Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 31, 2011

The Muslim Brotherhood, 1948 (John Roy Carlson)

Last July I linked to some writings by the amazing John Roy Carlson. (Unfortunately, the Google Books link no longer shows large portions of the book I screen-captured.)

Here is a description of the "Moslem Brotherhood" in Egypt that Carlson wrote in 1948, published in the Palestine Post, as part of a larger article about Egypt altogether.

The article goes on to describe Al Azhar University, and ends with the ominous and prophetic words, "The Jew, if left to his own resources in Egypt, is doomed to pogrom and persecution."

The most popular post in my blog over the past few days has not been one of my new posts, but a post from September.

The people viewing that post are finding it from a Google image search for "ElBaradei daughter." (And Google's algorithm for guessing search terms shows that a lot of people are also searching for "ElBaradei daughter swimsuit.")

The September post mentioned that Mohamemd El-Baradei was complaining that Egyptian media was trying to discredit him by publishing pictures of his daughter in a swimsuit and apparently drinking alcohol.

I cannot say why so many people are now doing searches for this image. Is it Muslim Brotherhood supporters who do not want to partner with El Baradei? Is it from El Baradei supporters who want to to discredit the MB? Is it from Mubarak supporters trying to tarnish El Baradei's reputation? I cannot really tell; most of the searches seem to be coming from Europe with a high percentage from German Google.

Headlines from Egyptian media

Tahrir Square protesters say they plan to march Friday to the presidential palace in Heliopolis unless the army makes its stance clear.

Youth-led groups issued a statement calling for all Egyptians to march on the palace, the People's Assembly and the television building, in what they are calling the "Friday of Departure."

They say the army must choose which side they are on: That of the people, or the regime.
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Al Jazeera reports that six of its reporters have been arrested in Cairo.

The Egyptian government on Sunday forced Al Jazeera's Cairo offices to close and suspended its correspondents' accreditations.

The reporters, who were arrested from their hotel rooms, believe they were arrested on the pretext of reporting without permission.

Dan Nolan, one of the reporters arrested, tweeted that he was being held at an army checkpoint outside the Hilton hotel in Cairo.
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250,000 protesters in Tahrir Square today, including thousands from trade unions.
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Egyptian actor Omar Sharif calls on Mubarak to step down.
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Egypt stopped all its rail services today. Speculation is that part of the reason is to stop escaping prisoners from getting too far....or perhaps to limit the number of people who can attend the major demonstrations.

Whew!

In the first round of the Pro-Israel Blog Off contest, I had chosen a cartoon to compete against articles by my competition, especially an excellent article called Zionist Football by Life Through My Eyes.

Part of my strategy was based on knowing that one of the judges was Yaakov Kirschen, the cartoonist who makes Dry Bones. (Who is not only brilliant but handsome too, just like the other wise and impartial judges. :) )

In the reader votes, which make up 35% of the total score, I was trounced by 20 percentage points. So I spent much of the week wondering if I'd even make it to the second round.

But the judges liked my entry best, and I ended up winning the round.

This week you can vote on the second part of the first round, with three great blogs competing: CiFWatch, Huffington Post Monitor and Divest This!

Morning links

Here is a great interview with Michael Oren from The Daily Caller.

Israel released a video showing that a Jewish resident of the territories shot a Palestinian Arab youth only after repeatedly being stoned by him.

No More Lies shows that while some Egyptian protesters seem to want genuine democracy, others seem to be motivated by hate for Israel.

Bicom analyzed the "Palestine Papers" released so far, and - surprise! - came up with the same conclusions I did, that Al Jazeera and the Guardian are misrepresenting the published materials.

Challah Hu Akbar sums up an interesting story where J Street falsely claimed to be going on a Birthright trip. Some branches still have the lies on their websites.

Iran is claiming to have caught spies based on the website meant to find information about missing Israeli soldier Ron Arad.

Amnesty supports a confessed Hezbollah spy

From TheJC:

Amnesty International has put out a Press Notice "urging the Israeli authorities to end their harassment of Palestinian human rights activists" "after a veteran Palestinian campaigner was jailed for nine years earlier today and given an additional one-year suspended sentence. Ameer Makhoul, a longstanding Palestinian activist, was convicted on various counts of having contact with enemies of Israel and espionage after a plea bargain agreement at his trial. He was originally charged with an even more serious offense, "assisting an enemy in war", which could have carried a life sentence, but that was dropped by the prosecution when he agreed to a plea bargain."

........

"Ameer Makhoul is well known for his human rights activism on behalf of Palestinians in Israel and those living under Israeli occupation. We fear that this may be the underlying reason for his imprisonment."

http://www.ngo-monitor.org/digest_info.php?id=3112#head

The truth is here: "On October 27, 2010 Haaretz reported that Ameer Makhoul, the director of Israeli-Arab NGO Ittijah, “confess[ed] to charges of spying, contact with a foreign agent and giving information to the enemy.” Makhoul, as head of Ittijah, has a background of anti-Israel activities characterized by demonisation and hate rhetoric. For example, an Ittijah email during the Gaza war claimed, “the IDF is turning Gaza into kind of an extermination camp, in the full sense of the word and with the full historical relativity.”

Amnesty International in London has had a succession of Israel-bashing speakers such as Ben White. I have offered them Ruvi Ziegler - an Israeli lawyer studying in Oxford who is an expert on the security fence - but they have stonewalled.

Shame on Amnesty International for its Israel-bashing biased agenda.

A Hebrew article shows that he passed on the names of six potential spies for Hezbollah as well as other information that was encrypted - showing that he had something to hide in his "innocent contacts."

But when someone hates Israel and pretends to care about "human rights," it appears that Amnesty will automatically side with him, no matter who it is.

The other "Palestine Papers" from AFP: Did Obama harden the Palestinian Arab position?

From AFP:

Palestinian delegates to 2010 peace talks rejected out of hand Israel's demand to hold on to swathes of West Bank settlements, documents given to AFP on Saturday show.

A discussion paper prepared by the Palestinian side and made available to AFP on condition of anonymity challenges the Israeli assumption that the large blocs of adjacent enclaves where most settlers live would be annexed to Israel in a deal to set up an independent Palestinian state.

The document, dated May 2010, also shoots down a reported Israeli proposal that the Palestinian state take over some Arab villages currently within Israel in exchange.

"We will not entertain swapping Palestinians on either side of the 1967 border," it said.

"Nor will we engage in land swap discussions that use so-called settlement blocs as the point of reference, let alone accept such areas' wholesale annexation."

The document was one of several given to AFP in the wake of publication of documents by television channel Al-Jazeera, which purported to show Palestinian officials prepared to make sweeping concessions to Israel at talks in September 2010.

They restate long-standing Palestinian positions on the sensitive issues of Jerusalem and the right of return for Palestinian refugees who fled after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The files released by Al-Jazeera contain minutes of discussions between Israel, the United States and Palestinians, in which Palestinian negotiators offered to cede large parts of east Jerusalem to the Jewish state and conceded that only limited numbers of Palestinian refugees would be able to return home.

The documents obtained by AFP on Saturday say that "The Palestinian state must include adequate land within east Jerusalem for the city's own growth and development. East Jerusalem must also have meaningful territorial, economic and other links with the rest of Palestine."

The papers all carry the disclaimer: "This paper is for discussion purposes only, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed."

AFP is not making a copy of this paper available, as far as I can tell, so we have no idea whether the AFP papers aretalking points for before a meeting or minutes of the meeting afterwards, who the meeting was with (in May 2010 there were no peace talks going on, they only happened in September) and, of course, who leaked them.

But if we are to assume that the specific content of both Al Jazeera's and AFP's papers are true (forgetting the context and spin that Al Jazeera and the Guardian have given in misinterpreting the papers) then we can come to some interesting conclusions.

It shows that the Palestinian Arab negotiators were not nearly as serious about reaching an agreement in 2010 as they were in 2008.

Now, what changed between those two dates?

There was a new Israeli government - and there was a new American administration.

Abbas became far more intransigent since Obama entered the White House because he could hardly act more flexible than the most powerful man on Earth was.

And almost certainly this AFP paper was for talks with America, not Israel. While it is difficult to know what Israeli peace proposals were at the time, we can safely assume that they still involved significant concessions if only because Netanyahu has repeated the mantra of "painful compromises for peace" - if he wasn't prepared to offer concessions, it makes no political sense to tell his supporters that they are coming.

Which indicates that it was the White House's actions that hardened the PLO's positions. Certainly it is what caused them to adopt a new strategy adding preconditions before peace talks could resume.

If these papers are true, (which is a big "if,") then the inescapable conclusion is that Obama's initial policy of leaning towards the Palestinian Arab position and publicly pressuring only Israel made peace a far more remote possibility than in was under the Bush administration.

ElderToons: Egypt's choice

Jewish boy kidnapped in Yemen

Wikipedia says:

Moshe Ya'ish al-Nahari (1978 - December 11, 2008) was a Jewish Hebrew language teacher in Raydah, Yemen, who was killed by Abdul Aziz Yahya Al-Abdi, a Muslim Yemenite who accosted him near his home demanding that he convert to Islam. Al-Nahari's attacker subsequently boasted of the killing and the prosecution demanded the death penalty. The court ruled that the attacker was mentally unstable and ordered him to pay damages. In the subsequent appeals case, however, al-Abdi was sentenced to death.

With that background...

From Yemen Post (h/t Jawa Report):

A Yemeni Jewish child was kidnapped from Reda district in Amran province on Saturday, informed source told media outlets.

Yameen Ameran Al-Nahari, 8 years, disappeared while the Jewish community was practicing their religious rituals on the weekend.

Sources said that the kidnapping of the child targeted to pressure the Jewish community to forgive Abdul-Aziz Al-Abdi, who shot dead a Jewish fellow citizen, Mashaa Yehiya bin Yaeesh Al-Nahari, and accept his fine in which he will pay 5.5 million riyals.

Lately, a Yemeni court upheld a death sentence on a Muslim man after being accused of killing a Jewish citizen.

So a Jewish child was kidnapped to allow the murderer of a Jewish man to go free.

Sick.

By the way that imposing sounding figure of 5.5 million Yemeni rials is only equivalent to about $25,000.

Is Hamas about to crack down on Ma'an News Agency?

Once upon a time. Ma'an News Agency tried to build for itself a niche as a professional, Western-style news outlet for Palestinian Arabs.

Then, after the Hamas takeover of Gaza, Ma'an started receiving threats from Hamas - and immediately it changed its coverage to stay away from anything negative about Hamas (unless Hamas denied a story from another source, in which case Ma'an would report the denial, but never the original story in context.)

Other Palestinian Arab journalists in Gaza were beaten and threatened not to report anything bad about Hamas, and for the most part, they obeyed.

Hamas kept a wary eye on Ma'an, occasionally paying "visits" to the agency to make sure that they were toeing the line.

That uneasy dance of Ma'an's self-censorship and Hamas' tolerance of the last Palestinian Arab media outlet in Gaza that was not explicitly pro-Hamas seems to have ended.

Palestine Times, a Hamas mouthpiece, just published an expose of sorts accusing Ma'an employees of Zionism, belonging to Fatah, and of lying in stories about Hamas.

Just a guess, but I have a feeling that Ma'an's days in Gaza are numbered.

No new "Palestine Papers" since Wednesday

Why have The Guardian and Al Jazeera stopped releasing any new memos since Wednesday?

Sunday linkfest

Iran is very happy at the events in Egypt, claiming that it is a natural extension of the Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran and installed one of the most repressive regimes in the world.

The prisons in Egypt are emptying as prisoners are rioting and killing guards. Some reports say that thousands of prisoners are now roaming the country. The Muslim Brotherhood is celebrating the escape of its members. There are reports of "dozens of bodies" on the roads near one prison.

Thousands of Jordanians rallied on Friday after prayers demanding a new Prime Minister, and there were additional Islamist rallies on Saturday to support the anti-Mubarak riots in Egypt, warning all Arab leaders who are allied with the US that they will be toppled as well.

Leading Tunisian Islamists are streaming back to Tunisia from their exile in Europe.

Analysis about the events in Egypt from The Muqata, Barry Rubin, TNR.

Khaled Abu Toameh asks "Who are the real peace partners?"

Right after my proof that Amnesty International is inherently biased against Israel, a "human rights activist" that Amnesty praised as a "key human rights defender" been sentenced to nine years in prison for spying for Hezbollah.

Also some delicious irony from Yaacov Lozowick concerning another "peace activist."

Southern Sudan vote results in: 98.83% chose to secede

From Al Arabiya:

Close to 99 percent of south Sudanese chose to secede from the north in a January 9-15 referendum, according to the first complete preliminary results published Sunday.

Updated figures published on the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission's website and accounting for 100 percent of ballots cast in both the north and the south gave secession an overwhelming 98.83 percent of the vote.

Early counting had put the outcome of the ballot beyond doubt only days after voting ended, with partial figures showing southern Sudan had comfortably secured a mandate to secede and become the world's newest nation.

According to the commission website, 3,851,994 votes were cast during an emotional week-long ballot that saw huge lines of dancing and praying voters form outside polling stations long before dawn on the first day of voting.

Five of the 10 states in Sudan's oil-producing south showed a 99.9 percent vote for separation and the lowest vote was 95.5 percent in favor in the western state of Bahr al-Ghazal which borders north Sudan.

Arab League "Conference to Support Jerusalem" postponed indefinitely

Late last year, Qatar undertook to host a "Conference to Support Jerusalem" in February 2011, which was advised at the end of the Arab League conference in Sirte last March.

Some 74 countries were invited to what was planned to be an anti-Israel hatefest.

The conference was meant to show that Jerusalem is not only a Palestinian Arab issue but a pan-Arab issue. Seminars scheduled included how the "Arab" Jebusites built the city and the ancient Israelites intruded, as well as how Israel is violating international law by buying buildings and having Jews live there.

Only last Sunday, plans for the conference were said to be "in full swing" in Qatar.

Today, it was announced that the conference was being postponed "indefinitely."

This appears to be Qatar's retaliation against the insults that the Palestinian Authority hurled at the Emir in wake of the "Palestine Papers" imbroglio.

What Hamas is doing in Egypt

Palestine Press Agency, which is rabidly anti-Hamas but whose reporting has generally panned out as true, is reporting exactly what Hamas is doing to take advantage of the chaos in Egypt:

Special units of the Qassam Brigades of Hamas infiltrated through the tunnels deployed on the border two days ago to the city of Rafah in Egypt and then to the towns of Sheikh Zuwaid and El-Arish to support the Sinai Bedouin attacking the centers of the Egyptian security; [the Bedouin represent] the strategic depth of the Hamas movement in the Sinai.

A number of cars in the Sinai are filled by Hamas with weapons smuggled [from Gaza to Egypt] through the tunnels: mortars, RPGs, and packages of homemade explosives, such as those used in the bombing of Alexandria, in addition to a number of hand grenades, and these are used against the security forces and supporting the Egyptian Sinai Bedouin in the eradication of the ruling system in Egypt.

A large amount of Hamas members in civilian clothes have already passed through the Rafah crossing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday through to Cairo, with the help of bribed state security officers, where they seek cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to attack the Egyptian prisons, where there are Hamas prisoners. Hamas is a natural extension of the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is talk about an escape of prisoners, including Ayman Nofal [jailed by Egypt in 2008] and others, and Hamas expects to return its prisoners to the Gaza Strip by Monday.

Aa state of overwhelming joy prevails in the ranks of Hamas from the influx of news from Egypt along with cheers and fireworks about the success of its own power to break points of the Egyptian security and access to the heart of Cairo. Hamas considers events in Cairo to end the rule of President Mubarak of Egypt, which they describe as a traitor and they wish the fall of the corrupt system in order for the Brotherhood to ascend to power.

It is worth mentioning the escape of the Palestinian King of Tunnels, nicknamed The Mouse, from the prison of Al-Arish, and his escape to Gaza after bloody battles fought by the Special Unit of the Qassam Brigades in collaboration with the Bedouins of the Sinai against the security forces of Egypt. In addition the al-Qassam Brigades kidnapped 3 Egyptian soldiers who seem to have been freed at the border of the city of Rafah.

Related, from Ma'an:

Palestinian sources say 12 people including Bedouins and Egyptian police officers were killed Saturday in clashes in the Sinai Peninsula, in what appeared to be an attempt by tribes in the region to take control of the swath of land south of the Egypt-Gaza border.

Gunshots were heard in the Egyptian city of Rafah as Bedouins attempted to occupy the border with Israel and the Gaza Strip. Rocket-propelled Grenades were fired at Egyptian soldiers, witnesses said, causing the near-total destruction of one home near the border area, and damage to a sector of the Gaza-Egypt border fence.

Gaza government police were said to have fixed the breach immediately, while eyewitnesses said police forces deployed across the border area on the Gaza side, in an apparent attempt to prevent Gaza residents from entering Egypt.

Armed groups attacked Egyptian police in the cities of Rafah and Sheikh Zweid, set fire to one police station and were behind the slaying of one officer identified as 36-year-old Jum’a Hamid after he was abducted along with two others, security sources said.

Security officials also said Bedouins were behind an earlier attack on an Egyptian security checkpoint, where four officers were killed and four others injured. All were transported to hospital in Al-Arish. Four banks and several state buildings were also reportedly set ablaze and looted.

The two stories are not inconsistent.