Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Egyptian Christians in trouble

Israel Today, a Christian Zionist publication, refers to Raymond Ibrahim's recent piece in writing an update on the dangers facing Egypt's Coptic minority:

Egypt has parliamentary elections coming up next month and an important presidential election next year. As with similar regimes throughout history, the current rulers of Egypt need a scapegoat to take the voters’ attention off its disastrous social and economic policies (after all, rigging elections is so tedious).

Unfortunately for Egypt’s 10 million Christians, they are the perfect scapegoat in an increasingly radicalized Muslim society.

To stir up the public against the Christians, Egyptian Muslim clerics and media outlets have circulated a claim that the nation’s Coptic Christian minority is importing weapons from Israel in preparation for an assault on Egypt’s Muslims.

The claim originated on the pan-Arab satellite news network Al Jazeera, which ensured that just about every Egyptian Muslim, if not ever Middle East Muslim, was aware of the unfounded assertion that Egypt’s Christians were preparing for war with the aid of the hated “Zionist entity.”

Speaking on Al Jazeera on September 15, prominent Egyptian Muslim cleric Mohammed Salim al-Awwa declared that Egyptian Christians were “stocking arms and ammunition in their churches and monasteries - arms imported from Israel, no less, as Israel is at the heart of the Coptic Cause - and are preparing to wage war against Muslims.”

Other reports have included rumors that the Christian assault has already begun, and that Christian women who have converted to Islam are being kidnapped and tortured by the Copts.
Since those reports first started circulating last month, the Barnabas Fund, an organization that provides assistance to persecuted Christian communities, says that at least 10 large Muslim demonstrations against Christians have taken place in Egypt.

At least one Muslim group is calling for a “bloodbath” to be perpetrated against the Christian minority.

Further inflaming Muslim passions was an official Egyptian government body’s insistence that the Coptic Church formally apologize after one of its clergymen criticized a verse from the Koran that refers to Christians as “infidels.” The leader of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III, promptly apologized, but the Muslim anger was not appeased.

It concludes:

Tellingly, the international media has almost completely ignored this story, while not failing to provide prime headline real estate whenever Israeli Jews build a few houses that upset the Palestinian Arabs.

That the construction of Jewish apartments can result in emergency UN meetings, official condemnations and weeks of front page news, but the persecution and potential slaughter of Egypt’s Christians cannot is evidence that the international community’s motives are not truly humanitarian in nature.

A new weapons route from Iran to Gaza?

From Ha'aretz:

Nigeria's secret service said on Tuesday it had intercepted 13 containers of weapons from Iran in what Israeli defense sources believe may be part of a new smuggling route from Iran to Hamas in Gaza.

Rocket launchers, grenades and other explosives camouflaged as building material were seized in the Nigerian port of Lagos after being unloaded from an Iranian ship.

Nigerian media reports said the ship, which came from Iran, docked in Lagos' port for a few hours only, unloaded 13 containers and sailed on.

The bill of lading said the shipment consisted of building materials, Nigerian State Security Service spokeswoman Marilyn Ogar said.

"On opening the first container, the service operatives discovered rocket launchers, grenades and other explosives," Ogar said, adding the weapons were concealed among crates of floor tiles.

A senior defense source said preliminary information suggests the weapons' seizure has exposed a possible new arms smuggling route from Iran to Hamas, via Africa. He said the Iranians may have run into difficulties sending arms to Hamas via the Red Sea to the Sudan region and from there to Gaza via Sinai, following the beefed up international supervision on the movement of Iranian ships.

"Perhaps the Iranians were planning to unload the weapons in Nigeria and transfer them by land to Sudan and Sinai," the senior source said.

Meanwhile, Arabic media quote Yediot Aharonot in Hebrew as saying that Hamas has tested a locally-manufactured rocket that has a range of 80 km, enough to reach the heavily-populated center of the country, as well as Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets with a 70 km range.

Hamas is also said to have anti-aircraft rockets.

Jordanian "honor killer" has sentence reduced

From Al Arabiya:

A Jordanian man was condemned to death on Wednesday for killing his raped teenage niece to "cleanse" the family's honor, but the sentence was later commuted to 10 years in jail.

"The victim's family has urged the court to reduce the sentence, and it was commuted to 10 years in prison," a criminal court official told AFP.

Murder is punishable by the death penalty in Jordan, but in the case of so-called "honor killings," a court usually commutes or reduces sentences, particularly if the victim's family urges leniency.

Last year, Jamil, 41, shot his 16-year-old niece Abir eight times in different parts of her body after she was raped in 2008. The court did not provide the surnames of the victim or her uncle.

"In his confession, he claimed that he killed the girl to cleanse his family's honor," the official said, citing court papers.

Abir gave birth to a baby boy two months before her murder, and her family kept the child, he added.

Between 15 and 20 women are murdered each year in Jordan in the name of honor, despite government efforts to fight such crimes. Parliament has refused to reform the penal code to ensure harsher penalties.

In 2006, Pew Research asked people throughout the world their opinion of Jews.

The country that came in dead last, with 98% saying that they do not like Jews, was Jordan. (Egypt came in at 97%.)

That's all the background you need to understand this:

It has been a while since Israelis entering Jordan were first required to deposit items of a Jewish-religious nature in order to cross the border for "security reasons." Most recently, Israelis have been asked to removes their yarmulkes.

A., an Israeli businessman who visits Jordan often was amazed when he was asked to leave his yarmulkes in a safe on his most recent visit to the country. "We know tefillin are confiscated and we recently heard brimmed hats were being taken, so we came with regular hats," he told Ynet.

"The man in the counter asked us to take off our hats and we thought it was standard procedure for passport control. But when the man saw the yarmulkes, he took us to the tourism police. The officer there said that the ban to wear yarmulkes was 'for our own benefit,' put it in the safe and gave us a form with which to receive the yarmulkes when we return."

Perhaps that is just because they are anti-Zionist and not anti-semitic? Not quite:

A. said that in light of such limitations he makes a point of not staying in Jordan for more than a day in each visit. "I don’t carry tefillin so I can't stay the night," he said. "What's really annoying about the whole thing is that together with us at the border crossing was a group of post-army youngsters with IDF training t-shirts who were so obviously Israeli citizens. They didn't give them any hard time, while with us they insisted."

Even if you agree that the border guards are simply protecting the Jews for their own good, it means that Jordan's government admits that its citizens are rabid Jew-haters - and it has no interest in doing anything about it.

Well, not quite true. They are willing to do something.

Because when Pew Research returned in 2008 to ask the same question about Jordanian attitudes towards Jews.

And Jordan refused to allow that question from even being asked!

(h/t Joel)

Lauren Booth sets the record straight about her Islamic adventure

Al Quds al Arabi, the London-based pan-Arabic newspaper, interviewed Lauren Booth about her conversion to Islam.

First, she said that she simply converted to Islam, not to any particular sect within Islam. I guess she needs to get past page 60 of the Koran to make such a decision. She said she did it after returning from Iran, not in Iran.

Some newspaper mentioned that she swam in Gaza in a bikini the last time she was there. She denies this, saying she kept her clothes on and swam early in the morning so no one would see, and anyway now that she converted all of her sins are gone so it doesn't matter, but she might sue the newspaper that claimed she was in a bikini.

Well, I did find a picture of her at the beach in Gaza...

At her Iranian employer PressTV, she adds:

It is definitely not easy for a Western woman to convert to Islam. Everything that you have been shown about the way that Islam is treated in the West says to you that this is going to be difficult.

Your practices and your daily life are going to change. We only like changes that come out of diet but someone suggesting a new gym routine, or to, actually, commit to praying 5 times a day, to commit changing your lifestyle, to commit trying to be a better person and to understanding Islam and to make that into your life.

It took her about three seconds to convert to Islam, and her love of the spotlight is giving her headlines that she adores. And she's saying that it is difficult?

Anyway, I'll let Julie Burchill have the last word:

It's hard to know where to start when describing the sheer ickiness of Booth. That she works as a paid stooge for the murderous Iranian regime's television channel has to come pretty near the top. A woman, choosing to act a front for a gang of thugs who uphold the punishment of death by stoning for adulteresses! This is surely Stockholm Syndrome gone gaga.

Her entirely inappropriate addiction to the spotlight, although she was obviously designed as one of Nature's plus-ones, is another stand-out feature. A failed actress, a mediocre hack, it's pretty fair to say we would never have heard of her had her half-sister not married a man who became Prime Minister. And now her meal-ticket is Mohammed.

Yes, it seems that even the faith she was raised in isn't narrow-minded, patriarchal and oppressive enough for the sensation-hungry Booth, who having tried everything else is so jaded that she can only get a kick from self-denial. (There does seem to be a particular affinity between Catholics and Muslims – Jew-hating is a great bonding agent.) And a kick it is – she describes her engagement with faith in terms that veer between the drooling of a clammy adolescent ("this shot of spiritual morphine, just absolute bliss and joy") and that of a recovering alcoholic clinging desperately to the wreckage of her sobriety ("I haven't had a drink in 45 days!")

We've all done embarrassing things, but the spectacle of Booth attempting to rap in the celebrity jungle does seem to indicate that she is the sort of dweeb who would do anything to get in with the tough kids – who she now perceives as being the Muslims.

Maybe like a lot of Western cowards, she thinks that if she sucks up to Islamism hard enough she will be spared its rage. Personally, I prefer to aspire to the words of the great Spanish anti-fascist activist Dolores "La Pasionaria" Ibarruri; "It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees."

As I pointed out in this column a while back, the website Iranian.com, a voice of the country's exiles, recently ran a photo of Miss Booth in full modesty drag, with the headline HAS THIS WOMAN GONE MAD? and the comment "in donning the hijab, she is kowtowing to the very fundamentalism that holds the fate of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in its hands ... To use the language that Booth might to describe Israel's excesses, it is shameful and disgusting that she a) works for Press TV, and b) agrees to wear Islamic headgear on screen."

What sort of woman freely converts to a religion which supports the oppression, torment and murder of thousands of Christians, homosexuals and spirited women, worldwide, every year? The sort of woman who writes love letters to a serial killer, I reckon. Still, might as well look on the bright side. Go on, Lauren, treat yourself to a full-face and – most essentially – mouth-covering burka!

If your Iranian paymasters and puppet-masters won't spring for it, I'd be more than happy to.

Wednesday afternoon links

Israeligirl: Cultural Oppression in Iran

Haaretz: Israeli Arab activist (and head of an NGO network) admits to spying for Hezbollah

Backspin: The Legal Niceties of Hamas Executions

Soccer Dad: Wanting peace more than the Palestinians

Sultan Knish: When Jewish Windows Break

Remember the nutty anti-semitic article about how Jews leaving the White House is a bad omen for America? Well, it now has a new audience - readers of the Arab American News! (h/t Dan)

Your tax dollars paying for PalArab pensions

A couple of weeks ago:

The European Commission decided, on 5 October, to provide an additional financial package worth €61.4 million for the Occupied Palestinian Territories under the 2010 budget. Some €41.4 million will go towards helping the Palestinian Authority meet its salary obligations for teachers, doctors and nurses in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But apparently some of that €41.4 million is going elsewhere:

The Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Dr Salam Fayyad, and the European Union Representative, Christian Berger, on Wednesday, signed a €41.4 million (Dh152.05 million) financing agreement, which will help to cover the expenses of the Palestinian Authority until the end of 2010.

These funds will cover the Palestinian Authority's salaries and pensions through PEGASE, the European mechanism for support of the Palestinians.

The €41.4 million financing package will contribute to the payment of civil servants' salaries and pensions, both in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, for November and December 2010.

Maybe to Europeans, pensions are considered so basic as to be the same as salaries, but doesn't it seem a little strange that a cash-strapped pseudo-government like the PA is paying people who contribute nothing towards building a state?

Which map is offensive?

Imagine that the State of Israel published maps showing its boundaries looking something like this:

This map would include parts of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, as well as all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

Do you think it might offend people? Would it spur a huge set of angry demonstrations and op-eds, accusing Israel of expansionism and having aggressive, militaristic goals? Would Jordan be justified in reducing diplomatic ties because of an official map that takes a chunk of that country away?

It turns out that this map roughly represents the boundaries of Palestine requested by the Zionist Organization and presented at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It is also not far off from what most people in the early 20th century would have considered to be historic Palestine, although it explicitly excluded Amman and the Hejaz Railway.

Nowadays, of course, Israel is not demanding these boundaries for itself. A map like this one would be considered highly offensive, and in all probability if the Israeli government would publish even one copy of such a map as reflecting the desired borders of Israel it would result in UN resolutions condemning it as incitement.

Now look at this picture of Mahmoud Abbas published in the PA's Al Hayat al-Jadida yesterday, via MEMRI:

He is holding a map of "Palestine" carved in stone - and Israel doesn't exist.

Is that not offensive?

(Note again that the PA has no territorial designs on any Arab country, even when they are part of historic Palestine. Only Israel.)

So does the UN support a unilaterally declared Palestinian Arab state?

Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post seems to have been the first to report:

UN Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace Negotiations Robert H. Serry expressed the UN's support for the declaration of an independent Palestinian state to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad while the two picked olives together on Tuesday near the West Bank village of Turmus'ayyeh, close to the Israeli settlement of Shiloh.

"All international players are now in agreement that the Palestinians are ready for statehood at any point in the near future," said Perry [sic]. He continued, "We are in the homestretch of your [Fayyad's] agenda to reach that point by August next year and you have our full support."

A few hours later, a reporter asked the UN spokesperson about this in their daily briefing:

Question: Robert Serry said yesterday to Salam Fayyad that the UN would support a declaration of the Palestinian State this… next summer… actually, next August.

Spokesperson: Said to whom?

Question: Said to Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. The 1995 Oslo Accords, for which the UN is sponsored, from which participation in the Quartet says that any such declaration should be a result of negotiation. The question is, does Serry… does the Secretary-General believe that Serry’s sentiment also supports a unilateral declaration of statehood or through the UN without consulting Israel, which is the current path on which the Palestinians are going?

Spokesperson: Well, Benny, let me check with Robert Serry’s office on exactly what was said. Okay, thanks. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. [He later informed the correspondent that Robert Serry had been quoted inaccurately, and that the paper writing about him had revised its story.]

As far as I can tell, the Jerusalem Post has not revised anything from what I just quoted above.

So what really happened?

Excitement in Yemen parliament over child marriages

The Yemen parliament debated a proposed law to set 16 years as the minimum age for girls to get married in that country.

The discussion deteriorated as the Islamists who oppose the law argued with its supporters.

The two sides started insulting each other and using profanity.

Then, one lawmaker raised his shoe to hit his opponent, and security broke up the scuffle. The session has now been postponed.

Al Watan, an Arab American newspaper reporting on the story, commented wryly in its headline: "Welcome to democracy."

By the way, I had never looked at the American Al Watan before. In Arabic, it links to at least one explicitly anti-semitic video.

Terrorist/butcher

Lizas Welt brings us an interesting photo of a butcher shop - in Brussels:

We knew he was a terrorist, but a butcher too?

Of course, the meat is Halal.

(h/t Silke)

Arab League still pushing boycott of Israel

The Arab League representative to "Palestine," Mohammed Sabih, spoke at a meeting of the regional boycott liaison office in Syria that it is the duty of Arab nations to adhere to the boycott of Israel.

Because of its violations against human rights.

Again...he said this in Syria.

He is encouraged by the worldwide BDS movement, which regularly announces successes but has in fact failed spectacularly.

I do not know whether the Arab League encourages the PA to stop all trade with Israel, or to demand that Gaza stop its imports of humanitarian aid and consumer goods from Israel.

The Arab boycott of Jewish businesses in then-Palestine started as early as 1909, some 39 years before the state of Israel was established.

It is notable that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have officially ended their boycott - the Saudis to enter the World Trade Organization and Bahrain to take advantage of a free trade agreement with the US. Nevertheless, the Saudi boycott is still in effect.

Despite this, there is trade between Israel and Arab countries worth tens of millions of dollars annually.

Wikipedia, quoting UPI, mentions an earlir boycott conference in Syria.

On May 16, 2006, after four-day conference of the Arab Boycott Bureau in Damascus, Syria, a "source close to the conference" reported that "the majority of Arab countries are evading the boycott, notably the [Persian] Gulf states and especially Saudi Arabia. ... The boycott deteriorated a lot, regressed and even almost collapsed... We should not lie on each other, because the boycott is quasi... paralyzed.

Islamic Jihad has responded to the controversy over publishing pictures of Turkish "peace activists" from Viva Palestina who visited Islamic Jihad and posed for commemorative photos with machine guns and RPGs.

Completely clueless about why the concept of peace activists proudly brandishing weapons is an oxymoron, Islamic Jihad stated that the pictures were "commemorative photos of solidarity" and emphasized that the activists were in no real danger at any point during their photo shoot. They emphasized that they didn't bring them to any border areas, for example, where they would have been at risk.

In other words, trying to get into Western heads as to what the problem is, they assumed that it was a safety issue!

They additionally said that the Turks were "motivated by an innate natural human solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people exposed to murder, genocide and torture at the hands of the Israeli occupation that kills children and abuses prisoners and burns the holy sites and traps civilians. These visits of solidarity are primarily of sympathy with the besieged and with the Palestinian right with the resistance."

They added, "This is systematic Israeli propaganda against peace activists."

Gaza rockets suffering quality control problems

The GANSO website that I mentioned earlier has bi-weekly reports of various dangerous things that happened in Gaza.

One interesting thing that they mention in these reports are the number of rockets and mortars that either explode prematurely or that fall short in Gaza.

According to their figures, over the past month, Gaza terror groups fired 19 rockets (that these NGO's call "homemade") and 14 mortars towards Israel. Out of those, 8 rockets and 8 mortars fell short or exploded prematurely.

That's a 42% failure rate for rockets, and 57% failure rate for mortars.

No wonder Hamas and their NGO partners want to import more raw materials into Gaza. The quality of weapon components they are getting from the tunnels is abysmal!

NGOs admit how they help Hamas

GANSO is the Gaza NGO Safety Office, run by CARE International, to help NGOs in Gaza stay safe.

Their website describes incidents that jeopardize the safety of internationals in Gaza, both from IDF incursions and from militant actions (like mortars or rockets that fall short.)

Last February, there was an (apparently Islamist) attack on a Red Cross convoy in Gaza, and GANSO wrote a special report about the ramifications.

This report describes, incidentally, how much the NGOs in Gaza help Hamas, and it makes clear that this is considered a desirable political goal.

Here's how NGOs in Gaza think - in their own words:

The presence of the international community in the Gaza Strip is vital to the stability of the de-facto government; over 60% of the Gazan population is food insecure, according to UN sources, and unemployment surpasses 50%; thus, a majority of the population is either partially or entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. The assistance provided by the international community, particularly by UNRWA and WFP. eases the burden on the de-facto government of managing the needs of its impoverished and dispossessed population, enabling the de-facto government to achieve a modicum of legitimacy. Thus, even the partial reduction or suspension of humanitarian aid activities in the Gaza Strip as a consequence of a disintegrating internal security environment would have devastating consequences for both the population and the de-facto government's legitimacy.

The presence of the international community in the Gaza Strip is also a major political benefit to the de-facto government. The willingness of international governmental and non-governmental organizations to send diplomatic delegations and expatriate staff into the Gaza Strip demonstrates a level of trust in the security infrastructure of the de-facto authority.

Moreover, the presence of expatriate staff in Gaza implies that expatriates do not feel threatened by the de-facto government itself a boon to the credibility of the Hamas movement in the international arena, in which the movement has for years been labeled as a terrorist organizationh by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

The skepticism of regarding Hamas as a terror organization is evident in this report, as well as the pride in how NGOs prop up Hamas as a political force.

In other words, NGOs in Gaza are acting at odds with EU and US policies by knowingly and eagerly propping up Hamas' Islamist rule in Gaza.