Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Egypt detains human rights activists; Wikileaks explains

From Amnesty USA (h/t Zach N via Facebook)

Two Amnesty International representatives have been detained by police in Cairo after the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre was taken over by military police this morning.

Amnesty International USA called on President Obama to immediately demand the release of the Amnesty International staff members. In addition, we have asked for a meeting in Washington with the Egyptian ambassador to the United States.

The Amnesty International representatives were taken, along with Ahmed Seif Al Islam Khaled Ali, a delegate from Human Rights Watch, and others, to an unknown location in Cairo. Amnesty International does not know their current whereabouts.

There happened to be a couple of Wikileaks cables released today that talks about how Egypt treats NGOs.

From December 2007, about a meeting of HRW's Joe Stork with Egypt's state security service SSIS:

Stork told us that Abdel Rahman opened the ninety minute meeting by asking that the discussion be "informal" and "off the record." Substantively, Stork characterized Abdel Rahman's position as "we (SSIS) don't do bad things." Abdel Rahman said that he commands over 40,000 police officers and told Stork he could count on one hand the number who had committed abuses. Abdel Rahman objected to Stork's use of the word torture, saying it implied something "systemic" and said Egypt's security services were "badly maligned." Stork asked about the monitoring and harassment of NGOs, which Abdel Rahman said was necessary because such organizations are run by "anarchists" and people with prior arrests who need "monitoring."

And from May 2009:

The quasi-governmental organization, the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR), released its 2008 human rights report on May 6, criticizing the GOE for specific violations and offering 25 recommendations.

The report criticizes the GOE for human rights violations such as restricting NGOs, continuing the emergency law and reacting violently to the April 2008 Mahalla strike. It also expresses concern over tensions between Christians and Muslims.

The most prominent of the 25 recommendations focus on ending the emergency law, combating torture, abolishing prison sentences as penalties for journalists, and easing restrictions on NGOs and political parties.

...Under the existing NGO law, the GOE is able to shut down NGOs, limit their activities and refuse to register them, and often utilizes these prerogatives.

Mubarak to Obama: "You don't understand Egypt's culture"

An article by Christiane Amanpour on her interview with Hosni Mubarak:

He said he's fed up with being president and would like to leave office now, but cannot, he says, for fear that the country would sink into chaos.

...While he described President Obama as a very good man, he wavered when I asked him if he felt the U.S. had betrayed him. When I asked him how he responded to the United States' veiled calls for him to step aside sooner rather than later, he said he told President Obama, "You don't understand the Egyptian culture and what would happen if I step down now."

In this case, Mubarak is telling the truth: Egypt will sink into chaos and Obama doesn't understand Arab culture.

Soros blames Israel for Egypt (NewsRealBlog)

At NewsRealBlog, I go into more detail on the ridiculous op-ed that George Soros wrote in today's Washington Post.

The most moderate PA leader blames Egypt situation on - Israel!

From Arab News (and AP):

PARIS: Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Thursday that the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has helped fuel unrest in Egypt and elsewhere in the Mideast.

During a visit to Paris, Fayyad said protesters’ complaints stem not only from internal problems in their own societies, but also from “a frustration, a desperation because of the failure of efforts to solve the Palestinian problem.”

Fayyad, the darling of the West and the most moderate, reasonable leader that Palestinian Arabs are ever likely have, just can't wrap his head around the fact that the entire world doesn't revolve around Ramallah..

He also cannot seem to grasp that the Arab world has paid nothing but lip service to the Palestinian issue for years. They gave up because the Palestinian Arabs couldn't get their own act together and they continue to act like babies who want everything handed to them on a silver platter.

Babies who think that...the whole world revolves around them.

When a Western-educated, so-called moderate leader of Palestinian Arabs doesn't make any sense, it makes it very unlikely that any real peace deal could ever happen.

Peace cannot be built on lies, and that is all that the Palestinian Arabs have been fed for over sixty years.

For more clear-eyed views, see David Suissa and John Podhoretz. (h/t Michael in FL)

Gazans smuggling food OUT - to Egypt

From JPost:

The tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, used in the past to smuggle arms and supplies from Sinai into Gaza, are now an important lifeline of supplies for Sinai residents facing acute shortages because of the turmoil in Egypt, the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar reported Thursday.

According to the paper, which supports Hizbullah, traders in control of the tunnels have "been working for days" smuggling bread and food in the "opposite direction" - from Gaza into Egypt – because of "supply disruptions" from Cairo to the Sinai.

The paper acknowledged something that Israel has been arguing for months, that "Gaza's markets are no longer experiencing a shortage in most food" products since Israel eased the blockade of the region in June.

The smuggling out of Gaza does not impact on the supplies inside the Strip, those running the tunnels were quoted as saying.

This is not the first time the tunnels have been used to smuggle goods into Egypt, with western officials having said in the Fall that Israeli products, specifically fruits and vegetables, were making their way through the tunnels to Egyptian markets.

Isn't it amazing that in only one week of riots, Egyptians are in worse shape than Gazans after years of being besieged and imprisoned and suffering a slow genocide?

(h/t T34)

Guardian defends its "Palestine Papers" coverage

In the Jewish Chronicle, the Guardian defends itself against the accusations that their coverage of the Palestine Papers was biased and anti-Israel.

I think the record speaks for itself - the Guardian and Al Jazeera misinterpreted and misrepresented the papers to put Israel in the worst possible light, and they weren't above lying to do so.

But I found this part of their defense curious:

Examining the haul of 1600 documents, there were a number of passages that the Guardian's team of reporters agreed are highly significant.

These included the offer by Palestinian negotiators – in the context of an overall peace agreement – that Israel would annex all but one of the settlements in East Jerusalem. PLO negotiators also agreed to a remarkably low number of returning refugees.

These are two of the stories we ran, and almost a week after the rest of the world's media gained access to the documents – all of which are now publicly available – no one has found a major story that we missed. We were led, in other words, by the source material. It is no surprise that the majority of the stories concern the PLO, as most of the documents come from the PLO's negotiations unit.

I've been searching for the entire set of documents since the story broke. At the Guardian website, only 26 of the documents are available - no new ones since January 26th. I similarly cannot find a list of all the documents at Al Jazeera.

So the Guardian is claiming that they only highlighted the papers that are newsworthy, and they bring as proof that no one else has found any newsworthy papers - when they can't be found!

I would prefer to decide for myself what is newsworthy, thank you very much. (I've been doing that with Wikileaks.) Let the Guardian put all 1600 documents on their site and then we can truly decide.

UPDATE: Found them. I'll see if there is anything else newsworthy.

Israelis plan to occupy 14 million square miles of prime lunar real estate

From Ha'aretz:

If Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub succeed and send a robot to the moon, they'll donate their millions in prize money to promote science among Israel youth. Yesterday the trio announced their participation in the Google Lunar X Prize competition - an effort to send an unmanned vehicle to the moon and beam back high-quality photos and short films.

The competition seeks to encourage space scientists and engineers from around the world to develop cheap technologies for robotic space exploration. To win, a team needs to raise private funding; the first team to achieve the mission gets $13 million; second prize is $5 million. The other prizes total $5 million. So far 13 groups have registered for the competition; prizes can be won up to the end of 2015.

The X Prize gained publicity in 2004 when Burt Rutan, who led a group in cooperation with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built and flew the first private manned spaceship.

The Israeli group's official declaration was issued at a space conference held by Tel Aviv University's Yuval Ne'eman workshop for science and technology. The group goes by the name SpaceIL and is registered in Israel as a nonprofit organization. It's the only Israeli team in the competition.

The three young men are not motivated by money; they view the competition as a national mission to develop Israel's ability to explore space.

The group has a website, http://www.spaceil.com, in Hebrew. "Our mission is to put the Israeli flag on the moon. During the next two years, we intend to build a small space robot that will make the long journey from the earth to the moon. The vision is to promote technological education in Israel," the website states.

Those Israelis, always trying to grab land.

Israeli technology behind Jeopardy computer contestant

From Israel21C:

A team of about a dozen IBM employees from four countries -- the United States, Israel, China and Japan - have built an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered supercomputer, "Watson," which could be the world's smartest question-and-answer machine.

On February 14, 15 and 16, Watson will take on Jeopardy champs on national TV in North America. The long running, prime-time program poses answers to which contestants must provide the correct trivia question.

Watson, though he's just a machine, will attempt to win a $1 million prize by playing against two of the brainy game show's most celebrated contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in two matches over three days. IBM has pledged that if Watson wins, all the prize money will go to charity.

Named after Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, and the assistant to Sherlock Holmes, the supercomputer will have a fan club watching. Dafna Sheinwald from the IBM Haifa Lab in Israel will be at the taping, excited to see how man will compete against machine.

It was a huge mission to develop a computer that could rival a human's ability to answer spoken questions posed as answers. Sheinwald and her research partner, David Carmel, say the contribution from the Israeli team was search algorithms that help sort out meaningful information from reams of heterogeneous data. That's their specialty at the IBM R&D facilities.

I found a poor-quality video of a test run showing Watson against the same two contestants - and it was very impressive:

A YouTube commenter wrote:

Welcome back to Final Jeopardy.

Our category is "Integers divided by zero".

The state of human rights at the UN (UN Watch)

UN Watch's Hillel Neuer testified before Congress about the state of human rights at the UN:

The transcript is here. Excerpts:

The urgent problem that I wish to address is the state of human rights at the United
Nations.

As you know, the primary U.N. body in this area is the 47-nation Human Rights Council,
which was created in 2006 to replace the Commission on Human Rights and redress its
shortcomings. Under its founding resolution, the council was required to review its work
and functioning after five years. With this review now underway at the U.N., our own
discussion here is particularly timely.

Let us consider, then: How has the council performed in its first five years?

Methodology

Let us measure the council’s performance by the yardstick of the U.N.’s own standards.
These were set forth in 2005 by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In calling to
scrap the old commission, he identified its core failings:

 Countries had sought membership “not to strengthen human rights but to protect
themselves against criticism or to criticize others.”

 The commission was undermined by the “politicization of its sessions” and the
“selectivity of its work.”

 The commission suffered from “declining professionalism” and a “credibility
deficit”— which “cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as
a whole.”

Today, we ask: Has the council remedied these fatal flaws?

Looking ahead, the U.N. General Assembly made clear its expectations for the new
council. Resolution 60/251 of 2006 promised that the new council would elect members
committed to human rights. Serious violators would have their membership suspended.
The council would address the world’s most severe abuses, including by urgent sessions
that could be easily convened. The council’s work would be objective, impartial and nonselective.

Five years later, where do we stand?

...

Turning A Blind Eye to Victims

Apart from a handful of exceptions, such as resolutions on Burma and North Korea that
were inherited from the old commission, the council has systematically turned a blind eye
to the world’s worst human rights violations. The council has failed the victims who are
most in need of international attention.

Impunity for Worst of the Worst

o There have been no resolutions for victims in China, despite gross,
systematic and state-wide repression, the unjust imprisonment of Nobel
Laureate Liu Xiaobo, the massacre of Uighurs, and the killing of Tibetans;

o None for Cuba, where peaceful civic activists are beaten or languish in
prison;

o None for Iran, even as it massacred its own citizens while the council was
in session, and even as the regime continues to subject democracy activists
to torture, rape and execution;

o None for Saudi Arabia, where women are subjugated;

o None for Zimbabwe, despite ongoing brutality by the Mugabe regime;

o And the list goes on. In total, beyond the impunity for the worst of the
worst, approximately 180 out of 192 U.N. member states have never been
condemned by the council once for any human rights violations.

What is most troubling is that no resolutions have even been proposed regarding these
gross violators. For this the democratic minority cannot blame others.

Egypt ordered mobile phone companies to text pro-Mubarak messages

From Al Masry al-Youm:

In a press statement, international mobile operator Vodafone said that Egyptian authorities have ordered the network to send pro-government messages.

“Under the emergency powers provisions of the Telecoms Act, Egyptian authorities can instruct the mobile networks of Mobinil, Etisalat and Vodafone to send messages to the people of Egypt,” read the message posted on Vodafone’s website on 3 February.

According to the statement, the mobile network operators have no influence in the content or working of the messages.

“Vodafone Group protested to the authorities that the current situation regarding these messages is unacceptable. We have made clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator,” read the statement.

Messages sent via Vodafone networks include a call to a protest on Wednesday in Mostafa Mahmoud square to support President Hosni Mubarak.

The funny part is that everyone is trying to use social media to frame what's going on to their advantage - but some do it more skillfully than others.

Even so, too many people are mindlessly believing everything they read on Twitter.

The other Tahrir Square - in Yemen

From AFP:

Tens of thousands of protesters massed on Thursday at Sanaa University for a "day of rage" against President Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule, while a similar number of loyalists flooded a central square in support of the embattled leader.

With Saleh supporters, some of them armed, taking over Al-Tahrir square from Wednesday night, protest organizers were forced to change the planned venue of their demonstration.

From early morning they drove through the streets advertising the new site over megaphones, blaming the change on the fact that "the men of the ruling party and their armed elements are holding Al-Tahrir."

By mid-morning tens of thousands of protesters had gathered at the university, with a similarly-sized crowd of loyalists massing at Al-Tahrir, about 2 kilometres away, in the center of the capital, correspondents said.

Police were on Thursday trying to filter the influx of people into the square, some of whom carried banners reading, "We are with Ali Abdullah Saleh. We are with Yemen," and "The opposition wants to destroy Yemen."

This is my 10,000th post

This post is the 10,000th post published on Elder of Ziyon.

Wow.

I'd like to thank you for coming here to read what I have to say, and especially for forwarding and linking to (and even translating) my posts. It is really humbling to know people have gone to my site some 2.2 million times.

And if you want to support me for the thousands of hours I pour into this site, I very much appreciate any donations you make.

Hamas and Fatah promoting Facebook revolution campaigns against the other

From Ma'an:

Major General Tawfiq At-Tirawi, former director of the PA general intelligence and Fatah Central Committee member called Wednesday in a statement for the people of Gaza to rise up in revolt against the Hamas government.

The people of Gaza, he said, should take their cue from Egypt and call for the end of the "dictatorship that restricts their freedoms."

At-Tirawi's statement is widely believed to be a response to the new group on the social networking site Facebook, Preparation for the Dignity Revolution, which calls for a mass rally in Gaza City on 11 February.

The group, created on 28 January, has 8,316 supporters, many from the West Bank. In its mission statement, unidentified organizers say they are not affiliated with any political party, but accuse Hamas of "implementing a Zionist-Iranian plan."

Ya gotta love Zionist-Iranian plans!

But Hamas websites are also promoting Facebook groups - against Fatah. The Hamas newspaper Palestine Times says:

Like the Egyptian revolution and the Tunisian revolution before that, thousands of young Palestinians began Facebook campaigns, with multiple calls to overthrow the authority of Abbas in the West Bank, demanding he step down from power and stop the injustice and tyranny and dictatorship in the West Bank.

One campaign, called "Palestinian revolution to overthrow the authority of Abbas," first set up on January 31, was titled "The first movement of the Palestinian people for change..."

The anti-Fatah page is here.

But I'm sure that both campaigns are strictly non-partisan and were set up by concerned young people, acting completely spontaneously. Absolutely.

Both sides in Egypt blame...the Jews!

George Soros, in a ridiculous op-ed in today's Washington Post, blames Israel (actually, the "Jewish lobby") for being the major obstacle to Egyptian democracy.

He writes

The main stumbling block is Israel. ... Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves.

He is not the only one.

Many of the protesters hate Mubarak because of....Israel:

Iranian TV says: (h/t G)

The International Network for Rights and Development said that three Israeli planes landed at Cairo's Mina International Airport on Saturday, carrying equipment for use in dispersing and suppressing large crowds, a Press TV correspondent reported.

According to the report, Egyptian security forces received the cargo on three Israeli planes, which were allegedly carrying a large supply of internationally proscribed gas to disperse crowds.

Of course, the Mubarak regime cannot take this ultimate insult lying down.

From YNet:

A young Egyptian woman claims that the Mossad trained her to assist in bringing down Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's regime. In an interview with Egypt's Al Mehwar network the woman, who noted that her facebook page was extremely popular, said that she was sent by an American organization to be specially trained "by Israelis and Jews" in Qatar.

The woman remained anonymous and was interviewed with her voice distorted and her face blurred. She told of her training and financial support from an American organization called Freedom House. She claims that her trainers were Jews and Israelis whose main job was recruiting "young and unexperienced" students from universities.

The organization is well known, and its website states that its purpose is to "support the expansion of freedom around the world" and that it was founded by "prominent Americans concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy".

According to the young woman, after her initial recruitment, she was sent to Doha in Qatar with a group of other young people for the next stage in the process. "We received intensive training for four days. The trainers had different citizenships but a predominant number among them were Israelis," she said.

At the end of the interview the woman was asked what led her to confess her secret activities. At this point, she burst into tears and answered that President Mubarak was "like a father to me," which is why she decided to share what happened to her.

I'm fairly sure the Arabic interview is here.

No matter what happens anywhere in the Arab world, you will never have to look hard to find people falling over themselves to blame - the Jews.

Omar Barghouti's lies in HuffPo

In the Huffington Post, Omar Barghouti argues against an earlier article by Bernard-Henri Levy in order to justify the anti-Israel BDS movement.

It doesn't take very long before one sees that the truth is not exactly Barghouti's strong suit.

The fact is the BDS Call was launched by a great majority in Palestinian civil society on July 9, 2005, as a qualitatively new phase in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and self-determination. More than 170 leading Palestinian political parties, trade union federations, women's unions, refugee rights groups, NGOs, and grassroots organizations called for a boycott against Israel until it fully complies with its obligations under international law.

Do the organizations behind the boycott really represent the majority of Palestinian society?

I found the list of organizations that signed on to BDS on the website he cited, and a good number of them are not based in "Palestine" but rather in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Europe and North America. As far as I can see, there is not a single political party on that list. And if all the 170 organizations signed on in 2005, as the website says, then that means that not too many have signed on since then!

The Palestinian Arab organizations that signed onto BDS are a motley crew of trade unions, highly anti-Israel organizations like "Al-Awda" which agitates to destroy Israel completely, and some pseudo-"human rights" organizations like Addameer which inflates the number of Arabs arrested by Israel by at least a factor of a hundred.

Apparently, lying comes naturally to all BDS supporters!

However, the Palestinian Authority does not support BDS. Most Palestinian Arabs consume Israeli goods. I daresay that one will be able to find plenty of Israeli products in the offices of most of the West Bank and Gaza organizations listed.

Not only that, but most Palestinian Arab trade unions don't support BDS! In fact, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) is explicitly against BDS. (h/t Zach N)

The BDS movement tries to represent itself as being far larger than it is, but if you want a laugh, look at the "Achievements Calendar" on the BDS Movement website.

It is, as far as I can tell, completely empty!

He goes on:

"Rooted in a century-old history of civil, nonviolent resistance ..."

I always laugh when I see this claim made. The liars who say that the Palestinian Arab "resistance" movement was nonviolent usually point to the beginning of the 1936-9 riots, which started with a strike. Of course, that didn't last long, and by the time it was over there were thousands of casualties - most of them Arab, and many of them injured and killed by other Arabs - for not adhering to the strike!

Palestinian Arab terrorism has evolved since then, to airplane hijackings, suicide bombings and shooting rockets at women and children. All of which are supported, implicitly or explicitly, by many of these same "civil society" organizations listed.

Even today, when Palestinian Arabs talk about "non-violent resistance," they include throwing large rocks through the windshields of cars belonging to civilians who happen to pass by the wrong neighborhood.

[T]he BDS National Committee (BNC) [is] anchored in deep respect for international law and universal human rights...

The entire point of the BDS initiative is to deny and destroy the right of the Jewish nation to self-determination. That is its entire raison d'être. To say that is based on human rights is a very bad joke - yet this lie is one that is used repeatedly.

The BDS movement, being strictly rights-based, has consistently avoided taking any position regarding the one-state/two-states debate, emphasizing instead the three basic rights that need to be realized in any political solution. Ending the Israeli occupation that started in 1967 of all Arab territories, ending Israel's system of legalized and institutionalized discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens, and recognizing the UN-sanctioned rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin are the three basic principles of the movement.

There is no UN-sanctioned right for the Palestinian Arabs to "return.' The 1949 UNGA Resolution 194 that they love to use has phraseology that limits this "right," it does not extend to the descendants, it was a General Assembly resolution with no legal weight, and it was roundly rejected by the Arab world anyway. It is simply a BDS and Palestinian Arab lie to take portions of one of its fifteen paragraphs as the holiest of holies while utterly disregarding the rest of the resolution.

Mr. Levy completely misrepresents my position on the matter. Citing a 2003 article of mine, he outlandishly claims that I endorse a "two-Palestines" solution....For more than 27 years, I've consistently and openly advocated a secular, democratic state in the entire area of historic Palestine.

Either way, the point of the BDS movement is to destroy the Jewish state. No two ways about that.

And when Barghouti says "historic Palestine" he is ignoring history and betraying the fact that the BDS movement is only interested in the portions of "historic Palestine" that happens to be controlled by Jews.After all, portions of Jordan were once considered "eastern Palestine" yet not one BDSer will ever insist that Jordan give up its portion of historic Palestine!

The BDS movement against Israel could not care less whether it is a Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or Hindu state; all that matters is that it is a colonial oppressor that persistently denies the Palestinian people their basic rights. Is this too difficult to understand?

If that was remotely the case, then the BDS movement would boycott every single Arab country - because every one of them has discriminatory laws to disallow Palestinian Arabs from becoming fully naturalized citizens of their states. Where are the boycotts of Lebanon? Saudi Arabia? Even Jordan has been systematically taking away Jordanian citizenship from their citizens of Palestinian origin.

Yet the BDS movement is silent on the matter.

The fact that they only call for sanctions against Israel indicates - actually, it proves - that anti-semitism is the root of the entire movement. Not that all of its members consciously realize it or not, but there can be no other explanation.