Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 30, 2011

Israel, better than ever (Yaacov Lozowick)

Yaacov writes one of his now-rare posts, and as always, it is a good one:

Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%, is not only lower than in most countries, it's at its lowest in Israel for decades and by some estiamtes, the lowest ever. If things stay this way until the next elections there will be no need to speculate on how crazy the Israeli voters have become to re-elect that supposedly universally hated government: any government running for re-election with an economy like this would stand a fine chance of re-election.

The BDS campaign to destroy Israel is not obviously working, apparently.

Culture: is Jewish culture thriving, stagnating or declining in Israel? This is a rhetorical question. There's no measure I can think of by which to claim there's any stagnation or decline. It has been thousands of years since the Jews have had such a broad-based cultural creativity, which isn't surprising if you remind yourself that fo rthe first time in millennia there are millions of Jews living in their language in their own society (and their own land).

How does cultural creativity fit into disappearing freedom of thought, you ask? It doesn't. The disappearing freedom and democracy exist only in the minds of a certain section of Israeli society and the multitudes of ignorant foreign reporters and politicians who avidly agree with them whenever they criticise Israel. Apart from them, it's not happening. There's a racuous debate about all sorts of things, of course, but in other countries that would be called democracy, not facism.

Demography: here the question is simple: are the more Jews in Israel today than a year ago. Of course there are. In an aside, the are growing indications that the demographic pendulum has peaked and is swinging back in favor of the Jews over Palestinians, whose birthrate is either declining or tumbling, depending on the data-sets one uses. (Here, for example).

Terrorism is mostly dormant, by Israeli standards. 2011 was one of the most peaceful years Israel has had since 1947. (The Palestinians had a rather peaceful year, too, since there's some correlation between the two).
...

Yes, there are lots of folks out there who dislike us, bt that's always been so. These days we don't have to give them too much attention. Seen historically, 2011 was probably one of the best years in millennia of Jewish history.

Read the whole thing.

Weirdest fatwas of 2011

I'm glad that Al Arabiya published these, because if anyone else did it would be considered Islamophobic (and might get one's website taken down.)

One of the weirdest and most controversial fatwas in 2011 was one issued by an Islamist preacher who lives in Europe. According to this preacher, women are prohibited from eating phallic-shaped fruits and vegetables like cucumbers, bananas, and carrots. Touching or consuming those, he argued, are bound to turn women on and make them engage in sinful fantasies.

In Morocco, the head of the Moroccan Association for Jurisprudence Research stirred both outrage and controversy when he issued a fatwa allowing Muslim men to have sex with their just-deceased wives under the pretext that nothing in Islam prohibits sex with corpses. This fatwa followed a series of sex-related ones issued by the same cleric.

In Somalia, the ultraconservative al-Shabaab al-Mujahedin Movement issued a fatwa during the holy month of Ramadan prohibiting the consumption of sambousak, a triangular pastry stuffed with meat, cheese, or vegetables. The popular snack, they explained, is a symbol of the Trinity in Christianity and is therefore not to be consumed by Muslims.

In Egypt, religious edicts were in most cases mixed with politics. Sheikh Amr Sotouhi, head of the Islamic Preaching Committee at al-Azhar, issued in November a fatwa prohibiting fathers from marrying their daughters to members of the formerly ruling National Democratic Party owing to their “corruption.”

A similar fatwa was issued by the late Sheikh Emad Effat, shot this month during recent clashes between Egyptian protestors and the army. Effat’s fatwa prohibited Muslims from voting for members of the same disbanded party and cited the same reason: corruption.

Mohamed Abdel Hadi, deputy chairman of the Salafi al-Nour Party in the governorate of Dakahliya went as far as saying that the results of the parliamentary elections, in which the party scored an unexpected victory, were mentioned in the holy Quran.

The most outrageous fatwa in Egypt was one that came out last June and in which Egyptian preacher Mohamed al-Zoghbi said eating the meat of the jinn is permissible in Islam and left everyone wondering how anyone can get hold of them in the first place, let alone eat their meat.

Why, you can buy jinn meat at your neighborhood grocery store!

Israel to demand compensation from Arab countries

From Arutz-7:

The government has decided to tackle head-on the alleged “Arab refugees” issue by renewing efforts for compensation for Jewish victims of Arab pogroms.

Estimates of property losses range from $16 billion to $300 billion in Arab countries where Arab leaders seized their property or took it over after Jews were expelled or forced to flee because of anti-Jewish violence and harassment.

Dr. Avi Bitzur, director-general of the Pensioners' Affairs Ministry, told Voice of Israel government radio it has created a new department to try to collect claims for more than 850,000 Jews from Iran and Arab countries. Approximately 80 percent of them moved to Israel.

Most of the refugees fled or were expelled after the violent Arab reaction to the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, six months after it was recognized by the United Nations under the Partition Plan that the Arab world rejected.

"Israel has talked about this on and off for 60 years. Now we're going to deal with it as we should have all along," said Bitzur.

He added that the Cabinet is scheduled to decide in the next two weeks to raise the issue of Jewish refugees whenever the Palestinian Authority brings up the “right of return.”

Bitzur added, “We should know the history of the pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, of the Libyan Jews who ended up in Bergen Belsen. It's time for people to know that there was this part of the Jewish people and its history was brought to an end."

"The UN has dealt at least 700 times with Arab refugees and their property, but not once with the issue of Jewish property.”

This all makes sense.

This story has been picked up in the Arabic press, but with a bizarre addition.

There is a second part of the law where the Israeli Foreign Ministry demands Saudi Arabia pay compensation of more than a hundred billion dollars for Jewish property in the kingdom since the time of the Prophet peace be upon him, a project which is currently being analyzed by top experts in international law, history and geography in the Bar-Ilan, Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa universities , with special funding set at U.S. $ 100 million carved from the budget of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 2012.

Israel is spending $100 million to make a claim against Saudi Arabia for the actions of Mohammed? Ummmm...I don't think so.

Sounds like an Israeli official made a joke that they took seriously.

Max Blumenthal is not a journalist by any definition

Max Blumenthal is a self-described journalist who has written op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and elsewhere. He is considered respectable.

And a single tweet by him shows how he is anything but respectable, and anything but a journalist.

He first retweeted a link to an article from the pro-Hamas Middle East Monitor, quoting (but not linking to) a PLO document that claims that Israel killed 180 Palestinian Arabs in 2011.

But then he tweeted a "correction":

Update/correction via @occpal: 239 Palestinians killed by Israelis/Israeli forces in 2011http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/irememberthevictims/

He didn't check the link for accuracy. He was sent a message that the real number of dead Arabs is much higher, and based only on that information he issued a "correction."

A quick look at the Occupied Palestine webpage shows that they list all people they consider "martyrs," but they are not claiming that Israel killed them all. This distinction is lost on Max, of course, who stated flatly that Israelis killed "239 Palestinians" in 2011. He didn't simply retweet - he added his own "facts."

So the ersatz journalist Blumenthal believes that the following people were killed by Israel:

Hamas member Nabil Frahan Az-Zaygh, 41, who drowned while on vacation.
Hamas member Ahmed Abdullah Al Mamlouk, who died in a "work accident."
Ahmed Irbai, who died in a tunnel collapse. Plus many others who were killed in smuggling tunnels from suffocation, electrocution or explosions.
Juliano Mer Khamis, who was murdered by masked Palestinian Arab terrorists in Jenin.
Vittorio Arrigoni, who was kidnapped and murdered by Arab terrorists in Gaza.

Blumenthal didn't check this out - even though the links to most of the "martyrs" are right there on the website. No, he reflexively believes that whatever number is higher must be the true one. If a random person would have tweeted that the real number was 372, he would have believed it without hesitation.

By the way, the Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights counts 91 people killed by Israel in 2011. OCHA counts 115 up until December 20th.

The IDF number is somewhere in between, saying that about 100 were killed in military operations this year. And that only nine of them were civilians.

Which one is true? That would require research and skepticism. Only a journalist would bother to do all that work. And Blumenthal is no journalist.

He's a hack who will repeat whatever comes his way, as long as it conforms to his pre-existing hate of Israel.

Here come the (unofficial) religious police of Egypt

From Al Masry al Youm:

Saudi religious police

The ultra-conservative Salafi Nour Party is funding a sort of religious police, known as the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Authority, according to the authority’s founders. The party has denied involvement in its formation.

The authority takes after the Saudi model of “mutaween,” a sort of religious police composed of volunteers that enforce Islamic Sharia law. Armed with thin wooden canes, the groups roam the streets enforcing dress codes, separation between the sexes, prayer, and other behavior believed to be commanded by Islam. The Taliban in Afghanistan are also known to have used the system.

The authority was launched on Facebook by Nour Party members. According to the founders, the Salafi party gave them check of LE2600 as a preliminary installment to help them launch the initiative and mobilize Salafi volunteers.

In a statement on Wednesday, the authority said it was formed upon directives from the party’s leadership, and that the party’s members unanimously approved the idea.

The founders threatened to resign from the party and manage the authority on their own if the party continued to deny its affiliation with it.

In a separate statement, the authority said it held its first meeting on Tuesday to determine the tasks and geographical jurisdictions of the first volunteers, who would monitor people’s behavior in the street and assess whether it contradicted the God’s laws.

The statement also said that the volunteers would wear white cloaks and hold bamboo canes to beat violators. Later, they would be provided with electric taser guns.

Why don't they just go straight to scimitars? I mean, if you are going to chop someone's hands off, a taser isn't going to do the trick.

(h/t Arthur)

The Sting (updated)

I don't usually spend much time on the anti-Israel blogosphere, but most readers here are probably familiar with wrong-headed, thin-skinned, and notoriously unreliable blogger Richard Silverstein.

Since last year the Seattle-based blogger has made a career of publishing news items that were censored by the Israeli military. He has made a name of himself more recently by taking unsourced allegations from people who email him and publishing them as scoops from highly-placed sources in the Mossad.Yet no matter how bizarre his claims, he was getting coverage from lazy newspaper reporters for his increasingly fantastical "scoops" (for example, that Israel sent a booby-trapped drone into Lebanon with the sure knowledge that Hezbollah would carry the drone to a highly sensitive indoor spot where the IDF could blow it up.)

Aussie Dave of Israellycool performed a classic sting on Dickie. In one fell swoop, he proved that:

Silverstein will publish anything that he hopes to be true, with no fact checking whatsoever.
Silverstein has no moral compunctions about revealing private details of people he hates.
Silverstein knows nothing about Israeli culture, even though he claims to.
Silverstein will come up with fanciful conjectures out of thin air - and post them.
Silverstein is a liar.

Read Aussie Dave's post explaining the sting. It is a thing of beauty.

And given that it is many hours later and Silverstein still hasn't deleted his post (his usual method when he's been made into a fool) nor admitted he was scammed, so we have also learned that he cannot bring himself to admit he was wrong.

In my experience, those who cannot admit mistakes are the ones who are the least reliable of all. Hubris and truth do not intersect.

Maybe he thinks it is Purim.

UPDATE: Silverstein finally admitted he was scammed, and is showing righteous indignation - because Aussie Dave used a fake Facebook account. Richard the Moral reported him. After all, it is a violation of Facebook rules! It's OK to defend Hamas, but creating a fake FB account to prove an idiot blogger has no clothes - well, that's going over the line!

You can't make this stuff up.

The Salafists who stole Christmas

From AP:

An ultraconservative Egyptian Islamist group says sending Christmas greetings to Christians is “against our beliefs.”

Nadar Bakar, spokesman of the hard-line Al-Nour party, told The Associated Press Wednesday that Muslims should only give greetings to Christians on “personal occasions,” not religious ones.

Al-Nour represents the ultraconservative Salafi movement, which wants to strictly impose Islamic law in Egypt. Al-Nour has won a surprisingly strong 20 percent of the vote so far in Egypt’s staggered parliamentary elections.

The remarks prompted Egypt’s Al Azhar, the most eminent religious institution, to issue a religious edict approving Christmas greetings. The country’s most influential Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, responded by sending “its best Christmas wishes to our brotherly Christians and Muslims as well.”

An estimated 100,000 Christians fled Egypt between March and September.

In case you think the Muslim Brotherhood comes out looking positively liberal in this AP article, keep this in mind:

“We'll prohibit alcohol,” said Sobhi Saleh, a leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood at a Tuesday rally in New Valley, an area west of Cairo.

“Tourism does not mean nudity and drunkenness,” he added. “We Egyptians are the greatest religious people, and we don’t need that.”

Saleh also said the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party will apply Islamic Sharia law. “It was planned since 1928,” he said. “But Islam is the solution.”

He is wearing a suit and has no beard, so you can't call him a fanatic.

UK professor under investigation for bias against Israeli

From TheJC last week:

An Israeli postgraduate student has succeeded in having her dissertation re-marked to a distinction after it was originally supervised and given a poor mark by a professor who campaigns for an academic boycott of Israel.

Smadar Bakovic

Smadar Bakovic repeatedly told Warwick University she was uncomfortable with Nicola Pratt overseeing her master's dissertation on Israeli Arab identity.

Professor Pratt is a vocal anti-Israel campaigner who was refused entry to the West Bank by Israeli authorities in 2009. Following Operation Cast Lead she was one of more than 100 academics who wrote to the Guardian saying "Israel must lose" and calling for the UK to implement a programme of boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

Ms Bakovic, 35, from Harei Yehuda, near Jerusalem, spent a year challenging Warwick's original rejection of her appeal against the decision to allow Professor Pratt to supervise her.

She was told last week that her re-marked dissertation had obtained a distinction, with a score 11 points higher than when it was first marked by Prof Pratt.

Ms Bakovic said: "I knew my work was better than the mark I'd been given. After a year of battling, I'm absolutely delighted. I feel vindicated. I did it for Israel."

A university spokesman said the higher mark could be attributed to the fact the dissertation was "substantially different" when it was re-submitted. But the JC has seen emails between Ms Bakovic and another professor who later supervised her, showing that the work was only "tweaked" with "no major changes".

Ms Bakovic said: "I knew Prof Pratt because whenever there was an anti-Israel event at the university I went along and she was often there. She moderated a Jews for Justice for Palestinians event, so I knew her stance. As soon as I saw her name a red light came on." But Warwick told Ms Bakovic she could not change supervisor.

Ms Bakovic said: "Professor Pratt said that I had taken an Israeli and Zionist perspective without investigating the issue. She said I had taken an Israeli government position, but I did not. I included the views of a number of Israeli Arab writers."

The university's complaints committee investigated Ms Bakovic's subsequent challenge. She convinced the panel to allow her dissertation to be re-marked. After being marked by two other professors at Warwick and an external marker, she was awarded the higher classification.

CiFWatch interviewed Bakovic:

It took me exactly 2 seconds to see exactly what [Pratt] was about – one of the largest supporters of the academic (and other) boycotts of Israel, who signs petitions accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and being an “Apartheid state.” Even she (on her site on the Warwick page) calls herself an activist.

I then knew that I was dealing with a self-defined anti-Israel academic, who really calls to boycott Israeli academia, meaning Jewish Israeli academia, which makes her also an anti-Semite.

If I were Muhammed Jaber but with an Israeli passport, then I am sure Nicola Pratt would not at all object to having me in the university, even if I were to apply from an Israeli institution which she calls to boycott. Additionally, Pratt, in her feedback of my dissertation said that I was pursuing Israeli and Zionist lines and perspectives.

What is a Zionist perspective, or an Israeli one?

Obviously, she doesn’t acknowledge that Israel is a pluralistic, democratic state, so there are MANY different opinions about everything. She also put down anything I wrote which was even slightly from the Israeli perspective and said “surely this is the perspective of the Israeli government.” (And she reduced points for this).

...Her obsession, as is the obsession of many others, is ONLY the “evil” coming out of Israel, the ONLY democracy in the Middle East, where woman and minorities have rights, and where they can vote and participate in all walks of life. The only place in the Middle East where human shields are not used, and where the army has strict guidelines about when they can fire.

This to her and to her like is the only point – Israel represents to her everything that is evil, the cause of everything that is bad in the region.

On my dissertation, she also claimed that my claim that minorities in the Arab Middle East don’t have equal rights is incorrect – that the only aspect in which they are discriminated against is religiously. And she is an “expert” on women in the Middle East. So you see? Nothing is as evil as Israel. And when something is evil…..well, you know what should happen to it.

Now, Professor Pratt is under investigation for her conduct:

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) will consider whether Warwick University's Nicola Pratt breached guidelines on impartiality when marking Israeli student Smadar Bakovic's dissertation.

QAA chief executive Anthony McClaran received a complaint about Professor Pratt last week and confirmed an agency officer would conduct a preliminary investigation.

Smadar is hardly a right-wing fanatic. In fact, she is classically liberal, a person who wants to work with Arabs to bring real peace to the Middle East. Here is a profile of her written at Bates University in the midst of the terror campaign in 2003:

Smadar Bakovic '03, an Israeli army veteran, knows the Middle East conflicts well. After the events of Sept. 11, she and a fellow student, Jordanian native Jamil Zraikat '05, visited a local high school to share their distinct perspectives. But Bakovic's view is not simplistic: She believes mutual understanding is key to a resolution.

An English major, Bakovic will explore Israeli-Arab poetry in her senior thesis. Aspiring to be a journalist, she has produced a newsletter for a Turkish organization that educates poor women migrating to urban areas. This summer she returns to the Israeli Arab coastal village of Arara to continue research for an independent study about Israeli-Arab relations. Bakovic will complete the project at Bates under Israeli native Mishael Caspi, visiting professor of religion.

Bakovic first visited Arara in 2001 to learn more about Israel's non-Jewish cultures with the support of a Phillips Student Fellowship that funds cross-cultural projects. Armed only with video cameras and intensive language training, she sought an Arab perspective on the historic mistrust between Arabs and Jews. She "went into places where Jews do not go and talked with hardworking people who experience everyday life," Bakovic says, -- villagers who told her, "not a lot of people want to hear what we have to say."

Lots of Qassams exploding - in Gaza. UNRWA school hit.

The Gaza NGO Safety Office keeps track of rockets fired from Gaza in their SMS messages - and also the rockets that fall short, since they are concerned with keeping their NGO members safe.

So over the past couple of days they have sent out:

12/28 9:00 Pal. ops. fired 4 HMRs ["home-made rockets" - EoZ] from Gaza Strip, 3 of them exploded prematurely.

12/29 9:00 Pal. ops. fired 5 HMRs from Gaza Strip, 1 of them dropped short and fell on a Pal. house causing 1 injury.

In their report on incidents for the first half of December, they note that

Over the course of three evenings, Pal. ops fired 8 HMRs (1 of which dropped short) towards Israeli territory. Most of the HMRs were fired from around the Al Bureij area.

During the same reporting period, Palestinian operatives fired 1 Grad, 4 HMRs, and 3 mortars [from Gaza City.] Of the HMRs, 1 exploded prematurely and 1 dropped short, striking and severely damaging a Palestinian home in Zaitoun area.

[In North Gaza] a total of 18 HMRs, and significantly, 4 Grad-style rockets were fired towards Israeli territory. Of these, one third of the HMRs (8) either dropped short or exploded prematurely before leaving Palestinian territory. While no damage was recorded in Israeli territory as a result of the rocket fire, Palestinian property was damaged one three separate occasions: on the first, an UNRWA girls school was struck with a rocket, piercing the roof (it is also worthwhile noting that that the rocket was launched at 1420hrs in the afternoon, though on a Friday); in the second, the boundary wall of a property in Beit Hanoun was struck causing minor damage; in the final case, a building in Beit Lahiya was hit, injuring 2 Palestinian civilians.

You mean you didn't hear about the UNRWA school being hit by a Palestinian Arab rocket? Or the injuries that Gazans have had, or about their property damage? You missed the angry condemnations by UNRWA officials? Or by Palestinian Arab "human rights" groups? You missed the story this morning about a Gazan being injured by a Qassam rocket?

By the way, we missed the third anniversary of the first people killed in Operation Oil Stain - two Gazan girls, killed by a Qassam rocket, December 26, 2008.

The rift in Hamas between Meshal and Haniyeh widens (updated)

Right now, Gaza Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is going on what was intended to be a mini-Muslim-world tour, the first time he has left Gaza since Israel's closure.

He is supposed to visit Egypt, Sudan, Turkey, Qatar, Tunisia and Bahrain.

According to the virulently anti-Hamas but usually reliable Palestine Press Agency website, Haniyeh is running into problems.

Apparently, the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshal is not happy that, after he has been talking about unity with Fatah, Haniyeh is acting like the Palestinian prime minister.

Apparently because of pressure from Meshal, Haniyeh is meeting much lower level officials than he had hoped to. Both Qatar and Turkey asked him to postpone the trip and are not planning to receive him in any official capacity. Similarly, he has not met with political leaders in Khartoum or in Cairo. And Tunisia has informed him that he can meet with Islamic party officials but not with government officials.

As far as I know, I am the only person who has been talking about a rift within Hamas between the Gaza leadership and Damascus-based Khaled Meshal. This story makes it sound like Meshal is winning - politically.

But Haniyeh and Zahar are the leaders in Gaza, and based on the increase in anti-Fatah actions being done lately in there, they seem to be roundly ignoring - or actively undermining - Haniyeh in Gaza itself.

Gazan supporters of Hamas don't get to see Meshal except on TV. Haniyeh and the other local leaders, meanwhile, organize rallies with hundreds of thousands of supporters.

There's one other thing to notice that indicates a serious split within Hamas. Isn't it odd that while Haniyeh is traveling all over, he is not meeting with Meshal himself? Nor has Meshal shown any interest in going to Gaza, something Egypt would certainly allow.

One other detail from the article: its source mentioned that Haniyeh flew from Cairo to Khartoum on a private jet that cost $48,000 to rent, which raised eyebrows for a group supposedly against corruption and that supports austerity. That source seems to be from the Meshal camp, which makes it sound like there's an active whispering campaign against Haniyeh being organized by his opponents in Damascus.

UPDATE: This seems to be a case where Palestine Press Agency got it wrong. And to an extent, so did I.

Haniyeh just met Sudan's president - along with Meshal.

(h/t CHA)

Unity! Hamas raids Fatah homes, tears down posters of Arafat and Abbas

Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas' attacks on Fatah members in Gaza has continued to intensify this week, immediately after the Cairo meeting between the two sides meant to solidify their unity.

According to the report, Hamas security forces raided dozens of homes in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City and forced the residents to remove Fatah posters and banners from their walls.

A number of residents were beaten and arrested.

In one home the forces ripped down pictures of Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

This comes on the heels of dozens of arrests earlier this week. Hamas also denied Fatah requests to hold celebrations on the 47th anniversary of the start of the PLO on January 1.

PCHR has confirmed the details of the earlier articles published by PalPress on arrests and detentions of Fatah members.

Meanwhile, Hamas security forces attacked students at Al Aqsa Universiity because they were dressed indecently. Al Aqsa is a conservative university where women are expected to wear veils.

In another PalPress story, Hamas barred journalist Sami Ajrami from traveling to Egypt. Must be that siege we hear so much about.

(h/t CHA)

US giving/selling $11 billion in weapons to shaky Iraqi regime

From the NYT:

The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.

The military aid, including advanced fighter jets and battle tanks, is meant to help the Iraqi government protect its borders and rebuild a military that before the 1991 Persian Gulf war was one of the largest in the world; it was disbanded in 2003 after the United States invasion.

But the sales of the weapons — some of which have already been delivered — are moving ahead even though Mr. Maliki has failed to carry out an agreement that would have limited his ability to marginalize the Sunnis and turn the military into a sectarian force. While the United States is eager to beef up Iraq’s military, at least in part as a hedge against Iranian influence, there are also fears that the move could backfire if the Baghdad government ultimately aligns more closely with the Shiite theocracy in Tehran than with Washington.

United States diplomats, including Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, have expressed concern about the military relationship with Iraq. Some have even said it could have political ramifications for the Obama administration if not properly managed. There is also growing concern that Mr. Maliki’s apparent efforts to marginalize the country’s Sunni minority could set off a civil war.

“The optics of this are terrible,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on national security issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a critic of the administration’s Iraq policy.

The program to arm the military is being led by the United States Embassy here, which through its Office of Security Cooperation serves as a broker between the Iraqi government and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Among the big-ticket items being sold to Iraq are F-16 fighter jets, M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, cannons and armored personnel carriers. The Iraqis have also received body armor, helmets, ammunition trailers and sport utility vehicles, which critics say can be used by domestic security services to help Mr. Maliki consolidate power.

So not only might this aid be used to repress dissent in Iraq, but it very possibly will end up going to Iran!

Brilliant!

It is unclear if this is a sale (as the headline states) or aid (as the article mentions.) If it is aid, notice that $11 billion is about four times the amount Israel receives annually from the US. Yet the people who protest US aid to Israel invariably defend themselves saying that it is their tax dollars being spent.

If it is indeed aid, how many protests will they hold against this very problematic US military aid to Iraq?

(updated to relfect the ambiguity on aid/sales.)

Questions about the mosque arson at Tuba Zangaria

Israeli blog "Brilliant Disguise" has an intriguing article about the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangaria in October.

The author, Gal Chen, is not a settler or even a rightist. She is against the settlements. But when this "price tag" attack was reported in October, a number of things bothered her - so she started researching it.

The first thing she noticed is that the village has a history of violence, corruption, intra-clan feuds and smuggling. Two years ago the office of the Jewish head of the town council appointed by Israel's Interior Ministry was hit with a hail of bullets.

Chen went to Tuba Zangaria to see it for herself.

It is not an easy village to travel to, especially for any settlers. It is really two villages - Tuba on the bottom of the mountain and Zangaria on top. The only way to get to Zangaria is to go through Tuba.

The village itself is in the Galilee, not very close to Judea and Samaria.

In Tuba itself, the mosque is easily visible and accessible - but it was untouched. The arsonists apparently spent the extra ten minutes to go up the mountain to find a much less prominent mosque to burn.

There are houses surrounding the mosque. Chen wondered how outsiders could have made it to this inaccessible mosque in a small village without residents noticing, as well as how no one smelled the smoke or heard the fire before it became so large.

Here is the graffiti that seemed to prove this was a "price tag" attack:

The words say "[Price] tag" "Palmer" "Revenge", referring to the murder of Asher Palmer and his son in September.

But Chen noticed that the words were not written with spray paint, as is usual with this sort of vandalism - but with charred wood from the fire itself. She wonders how the arsonists could have forgotten a can of spray paint.

Not only that, but the diagonal pattern of the graffiti indicates that it was written after the fire had already blackened the wall.

Chen asked the villagers how anyone could have driven to the village without being noticed. They admitted that they are vigilant to see strange vehicles, especially at night, and conjectured that the arsonists walked there from the fields.

Which would mean that they decided to carry gallons of gasoline up a mountain, filled with thorns and stones, to get to an inaccessible mosque, in a crime-ridden Galilee village, surrounded by houses, miles from Judea and Samaria. Residents who live next door did not notice the fire until about half of the mosque was burned and destroyed, and yet the criminals managed to wait there long enough for the fire to cool down so they could write "Price tag/Palmer/Revenge" afterwards.

A few days later, village youths set fire to the local council building - led by a retired IDF general - and he fled, fearing for his life.

Chen ends her post without any accusations, but wondering about how the Israeli media at the scene jumped to conclusions without asking any of these questions.

(h/t Ruchie)

(correction - I had initially assumed Chen was male.)

Israel saving the world, again

From Israel 21C:

Every patient, nurse, doctor and visitor to a hospital knows the drill: hands get a splash of antibacterial fluid found at every bedside, entrance and exit. Keeping hands clean can prevent some infections, but superbugs -- those sometimes deadly bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics -- can outwit the best hygiene practices.

Hospital-acquired infections are one of the leading causes of preventable death in the developed world today, with 100,000 people in the United States alone dying every year from bugs they catch as patients in the hospital, according to the World Health Organization. The old and very young are at an especially high risk of infection from resistant bacteria that can spread like wildfire.

But now superbugs may have met their match, thanks to a genetically engineered cleaning solution developed in Israeli laboratories.

Costing only a few dollars a quart, the solution is non-toxic to patients and can be spread on hospital surfaces to kill what conventional soaps and antibiotics can't, report researchers Rotem Edgar from the Tel Aviv Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center and Udi Qimron from Tel Aviv University. They detailed their technology recently in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

The solution uses a laboratory-grown virus called a bacteriophage, which disrupts the DNA of resistant bacteria and renders them susceptible to antibiotics.

"We have genetically engineered the bacteriophages so that once they infect the bacteria, they transfer a dominant gene that confers renewed sensitivity to certain antibiotics," says Qimron, who believes his solution will one day be part of every hospital's anti-germ arsenal.

The researchers say that the new spray could be applied on any surface where there is a high concentration of germs, such as door handles, faucets, bedrails and handrails.

"Our novel approach relies on an effective delivery process and selection procedure, put on the same platform for the first time," says Qimron, suggesting that it will knock out all kinds of bacteria, reducing the infection rate from even non-resistant bacteria.

This solution, the researchers note, should be part of a two-step process to neutralize bacteria in the hospital effectively. The second part of the process is a compound called Tullurite. This would be spread over the surfaces to kill any remaining bacteria not sensitized by the new advance. The two-step cleaning combination would first disarm the bacteria and then go on to kill those that are still dangerous, they say.

Like all medical products, the new spray needs to be tested in a clinical setting before being approved for sale.

This is huge, as hospitals are breeding grounds for the most dangerous strains of bacteria. Tens of thousands of lives could be saved.