Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

"(Arab) settlement workers paid double average wage"

Just one percent more Palestinians worked in settlements in 2010 than the year before, making almost double the wage of their peers in the public and service sectors, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said in a new report released Wednesday.

Average daily wages for settlement workers were 150 shekels ($44) per day, compared to 76.9 ($22) in the West Bank and 46.2 ($13.50) in Gaza, the latest research showed.

The figures for settlement workers are likely to concern leaders of the Palestinian Authority, who have said they will outlaw all work in Israeli factories across the Green Line by 2012.

But settlement leader Yaakov David Ha'ivri called on the Palestinian leadership to admit that the settlements benefit workers, saying workers likely made even more than double the average wage.

"Palestinian workers in our factories are making closer to three times the wages they would be making in the PA. I guess that is the reason that Salam Fayyad's threats to impose a workers boycott never materialized.

"It would be very interesting to see the results of a true open and democratic referendum of the local Arab population" to learn if they would prefer the ban on settlements or continue working in them, he added.

Kudos to Ma'an for actually seeking out a Jewish leader in Judea and Samaria to comment.

Amnesty International says I acted "deplorably"

On Monday, I noticed that the murdered terrorist supporter Vittori Arrigoni's girlfriend worked for amnesty International but she seems to have had close relationships not only with Arrigoni but also with other rabid haters of Israel. I asked:

Isn't it interesting that Amnesty (and HRW's) activists are so much more friendly with people who want to destroy Israel than they are with people who love Israel?

A reader sent that link to Amnesty for a response. Their answer:

We reject absolutely any suggestion that our organisation has a bias against Israel. As you will see from reading our report (attached) on the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, for example, we condemned the human rights violations and possible war crimes committed by Palestinian armed groups as well as by Israel. It is also worth noting that this is the only report prepared by human rights researchers who were on the ground in southern Israel and in Gaza during the fighting.

Indeed the first report from Amnesty International’s researchers was to expose extrajudicial killings carried out by Hamas under cover of the Israeli offensive. We have condemned on numerous occasions rocket attacks by Hamas and others against Israeli civilians targets in southern Israel and just last month profiled the case of Gilad Shalit as our prisoner of the month in a national newspaper (attached).

Our concern is solely the protection of human rights. We have condemned, and will continue to condemn, the Israeli state and its armed forces for repeated, gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and in Israel. Likewise, we have condemned, and will continue to condemn Hamas, Fatah and other armed Palestinian groups for deliberate attacks on civilians and for failures to protect human rights in those areas of the Occupied Territories they are responsible. Protagonists on both sides would do well to examine what they are doing rather than assume any criticism of them is motivated by bias or prejudice.

Finally, if I could say this. It is absolutely legitimate to raise questions about Amnesty International's policies and priorities, indeed we welcome it as a valuable contribution to our own thinking. However, I think the site you link to is acting in a deplorable manner by using the tragic death of Mr Arrigoni to personally target his girlfriend, a woman who is right now coping with the loss of a loved one in unbelievably tragic circumstances. I realise it is not your site and you merely wished to raise a legitimate point, to which I am happy to respond, but I wished to place that on the record.

Yours,

Justin Moran
Communications Co-ordinator
Amnesty International Ireland
E-Mail: jmoran@amnesty.ie
Tel: 01 863 8300 Ext. 8334
Mob: 085 814 8986
www.amnesty.ie

Of course, Mr. Moran did not address the main thrust of my question: why do so-called "human rights" organizations' members seem to have closer relationships with activists whose focus is to destroy Israel than with anyone who could be remotely described as Zionist?

Arrigoni was not, as I have written, a human rights activist nor a peace activist by any definition of the term. Obviously Amnesty's employees can have relationships with whomever they want. But Arrigoni was a supporter of Hamas and an avowed anti-Zionist. Are any Amnesty employees friends with members of Likud, or with Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria?

Somehow, I doubt it.

In fact, Amnesty itself has no problem partnering with organizations that are explicitly dedicated to Israel's destruction. If Amnesty accepts ab initio that the destruction of the Jewish state is a legitimate position, it is difficult to accept their argument that they are not biased against Israel. There s no real difference between organizations that advocate replacing Israel with another de-facto Arab state and those who want to ethnically clean the Middle East of all Jews, no matter what word games they play with liberal-sounding concepts like "one state for all people."

If Amnesty supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, let them say so explicitly. If they do that, they'd lose a lot of their "friends" very, very quickly.

(As far as my acting "deplorably," I had never heard of Claudia Milani until Monday, and I simply looked at her history once I saw her name. I would have done the same had I known about her while Arrigoni was alive. I see no reason why her previous activities should be off-limits once she becomes a public personality, just because she is grieving over the death of her Hamas-loving boyfriend. Amnesty being more concerned over my blog post than over the relationships their employees have with people who want to see Israel wiped off the map seems a bit misplaced.)

UPDATE: Harry's Place notices Arrigoni's relationship with Milani as well, and acts equally "deplorably." (h/t habibi)

The Muslim basketball star and the chief rabbi

From YNet:

American basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will visit Israel in July and meet with Rabbi Israel Meir Lau to discuss a film that he is making about World War II, the rabbi said recently.

The film is based on the book "Brothers in Arms", which Abdul-Jabbar co-authored and deals with the American troops who liberated Nazi concentration camps in the end of World War II. Abdul-Jabbar's own father served on the 761st Tank Battalion, which liberated the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Germany.

Among the Jews rescued from the camp were two children: Rabbi Lau and his brother, Naftali Lavie. Abdul-Jabbar and Lau met for the first time 14 years ago, during the former's first visit to Israel.

"The fact that such a famous basketball player, and a Muslim, is about to attach himself to the Holocaust issue is very exciting," he said. "I will certainly give my blessing to this initiative."

The retired athlete will arrive early in July as a guest of the Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Consulate in New York, and will participate in the Jerusalem Film Festival, where he will present the basketball documentary that he produced, "On the Shoulders of Giants."

Lau said that Abdul-Jabbar's father, Ferdinand L. Alcindor, had a dying wish: "That his son visit Israel, and meet the little boy that he rescued from Buchenwald and turned into a prominent rabbi."

Lau said he clearly remembers how an African American solider came up to him during the liberation, picked him up, and told the residents of the German city of Weimer: "Look at this sweet kid, he isn't even eight yet. This was your enemy, he threatened the Third Reich. He is the one against whom you waged war, and murdered millions like him."

Decades later, Lau said, his rescuer's son found him.

Rabbi Lau was the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1993-2003.

(h/t JB)

Surfing in Gaza II

From the Hamas mouthpiece Palestine Times, a photo-essay on people surfing in ~~prison~~ Gaza.

They had a similar photo-essay in December.

Three good articles

Mudar Zahran in Hudson-NY:

The UN general assembly's vote could also bring terrifying complications and hardships to the Palestinians. The establishment of a Palestinian state in such a manner would give Israel the cause to absolutely sever its ties with the Palestinians; this act would deprive the Palestinians from working with Israel, the only country in the region where they are allowed to take employment, and the country that provides them with water, electricity, fuel and transportation outlets. Of course, such deprivation would be merely a technicality for Abbas and his colleagues in the Palestinian Authority. It would just bring them even more prominence and legitimacy to cover their corruption and abuse of their own people, while at the same time enabling them to delegitimize Israel even further by portraying themselves as Palestinian freedom fighters under siege by the "inhumane Israelis."

David Harris in HuffPo:

Over a span of two decades, hundreds of thousands of Jews were compelled to leave their ancestral lands because of violence and discrimination, yet there was hardly a peep from the international community.

The UN kept silent. Most governments looked the other way. Editorial writers and news reporters wasted little time on the subject. And few scholars rushed to their usual intellectual outlets to speak out.

But it should have been clear that this mass exodus was not just about the Jews. In fact, it was about the intolerance of societies that rejected basic notions of pluralism and respect for minorities.

Well, no one said anything and then what happened? Without Jews to target, those very same societies began to focus on other communities, especially Christians, but also minority Muslim sects.

But again, the very same universe that looked the other way when it came to the Jews didn't acquit itself any better when it came to Copts in Egypt or Chaldeans in Iraq.

After all, if it couldn't be pinned on Israel, why bother?

Yair Rosenberg in The Harvard Crimson:

In early 2010, the disruption of talks by major officials was all the rage on university campuses, even as these outbursts inspired greater measures of outrage amongst the broader student body. In January, General David H. Petraeus was repeatedly shouted down by student anti-war protesters during a speech to a packed Gaston Hall at Georgetown University. In response, organizations across campus—from the Georgetown University Student Union to the Georgetown Democrats—condemned the conduct. The next month, Israeli Ambassador Michael B. Oren was similarly assailed, this time by 11 members of the Muslim Student Union at UC-Irvine. The interruptions of “war criminal” and “mass murderer,” which prevented the ambassador from addressing an assembled audience of hundreds, were harshly condemned by the university administration, and the MSU was subsequently suspended as a campus organization.

But what seemed like a typical story of an overheated campus culture clash took an unusual turn after emails among the MSU’s membership surfaced indicating that the Irvine disruptions were carefully coordinated by the group to prevent the ambassador from speaking—a premeditated plan that involved staggered disruptions by predetermined individuals with cue cards, all directed via text messages. In light of this evidence, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas convened an investigatory grand jury and then leveled charges against the so-called “Irvine 11,” bringing the campus controversy into the California courts. Arraigned this past Friday, the students each pled not guilty to misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to disturb a meeting and disturbance of a meeting.

To understand why this prosecution is justified, and indeed similar future prosecutions of campus disruptors are warranted, one must first understand what this prosecution is not.

Read them all.

And if you are looking for reading material over the next two days that I am not posting, check out the "Gleanings" linkdumps at The Augean Stables. Lots of great stuff there.

Terrorist fan Vittorio was in bed with Amnesty. Literally.

We've already blogged a bit about Vittori Arrigoni, the terrorist supporter who was killed on Friday.

Well, it turns out that he had a girlfriend, Claudia Milani:

Claudia Milani (R), girlfriend of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni, visits his mourning tent in Gaza City April 17, 2011.

And it turns out that she is the "coordinator of Israel/Occupied Territories section of Amnesty International/Italy," and as such she gave a talk at an "Israel Apartheid Week" event advertised by Amnesty last month.

Her Facebook page shows that she is "friends" with such illustrious Israel haters as Greta Berlin, Adam Shapiro, Max Ajl and Ken O'Keefe.

Isn't it interesting that Amnesty (and HRW's*) activists are so much more friendly with people who want to destroy Israel than they are with people who love Israel?

And, given that Amnesty is supposed to be concerned with human rights issues that are totally antithetical to the daily actions of Hamas, are there any Amnesty members who are bothered the least bit by this?

*Before she closed off her Facebook page, I saw that Sarah Leah Whitson from HRW's "friends" were very similar. I regret never doing a screen capture.

Abbas' newest threat: "PA will collapse!"

Mahmoud Abbas continues his long-standing strategy of making the world do what he wants: by threatening them.

His latest is reported in Palestine Today but seemingly based on this article in The Daily World Buzz, not sure where is was originally published:

The Palestinian Authority "will collapse" if Israel persists in its need to maintain a military presence in the territory of a future Palestinian state, estimated the organization's president, Mahmoud Abbas, in an exclusive interview. Abbas explained that during the peace negotiations in September 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told of his desire to hold "for 40 years," a military presence in the border zone along the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.

"If you stay 40 years, that means it is an occupation that he will maintain the occupation. I reply: 'If you insist on it, let your troops here and continue its occupation forever,'" said Abbas, pointing out that Netanyahu rejected the proposed deployment of international forces, especially NATO, on the border.

On the assumption that Israel will be realized, "there will be no Palestinian Authority," warned Abbas, who on many occasions expressed his opposition to the continuance of any Jewish soldier in a future Palestinian state. It is the first time that Abbas spoke out loud about the disappearance of the Palestinian Authority if Israel's permanence in Palestinian territory.

The PA was built while Israeli troops were deployed throughout the West Bank. Its economy is thriving while Israeli troops are there. It is getting praise for its supposed state-building from the World Bank and the UN while Israel is there.

Now, if Israel stays there, it will collapse?

I fully expect that an independent Palestinian Arab state, should it ever come about, would not last 40 years. Or even 20.

Chag Sameach!

I wish all of my readers who celebrate Passover to have a happy and healthy holiday!

I'll still be posting for a few more hours, but I wanted to make sure that my readers in Israel and Europe get the message. I will not be posting anything during the first two days of the holiday, until at least Wednesday night.

Hamas' Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades website reports about the death of Daniel Viflic, the 16-year old schoolboy who was killed because Hamas shot a laser-guided anti-tank missile at a school bus.

The Hamas article doesn't acknowledge that Daniel was a minor. Instead, it says that Daniel was a "Zionist soldier" and even has the gall to pretend that it is quoting Ha'aretz to that effect!

The Haaretz newspaper reported that the slain Zionist was killed weeks east of Gaza City after the targeting of a bus he was traveling in by the Qassam Brigades.

The newspaper said that the dead man was a Zionist soldier who stayed in intensive care at Soroka Hospital in BeerSheva in the territories after a significant deterioration in his health.

The website then gleefully shows photos from the funeral as well as from the bus. And the commenters are uniform in their praise of this "heroic operation."

Mer-Khamis' "Freedom Theatre" spawned terrorists

Two weeks ago, a new martyr was created. Juliano Mer-Khamis, who ran a drama club and theater for the youth of Jenin, was murdered by the very people he was said to be trying to help.

Condolences came from all over the world talking about how Mer Khamis and his mother, Arna, who created the theater were a ray of hope in Jenin, where they were teaching the young people there about how peace is better than bullets.

In reality, the theater was not only a failure, but its original members spawned an almost unbelievable amount of terror.

From The Globe and Mail, April 20, 2009 in an article that is sympathetic to the theater (no longer online, a copy is here):

The scene is 1989, the second year of the Palestinian intifada. Stone- throwing protests against Israeli occupation have spread throughout Gaza and the West Bank. In Jenin, the youthful protesters are joined by older militants who carry out armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. The Jenin camp´s schools are closed; its children have nowhere to turn.

Enter Arna Mer, a 59-year-old Jewish peace activist who had been born in a northern collective farm, fought as an 18-year-old to create the state of Israel, joined the Israeli Communist Party and married an Arab-Israeli activist. Since 1967 she had protested against the Israeli occupation and, by 1989, was determined to help the children of Jenin.

On the top floor of a house owned by a local widow name Samira Zubeidi, Ms. Mer opens a children´s drama school. Aided by her actor son, Juliano Mer Khamis, she forms a small troupe and provides an artistic and educational outlet for dozens of children, including Ms. Zubeidi´s sons, Zakariya and Daoud. For her efforts, Ms. Mer was awarded an alternative Nobel prize in 1993 and the prize money went to create a proper school facility.

The school would survive Ms. Mer´s death from cancer in 1996, and Mr. Mer Khamis´s departure – until 2002, that is, and the violence of the second intifada. It was destroyed when Israeli bulldozers levelled a section of the camp.

That´s when Mr. Mer Khamis would return and make an extraordinary film called Arna´s Children, using old and new video footage to show what had happened to those original young children his mother had nurtured.

Thirteen years after joining Ms. Mer´s company of children, all but one of the original troupe were dead: One had been so affected by the killing of a young girl, he launched a suicide attack on the Israeli town of Hadera; two had perished in the Battle of Jenin, killed in the theatre school´s rehearsal hall from where they had fired on advancing Israeli forces. One had become the Jenin leader of the al- Aqsa Martyrs´ Brigades militant group and was hunted down and killed.

Only Zakariya Zubeidi had survived. Imprisoned for throwing rocks, and again for throwing Molotov cocktails, he had been released after the 1993 Oslo Accords and joined the Palestinian police. He left the force, as a sergeant, disillusioned, he said, by the corruption he encountered.

In 2002, his mother and brother were killed when Israeli forces moved into Jenin camp. Once again, Mr. Zubeidi picked up a weapon.

He survived the intense battle in Jenin and, somewhat reluctantly, succeeded his friend as the leader of the al-Aqsa militants.

Mr. Zubeidi, his face still badly marked by a bomb of his own making, said in an interview last week that he did not approve of suicide missions, only military attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. High on Israel´s most wanted list, however, he somehow survived several assassination attempts.

In 2006, Mr. Zubeidi approached Juliano Mer Khamis, his old drama tutor and, by that time, an award-winning filmmaker, and urged him to reopen the theatre school.

Mr. Zubeidi, by this time a husband and father, said he wanted the next generation to find a better way to express itself.

“I was fed up with the fighting,” he said. “It didn´t get us [Palestinians] anywhere.”

Arna's school had not resulted in a single original student supporting pacifism. Every single one of the original kids there became a militant.

It is hard to imagine that any random classroom of Palestinian Arab kids in the West Bank, or even in Gaza, would have such a stunning record of churning out terrorists.

Juliano's film, instead of castigating what was by any measure a catastrophic failure of the vision of his mother, romanticized it by claiming that Israeli measures are so bad that every single child was driven into terror, despite his mother's efforts.

From Mother Jones' tribute to Juliano and description of his film:

The film, shot over almost two decades, is set in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin, a place where Israeli bombs and tanks are inescapable realities of childhood. In the first half of the film, we are introduced to Juliano's mother, Arna, a Jewish Israeli who set up the theater group in Jenin in the late 1980s. Arna is bald from chemotherapy, yet devotes her dying days to her playful and talented little actors, helping them express their anger and grief through art and drama.

Years pass. Arna succumbs to cancer, the 1994 Oslo peace accords unravel, the theater program shuts down, the Israeli occupation hardens, and the 2000 second intifada erupts. On April 3, 2002, the Israeli army invades Jenin, killing more than 50 Palestinians and destroying hundreds of homes.

And many of "Arna's children" have now become militiamen and suicide fighters.

In the second half of the film, Juliano returns to Jenin to find out how and why this has happened. We see that it's not mainly about anti-Semitic brainwashing—Jenin residents adore Arna and Juliano despite their Jewish background and Israeli nationality. Rather, Arna's children have chosen "martyrdom" because of the searing horrors they've witnessed with their own eyes.

How can a youth program, supposedly meant to foster "peace" but that has a 0% success rate of creating peaceful people, be considered so wonderful?

Arna Mer-Chamis, if she really was trying to teach peace, was a spectacular failure. It is not possible for her to have been more of a failure. The last person alive from her kids, who now claims to want peace, didn't say he learned the idea from the Mer-Chamises - he just says that he was simply "fed up with fighting."

Which brings up the question: did the theater really promote peace in any sense at all?

Now Juliano Mer-Chamis, who created an entire movie trying to soft-pedal the terrorism of his mother's proteges, has become victim to something the leftists pretend doesn't exist - Palestinian Arab hate. His film, rather than showing the inherent culture of violence and hate that laughs at the idea of words replacing bullets, was a prophetic view of what his own end would look like.

No one is asking the question - if Mer Chamis was murdered by Palestinian Arabs for no good reason, then perhaps the terrorism that he justified in his movie is also for no reason, and not because of anything Israel does?

Too bad that those who watch the film have no capacity to look beyond the rosy, romantic notion of Palestinian Arab peacefulness and see the simple facts: the Palestinian Arab kids who were exposed to Western values became terrorists anyway. The same kind of terrorists that killed Juliano himself.

(h/t Silke, Giulio Meotti)

Muslim intimidation of Christians in Nazareth before Easter

This is Easter week, so the media is doing their annual stories about how Israel is supposedly restricting some Christians from coming to Jerusalem. (I showed the bias on a similar Reuters story last year.)

I received an interesting email from commenter Womble last Tuesday. Here's what he wrote:

I’ve just returned from a trip to the north of Israel, focused mostly on Christian holy places, and I’ve taken some photos.

This photo was taken in Nazareth this morning. It shows the banner which greets any Christian pilgrim or tourist who wants to visit the Christian places of worship in the city.

If you want to get to the Church of the Annunciation or to the Synagogue Church, there’s literally no way to get there without being confronted with this warning to embrace Islam or else. (The building on the right is the Church of the Annunciation; this way you can see the proximity). My guess is that it is the work of the local branch of the Islamic Movement, whose offices are located nearby.

However, I cannot identify the logo in the upper left corner of the banner, so I can’t be absolutely sure if it’s the Islamic Movement or some other, less known, organization doing it.

I think that Womble is right and this is the Islamic Movement of Nazareth:

Either way, here is a little seen side of how Muslims feel free to intimidate and bully Christians in the Middle East - and even in Israel.

It turns out that this is not the first time the Nazareth Islamists have done something like this. Here's a banner they erected before Christmas, 2008, also in front of the Church of the Annunciation:

More about that incident here.

This is a story you will not be seeing in the mainstream media.

Especially this week.

Just in case you still thought the PCHR was unbiased...

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights put out a statement condemning the murder of Vittorio Arragoni, the terror-supporting member of ISM (but I repeat myself) who was killed on Friday.

If you believe that the PCHR has any objectivity left after its willful labeling of Hamas terrorists as "civilians" in Gaza, check this out:

According to investigations conducted by PCHR, on Thursday evening, 14 April 2011, a group named "Group of the Companion Mohammed Bin Maslamah" announced the kidnapping of the Italian journalist, Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, a prominent member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and a human rights defender. In a video posted on the Youtube website, the group demanded the release of detained members of the group, affiliates of the so-called "Salafist Jihadist Group". The kidnappers threatened to kill Arrigoni if the government in Gaza did not meet their demands within 30 hours.

In a grave development, contrary to fundamental values shared by all Palestinians, the group carried out their threat. On Friday morning, 15 April 2011, security services found the body of Arrigoni in a house located in the 'Amer project area, west of al-Karamah building in the west of Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip. In his testimony, a PCHR staff-member reported signs of beating on the victim's face, signs of handcuffs on his hands, and signs of strangulation around his neck.

Yes, a so-called human rights organization is stating as a fact that all Palestinian Arabs are against murdering innocent people.

This same PCHR had, up until a couple of years ago, prominently detailed hundreds of instances of Palestinian Arabs being murdered by other PalArabs. It know quite well what Fatah and Hamas did to each other. It knows what Hamas did the the Salafist group in Gaza. Yet PCHR states as a fact that all Palestinian Arabs share fundamental values against murder!

Do we detect a wee bit of bias here?

One more fun part of the PCHR report:

[The PCHR] appreciates the role played by the International Solidarity Movement and other human rights defenders in the occupied Palestinian territory;

The ISM is not a human rights group, it is a terror-enabler group. So is, apparently, the PCHR.

Vittorio was not the first ISM activist murdered by Palestinian Arabs

Vittorio Arrigoni, who is being beatified as a new Palestinian Arab saint as I write this, was not the first ISM activist to be murdered by his fellow Palestinian Arabs.

In September 2007, ISM member Akram Ibrahim Abu Sba’ was killed by members of Islamic Jihad. He was shot twice in the chest in Jenin.

His killing was never condemned by the ISM. They know better than to say anything bad about Islamic Jihad, their erstwhile partners in "resistance" against Israel.

The immense value of moonbat art

Palestine News Network has an article about a mural painted in a Gaza camp:

The Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural Project is an initiative co-produced by The Rachel Corrie Foundation and Breaking the Silence Mural Project, along with co-sponsors The Middle East Children’s Alliance, the Gaza Community Mental Health Program and the International Trauma Treatment Program.

The mural is a community building memorial honouring all those who have lost their lives in struggle and those who are resisting oppression. Inspired by the killing of Rachel Corrie, the mural tells a tale of two cities linked through tragedy, Olympia, Washington and Rafah, Palestine. The overall purpose of the project is to increase the strength and visibility of the global solidarity movement for social justice across the world through the use of art, culture and technology.

‘Freedom Tree', the first of A Tale of Two Cities- Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural Project in Gaza, was inaugurated last January 16th. Located in the Afaq Jadeeda (New Horizons) Association of Nuseirat Refugee Camp, the mural was painted by the staff of New Horizons and facilitated by Susan Greene.

Facing the deaths of more than 1400 civilians, destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, roads and infrastructure after Israel’s large-scale military offensive (December 2008- January 2009), Palestinians in Gaza are finding ways of continuing to cope with trauma and rebuilding their communities.

The anti-Israel activist who wrote this story for PNN, Alessandra Bajec, is now claiming that every single Arab killed in Cast Lead was a civilian. They love to deny that Gaza is run by a well-armed, Iranian trained terror group, and that more than half of those killed in Cast Lead were in fact terrorists. Nope - to these moonbats, they are all "civilians."

More interesting, though, was part of an interview where she asks the Director of the Public Relations Department at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program a very good question:

How concretely do you think this and similar projects can help people in Gaza in rebuilding their communities?

Indeed - how do these art projects really help Gazans who are supposedly suffering so much? Why is a giant mural in a camp a wonderful thing for people who are under "siege"?

The answer:

Such projects are very important, as I said, to show solidarity with Palestinians, to make people aware and expose the human rights violations that Palestinians endure. Once people in the world get to know about the Palestinian people, see what their life looks like…that will encourage more solidarity and advocacy, will help build our community and fundraise for our projects. So this is a really important project, definitely valuable in this respect.

So this project helps make people aware of supposed Israeli crimes (like killing over 1400 mythical civilians) so those people can hate Israel and give money for more similar projects, so more people can become aware of Israeli crimes and hate Israel!

It doesn't really help Gazans, you see. It helps the world hate Israel, which makes the Gazans feel good and their mental health will therefore improve because they know other people hate Israel as much as they do. Then more Westerners can tattoo "Resistance" on their biceps and really make a difference!

It is the circle of death wrapped up in pseudo-art. Very progressive!

Book review: "The Road to Fatima Gate", Michael Totten

Lebanon is a very complicated place.

You literally need a scorecard to keep track of all the different groups that make up Lebanon's political scene and their shifting loyalties. The three main groups are,of course, the Christians, the Shiites and the Sunnis, but each of those groups have splinter groups that may or may not be aligned with their co-religionists at any time. There are also the Druze and smaller groups, whose very survival depends on being able to anticipate which way the wind is about to blow and jump on the side of the winning team.

Add to this that these are not just political groups but they all generally were parts of militia in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes they have to take out their weapons to defend their towns and villages.

And add to this the entire recent history of civil war. Plus the collective memory of being effectively controlled by Syria, by Israel or (more recently) by Iran. Not to mention the French influence on Lebanese culture and the fact that it is a favorite vacation spot for decadent, rich Saudis. More ingredients in Lebanon's ratatouille is the generally liberal and Western-style of downtown Beirut compared with the poverty of the south and the traditionalism in other areas.

The resulting dish is dizzying in its complexity.

Michael Totten, in his great book "The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel ," explains it all (or at least a lot of it) in a wonderful first-person journalistic style.

We learn about Lebanon as Totten does. We follow him as he interviews Shi'ite, Maronite and Sunni leaders and ordinary people as well. We tag along as he gets threatened by people with guns and eventually finds that he is somehow safer with armed people around.

Unlike many journalists who speak as if they are omniscient, Totten lets us see his mistakes and how he learns from them.

He takes us on his journey during the Israel/Hezbollah war of 2006 and mini-civil wars precipitated by Hezbollah in afterwards. He speaks to many people on most sides, and lets us know when he doesn't believe what they say. He and his friends get into dangerous situations that are inconceivable to Western eyes - but he knows that and explains it so the audience gets it.

Totten often uses that skill to great effect. For example, he mentions that he asks Eli Khoury, a leader of the March 14th movement, "What is the solution?" Totten then goes on to tell his readers that this is a very American question, one that he soon learned not to ask, because the Lebanese know that there isn't one. However, Americans are solution-oriented and cannot grasp that basic concept that is so integral to survival in the Middle East.

We cannot solve the problems. We can only manage them as best we can, today.

One other talent that Michael Totten has is the ability to see the entire picture and relate to it. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae, especially in Lebanon where there are so many groups competing with each other and none of them are in the majority. But Totten is always there to remind us what the real danger is. It is Iran, using Hezbollah as its proxy. All of the desire to be pacifist or pan-Lebanese is doomed as long as Hezbollah, effectively an arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, has effective veto power over the Lebanese government and controls its own state within a state. No one can confront Hezbollah militarily nor politically, and as a result Iran is extending its hegemony over the region.

Totten's journalistic style is especially appreciated in the Lebanese arena. While most other journalists will meekly follow whatever restrictions their interview subjects impose on them, Totten reports on the entire context of his interviews, letting us know that if he cannot find out a piece of information it is not because he didn't try. He also lets us know when his subjects are not being entirely truthful.

Totten was not in Lebanon for all the events he covers so he relies on his friends to fill in the personal stories. Also, he didn't talk much about the Palestinian Arab experience in Lebanon outside of broad historical strokes; there is no interview with the Arabs in refugee camps and the Nahr al-Bared fighting is glossed over as a "sideshow." While this is probably true, there are about as many Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon as there are Druze, and demographics do matter. I would love to have seen him highlight Lebanese discrimination against them across the board as well as what they have done to help destroy Lebanon from inside.

These are minor points, though. The Road to Fatima Gate is a brilliant combination of memoir and journalism, and it is highly recommended.