Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, January 16, 2011

My New York Times prophecy

On Friday, I tweeted:

Death toll in Tunisia riots tops 60. Must be Israel's fault.

My sarcastic point, which I had made Monday in a similar post, is that Arabs will blame Israel for every problem in the Arab world - and credulous Westerners will happily believe it.

At least I thought I was being sarcastic. But mainstream Middle East reporting has a way of outdoing even the most outrageous satire.

From the New York Times on Saturday:

Tunisia’s uprising electrified the region.... Yet the street protests erupted when Arabs seemed more frustrated than ever, whether over rising prices and joblessness or resentment of their leaders’ support for American policies or ambivalence about Israeli campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009.

...That the events in Tunisia took place far beyond the region’s traditional centers of power did little to diminish the enthusiasm they seemed to generate. In fact, the very spectacle of crowds surging into the streets and overwhelming decades of accumulated power in the hands of a highly centralized, American-backed government seemed an antidote to the despair of past years — carnage in Iraq, divisions among Palestinians and Israeli intransigence and the yawning divide between ruler and ruled on almost every question of foreign policy.

Note the NYT's belief that Israel is the intransigent party in the conflict. It doesn't say "alleged" or "belief of" - the NYT is saying that the fact of Israeli intransigence riles up the Arab world, despite the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have not made a single real concession since 1988.

Only in paragraphs 18-20 does this writer, Anthony Shadid, mention the actual reason for the protests - well after he talks about his absurd guesses:

Tunisians’ grievances were as specific as universal: rising food prices, corruption, unemployment and the repression of a state that viewed almost all dissent as subversion.

Smaller protests, many of them over rising prices, have already taken place in countries like Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan. Egypt, in particular, seems to bear at least a passing resemblance to Tunisia — a heavy-handed security state with diminishing popular support and growing demands from an educated, yet frustrated, population.

In Jordan, hundreds protested the cost of food in several cities, even after the government hastily announced measures to bring the prices down. Libya abolished taxes and customs duties on food products, and Morocco tried to offset a surge in grain prices.

Ordinary Arabs have long ago stopped caring about their Palestinian brethren, and ordinary Arabs are the ones who are doing the rioting. But idiotic - or perhaps malicious - reporters like Shadid, and their NYT editors, will not bother to actually ask members of the Arab street what they think. They will uncritically parrot the lies of the leaders - the very leaders the people are protesting against!

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

UPDATE: The American Thinker has more on this article.

Will STL find Iran behind Hariri murder?

From YNet: and other sources:

Sources familiar with the investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 told Newsmax that the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon will accuse Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei of giving the order to murder the former Lebanese prime minister, according to the Lebanese website Naharnet.

The sources told Newsmax, an American news website, that the tribunal will lay out evidence showing that the murder was committed by Iran's Quds force and Hezbollah.

The order to murder Hariri was transmitted to Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's top commander at the time, by Quds force chief Qassem Suleymani, sources familiar with the investigation told Newsmax.

The sources said Mughniyeh and his brother-in-law, Mustapha Badr al-Dine, put together the hit team that carried out the attack. "The Iranians considered Hariri to be an agent of Saudi Arabia, and felt that killing him would pave the way for a Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon," one of the sources said.

According to the sources, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of Syrian intelligence, also played key roles in the assassination plot.

The order to murder Hariri was transmitted to Hizbullah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, by Quds force chief Qassem Suleymani, sources told Newsmax.

Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in Damascus on February 12, 2008. According to Saturday’s report, Mughniyeh put together the hit team that carried out the attack at the behest of Iran, with the help of his brotherin- law.

“The Iranians considered Hariri to be an agent of Saudi Arabia, and felt that killing him would pave the way for a Hizbullah takeover of Lebanon,” a source told Newsmax.

Iran was not the only country involved in the assassination plot, they said. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of Syrian intelligence, also played key roles in the plan to murder Hariri, a source was reported as saying.

This is most interesting, and would have huge repercussions, but I have one question:

Why is the media suddenly quoting a Newsmax article from six weeks ago?

It appears that Lebanon's Naharnet found the Newsmax article earlier today, and when it published it then all these other outlets followed immediately.

Newsmax is a conservative-leaning site. I have no idea how good their reporting is, although I seem to remember this reporter, Ken Timmerman, appearing to have some good sources in the past.

So why is a six-week-old news item suddenly considered "news"?

Did Israel test Stuxnet in Dimona?

A fascinating NYT article on Stuxnet:

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

...
The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.
...
[Security expert Langer] quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

Ken O'Keefe says Jews who do not criticize Israel are like pre-war Germans

From OyVaGoy:

When he gives interviews to the media, Ken O’Keefe usually concentrates on his favourite topics: himself and how heroic he is. However, of late he has been getting ever more angry, as even his own side begins to wisen-up to what a spectacular fake he is.

Here, during an interview on Press TV, he speculates whether Jews “as a people are a threat to every ounce of decency and humanity that exists”. He adds that if the Jewish people of the world do not turn against Israel, then they will be akin to Germans who failed to stop the rise of Hitler. What a creep.

Being insulted by Ken O'Keefe is perhaps the biggest compliment one can get.

But just to cover my bases, maybe I should ask every gentile on the planet to dissociate themselves from this lying nutcase, or else I will hold them responsible when he one day goes on his inevitable murder spree.

Gellhorn on Meron

Two related excerpts from Martha Gellhorn's 1961 Atlantic article:

HIGH on a mountaintop [in Lebanon], with a down-sweeping view of orange groves and the satin blue of the Mediterranean, is a small Muslim camp named Mia Mia. Here one whole Palestinian village, amongst others, had landed; they came from a mountaintop in Galilee, a place called Meron. Their headman, or village leader, the Muktar, plied us with Coca-Cola and Turkish coffee in his exile's parlor. He is a beautiful man, perhaps sixty-five years old, lean, with exquisite manners. He wore the handsome white Arab headdress, held in place by the usual black double-corded crown; he was dressed in a well-preserved cream silk jacket, a white silk shirt, pressed gray flannel trousers, polished Italianate black shoes.

Whilst we sucked Coca-Cola through straws and studied his son's pitifully bad but lovingly executed paintings—a portrait of Nasser; Christ and the Virgin—the Muktar talked. Seventeen people of his village were massacred, which was why they fled, but an old blind woman of 104 was left behind and the Jews poured kerosene over her and burned her alive. How did they know, if they had all fled? Well, then the Jews went away and some villagers crept back and found her, and besides, the United Nations Truce Commission also found her.

My guide looked embarrassed. The Truce Commission was a shaky point. It was a strain to believe that the UN military observers, occupied with armies and frontiers, would have had time to investigate each atrocity story in the country. I wondered where the families of the massacred and the cremated were; everyone knows everyone else in a village, surely the surviving relatives were the best witnesses.

"I could tell you many such stories," said the Muktar.

"I am sure of it," said I. "But please tell me about Meron."

So I heard of Meron, their beautiful stone houses, their lovely, groves, their spacious and happy life in Eden; all lost now. I could readily imagine this aristocrat living in a palace on a mountaintop and decided that I would later go and see his home; but for the moment I accepted a rose from him, and we set off to pay calls in the camp.

---
The driver of my car, on the journey in Israel, was an Israeli Jew, born there, who speaks Arabic as his second mother tongue and looks so like Nasser that it is a joke. I said I wanted to visit the village of Meron, on a mountaintop in Galilee. He said that at Meron there was an ancient, temple of the Jews, the grave of a famous rabbi, a synagogue, a Yeshiva (the Orthodox Jewish equivalent of a Catholic seminary), but nothing else to his knowledge. Let us go and find out, I said. So we drove north through this country,' which is a monument to the obstinate, tireless will of man. In 1949, the new immigrants, like ants on the hillsides, were planting trees: their first job. It looked as if they were planting blades of grass and seemed a pitiful act of faith. Now the trees have grown.

There are countless changes in Israel, but the Arab villages along the road to Nazareth have not changed. The old adobe or field-stone houses cling to and grow from each other. They are charming, picturesque, primitive, and wretched; but not to Arab peasants. This is the way it always was; this is the way they like it and want to keep it.

We drove up the mountain. Between the synagogue and the heroic ruins of the two-thousand-year-old temple, we did indeed find Meron, the home of the aristocrat who had offered me a rose on a mountaintop in Lebanon. There were not more than twelve houses in the village. The Muktar's palace is a long narrow stone shed, with an ugly narrow porch along the front. Instead of beams, bits of rusted railway track hold up the porch. The other small houses were built of the honey-colored, rough field stone, with traditional graceful doors and windows. Inside, the houses were like stables unfit for decent animals. The rich fields and groves the Meron refugees had described were the steep slopes of the mountain behind, where the villagers cultivated tobacco and some fruit and fig trees. In their day, the village had no electric light or water; the women carried water on their heads from 'the wadi at the foot of the mountain. The view is a dream of beauty. Hardship for hardship, Meron is no better than their refugee camp, Mia Mia, perhaps not as good; but memory is magical, and Meron was home.

Beside these pretty stone hovels tower the remains of a great temple. The blocks of granite in the fragmented, wall are as massive as those' in the wall of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. The broken pillars are enormous, unadorned, and suddenly Samson is real and pulled down real, pillars as heavy as these. Here, two thousand years ago, the Jews were praying in a new temple, for two thousand years is not all that much in the history of the Jews or of this land. And here, with weeds around their low walls, stand the abandoned houses of the descendants of warrior strangers, the Arabs who came to this country and conquered it when the temple was some six hundred years old, doubtless already a ruin. Were the villagers of Meron happy when they lived on this mountain; did they think it Eden then? And why did they run away? The war never touched this place.

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Gaza,1961 (Martha Gellhorn)

I had forgotten much of the 1961 Martha Gellhorn article, where she visited Palestinian Arab refugees, that I had excerpted on a tiny portion of a couple of years back.

Look at her description of Gaza in 1961:

TO ENTER the Gaza Strip you require a military visa from the Egyptian government in Cairo. I had arrived in Cairo expecting to proceed like the wind directly from there to Gaza but was informed, by the local UNRWA press officer, that this permit took two or three weeks to get, and sometimes you never got it. Besides, there was only one UNEF army plane to Gaza each Saturday, and they didn't like carrying anyone except their own personnel; besides, it was now Thursday, and tomorrow was the Muslim Sunday, and indeed all looked hopeless. I foresaw bumming a jeep ride over the sand-storming desert and infiltrating into the Strip somehow; but meantime I called on the Egyptian authorities.

Because of the Muslim holy day, and the number of passport photos I needed and the number of offices I had to run between, it took about four days to get the visa, and every minute was enjoyable. ...

THE Gaza Strip, from all accounts, would be a real hell hole. It is a roughly rectangular slice of land, on the southernmost Mediterranean frontier of Israel, some forty kilometers long by five to ten kilometers wide, and 365,000 people, refugees and residents, live on it. I imagined it as a sand dune, packed solid with human flesh, blazing hot, hideous, and filthy. It is none of these. The weather was so idyllic—a china-blue sky and a constant cool breeze—that I assumed this was special luck and at once asked my charming landlady about it. No, the weather in Gaza was always delightful. She had lived here for thirty years; there were two "sticky" weeks in the summer, otherwise you could not find a more benign climate. Flying over the Strip, I had noted plenty of sand, but also plenty of green. There were always citrus groves in Gaza, my landlady reported, Gaza was famous for them, but since the refugees came these had greatly increased, as had the general cultivation. Anything grows here, she said, exhibiting her blossoming garden.

Then I remarked that Gaza town was a beehive of activity, with all the UNEF soldiers, Danes, Norwegians, Indians, Canadians, Yugoslavs, who patrol the Israeli-Gaza border and spend money in the town in their free time, and the Egyptian upper crust which oversees the Palestinian officials, and UNRWA and visitors and the local residents and, indeed, the refugees. The refugees seemed to bring prosperity with them; it was most mysterious.

Not at all, said my landlady, we do not know why we are not completely bankrupt; but she was adding a third floor to her already roomy house, so great is the demand for lodgings. Sizable villas are being built in what must be the fashionable section of Gaza. The main square boasts an array of parked Mercedes, finned pastel American cars, and humbler Volkswagens. The taxis in Gaza are new. There is an imposing movie theater, in the ugly world-wide chromium-and-junk style; there are abundant cafés and numerous ill-lit dingy shops, typical of the region. An economist could surely answer this riddle: if no one has any money, what are these eccentric merchants and purveyors of services doing?

The refugee camps are much larger than those in Lebanon, small towns by Middle Eastern standards. They are by no means luxury establishments, but many people live in a nastier state in American and European slums. The poor villagers of Gaza are not as well housed or cared for as the refugees. The Gaza Strip is not ,a hell hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse; it is a jail--with a magical long white sand beach, and a breeze, and devoted welfare workers (UNRWA) to look after the prisoners.

The Egyptian government is the jailer. For reasons of its own, it does not allow the refugees to move from this narrow strip of land. The refugees might not want to leave at all, or they, might not want to leave for good; but anyone would become claustrophobic if penned, for thirteen years, inside 248 square kilometers. A trickle of refugees, who can prove they have jobs elsewhere, are granted exit visas. The only official number of the departed is less than three hundred, out of 255,000 registered refugees. It seems incredible. Rumor says that more refugees do manage to go away illegally, by unknown methods.

These locked-in people--far too many in far too little space--cannot find adequate work. Naturally, there is less chance of employment than in the other "host countries." Meantime, they are exposed to the full and constant blast of Egyptian propaganda. No wonder that Gaza was the home base of the trained paramilitary bands called commandos by the Egyptians and Palestinians, and gangsters by the Israelis--the fedayin, whose job was to cross unnoticed into Israel and commit acts of patriotic sabotage and murder. And having been so devastatingly beaten by Israel again, in 1956, has not improved the trapped, bitter Gaza mentality; it only makes the orators more bloodthirsty.

ANOTHER Mad Hatter conversation, practically a public meeting, took place in the office of the leader of two adjacent camps, a man in charge of some 29,000 people. The camp leader, the self-appointed orator, sat behind his desk. The Secret Service youth, mentioned earlier, the quiet UNRWA Palestinian, my regular chaperone, and the three uniformed cops of highish rank completed the company.

First the camp leader told me how rich they had all been in Palestine and how miserable they were now and how much land they had all owned. I do not doubt for one minute how much land some of them owned, nor how rich some of them were, and I did not point out this subtle distinction: if everyone owned the land claimed, Palestine would be the size of Texas; if everyone had been so rich, it would have been largely populated by millionaires. To gild the past is only human, we all do it; and to gild it with solid gold is even more human if you are a refugee.

This part of his address was already so familiar that I could have recited it for him.

Then he spoke of Jaffa, his native town. The Jews surrounded the city, firing on all sides; they left one little way out, by the sea, so the Arabs would go away. Only the very old and the very poor stayed, and they were killed. Arab refugees tell many dissimilar versions of the Jaffa story, but the puzzler is: where are the relatives of those who must have perished in the fury of high explosive the infallible witnesses? No one says he was loaded on a truck (or a boat) at gun point; no one describes being forced from his home by armed Jews; no one recalls the extra menace of enemy attacks, while in flight. The sight of the dead, the horrors of escape are exact, detailed memories never forgotten by those who had them. Surely Arabs would not forget or suppress such memories, if they, too, had them.

As for those Arabs who remained behind, they are still in Jaffa--3000 of them--living in peace, prosperity, and discontent, with their heirs and descendants.

"The Jews are criminals," the camp leader continued in a rising voice. "Murderers! They are the worst criminals in the whole world."

Had he ever heard of Hitler?

He banged his table and said, "Hitler was far better than the Jews!"

"Far better murderer? He killed six million Jews as a start," I observed.

"Oh, that is all exaggerated. He did not. Besides, the Jews bluffed Hitler. They arranged in secret that he should kill a few of them--old ones, weak ones--to make the others emigrate to Palestine."

"Thirty-six thousand of them," said the Secret Service man, proving the point, "came here, before the war, from Central Europe."

"It's amazing," I said. "I have never before heard anywhere that the Jews arranged with Hitler for him to kill them."

"It was a secret!" the camp leader shouted. "The documents have been found. Everyone knows. It was published. The Jews arranged it all with Hitler."

There is a limit to the amount of Mad Hattery one can endure, so I suggested that we visit the camp. I knocked on a door at random, before the camp leader had a chance to steer me anywhere. Two young married couples lived here. In a corner by the courtyard wall stood a group of visitors, silent Arab women, in their graceful long blue dresses, slightly hiding their faces behind their white head veils. The older women wore silver coins on chains across their foreheads; this is very pretty and is also guaranteed to prevent sickness of the eyes. It was useless to try to lure the women into talk, but one of the husbands talked freely. The Secret Service youth translated.

"It is the blame of America that this happened, because they help the Jews. We only want America to help us to get back to our land."

"How?" I asked. "By war?"

"When the Arabs are united, we will make the war."

"What do you want from us then? Arms to make this war with?"

"No, we want you to stop giving arms and money to Israel. Just now Kennedy has given Israel $25 million for arms"

"I do not believe that the U.S. government has ever given or sold arms to Israel. What about the arms Nasser gets from Russia and Czechoslovakia?"

"That is all right. That is different. They are peace-loving nations. They only want to help the undeveloped countries."

The Secret Service man put in: "America offered us arms, but with conditions. We will not accept conditions. So we take from the Eastern countries, who give without conditions."

"What do you do?" I asked the fat young husband.

"Nothing."

"What would you like to do?"

"Be a soldier and fight Jews."

This oratory pleased the public very much.

"Do you all like Nasser?" I asked, politely.

Wide smiles. General joy.

"We do. Certainly. Oh, of course. He will unite us and make us strong. He is our leader."

Latest Latma (1/14/11)

A lot of political jokes that only Israelis would get, but a very good short commercial for a new horror-film sequel.

Sky News bias and Amnesty hypocrisy

From Sky News:

Britain is buying 30 Watchtower WK450 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which are based on the Israeli Elbit Hermes 450 system, in a deal worth close to a £1bn.

But some accuse the Government of purchasing technology that was "field-tested on Palestinians" during the three-week Gaza conflict in 2008-9.

And the revelation that Royal Artillery soldiers undertake drone training in Israel has reignited the debate over Watchkeeper's purchase - particularly given that their Israeli trainers may have been involved in the Gaza conflict.

Note the implication by Sky News that the Gaza operation was inherently immoral. Not that some bad things may have happened, or that Israel could have somehow done a more effective job at targeting only militants in civilian clothing with weapons caches in civilian neighborhoods hiding among civilians, but that the war itself was illegitimate and Israel had no business defending itself against thousands of rockets aimed at its citizens. This is a sickening implication, one that is aimed only at Israel and no other nation who has ever had a war.

Amnesty International UK Campaigns Director Tim Hancock said: "Amnesty International has documented the role of drones in serious human rights violations by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza."

Amnesty's Gaza report talks often about the advanced optics that the drones have that should allow the IDF to distinguish between civilians and terrorists. For example, it says "Surveillance drones have exceptionally good optics, allowing those watching to see details such as the type and colour of the items of clothing worn by those being observed, and what kind of objects they are carrying." Yet most of the specific instances they discuss are where the people are in the building that was bombed - where the optics are useless. Not only that, but we have seen the video from the drones. it is not nearly as easy to distinguish the targets from civilians in real time, especially when the targets hide among the civilians.

Amnesty's report assumes a superhuman, omniscient infrastructure where the IDF knows what every Gaza citizen is doing every minute of the day and can instantly distinguish between legitimate targets and civilian targets. And once it creates this huge straw man of the all-knowing, all powerful, highly accurate IDF, it then compares the actions of the real army against its ideal. Then when the IDF inevitably falls short - it is ready to accuse them of severe human rights violations.

And, of course, Amnesty never acknowledges Israel's explanations and justifications for its actions. The report was written in 2009 but a lot of information has come out since then from the IDF - information that Amnesty has shown little interest in using to modify its initial conclusions. Has Amnesty ever retracted a specific allegation after an Israeli explanation or proof otherwise?

"There is already growing international concern over the use of drones in remote unlawful killings, sometimes amounting to extrajudicial executions," Mr Hancock said.

Don't you love the passive voice here? He is referring only to his own organization, of course, but he wants to make it sound much more like a consensus.

Note also that he is implying that no one is a legitimate target of drones, since every death in war is an "extrajudicial execution."

"It would seem wholly inappropriate for UK forces to be trained in the use of drones by a country with a track record of applying this technology in grave abuses of people's human rights."

Here we see Amnesty's hypocrisy in full bloom.

Amnesty admits that drones help nations be more effective in fighting their enemies. They allow more precise targeting, and less collateral damage. In fact, if you believe Amnesty, Israel's drones - seemingly the best in the world - should result in zero collateral damage, because their optics are so fantastic.

Amnesty should love drones as the single most effective method of distinguishing between military and civilian objects - to do exactly what the Geneva Conventions require.

Yet when Great Britain shows a desire to purchase the weapons that would allow them to minimize human rights violations, Amnesty is suddenly concerned and calls such a move "inappropriate." Why? Because they believe that the people selling these weapons that can save lives are immoral people, therefore the purchase of these effective tools are tainted by Israel's inherent immorality.

This is an astonishing example of Amnesty's hatred of Israel. Would they say the same thing about Great Britain buying American drones, even though by any objective measure the US is guilty of exactly the same alleged crimes Israel is, on a much larger scale, in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Alternatively, would Amnesty rather have Great Britain target terrorists in Afghanistan with blunter and less accurate weapons?

During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli offensive on Gaza following Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel in 2008, UAVs were used for targeting - leading to Israel being accused of breaking international law.

Amnesty International estimated that hundreds of civilians were killed, including up to three hundred children - the targets often identified by UAVs.

Sky News here (and Amnesty in its report) is broadly implying that Israel specifically targeted children. This is simply slander, and it can be disproven by the simple fact that Amnesty admits that Israel used phone calls, "roof-knocking", flyers and other methods to avoid civilian casualties. Why on earth would Israel go through so much effort to avoid civilian casualties if they then turn around and target them?

But consistency is not what Amnesty, and Sky News, are after. They want blood - and in this case, Israeli blood.

(h/t T34)

PA health ministry denies Hamas claims of medicine shortage

Hamas has been claiming a severe medicine shortage in Gaza, blaming the PA for not providing enough for the area.

Today, the PA health ministry released specific figures of the value of the drugs sent to Gaza in 2010, saying it took up 45% of its budget for medicines. (Gaza's population is about half that of the West Bank.)

The ministry slammed Hamas' claims, saying it was a cover for Hamas crimes against doctors and medical institutions in Gaza.

The Palestine Press Agency notes an earlier story where the medicines that are meant to be freely available to patients have been diverted to pharmacies where patients are forced to buy them - even though they are labeled as gifts for Gazans.

Whether Hamas is involved in this black market is not explicitly stated but it is assumed to be.

New prayer area adjacent to HaKotel HaKatan?

From Ha'aretz, an article by Akiva Eldar where I try to remove all vestiges of bias. Read the original to see how bad it really is.

The Jerusalem Development Authority recently removed scaffolding in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. The authority, controlled by the Jerusalem municipality and by several ministries, removed scaffolding from under an arch supporting Palestinian homes in the Little Western Wall plaza (also known as the Little Kotel plaza ).

The move was carried out to make more room in the plaza for Jewish prayer and other events.

The courtyard faces a small of section of the western support wall of the Temple Mount. The largest open section of that same wall is known as the Western Wall.

The Little Kotel plaza is considered the second closest spot (after the Western Wall Tunnel) to the "Holy of Holies," which was the most sacred place for Jews in the temple.

Ateret Cohanim, headed by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, has been demanding for years that the scaffolding be removed to make room for prayer and other events. The Waqf (the Muslim religious trust ) has specifically warned against the removal of the scaffolds and opening the site to prayer gatherings, threatening a strong response.

According to the Ateret Cohanim website, students of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva pray in the courtyard every Friday, and no disturbances at the site have been recorded in recent years. The website also states that the Little Kotel is visited by Jews throughout the year, including both private individuals and tours organized by various groups.

The scaffolds do not actually support the arch.

I found a photo of the scaffolding in a picture of a women's prayer gathering at the Kotel ha-Katan in 2005 taken by Batya Medad::

Her husband, Yisrael, took this photo only yesterday - there was no sign previously:

Notice that when Jews want to use a space that is not being used at all, by Muslims of anyone else, this is considered highly provocative. No one is being kicked out of their homes, no change to the status quo (despite what Ha'aretz is claiming in the original article,) - just when Jews who are already praying at the site want to be shielded from the elements, they'll have a place to go.

This is fantastic news. There is no downside except for Muslim threats - and Muslims will threaten Jewish rights in Jerusalem regardless of what Jews actually do. Far better for Jews to assert these rights than to ceded them in fear of a "strong response."

Here is a post about my visit to the Kotel ha-Katan four years ago, and here's some background about efforts to give the site the prominence it deserves.

Guyana's recognition of "Palestine" - the definition of nonsense

Here is the statement by the government of Guyana, joining the list of South American countries that recognize "Palestine":

The Government of Guyana has today decided to formally recognize the State of Palestine as a free, independent, and sovereign state, based on its 1967 borders.

"Based on its 1967 borders"? In early 1967 there was no entity called "Palestine," period. There were no borders. There was no government, not even a puppet government.

So what does it mean to recognize a state based on pure fantasy?

By the way, there were plenty of countries that already recognized "Palestine" since 1988 - by my count, 70 of them where "Palestine" maintains embassies. That doesn't make it a state.

But, as I asked previously (and I don't know the answer,) does this mean that - from the perspective of these 70 states - that "Palestine" must adhere to states' obligations under international law? Much of the Geneva Conventions are concerned with how states must act, and, to put it charitably, "Palestine" has not been exactly doing that.

It is easy to assume the benefits of statehood - but is "Palestine" ready to assume the responsibilities? So far, that answer has been a very clear "no."

The only bone marrow registry for Arabs is in...Israel

From JPost last October:

There are 325 million Arabs in 22 Middle Eastern countries and other lands, but the first and so far only registry for potential unrelated Arab donors of bone marrow or stem cells – which have the ability to cure certain cancers and other serious disorders – is at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.

In 1987, Prof. Chaim Brautbar established Israel’s first general unrelated bone marrow donor registry at Hadassah; upon his retirement, he was succeeded by Dr. Shoshanna Israel. Today, the general registry has over 80,000 people listed. Two years ago, he set up the Arab registry with veteran immunologist Dr. Amal Bishara. Since then, data from over 9,000 Israeli Arabs (initially obtained only from peripheral blood and more recently also from buccal cells taken from the inside of the cheek) have been stored in its computers and fed into the international database in Leiden, Holland so that compatible Arab HLAs for would-be recipients can be more easily found. Yet many more samples are needed to find potential donors for those who are ill.

Today, there is an option for Arabs in other countries – even those officially at war with Israel – to find a compatible Israeli donor and come to Hadassah for a transplant, or send the bone marrow or stem cells abroad to the transplant center.

(h/t Jawa Report)

Espouser of "Jewish racism" defends her master's thesis

Remember Jenny Peto, the University of Toronto student who wrote her master's thesis on how Jews justify their inherent racism by invoking the Holocaust?

She was just interviewed by The Varsity, and in the interview she - and her thesis adviser - justify the paper on the grounds that the only critics are Jewish racists who never read the paper to begin with!

I think that this is about who I am as a pro-Palestinian activist and what I have to say which is very critical of Israel, very critical of mainstream pro-Israel institutions in Canada, and critical of what I see as an abuse of Holocaust memory to justify Israeli apartheid.

I really don't think that it's a case where it's just such a convoluted academic paper that people don't understand. People who have read it understand what I'm saying. And some may agree, some may disagree, but for the most part all the [criticism] hasn't actually been about the content of the paper itself.

This is almost like a warning shot to Jewish Canadians saying, "you watch yourself, if you're going to criticize Israel, we'll come down on you, and we'll come down on you in a huge way."...But it's what I expect of the Canadian media, it has a terrible, terrible pro-Israeli bias.

Yes, the person who is claiming that Jews are using "victimhood" is whinng about being a victim herself of a vast pro-Israel conspiracy that includes the Canadian media.

That media, unsurprisingly, is unimpressed with Peto's arguments - not because of her anti-Israel stance but because of her shoddy research and pitiful justifications. See here and here.

When a photo caption lies

From Daylife:

A Star of David and the name of the Israeli settlement of Shilo written in Hebrew are seen on a Palestinian farmer field vandalized by Israel settlers on January 12, 2011in the northern West Bank village of Qariot, near Nablus. (Getty Images)

Horrible Jewish settlers defacing a Palestinian Arab field - and rubbing the owner's nose with it, by placing a Star of David there. How heartless! (The words say "Shiloh Land.")

However, Yisroel Medad - who lives in Shiloh - fills in the details:

Well, I happen to know something of this incident. In fact, I blogged about the background which was a legal dispute with illegal intervention, leading to Arab violence against Jews perceived to be desirable due to the presence of Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights. And read his comments at a later post on another but similar issue: land disputes.

They lost the court case but Ascherman never reported that.

The judge decided that the land was legally the property of Moshe Moskowitz of Shiloh and he could plough it and farm it at will. You can see Shiloh marked in the lower right-hand corner. Qaryut is in the top right-hand corner. The pink-colored land is below Qaryut and Shiloh and lies much lower than either village. The road that can be discerned as the left-hand boundary of the property is Highway 60, from Jerusalem north. Our main road.