Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Reaching out to Arabs in Hebron. But where's the other side?

I cannot bring myself to be as ecstatic about these sorts of initiatives as the well-meaning organizers are. All I can think is - where are the people creating similar initiatives on the Arab side? Why are all of these types of programs created by Israeli Jews?

A few other things bother me about this video.

For the past 10 years, it has been officially forbidden for Israeli citizens to visit the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron.

Really? I saw the houses of a few hundred Israeli citizens in Hebron, and their friends in Kiryat Arba visit them all the time!

You can refer to it as a "majority Arab city" or whatever, but calling it a "Palestinian city" is an insult to those who believe that Hebron is Jewish, and it was Jewish way before any Arabs were around.

Also, note that even the organizer himself is afraid to walk around the Arab section of Hebron with a yarmulka on his head. Are Arabs afraid to walk around Israel with keffiyehs?

Moreover, note that Jew cannot visit the Muslim part of the Tomb of the Patriarchs. However, I witnessed Arabs visiting the Jewish side when I was there.

And mentioning only that it is the burial ground for Abraham, while ignoring the five or more prominent Biblical figures who are there as well, plays to the Muslim narrative of the second-holiest place in Judaism.

Altogether, I like Israel21C, but their desire to be politically correct in this case ends up insulting Jews more than they intended.

Abu Rahma Lawfare

Palestine Today says that the Abu Rahma family is planning to sue the IDF for the death of Jawaher, which they claim was caused by tear gas.

Her brother Ahmed narrates a tale of her death that seems at odds with what her cousins told Ha'aretz. He describes what happened when she collapsed as if he was there, but her cousins say that he came later with the ambulance.

He also said that she had attended many protests and had never been affected by the tear gas before.

The entire family seems to be heavily involved in the weekly Bil'in riots. Besides her brother Samir who is the ringleader, we see that Ahmed also protests, and three weeks ago the IDF released a Bil'in rioter from prison named Adeeb Abu Rahma, possibly a cousin. And who provided the photos to the ISM in that article? Hamde Abu Rahma, the same person who claimed on Facebook that she was at her home.

So when the family of agitators, rioters and liars (remember, Samir went on TV saying that the soldiers shot "phosphorus") says they want to sue, it is not for justice - it is for politics.

And in the end, they won't, because that would reveal facts about the case that they would rather not have publicized.

According to rioters, Abu Rahma was 150-180 meters away

Ha'aretz published a map of the (one of many) Palestinian Arab version of events in Bil'in. I received a horrible fax copy of it (click to enlarge - h/t Joel for color Hebrew version)

According to this version, Jawaher Abu Rahma was standing 150-180 meters away from the kids throwing stones who were hit with tear gas.

This is nearly two football fields away.

As we saw yesterday from the Physicians for Human Rights paper on tear gas, the immediate cloud produced is some 6-9 meters in diameter and even in the center of the cloud the concentrations of the agent are 3%-10% of the amount usually needed to be breathed in for a full minute to kill the average healthy person.

I can't find any studies on dissipation of CS gas outdoors but simple watching of videos of these demonstrations shows that the gas cloud dissipates within seconds (although the canister emits gas for maybe 10 seconds so if one was right next to the canister one could be exposed at the highest outdoor levels for perhaps 15 seconds.)

While I have no doubt that someone can smell tear gas from a greater distance and even that their eyes can tear from a whiff, the idea that tear gas is toxic from 150 meters is absurd. The entire town of Bil'in would have been wiped out years ago.

(h/t Yisrael Medad and SoccerDad)

Poster for counterprotests - 7

Continuing the series....

Morning links

Some stuff to tide you over (not sure how much I'll be able to post today):

Jeffrey Goldberg on the plight of Middle East Christians (except for Israel, of course.)

Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism - book review at JCPA.

Roots of Muslim anti-semitism at CJN

Why isn't Obama pressuring the Palestinians? at FP

Free Jonathan Pollard (video)

(h/t V)

Islamist "cookbook" for Alexandria church bombing - plus a prophecy

From MSNBC:

In the weeks before the New Year's Day suicide bombing of an Egyptian church, al-Qaida-linked websites carried a how-to manual on "destroying the cross," complete with videos on how to build a bomb and the locations of churches to target — including the one that was attacked.

They may have found a receptive audience in Alexandria, where increasingly radicalized Islamic hard-liners have been holding weekly anti-Christian demonstrations, filled with venomous slogans against the minority community.

Only two or three days before Saturday's bombing, police arrested several Salafis spreading fliers in Alexandria calling for violence against Christians, a security official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

According to authorities, the strong belief among investigators is that local extremists who knew the area and the nature of their target were behind the blast. The Egyptian weekly Al-Youm Al-Saba said police were examining photos of the Salafis' weekly protests for suspects.

In the weeks before the attack, al-Qaida militants on the Web spewing calls for "jihad," or holy war, on Egypt's Christians laid out everything anyone would need to carry out a bombing.

One widely circulated posting includes a so-called "Jihadi Encyclopedia for the Destruction of the Cross," with a series of 10 videos describing how to build a bomb.

In the videos, an unidentified militant in a white lab coat and a black mask is shown listing the ingredients to make TNT and mixing up the chemicals in beakers.

The site lists Coptic Christian churches in Egypt, along with phone numbers and addresses — including Alexandria's Saints Church. "Blow up the churches while they are celebrating Christmas or any other time when the churches are packed," it says.

But I thought that "it goes without saying that no Muslim, whatever their political leanings may be, will ever commit such an inhumane act."

I'm shocked. Shocked!

(h/t Callie)
------------------
After I wrote this, I saw an amazing letter by a Christian who essentially predicted the fatal attack on Egyptian Copts on December 24th:

Egypt is another place in the Middle East where Christians are in peril. They are more numerous in Egypt than they are in Iraq, but they are targets of a similar strain of hostility. In January of 2010, six Christians were murdered outside the church where they were celebrating Christmas mass. (Christians in Egypt are Coptic Orthodox Christians who celebrate Christmas in January.)

This was only one of several attacks that took place in Egypt during the past year and given the level of hostility, it's likely more acts of violence will take place in the next few weeks. Imams have appeared on television accusing Coptic Christians in Egypt of storing weapons in their churches and of being in league with Zionist Jews from Israel. In Muslim majority Egypt, these are lethal charges. When prominent religious and political leaders make accusations like this, it's a signal to others that personal attacks on Christians will be tolerated and condoned.

Female terrorists in Gaza (video and poster)

From CNN:

With faces covered and guns loaded, Palestinian militants are training among the sand dunes of Gaza.

Shouts of "Allahu Akbar" -- God is great -- are followed by intense target practice. These militants are preparing to fight their sworn enemy, the state of Israel. But there is a difference -- they are women.

Training alongside men, they say they are ready to go into battle and are calling on more Palestinian women to join what they call the resistance against Israel.

CNN was given rare access to some of these women inside Gaza. The militant group insisted the location was kept secret, so we were blindfolded in the back of a car and driven to a house.

Five women are sitting in the back garden, all from the Salah ad-Din Brigades -- one of several militant groups in Gaza -- all veiled and armed. Only their eyes are uncovered.

Sitting beside a table of guns, rocket-propelled grenades and land mines, the scene is carefully choreographed for our camera and the message is clear.

One woman tells me: "I am trained and ready to be a suicide bomber against Israeli soldiers."

Which inspired me to make a new poster:

(h/t Clark)

PA GDP proportional to percentage working for Israelis

From Ma'an:

Of every 100 Palestinian workers, 11 work in Israel and the settlements compared to 10 in 2009, a new survey from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found.

The increase helped push up the Palestinian GDP per capita, in what was counted as a year of growth across the region.

Palestine's Gross Domestic Product increased by about 9 percent during the first three quarters of 2010 compared with the same period of 2009.

Released on Monday, the survey said growth was concentrated in economic activities with largest share in construction with a growth rate of 36 percent, followed by agriculture and fishing, wholesale and retail trade, transport, storage and communications, services, and public administration.

GDP per capita for Palestinian areas increased by 5 percent during the third quarter of 2010 compared with the same quarter of 2009, spurred mostly by an increase of three percent in the number of workers in construction, industry and the service sector.

Which means that since the settlement freeze ended, with Arabs working to build houses in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian Arab GDP for the fourth quarter should go even higher.

So once again the people who say they want "peace" also want to hurt ordinary Palestinian Arabs trying to raise their families in dignity.

It is also interesting to see that the GDP increase is almost directly proportional - 9-10% - to the increase of workers in Israel and the Israeli towns across the green line. Foreign aid might not be so much a factor - jobs and cooperation with Israel is.

By the way, these statistics include Gaza, where no one works for Israelis, so that means that the percentage of West Bank Arabs who work for Israelis is probably closer to 15%. Boycotting Israel would throw the Palestinian Arab economy into a tailspin, and it would raise the West Bank unemployment rate to about the same as Gaza's is now - from around 17% to around 32%.

Posters for counterprotests - 5 and 6

Continuing the series...

I couldn't think of a sarcastic tagline that would be better than just showing the photos straight (with URLs so people can see for themselves.)

"Jews are Judaizing the Samuel's Tomb!"

The Al Aqsa Foundation (the same one that just freaked out over the iKotel iPhone app) is upset that Israel is spending "millions of dollars" to Judaize the site of Samuel's Tomb which, they say, is a mosque.

Just FYI: Samuel is not mentioned once in the Quran (although he is implied in 2:247-8.)

Long-time readers may remember my visit to the site four years ago - right after it was vandalized, and holy objects stolen, by Arabs. So let's hope that part of this money will go towards security.

But I suppose they weren't trying to vandalize it - just to "de-Judaize" it.

Qaradawi attacks the PLO

Prominent sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most popular religious figures in Sunni Islam, has issued a scathing attack the PLO for not being radical enough.

He criticized them for cooperating with the Zionist entity, and demanded that they return to "resistance" (i.e., terrorism, since they already claim to be doing non-violent resistance.)

He stressed that security coordination with Israel implies that Jews have a right to at least some of Palestine, which is completely unacceptable.

Qaradawi, who has some 40 million people viewing his al Jazeera TV show, also said these words that show in yet another way why the peace process could never work:

"Palestine does not belong to the Palestinians to do as they like but for [it belongs to] the entire Arab and Islamic nation."

Which means that even if Abbas and his henchmen manage to compromise and come to terms with Israel, the Arab world has effective veto power - certainly those who follow Qaradawi.

Poster for counterprotests - 4

4th in a series....

Physicians for Human Rights can't figure how tear gas could kill people outdoors

Physicians for Human Rights wrote a paper in 1989 to try to make tear gas sound as dangerous as possible. Here's the main point of the paper concerning CS, which is the type used by the IDF and Israeli police.

After discussing how CS could be potentially lethal if used indoors, the paper says:

The respiratory concentration of CS that would be lethal for 50% of healthy adults has been estimated to be 25,000 to 150,000 mg/m 3 per minute, based on animal studies (15). When detonated outside, a CS grenade generates a cloud 6 to 9 m in diameter, at the center of which a concentration of 2,000 to 5,000 mg/m 3 can be produced, with concentrations rapidly tapering off at the periphery. (16)

So for it to be lethal for a normal adult, there would have to be exposure for a full minute at concentrations that are ten to thirty times higher than is physically possible outdoors. I don't know how long CS takes to disperse, but certainly the highest concentrations of up to 5000 mg/m3 would not last for more than a few seconds.

The studies done of people who have been seriously injured from CS all show that they were indoors at the time, and had prolonged exposure - far more than a few seconds - and they could not leave the room.

I cannot find any case of someone succumbing quickly (within a day) to any level of exposure to CS.

In 1989, some human rights groups charged that Israeli use of tear gas - the more dangerous CN gas at the time - was responsible for increases in miscarriages and even 400 deaths. A US government GAO study found the claims to be baseless.

So this is nothing new.

UPDATE: Some blogs are saying "The U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine warns that at a concentration of 2mg per cubic meter, CS gas “is immediately dangerous to life…”

The document does say that - and it is a typo.

The document cached here says that for CS,

LCt50 = 61,000 mg-min/m3

which means that the median lethal dose of CS is 61,000 mg per cubic meter for a full minute - well within the range described by PHR and way, way higher than is possible outdoors. There is simply no way that it is dangerous to life at 1/30,500 of the median lethal dose, if the words "median lethal dose" have any meaning.

Not to mention that if the dose of 2 mg/m3 is immediately dangerous to life, then Bil'in protesters would all have been dead for years. A minor point.