Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 04, 2011

Egyptian ambassador admits terrorists coming from Gaza to Sinai

Palestine Today reports on statements made by the Egyptian ambassador to the PA, Yasser Osman, in Ramallah.

Osman confirms that Egypt is closing tunnels in Rafah, but not any of the tunnels that are used to smuggle goods into Gaza; rather only the tunnels that "harm the national security of Egypt and the Palestinians."

He said that Egypt plans to increase the number of people travelling through the Rafah crossing, but it has to wait for "the return of calm to the Sinai."

Which means that Egypt is publicly admitting that Gaza terrorists are infiltrating the Sinai and causing problems for Egypt as well as Israel.

While he didn't explicitly say that there was coordination with Hamas on the closing of tunnels, he said that "there is an understanding with the Gaza Strip on the border control and that includes the issue of tunnels."

Arab cartoon threatens Israel

A video from Arabic online cartoon network Kharabeesh:

The warning in Hebrew at the end translates to "Egypt will be the grave of invaders."

The tune at the end is an Arabicized version of Israel's national anthem.

(h/t Yoel)

"Jewish extremist gangs stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque"

Palestine Today writes that "Jewish extremist gangs stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque" this morning.

And they provide a photo of those rampaging, storming Jews:

Shocking, I know. They didn't even have enough respect for the holy spot to play some soccer.

Palestine Times' photo shows haredi visitors to the site today, which is a relatively new and growing phenomenon:

I have no idea why they censored some of the faces.

Wikileaks: Anti-semitism in Tunisia is well hidden

From a newly released Wikileaks cable from January 2007:

In separate meetings on December 12 with the Minister of Religious Affairs, the MFA, and members of Parliament, including Jewish community leader Roger Bismuth, the GOT presented a united front on Tunisia's record of religious tolerance. All interlocutors described the Tunisian model as a shining example of how a minority religious community was supported and protected by government policies. The Minister of Religious Affairs, El Akhzouri, stating a talking point heard throughout the day, said "Tunisian Jews are Tunisians first, Jewish second." Another oft-repeated soundbite heard from GOT officials was: "We shouldn't speak of tolerance, we should speak of acceptance." While recognizing some isolated incidents (Ref B), Tunisian officials denied that anti-Semitism was a significant problem in Tunisia.

...In Djerba, members of the community, including the community president and the Grand Rabbi of Tunisia, picked up where the GOT interlocutors left off the previous day, extolling the virtuous religious policies of President Ben Ali, and repeating throughout the day that "there are no problems." The President of the Djerba Jewish community, Youssef Uzan, nervously intimated to PolFSN that things were not as perfect as everyone said, but would say nothing more. "You may come and go, but we have to stay here and deal with (the GOT) when you are gone," he said, explaining why he did not want to complain about community problems to a foreign visitor. Throughout the day, Uzan had to constantly report on the delegation's whereabouts to GOT authorities (who were tailing the group everywhere in any case), and had to set an extra place when a local GOT official entered uninvited to a lunch prepared by the Jewish community for the visiting delegation.

One community member, a jeweler named XXXXXX, however, quietly told poloff "of course we have problems." While emphasizing that the GOT should be commended for its protection of the community, he said it was "ridiculous to claim that everything was perfect." He spoke at length, and with as much caution as if he were disclosing a state secret, of a long-standing dispute, dating back ten years, with the former community president. The president had received, in the name of the community, a significant donation from the widow of a Tunisian Jew. This former president had misappropriated the funds, and when the community tried to install a new president, the matter went to court. According to the Haddad, the court only recognized the former president since only his name was listed on papers establishing the Jewish association. Haddad told poloff that to officially replace him and gain control of the widow's donation, the community would have to create a new association, but that Tunisia's restrictive law on associations prevented this. Haddad said the former president left Djerba, and was currently living in "a million-dollar" apartment in Tunis, where he enjoyed high-level connections in the GOT.

XXXX also mentioned several periods of tension between the Djerban Jews and their Muslim counterparts. He said that in the early eighties, during a time of increased tension in the Levant, members of the Jewish community were the targets of physical and verbal assault, causing many members of the community to emigrate. He said that this had stopped with Ben Ali's accession to power in 1987, and the protective policies the GOT employed towards the Jewish community. XXXXXX said that the Muslim community now knew that the GOT had made it clear that any assault on the Jewish community would meet severe retribution, as the GOT benefited greatly from "showing the world" Tunisia's Jewish community. XXXXXX quickly noted that, absent this tacit threat, as well as the tangible measures of protection, he feared he and his fellow Jews would "again be stoned in the street."

The former regime was clearly protecting the Jewish community for political purposes and used them as a showcase for their tolerance. The question is, in the new Tunisia, whether the Muslims continue to treat Jews with respect or if things will go downhill for Jews without government protection.

Amnesty seizes on Palmer's criticism of Israel, ignores rest of report

Amnesty International has come out with their comments on the Palmer Report. Curiously, they are only on video.

What is not surprising is:

They seize on the one relatively small part of the report critical of Israel and completely ignore the other parts of the report - including those critical of Turkey and the flotilla organizers.
They do not address, at all, the parts of the report that completely contradict Amnesty's own legal reasonings.
They continue to call the Turkel report a "whitewash" even though the Palmer report was much closer to the Turkel report in most important matters, and Turkel himself recommended that the testimony of soldiers be made public - the exact opposite of a "whitewash."
They never responded to Turkel's not Palmer's, extensive legal arguments.

Truth does not seem to be what Amnesty is interested in.

PA: Palmer report "violates international law" (updated)

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority on Saturday condemned a UN report into a deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish-led aid flotilla as a political document not based on international law.

"This report is terrible and negative. It's a purely political report, it's not legal," Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said of the report on the May 2010 raid which killed nine Turkish activists.

"It's a political report that is not based on international law, but on the contrary, it violates international law, because the Gaza Strip is still under Israeli occupation," he told AFP.

"Israel's actions against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip has reached the level of war crimes," he said.

I have a feeling we will not see a scholarly repudiation of the Palmer report by Erekat, and that his criticisms will remain on the level of the political equivalent of schoolyard insults.

UPDATE: Challah Hu Akbar notes that the PA criticized the report without even reading it!

Poster: How badly do PalArabs want a state?

IAEA concerned over evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons

From the BBC:

The UN nuclear watchdog says it is "increasingly concerned" that Iran is secretly working on components for a nuclear weapons programme.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) describes its information as "extensive and comprehensive".

In a report seen by news agencies, it also says Tehran is preparing to enrich uranium at a new location - an underground bunker near Qom.

The IAEA says "many member states" had provided evidence for its latest assessment on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Extracts of the report, published by the AFP news agency, said the IAEA was "increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organisations".

These included "activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile".

Sleep tight.

The NYPD's "mosque crawlers" and "rakers" look for terror intel

The AP came out with this serious piece of investigative journalism last week, revealing an alleged secret NYPD unit that works with the CIA to gather intelligence on potential Muslim terrorists in the area. Excerpts:

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.

The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what's going on.

Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit.

A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency's payroll, was the architect of the NYPD's intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency's spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.

The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. Police operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.

"The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there's not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard."

AP's investigation is based on documents and interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters.

...

Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior.

To settle a lawsuit, the department agreed to follow guidelines that required "specific information" of criminal activity before police could monitor political activity.

In September 2002, [NYPD intelligence chief David] Cohen told a federal judge that those guidelines made it "virtually impossible" to detect terrorist plots. The FBI was changing its rules to respond to 9/11, and Cohen argued that the NYPD must do so, too.

"In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long," Cohen wrote.

U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. agreed, saying the old guidelines "addressed different perils in a different time." He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones.
It was a turning point for the NYPD.

...

With his newfound authority, Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program.

The NYPD carved up the city into more than a dozen zones and assigned undercover officers to monitor them, looking for potential trouble.

At the CIA, one of the biggest obstacles has always been that U.S. intelligence officials are overwhelmingly white, their mannerisms clearly American. The NYPD didn't have that problem, thanks to its diverse pool of officers.

Using census data, the department matched undercover officers to ethnic communities and instructed them to blend in, the officials said. Pakistani-American officers infiltrated Pakistani neighborhoods, Palestinians focused on Palestinian neighborhoods. They hung out in hookah bars and cafes, quietly observing the community around them.

The unit, which has been undisclosed until now, became known inside the department as the Demographic Unit, former police officials said.

"It's not a question of profiling. It's a question of going where the problem could arise," said Mordecai Dzikansky, a retired NYPD intelligence officer who said he was aware of the Demographic Unit. "And thank God we have the capability. We have the language capability and the ethnic officers. That's our hidden weapon."

The officers did not work out of headquarters, officials said. Instead, they passed their intelligence to police handlers who knew their identities.

Cohen said he wanted the squad to "rake the coals, looking for hot spots," former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers.

A hot spot might be a beauty supply store selling chemicals used for making bombs. Or it might be a hawala, a broker that transfers money around the world with little documentation.

Undercover officers might visit an Internet cafe and look at the browsing history on a computer, a former police official involved in the program said. If it revealed visits to radical websites, the cafe might be deemed a hot spot.

Ethnic bookstores, too, were on the list. If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn. The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny. If a restaurant patron applauds a news report about the death of U.S. troops, the patron or the restaurant could be labeled a hot spot.

The goal was to "map the city's human terrain," one law enforcement official said. The program was modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank, a former police official said.

...The NYPD declined to make Cohen available for comment. In an earlier interview with the AP on a variety of topics, Police Commissioner Kelly said the intelligence unit does not infringe on civil rights.

"We're doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city," he said. "We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties. And we know there's always going to be some tension between the police department and so-called civil liberties groups because of the nature of what we do."

...Undercover agents like the rakers were valuable, but what Cohen and Sanchez wanted most were informants.

The NYPD dedicated an entire squad, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, to developing and handling informants. Current and former officials said Sanchez was instrumental in teaching them how to develop sources.

For years, detectives used informants known as mosque crawlers to monitor weekly sermons and report what was said, several current and former officials directly involved in the informant program said. If FBI agents were to do that, they would be in violation of the Privacy Act, which prohibits the federal government from collecting intelligence on purely First Amendment activities.

...To identify possible informants, the department created what became known as the "debriefing program." When someone is arrested who might be useful to the intelligence unit — whether because he said something suspicious or because he is simply a young Middle Eastern man — he is singled out for extra questioning. Intelligence officials don't care about the underlying charges; they want to know more about his community and, ideally, they want to put him to work.

Police are in prisons, too, promising better living conditions and help or money on the outside for Muslim prisoners who will work with them.

...NYPD's intelligence operations do not stop at the city line.

Cohen's undercover squad, the Special Services Unit, operates in places such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, officials said. They can't make arrests and, if something goes wrong — a shooting or a car accident, for instance — the officers could be personally liable.

But the NYPD has decided it's worth the risk, a former police official said.

With Police Commissioner Kelly's backing, Cohen's policy is that any potential threat to New York City is the NYPD's business, regardless of where it occurs, officials said.

[T]he NYPD's out-of-state operations have had success.

A young Egyptian NYPD officer living undercover in New Jersey, for example, was key to building a case against Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. The pair was arrested last year at John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

Cohen has also sent officers abroad, stationing them in 11 foreign cities. If a bomber blows himself up in Jerusalem, the NYPD rushes to the scene, said Dzikansky, who served in Israel and is the co-author of the forthcoming book "Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response."

"I was there to ask the New York question," Dzikansky said. "Why this location? Was there something unique that the bomber had done? Was there any pre-notification. Was there a security lapse?"

All of this intelligence — from the rakers, the undercovers, the overseas liaisons and the informants — is passed to a team of analysts hired from some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Analysts have spotted emerging trends and summarized topics such as Hezbollah's activities in New York and the threat of South Asian terrorist groups.

There's a lot more. Although the tone of the report is very negative, it does not appear that any of this is illegal. It also looks like the NYPD is going as close to the line as it can without crossing it.

Will Amnesty accuse Palmer of a "whitewash"?

A day after Israel released the Turkel Report on the 2010 flotilla incident, Amnesty International called it a "whitewash" - before they even read the report.

A few days later, they made that accusation clearer, writing a report officially calling the Turkel report a "whitewash." This is not only them disagreeing with the conclusions; it is Amnesty impugning the objectivity and methodology of the Turkel Commission, with no evidence on their part.

Among their charges of Turkel:

The Commission’s failure to account for the deaths reinforces the view that the Israeli authorities are unwilling or incapable of delivering accountability for abuses of international law committed by Israeli forces.

...Amnesty International also contests the Commission’s findings that the purpose of Israel’s naval blockade on Gaza was “primarily a military-security one”....The naval blockade must be assessed in the context of the closure policy implemented by the Israeli government since June 2007 – a siege that constitutes collective punishment and violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Finally, Amnesty International rejects the Turkel Commission’s conclusion that the closure policy is lawful.

All of these points are considered and repudiated in the Palmer report.

Will Amnesty call Palmer a "whitewash" as well? Will they claim that the Zionist lobby infiltrated the UN? Will they continue to pretend that somehow the biased UNHRC report is fair and Palmer is not? Or will they apologize to the Turkel Commission for being largely vindicated by Palmer?

Turkey's temper tantrum

Turkey, which claims that they denied an Israeli request to push off the release of the Palmer report, is outraged that the New York Times released that same report a day early.

And they are downgrading relations with Israel:

Turkey on Friday downgraded its diplomatic relations with Israel to the lowest possible level, expelling the Israeli ambassador and canceling all military agreements with Israel, Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters, a day after The New York Times published a leaked U.N. report into the May 2010 Gaza flotilla incident.

The report backed Israel's legal right to impose a naval blockade on Gaza, but said Israeli commandos used "excessive and unacceptable force" when they commandeered the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the Gaza-bound flotilla, in international waters. The report slammed Turkey for not doing enough to ward off the deadly confrontation at sea. Turkey has rejected the report's conclusions and is sticking to its demand that Israel apologize for the incident, which left nine of its citizens dead, and compensate the victims' families.

A visibly angry Davutoglu told reporters at a press conference that since Israel had not apologized for the incident, Ankara was embarking on a series of steps against Israel, including scrapping all military agreements between the two once-close allies, and downgrading diplomatic ties to the level of second secretary. Davutoglu said that Israel's ambassador in Ankara, Gaby Levy, will leave Turkey by Wednesday.

Davutoglyu said Turkey would initiate legal action against the Gaza blockade in international courts, as well as aid families of those killed in the Gaza flotilla raid in seeking litigation against Israel.

The five measures Turkey is taking against Israel:

1. Downgrade diplomatic ties between the two countries to level of second secretary, effectively expelling diplomats above the said level.

2. All military agreements will be put on hold.

3. Turkey will take measures for freedom of maritime movement in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

4. Turkey will no longer recognize the Gaza blockade and will take the issue to the International Court of Justice.

5. Turkey will support all flotilla victims, Turkish and foreign, in court.

Also:

Turkish President Abdullah Gül on Friday termed a leaked United Nations panel report on the Mavi Marmara incident “null and void” for Turkey, saying a series of decisions taken by the Turkish government in the face of the report are only initial steps, signaling further measures.

Turkey may be outraged, and Israel upset, but Hamas is happy.

So are Israel's Arab MKs. (h/t Sophie)

One more video of the BBC Proms audience reaction

From Richard Millett, who was there and wrote about it:

I don't know about the protocol of classical concerts, but wouldn't it have been great if Mehta had anticipated this and gone into a loud, rhythmic British march piece that could have gotten the audience clapping along each time he was interrupted?

(h/t Silke)

JPost editor says why he fired Derfner

From Steve Linde at the JPost:

Larry Derfner, a veteran journalist who penned a weekly column and reported for our Magazine, crossed the line into the territory of hate speech when in a personal blog last week he sought to justify Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.

His egregious posting came in response to the August 18 terrorist murder of Israeli citizens on the Egyptian border.

“Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack,” Derfner wrote. “Palestinians have the right to resist – to use violence against Israelis, even to kill Israelis.”

These comments are exceptionally offensive to most Israelis, and especially hurtful to those who have been victims of terror. They endorse and encourage, if not incite and inflame, terrorism against Israel.

When Derfner asked that we run the piece in the Post, we rejected it and dissociated ourselves completely from his comments, to which we object in the strongest possible terms.

Even though his column did not appear in the paper, we came to the conclusion that we could no longer provide a stage to someone who openly promulgates such venomous views.

Derfner later wrote an apology that we chose not to run. In it, he expresses deep regret for his blog post, saying: “My intention was to shock people into recognition, but I ended up shocking many of them into revulsion, and twisting what I wanted to say into something I didn’t and don’t mean at all.

“I regret what I wrote [last] Sunday. I apologize to everyone who was offended by it, and I apologize to my countrymen. The post is no longer on my blog; I’ve taken it down.”

The substance of Derfner’s apology itself was not convincing. He used ludicrous logic to defend his position, repeating the same obscene sentiments that made many readers sick to their stomachs in the first place.

He had meant, he said, “to shock Israelis and friends of Israel into seeing how badly we’re hurting the Palestinians by denying them independence: It’s so bad that it’s helping drive them to try to kill us.”

If you saw Oren Kessler’s article in the paper this week about the anti-Israel coverage in the Arab media following the attacks on the southern border, you may have noticed that their commentaries were not significantly different from Derfner’s.

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-inchief of the London-based pan- Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, wrote that Israel bore direct responsibility for the terrorist attack on its soil.

“This attack put the spotlight back on the most important struggle – that for the honor of the Arab and Islamic nation,” Atwan argued. “Resistance is a legitimate right as long as land is occupied and the people and holy places are humiliated.”

Derfner’s blog later appeared on a Hamas website, giving succor to Israel’s enemies.

By trying to rationalize the murder of his fellow Jews by terrorists, Derfner – who has always been the consummate journalist for the Post – went beyond the pale. Consequently we terminated his employment.

We are certainly not silencing the Left, and will continue to feature columnists of all political stripes. Freedom of speech has its limits, however, and Derfner clearly overstepped them.

Derfner is a fine writer but a loose cannon. His column in the Post was titled “Rattling the Cage.” There is a huge difference between rattling the bars and letting the tiger out.

Quick survey of how media framed Palmer report in headlines

The Palmer Report was almost completely in line with Israel's own Turkel Report with one notable exception, that they felt that Israeli actions on the Mavi Marmara were "excessive." clearly its major point was that the blockade on Gaza is legal and that Israel has the legal right (actually, obligation) to maintain it. It also said the organizers were reckless and that the IDF faced significant, organised and violent resistance. In addition, it showed clearly that it was not a humanitarian mission.

Many newspapers, however, emphasized the relatively small part that was critical of Israel. And the identity of some of those is surprising.

The Independent: UN censures Israel for raid on flotilla that killed nine Turks
MSN News India: Israel used excessive force on flotilla: UN inquiry
Irish Times: UN says Gaza ship raid 'excessive'
The Telegraph: UN inquiry calls Israel flotilla raid 'excessive'
Washington Post: U.N. calls Israeli raid ‘unreasonable’
WSJ: U.N. Calls Israel Force on Flotilla 'Excessive'

Other news outlets had headlines that were either "evenhanded" or more accurate:

Radio Free Europe: UN Panel Faults Both Sides In Gaza Flotilla Clash
San Francisco Chronicle: Israel justified, hit in U.N. report on blockade
Boston Globe: Israel blockade of Gaza legal, UN review says; Force against Turkish flotilla called excessive
TVNZ (New Zealand): Israeli blockade deemed legal by UN

Most interestingly, RTE/Ireland originally had a headline that said "UN report says Gaza blockade was legal" but it then changed it to Israel used "excessive force" on Mavi Marmara.