Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, December 26, 2010

German mayor calls on removal of anti-semitic exhibit

Mayor of Cologne Jürgen Roters (Social Democratic) and its sister city partnerships, Cologne-Tel Aviv and Cologne-Bethlehem, issued a joint statement last week blasting the long-standing anti- Israel exhibit in his community’s bustling Cathedral Square pedestrian-only zone.

According to the resolution, “The anti-Semitic and anti- Israel presentation of the socalled ‘Cologne Wailing Wall’ spreads hatred against humans and feeds anti-Israel resentments.”

Roters and the Cologne authorities called on Walter Hermann, the organizer of the “Cologne Wailing Wall,” to “immediately remove the installation that shows contempt for humanity” and said the city of Cologne would no longer accept Hermann’s exhibit and approach.

The resolution said that Hermann has displayed his hatefest against Israel since 2004.

Hermann’s display of an anti-Semitic cartoon in January triggered a legal complaint and a grassroots campaign from the non-Jewish theater director Gerd Buurmann. The cartoon showed a man sporting a Star of David on his bib as he devoured a young Palestinian boy with a fork while draped in an American flag and a knife with the word “Gaza.” A glass filled with blood stood next to to his dinner plate.

Buurmann filed a legal protest earlier this year, asserting a violation of Germany’s anti-hate law, which prohibits incitement against minority groups. In April, the Cologne public prosecutor dismissed Buurmann’s grievance, saying the cartoon represented criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza and not hostility toward Jews.

The Israeli Embassy then said: “If one shows a figure with an Israeli flag devouring a Palestinian child, this reminds us of the most scurrilous accusations of ritual murder in European anti-Semitism... We don’t interfere in the decisions of German judicial authorities.

But at the same time, we are convinced that the cartoon was of a clearly anti-Semitic nature and that it incites hatred and violence.

“The claim that one must distinguish between hatred of the Jewish people and hatred of the State of Israel is absolutely inappropriate and leaves a bad taste.”

(h/t Philosemitism Blog)

Stoner Claus

AP shows us how heartless the IDF is. Imagine, tear-gassing Santa Claus on Christmas Eve!

A Palestinian protester wearing a Santa Claus costume runs away from a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops during a protest against Israel's separation barrier outside the West Bank village of Bilin, near Ramallah, Friday, Dec 24, 2010.

That's all we know from AP.

But Getty Images has another photo of our peaceful protesting Santa:

A Palestinian demonstrator dressed as Santa Claus throws stones towards Israeli soldiers during a weekly protest against Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah on December 24, 2009.

UPDATE: Even though the second photo says 2009, I believe that is a typo. The photo EXIF information shows it is copyright 2010 and these protests are always on Fridays, and December 24 2009 was a Thursday. The downloaded picture says it was taken December 24, 2010.

"Burning Sheep" story proven fake

Remember the Arab farmer last week who claimed that evil extremist Jewish settlers had gathered his sheep in a group and burned them - on the Sabbath?

And that this ridiculous claim was instantly believed by Uruknet, Islamic News Daily, PressTV, Ikhwanweb and Mondoweiss?

Well, surprise surprise - he admitted he was lying.

From Arutz-7:

A Jordan Valley Arab farmer has exposed the tactic of leftists accepting Arab claims and falsely accusing Jews of attacking Arabs. He admitted that the “burning sheep” libel against Jews was meant to disguise his own blunder of losing control of a brush fire.

The Arab farmer, Samir Bani Fadel, claimed that four armed Jews approached him, chased him away, set fire to his field – which also is forbidden on Sabbath – and drove away as the fire spread and burned to death 12 pregnant ewes while injuring others.

Regardless of the doubts, the left-wing B'Tselem and Yesh Din human rights group rushed to allege that the supposed attack was another one of hundreds of supposed acts of vandalism by Jews against Arabs.

New York-based writer Philip Weiss promptly reprinted the libel on his Mondoweiss blog, and the image of sheep being cruelly burned aroused sympathy for Arabs and anger against Jews. “It was an awful sight,” the farmer said. "I've lost at least $12,000."

The Palestinian Authority called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop "settler violence.”

The tale began to unravel when Arabs pointed their fingers at residents of Itamar, an easy target as it is a religious community, but located almost an hour’s drive from the scene of the fire. The story then was changed, with the blame being placed on the closer community of Maaleh Ephraim, most of whose residents are professionals and who almost never have been accused of any activities against Arabs.

Fadel finally admitted to police the whole story was a lie and that he was responsible for the fire, which he set to burn thorns before it spread beyond control. Blaming Jews not only would have saved him from the embarrassment of having burned his own sheep, it also would allow him to claim damages from the government while being hailed as a hero among Palestinian Authority Arabs and left-wing anti-Zionists.

Hundreds of accusations against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria have been leveled in recent years, usually in claims that Jews attack or destroy olive trees, although evidence has been produced that in most cases the Arabs have simply pruned their trees, counted on lack of agricultural knowledge on the part of the media and leftwing groups, and then accused Jews of damaging them. Olive trees look hacked when they are pruned and months later, the supposedly damaged orchards have been seen to be full of fruit.

Another tactic has been to instigate violence, especially on the Shabbat when Jews are forbidden to take pictures, and then accuse Jews of attacking them.

A quick Google search shows that this story has already been reproduced in about 5000 websites.

Which proves the old adage, ironically mis-attributed to Mark Twain:: "A lie can travel half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on."

(h/t My Right Word)

Poster: Obstacle to peace

This one requires some documentation.

Here are the best numbers I could find in Arabs killing Arabs since 1948, mostly relying on Wikipedia.

War	Year started	Low estimate deaths	High estimate deaths
Algeria civil war	1954	150000	800000
North Yemen Civil War - Egypt	1962	100000	126000
Black September, Jordan	1970	2000	25000
Sahara war	1975	10000	24000
Lebanese Civil War	1975	130000	250000
Libya Egypt war	1977	500	500
Iraq under Saddam	1979	600000	800000
Hama massacre, Syria	1982	17000	40000
South Yemen civil war	1986	10000	10000
Iraq invasion of Kuwait	1990	1000	2000
Yemen civil war	1994	7000	7000
Yemen - Sa'adah Insurgency	2004	5000	8300
Hamas-Fatah fighting	2006	600	600
Lebanon Camps	2007	275	275
TOTAL		1033375	2093675

As you can see, estimates vary wildly for many of these events. I pretty much took the midpoints for the purposes of the chart, estimating about 1.5 million Arab deaths. (There have been perhaps 60,000 Arabs killed in all the Arab/Israeli wars combined including the intifadas.) I tried not to include Kurdish deaths nor those Arabs killed by the French during the Algerian war - much of that war was a civil war as well. I also did not include the Iran/Iraq war at all since that was not Arab on Arab violence, and Muslim on Muslim deaths is an entirely different set of numbers.

Church of Nativity desecrators wish Merry Christmas

One of the most cynical articles I've read in a while:

Palestinians deported after the 2002 siege of the Nativity Church were sad during Christmas to be away from Bethlehem and the church, which sheltered them or 39 days.

Fahmi Kan’an, a spokesman for the Gaza deportees, said Friday that they grieved to be away from the festivities.

“The deportees will never forget the courageous support they received from the monks who disobeyed Israeli military orders to evacuate the church, and instead they offered as much services and support to those who took refuge in their church,” Kan’an said.

He added: “Nine years have passed, and we are burning and yearning to see each alley, tree, and stone in the city. We would never give up on Bethlehem even if they give us the whole world. It is our right to return to Bethlehem just as all other Palestinians displaced from their homes have the right to return.”

Kan’an wished all Christians in Palestine a merry Christmas expressing his hope that all deportees in Gaza and in Europe will celebrate Christmas next year in Bethlehem.

The deportees shot their way into, and desecrated, one of the holiest shrines of Christianity, bringing guns and explosives in and causing huge amounts of damage. They used nuns as human shields and insulted Christians worldwide.

And now they are wishing them a Merry Christmas???

A new "xtranormal" video

This is another of those animated videos popping up all over, but thankfully not a bear to be seen. Here Mahmoud Abbas is being interviewed as to his goals.

(h/t Adi)

Here's a little Indian Muslim anti-semitism

From the Milli Gazette, described as "Indian Muslims' Leading Newspaper", some garden-variety anti-semitism:

President Obama and other Western leaders are repeatedly asking the Muslims to stop “terrorism” so that they can call off their “war on terrorism”.

There is lot of hypocrisy on this newly popularised term “terrorism”. The Western war on terrorism is nothing but a war on Muslims – plain and simple.

This war is nothing but a zionist conspiracy carried out by the Western Christian leadership at the behest of Jews.

This is because all the Western Christian countries are controlled by the Jews with the help of their money power, media and Christian stooges.

Even a child knows it.

Muslims refused to be fooled: It is the American Jews, who control that country and managed Obama election. It is they who managed to make him utter sweet words to Muslims at Cairo and elsewhere.

But the Muslims refused to be fooled. The Jewish engineered war on Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in disastrous defeat for US.

Obama later tried to fool the Muslims on Palestine. But here also he failed because the zionist Jews are not prepared to budge even an inch on Palestine.

Any amount of his pouring milk to the serpent is no use. Serpent will continue to bite Obama.

China on the top of the world: Western Christian leaders, led by the US which is controlled by its 2% Jews, are defeated in their war on terror. The Jews with their monopoly over the media, have launched a hurricane of Islamophobia. But nothing is working.

The disgusted Jews got Obama defeated in the recent Congressional elections. Nor are they giving any opportunity to him to succeed in Palestine.

It keeps going but this is the gist of it. When Obama wins, it is because of the Jews. Then he does the bidding of the Jews. Then they get disgusted at how poorly he is acting as their puppet and they defeat him.

Insane ramblings, true, but these ramblings represent at least a portion of Indian Muslims - of which there are some 140 million. Even if only one in five Indian Muslims believe this garbage, they outnumber the Jews of the world by a wide margin.

This endemic Jew-hatred among mainstream Muslims is still rarely addressed in the Western media, as they concentrate on more polished Muslims' public statements that they are only against "Zionists," not Jews. But scratch the surface and you can see that a great portion of the Muslim world makes no such distinctions, and never have.

Christmas greetings from Binyomin Netanyahu

And a merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate the holiday as well!

(h/t Yerushalimey)

PA TV: "Jesus was a Palestinian"

From Palestinian Media Watch:

One of the ways the Palestinian Authority attempts to create a Palestinian history is to deny the Judean/Jewish nationality of Jesus, and misrepresent him as a "Palestinian."

Palestinian Media Watch has documented this ongoing Palestinian Authority historical revision. Recently on PA TV, the author Samih Ghanadreh from Nazareth was interviewed about his book "Christianity and Its Connection to Islam."

The following is the transcript of the discussion describing Jesus as a Palestinian:

Religious program on PA TV: This is our religion
Author: "The Shahid (Martyr) President Yasser Arafat used to say: "Jesus was the first Palestinian Shahid (Martyr)." I heard him say that sentence many times."
PA TV Host: “He [Jesus] was a Palestinian; no one denies that.”
Author: "He [Jesus] was the first Palestinian Shahid (Martyr). He (Arafat) attributed this Martyrdom to Palestine, as well."
[PA TV (Fatah), Dec. 3, 2010]

Fatah proud of "Palestinian" Virgin Mary
Earlier this year the Fatah Communications and Education Authority issued as statement on the official Fatah website claiming the Virgin Mary was "of the nation of Palestine":
"If we are proud of the holiness of our land, then we are proud and pride ourselves that the first and most important holy woman among the nations and peoples is from the holy land: The Virgin Mary - the woman of love and peace - is of the nation of Palestine..." [palvoice.com/index.php?id=23043]

Jesus and Mary were Palestinians par excellence
The Palestinian Authority religious leader, the Mufti Muhammad Hussein:
"Jesus was born in this land; he took his first steps in this land and spread his teachings [of Islam] in this land. He and his mother [Mary], we may say, were Palestinians par excellence." [PA TV (Fatah), May 12, 2009]

Brother of Syrian nuclear scientist vanishes

Hmmm...

The brother of Marah Ahmed al-Homsy, a scientist working for the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, has been reported missing in Cairo.

According to al-Homsy, her brother had accompanied her to Cairo where she was scheduled to attend a conference organized by the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority on 17 December. The two had been staying at a well-known hotel in Cairo's Dokki neighborhood.

“My brother abruptly disappeared on Tuesday and his phone remains switched off,” al-Homsy said.

Before her brother's disappearance, al-Homsy said she thought "there had been a car following us from time to time.”

She went on to say that her brother, Mohamed, 27, did not know anyone in Egypt, nor was he known to have any enemies.

“We checked with all the police stations and hospitals but found no trace of him,” said al-Homsy's lawyer, Mazen Shikho.

A security source said that hotel personnel had seen Mohamed exit the hotel, leaving all his belongings in the room, on the day of his disappearance.

Loophole allows US to sell goods worth billions to Iran

From the New York Times:

Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.

At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has granted nearly 10,000 licenses for deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.

Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law mandating that agricultural and medical humanitarian aid be exempted from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley’s gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.

Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, among them deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.

In one instance, an American company was permitted to bid on a pipeline job that would have helped Iran sell natural gas to Europe, even though the United States opposes such projects. Several other American businesses were permitted to deal with foreign companies believed to be involved in terrorism or weapons proliferation. In one such case, involving equipment bought by a medical waste disposal plant in Hawaii, the government was preparing to deny the license until an influential politician intervened.

The article does go on to say that the loophole is not quite as big as it initially claimed.

Jordanians aghast at school teaching about Anne Frank

From YNet:

A private school in Jordan stirred the anger of many in the Hashemite Kingdom after it was revealed that one of its English textbooks includes a chapter about the Holocaust and even quotes excerpts of Anne Frank's diary.

The "sensational affair" was uncovered by local newspaper Al-Dustour and led the Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Dr. Khalid Karaki to order the establishment of a commission of inquiry that will "examine and write a report about the implications of the incident."

Following the initial report, the Education Ministry issued an official response in which it said it "prohibits the inclusion of additional study materials, unless they have received an official approval. The ministry will look into other schools that have used similar materials, and has instructed the school to stop using the textbook," it read.

Here's one of the al-Dustour articles that says that these are "misleading Zionist curricula which seeks to penetrate the minds of students and future generations."

This is the textbook that they were using; it uses the text of the play based on Anne Franks's diary rather than the diary itself.

"This Week in the Middle East"

The Guardian's Brian Whitaker started a new weekly feature:

This is the start of a regular weekly look at the Middle East, focusing on some of the issues and stories that you may have missed. If there's something you would like to see included, send an email to brian.whitaker@guardian.co.uk

So since he is gracious enough to make such a request, I'm emailing him about these stories that I posted about this week that he "may have missed" himself:

* Palestinian Arab family sends their mentally handicapped son to be killed by Israel
* One of the Guardian's competing newspapers interviewed a former Iranian diplomat who confirms that the country has an active nuclear weapons program
* Gazans prefer Israeli goods over goods smuggled from Arab countries
* Iran faces an economic crisis
* An explosion in a crowded Gaza neighborhood was apparently a secret stash of Hamas munitions
* Wikileaks: No one is guarding Yemen's nuclear materials
* Syria's President Assad bizarrely ignores Middle East history and blames all problems on "occupation"
* Hamas beat and arrested Gazan children for raising a Fatah banner
* Arabs burying their dead in Israeli-controlled Area C as a land grab
* A Gaza Salafi leader calls for an end to rocket attacks on Israeli civilians
* Plus a couple of animal stories

I ask my readers to feel free to email him whenever I or another blogger posts something the Guardian may have missed.

You're welcome, Brian!

(h/t Yerushalimey)