Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Nice video on women's rights in the Middle East

From Honest Reporting Canada:

Is Hamas trying to stop rockets?

Even though the number of rockets from Gaza has accelerated in recent months, there are a number of reports that Hamas is trying to stop them.

The latest evidence is from an internal memo obtained by the anti-Hamas Palestine Press Agency that apparently shows a Hamas police directive to find rocket launchers and stop all rocket attacks against Israel, saying it is a severe violation of the law:

GANSO reports that Hamas police did discover and stop one rocket attack, on February 10th, from central Gaza. None of the recent rocket attacks have been claimed by Hamas.

One interesting incident mentioned in that same report occurred last month, when a test rocket was fired out to sea on February 8th. It is unclear if that was Hamas or another group. But it is possible that they were testing out a newer Grad rocket, as the rocket that hit Beersheba might have been a new rocket that was manufactured in China.

Is it plausible that the smaller Salafist groups or Islamic Jihad are importing longer-range Grads? Even if so, Hamas is certainly aware of it.

MSM roundup (David G)

From David G:

From NYT:

As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By

Scott Shane interviews Paul Pillar, Brian Fishman (from the New America Foundation), Steven Simon, Michael Scheuer and Christopher Boucek (from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace) for this news analysis.

The article is tailored to promote a view such as:

“These uprisings have shown that the new generation is not terribly interested in Al Qaeda’s ideology,” Mr. Simon said. He called the Zawahri statements “forlorn, if not pathetic.”

From what I read, Scheuer is the voice of reason. *gasp* (EoZ: Here's a video of Scheuer going on an anti-Zionist and cirtually anti-semitic rant on C-SPAN)

Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.

Boaz Ganor in the Jerusalem Post wrote

The revolutions and US euphoria

Talhami points out that it is still too early to tell where the Egyptian revolution is headed, but claims one conclusion is evident – this is Osama bin Laden’s nightmare, since peaceful masses, not the murder of innocents, overthrew the regime.

The loser is therefore al-Qaida, since it has tried to convince the Muslim masses that the only way to fulfill their ambitions is through violence.

This argument reflects an erroneous understanding of the essence and goals of al-Qaida. This terrorist organization, like most others, is not merely a group of bloodthirsty madmen who commit violence for violence’s sake. Al- Qaida carries out terror attacks to advance its religious-ideological goal – the foundation of a global Islamic caliphate governed by Shari’a. If the Egyptian process will eventually lead to an Iran-like state, al-Qaida will have gained greatly.

The assumption that the loser is al- Qaida may lead to the erroneous conclusion that the winner is the bloc opposing al-Qaida – the Western nations led by the US. Such a victory may yet prove to be Pyrrhic.

This is similar (though the particulars are different) to what Barry Rubin's written recently about the need to be realistic not optimistic.

The Times article is marked by that optimism. True it's a great story. Millions of disenfranchised people across the region bring down entrenched autocrats using little more than Facebook. With the Facebook angle it is a great story for this era. The bonus of defeating the terrorists would be a wonderfully happy ending. Too bad that real life doesn't always follow a Hollywood plot line.

For what it's worth another writer for the Times does present the only fly in the ointment. Not surprisingly Roger Cohen sees Israel as a possible obstacle to the democratic paradise emerging in the Middle East.

Evoking Emerson Lake and Palmer, Cohen wrote a Paean to President Obama, Oh What a Lucky Man.

(Does Cohen even understand the song? It's about a man of war, not the man of peace he is portraying.)

In one case, Cohen channels his inner Walt and Mearsheimer.

By contrast, the American right has found itself tied up in knots, wondering how to disentangle the words “freedom” and “Arab,” the first demanding its hard-wired allegiance, the second demanding its Israel-dictated skepticism. Pity the poor Republican newbies, once so full of certainties, confronted by a nuanced world.

Why is the skepticism "Israel-dictated?" One would think that the return of Yousef al Qaradawi to huge crowds, the new smuggling into Gaza or increased persecution of Copts as reasons for skepticism about the direction of Egypt revolution. Instead Cohen turns to the first refuge of the foreign policy scoundrel and blames Israel.

Later Cohen writes:

How can the West help forge the new regional safe house of emergent Arab democracies? Obama must bring the best minds to bear on that question and a related one: How to coax Israel from its paralyzing siege mentality into seizing this moment to seek peace?

"Siege mentality?" Israel negotiated with Arafat granting him land, arms and legitimacy while he encouraged terrorism. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon only to see Hezbollah increase its influence and power and then saw the same thing happen when it withdrew from Gaza with Hamas. Now the major players in Egypt have made it clear that they view the peace treaty with Israel as a negative for their country. This isn't a "mentality" it's experience.

There's a lot more in Cohen's absurd op-ed. I'll leave it to others to fisk as an exercise.

Over at the Washington Post...The editors have questions, and they're pretty happy with the answers.

The Arab revolution swells

THREE QUESTIONS have driven discussion of the ongoing Arab revolt and how the United States should respond to it. Can it spread to all of the Arab states, including seemingly stable kingdoms, such as Saudi Arabia, and the most repressive police states, such as Syria? Can it be stopped with violence by regimes more ruthless than those of Tunisia and Egypt? And can entrenched power structures succeed in limiting the amount of change, through bribes or negotiation?

The answers are not yet in - but so far, the trends point toward a "no" to all three questions. That's an exciting prospect for supporters of democracy, above all young Arabs who yearn for their countries to refound themselves. But it also means more instabilility ahead in the region, along with some hard choices for the United States.

Richard Cohen (more and more he makes sense, what's happened?) has a different question. More importantly his question is based on history, and isn't asked (and answered) in a vacuum.

Can the Arab world leave anti-Semitism behind?

During World War II, the leader of the Palestinians lived in a Berlin villa, a gift from a very grateful Adolf Hitler, who clearly got his money's worth. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and as such the titular leader of Muslim Palestinians, broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, recruited European Muslims for the SS, exulted in the Holocaust and after the war went on to represent his people in the Arab League. He died somewhat ignored but never repudiated.

Husseini might have been a Nazi to his very soul, but he was also a Palestinian nationalist with genuine support among his own people. The Allies originally considered him a war criminal, but to many Arabs, he was just a patriot. His exterminationist anti-Semitism was considered neither overly repugnant nor all that exceptional. The Arab world is saturated by Jew-hatred.

Some of this hatred was planted by Husseini and some of it long existed, but whatever the case, it remains a remarkable, if unremarked, feature of Arab nationalism. The other day, for instance, about 1 million Egyptians in Tahrir Square heard from Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an esteemed religious leader and Muslim Brotherhood figure whose anti-Semitic credentials are unimpeachable. Among other things, he has said that Hitler was sent by Allah as "divine punishment" for the Jews. His al-Jazeera program is one of that TV network's most popular.

Islamist IHH swoops into Libya's vacuum

From the IHH website:

The IHH relief teams have been conducting relief works in al Bayda and Benghazi cities of Libya.

The IHH team that managed to enter Libya, which is undergoing riots against Gaddafi, starts urgent relief works right away.

The team visited various hospitals in al Bayda along with a group of 35 medical doctors and distributed medicine. The team also observed the situation about the injured at the hospitals.

Another relief work by IHH Libya team is distributing the food aid packages to the suffering families in al-Bayda city of Libya. Food aid including cheese, floor, canned food, tea, sugar, rice, olive oil, tomato paste and milk, is distributed to 100 families in different neighborhoods of the city al-Bayda. The distribution will be continued to other families.

After al Bayda, the IHH team moved to Benghazi which is where the riots first broke out. The team still conducting relief works in this city.

Another case where the West is caught flatfooted and the Islamists take the first step to gain hearts and minds. Charity is wonderful, but there is a long green string attached.

(h/t Suzanne)

Buy your Zionist Olympics 2012 T-Shirt!

Since Iran seems to have multiple problems with the London 2012 Olympics logo, why not show off the wonderful Zionist version?

The T-shirts (and sweatshirts) are now available for purchase at my Printfection store:

(h/t Liza's Welt via Silke for the idea)

Guess who Yemen's president blames Arab protests on? (updated)

One guess:

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh accused Israel of financing and plotting protests in his country and other Arab states, and criticized U.S. President Barack Obama for expressing support for the protesters.

Saleh, speaking to a gathering of Sanaa University professors and students, said Obama was "meddling in the affairs of Arab countries."

Well, that was an easy one.

UPDATE: More details from JPost:

"There is an operations room in Tel Aviv with the aim of destabilizing the Arab world," Saleh said as he gave a speech at Sanaa University. He explained that the "operations room" is "run by the White House."

(h/t Dan)

Turkey's foreign minister says Israel's human rights violations are the worst

From Bloomberg:

Israel is at the “very top of the list” when it came to human-rights violations, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, showing little thaw in relations between the once-close countries.

Davutoglu was speaking at Ankara’s Esenboga Airport before leaving for a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where ministers from around the world will meet to discuss a coordinated response to Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s crackdown against anti-regime rebels in Libya.

“If you’re going to make a list ranking human-rights violations, Israel’s probably at the very top of the list,” Davutoglu said in remarks carried today by Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency.

Turkey's human rights record is far worse than Israel's. has extrajudicially killed hundreds of citizens and is complicit in the murders of thousands of Kurds. Hundreds of others have "disappeared." It routinely tortures its citizens in prison, and hundreds of prisoners are thought to have been tortured to death. It has laws that curtail freedom of expression. Human rights activists are in constant danger.

No wonder Davutoglu wants to divert the UN's attention to Israel.

Palestinian Arab delegation walked out of Clinton's speech at UNHRC

Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Most of the speech was dedicated to talking about Libya and about the events happening in the Arab world as a whole. She spoke about the importance of democracy and freedom.

In a very brief section of the speech, she said:

And I must add, the structural bias against Israel – including a standing agenda item for Israel, whereas all other countries are treated under a common item – is wrong. And it undermines the important work we are trying to do together.

This was the only mention of Israel in the speech.

According to Palestine Press Agency and other Arabic news agencies, quoting unnamed Arab diplomatic sources, the Palestinian delegation walked out because of her remarks, saying that she has double standards by speaking about Libyan human rights but downplaying (in their minds) Palestinian Arab human rights.

Here is another insult that the Palestinian Arabs have hurled at the US - and another insult that goes unreported by the media. Imagine the outcry if an Israeli delegate walked out during any speech by an American!

(h/t Ali for translation help)

January/February 2011 rocket calendar

It is unfortunately necessary to resume keeping track of rockets and mortars shot by Gaza terrorists towards Israel so people can see that the threat to Israel's southern communities is growing.

G=Grad
Q=Qassam
M=Mortar
P=Unidentified projectile
S=Fell short in Gaza
F=Fatality (Green-Gaza, Red-Israel)

January 2011

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
						1 1M
2	3	4 1Q	5 1Q	6 1M	7 1P	8 2Q 5M
9 3Q	10 4Q	11 1Q	12	13	14	15
16 3M	17 1Q 2M	18 5M 1Q	19	20	21 2M 4Q (1S-F) 2G	22
23	24	25 2Q	26	27	28	29
30	31 2G 1Q

February 2011

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
30	31 2G 1Q	1 1Q	2	3	4 1Q	5
6 2Q 2M	7	8 4Q 2M	9	10	11	12
13	14 1Q	15	16	17 1QS	18	19 1Q
20 1QS	21 1QS	22	23 3M 2G	24	25 1Q 1QS	26 1M
27 1Q	28

According to GANSO, 4 Palestinian Arabs have been injured and one killed as a result of Qassam rockets that fell short or exploded prematurely in the first two months of the year.

It's not only a Zionist Olympic logo. It's a Gay, Freemason Zionist logo!

It turns out that the London Olympic 2012 logo is not merely Zionist. It's even worse!

From Iran's Hamsayeh.net:

Iranian Olympic Committee has launched an official complaint to the International Olympic Committee concerning the design of London 2012 Olympic games logo.

Baharm Afsharzadeh, the secretary general of Iran’s Olympic Committee told reporters the logo depicts the word ZION, a totally irrelevant symbol for what it is supposed to depict i.e. the spirit of Olympics.

‘We had to show protest against the measure. We intend to write a letter to Asian Olympic Council to call for them to follow up on the issue more seriously,’ said Afsharzadeh in a report published by Iranian Student News Agency ISNA, Monday.

According to Afsharzadeh, the so-called designer of this logo has a proven track record of being affiliated to certain well-known Zionist organizations and Freemasons.

The logo’s rudimentary and rather silly design shows the word ZION written in off pink color - a much revered color theme associated with some deviated Western-based circles. Yet it is not clear, why the British Olympic Committee has chosen this design as the main logo of the Olympic games which is to be held in London, England in August 2012.

Several countries including some British organizations have protested against this logo, finding it pejorative as well as totally irrelevant to spirit of Olympic games.

‘This is the first time that it has happened in the history of Olympic. Zionists have exercised influence in Britain and based on our information, designer of the summer games' logo has been a Zionist organization linked to Freemasons,’ Afsharzadeh said.

Anti-semitic and anti-gay sentiments all rolled up into one nice pink kerfuffle!

UPDATE: You can jump on the bandwagon and buy your own T-shirt with the Zion logo!

Iranians are on to me!

From MEMRI, an Iranian TV program that exposes my nefarious plan to take over the world!

Following are excerpts from a TV show on the influence of the Internet, which aired on IRINN, the Iranian news channel, on December 31, 2010:

Iranian author and journalist Pejman Karimi: In 1969, the Internet was established by the Pentagon, the US war department, and then it was presented to the world. The goal of the virtual control over the world was and still is to [enable] American imperialism to take over the world, through the security and intelligence services of the Pentagon. Keeping the [plan] a secret, while spreading the Internet worldwide, led millions of users to be trapped in the spiderwebs of the Western Crusader Zionist intelligence systems.

[...]

Reporter: Facebook is managed by a Zionist called Mark Zuckerberg, who offered a prize for Israelis who kill Palestinians.

Voice over footage of Israeli Minister of Science Daniel Hershkowitz: We should honor Mark Zuckerberg, who said: It is my honor to give 100 gold coins to any Zionist soldier who kills a Palestinian in Gaza.

Of course, I'm not worried, because Pejman Karimi is on the payroll to scare Iranians into creating their own version of the Internet that will be easy to break into and install Stuxnet 5.0. Thats' where the real Zionist Web will shine. (You never heard of Stuxnet 2, 3 and 4? Just wait.)

I like how Iran thinks Jews still deal with gold. We've gone way beyond, and have standardized on Zionist Monetary Units, tied to a combination of of the prices of platinum and corned beef. In fact, I'll offer 350 ZMUs to anyone who kills any random Palestinian in Gaza - who is about to fire rockets at Israel.

(h/t SES)

Meanwhile, in Oman...

From Al Arabiya:

Men and women casually looted a smoldering supermarket in Oman's main industrial centre on Monday, after police disappeared in the wake of violent protests in the normally placid Arab state.

"It's a free for all," said one man who watched while people grabbed all they could find -- from food to metal sheets and electronic goods -- and piled their hauls into trolleys at the Lulu Hypermarket at a road junction in the port of Sohar.

The looting followed protests on Sunday night when Omanis demanding jobs and political reforms clashed with police, throwing stones and setting government buildings and part of the market ablaze. A doctor said six people died in the clashes, although the health minister said only one person had died.

Must be Israel's fault.

Is the ancient tekhelet dye bluish-purple?

An interesting New York Times article was published today about the ancient Biblical dye known as tekhelet.

One of the mysteries that scholars have puzzled over for centuries is the exact shade of blue represented by “tekhelet,” which the Bible mentions as the color of ceremonial robes donned by high priests and ritual prayer tassels worn by the common Israelite.

What was known about tekhelet (pronounced t-CHELL-et) was that the Talmud said it was produced from the secretion of the sea snail, which is still found on Israeli beaches.

Traditional interpretations have characterized tekhelet as a pure blue, symbolic of the heavens so that Jews would remember God. Not so, according to an Israeli scholar who has a new analysis: tekhelet appears to have been closer to a bluish purple.

The scholar, Zvi C. Koren, a professor specializing in the analytical chemistry of ancient colorants, says he has identified the first known physical sample of tekhelet in a tiny, 2,000-year-old patch of dyed fabric recovered from Masada, King Herod’s Judean Desert fortress, later the site of a mass suicide by Jewish zealots after a long standoff against the Romans.

“It really is majestic,” Dr. Koren said of the shade, which he said remained close to its original hue and appeared to be indigo.

Dr. Koren is scheduled to deliver a paper on Monday at a conference here at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, where he heads the Edelstein Center for Analysis of Ancient Artifacts.

Dr. Koren, originally from Staten Island, described his work as “Indiana Jones meets C.S.I.” He said that when he first photographed the fabric scrap with the tekhelet dye, “the L.C.D. on my camera literally radiated.”

Until now, the limited number of blue or purple dyes found on textiles from the period in this region have been derived from plant material, he said.

The fabric he examined was one of many items discovered at Masada in the 1960s and stored at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It came to his attention when a British historian, Hero Granger-Taylor, who specializes in ancient weaves, asked him to analyze some textiles. Dr. Koren said he was the first researcher to make the connection between the fabric and the snail dye.

He found that the dye used in the Masada sample, a piece of bluish-purple yarn embroidery, came from a breed of Murex trunculus snail familiar to modern Israelis. Such shades on textiles are rare finds since they were typically worn exclusively by royalty or nobility.

But the article does not quite explain everything. Today there are people who are producing tekhelet from that same murex trunculus snail, but the dye they are producing is more sky-blue than dark blue/purple. To understand this, one must go to the Tekhelet website:

While researching the methods used by the ancient dyers, Prof. Otto Elsner, of the Shenkar College of Fibers, noticed that on cloudy days, trunculus dye tended towards purple, but on sunny days it was a brilliant blue! He found that at a certain stage of the dyeing process, exposure to sunlight will alter the dye, changing its color from purple to blue.

So if Dr. Koren is correct, the dye must be shielded from the sun in order to produce the correct, darker shade of blue.

The NYT does interview the people who make tekhelet nowadays, and now the rest of the article makes sense:

Baruch Sterman, a P’til Tekhelet founder, said that new scientific findings were unlikely to change the tradition his group had reintroduced: using the sky-blue color for ritual tassels.

“Probably in ancient times, what was most important to the Jews was that the color is a beautiful color and it comes from the snail,” Mr. Sterman said. “The minor distinction — sky blue, turquoise, lapis or purple blue — were probably not of significance to them.”

But then the Times ends off the article with a ridiculous quote, from someone not involved in the entire enterprise and that was almost certainly taken out of context:

Yuval Sherlow, a prominent rabbi in Israel’s modern Orthodox circles — where wearing tekhelet in ritual fringes has become increasingly popular, as it has in American ones — agreed.

“Tradition is not so interested in science,” Mr. Sherlow said. “There is a type of denial of science and new information.”

Since it is modern science that allowed Jews to rediscover which snail was used to create the tekhelet dye, and those who use it today are relying on that same science, the Sherlow quote seems to have been included simply for the Times to bash traditional Jews.

Video: Damage from Grad rocket, Beersheba

Here is some of the damage caused by the Grad rocket shot into Beersheba last week. Note the damage from the ball bearings in the missile, as buildings and cars are pockmarked.

(h/t Uri P)

EoZ "Apartheid Week" posters go international

The posters I created for the upcoming "Israel Apartheid Week" have been featured on the front page of a popular Dutch site, Het Vrije Volk ("The Free People"), and I received hundreds of hits from that site.

They were also featured in a posting on a Polish site, Racjonalista (Rationalist).

A professor at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, has put some of the posters outside his office door, and plans to add more:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to send the link to your local college's Zionist organization or Hillel House so they can be better prepared. Especially if you live near one of the cities that "Apartheid Week" is going to have activities. (I've sent to a few but there are thousands of colleges out there, and it takes time to find the right contact...)

I'll happily repost any photos of how the posters are being used.