Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Tuesday night movie: The Chosen

I was not a big fan of Chaim Potok's books but as I recall this was not a bad movie. (From Hulu, with some commercials.)

(h/t Israel Video Network)

Wikileaks: Fearful Jews emigrating from Iran

From a Wikileaks cable from August 2009:

Morris Motamed, a former two-term MP for Iran's Jewish community, told IRPO that four Jewish youths were arrested by Basij militiamen while participating in the June 20 street demonstrations in Tehran. The four teenagers spent one night herded into a parking lot with dozens of other detained demonstrators. According to their families, the whole group was badly beaten with batons and stun guns throughout the night before being moved to a police station, where the physical abuse continued. Two of the young men were released after "two or three days" but the other two were transferred to Evin Prison and held 18 days. According to Motamed, who said he maintains ties with many former and current IRIG officials from his days as an MP, the two young men were released after he spoke with Hossein Ali Amiri, who is the deputy to Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Shahroudi. The two were re-arrested in their homes on July 18 by "IRGC security."...Motamed said that at least one of the young men picked up July 18, Yeghoutiel Shaoolian, was among the detainees prosecuted in the August 1 show trial. He said that Shaoolian's mother told him that at some point during his incarceration her son made a taped statement in which he confessed to spying for Israel. Motamed believes that Shaoolian's confession may be linked to the testimony of the "unnamed spy" referenced in the six-part indictment released by the government in advance of the trial. Motamed, who was an MP during the trial of the 13 Jewish Iranians arrested in 1999 in Shiraz and Esfahan on espionage charges, fears a repeat of that ordeal, which he says had far-reaching repercussions for Iran's Jewish community.

Motamed said that the consensus of the community is that only about 20,000 Jews now remain in Iran and noted that emigration has increased over the past two years following President Ahmadinejad's increasingly strident rhetoric against Israel and his public questioning of the Holocaust. Though Jewish Iranians "continue to love Iran" they are being compelled to leave, mostly out of fear that they will become targets of a government backlash should Israel confront Iran militarily. Motamed said he lives in fear of an Israeli strike because the Jewish community has no ability to protect itself from what he believes would be a wide-scale attack on Jews and Jewish interests. He said that while economic opportunity and the chance to live somewhere as a "first-class citizen" do factor into decisions to leave, the uptick in departures is driven mostly by fear of the future. Motamed noted that as a community leader, he has been asked for many years his opinion by Jews weighing their options. Until two years ago, he told people they had to make the decision themselves. Now, he said, he recommends moving out of Iran to every Jew who asks his opinion. He estimated that 80 percent of Jews emigrate to the United States, while the rest relocate to Israel or Europe. (Note: Motamed's wife is emigrating to the U.S. and he is considering his options.)

Some official Jordanian anti-semitism on Wikileaks

From a July 2009 Wikileaks cable:

Another intensely debated amendment concerned Article Twenty-Nine, which outlines restrictions on non-Muslim religious NGOs in Jordan. The amended article as submitted by the government to parliament allows non-Muslim religious organizations to provide "social and charitable services" as long as those services are not part of a proselytizing campaign. During the debate, MP Mamdouh Abbadi warned that the article as written would allow "Jews, Buddhists, and Baha'is" to establish religious charities in Jordan. He proposed an amendment that would only permit Christian organizations to form non-Muslim religious charities. IAF deputy Suleiman Sa'ad, warning deputies of the potentially nefarious influence of foreign religious charities, proposed a further amendment which would only allow non-Muslim religious organizations to operate in Jordan if their members were Jordanian. Abbadi countered that non-Jordanian religious organizations have set up hospitals and other service-oriented programs which provide valuable services to the Jordanian public at no cost to the government. In the end, Abbadi's amendment carried the day and Sa'ad's amendment was defeated -- only Christians will be allowed to establish non-Muslim religious organizations, but there will be no requirement that they be of Jordanian nationality.

Allowing Jews, Buddhists and Baha'is to open up charities in Jordan? How obscene!

Do Muslims ever apologize to non-Muslims?

Ma'an Arabic reports that a delegation of rabbis apologized for the arson against a mosque apparently done by Jews from Judea and Samaria a few days ago. Last year there was an apology by well-known rabbis for a similar incident.

Not condemnations - but apologies.

In light of this, as well as the recent kerfuffles over Israel's apologies and statements of regret to Egypt and Turkey, the question must be asked: do Muslims and Arabs ever apologize to the West for their actions?

There are some very rare occasions when one sees an Arab or Muslim apology to non-Muslims.

Abu Abbas, who masterminded the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1986, apologized ten years later for the killing of Leon Klinghoffer, saying it was a mistake.

An Egyptian and an Arab American citizen apologized on behalf of their people for 9/11.

And, in a very moving gesture, Jordan's King Hussein made a heartfelt apology for the murders of seven Israeli schoolgirls at the "Island of Peace."

Outside of these isolated cases, I am having a hard time finding any apologies by Arabs to non-Arabs. It is slightly easier finding Muslim apologies to other Muslims. Mahmoud Abbas apologized to Kuwait for the PLO's support of Saddam Hussein, for example. Turkey once apologized to the family of a man beaten to death in prison. Saudi Arabia apologized to Indonesia for beheading a maid without informing them. All of these are rare enough, but they are to Muslims.

A telling counterexample: in 1972, Japan apologized to Israel for a terror attack perpetrated by the Japanese Red Army at Lod airport - and Arab nations were incensed at that apology.

Finding apologies to the Muslim world by the West is easy. But given the tens of thousands who have been killed and mistreated by Muslims and Arabs, and the ubiquitous demands by Muslim leaders for non-Muslims to apologize for a huge array of perceived grievances, where are all the Muslim apologies?

Unity! Gaza and West Bank are in different timezones

I noted last week that Hamas decided to adopt a different date for moving from Daylight Savings Time than Fatah did, meaning that Gaza is now in a different time zone than the West Bank.

Al Arabiya elaborates:

Palestinian divisions have for the past years seemed endless, yet they were mostly political. Now, another problem has emerged: Gaza and the West Bank look like two officially separate countries, with a one-hour difference between them that confuses Palestinians and adds to their despair as far as unity in the Occupied Territories is concerned.

Until a few days ago, both the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank were within the same time zone, and both adjusted clocks backward before the start of the holy month of Ramadan so that sunset, when the fast is broken, would come one hour earlier.

After the end of Ramadan, the West Bank went back to its daylight saving time and advanced the clock one hour, while Gaza remained in wintertime so that, for example, when it’s midnight in Gaza, it is 1:00 am in Ramallah.

The time difference is all the more absurd now that two adjacent universities are using two different time zones. Al-Azhar University, located in Gaza yet affiliated to Fatah, announced working according to summertime, while the Islamic University right next to it is using wintertime. The two campuses are separated by a wall.

“This is ridiculous,” said student and blogger Khaled al-Sharkawi. “I live in Gaza but my university is following the West Bank time zone.”

The university case is repeated in several other examples. Private banks and international organizations in Gaza follow West Bank time, while schools, hospitals, and public institutions follow Gaza time. The website Date and Time, which tells you the time anywhere in the world, lists both times for Palestinian territories.

Gazan journalist Sami Abu Salem points out how the time difference between Gaza and the West Bank has become a joke for Palestinians.

“When it is 5:00 o’clock in Gaza and you ask someone in the street about the time, they tell you it’s 5:30, and when you ask why they added half an hour they answer that they don’t want to be biased towards Hamas or Fatah.”

Student Hamman Mubarak approaches the issue in a much more bitter way.

“There’s no problem with time difference. We are two republics and are divided about everything anyway,” he wrote in one of his tweets.

The tweet of IT specialist Ola Anan approached the issue politically and playfully imagined the confusion that might happen when Palestine asks for official recognition at the UN this month.

“I wonder if they will recognize the Palestinian state according to Gaza time or West Bank time.”

For writer Samir Abu Shetat, the difference in time is just one more addition to the internal divisions between Palestinians.

“It is this bitter division that turned our lives into hell,” he said. “The division splits our backs like it split our nation and our people.”

“I pray to God to unify our clocks.”

How's that unity coming along?

And the question is a good one: who will be represented in that new UN seat they are angling for?

Iran hacked Dutch digital certificates to spy on Iranian citizens

From The Register:

The Google webmail of as many as 300,000 Iranians may have been intercepted using fraudulently issued security certificates made after a hack against Dutch certificate authority outfit DigiNotar, according to the preliminary findings of an official report into the megahack.

Fox-IT, the security consultancy hired to examine the breach against DigiNotar, reveals that DigiNotar was hacked on or around 6 June – a month before hackers begun publishing rogue certificates. Between 10 July and 20 July hackers used compromised access to DigiNotar's systems to issue rogue 531 SSL certificate for Google and other domains, including Skype, Mozilla add-ons, Microsoft update and others. DigiNotar only begun revoking rogue certificates on 19 July and waited more than a month later to go public about the problem. The fake *.google.com certificate – which was valid for code-signing – wasn't revoked until 29 July.

The compromise was used, in part, to spy on Iranian internet users, using the forged Google SSL certificate to run man-in-the-middle attacks.

"The list of domains and the fact that 99 per cent of the users are in Iran suggest that the objective of the hackers is to intercept private communications in Iran," [Fox-IT] adds.

In English, this means that Iran apparently forged the certificates that are used to ensure that web traffic to various websites - like Google - is correctly encrypted. This means that Iran was able to spy on email and web traffic that even the most conscientious user would have assumed was safe from prying eyes.

Or, as Israel Hayom describes it:

In theory, a fraudulent certificate can be used to trick a user into visiting a fake version of a Web site, or used to monitor communications with the real sites without users noticing.

But in order to pass off a fake certificate, a hacker must be able to steer his target’s Internet traffic through a server that he controls. That is something only an Internet service provider, or a government that commands one, can easily do.

According to AP, technology experts cite a number of reasons to believe the attack is connected to Iran. Notably, several of the certificates contain nationalist slogans in Farsi, the language spoken by most Iranians.

“This, in combination with messages the hacker left behind on DigiNotar’s Web site, definitely suggests that Iran was involved,” Ot van Daalen, director of Bits of Freedom, an online civil liberties group, told AP.

Robert Fisk really wants to blame 9/11 on Israel

From Robert Fisk in The Independent:

I'm drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. "All the evidence ... indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level," they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on "the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel". Palestine, the authors state, "was certainly the principal political grievance ... driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg".

The motivation for the attacks was "ducked" even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this "issue" – cliché code word for "problem" – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: "This was sensitive ground ...Commissioners who argued that al-Qa'ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa'ida's opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy." And there you have it.

So what happened? The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, "settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive". There's a hint in the official report – but only in a footnote which, of course, few read. In other words, we still haven't told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – "changed the world for ever". Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I'm really not surprised.

When the Israeli Prime Minister gets even the US Congress to grovel to him, the American people are not going to be told the answer to the most important and "sensitive" question of 9/11: why?

Fisk believes that if the US would have dumped Israel as an ally - during the Oslo process, naturally - Bin Laden wouldn't have attacked America!

So simple! So clear! And there is even a book that says so!

(Actually, the book says that the hijackers and KSM were obsessed with "Palestine" - Fisk wants us to make that last logical leap that there would have been no attacks if it wasn't for Israel.)

Too bad that the words of Bin Laden himself make it clear that he threw in "Palestine" in order
to buttress his anti-American arguments. It wasn't his top issue by any stretch.

To find this out, all you need to do is read two fatwas issued by Bin Laden against America - in 1996 and in 1998.

The 1996 fatwa says explicitly that the major issue for Bin Laden was US forces in Saudi Arabia:

The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.

The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about "Human Rights" were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.

The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka'ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (We bemoan this and can only say: "No power and power acquiring except through Allah").

And in his 1998 fatwa Bin laden was kind enough to enumerate his grievances in order of importance:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

In 2002, Yasir Arafat - clearly frustrated that his PLO was being compared to Al Qaeda - said that Bin Laden never did anything for "Palestine":

"Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now?" Mr. Arafat said. "He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests."

In the Muslim world, if you want to gain a following, you have to blame everything on Zionism. OBL's words make it clear that his attachment to that cause was a cynical attempt to broaden his appeal to would-be jihadists, not a reflection of Al Qaeda's single-minded focus against America.

But Fisk knows better. His own hate for Israel is so visceral that he must find reasons to blame 9/11 on Israel, however elliptically. Which makes him no better than any of the crazy 9/11 conspiracy theorists - the same crazy people who are demolished in that same book that Fisk quotes so approvingly.

(h/t jzaik)

Palestinian Arabs deported to Gaza - by Egypt

You know how it is an international incident every time Israel sends a Palestinian Arab to Gaza?

Yesterday, Egypt deported three Palestinian Arabs to Gaza. They had entered Egypt illegally, via the tunnels.

Egyptians build wall to protect Israel embassy; activists vow to destroy it

From AFP:

The Egyptian authorities are erecting a wall around the Israeli embassy in Cairo as relations between the two neighbors who signed a peace treaty in 1979 are at a delicate phase.

The wall, about two meters high, consists of prefabricated cement slabs that are being installed around the building that houses the Israeli embassy overlooking a bridge in Cairo.

Part of the wall has been painted with Egypt's national colors: black, white and red.

Egyptian officials quoted by the local media have meanwhile stressed that the wall being erected around the embassy was aimed at protecting residents of nearby buildings.

Ali Abdel Rahman, the governor of Giza district where the embassy is located, told Al-Gumhuriyya newspaper the wall "has nothing to do with the protection of the Israeli embassy" but is for the protection of private citizens.

Some Egyptians aren't happy, and plan to destroy the wall:

Egyptian activists called for a people's march to the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Friday for the demolition of the concrete wall which was established by Giza to protect the embassy.

Activists in dozens of posts on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter called for all participants in the march to carry hammers to use to demolish the concrete wall that has become known as among the Egyptians as the "separation wall."

Egypt's reaction on Friday will be interesting.

(h/t Dan)

Palestinian Arabs would prefer negotiations to UN unilateralism

In the latest PCPO poll, released yesterday, this question was asked of Palestinian Arabs:

Which, in your opinion, is the preferable option for the future of Palestine? Is it going to the United Nations for the recognition of the Palestinian state without concluding a peace agreement with Israel, or going back to the negotiation table with the Israelis for the sake of a permanent peace with them and then resort to the UN?

59.3% said it was better to go back to the negotiating table with Israel; only 35.4% said going to the UN was preferable.

Another interesting finding is that a plurality of Palestinian Arabs oppose "holding huge peaceful demonstrations in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem with the aim as to overrun the barriers and close the roads against the Israeli army and the settlers after the proclamation of the recognition of the State of Palestine in the coming September" - 48.8% vs. 41.5%.

And given a three way choice:

Some people say that Palestinians should hold huge peaceful demos that overrun the barriers and close the roads against the Israeli army and the settlers with the aim to force the Israelis to withdraw from the territories of the State of Palestine after the proclamation of the UN-resolution recognizing the State of Palestine, whilst others say Palestinians should carry out violent actions against the Israeli army and the settlers, and a third group of people is in favor of going back to the peaceful negotiations with the Israeli government. Which of these three opinions is the closest to yours?

25.9% support demonstrations
15.2% support violence
53.4% support negotiations

Then again, when did anyone accuse the Palestinian Arab leadership of listening to their people?

Today's garbage from Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen in the New York Times says that Israel's refusal to apologize to Turkey over the Mavi Marmara is terrible for Israel:

Overall, the panel finds that Israel should issue “an appropriate statement of regret” and “make payment for the benefit of the deceased and injured victims and their families.”

Yes, Israel, increasingly isolated, should do just that. An apology is the right course and the smart course. What’s good for Egypt — an apology over lost lives — is good for Turkey, too.

...[L]ocked in its siege mentality, led by the nose by Lieberman and his ilk — unable to grasp the change in the Middle East driven by the Arab demand for dignity and freedom, inflexible on expanding settlements, ignoring U.S. prodding that it apologize — Israel is losing one of its best friends in the Muslim world, Turkey. The expulsion last week of the Israeli ambassador was a debacle foretold.

Israeli society, as it has shown through civic protest, deserves much better.

First, let's get Cohen's usual sloppiness with the facts out of the way.

The Palmer Commission recommended that Israel express regret, not that Israel apologize. And Israel did just that - over a year ago.

Israel reiterated that regret on Friday when the report was released. So Cohen is claiming that Israel obstinately refuses to do what Palmer recommended - when Israel already did.

Moreover, Israel did give a full apology to Egypt after the deaths of soldiers in the Sinai as Israel was pursuing terrorists - and Egypt rejected that apology as insufficient. In other words, demands for apologies in the Muslim world are a political tool, not an actual reflection of national pride, and acceding to them just engender more demands.

But what do you expect from a prestigious New York Times columnist - actual facts?

Let's look at the larger context. Cohen is insisting that Israel spologize for killing Turkish citizens who were violently attacking IDF soldiers with clubs, knives and chains as well as throwing soldiers overboard. The reason is that Israel's refusal to apologize hurts Israel-Turkish relations.

Last I checked, relations are a two way street. So it is equally accurate to say that Turkey's demand for an apology that it does not deserve is hurtful for Israel-Turkey relations. The Palmer Commission report, that I doubt Cohen actually read, blamed Turkey for not doing enough to stop the flotilla as violence was fairly likely.

To Cohen and his friends, however, Turkey's trumped up demand for dignity is inherently more important than Israel's dignity. Only Israel should bend its knee in abject apology (an apology that would probably also be deemed "insufficient") - in order to save the relationship. Israel must adhere to the demands of realpolitik while Islamist thugs are free to demand more and more to protect their own pride.

As usual, Israel is expected to act like the grownup, to look beyond intangibles like national pride and indeed the truth of what happened on the Mavi Marmara, while Muslim countries are expected to act like children that can make demands of apology from Western states whenever they want to - and then raise the stakes when the apologies aren't abject enough.

Cohen would never require any Muslim or Arab nation apologize for anything done to the West. That's just not how things are done in the Middle East. To him, only Arabs and Muslims have pride - Westerners don't.

As stupid and inaccurate as Cohen's piece was, he looks absolutely sane next to MJ Rosenberg, who used Cohen's piece as a springboard to come to the hilariously imbecilic conclusion that Turkey is Israel's best friend for demanding an apology and not acting like an "enabler."

PCHR's condemnation of Palmer shows its hypocrisy

It is hardly surprising that the Palestinian Center for Human Rights is livid at the Palmer Report finding that many of its well-worn anti-Israel tropes over the years are invalid:

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the report of the Panel of Inquiry (Palmer Committee) established by the UN Secretary-General to investigate the attack on Mavi Marmara, one of the ships of the Freedom Flotilla, while it was in international waters and headed to the Gaza Strip, carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza’s civilian population. PCHR believes that the Committee prioritized political considerations over the rule of international law and the rights of victims, while legitimizing the policy of collective punishment represented in the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip.

...PCHR believes that the Panel of Inquiry, established by UN Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-moon on 02 August 2010, which started its mission on 10 August 2010, is purely political, and consequently, its conclusions are purely political.

PCHR further believes that the Panel of Inquiry lacks professionalism as its conclusions contradict various legal opinions issued by many international legal experts and UN bodies concerned with human right and international humanitarian law...

PCHR totally rejects the findings of the report of Palmer Committee considering it is politicized and disregards for the international law. PCHR calls upon all international organizations to condemn the report, and not to deal with the findings that contradict with international law and human rights standards.

Have you ever seen a so-called "human rights" organization demand that other human rights organizations condemn a UN Panel of Inquiry?

This part is even more interesting:

PCHR supports the move of the Government of Turkey to the International Court of Justice, as the highest international judicial body to consider this crime, and reminds of its Advisory Opinion on the wall in the West Bank issued in July 2004, which considered the siege imposed on the Occupied Palestinian Territory a form of collective punishment prohibited under the international law.

The ICJ's flawed advisory opinion on Israel's security barrier did find it to be illegal, but nowhere in that document did it say that the reason is because the barrier is "collective punishment."

The PCHR makes up its own facts.

We can see more than a little psychological projection going on here. While the PCHR said no less than four times that the Palmer Commission was politicized, it brought not a scintilla of evidence to back up that charge. But the PCHR itself is suffused with anti-Israel politics, as it cannot even use the term "Israel Defense Forces" in any of its press releases, instead referring to Israel's army as "Israeli Occupation Forces."

As I and my team exhaustively proved, the PCHR knowingly referred to hundreds of terrorists killed during Cast Lead/Operation Oil Stain as "civilians."

There are plenty of other examples where the PCHR clearly played politics rather than report the truth.

This lying and thoroughly politicized organization gets funding from donors like The Ford Foundation, Christian Aid, Oxfam, the EU, Norway and Denmark (as well as from George Soros.)

Perhaps these donors should start to require that PCHR adheres to a minimum standard of objectivity and truthfulness.

Abbas: "Palestinians have been under occupation for 63 years"

From NYT, in an interview with Mahmoud Abbas:

We don’t want to isolate Israel but to live with it in peace and security. We don’t want to delegitimize Israel. We want to legitimize ourselves.

All well and good - except for what he said immediately prior to this:

We are going to complain [at the UN] that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.

How can one reconcile those two statements? If Israel has been occupying their land since its birth in 1948, doesn't that make Israel illegitimate?

(Somehow, I don't think he was referring to Jordanian occupation.)

The New York Times' Ethan Bronner, as usual, did not ask for clarification. And Mahmoud Abbas remains free to say whatever he wants to whatever audience he wants without fear of someone pointing out that he is a liar.

(h/t Dan)

Labor Day open thread

Vacation day here in the US, so here's an open thread while I do some things in the real world....

Palestinian Arab newspaper Al Majd has a study about USAID, the American governmental agency dedicated to offering humanitarian assistance and to help build democratic institutions.

The report accuses USAID of actually being involved in espionage and describes it as one of the most dangerous organizations in the world.

As evidence, the report notes that USAID requires partner NGOs and employees to sign an agreement renouncing terrorism and violence.

Not only that, but USAID will actually do background checks to verify that employees aren't terrorists - and, in the Palestinian Arab territories, they will even ask Israel to help with the verification!

This "study" goes on to say that the only people who remain after this vetting process are those who have "abandoned their national heritage."

In other words, terrorism and violence is - according to Al Majd - part of the Palestinian Arab national heritage.

The report piles on the horrid things USAID does. It actually encourages Palestinian Arabs to work with Israelis in the name of coexistence and peace! It promotes normalization with the "Zionist enemy"!

The study concludes that the entire point of USAID is to humiliate the Palestinian Arabs.

Of course, no one is forcing Palestinian Arabs to accept any aid from the US. Perhaps if the conditions for aid are so onerous, the PA should politely inform USAID that their money should be better spent elsewhere in the world.

I'm certain that American anti-Israel groups, who are so concerned over their tax dollars that go to Israel, would support USAID dropping all aid to the Palestinian Arabs as well.