Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Bad (but original) Purim Torah

Q: How do we know that Benjamin Netanyahu is Jewish from the Torah?

A: Jeremiah 36:14: יְהוּדִי בֶּן-נְתַנְיָהוּ

"The Jew, Ben Netanyahu"

Islamist group threatens to kidnap Christian women in Nigeria

From Bikya Masr:

A Nigeria spokesman for the Islamist militant group Boko Haram told Bikyamasr.com on Tuesday afternoon that the group has plans to begin kidnapping Christian women in a push to “liquidate” the religious group from the country.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the spokesman said that “we are going to put into action new efforts to strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women.”

He added that they would not sexually assault or harm the women, “but we will demand as ransom that the families leave our Islamic areas.”

The spokesman did not elaborate on when or how this new “campaign of terror” would take place, but it is striking fears in many Christians in the country.

“Kidnapping is very serious and dangerous. After all the bombings and violence, I don’t know what we would do,” Markos, a Christian living in Lagos, told Bikyamasr.com.

According to the same spokesman, speaking via telephone from northern Nigeria on Sunday, the group “will launch a number of attacks, coordinated and part of the plan to eradicate Christians from certain parts of the country.”

Boko Haram have taken responsibility for a number of bomb attacks on Christian churches across the country since a Christmas Day bombing left dozens of people killed.

Muslim states walk out of UN debate on gay rights

From AFP:

African and Arab states walked out in protest Wednesday during a U.N. Human Rights Council debate on gay rights, saying that they could not legitimize homosexuality.

The 47-member state council was holding a session on sexual orientation-based discrimination for the first time after a historic resolution seeking equal rights for everyone was passed in June 2011, to the consternation of Muslim states.

On Wednesday, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab group and the African group made their opposition clear, by walking out during the meeting.

“Licentious behavior promoted under the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ is against the fundamental teachings of various religions including Islam,” Pakistan’s envoy said.

“From this perspective, legitimizing homosexuality and other personal sexual behaviors in the name of sexual orientation is unacceptable to the OIC,” he added.

WaPo adds:

On Wednesday the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva is to discuss the recommendations of a November report surveying the discrimination and abuse — often state-sponsored — that gay people endure around the world. Even those who disapprove of homosexuality on religious grounds are unlikely to object to the report’s anodyne recommendations: that governments should decriminalize homosexuality, work to prevent violence against gays and recognize sexual orientation as a valid cause for asylum.

But not everyone welcomes the report’s conclusions. The most vociferous opposition has come from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a group of 57 Muslim states. “We note with concern the attempts to create controversial ‘new notions’ or ‘new standards’ by misinterpreting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international treaties to include such notions that were never articulated or agreed to by the U.N. membership,” Zamir Akram, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.N. office in Geneva, wrote to the president of the Human Rights Council on the Muslim organization’s behalf.

Notice how the AFP report refers to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation as "African and Arab states." Which isn't even accurate, as there are some members of the OIC that are neither - like Iran and Pakistan. But AFP would never put the word "Islamic" in the first paragraph of an article like this.

An amazing day for rhinoplasty stories

From CNN:

A lie and a nose job may cost an Egyptian politician his spot in parliament.

Anwar al-Bilkimy, a newly elected legislator, was forced to resign from the ultra-conservative al-Nour Party after lying about having plastic surgery, Ahmed Khalil, a party spokesman said late Monday.

Black and blue from his rhinoplasty, al-Bilkimy told parliamentarians that his face was bandaged because gunmen attacked him after he refused to get out of his car, Khalil said.

Suspicious, the al-Nour Party, who's hardline creed forbids plastic surgeries, formed a committee to investigate his story and found out that he had lied, a party statement said.

Al-Balkimy checked into Cairo's Selmi hospital on February 28 for plastic surgery on his nose and the next day checked into another hospital, where doctors said he claimed to have been beaten by gunmen, Egyptian media reported.

"Based on what the hospital officials said, we decided to expel him from the party, and so he submitted his resignation," a statement on al-Nour's official Facebook page said.

Which brings up perhaps the only rocking music video about nose jobs by a band with a frontman who wears a kippah, with a band name appropriate for the day:

I love all the Groggers songs I've heard so far.

(h/t Muqata)

Hamas denies report; says it would hit Israel if Iran is attacked

BBC reported earlier today:

Leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, say they will not help Iran militarily in any conflict between Israel and the Islamic Republic.

There is speculation in Israel that if it attacked Iran's nuclear facilities, it could face rocket fire from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Both are long-time allies of Iran.

But Mahmoud Zahhar, a senior leader of Hamas in Gaza, denied the group would get involved and told the BBC: "We are not part of any political axis."

"If Israel attacks us we will respond. If they don't, we will not get involved in any other regional conflict," he added.

Mr Zahhar questioned Hamas's ability to offer support from the Palestinian territory to the south of Israel, even if it wanted to.

"Don't exaggerate our power. We are still suffering from the occupation, the siege and two wars in recent years," he said.

But Iran's FARS quotes Zahar as saying the opposite:

Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior official of the Palestinian Hamas movement, strongly rejected a recent BBC report which quoted him as saying that Hamas would take no action in case of an Israeli invasion of Iran, and warned that any Israel or US attack on Iran will be reciprocated by Hamas's crushing response to the Zionists.

BBC Persian's website alleged in a report on Wednesday that the No. 2 Hamas official in the Gaza Strip has assured that his movement would not take any action in the face of an Israeli attack on Iran.

Al-Zahar strongly rejected the BBC claim as unfounded and a lie.

"Retaliation with utmost power is the position of Hamas with regard to a Zionist war on Iran," Zahar told FNA on Wednesday afternoon.

Zahar rejected the possibility of any Israeli aggression against Iran, but meantime, reiterated that Hamas will give a crushing response to not only the Zionists but also to "whoever helping them" in such an attack.

Who is more likely to be lying: The BBC, Mahmoud Zahar or Iran's FARS news agency?

That's a tough one.

Lebanese Apartheid Week (poster)

Palestine Times has a photo essay of how Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon live in squalor:

If there is any issue that unites Lebanese - right or left, religious or secular - it is that these Palestinian Arabs must never become citizens of that country. There is institutionalized discrimination against them, as they cannot move out of these camps, they cannot expand them, and usually they cannot even build within them.

This is all separate from the many jobs they are not allowed to take, and that they cannot buy land.

There is even a religious aspect to this. Practically all Palestinian Christians did manage to become Lebanese citizens, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Sunni Muslims, for the most part, did not (unless they could convince officials that they had Lebanese ancestry.)

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what apartheid looks like.

Reporter for Iranian news agency arrested for India bombing

From NDTV:

An Indian journalist who allegedly works for an Iranian news agency has been arrested in Delhi for last month's bomb attack on an Israeli diplomatic vehicle in New Delhi. Israel has accused Iran of orchestrating the attack.

Syed Mohammed Kazmi, who is 50, was brought to a Delhi court today. He was sent to 20-day police custody. He has admitted to being part of the conspiracy, says the police. The police say its investigations show he had been in touch with a man on a motorcycle who planted the bomb using a magnetic on the car.

The police say it searched Kazmi's house over the past two days to gather evidence of his link to the February 13 attack, which wounded the diplomat's wife, her driver and two other people in a nearby car. Police did not say what evidence they found.

The blast came the same day a bomb was discovered on an Israeli diplomat's car in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The next day, three Iranians accidentally blew up their house in Thailand, and Israeli authorities said the similarity between their explosives and the two earlier bombs linked Iran to all three incidents.

Israel has accused Iran of waging a covert campaign of state terror and has threatened military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

But if you read Al Jazeera, you know that it was a Zionist false flag operation. As it always is.

(h/t Philtheman)

Failed suicide bomber complains that Fatah isn't paying for her surgery

From ITIC:

In the early morning hours of June 20, 2005, a 21-year-old Palestinian female suicide bomber arrived at the Erez crossing in the Gaza Strip, wearing (extra) stockings that contained approximately 20 lbs. of explosives. The female terrorist, who aroused the suspicion of the Israeli security forces, was taken to a security check during which the explosive stockings were uncovered. She att em pted several times to detonate herself at the crossing and, having been unsuccessful, was brought to questioning.

The arrested suicide bomber is Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Bass, a resident of the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, born in 1984. In her questioning, she admitted to being affiliated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah's operative wing). She also stated that she had been dispatched by the organization's infrastructure in the northern Gaza Strip to carry out a suicide bombing attack in an Israeli hospital, with the intention of killing Israeli civilians. In an interview granted to a Channel 10 reporter, Wafa al-Bass pointed out that ever since she was a little girl, her dream had been, and still was, to be a shahid (“martyr”) and die for Allah's sake (Israeli TV's Channel 10, June 20, 2005)

She was being treated in Soroka Hospital for severe burns from a previous gas explosion accident.

Last year she was released in the Shalit deal.

Now, Wafa al-Bass is complaining to an Islamic Jihad newspaper that she injured herself while trying to explode herself in 2005, and she needs surgery that would cost 16,000 shekels - and Fatah isn't willing to pay for it! (As far as I know, there was no explosion, so it is unclear how injured she could have gotten while trying to detonate herself.) Not only that, but while other terror groups have been giving jobs to former prisoners, Fatah hasn't offered her anything. She says that she is being treated with negligence and neglect as she gave her blood and years of her life to the cause.

Maybe Fatah isn't paying because she is such a failure. After all, if she had managed to blow herself up in Erez, they wouldn't owe her a thing.

An Israeli Arab defends her country in South Africa

From Ma'an:

Israel has sent a delegation of 100 students to represent it in the annual Apartheid Week in South Africa, an Israeli newspaper reported Tuesday.

The report in Maariv noted one unusual participant in this year's delegation -- a 25-year-old Muslim Bushra Khalilieh, a member of Israel's Arab minority in the Galilee.

The newspaper said Khalilieh was attending university in one of South Africa’s university campuses. Khalilieh, who wears a hijab, came to Israel's defense during activities on campus.

"We toured Johannesburg and Cape Town’s campuses and met local students," she said.

"We spoke with them about Israel and I told them about my personal issue as an Arab girl living in Israel. I feel Israel to be my hometown where there’s equality and I have all my rights.”

"When students hear us, they are surprised as there are some who do not even know there are Arabs living in Israel. I, as an Arab Israeli girl, love my country and believe that it seeks peace and respects all its citizens.”

Khalilieh, a masters student at Tel Aviv University, stressed that she represents herself and not the position of the Israeli government.

“I represent myself as a Muslim Arab who lives in Israel as a liberal and free girl unlike other Arab girls who live in Arab countries and do not have the human rights I have like freedom of expression and dignity.”

She added: "There are people who are calling to boycott us and say that there is apartheid in Israel, but I try to show Israel as a country that’s different from what they think."

A number of Arab sites have picked up on the story, most highlighting the fact that she defines herself as an Arab Israeli - and not a "Palestinian."

(h/t IsReal1948 and Herb)

Translating a Tikkun NYT ad into English

I received an email from Tikkun Magazine showing a full-page ad in tomorrow's New York Times urging the US and Israel to abandon any idea of attacking Iran.

Here is what the ad says:

Some of us who signed this ad believe that even a nuclear Iran—faced with the certainty that its first aggressive use of nuclear weapons would engender a massive retaliation sufficient to kill most of the people of Iran—would not dare take a first nuclear strike against Israel or the United States. Americans once perceived the Soviet Union to be equally evil, irrational, and driven by ideological fundamentalism—yet the Soviet Union, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, was constrained by the possibility of mutually assured destruction. The same is likely to be true of Iran should its ideologically driven fundamentalist leaders ever decide to develop nuclear weapons.

In other words, we think that we are right. We're not sure, but we are willing to bet every Israeli's life on our certainty of our understanding of the human nature of the mullahs.

Some of us fear that electoral pressures have pushed President Obama and many Democrats in Congress to abandon the strategy of containment used with all the other nuclear powers and instead to coerce Iran into not developing nukes. We agree with the goal of non-proliferation, but believe that the only way to restrain the development of nukes by other states like Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt is for the current nuclear powers—including the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel—to disarm their own nuclear weapons.

In other words, we think that we are right. We're not sure, so if the last nuclear weapon on the planet belongs to Iran or Pakistan or gets into the hands of Hezbollah or Hamas, and they decide to use it, we will condemn their murder of tens of thousands of people in very strong terms. Tsk, tsk!

Some of us believe that Israel could actually work out peaceful relations with Iran and enhance its own security and U.S. security by ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, helping the Palestinian people create an economically and politically viable state, taking generous steps to alleviate the humiliation and suffering of Palestinian refugees, and supporting Palestinian membership in the United Nations.

In other words, we haven't bothered reading a word of what Iranian leaders say about Israel day in and day out since Khomeini. When they say, repeatedly, that they want to see Israel utterly destroyed, they really mean they want to see an end to the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza. If only Israel would make a gesture, then Iran will erupt in lovingkindness and generosity, we think. And we are so convinced of our wisdom that are willing to risk the lives of millions of Jews and the existence of the Jewish state itself. That's how smart we are.

Similarly, if the United States were to apologize for its role in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and ushering in the Shah’s dictatorial regime, it would strengthen the hands of those in Iran who seek an overthrow of the even worse Islamic fundamentalist regime that now terrorizes the people of Iran.

Yes, an apology will strengthen the people Iran is throwing in jail when they dare to go against the government version of facts. We know this because we know it would work for us, and everyone thinks like we do.

Except for Netanyahu, who is just a warmonger.

The ad goes on to push something called The Global Marshall Plan — a plan developed by Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. This plan says that if we would just be nice to everyone, everyone will be nice to us.

This is what happens when aging hippies get hold of enough money to place an ad in the New York Times.

Who wants to be a member of the UN? (Daily Show)

Inaccurate - the Security Council would have voted down Palestinian Arab membership even without a US veto - but still funny:

(h/t Ian)

Latest crazy Arab rumor: Israel planning artificial earthquake to demolish Al Aqsa

Quds Media, one of the major inciters of hate against Jews and Israel, is claiming that Israel is planning to create an artificial earthquake in order to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

The head of the Supreme Council for Islamic courts in the territories, Yousef Adeis, issued a statement saying "The Al-Aqsa mosque had just entered the stage of the extreme danger that is facing during which the fiercest war waged against it by the Government of the Israeli occupation and the settlers who seek to destroy it and build a temple in its place."

Adeis added that there have been more and more covert and overt meetings by the leaders and rabbis of Jewish groups recently, in coordination with the Israeli military establishment, which aim to develop a number of schemes that seek to demolish the Al Aqsa Mosque. One of them is to create an artificial earthquake that would collapse the mosque, after they perform all the excavations underneath the Temple Mount necessary to ensure that it would work.

Adeia is demanding an Arab-Islamic emergency summit meeting of to discuss the implications of these imaginary threats to Al Aqsa Mosque.

There were major, deadly earthquakes in the area in 1759, 1837, and 1927. One can surmise that another one is due in the next few years. People like this want to ensure that when it happens - everyone will blame the Jews.

1927 earthquake damage in Jerusalem

Following a lie from Al Aqsa Foundation to the Arab League to UNESCO and the Security Council

I mentioned that the Al Aqsa Foundation was inciting against Israel, blaming the partial collapse of a wall and a small landslide on a hill in Silwan on "Israeli excavations" that are meant to "Judaize" Jerusalem.

This damage has nothing to do with any excavations (which are hundred of meters away anyway.) It is simply a result of heavy rains that have been saturating the ground and making it unstable, and there have been other instances of similar damage. (In Gaza today a man was killed when a well collapsed, for example.)

The Al Aqsa Foundation is a fringe extremist group whose only purpose is to incite hate against Israel. Several times a week it fabricates stories about supposed Israeli plans to demolish the Al Aqsa Mosque. Sometimes, the stories get play and when they are lucky they can cause riots and even deaths with their unfounded rumors.

Yet their repeated lies continue to get coverage in Palestinian Arab media and beyond.

Now, according to the group, the Arab League has lodged a complaint with UNESCO and the Security Council to condemn Israel for its imaginary role in these incidents.

Assuming it is true (perhaps the Aqsa Foundation lies about Arabs too) this shows how irresponsible the Arab League is. It has no problems pushing ridiculous lies up towards world bodies without the least bit of vetting. It fully supports the incitement and hoped-for violence that would result. It reflexively believes - and goes on to take ownership of - the most outrageous claims, as long as Israel and Jews are the target.

Hamas says it will get Egyptian fuel through Rafah

From Ma'an:

Gaza's energy authority on Monday announced an agreement with Egypt to import fuel via the Rafah crossing to ease the power crisis.

The Hamas-run authority said Egypt's General Petroleum Authority would initially deliver diesel meant for cars through the terminal until industrial diesel could be transferred.

Pipes, pumps and tanks to receive the fuel will be prepared Tuesday morning, the Gaza authority said in a statement.

The announcement follows weeks of critical power shortages in the Gaza Strip. Since Egypt shut off fuel deliveries via underground tunnels in February, Gaza's power plant has shut down twice and the 1.7 million residents of the coastal strip face up to 18-hour blackouts each day.

Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Friday blamed Cairo for the outages and said Egypt controlled the flow of fuel into the enclave.

Egypt had told Hamas that in future it should import its oil through legal channels -- namely the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom border crossing.

But Haniyeh said he would not import fuel from Israel, which would be more expensive and vulnerable to Israeli sanctions.

"If someone fired a bullet three kilometers away from Kerem Shalom, the Israelis would close the crossing and prevent the entry of fuel," Haniyeh said.

I don't recall any security-related closings of Kerem Shalom although that happened frequently with other crossings when terrorists shot rockets at them. Perhaps they haven't attacked Kerem Shalom for fear that the rocket might hit Egyptian territory, which is just west of Kerem Shalom.

Kerem Shalom has closed for holidays and maintenance. But then again, so has Rafah - for Egyptian holidays, because of computer problems, and because of Palestinian Arab disturbances. Haniyeh doesn't seem to worry about capricious Egyptian closures of Rafah.