Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 20, 2011

Fear of Islamists: Belly-dance festival canceled in Egypt

An oriental dance festival (belly dancing) that has been held for the past ten years in Egypt has been canceled, reportedly out of fear of Islamist reaction.

Some 1200 dancers were expected to arrive, and it was estimated that the festival would boost the Egyptian economy by some $3 million.

A majority of commenters at Al Wafd support the ban on this immoral activity, but some are protesting how the Islamists are curtailing their lives.

Innovative lawfare: US man sues to take possession of flotilla

From JPost:

Dr. Alan Bauer, an American- Israeli victim of a Palestinian terrorist attack, on Thursday filed a first of its kind lawsuit in an effort to seize ships to be used by Islamic and anti-Israel organizations to try to breach the blockade of the Gaza Strip later this month.

The suit, Bauer v. The Mavi Marmara, was filed in Manhattan federal court, seeking to confiscate 14 ships, which are scheduled to participate in the upcoming flotilla and which were outfitted with funds Bauer says were unlawfully raised in the United States by anti-Israel groups, including The Free Gaza Movement. Over the weekend, however, the Turkish IHH organization said the Mavi Marmara was still too damaged to sail for Gaza.

The plaintiff, a biologist from the Chicago area, and his son Jonathan, then aged seven, were seriously wounded when Palestinian suicide bomber detonated a bomb, packed with metal spikes and nails, in the center of a crowd of shoppers on King George Street in Jerusalem on March 21, 2002.

Three people were killed and 85 other people were also wounded.

Bauer alleges that The Free Gaza Movement and other American-based anti-Israel organizations have raised funds in the United States to outfit the Gaza flotilla ships. The lawsuit contends that furnishing and outfitting the ships, which are being used for hostilities against a US ally, violates American law.

The plaintiff rests his claim upon the rarely used 18th-century “informant” statute (18 USC Section 962) that allows a plaintiff (called an “informer”) to privately seize ships outfitted in the United States for use against a US ally.

The stature states: “Whoever, within the United States, furnishes, fits out, arms, or attempts to furnish, fit out or arm, any vessel, with intent that such vessel shall be employed in the service of any foreign prince, or state, or of any colony, district, or people, to cruise, or commit hostilities against the subjects, citizens, or property of any foreign prince or state, or of any colony, district, or people with whom the United States is at peace; or Whoever issues or delivers a commission within the United State for any vessel, to the intent that she may be so employed – Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

“Every such vessel, her tackle, apparel, and furniture, together with all materials, arms, ammunition, and stores which may have been procured for the building and equipment thereof, shall be forfeited, one half to the use of the informer and the other half to the use of the United States.”

The plaintiff is represented by attorneys Robert J. Tolchin of New York, and by Nitsana Darshan- Leitner of Israel, founder of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center.

This is the first lawsuit brought to seize the Gaza Flotilla ships.

“We intend to seize the Gaza flotilla ships and turn them over to a victim of Palestinian terrorism.

You can see an interview with Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Shurat HaDin about this lawsuit and other flotilla news on PJTV.

A copy of the lawsuit can be seen here.

Gaza says they'll allow Fatah members to return. But they might arrest them.

In 2007, some 70 Fatah members fled Gaza in the wake of the violent Hamas takeover of the sector, and they went to Egypt.

Egypt is now planning to ship them back, and Hamas interior minister says that whoever wants to return to Gaza is welcome to do so.

But, of course, if Hamas determines that they were involved in any criminal activities, they'll be put into prison, he added.

Interestingly, he didn't say that Hamas would welcome back the residents of Jordan's Jerash "Gaza" camp, who actually lived in Gaza and would love to return.

Cooking gas shortage in Egypt - because it is all being smuggled to Gaza

Palestine Press Agency reports that there is a severe shortage of cooking gas in El Arish and the Sinai - because smugglers are sending the gas over to Gaza for a profit.

Bakeries are having trouble staying open because of the shortages.

Meanwhile, residents of the Sinai are also alarmed at the huge amount of smuggling of other items into Gaza, including building materials that are being taken from their area. Residents report seeing many trucks filled with gravel and other materials going to Rafah to be smuggled into Gaza, and last week some 150 Libyan cars were smuggled into Gaza in one shot through a Rafah tunnel.

Tens of thousands of Gazans applying to become Egyptian citizens

A few months ago, a group of Egyptian women who are married to Palestinian Arabs protested in Tahrir Square to allow their children to be considered Egyptian citizens.

A 2004 Egyptian law allowed children of Egyptian mothers to become citizens, with the exception of those married to Palestinians.

In 2006, an Egyptian court ruled that the law must apply to Palestinian Arabs as well, but the ruling was ignored by the Mubarak regime.

After the protest, Egypt started enforcing this ruling, and now children of Egyptian mothers and Palestinian Arab fathers can become Egyptian citizens.

And now the floodgates have opened.

Tens of thousands of Gazans are now applying to become Egyptian citizens.

Sharif Rafik Fares, who owns a shoe store in Gaza, said that such nationality is as valuable as gold.

The original goal of stopping Palestinian Arabs from gaining citizenship in other countries was pushed by none other than Yasir Arafat.

Dr. Mohamed Shihab, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told Al Arabiya, "in the wake of the Nakba and the Naqsa and what happened from the diaspora and oppression of the Palestinian people, there was an Arab resolution adopted by the Arab League, and supported by the Palestine Liberation Organization [to disallow citizenship for Palestinian Arabs in other countries.] But the passage of time and the continued suffering of the Palestinian people, proved that such decisions was a noble goal, but it came at the expense of many segments of the Palestinian people and increased their suffering in the diaspora, which exacerbated their suffering. "

The Arab League decision pushed by the PLO not to give the Palestinians living in Arab countries citizenship was to prevent melting of the Palestinian people in the Arab world, and thus to forget their cause, as well as to keep the Palestinian refugee camps in the Diaspora, as a political symbol to remind all of that the Nakba and the displacement, and these camps remained undeveloped.

Political writer Mohammad Hafiz Abdullah is against this move .He said: 'Although there are conditions of oppression and siege against the Palestinians, there is no reason to have thousands of Palestinians accept the other nationalities, so they can at any moment decide to migrate to different countries'.

Abdullah says that granting citizenship to Palestinians is not in the supreme national interest. He said, 'This is an abandonment of the state of the national struggle in which the Palestinians have sacrificed with their blood and their lives over the decades of occupation for their independence."

The hypocrisy of the Palestinian Arab leadership is once again laid bare. For decades, they have insisted that their people do not want citizenship, and the got UNRWA and even Human Rights Watch to support their decision to perpetuate misery among Palestinian Arabs. However, no one actually asked the Palestinian Arabs what they wanted, and every time they had a chance to become naturalized elsewhere they jumped at the opportunity, first in Jordan, then in Lebanon and now in Egypt.

"Miles of Smiles" exposes the lies of the flotilla

From Bikya Masr (Egypt):

An aid convoy heading to the Gaza Strip was allowed to cross into the embattled Mediterranean enclave on Sunday evening, Palestinian officials confirmed on Monday morning to Bikya Masr.

The vessel, Miles of Smiles, is carrying aid and some 60 activists, most Europeans, a few South Africans, Tunisian and Lebanese nationals, had docked at the northern Sinai town of al-Arish on Saturday before making the 45 kilometer journey to the Gaza border.

The activists are also carrying ambulances, medicine and medical equipment for the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, which has been suffering from an Israeli-Egyptian led blockade on the area.

To summarize:

Miles of Smiles	Flotilla
Brings real aid, including ambulances	Pretends to bring aid, but the aid it brings is useless
Works modestly without huge publicity; doesn't even have a website	Publicity whores
Has not acted violently	Justifies violent actions of IHH in May 2010 flotilla; supports terrorism
Adheres to international law	Violates international law in trying to break legal blockade
Brings aid through Egypt	Has come out publicly against humanitarian aid delivered legally
Doesn't lie to the media	Always lies to the media

Report: Hezbollah shocked at level of Israeli spies there

From Ya Libnan:

The Kuwait newspaper al Rai published a report on Sunday in which it stated that the intelligence war between Hezbollah and Israel has revealed shocking discoveries for the party’s leadership. The big shock for Hezbollah was the number and the quality of those spying for Israel within its ranks.

According to the report more than ten spies were discovered and some are from the front ranks of the party.

Some of those discoveries couldn’t be imagined al Rai said pointing out that Hezbollah discovered the Israeli spying cell within its ranks three months ago when it intentionally sent very crucial information to Israelis and put the suspects under tight surveillance.

NOW Lebanon reported that an unnamed Hezbollah source told its correspondent on Saturday that a “group of Hezbollah members were detained in the past few days for collaborating with Israel.” The source who spoke on condition of anonymity declined to disclose the number of those detained or their position in the party but revealed that that one of the collaborators is related to a prominent Hezbollah official and another is a “religious figure.”

Al Rai also said that Jnoubiyeh website confirmed the arrests of the Hezbollah members over spying for Israel.

According to al Rai one high ranking Hezbollah official that was discovered spying for Israel is Mohammad Atwi from the Nabatiyeh district in south Lebanon, who was responsible for organizing security within the party and coordinated activities with Iran and Syria.

Al Rai has not always been the most accurate at reporting things from Lebanon, but this story seems to be corroborated at least a bit.

If nothing else, adding to Hezbollah's paranoia can only be a good thing.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

It isn't only "Who Started?" - it is "Who wanted to live in peace?"

Last week, Shlomo Avineri wrote a nice essay in Ha'aretz called "The truth should be taught about the 1948 war." Excerpts:

In recent debates about the Palestinian "Nakba," the claim has been made that there are two "narratives," an Israeli one and a Palestinian one, and we should pay attention to both of them. That, of course, is true: Alongside the Israeli-Zionist claims regarding the Jewish people's connection to its historic homeland and the Jews' miserable situation, there are Palestinian claims that regard the Jews as a religious group only and Zionism as an imperialist movement.

But above and beyond these claims is the simple fact - and it is a fact, not a "narrative" - that in 1947, the Zionist movement accepted the United Nations partition plan, whereas the Arab side rejected it and went to war against it. A decision to go to war has consequences, just as it did in 1939 or 1941.

The importance of this distinction becomes clear upon perusing the op-ed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently published in The New York Times. Abbas mentioned the partition decision in his article, but said not one single word about the facts - who accepted it and who rejected it. He merely wrote that "Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs."

That is like those Germans who talk about the horrors of the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945, but fail to mention the Nazi attack on Poland, or the Japanese who talk about Hiroshima, but fail to mention their attack on Pearl Harbor. That is not a "narrative," it is simply not telling the truth. Effects cannot be divorced from causes.

The pain of the other should be understood and respected, and attempts to prevent Palestinians from mentioning the Nakba are foolish and immoral: Nobody prevents the descendants of the German refugees from Eastern Europe from communing with their suffering.

But just as nobody, even in German schools, would dream of teaching the German "narrative" regarding World War II, the 1948 war should also not be taught as a battle between narratives. In the final analysis, there is a historical truth. And without ignoring the suffering of the other, that is how such sensitive issues must be taught.

Dimi Reider in the anti-Zionist +972 magazine, takes issue with Avineri:

The problem with Avineri’s answer to the question of “who’s to blame for the beginning of the war in 1948″ is that politically speaking, the question itself is no longer relevant.

...But what caused the war isn’t and has never been the true challenge of the Nakba. The true challenge is what happened after the war was caused. Even if we accept Avineri’s argument that “they started”, it’s still unclear why Israel had to expel neighborhoods, towns and villages; and if, somehow, we accepted that, it’s very unclear why this had to be accompanied by massacres; and even if we accept (heaven forbids) that massacres and expulsions happen in wars, no amount of “they started” can excuse the still-standing ban on the refugees and survivors to return.

Since this is a little discussed aspect of Israel's War of Independence, and since Israel's detractors like to hold up "The Nakba" as one of the biggest single tragedies of the twentieth century, it is worthwhile to answer this.

While this is a much bigger topic than can be dealt with adequately in a blog post, I would like to republish a Palestine Post article by Dorothy Bar-Adon from August 17th, 1948, where she describes exactly why the Arab residents of Zer'in - her neighbors, who she knew by name and was on friendly terms with - should not be allowed back.

The reason is simple. The Arabs that she thought were her friends happily and lustily took up arms against the Jews. Their women encouraged them with war cries that the Jews in the valley below could clearly hear. The idea of allowing a hostile population back where they could again menace their Jewish neighbors was out of the question.

Read this article, and you can see that the Jews who didn't let their Arab neighbors back were not monsters, but were acting out of real fear and a very definite sense of self-preservation. This account is obviously not written by someone trying to rewrite history and fit it into 21st century ideas of morality; it was written by a real human being who had real feelings for the Arabs of the village.

The anecdote about the paralyzed Arab woman whose family deserted her when they fled, and who was taken care of by Jewish troops, says more than any number of history books about the 1948 war.

(This article originally mentioned on this blog in 2006.)

Correction: I had originally attributed the +972 article to Joseph Dana.)

Last minute chance to vote in the Blog-Off!

If you are a procrastinator, waiting to the very last minute to vote (hopefully for me) at the Israellycool Pro-Israel Blog Off Finals, your time is almost up.

Just imagine how much more I'd be able to blog with a brand new iPad! :)

I'm hoping to make the vote closer than it is.

Click on this link now and vote!

(If it doesn't work, try it with a different browser; people have been having problems all week.)

And...Happy Father's Day!

1960's style video of Mavi Marmara "peace activists"

Something to link to every time an Israel-hater says that "Israel killed nine peace activists in cold blood" on the Mavi Marmara.

Peace and love, baby.

Stunning IMAX aerial video footage of Israel

Jerusalem | Filmed in Imax 3D from JerusalemGiantScreen on Vimeo.

It looks good here, but click on the HD button and watch it, full screen, on Vimeo. Really, really beautiful.

A full-length version is going to be released as an IMAX 3-D movie in 2013.

(h/t Y. Medad)

80% of PalArab "refugees" have citizenship!

On the eve of World Refugee Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released some interesting numbers. From Wafa:

According to UNRWA records, registered Palestinian refugees totaled 4.8 million in 2010: 41.6% in Jordan, 23.2% in the Gaza Strip, 16.4% in the West Bank, 9.9% in Syria and 8.9% in Lebanon.

In the Palestinian Territory, refugees represent 43.4% of the total population in 2011, with 29.7% of them in the West Bank and 67.3% in the Gaza Strip.

The vast majority of "refugees" living in Jordan have had Jordanian citizenship since 1950, meaning that they cannot be considered refugees in any sense of the word - except for UNRWA's tortured definition.

But even more bizarre is the characterization of "Palestinian refugees" living in...Palestine! How can people be considered refugees if they live in their own purported country? The most they can claim to be are "displaced persons" which is a completely different thing.

If you add together the Jordanian "refugees" with citizenship and the Palestinian "refugees" who also are citizens of the Palestinian Authority, you see that about 80% of all so-called "Palestinian refugees" are nothing of the sort. You cannot be a citizen of a country and a refugee at the same time.

If UNRWA and the Palestinian Arab leadership and Jordan were interested in solving the so-called refugee problem, they would acknowledge these simple facts and work to mainstream those who still live in camps and depend on UNRWA services into their respective Jordanian and Palestinian Arab societies. Their refusal to do so shows, more than anything else, that the "refugee" problem is an artificial construct, a fake issue that is being exacerbated and prolonged by the very people who pretend that it is their primary concern.

The facts are clear. 80% of the so-called refugees, aren't. And the only reason they are still called refugees is to use them - some four million people, if you believe UNRWA's numbers - as pawns to help destroy the Jewish state.

If the US and EU truly want to see peace in the region, this issue must be dealt with head-on. The truth must be exposed, and these "refugees" must be properly categorized and their issues solved within the context of Jordan and the PA. Otherwise, all the calls for negotiations and Israeli concessions are a large shell game to conceal the truth of how the Arabs (and the UN) have been cynically using millions of people as political pawns.

Hamas not happy with "prisoner Facebook" story

Here's a funny item from Hamas mouthpiece Palestine Info:

The Gaza prisoner affairs ministry has called on local media not to reproduce Israeli media hype that Palestinian prisoners communicate with the outside world using social networking sites on the internet.

Israel tries to convince the world that the Palestinians enjoy all their rights while Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured in Gaza, is denied visits and access to family, the ministry’s media director Riyadh al-Ashqar said in a statement on Saturday.

Ashqar added that Israel also uses such rumors to justify the prison authority’s frequent violent raids on prisoners’ cells in search of mobile phones.

Ashqar expressed surprise that Palestinian news outlets would reproduce such reports despite the ulterior motives behind them.

Note that Ashqar doesn't deny that Palestinian Arab prisoners are on Facebook, just that he wants to censor Arab media from mentioning it.

The good part? The story was not broken by Ma'ariv (which published it on Wednesday) - but by Al-Arabiya, which printed it last Monday!

So it was Arab reporters who came up with this Zionist propaganda to begin with!

(h/t Gaia K)

Poster: How can you make peace with those...

...who treat each other like this?

(from an idea by Y. Medad, h/t to Adam L. for better wording)

UNRWA summer camps shut down, Hamas camps in full swing

I reported on Friday that some Gazans, upset that UNRWA has not rebuilt their homes, have been blocking UNRWA from performing its services - and threatened to block UNRWA's Summer Games program.

On Saturday, the protesters made good on their threat:

Homeless families in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday shut down UNRWA summer camps in protest over the agency's failure to reconstruct homes destroyed during the Second Intifada.

Gaza residents also closed UNRWA's emergency department, social services office and ration stores, said Atiyya Radwan, who heads a committee of families whose homes have been destroyed.

Now as bad and counterproductive as UNRWA is, alternate providers of services are worse.

And, right on cue, Hamas is moving in to fill the vacuum.

Hamas announced Saturday that its own summer camp program, which they use as a breeding ground for terrorists, is in full swing and so far has 50,000 campers.

Hamas camps have been known for paramilitary activities as well as routinely teaching kids to hate.

For some reason, the protesters are not complaining against Hamas building mosques instead of houses on otherwise empty land.