Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, June 26, 2011

UN flotilla report to slam Turkey?

Turkey has asked Israel to agree to a toned-down version of the UN Secretary-General's report on last year's flotilla to Gaza, according to a senior government official in Jerusalem.

According to the official, the Turks are "very worried" about the harsh criticism of Turkey they expect the report to contain, and want Israel to agree to a softened version as part of a package deal to end the crisis between the two countries over the flotilla, which took place in May 2010.

The director general of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Feridun Sinirlioglu, conveyed Turkey's request in a secret meeting early last week in Geneva with Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon.

A draft of the report, due to be released within two weeks, was given to Israel and Turkey about six weeks ago. The committee determined that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is in keeping with international law, and therefore its actions to stop the flotilla were also legal.

According to a senior government official in Jerusalem, the report criticizes the Turkish government and highlights the relationship between it and IHH, the group that organized the flotilla.

The report also states that, while Israel Defense Forces soldiers acted in self-defense, they used disproportionate force that led to the death of nine Turkish citizens. The report recommends that Israel pay compensation to the families of the dead and injured Turkish citizens, which Israel has already said it is willing to do.

The official said the Turks would like to soften the parts of the report that could cause a political storm in Turkey.

Ha'aretz had an earlier story in May that also mentioned the report was harsh on Turkey and accepted the legality of Israel's blockade.

Controversy over whether Muslim devils have sex with human women

The Arabic press had a number of stories over the weekend about whether it is possible for "jinn" (Muslim devils) can have sex with human women, and if so, if it breaks her hymen and if she can become pregnant.

The main one being copied seems to have come from the Elaph site. It first quotes an Islamic scholar as saying that such an event is impossible.

Some professional exorcists, however, disagree and claim to have evidence of such couplings. Anecdotal evidence is given from comments to a similar article in Saudi Arabia's Okaz where a story is told of a jinn fetus that was, thank Allah, aborted.

Some women are so attached to their jinns that they refuse to marry.

The auto-translation is difficult to interpret, so there might be some more interesting anecdotes.

Who is destroying graves in Jerusalem?

From the Palestine Telegraph:

Israeli bulldozers started yesterday overnight demolishing the historic Muslim cemetery of Mamila in Jerusalem according to the decision made by the planning and construction committee of Israeli Municipality to build the museum of tolerance on the ruins of the cemetery.

Witnesses said that Israeli bulldozers started demolishing the graves since last midnight until dawn and loaded them in trucks and metal boxes.

The Mamila cemetery , which means Maaman Allah in Arabic, is located in the west of Jerusalem and considered one of the largest cemeteries in Jerusalem at an area of 200 dunums.

What the story fails to mention is that the interred bodies were already removed, that the name was always Mamilla and never "Maaman Allah" and that the Israeli Supreme Court had already listened to all the arguments against the demolition of the cemetery - twice - and rejected them as baseless.

Not to mention that, as I discovered last year, the Supreme Moslem Council of Jerusalem had made plans to build an office park - including their own headquarters - on top of the cemetery in 1945.

And the small fact that Mahmoud Abbas' hero, the anti-semitic Mufti of Jerusalem, tried to hide the skeletons his workers found across the street when he built the Palace Hotel, and he redirected partially treated sewage into the Mamilla Cemetery itself!

However, in a little reported story, there has been some real desecration of graves in Jerusalem recently:

More than a dozen graves at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem were vandalized, the latest in a series of attacks on one of Judaism's oldest cemeteries.

On June 14, some 14 graves were damaged by Arab youths wielding sledgehammers, according to private security guards stationed at the iconic cemetery located in eastern Jerusalem. At least five of the damaged gravesites are those of Americans buried in the cemetery, according to Rabbi Moshe Bezalel Buzokovsky of the Chevra Kadisha.

The recent damage is in addition to vandalism sustained at the cemetery last month on Nakba Day, or Catastrophe Day, when Arabs mark the declaration of the state of Israel. During riots, Palestinians hurled large rocks and boulders toward the graves, chipping and breaking at least 15. Arab youths also vandalized or destroyed nearly 40 newly installed surveillance cameras in the cemetery, according to the International Committee for the Preservation of Har HaZeitim. Har HaZeitim is the Hebrew name for the Mount of Olives.

At the same time, local Arabs began illegally expanding a mosque to within 15 feet of the grave of Menachem Begin, according to the committee.

In the last year, efforts of the committee have resulted in the restoration of 2,000 of an estimated 40,000 graves that were destroyed prior to 1967 under Jordanian rule, an increased private security presence as well as the installation of 50 surveillance cameras and fluorescent lighting.

There are an estimated 150,000 graves on the Mount, where Jews have been buried since biblical times. Notable individuals buried there include the prophets Zechariah, Malachi and Hagai; famous modern rabbis such as Aryeh Kaplan and Ahron Soloveichik; Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Hazzan Yossele Rosenblatt; and British Parliament member Robert Maxwell.

(h/t Jihad watch)

Alice Walker supports apartheid

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker has been getting a lot of publicity for joining the latest planned flotilla to Gaza, and she has also gotten a bit of much-deserved criticism.

Something she said over the weekend shows just how skewed her thinking is:

I grew up in the South under segregation, under the state terrorism of apartheid. When I was in the West Bank and Gaza recently, it was like stepping back into that.

While segregation in the 1950s and 1960s was reprehensible, characterizing it as "state terrorism of apartheid" is ridiculous.

But even more absurd is this simple fact: The areas of the West Bank and Gaza that she visited did not have a single Jewish resident, and neither would "Palestine."

She is supporting the creation of a state that would be founded upon ethnically cleansing every Jew from its borders. A state where selling land to a Jew invokes the death penalty. A state whose nascent constitution says explicitly that its laws are based on Islamic Shari'a law. A state where Christians have been persecuted by their Muslim neighbors, where tens of thousands have already fled and where the remainder are cowed into silence rather than standing up for equal rights.

She is traveling to Gaza with groups that have met with and supported Hamas, whose charter explicitly calls for genocide against Jews and that offers an Islamic supremacist vision of the world. She is traveling with groups that have supported terrorism against Israelis

Apparently, Alice Walker enthusiastically supports Palestinian Arab apartheid.

The "moderate" Palestinian Arabs add FOUR new preconditions for talks

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority passed on four official demands to the Mideast Quartet for discussion in upcoming meetings, PLO official Saeb Erekat told Saudi newspaper Al-Watan on Friday.

European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton told the PA's leadership Friday that the Quartet would convene in July for ministerial level talks to discuss relaunching the peace process. Quartet envoys are scheduled to meet Friday.

Erekat said the demands included a complete halt to all Israeli settlement activity, 1967 borders as the basis for peace negotiations with mutually agreed land swaps, EU support for reconciliation talks "which will strengthen peace opportunities" and EU support for a Palestinian UN statehood bid in September.

He also wanted EU acknowledgment that a UN statehood bid does not contradict peace negotiations.

Demand #1, complete halt to all "settlement" activity (which of course includes Jerusalem) was never a precondition of talks before 2008.

Demand #2, the 1967 borders as a basis for negotiations, was similarly never a precondition - it was what the PLO wanted as a result.

Demand #3, EU support for Fatah to be reconciled with unrepentant terror organization Hamas, directly contravenes the Quartet position on Hamas. Hamas' statements since the "unity" agreement proves that it has no interest in living at peace with Israel so this demand proves that the official PLO position is that they prefer Hamas to peace.

Demand #4, support for a unilateral state, is literally a demand to rip up the entire Oslo process.

And the "acknowledgement" he is asking from the EU is pretty much self-contradictory - if the PLO gets recognition as a state then the point of peace talks is moot. It also implies that if such a state was declared tomorrow, it would not be at peace with Israel.

These outrageous demands prove yet again that the so-called "moderate" PA is far, far more intransigent than the "hawkish" Likud. Not only that, it proves that there is nothing remotely peaceful about it as it insists on partnering with Hamas and demanding that the world support a genocidal terror organization.

Apparently, Erekat really didn't resign from his role as chief negotiator as he pretended to in February.

(h/t Mike)

UN headquarters in Gaza bombed

On Thursday morning, to mark the fifth anniversary of Gilad Shalit's abduction, the International Committee of the Red Cross called on Hamas to prove that Gilad Shalit was still alive.

Thursday afternoon, Gaza protesters attacked the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza in anger over that request.

On Friday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon demanded that Hamas release Shalit (going way beyond what Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other "humanitarian" organizations were willing to demand.)

On Saturday, the UN headquarters in Gaza City was bombed. The compound includes the offices of UNESCO and the United Nations Coordinator in Gaza. One was injured and Hamas closed off the area.

Think there is a pattern there?

(h/t Jawa Report)

Hello Kitty announced earlier this year that they will open a chain of new stores in Israel. As reported in YNet in February:

While listening to what Hello Kitty officials have to say about the reasons for their decision to expand the brand's activity in Israel in the coming year, one might want to consider appointing them as economic attachés in one of Israel's embassies. The company managers insist that Israel is an overwhelming financial success story.

"You are one of the only countries which have survived the global financial crisis so well," says Roberto Lanzi, an Italian, president of Global Consumer Products for the EMEA market (Europe, Middle East, Africa) at Sanrio, the Japanese company which owns the Hello Kitty brand.

He made the remark during a visit to Israel with Kunihiko Tsuji, one of the company's owners. "Although you have the limitations of a small country, the Israeli market has great potential," the two agreed.

This is making the usual crowd of Israel haters very upset as can be seen in this letter written to the company at "Palestine Campaign."

Dear Shintaro Tsuji,

We are writing to urge you to not to open a Hello Kitty store in Israel,until Israel ends its occupation and abides by international law.

The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories') are all under Israeli rule. Israel's occupation is illegal under international law, including UN Resolution 242 which demands Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank.

(Of course, Resolution 242 does not say that; it implies that Israel would continue to hold onto parts of the area.)

The campaign does not seem to have worked. From YNet on Saturday:

The Hello Kitty brand is launching a chain of 18 stores in Israel at an initial investment of $2-3 million.

Sanrio, the company which created the pink icon in 1974, has chosen Leader Brands as its franchiser in the Jewish state.

The chain's first store is expected to open by the end of June at the Givatayim Mall and will offer a variety of items for young girls and women, starring the famous Japanese cat.

"We'll open eight to 10 stores this year," says the owner, Yossi Shoch. "We are about to finalize three additional locations in the Azrieli Malls chain, and we'll open a total of 18 stores within a short period of time.

Another BDS fail.

(h/t Sophie, see also Blogwrath.)

The human rights community shows its hypocrisy on Shalit

I mentioned Friday that there was a joint press release from eight human rights groups regarding Gilad Shalit. Noah Pollak at Commentary noted:

If a better example of the utter moral collapse of the human rights community exists, it would be hard to find. The statement is one of passionless brevity — just a few sentences long — and expresses no opinion on the standing of Hamas, or on its 2006 raid into Israel, or on the legitimacy of its goals and methods. Remarkably, it doesn’t even demand the release of Gilad Shalit. The most that this allegedly courageous and principled human rights community could bring itself to say to the terrorists of Hamas is that they should improve the conditions of Shalit’s imprisonment.

Even the Goldstone Report demanded Shalit’s release. Human rights groups, especially when it comes to condemning Israel, invoke what they believe to be the inflexible requirements of international law as a guide to matters of war and peace. Their only source of credibility is their adherence to principle. Yet here these same champions of international law have lost their voices, and their outrage, when it comes to making what should be the easiest of judgments: That it is against international law to raid a sovereign state for the purpose of abducting its citizens, that Shalit’s imprisonment is barbaric and utterly without legitimacy, and that Hamas must release him immediately.

Pollak's criticism is slightly unfair, but only slightly.

Let's first look at the actual press release:

Human beings are not bargaining chips

Marking five years since the capture of Gilad Shalit, Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations state:

Hamas must immediately end inhumane and illegal treatment of Gilad Shalit

Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit has been in captivity for five years. Those holding him have refused to allow him to communicate with his family, nor have they provided information on his well-being and the conditions in which he is being held. The organizations stress that this conduct is inhumane and a violation of international humanitarian law.

Hamas authorities in Gaza must immediately end the cruel and inhuman treatment of Gilad Shalit. Until he is released, they must enable him to communicate with his family and should grant him access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. ]

Amnesty International & the Israel Section
B'Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights
Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement
Human Rights Watch
International Federation for Human Rights
Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Gaza
Physicians for Human Rights - Israel
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
Rabbis for Human Rights
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel
Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights

In a separate press release,B'Tselem explicitly calls for Shalit's release:

Shalit is considered a hostage due to the circumstances of his abduction and the manner in which he is being held. International humanitarian law absolutely forbids the taking and holding of a person by force for the purpose of pressuring the adversary to comply with certain demands, while threatening to harm the person if the demands are not met. The taking of hostages is considered a war crime, for which all those involved bear personal criminal liability.

The Hamas leadership in Gaza bears an obligation to release Shalit immediately and unconditionally. Pending his release, his captors must treat him humanely and enable representatives of the ICRC to visit him.

But Amnesty does not:

Amnesty International is asking activists around the world to sign our petition to Isma’il Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Hamas de facto administration in Gaza, urging him to alleviate the suffering of Gilad Shalit and his family by immediately complying with its obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that he is well treated, held in humane and dignified living conditions, and to allow him to communicate with his family, including through sending and receiving letters. Treating Gilad Shalit as a hostage is a flagrant violations of these obligations as Amnesty International stressed again today together with Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights NGOs.

This means that Amnesty is considering Shalit a prisoner of war, not a hostage, even though he was captured on the Israeli side of the Gaza fence and the entire operation was meant to capture hostages. Amnesty, amazingly, ignores these facts and merely calls for Hamas to treat him humanely.

HRW is equally bad. This year they merely reproduced the joint press release, but even last year they did not call for Shalit's release:

Hamas authorities in Gaza should immediately end the cruel and inhuman treatment of Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit of Israel and allow him to communicate with his family and receive visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Human Rights Watch said today. June 25, 2010 is the fourth anniversary of his captivity.

Interestingly, they did call for his unconditional release immediately after he was abducted. One can only wonder why they have dropped that demand in the years since.

B'Tselem is not blameless either.

In its press release about the joint declaration, takes pains to note that

[L]eading Israeli, Palestinian and International Human Rights organizations issued a joint statement demanding that those holding him must immediately end his inhumane and illegal treatment.

The organizations take a variety of positions on the issue. Some call for the immediate release of Shalit, while others support a prisoner swap. Some of the organizations have not made any statements until today. It is therefore particularly significant that the organizations have united around a joint message.

It is obvious that B'Tselem was the driving force behind this declaration. It is equally obvious that they tried really hard to get PCHR, the lone Palestinian Arab "human rights" group, to sign on, and they noted to AFP that the declaration was also issued in Arabic.

However, the PCHR website is silent about this declaration!

What good is the Arabic translation of the message when even its sole Arab participant refuses to admit of its participation in its own website?

Thus we can see the incredible hypocrisy of the so-called "human rights" community. By refusing to demand Shalit's immediate and unconditional release, they are winking at Hamas' abduction of Israelis as hostages and encouraging more such raids. It is a travesty of everything they pretend to stand for.

Weekend link grab bag

As always, Now Lebanon has tons of new news from Syria. Many, many major protests today, and reports of 14 killed. Hundreds of people fleeing to Turkey and Lebanon

Hundreds protesting in Jordan for reforms.

Caliphate conference coming to the UK!

Oldie but goodie BBC/Gaza spoof

Logical, but wrong

Was there a Fatah/Hamas reconciliation agreement?

Haaretz: "A leading Israeli official has praised Pope Pius XII for saving Jews during the Nazi occupation of Rome, a surprise twist in a long-standing controversy over the pontiff's wartime role."

Michael Totten on Syria/Turkey

National anthem not played for graduating law students in Haifa - because of Arab students?

A female president of an Orthodox shul in Australia. Oh, she's also an aborigine.

Israeli company cyber-spies terrorists

People are liking this video of Rep. Michele Bachmann on Israel.

Hey Jews!:

(h/t Israel Muse, Joel, YM, Yerushalimey, MM, Ian, Silke, Mitchell)

25-30% of Saudi men can't get it up

Al Quds al Arabi has two interesting stories.

One quotes a Saudi doctor and surgeon as saying that between 25% and 30% of all Saudi men suffer from erectile dysfunction. He also goes into detail about other problems Saudi men are having in the bedroom. He also noted that the percentage of Saudi men with ED have been steadily increasing over the past decade.

The other story is from Egypt. One of the new Islamist political parties that was illegal under Mubarak has a problem: their religious leaders ruled that they cannot appear on news programs where there are unveiled women, especially interviewers. This limits their ability to use the mass media to get support.

I wonder if the stories are related.

Berkeley and CAIR team up on "Islamophobia"

The University of California-Berkeley has a Center for Race and Gender, and withinthat center they have recently started an "Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project." CAIR is a major sponsor of this initiative, and CAIR co-sponsored a conference in April on the topic.

Yesterday, they announced the First Annual Islamophobia Report.

It takes only a few seconds of reading it to see that there is nothing academic about this report. It is little more than an excuse to push a myth of Muslim victimhood in America.

One proof of this is a section of the report called "The Worst":

Some individuals, institutions and groups were at the center of pushing Islamophobia in America during the period covered by this report. This list is neither comprehensive nor offered in any specific order. However, those listed below do deserve particular note for their intentional efforts to spread fear and prejudice.

Everyone that they hate, from Pamela Geller to Robert Spencer to Steven Emerson and Newt Gingrich.

I was particularly interested in their section on how "Islamophobic" Daniel Pipes is. I once had a lengthy message board exchange with a (very nice) Muslim woman who claimed that Pipes hates Muslims and Islam, and she gave me a bunch of quotes proving it from CAIR (or maybe from WRMEA.). Luckily, Pipes keeps every one of his writings available on his website, easily searchable, and I spent the time to track down the context of each quote.

Every single quote was taken out of context, deliberately, to make Pipes appear to be a hater.

Here is part of what this report, under the aegis of UCB, says about Pipes:

The grandfather of Islamophobia in America. Pipes’ eminence is fading but his contributions to anti-Muslim intolerance in America cannot be overlooked.

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank.

In 1990, he said:

“Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

“This religion would seem to have nothing functional to offer,” Pipes said of Islam in 1996.

And so forth.

Pipes, however, has already responded to most of these CAIR lies here. He shows how the quotes are either mis-attributed or way out of context. And anyone can search his site and figure out that he is entirely right.

Which means that a publication with a university imprimatur is pushing what are, quite literally, lies written by CAIR. It doesn't even pretend to fact-check the lies.

This may be the worst example of pseudo-scholarship in the US today. The University of California-Berkeley is no longer even engaging in the pretense of scholarship - it is now a fully activist organization masquerading as a university.

IDF video on blockade

From the IDF website:

In order to protect Israeli civilians from attacks by the terrorist organization Hamas, the IDF lawfully enforces a naval blockade on the Gaza Strip. Given previous attempts by the terrorist organization Hamas in smuggling weapons via land and sea and the inherent difficulties in conducting inspections at sea, it is critical that Israeli forces inspect all goods and material marked for Gaza prior to their transfer into Gaza. Thus, the Israel Navy will be forced to intercept the Gaza flotilla if it attempts to break the legally enforced naval blockade.

This week, the Israel Navy conducted an integrated exercise simulating all possible scenarios in the event that the Gaza flotilla attempts to breach the legally enforced naval blockade on Gaza.

Will Hezbollah attack Israel to loosen pressure on Syria?

From Reuters:

Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group is preparing for a possible war with Israel to relieve perceived Western pressure to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, its guardian ally, sources close to the movement say.

The radical Shi'ite group, which has a powerful militia armed by Damascus and Iran, is watching the unrest in neighboring Syria with alarm and is determined to prevent the West from exploiting popular protests to bring down Assad.

Hezbollah supported pro-democracy movements that toppled Western-backed leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, but officials say it will not stand idly by as international pressure mounts on Assad to yield to protesters.

It is committed to do whatever it takes politically to help deflect what it sees as a foreign campaign against Damascus, but it is also readying for a possible war with Israel if Assad is weakened.

"Hezbollah will never intervene in Syria. This is an internal issue for President Bashar to tackle. But when it sees the West gearing up to bring him down, it will not just watch," a Lebanese official close to the group's thinking told Reuters.

"This is a battle for existence for the group and it is time to return the favor (of Syria's support). It will do that by fending off some of the international pressure," he added.

...While Hezbollah's fate is not linked exclusively to Assad's future, his departure would make life more difficult for the group, which depends on Syria's borders for arms supply.

"Syria is like the lung for Hezbollah...it is its backup front where it gets its weapon and other stuff," said another Lebanese official who declined to be named.

This is certainly something to be concerned about.

Then again, some of the analysts interviewed in the longish article are idiots:

While he dismissed the possibility of a regional war, Augustus Richard Norton, author of a book on Hezbollah, said an Israeli Lebanese war may be possible, adding he believed Israel was likely to strike first.

"It is not too challenging to imagine a scenario for a Israel-Lebanon war to erupt, especially given the Obama administration's diffident and permissive approach to Israel.

"...It is far more likely that Israel will pursue a war with the goal of crippling Hezbollah and punishing Lebanon than that a war will be intentionally provoked by Hezbollah," he said.

Norton is a Hezbollah apologist.

Latest Latma (6/24/2011) - Tom Friedman's love song

Great Tom Friedman skit.

There WAS an injury in last week's Qassam attack

Last week a rocket was shot from Gaza to Israel, ending a lull of no rockets landing in Israel since April. That rocket cause no damage when it landed in the Eshkol Regional Council.

What was not reported was that there were at least two rockets shot last Thursday - and one of them did cause extensive damage and significant injuries.

In Gaza.

From PCHR:

According to investigations conducted by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), at approximately 22:30 on Thursday, 16 June 2011, a home-made rocket hit the first floor of a 3-storey house belonging to Suleiman ‘Ayash Abu ‘Owaida in al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. As a result, Samia ‘Ayash Abu ‘Owaida, 18, was injured by shrapnel throughout his body, and the house and neighboring house belonging to Sameer Sa’id Abu Jayab was damaged.

I wonder if the upcoming flotilla will protest against these continued examples of Gaza terror groups injuring their own people with rockets.

Or will these purported "peace activists" call for better quality control to ensure that 100% of the rockets land on Israeli civilians?