Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Gazans shut down UNRWA again

Palestine Today reports that Gazans blocked all the doors to UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City, shutting off all services. The reason? Because UNRWA has been reducing services.

There have been a lot of similar Palestinian Arab protests against UNRWA lately, which are all ignored by major media outlets.

Khaled Abu Toameh elaborates:

In recent weeks, UNRWA has come under attack from many Palestinians who fear that the international agency is planning to cut its services to the refugees.

UNRWA has in fact reduced some of its services to refugees – but only due to a $60 million budget deficit.

The reactions of both Hamas and the PLO show that neither party is willing to assume responsibility for the refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The two parties do not want to provide any services to the refugees, and want UNRWA to do the job for them. Their goal is to keep the refugees in their places so Hamas, the PLO and the rest of the Arab governments can continue exploiting their plight for political purposes.

The anti-UNRWA protests are aimed at extorting the agency and the international community into continuing to provide services and jobs to tens of thousands of Palestinians, exempting Hamas, the PLO and the Arab world from any responsibility.

Instead of threatening UNRWA, the PLO and Hamas should start thinking of ways to help the refugees to improve their living conditions and find jobs.

Instead of demonstrating in front of the UNRWA headquarters in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian refugees should be demanding that oil-rich Arab countries help them.

It is worth repeating that the PA and Hamas have not lifted a finger to dismantle "refugee" camps in territories under their control - inside the area of British Mandate Palestine! Instead of preparing their citizens in camps to be normal members of society, they have been ensuring that they remain second-class and living in misery; refusing to build permanent housing for them.

Saudi anti-witchcraft unit swings into action!

From The Media Line:

When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk in northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of witchcraft on their hands, a capital offence in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.

Agents of the country’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head.

Saudi Arabia takes witchcraft so seriously that it has banned The Harry Potter series by British writer J.K. Rowling, rife with tales of sorcery and magic. It set up the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in May 2009 and placed it under the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPV), Saudi Arabia's religious police.

"In accordance with our Islamic tradition we believe that magic really exists," Abdullah Jaber, a political cartoonist at the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, told The Media Line. "The fact that an official body, subordinate to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, has a unit to combat sorcery proves that the government recognizes this, like Muslims worldwide."

The unit is charged with apprehending sorcerers and reversing the detrimental effects of their spells. On the CPV website, a hotline encourages citizens across the kingdom to report cases of sorcery to local officials for immediate treatment.

In the case of the wolf's head, the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Tabouk was able to break the spell. The Saudi daily Okaz reported on Monday that the unknown family that had fallen victim to the spell had been "liberated from the jaws of the wolf.”

The Anti-Witchcraft Unit was created in order to educate the public about the danger of sorcerers and "combat manifestations of polytheism and reliance on other Gods," the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

The belief in sorcery is so widespread in Saudi Arabia, that it is even used as a defense in criminal court cases. Last October, a judge accused of receiving bribes in a real-estate project told a court in Madinah that he had been bewitched and is undergoing treatment by Quranic incantations, known as ruqiyah, a common remedy for the evil eye.

...Belief in sorcery is not necessarily more widespread in Saudi Arabia than in other Gulf countries, Wilcke added. On Monday, the Emirati daily Al-Khaeej reported that Dubai police had arrested an Arab African national on charges of fraud and sorcery, after he charged 15,000 Dirham ($4,000) from a woman whose husband had left her, promising to bring him back using magic.

A wolf in lingerie indicates sorcery? Sounds more like an Arab re-enactment of Little Red Riding Hood!

The humiliation in Gaza continues: The Andaluseyya Mall

From Al Masry al-Youm:

After marking its inaugural opening on Tuesday, the three-story mall in Gaza City now offers products running the gamut. The supermarket has nearly all possible commodities. Shoe stores with popular brand names, such as Nike, Adidas and Fox, sit next to clothing shops displaying window mannequins with hot miniskirts and vibrantly colored t-shirts.

On the Andaluseyya mall’s top floor, customers are able to enjoy quality time with their families, eating at restaurants, playing arcade games and, for the first time in Gaza, watching a movie in the cinema. Escalators, rare sites in this besieged coastal enclave, escort people between floors. To top it off, air conditioning provides much-needed respite from the oppressive heat outside.

In addition to recent construction that paved the way for this mall to open, Gaza City is in the process of opening several sea-side resorts. After three years with limited to non-existent commercial building, construction firms are now breaking stereotypical images of Gaza as a destitute territory with conditions comparable to the most-devastated sub-Saharan regions.

One of the primary investors in the mall, Ihab Al-Esawy, says the opening could never have been achieved if the current situation in Gaza was similar to years past. He needed previously-absent construction materials, now available, at his disposal [from smuggling tunnels - EoZ].

“We put the [mall] plan of the project in on October 10th, 2010 and started the work immediately,” al-Esawy says. “We wanted to make sure that we had enough construction material though so we could start building.”

Once again I am saddened to have to show you the photos of the hopelessness that Gazans are forced to live under - hopelessness that is worse than a humanitarian crisis. The captions are written in the style of the Free Gaza Movement, 972Mag, Mondoweiss and Reuters.

Gazans are forced to wait in dehumanizing lines in the scorching heat to have a few minutes of respite from their unbearable lives.

While there is a large selection of products, the stores are empty because the prices are too high. The owners of the mall are in danger of losing all their money.

OK, maybe the stores aren't empty. But look how poor Gazans are forced to wear second-hand Lynyrd Skynyrd T-Shirts, humiliated that they appear to be fans of Western classic rock.

The abused Gazans put up a brave front as they browse the men's suits, suits that they will be forced to eat because of their crushing poverty from the illegal Zionist siege.

Once again, we see Gazans being forced to wait at virtual checkpoints to be served. Some give up and go to other sections of the mall in their frustration and humiliation. But it is all in vain - the lines are everywhere.

Escalators were installed at the insistence of the Zionists who manufactured, and are enriched by, them. This is meant to ensure that proud Gazans get less exercise and more heart attacks, thus contributing to their slow genocide.

As Reuters wrote: Gaza shelves stocked, but hope in short supply.
That crushing hopelessness is etched upon the faces of the few remaining Gaza survivors of constant Israeli aggression.

Isn't it past time to recall the US ambassador to Syria?

From Now Lebanon:

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem warned the French and US ambassadors on Wednesday not to travel outside Damascus after they both visited the flashpoint central city of Hama earlier this month.

"We will impose a ban on any [diplomatic] travel more than 25 kilometers (15 miles) outside Damascus, if the ambassadors continue to ignore [our] guidance," Muallem told the envoys at a meeting broadcast by state television.

"I hope that we will not be forced to impose the ban," he added.

"We did not expel the two ambassadors because we had hoped to maintain better relations in future."

Both US envoy Robert Ford and French ambassador Eric Chevallier visited Hama on July 7 amid repeated large demonstrations in the city against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Damascus reacted furiously to the visit, accusing the US ambassador of seeking to undermine the stability of Syria and calling in both envoys for consultations on July 10.

The Syrian authorities accused the pair of travelling to Hama without authorization but Washington insisted Damascus had been notified in advance.

Either Ford should immediately go to Hama or he should immediately go home. There is no value to his staying under virtual house arrest while the Syrian regime slaughters thousands.

And if France does it first, it would make the US look really bad.

"How to tell an Arab far-leftist"

There is a Twitter hashtag, mostly written by Arabs, called "#HowToTellAnArabFarLeftist." A lot of them are quite funny - and many apply to leftists altogether.

Here are some of the entries:

can't see a single leading communist country but still thinks communism is the best, ohh just like islamists yeah

when they say that Nutella is an American conspiracy product to taint the brains of 3 yr old kids.

All our problems are from colonialism, till now, duh. (oh shit US was colonized bt UK? Nevermind!)

mention colonialism every 5 min even though foreign aid has hurt economies much worse.

They despise the west and United States but they probably graduated from American University of Beirut

they voted for Bush in 2000 because Gore's running mate was Jewish...then they complain about how Bush "stole" Florida

they think Norman Finkelstein is a genius

"there has always been a secret American plan to invade and split up Iraq into 3 countries."

Castro is not ruining Cuba. He is merely teaching his people how common misery is better than greedy capitalism.

"The Israel lobby controls the media and the U.S. government."

"my daughter is only allowed to marry from my village"

the UN is a Zionist conspiracy. The Israel lobby is America's shadow government. Syrian revolt a conspiracy too.

a sentence cannot be formed w/o: zionist, racist, imperialism, puppets, conspiracy, corporate.

Gulf Princes are American puppets, Levant Dictators are Zionist agents, Maghreb autocrats are Colonial servants

"USSR didn't lose the war of Ideas... Obama is a secret communist you know."

Speaking out against religious extremism is so passé compared to railing against corporations

Wears the Kaffiyye for protests, then takes it off before going to work... in Mcdonald's.

"Starbucks gives money to Israel" so do you with your tax dollars now GTFO

they bitched and moaned when Bush passed the patriot act and said nothing when Obama renewed it

Bush hated Muslims for Iraq and Afghan but Obama doesn't and stays there and attacks Libya, Yemen and Somalia

Obama loves Muslims because of a Ramadan YouTube video

"Palestinians aren't allowed to own land in Lebanon because they want them to go back to their homeland"

holocaust denial. Sad but true.

The only scholar worth mentioning in regards to the Middle East is Edward Said.

If you criticize West they're your best friend,if you criticize Arabs they support you're guilty of Orientalism.

"we're replacing Mubarak thugs w our much nicer ones who'll punish the real bad guys (e.g Investors)"

Saddam Hussein was a good guy he is just misunderstood.

Rage rage against human rights abuses by Obama and Bush. Crickets chirping with regard to Castro, Lenin, Stalin

they are secular but praise Osama bin Laden and yell about it on al-Jazeera while screaming conspiracy.

their vocabulary consists in one word: colonialism. Ok two, they can say it in Arabic too: ???????

Having an import cup of coffee at a super lavish cafe while discussing child labour

sympathizes with and takes photos of homeless people from his 1000$ Canon camera

tweets frequently about the rights of the poor from his iPad

he can't be bothered to explain himself coz he always assumes u dont know what u are talking about, yells GO READ

yells & screams in Tahrir demanding minimum wage but is driven around town by driver earning eq of $100 a month

u thnk wearing a Keffiyeh & nagging will free Palestine, but an economically strong arab world won't.

give you a long lecture about horror of fascist dictatorship then praise #Stalin

strongly supports freedom of speech except when you disagree with his beliefs

they don't smile because smiling is a western conspiracy to distract us from their plot to destroy us.

they love revolutions and elections but hate liberty

they would rather Palestine never get a state always be occupied, to bitch, rather than them get half the loaf.

(h/t JW)

Blowing up a mosque, of course.

Apparently this is from about 9 months ago, but I just ran across it.

Israel HaYom is read by nearly 7x as many Israelis as Ha'aretz

Israel HaYom, which has recently come out with an online English edition, is now the most popular newspaper in Israel, read by some 39.3% of the population in the first half of this year.

The newspaper is a breath of fresh air as it reports without the sickening bias of Ha'aretz, whose readership fell to a tiny 5.8% market share.

Of course, this won't stop foreign journalists from using Ha'aretz as their benchmark on how Israeli society thinks. They like to push the false idea that Israel hates its government and it more oriented to Meretz than Likud - since this is more in line with what they themselves believe. Wishful thinking trumps sober reporting nearly every time.

Erekat spouts lies in response to Israeli YouTube video

This week, Israel's Foreign Ministry put out a video that has spread quickly, called The Truth About the West Bank:

PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, who apparently has never resigned even though he claimed he did, lashed out at the video. His sputtering statement has a lot of nonsense, but I want to concentrate on one of his many lies that we have not covered before:

Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat Wednesday expressed his shock at a Youtube video produced by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which the Israeli Ministry distorts international law regarding the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.

“With this video, the Israeli government has left no doubt on its pro-conflict agenda,” said Erekat in a press release....

Erekat continued: “In its desperate attempt to gear international discourse away from the pursuit of genuine peace to the outdated arguments of those who oppose it, this official video went as far as discarding United Nations Resolution 181 (II). I want to remind the government of Israel that it was accepted at the UN as a full member based on its acceptance of this resolution.”

This is a claim that has been made before by anti-Israel activists. Was Israel's acceptance to the UN conditional upon accepting UNGA 181?

The easiest way to find out is to read the text of the resolution accepting Israel itself:

Having received the report of the Security Council on the application of Israel for membership in the United Nations,

Noting that, in the judgment of the Security Council, Israel is a peace-loving State and is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter,

Noting that the Security Council has recommended to the general Assembly that it admit Israel to membership in the United Nations,

Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it "unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them from the day when it becomes a member of the United Nations,"

Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 and 11 December 1948 and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representative of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions,

The General Assembly,

Acting in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure,

1. Decides that Israel is a peace loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;

2. Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations.

While the resolution "recalls" UNGA 181 and 194 there is no conditional language in this resolution at all. The actionable part of the resolution is unambiguous. Beyond that, the preamble explicitly notes that Israel clarified - at length - its interpretation of those resolutions in a number of now obscure UN documents (here and here, among others.) Abba Eban was, as usual, masterful in explaining Israel's position, and his explanation is referred to in this resolution just as the UNGA resolutions are. The language of the resolution seems to accept Eban's words as being just as important as the texts of the earlier resolutions themselves.

Which means that Erekat is shown yet again to be a liar.

UNESCO's Islamicization of Maimonides

YNet has a damning article by Giulio Meotti about UNESCO that makes a very good case that the agency is actively engaging in a fight against Israel, and even against Jewish culture and history - especially if that history happened to occur on the "wrong side" of an imaginary green line.

The Arabs find it difficult to convincingly portray Israel as usurper of the land as long as the world believes there is a huge connection between the people of the Bible and the land of the Bible. UNESCO is denying this connection by depicting Jewish history in the Middle East as no more than an insignificant, brief sojourn by arrogant colonizers.

UNESCO appears to deny that the Jewish people has laid its roots in Israel more than 4,000 years ago, or that 1,000 years before Christ, King David made Jerusalem the Jewish city par excellence, never entirely abandoned even in times of deadly persecution.

The City of David in Jerusalem, a major target of UNESCO’s anti-Jewish fury, is now the hottest open archaeological site in the world, with biblical artifacts, ancient burial spots and royal seals. There, UNESCO is using archeology to bash Israel and treats Israeli archeologists as nationalistic martinets.

In recent years, UNESCO increased its collaboration with ISESCO, the cultural body of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. According to ISESCO’s propaganda, the Biblical story and the Jewish temples are only fiction, Jewish monuments are Islamic treasures stolen by the Zionists, and Israeli archeological works are criminal acts against Muslims.

UNESCO’s ideology portrays the Jews as no more than invading colonizers, while the Muslims who invaded the country and ravaged it in the Seventh Century are, by some inexplicable leap, the descendants of the so called "indigenous Canaanites."

In 2010, UNESCO decided that Rachel’s Tomb and Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs are “Muslim mosques.” Western countries didn't raise any protest. UNESCO never mentioned that in addition to the famous Tomb of the biblical Patriarchs, Hebron contains also the tomb of the first judge (Otniel Ben Kenaz), the tomb of generals and confidants to Saul and David and the tombs of Ruth and Jesse, David’s great-grandmother and father. There is also no word by UNESCO about the fact that Rachel’s tomb is unanimously revered as the burial site of one of the Bible’s great women, the wife of Jacob, the Jewish blessed mother.

During the Second Intifada, UNESCO condemned Israel for “the destruction and damage caused to the cultural heritage in the Palestinian territories” as “a crime against the common cultural heritage of humanity.” However, UNESCO remained silent when a Palestinian mob destroyed Joseph’s tomb, a major Jewish religious shrine, and built a mosque on the site.

Upon the outbreak of the Second Intifada, Palestinian terrorists also attacked Rachel’s tomb, and for 41 days Jews were prevented from visiting the compound. UNESCO never condemned it. Recently, dozens of graves at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem were vandalized, the latest in a series of attacks on Judaism’s oldest cemetery, where Jews have been buried since biblical times. Again, UNESCO remained silent.

This one part of the article was stunning to me:

On a final note, a recent UNESCO report on science, Jewish physician and theologian Maimonides is classified as a Muslim named “Moussa ben Maimoun.” So the Rambam - for Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon – has been forced to “convert” to Islam by the UN’s revisionist historians.

During the Middle Ages, the French Inquisition confiscated and burned Maimonides's books. From the elegant Parisian boulevards, UNESCO’s inquisitors are now following the same dreadful solution of rendering history and the Holy Land "Judenrein."

I asked Meotti for the document where UNESCO calls Maimonides (the Rambam) a Muslim, and after a bit of searching we found it. It was in the French version of a December 2010 report on science in the Arab world by Adnan Badran:

Une fois Tolède reprise aux Maures par les croisés en 1085, les savants européens y affluèrent afin de traduire les anciens textes classiques du grec (que l’Europe avait oubliés) vers l’arabe et l’hébreu, puis le latin, rendant ce la première partie du Moyen Âge européen (1100-1543), les noms de quelques savants européens apparaissaient dans la littérature scientifique à côté d’un grand nombre de savants musulmans, parmi lesquels Ibn Rushd (Averroès), Moussa ibn Maïmoun (Maïmonide), Tousi et Ibn Nafis.

After the recovery of Toledo from the Moors by the Crusaders in 1085, European scholars flocked there to translate the ancient classical texts from the Greek (which Europe had forgotten) to Arabic and Hebrew and Latin, making it the first part of the European Middle Ages (1100-1543), the names of some European scholars appeared in scientific literature next to a large number of Muslim scholars, including Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Maimouna Ibn Moussa (Maimonides), Tousi and Ibn Nafis.

This is in marked contrast to how UNESCO used to act. In 1986, it organized a roundtable to celebrate the 850th anniversary of Maimonides' birth, and dedicated an entire issue of its cultural magazine to Maimonides and Averroes that same year where his Jewish roots are emphasized. In that issue they mention that he is known as The Rambam and they say his name was Moses ben Maymun.

That began to change as UNESCO started de-emphasizing his Judaism. In their description of Cordoba, for example, he is referred to as "Musa-ibn-Maymun."

And now - he is a Muslim.

This isn't the usual anti-Zionism that we come to expect from the UN. This is a consistent pattern of the denial of Jewish history and culture. In other words - this is UN-sanctioned anti-semitism.

Hasbara 2.0 - the video

Yesterday I posted the slides for my Hasbara 2.0 speech last year. Here is the video of the presentation. If you have a couple of free hours, you might find it interesting.

Ahmadinejad: "We've never thought of aggression"

One of the funnier articles in the Tehran Times:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that Iran will give a crushing response to any malicious movement in the region against its interests.

“The Iranian nation is an honest friend and is true to its word, but if anyone wishes to collude with the sworn enemies of Iran and make malicious moves, they should know that Iran will stand firm until the eradication of global arrogance (imperialist powers) and the Zionist regime,” he said.

“The entire world knows that Iran is the biggest military power in the region,” he said. “We have never wanted to take advantage of nations’ limitations, because it goes against our beliefs and we have never thought of aggression against others.”

He added: “The era of the Unites States and the Zionist regime has come to an end; their days are numbered.

Yup, aggression never even crossed his mind, as he promises a "crushing response" to any "malicious moves" until the US and Israel are utterly destroyed.

2010 Hasby Awards/Hasbara 2.0: The slide presentation

Here are the slides that I created for my lecture last year at Yeshiva University which included the 2010 Hasby Awards and Hasbara 2.0.

Yes, I know that there is a risk that the Israel-haters will learn all our nefarious secrets. I'll just have to take that risk.

Worst insult for anti-Israel leftists: "Hasbara activist"

It's been a fun day in the Twittersphere, as my post demolishing the 972mag's attempt to attack me got some play.

It seems to have angered the usual hate-Israel crowd, who have been hurling the biggest insult they can to me - that I engage in hasbara.

The author, Noam Sheizaf, called me a "Hasbara mouthpiece."

Joseph Dana of the same online blog said I was having a "bad hasbara day."

Later he said "@elderofziyon calls his own work 'humorous.' Do his readers understand that he writes humor or Hasbara?"

One of his retweeters wrote "that hasbara means deceit and you are not insulted means to admit to the charge, an honest man who ply's deceit for a living."

And Dana then had a series of tweets for what good, upstanding citizens must look for when dealing with that hasbara crowd.

Wow! The word "Hasbara" is as toxic to these guys as the word "Zionist" is to Arabs! So much so that they assume that bringing out that term automatically means they win the argument!

Well, at the risk of making their heads explode, this blog is dedicated to hasbara. There, I admit it. I even gave a couple of lectures on how to create effective hasbara (and how this blog falls short.)

I wrote eleven hasbara rules in the talk, and one of them was "Truth Above All." If we lose credibility, we lose everything; if one is not comfortable using a specific argument, don’t fake it.

"Hasbara" means, simply, explanation. It refers to public advocacy for Israel. It does not mean deceit, lies, or running away from the truth - quite the opposite. It means telling the truth about Israel and the Arab world in the face of the huge amount of misinformation and lies that exists out there.

So, go ahead, call me a hasbarist. It's a compliment.

Israeli-Palestinian Arab soccer team upsets PalArabs

Earlier this month, the Vancouver International Soccer Festival was held. It included many international teams, including a joint Israeli/Palestinian Arab team. As the Jewish Independent wrote:

The Independent spoke briefly with Noor Daoud and Liraz Cohen, who were visibly eager, having just played a game and done a TV interview, to rejoin their fellow players and enjoy the rest of their night.

Daoud, 21, who is from the West Bank, said she recently completed her studies at Miami University; she has taken a year-long program in criminal justice and two years of fitness training. She is now working at a gym, in addition to playing soccer with an Israeli team. She played on the Palestinian national team, which took her to competitions in places like the United Arab Emirates, Germany and London, but had to change teams because she reached the de facto age-limit of the Palestinian team, which focuses on younger players.

Cohen, 22, is one of the Israelis on the VISF Palestine/Israel team. She said she had just finished a six-month vacation in the United States. She currently lives in Eilat, where she is a bartender, as well as a soccer player.

About the potential impact of VISF, Daoud said, “I think it will really, really help, because we’ve never gone out as both teams [together] like this, we never tried it, it’s our first time, and I’m really enjoying it because it’s been a long time [that] I wished this moment would happen. We’re here now and I’m really happy because we can show the world and everybody here that Israelis and Palestinians can mix and we can become one team. I hope one day we will have huge team in Israel and it will be mixed, Palestinians and Israelis.”

While Daoud was speaking, Cohen put her arm around Daoud’s shoulder in a show of camaraderie. “It’s good for peace, for the future,” said Cohen about VISF. “I think all people are the same and we need peace. That’s it,” she concluded.

This is not sitting well with Hamas.

The Hamas-oriented Felesteen and Palestine Times websites are upset over photos that came out of Canada at the festival:

They are especially upset at how this joint team represents "normalization" with the "Zionist entity" and they note the names of the Arab players and where they are from, in what may be a veiled threat against them.

One comment at the Felesteen site emphasized that "they do not represent the Palestinian people."

Pakistanis killing each other in Karachi - so minister blames Israel

The background:

A wave of deadly political and ethnic violence gripped Pakistan’s largest city for the fourth straight day Friday, and police and paramilitary troops were given orders to shoot suspected assailants on sight.

As many as 95 people have been killed in Karachi since Tuesday in assassinations, shooting rampages on buses and arson attacks, according to law enforcement authorities, who were widely faulted for doing little to stop the carnage. The fighting spread from one multiethnic, lower-middle-class district to other parts of the seaside metropolis, and by Friday the city was under near-lockdown as armed men fired from windows and rooftops.

So, naturally, this must all be Israel's fault!

Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said Israel-made weapons have been recovered from trouble-makers in the city which shows that some external hands were involved in the unrest.

“Weapons are being brought to Karachi from abroad,” he said, adding: “Not only weapons even target killers also were coming from outside.” He said steps are being taken to tackle the situation but did not elaborate.

“Over 200 persons have been arrested and Israel-made weapons, including AK-45s, have been recovered from them. This proves that a foreign hand is behind the unrest in Karachi,” he told newsmen here

Some Pakistani editorials ran with this:

Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s disclosure about the use of Israel-made weapons in Karachi that has for long been in the grip of murderous attacks by rival criminal groups might have surprised those who are unaware of the machinations of the Zionists, but to the informed it was no news. They have always believed, not merely suspected, that not only Israel, but also a wider nexus that brings India and the US into the fold, has been at work stirring up trouble in Pakistan as well as, particularly, other Muslim lands, which could serve their strategic designs of the dominance of certain regions of the world to enable them to appropriate their resources for exploitation. In the case of Pakistan, where war-like situation exists, thanks to the invaders of Afghanistan, the nexus has been active not only in Karachi, but also in Balochistan and elsewhere. The links of the attackers on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore can be traced back to Zionists.

Others are dismissive:

WAS the goal to grab headlines? Or simply to shift responsibility? It was the classic Pakistani conspiracy theory of blaming those mysterious `foreign hands`, but coming from a senior government official in charge of domestic security, Interior Minister Rehman Malik`s statement on Sunday only trivialised the horror Karachi has been through over the last two weeks. Israeli weapons have been found in the port city, Mr Rehman claimed, suggesting that this meant a foreign element was behind Karachi`s unrest. Without more direct linkages between the city`s violence and external powers, this claim defies logic.

If Israel didn't exist, who could the Muslims blame for all their problems?