Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 03, 2011

Unclear on the concept, Erekat accuses US of "blackmail"

From Ma'an:

Senior PLO official Saeb Erekat said on Sunday that US threats to withdraw aid to Palestinians over the bid for UN membership were "unacceptable".

...Erekat told reporters in Cairo "we appreciate US aid, but to be blackmailed and bargained with over our right to self-determination, on Jerusalem, and on our Arab and Islamic identity is unacceptable."

Blackmail?

Erekat is telling the US that the hundreds of millions of dollars that are paid by US taxpayers to the PA every year are not negotiable - that the PA deserves it, period. The US, according to Erekat, has no right to put any conditions on the money it pays the PA whatsoever. And if, Allah forbid, the US tries to influence the PA in any way, it is guilty of "blackmail."

The definition of blackmail, of course, has nothing to do with this scenario in any universe outside Saeb Erekat's fevered imagination. The closest one can come to that term in the Middle East is how the Palestinian Arabs regularly threaten the US and the world with terrorism if they don't get their way - not blackmail, but a Mafia-type protection racket.

Notice also how Erekat, who regularly rails against the very idea of Israel being considered the Jewish state, has no compunction to say that the supposedly democratic Palestinian Arab state would have an "Arab and Islamic identity."

Erekat's hypocrisy shines through yet again.

Polish soccer fans wave massive "Jihad" banner at Israeli team

From Australia's news.com.au:

ANTI-racism groups are outraged after Polish soccer fans waved a "Jihad" banner at an Israeli team.

Anti-racism groups have called on European football's governing body UEFA to punish Polish club Legia Warsaw after fans brandished a "Jihad" banner during a Europa League match against Israeli side Hapoel Tel Aviv.

"This is yet another case of anti-Semitic behaviour by extremist groups active in Polish football stadiums, and it could have been predicted," said Rafal Pankowski of the campaign group Never Again.

At the start of Thursday night's Group C home game in Warsaw - which Legia won 3-2 - a group of fans unfurled a huge banner stretching across three blocks of a stand.

Written in Arabic-style letters, it read "Jihad Legia". The banner was green, which is one of Legia's colours but also that of Islamist groups.

"Some Legia fans have been known for anti-Semitic and extreme-right behaviour for years and they had a chance to express their hatred of Jews again when Legia played an Israeli team, this time adopting a pseudo-Islamist guise," added Mr Pankowski, who runs the UEFA-backed Football Against Racism in Europe network.

Miroslaw Starczewski, deputy head of security at Poland's PZPN football association, said Legia could be hit hard by UEFA.

"Legia should pay the price for this," Mr Starczewski told the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

"A fine is the most likely penalty. And UEFA may even ban Legia fans from the second leg in Tel Aviv."

Legia's away game in the Israeli city is scheduled for December 15.

Under its disciplinary rules, UEFA could levy a fine of up to a million euros ($1.4 million).

Far-right and anti-Semitic banners and slogans are notably shocking given Poland's World War II history, when millions perished at the hands of occupying Nazi Germany, including the overwhelming majority of Europe's Jews.

Will we hear the "Jihad means inner struggle" defense?

(h/t Silke)

Reports that Ilan Grapel will be released this week

From Al Ahram:

Al-Hayat newspaper claimed on Sunday that Ilan Grapel, an Israeli-American citizen accused of spying for the Mossad, will depart Egypt with the US secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, on Tuesday.

The unnamed official source added that what Grapel did was not espionage and thus he can be released in return for economic benefits for Egypt.

US congressman Gary Ackerman, who is lobbying for the release of Grapel, offered an increase in economic support for Egypt.

The family of Grapel visited him in his jail with the presence of the American consul in Cairo last Thursday.

Palestine Today quotes Israel's Channel 10 as saying that Israel will release Egyptian prisoners in exchange for Grapel.

Grapel's incarceration, which started last June, was extended for yet another 45 days in mid-September.

PA to stop paying Gaza's electric bills

Get ready for more staged heartbreaking photos of Gazans with candles.

Remember this staged photo from Reuters?

Palestine Today reports that the Palestinian Authority has informed the Hamas-led Gaza government that it will phase out payments of Gaza's electric bill over the rest of the year.

Currently, the Ramallah government pays an Israeli electric company to provide electricity to Gaza.

In September, the PA paid 40 million shekels for Gaza's electricity, but it plans to reduce that amount by 10 million shekels a month down to zero by January 2012.

The PA told the Gazans that they will have to pay for their own electricity, as the financial crisis is forcing the PA to reduce services.

The PA pointed out that some 70-80% of Gaza's electric customers have not been paying their bills, and that the Gaza utility companies must do a better job collecting their bills.

As far as I can tell, despite this financial crisis, the PA continues to pay salaries to terrorists in Israeli prison and stipends to their families. Some things are just too important to consider cutting.

Especially since they know that any electricity shortage in Gaza will be blamed on Israel anyway.

Muslim mob torches another church in Egypt (update - video)

From AINA:

After Friday prayers, a mob of several thousand Muslims from the village of Elmarinab in Edfu, Aswan province, demolished and torched St. George's church, which was being renovated. The mob demolished the dome, walls and columns, then went to the church depot where the lumber to be used for construction was stored and torched it. The fire lasted 2 hours but the attack continued until 7 PM.

In an interview on Coptic TV channel, Father Salib of St. George's Church said "the Imam of one of the village mosques called on the people to take matter in their own hands, he added. Other witnesses named the Imam as Sheikh Sabry.

According to eyewitnesses the Muslims also torched a large depot of electrical goods owned by a Copt, a supermarket and four Coptic homes. Muslims prevented the fire brigade from entering the village. Security forces, which were present, "stood there watching," said Mr.Michael Ramzy, a social worker at the church.

Dr. Naguib Gabriel, head of the Egyptian Union of Human rights Organizations send an urgent message to field Marchall Tantawi to save the Copts in Egypt. "The Copts, their lives and their churches are in danger," he said.

Attorney Mamdouh Nakhla, head of Al-Kalema human rights organization condemned Muslims taking the law in their own hands. He said "if the Egyptian Government is unable to protect its citizens, then the civilized international society should step in immediately to stop this human tragedy."

The only English-language Egyptian media to cover the incident was Bikya Masr:

Aswan’s governor denied the burning of a church in Edfu, in southern Egypt, on Friday and said there was no attack on the church since there is no church “but a Christian guest house,” adding that the situation has calmed and the clashes stopped.

Governor Mostafa el-Said told Channel One, Egypt’s national TV channel, late on Friday that reports stating violence against a church in the city were “wrong.”

Eyewitnesses, however, have reported that a number of Muslim men surrounded church and set fire to parts of it, then moved to Coptic houses in the area, where they set fire to buildings and vandalized a grocery store.

They added that violence continued into the night, with the men using gas containers to set a residential home on fire, while another reported that one of the Muslims said “we don’t want Copts in our town.”

Eyewitnesses have confirmed that some men tried to stop the fire trucks from reaching the burning buildings, which contributed to financial damages for the city.

El-Said said that the clashes erupted after construction was taking place at the guest house with “the intention of turning it into a church which provoked the Muslims.”

He added that the Copts had permission to build on the guest house for 9 meters only, but they exceeded that and increased the building by 13 meters.

He said the Muslims “got angry” and the Copts admitted to the wrongdoing and promised to remove the extra floors, but there was a delay in the removal “which made a local Islamic clerk mobilize young men and head there to remove it themselves.”

That burning smell in the air? That's the fragrance of Arab Spring!

(h/t Ya'akov S, jzaik)

"Zionist-Free Middle East" conference in Tehran

Iranian monomania:

Students from Iran and other Muslim states on Sunday convened in an anti-Israel meeting in Tehran titled as 'A Zionist-Free Middle-East' to voice their support for the Palestinian schoolboys and children.

Iranian Education Minister Hamid Reza Haji Babaee addressed the opening ceremony of the conference on Sunday, and briefed the participants on the principles of Iran's policy on the Palestinian issue.

"Our policy on the Palestinian issue is neither political nor temporary; rather to us, the Palestinian issue is a divine belief in defending Islamic lands and Muslim people," Haji Babaee said.

He also reiterated the world arrogant powers' animosity towards the Palestinian nation is actually enmity and hostility towards Islam.

"They have not attacked just a part of Islamic territories; rather they have attacked Islam itself" by their aggressions against the oppressed Palestinian nation, the minister continued.

The 'Zionist-Free Middle-East' conference is being held in Tehran concurrently with the 5th International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada which started work in Tehran on Saturday.

Tunisia refuses to grant visas to Palestinian Arab bloggers

This week there is an Arab bloggers' conference in Tunisia.

But they are excluding the bloggers from one Arab "nation", as this tweet shows:

@ifikrasami ben gharbia

Tunisian IM refused to give Palestinian bloggers visas to attend the 3 Arab bloggers meeting in Tunis for unknown reasons #AB11

An Arabic tweeter confirmed, saying that Tunisia would not recognize bloggers using Palestinian Arab passports.

It seems that Jewish pro-Arab bloggers from Israel were denied as well, from this tweet from anti-Zionist Joseph Dana, which he has since deleted:

Isn't that interesting?

New Gilo housing plan is nowhere near any Arab communities

The world has been aghast at the very idea that the Jerusalem municipality approved expanding its Gilo neighborhood with 1100 new housing units.

But where exactly are the planned units going to be?

Here is Gilo as it looks today.

The green line is The Green Line. The blue line is roughly were the municipal boundary of Jerusalem is. Here is a larger view of Gilo within Jerusalem's boundaries. (The red line is the security fence.)

Gilo has had plans to expand for a while now.

This map from the Jerusalem Municipality website shows, in orange, the various potential areas in which Gilo could expand, mostly to the west and the north as well as filling in the area between the two western "peninsulas":

Notice that the boundaries of the Gilo neighborhood in the second map already includes all of the proposed expansions in the orange area above.

The total number of units in all the proposals is about 5000.

Here are four specific housing proposals from last year:

As far as I can tell, from emailing people who know the area as well as from news stories about the development, the proposed new housing units that is so upsetting the world are on the northwest part of Gilo, going into what is now the Gilo Forest - the one that is listed as 820 units in the map above.

Going back to the first map, we can see that the proposed housing does not go towards any Arab areas at all. The only space it take are a forest and park built by the Jerusalem municipality. It does not take up any land ever owned by Arabs. It is not "encroaching" on "Arab land." Instead, it is going towards the Jewish parts of "west" Jerusalem!

(UPDATE: Missing Peace says that the area being built is the land north of and between the two western "peninsulas.")

There is nothing at all controversial about the idea of Gilo expanding to the northwest. There is no possible way that any of that land would ever be part of an Arab state.

The reflexive condemnation of every single expansion within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries of existing Jewish communities is not based on any logical or legal objection. It is simply a tacit acceptance by the world community of the reprehensible idea that the PLO has veto power over construction in much of Jerusalem.

And that is simply not acceptable.

Lots more weapons seized in Egypt

From AFP:

Egypt’s security forces on Thursday seized a large weapons cache including anti-aircraft missiles and an aircraft bomb,, the official MENA news agency reported.
North Sinai security forces found 545 mortars, eight anti-aircraft missiles and a 70-kilogram (around 150-pound) aircraft bomb in a cave in the Sinai mountains, MENA said.

There were no immediate details on the origin or intended destination of the weapons.

Al Masry al Youm reports today on a huge shipment of 200,000 weapons components caught at an Egyptian port coming from China.

Between Libya, the Sudan, the Sinai terrorists and Gaza, Egypt is turning into a major weapons smuggling crossroads.

And you can be sure that they are not catching most of the weapons crossing the country.

Hamas and Fatah's on-again, off-again talks

Palestine Press Agency reports that the Secretary of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah announced that there would be a meeting between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo in mid-October to discuss reconciliation.

But immediately afterwards, Palestine Today quoted a different Fatah official as denying that here are any planned meetings this month.

This unity thing is really going well. After five months, the two sides still cannot agree on meeting each other.

So the wonderful choices are:

A dictatorship where the leader who has gone to years past his term unilaterally makes all the decisions, or
A state where the government includes unrepentant terrorists who are sworn to destroy another state.

And the world believes that either of these is preferable to the status quo.

Biden, Hillary Clinton's about-faces under Obama

From the New York Times:

In the middle of a meeting with 15 rabbis in Boca Raton, Fla., last week, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took a punch meant for his boss.

One of the rabbis asked why Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted in 1986, was still in prison. Mr. Biden, on a mission to shore up support for President Obama, replied forcefully, according to several people at the meeting.

“President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, ‘Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time,’ ” Mr. Biden said. “If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life.”

Yet in 2007, Biden said that he supports leniency for Pollard:

This is not the only recent public about-face done by an Obama 2008 presidential opponent turned employee.In Hillary Clinton's position paper on Israel in 2007 it says:

Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.

This was a restatement of what she said during her 1999 Senate campaign: "I personally consider Jerusalem the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel."

But last week she was singing a decidedly different tune:

We believe that this morning's announcement by the government of Israel approving the construction of housing units in east Jerusalem is counter-productive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties. As you know, we have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side.

Which means that she no longer believes in an undivided, Jewish Jerusalem, and she thinks that Israel must let all new Jewish neighborhoods built over the past 44 years that "everyone knows" will end up in Israel under any peace agreement must remain stagnant indefinitely, lest a Jew adding a bathroom to his house be considered "provocative."

(h/t Avi Mayer tweet via JW)

Today's rejectionism that the Western media ignores

Hamas Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh reiterated that while Hamas wouldn't object to a Palestinian Arab state he would not accept the existence of Israel, ever, not the idea that Israel is anything other than eternal Arab land.

Hamas "political leader" Khaled Meshal said on Saturday that "resistance" remains the strategic option at all stages in order to liberate all of Palestine is the elimination of the Zionist project.

Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shallah said that no one is entitled to give up one inch of "Palestine" and the Palestinian Arabs want the entire land from the river to the sea.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini said that any solution that allows Israel to remain in existence in any form is rejected in full.

Peace!

More strikes against UNRWA planned this week

Palestine Press Agency reports that there are a number of planned actions against UNRWA by unions in Gaza this week.

Last Thursday there was a teacher's strike in solidarity with a terrorist-supporting union leader who had been suspended. This week's strikes seem to be more about salaries, though.

Shutdowns of Gaza's UNRWA headquarters and other facilities are planned for Monday and Thursday. Teachers will strike again on those days.

The union says it will reject all attempts at mediation. It also asserted that while everything is in Allah's hands, their employees have the right - as refugees and displaced persons - to have jobs at a good salary.

Reading between the lines, the dispute seems to be related still to the earlier issue with union leader Suheil al-Hindy. UNRWA says that its employees cannot explicitly be associated with terrorist groups, and the union is saying that the outside activities that its teachers are engaging in are charitable - which makes it sound like working with Hamas or Islamic Jihad is the issue. UNRWA has committed to its Western donors not to use their money to support terrorism, and this seems to be what the union is insisting on.

As usual, UNRWA's website is silent on this topic. They don't want to announce to the world that they are being forced to act against terrorist supporters in their ranks.

The real-life Muslim burning flag manufacturer

About a year ago, I added subtitles to a German video spoof documentary about a Palestinian Arab who manufactures Western flags so they can be burned in protests:

It turns out that the spoof is close to the truth, at least in Pakistan.

From The Telegraph:

It is five years since a stationer in Rawalpindi came up with the bright idea of printing flags for political demonstrations.

Not Pakistani flags to be waved in celebration, but Danish flags to be burned in anger at blasphemous cartoons.

Since then, Syed Mohammed Hussain has seen his one-off experiment turn into a profitable little sideline as he produces American and Israeli flags to order.

This week brought fresh demand for the Stars and Stripes with a wave of demonstrations against American allegations that Pakistan was using an Afghan insurgent group to wage a proxy war against US forces.

But it all started with protests at caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed printed in a Danish newspaper in 2006. Pakistan witnessed some of the fiercest demonstrations, with two people shot dead.

"I was also very angry about the Danish cartoons but I wouldn't have gone out on the streets myself. Instead I decided to get Danish flags printed," Mr Hussain, who sells his flags for 500 rupees or about £3.50, told The Express Tribune

Word spread fast and he couldn't keep up with the orders.

Today, bulk buyers – looking for more than 100 flags – are given a discount.

And there has been no shortage of business this year as relations with the US have fluctuated between poor and catastrophic.

The killing of Osama bin Laden in May ignited a spate of flag-burning protests. Many Pakistanis were angry that the US could launch a secret, unauthorised raid on Pakistani territory.

Today his storeroom has a selection of western flags, including the Union Flag and French Tricolour, ready to be stamped, trampled or burned.

Nutty Muslim rage is literally beyond parody.

(h/t Folderol)

!Shana Tova u'Metuka שנה טובה ומתוקה!

My lunchtime activity Tuesday was to design this updated Rosh Hashanah graphic, using an obscure drawing tool that no graphic artist with any integrity would be caught dead using.

(And already on Wednesday I received a Rosh Hashana e-card - with this very picture I made, with my name carefully edited out!)

I wish all of you a happy and sweet New Year. May we all be written in the Book of Life, and enjoy a year of health, a year of prosperity, a year of joy, a year of peace, and a year of security.

I will not be posting until Saturday night or Sunday.