily exact plan on how the Palestinian Arabs plotted out the propaganda war against Israel.

Here are the entire section on Methods:

1. The Palestinian Arab people have chosen the course of armed struggle in the fight to recover their usurped territories and rights. The current phase in their armed struggle started before the defeat of June, 1967 and has endured and escalated ever since. Moreover, despite the fact that this struggle renders a service to the entire Arab nation at the present stage, insofar as it prevents the enemy from laying claim to a status quo based on surrender, and insofar as it keeps the flame of resistance alive and maintains a climate of war, preoccupies the enemy and is an object of concern to the entire world community, that struggle is nevertheless a true and distinct expression of the aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people and is inspired by their objectives. In addition, we feel bound to declare quite frankly that this struggle goes beyond the scope of what it has become customary to call “the elimination of the consequences of the aggression", and all other such slogans, for the objectives of this struggle are those of the Palestinian Arab people, as set out in the preceding paragraph. The fight will not cease; it will continue, escalate and expand until final victory is won, no matter how long it takes and regardless of the sacrifices involved.

2. The enemy has chosen Blitzkrieg as the form of combat most suitable to him, in view of the tactical mobility at his command which enabled him, at the moment of battle, to unleash forces superior to those deployed by the Arabs. The enemy chose this method in the belief that a lightning victory would lead to surrender, according to the pattern of I948, and not to Arab armed resistance. In dealing with it, we must adopt a method derived from elements of strength in ourselves and elements of weakness in the enemy.

3. The enemy consists of three interdependent forces:
a) Israel.
b) World Zionism.
c) World imperialism, under the direction of the United States of America.

Moreover, it is incontestable that world imperialism makes use of the forces of reaction linked with colonialism.

If we are to achieve victory and gain our objectives, we shall have to strike at the enemy wherever he may be, and at the nerve centres of his power. This is to be achieved through the use of military, political and economic weapons and information media, as part of a unified and comprehensive plan designed to sap his strength, scatter his forces, destroy the links between them and undermine their common objectives.

4. A long-drawn out battle has the advantage of allowing us to expose world Zionism, its activities, conspiracies, and its complicity with world imperialism and to point out the damage and complications it causes to the interests and the security of many countries, and the threat it constitutes to world peace. This will eventually unmask it, bringing to light the grotesque facts of its true nature, and will isolate it from the centres of power and establish safeguards against its ever reaching them...

5. An information campaign must be launched that will throw light on the following facts:

a) The true nature of the Palestinian war is that of a battle between a small people, which is the Palestinian people, and Israel, which has the backing of world Zionism and world imperialism.

b) This war will have its effect on the interests of any country that supports lsrael or world Zionism.

c) The hallmark of the Palestinian Arab people is resistance, struggle and liberation, that of the enemy, aggression, usurpation and the disavowal of all values governing decent human relations.

6. A comprehensive plan must be drawn up to fuse the Arab struggle and the Palestinian struggle into a single battle. This requires concentrated ideological, information and political effort that will make it clear to the Arab nation that it can never enjoy peace or security until the tide of Zionist invasion is stemmed, and that its territory will be occupied piecemeal unless it deploys its resources in the battle, not to mention the extent to which the Zionist presence constitutes a drain on its resources and an impediment to the development of its society.

Palestinian action regards the Arab nation as a reserve fund of political, financial and human resources on which it can draw, and whose support and participation will make it possible to fight the successive stages in the battle.

7. The peoples and governments of the Arab nation must be made to understand that they are under an obligation to protect the Palestinian struggle so that it may be able to confront the enemy on firm ground and direct all its forces and capabilities to this confrontation, fully assured of its own safety and security. This obligation is not only a national duty, it is a necessity deriving from the fact that the Palestinian struggle is the vanguard in the defence of all Arab countries, Arab territories and Arab aspirations.

8. Any objective study of the enemy will reveal that his potential for endurance, except where a brief engagement is concerned, is limited. The drain on this potential that can be brought about by a long-drawn out engagement will inevitably provide the opportunity for a decisive confrontation in which the entire Arab nation can take part and emerge victorious.

It is the duty of Palestinians everywhere to devote themselves to making the Arab nation aware of these facts, and to propagating the will to struggle. It is also their duty to endure, sacrifice and take part in the struggle.

While the PLO has not been as successful in rallying the Arab nations behind it in recent years, its propaganda plan has been executed flawlessly. Even though their plan describes how the Palestinian Arabs are part of, and depend on the help of, the much larger Arab nation, they present themselves as an isolated, tiny, besieged and victimized entity to the West, compared to the huge Israel/World Zionist/imperialist alliance.

Any glance at a map reveals the absurdity of the idea that Israel has territorial designs on the larger Arab world, or that it is an expansionist, imperialist state. Yet years of repetition of the points listed in this document - repeated in the media, repeated on college campuses, repeated by the useful idiots of the Left and the latent anti-semites of the world - have made them appear self-evident to nearly everybody.

Not only that, but this document foreshadows the terrorist spree of the 1970s. That string of high-profile attacks against Western targets was a successful implementation of section 5b, where the Palestinian Arabs let the West know that any support of Israel will result in their citizens getting killed. Over time, that idea became crystallized in many countries' collective psyches to turn their political viewpoints towards defending their nations from terror - and believing that by sacrificing Israel, they would achieve short-term security. They of course justified their abandoning Israel in terms of human rights and justice, and their excuses took liberally from the brand new Palestinian Arab narrative - a narrative that was created expressly for the purpose of isolating Israel from the West!

US resolution 242, this document bitterly notes, did not even mention Palestinian Arabs. In 1967, it was obvious that the conflict was between Israel and the much larger Arab nation, and that the refugees and their descendants were pawns of the Arab world. The policies that resulted from the PLO decisions to implement this plan effectively created the "Palestinian people" ex nihilo from the perspective of the Western nations. (This document is also explicitly against creating a Palestinian Arab state in the territories, calling it a Zionist plan and saying that such a state would serve Zionist objectives.)

While their military plans from 1968 only had limited success, the PLO's propaganda plan was executed brilliantly, and it continues to this day.

(h/t sshender)

Monday afternoon links

Israel's Chief Rabbi tells the Vatican not to interpret the Torah for Jews (story in French, in reaction to this story)

Eid al Adha is coming, and Gaza needs some 20,000 sheep and 8,000 cows to ritually slaughter in the streets (Arabic)

The Guardian, about a month late, notices that Hamas torched a Gaza water park. But they take pains to distringuish between mainstream Hamas and the extremists from Hamas who, in uniform, capriciously force Gazans to do what, um, Hamas wants. (h/t CiFWatch)

An op-ed that notices that, just maybe, UNRWA is part of the problem!

Egypt: Feeding its Coptic Christians to the Islamic lions

Also in Egypt, a pro-Israel conscientious objector, whose freedom to say unpopular opinions publicly is about to go away, possibly forever.

Oh, by the way, Cast Lead was as moral as war can be

Evelyn Gordon writes:

The New York Times tucked a remarkable statistic into the tail-end of an article on WikiLeaks’s latest document dump, one with ramifications for the ongoing delegitimization campaign against Israel: for most of the last century, the normal civilian-to-combatant wartime fatality ratio has been 10:1.

Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This elicits an obvious question: if civilians routinely account for 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare, why is the world up in arms about the civilian casualty rate in last year’s Israel-Hamas war in Gaza — which, by even the most anti-Israel account, was markedly lower?

Indeed, by the count that my team and I came up with of Gaza war casualties, nearly one half of the dead were either terrorists or members of the Hamas police which is effectively a paramilitary force, or (often) both. (The IDF claims closer to two-thirds killed were militants. The discrepancy is mostly in counting how many were killed in the war altogether.)

By way of contrast, the latest numbers from Iraq indicate a 2-1 civilian to militant casualty ratio - at least double Israel's rate.

So, yes, many civilians were killed - but compared to pretty much any modern war you can name, the ratio of civilian to fighter deaths was very, very low. Not only that, but a clear part of Hamas' strategy was to maximize their own civilian casualties, which makes Israel's achievement even more remarkable.

(h/t T34zakat)

Doesn't he look trustworthy?

Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Youssef has denied making the statements I reported that he said to Jordan's Addastour news.

In the interview, he had said "Martyrdom operations bring us problems with the international community, and are exploited by the Israeli media to distort our image, and accuse us of terrorism and incitement to violence....and this issue has been behind us since 2004, when we abandoned martyrdom operations." He also said that the Hebron massacre of four civilians was not timed to disrupt negotiations and that the Hamas ban on women smoking the hookah was a moral, and not a religious, issue.

Today, without specifying in which topic he was misquoted, he told Ma'an that he doesn't want to deny or even comment on the "yellow journalism and lies" that were in that article that could prejudice the resistance. That sounds like a denial to me.

Over a million Palestinian Arabs want to leave their homeland - and cannot

The latest PSR poll asks Palestinian Arabs:

Do current political, security, and economic conditions lead you to seek emigration abroad?

37% of Gazans, and 24% of West Bankers, say either that they "certainly seek to emigrate" or "seek to emigrate" from the territories.

That comes out to some 1.1 million Palestinian Arabs who do not want to stick around.

Now, imagine what would happen if they were free to emigrate to any Arab country they wanted. After all, the Arab League encourages its members to have liberal naturalization policies for Arabs from any Arab state - except Palestine.

The reason given by the Arab leaders for this explicitly discriminatory policy is that they are helping to preserve Palestinian Arab unity - by keeping them in a stateless limbo. But has anyone asked the Palestinian Arabs themselves what they want to do? As high as these numbers of West Bank and Gaza Arabs who want to emigrate are, the percentages of those who are already in other Arab countries and would love to become full citizens in their host or other Arab countries is almost certainly much higher - many millions who would happily become citizens elsewhere.

For some reason, their freedom of choice is not a concern for organizations like Human Rights Watch, which explicitly denies individual Palestinian Arabs the right to become citizens of their host Arab countries. And they are silent, of course, on Arab League discriminatory policies against Palestinians.

By sheer repetition of the mantra of "keeping Palestinian unity," the world has bought into one of the greatest human rights abuses occurring today, by Arabs against their fellow Arabs.

As I was writing this, I discovered a tiny loophole that some Palestinian Arabs have managed to use to become citizens of some Gulf countries. If they manage to move to the EU first, and become citizens there, then they or their children can move to Arab countries and become citizens as non-Palestinians!

Just another threat from Hamas

Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad accused Israel of planning to invade Gaza, and since imaginary threats are so thoroughly offensive, he decided to make a real one in response (a "cycle of threatened violence," if you will.)

Speaking at a university in Khan Younis, Hammad said that Hamas, accompanied with the armies of the world, will come to Haifa and Acre to liberate them from Zionist control.

He bragged that Israel is spending so much effort on missile defense, saying that the "occupation" is hiding behind walls and Israelis are unaware that they are trapped.

Moreover, he said that the siege of Gaza has made Gazans stronger and more steadfast.