Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, December 13, 2010

A challenge to Khaled Amayreh

Khaled Amayreh, a prolific Arab writer and hater who we've already seen is an explicit anti-semite, has a new and unintentionally funny article:

A few weeks ago, a supposedly religious activist, probably from one of the Gulf States, suggested to me that Muslims shouldn't confine our attacks to Zionists; we ought, he said, to attack Jews as Jews, on the grounds that the vast majority of Jews support Israel.

I treated this "advice" with great caution, suspecting that he might be one of those overzealous fanatics who are duped by Zionist circles to malign Jews so that Israeli hasbara (propaganda) operatives such as MEMRI and Honest Reporting [sic] would be able to use his extremist rhetoric to their best advantage. They highlight "Muslim anti-Semitism" and con the world into thinking that the conflict in the Middle East is not really over the Israeli occupation of Palestine and oppression of its Christian and Muslim people, but is rooted in deeply-held Arab racism against the Jews.

After some investigation, I found out that the website used by that extremist was actually a Mossad front used to attract religious radicals in order to serve Israeli propaganda purposes. Needless to say, Zionist groups just love Muslims like this and they usually have no shortage of such imbeciles to use; when there is, the Mossad hasbara department simply creates or recruits a few more.

Besides the great irony of someone who makes no bones about his hatred of Jews worrying about a Muslim extremist spouting anti-semitism, there is another thing that doesn't quite add up:

Khaled - why aren't you identifying this "Mossad site" publicly?

Don't your first-class investigation skills deserve a wide audience? Shouldn't you be warning your readers not to be taken in by this bogus Mossad site where their presence would play into the hands of the evil Zionists? How can you be so irresponsible so as not to work assiduously to expose this site to the world and embarrass the manipulative and evil Jews who are trying to pull the wool over innocent Muslim eyes and turn them, unwillingly, into anti-semites?

I'm sure there is some logical explanation for your seemingly inexplicable ommission. So, come one: where is this site?

After all, you wouldn't want people to think you are lying, would you?

Christians fleeing Iraq - and every other Arab country. NYT not sure why.

From the NYT:

A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them.

The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the country after elections in March.

It threatens to reduce further what Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana of the Assyrian Church of the East called “a community whose roots were in Iraq even before Christ.”

Those who fled the latest violence — many of them in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars — warned that the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq’s Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

“It’s exactly what happened to the Jews,” said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once mixed neighborhood in Baghdad. “They want us all to go.

And who is driving the Christians out? Somehow, the New York Times cannot find a way to pronounce the word. The entire article on religious persecution in Iraq uses the word "Muslim" once, referring to Iraq as "an overwhelmingly Muslim country" but without quite drawing the line between that and the persecutors. It talks about "daily threats" without identifying those making them.

Of course, this is hardly limited to Iraq. The NYT's Ethan Bronner noted last year that

[A] dwindling and threatened Christian population [is] driven to emigration by political violence, lack of economic opportunity and the rise of radical Islam. A region that a century ago was 20 percent Christian is about 5 percent today and dropping.

Even though he mentions "radical Islam" he is also reluctant to explicitly state that Muslim threats against Christians are driving them out, instead primarily blaming the economy and other factors.

But wouldn't the economy be equally bad for Muslims as well?

In fact, the only Middle Eastern country whose Christian population is increasing is Israel. This CAMERA report last year goes into detail on this phenomenon.

So why is the New York Times so reluctant to identify the persecutors of Christians? Why is it silent on the threats, verbal and sexual assaults, and land confiscation by Muslims against Christians?

(h/t MW)

Is the ultimate goal a Palestinian Arab state - or a pan-Arab state?

One of the revelations in the National Archives report I posted about yesterday was this one:

Husseini, however, was a believer in a Pan-Arab state.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who became a supposed convert to Palestinian Arab nationalism from pan-Arab nationalism in 1920 in the wake of the 1920 San Remo Conference, really remained a pan-Arab nationalist but used the idea of "Palestinian" nationalism - something virtually nonexistent before San Remo - as a way to expel the Jews from Palestine.

And he is not the only one.

The original PLO charter written in 1964 does not explicitly call for a Palestinian Arab state! It is filled with phrases like

The Palestinian people firmly believe in Arab unity, and in order to play its role in realizing this goal, it must, at this stage of its struggle, preserve its Palestinian personality and all its constituents. It must strengthen the consciousness of its existence and stance and stand against any attempt or plan that may weaken or disintegrate its personality.

In other words, Palestinian national identity is essentially a fiction that was created and maintained by Arab leaders as a means to destroy Zionism. Before the 1960s, most Palestinian Arabs identified far more with the Arab nation - and their own clans - than with "Palestine," and indeed practically none of them fought in 1948 for anything outside their own villages.

But we can go further, as the Hamas charter says this rather explicitly as well, although in terms of pan-Islamism rather than pan-Arabism:A

s for the objectives: They are the fighting against the false, defeating it and vanquishing it so that justice could prevail, homelands be retrieved and from its mosques would the voice of the mu'azen emerge declaring the establishment of the state of Islam, so that people and things would return each to their right places and Allah is our helper

. Only as a strategy is Palestinian Arab nationalism mentioned, not as a goal:

Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. "Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know."...

The question of the liberation of Palestine is bound to three circles: the Palestinian circle, the Arab circle and the Islamic circle. Each of these circles has its role in the struggle against Zionism.

The very first article in the 2003 Palestinian Constitution says:

Palestine is part of the large Arab World, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab Nation. Arab Unity is an objective which the Palestinian People shall work to achieve.

Given this, it becomes even clearer that the antipathy towards Israel is from an Arab perspective as an encroacher of eternally Arab or Islamic land, not primarily for the purpose of establishing a independent state of "Palestine." On the contrary, a state of Arab Palestine is simply a tactic towards the goal of a huge, united Arab nation. Even though that goal is illusory, it shows that Palestinian Arab nationalism is an artificially created paradigm and not a natural national group.

In other words, Palestinian Arab nationalism is a fiction created for Western consumption, where people are sympathetic to arguments for self-determination. Today, of course, due to oppressive Arab discrimination specifically against Palestinian Arabs, they have coalesced into a people united by their misery - misery that is a policy-level decision made by their brethren, calculated to inculcate hate against the people who really do have a legitimate national historic ties to the area of Palestine.

HaShomer HaChadash - defending Jewish-owned land in Israel

Jewish-owned farms and other lands are under attack by Israeli Bedouin and others. A new group has been set up to defend this land.

This is a scary and sobering, but ultimately uplifting, video:

The war isn't over even within the Green Line. It is a touchy subject because Israel is under such a microscope that even Israeli politicians and police apparently don't want to antagonize Israeli Arabs who break the law.

It is wonderful to see young Israelis who care enough to do something about it.

(h/t Yerushalimey and CiFWatch)

ElderToons: Erekat speaks out for Palestinian Arab rights

In honor of the Comment is Free column I posted on...

Saeb Erekat's lies in CiF

Saeb Erekat, that Palestinian Arab negotiator who the West feels is so moderate because he wears suits and not army fatigues, has once again called for the destruction of Israel - this time in the pages of the Guardian's Comment is Free column.

He couches his demand to the end of the Jewish state in terms of the specious arguments that descendants of Palestinian Arabs who fled in 1948 have a "right to return" to the homes of their ancestors.

Here are some of his lies:

Israel's own admission as a member to the United Nations was contingent on its adherence to the principles of UNGA 194, something it proceeded to disregard once membership was granted.

While the resolution granting Israel's membership in the UN mentions UNGA 194, in no way does it say that it is contingent on it:

Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 and 11 December 1948 and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representative of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions,

The General Assembly,

Acting in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure,

1. Decides that Israel is a peace loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;

2. Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations.

While I cannot find the specific "declarations and explanations" noted at the moment, Israel's interpretation of 194 at the time was clear - no "return" of Arab refugees could be contemplated until there was a comprehensive peace and until the Arabs who return were willing to "live at peace with their neighbours", a UNGA 194 condition that was never met. The idea that Israel's admittance was somehow conditional is clearly a blatant lie.

The lies continue. Erekat says that "Palestinian refugees [are] the oldest and largest refugee community in the world today." The fact is that the vast majority are not refugees, but descendants of refugees, and that designation was created for them by UNRWA for practical reasons as a working definition but not as a legal definition. If they are legal refugees, then so are hundreds of millions of other people.

The lies continue:

The fact that Israel bears responsibility for the creation of the refugees is beyond argument. Even if the state still claims amnesia for its deeds, Israeli historians have debunked the traditional Zionist mythology and shown how Zionist leaders prior to 1948 formulated plans to displace the indigenous Palestinian population in order to create a Jewish majority state.

While there is a tiny amount of truth to this - plans are created for a lot of situations - there was no actual implementation of any such plans. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs fled out of fear, not from force; their leaders fled early quite voluntarily leaving the masses without any anchor in the land. They fled because they thought that their Arab neighbors would allow them to resettle or stay until the Jews would be destroyed, but their fleeing showed that their attachment to the land was far more tenuous than the Jews who had no choice but to stay and fight, or die.

The lies continue:

Resolution 194 must provide the basis for a settlement to the refugee issue.

Resolution 194 was a General Assembly resolution, not legally binding. It also required that the Jerusalem area be under UN control - something ignored by Arabs. It does not specify only Arab refugees - in its language, Jews should have been allowed to return to their homes in the Old City and Gush Etzion and elsewhere - a provision rejected by Arabs even today. The entire resolution has no legal validity whatsoever in any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, as Israel argued in 1999:

The letters of invitation to the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Agreements signed between Israel and the PLO expressly provide that permanent status negotiations are to be based on Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). No other United Nations resolution is cited. The Palestinians have thus affirmed that a permanent solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be achieved by a negotiated settlement in West Bank and Gaza Strip territory that is the subject of those Security Council resolutions.

Other provisions of UNGA 194 were roundly ignored by the Arabs as well, such as free access to holy places. It is the Arab actions no less than anyone else that made 194 irrelevant.

Erekat's final lie is that masses of so-called refugees flooding Israel "will lead to a lasting peace." On the contrary, it would lead to the kind of internal terrorism that Palestine suffered before Israel was established, where thousands of people were slaughtered while Jews were a minority.

The entire issue is a ruse meant to destroy the Jewish state, and when the most "moderate" Palestinian Arab leaders are still publicly calling to dismantle Israel by demographic means, it shows that their stated desire for a two-state solution with both states living side by side in peace is an utter sham.

This article also proves that Palestinian Arab rejectionism is not merely a tactical move to improve their negotiating position, but an absolute rejection of Israel as anything other than yet another Arab state. This is the mainstream position of so-called "moderate" Palestinian Arabs, not a fringe extremist position. If the West is serious about a real peace - something that seems literally impossible given such intransigence - it needs to insist that Palestinian Arab leaders admit, publicly, that Israel is not where descendants of Palestinian Arabs who fled in 1948 will live and that they need to be absorbed in Arab countries instead of being the victims of institutional discrimination in every single Arab country as they are today.

That is the issue that Erekat and his ilk studiously avoid mentioning, and it proves beyond all doubt that they do not give a damn about their people but rather want to continue using them as pawns in their six-decade old, single-minded goal of destroying Israel.

New Asian convoy: India to Iran to Turkey to Syria to Gaza (updated)

A potentially dangerous new convoy, whose ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel, is currently in Iran where they are being encouraged by Ayatollahs and government officials.

The planned route looks like this (via Israeligirl):

The final leg seems to be intended to be a ship from Syria to Gaza.

The group behind it is called Asian People's Solidarity for Palestine, and they claim that some of the members of the journey were injured on the Mavi Marmara, making it clear that these are not "peace activists." (Their manifesto also calls for the"right of return," showing that they are anti-Israel activists as well.)

They plan to arrive in Gaza in time for the second anniversary of Cast Lead.

I believe that Israel would regard a ship sailing from an enemy state to be an act of war, and that threat (as I recall) was what scuttled the Lebanese "women's flotilla" last summer, as they could not find a country willing to host the final part of the journey. I think it is doubtful that Syria would risk this, but it is a story that needs to be followed.

(h/t Israeligirl)

UPDATE: Commenters have noticed what I didn't - that the last sea leg of the journey is in fact to El Arish in Egypt and then an overland convoy to Gaza, similar to other convoys and something that Israel does not object to. Egypt has just as little interest in Hamas acquiring weapons as Israel does.

Is Hezbollah threatening STL members?

Maybe a non-story - but maybe something significant:

Fatima al-Issawi on Sunday announced her resignation from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, citing "professional reasons."

"I announce my resignation as a spokesperson for the STL for professional reasons," Issawi said in a statement delivered to the state-run National News Agency.

She said she will not go into details of her resignation "out of respect for the position I had represented."

She does seem to come from Lebanon, so could Hezbollah be making some discreet threats against her family members in an attempt to delay or influence the STL indictments?

A possible hint from Iloubnan:

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is an “international conspiracy concocted against Lebanon in the service of Zionist entity”, Development and Liberation bloc MP Ali Khreiss said on Sunday, according to the National News Agency (NNA).

The MP stressed Amal and Hezbollah determination to thwart the STL conspiracy targeting Lebanon.

Stephen Colbert has the last word on the Mossad sharks

Israel Shark Conspiracy

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

March to Keep Fear Alive

(h/t Yid With Lid)

New revelations about the Mufti's Nazi ties - and Nasser's

From NYT:

After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.

In chilling detail, the report also elaborates on the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the British.

In fact, the report says, the Muslim leader was paid “an absolute fortune” of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year). It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party’s elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated more than 350,000 Jews there.

On Nov. 28, 1941, the authors say, Hitler told Mr. Husseini that the Afrika Corps and German troops deployed from the Caucasus region would liberate Arabs in the Middle East and that “Germany’s only objective there would be the destruction of the Jews.”

The report details how Mr. Husseini himself was allowed to flee after the war to Syria — he was in the custody of the French, who did not want to alienate Middle East regimes — and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israeli Arab leaders and “were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism.”

“You have an actual contract between officials of the Nazi Foreign Ministry with Arab leaders, including Husseini, extending after the war because they saw a cause they believed in,” Dr. Breitman said. “And after the war, you have real Nazi war criminals — Wilhelm Beisner, Franz Rademacher and Alois Brunner — who were quite influential in Arab countries.”

In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine’s Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attaché in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and “cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can’t do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that.”

“We have more detailed scholarly accounts today of Husseini’s wartime activities, but Husseini’s C.I.A. file indicates that wartime Allied intelligence organizations gathered a healthy portion of this incriminating evidence,” the report says. “This evidence is significant in light of Husseini’s lenient postwar treatment.” He died in Beirut in 1974.

Here are sections about the Mufti from the actual report:

Rauff ’s Einsatzkommando, technically subordinated to Rommel’s army, reported directly to the RSHA in Berlin. After Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia, SS chief Heinrich Himmler took direct command of this umbrella security-police organization. Two German historians have indicated that Himmler conferred with Hitler about the deployment of Einsatzkommando Egypt, which was to take “executive measures” against civilians on its own authority, in other words, the mass murder of Jews.

In 1946 Hoth commented only that his Einsatzkommando was supposed to perform the usual Security Police and SD duties in Egypt; he avoided saying that such duties elsewhere had included the mass execution of Jews. But this context puts a rather different light on what his British interrogator called Hoth’s idealism.

Hitler himself signaled his intention to eliminate the Jews of Palestine. In a November 28, 1941, conversation in Berlin with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler said that the outcome of the war in Europe would also decide the fate of the Arab world. German troops intended to break through the Caucasus region and move into the Middle East. This would result in the liberation of Arab peoples. Hitler said that Germany’s only objective there would be the destruction of the Jews.

Recent books have added greatly to our knowledge of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s activities as leader of anti-Jewish revolts in the British Mandate in Palestine in 1929 and 1936, as the impetus behind the pro-German coup in Iraq in April 1941, and as a pro-Nazi propagandist in Berlin, broadcasting over German short-wave radio to large audiences in the Middle East starting in late 1941. CIA and U.S. Army files on Husseini offer small pieces of new evidence about his relationship with the Nazi government and his escape from postwar justice.

The Nazi government financed Husseini and Rashid Ali el-Gailani, the former premier of Iraq who had joined Husseini in Berlin after his failed coup in Iraq. After the war Carl Berthold Franz Rekowski, an official of the German Foreign Office who had dealt with Husseini, testified that the Foreign Office financially supported the two Arab leaders, their families, and other Arabs in their entourage who had fled to Germany after the coup. Husseini and Gailani determined how these funds were distributed among the others. The CIA file on Husseini includes a document indicating that he had a staff of 20–30 men in Berlin. A separate source indicates that he lived in a villa in the Krumme Lanke neighborhood of Berlin. From spring 1943 to spring 1944, Husseini personally received 50,000 marks monthly and Gailani 65,000 for operational expenses. In addition, they each received living expenses averaging 80,000 marks per month, an absolute fortune. A German field marshal received a base salary of 26,500 marks per year. Finally, Husseini and Gailani received substantial foreign currency to support adherents living in countries outside Germany.

Through conversations with other Foreign Office officials, Rekowski learned that Nazi authorities planned to use both Arab leaders to control their respective countries after Germany conquered them. Gailani was an Iraqi nationalist who maintained good ties with the German Foreign Office. Husseini, however, was a believer in a Pan-Arab state. His closest ties were with the SS. The other Arabs were divided into one camp or the other. SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Beisner, like Hoth, an officer on Einsatzkommando Egypt, had frequent contact with Husseini during the war. Beisner told Rekowski that Husseini had good ties with Himmler and with Waffen-SS Gen. Gottlob Berger, who handled the recruitment of non-German forces into the Waffen-SS. SS leaders and Husseini both claimed that Nazism and Islam had common values as well as common enemies—above all, the Jews.

Another independent source of information on Husseini’s ties with the SS was the disaffected and abused wife of a young Egyptian, Dr. Abdel Halim el-Naggar, who had worked in Berlin for the German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry. An Egyptian named Galal in Berlin edited an Arabic-language periodical designed to stir up the Arabs to support Germany, and el-Naggar assisted him in 1940. By 1941 el-Naggar had his own Arabic publication for Middle Eastern audiences, and in 1942 he took on the additional job of director of Nazi short-wave broadcasts to the Near East. After Husseini came to Berlin, he wanted to cooperate with el-Naggar on Middle Eastern broadcasts, and for a time they worked together successfully. Then el-Naggar established an Islamic Central Institute in Berlin. Husseini had wanted to head this institute, and after el-Naggar refused him, Husseini used his influence with the SS to get el-Naggar removed from the broadcasting job.

In the fall of 1943 Husseini went to the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi ally, to recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS. During that trip he told the troops of the newly formed Bosnian-Muslim 13th Mountain Waffen-SS division that the entire Muslim world ought to follow their example. Husseini also organized a 1944 mission for Palestinian Arabs and Germans to carry out sabotage and propaganda after German planes dropped them into Palestine by parachute. In discussions with the Foreign Intelligence branch of the RSHA, Husseini insisted that the Arabs take command after they landed and direct their fight against the Jews of Palestine, not the British authorities.

Today we have more detailed scholarly accounts today of Husseini’s wartime activities, but Husseini’s CIA file indicates that wartime Allied intelligence organizations gathered a healthy portion of this incriminating evidence. This evidence is significant in light of Husseini’s lenient postwar treatment.

In the spring of 1945, a German Foreign Office official reached agreement with Gailani effective April 1: his cash payments were raised to 85,000 marks, but Gailani would repay the Germans after his forces reconquered Iraq. Similarly, according to a newly declassified document, the Foreign Office and Husseini signed a contract for subsidies of up to 12,000 marks per month to continue after April 1, 1945, with the Mufti pledging to repay these amounts later. In April 1945 neither side could have had much doubt about the outcome of the war. The continuing contractual relationships meant that Nazi officials and the two Arab leaders hoped to continue their joint or complementary political-ideological campaign in the postwar period.

Declassified CIA and Army files establish that the Allies knew enough about Husseini’s wartime activities to consider him a war criminal. Apparently fearing Allied prosecution, he tried to flee to Switzerland at the end of the war. Swiss authorities turned him over to the French, who brought him to Paris. Right after the war ended a group of Palestinian-Arab soldiers in the British Army who were stationed in Lebanon had staged anti-French demonstrations. They carried around a large picture of Husseini and declared him to be the “sword of the faith.”

According to one source considered reliable by the rump American intelligence organization known as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), British officials objected to French plans to prosecute Husseini, fearing that this would cause political unrest in Palestine. The British “threatened” the French with Arab uprisings in French Morocco.

In October 1945 Arthur Giles (who used the title Bey), British head of Palestine’s Criminal Investigation Division, told the assistant American military attaché in Cairo that the Mufti might be the only person who could unite the Palestine Arabs and “cool off the Zionists…. Of course, we can’t do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that.” French intelligence officials, bitter at France’s loss of colonial territory in the Middle East, said they would enjoy having the Mufti around to embarrass the British.

Husseini was well treated in Paris. Meanwhile, Palestinian Arab leaders and various Muslim extremists agitated to bring him back to the Middle East. According to the American military attaché in Cairo, this plan initially embarrassed moderate officials in the Arab League. But as prospects for a peaceful settlement in the British Mandate for Palestine declined and as other Arab prisoners were released or escaped (Gailani escaped), sentiment changed. A delegate of the Palestine Higher Arab Committee went to Paris in June 1946 and told Husseini to get ready for a little trip.

According to another American source in Syria, at a meeting in the Egyptian Embassy in Paris, the ambassador, the ministers of Syria and Lebanon, and a few Arab leaders from Morocco and Algeria worked out the details of Husseini’s escape. The French government learned of, or was informed of, the plan, but chose not to intervene in order to avoid offending the Arabs of North Africa. Husseini flew to Syria, then went via Aleppo and Beirut to Alexandria, Egypt.

By 1947 Husseini denied that he had worked for the Axis powers during the war. He told one acquaintance that he hoped soon to have documentary evidence rebutting this slander, which the Jews were spreading. Similarly, after Adolf Eichmann was brought to Israel for trial in March 1961, Husseini, by now in Beirut, denied having ever met Eichmann during the war. He said that he had been forced to take refuge in Germany simply because British wanted to capture him. Nazi persecution of Jews had served Zionism, according to Husseini, by exciting world sympathy for them. Husseini never worked for American intelligence; the CIA simply considered him a person worth tracking. He died in Beirut in 1974.

He should have been hung as a war criminal - but today Husseini gets praised by the President of the Palestinian Authority.

But the Mufti was not the only prominent Arab leader who had Nazi ties:

Beisner’s importance grew in February 1958 when Franz Rademacher, living in Damascus under a pseudonym, told an unnamed CIA source in Syria that Gamal Abdel Nasser (called Jamal Nasir in one document and Gamal Nasir in another) had worked for the Germans during the war, and that Beisner had served as his liaison. They still were close, Rademacher claimed.

After leading a revolution and becoming the second president of Egypt in 1956, Nasser had established an intelligence organization under Zakaria Mohieddin. Zakaria had chosen Beisner’s former RSHA comrade Joachim Deumling as his intelligence adviser. Deumling had worked for the British Army of the Rhine after the war, but the British blacklisted him for security reasons in 1951.

When he decided to leave West Germany for Egypt, he traveled secretly to avoid attracting British attention. Zakaria, who soon became minister of the interior as well, praised Deumling’s intelligence work in Egypt.

Beisner may have benefited from an increasing presence of former Nazis in Cairo under Nasser. He later claimed that while in Cairo he had helped to train Algerian volunteers for the struggle to liberate Algeria from French control and that he sold arms to the Algerian National Liberation Front. Whether he operated on his own or with Egyptian intelligence approval is unclear.

I have had posts about Nazis being recruited to help Arabs in 1947-8 to fight Israel and about the Arab Nazi paratroopers who parachuted into Israel - apparently on the Mufti's orders.

ElderToons: Abbas threatens to resign

The second of what may become a series, if I find the time...

References:
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=1526
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-abbas-poster.html
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=2531

50th anniversary of sacking of Algerian synagogue

From Jewish Refugees website:

It is exactly 50 years, on 11 December 1960, since Algerian Arabs attacked the Great Synagogue in Algiers. They had been incensed by the visit of General de Gaulle and violence by the 'pieds-noirs' (Algerians of French descent) and the OAS. The Algerian Jews had hitherto tried to remain studiedly neutral between the FLN fighters for independence and the pro-French paramilitary (OAS). Now they understood that their bread was buttered on the French side. Two years later, almost the entire Algierian Jewish community fled, nearly all to France.

"What better way of expressing weakness and cowardice than by attacking the greatest symbol of Algerian Judaism, hitherto always respected and untouched, in the heart of the Casbah," write Albert Bensoussan and Julien Zenouda.

They go on to describe the scene: " In the centre of the old city, Jews and Arabs had always lived in harmony. The Jews came and went among them without fear. We spoke the same language, they respected us and we had esteem and affection for them. They entered the holy place and went on the rampage, tore the memorial plaques off the walls, ripped up the symbols of our faith, sullied books and Torah scrolls, emptied the lockers where people stored tallit, tephilin and prayer books, and torched everything.

"The (French) Paras then came with their red berets, occupied the place, camped on the floor of our Temple, ate, drank and fornicated with the clear conscience of soldiers, and, adding insult to injury, set up a Christmas tree. "

Here is how AP reported it:

Muslims attacked Jews, whom they lived with in peace for years. The usual, tired excuse - Zionism - is entirely absent from this story. They were angry at the French - and took their anger out on Jews, the easy to find and weak neighbors.

(h/t Silke)

Marxists march in Gaza

From Ma'an:

Thousands of supporters celebrated the 43rd anniversary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Gaza City on Saturday.

Politburo member of the leftist faction Jamil Majdalawi delivered a speech urging rival factions Hamas and Fatah to end "the unjustified disagreement which harms the Palestinian people, resistance fighters and negotiators."

Resistance, Majdalawi continued, was a legal right of the Palestinian people, and it would be wrong to look for alternatives.

The PFLP is a Marxist organization that has connections to socialist groups worldwide. (Here is its German site, for example, complete with links to a shop where you can buy their caps and T-shirts, which seems strangely capitalist. And here is the webpage of the New Zealand branch, complete with a video of "pro-peace" activist David Rovics, whom I lampooned here, performing at a terrorism fundraiser.)

The rally seems to have been fairly well-attended, and Hamas apparently did not interfere with this staunchly secular but terrorist organization's march:

The very existence of the PFLP in Gaza is proof that even if somehow an agreement would be reached with Fatah and (let's fantasize) Hamas, there are other terror groups like PFLP, DFLP, Islamic Jihad and some Salafist and al-Qaeda-leaning groups that would still happily attack Israelis by whatever means they could. Not only that, but groups like Fatah would encourage those groups to continue the "resistance" in the same way that Fatah has used the fiction of having a separate "political wing" as cover to shield it from criticism for terror attacks by organizations it actively supported behind the scenes.

When even Assad says Abbas is wrong.... (Zvi)

From Zvi:

Even Syria's Bashar al-Assad now says openly that making an Israeli construction freeze in the West Bank a precondition before Abbas will talk to Israel is pointless and stupid.

Even the most hard-line, anti-Semitic regime in the neighborhood agrees with most Israelis that insisting on a settlement freeze is a complete waste of time; if Mahmoud Abbas wants to stop the growth of settlements, then the only way to do it is to negotiate an agreement.

The column is dressed up in the usual flotilla of paranoid anti-Israel claims, of course, but the final conclusion is actually pretty reasonable:

"What matters are results, not the slogans that we have become addicted to."

It is time for Pres. Obama, Sec. of State Clinton and Sen. Mitchell, and also the useful EU idiots who wrote an anti-Israel letter to Catherine Ashton the other day, to come to the same conclusion. Blaming the settlers amounts to a mindlessly repeated, worn-out slogan. But the mindless repetition of slogans does nothing to improve the world.

Only an Israel-PA agreement that specifies borders will define the borders of Israeli towns in the West Bank. Without a peace agreement, US or PA attempts to micromanage what construction occurs in Israeli towns in the West Bank bring absolutely no benefit to anyone.

Of course, one cannot lay the blame *entirely* on Mr. Abbas.

The Obama administration, not Mahmoud Abbas, created this fiasco. The Obama administration took a situation that was gradually improving and, by introducing this mindless precondition, completely shut down negotiations. And they pursued this direction, in their arrogance and ineptitude, despite being warned of the consequences.

But Mr. Abbas, of course, had every opportunity to reject such a pointless diversion. Mr. Abbas, being the do-nothing that he is, leaped at the chance to sit around doing nothing. And for that he MUST be blamed.

Since that time, the US insistence on beating up Israel for Abbas' rejectionism has given those who hate Israel a chance to sit back and smile. But the handful of people who would prefer to actually improve the lot of West Bank Arabs have grown increasingly frustrated.

Meanwhile, naive European and Israeli leftists, by continuing to flog the dead horse of the freeze, have simply prolonged the fiasco.

But there are some people in the Arab world who actually do think about the situation, and these people have increasingly criticized the whole pointless freeze idea. And now even Bashar al-Assad, die-hard enemy of Israel, looks at the freeze and comes to the same conclusion as Netanyahu or Lieberman.

Without a peace agreement, US and PA attempts to micromanage what construction occurs in Israeli towns in the West Bank bring absolutely no benefit to anyone. Only an Israel-PA agreement that specifies borders will define the borders of Israeli towns in the West Bank.

Comment issues

People have been complaining, a lot, about the new comment system.

Disqus already said they can't do anything about my linking the old Echo comments to Disqus because of something wrong with their format, but I can see that if I go to Blogger comments I would be receiving a lot of spam comments.

I just changed a setting that might help the comment situation; let me know if you are still having problems.