Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Latest peaceful PalArab poll

Highlights from the latest PSR public opinion poll in the territories show that both West Bank and Gaza Arabs think that their governments are corrupt, that there is only some or no press freedom, and an overwhelming majority say that they cannot criticize their respective governments without fear.

5)	Do you think that there is corruption in PA institutions under the control of President Abu Mazin?
	1) Yes	72.9%	73.1%	72.6%
	2) No	17.7%	15.8%	20.7%
	3) DK-NA	9.4%	11.1%	6.7%
		Total	West Bank	Gaza Strip
6)	Do you think that there is corruption in PA institutions under the control of the dismissed government in the Gaza Strip
	1) Yes	61.6%	57.3%	68.7%
	2) No	21.2%	19.3%	24.3%
	3) DK-NA	17.2%	23.5%	7.0%
		Total	West Bank	Gaza Strip
7)	In your view, is there a press freedom in the West Bank?
	1) Yes	23.0%	23.3%	22.5%
	2) To some extent	43.1%	40.0%	48.3%
	3) No	30.6%	33.0%	26.7%
	4) DK-NA	3.3%	3.7%	2.5%
		Total	West Bank	Gaza Strip
8)	In your view, is there a press freedom in the Gaza Strip?
	1) Yes	16.2%	16.5%	15.8%
	2) To some extent	33.8%	30.9%	38.6%
	3) No	40.4%	38.9%	43.0%
	4) DK-NA	9.5%	13.7%	2.6%
		Total	West Bank	Gaza Strip
9)	In your view, can people in the West Bank today criticize the authority without fear?
	1) Yes	30.2%	33.7%	24.5%
	2) No	66.0%	63.5%	70.0%
	3) DK-NA	3.8%	2.8%	5.4%
		Total	West Bank	Gaza Strip
10)	In your view, can people in the Gaza Strip today criticize the authority without fear?
	1) Yes	21.9%	25.2%	16.6%
	2) No	67.5%	60.5%	78.9%
	3) DK-NA	10.6%	14.3%	4.5%
		Total	West Bank	Gaza Strip

Other highlights:

72.6% said that the "right to return" (i.e., the destruction of Israel) is either the top or the second most important national goal.

In answer to the question "If you think there are other options to solve the financial crisis confronting the PA, which of the following you would choose?" 52$ say "Return to negotiations in order to obtain greater donor support" (i.e., get more free money from the West by pretending to want peace) and 27% said "Dissolve the PA."

Here's where years of propaganda pays off: 62% said Israel's long term plans are "Extending the borders of the state of Israel to cover all the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and expelling its Arab citizens." 21% more said that Israel plans to annex the entire West Bank and keep the Arabs without any rights.

39% of all Palestinian Arabs, and 55% of Gazans, support a return to "armed resistance" (i.e., terrorism.)

47.5% of all Palestinian Arabs, and 62% of Gazans, support "armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel."

(h.t Andreas)

A victory over lawfare

From NGO Monitor:

In a key defeat for NGO “lawfare” in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) today decided that it does not have jurisdiction to begin an investigation over cases related to the 2008-09 Gaza War because “Palestine” is not a state. In January 2009, the Palestinian Authority (PA) filed a letter with the Court, purporting to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction in order to bring war crimes cases against Israeli officials, notes Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, which was involved in the case from the outset.

“Throughout this process, the ICC – created to punish the worst perpetrators of war crimes and mass murder – was exploited by several EU- and European-government funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which intensively lobbied the OTP as part of their campaign to attack the legitimacy of the State of Israel,” says Anne Herzberg, legal advisor for NGO Monitor. “The NGOs Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Al Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Federation Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l´Homme (FIDH), and Adalah campaigned at the ICC in support of the Palestinian Authority’s political goals. This clearly was contradictory to the spirit and substance of peace negotiations.”

On behalf of NGO Monitor, Herzberg submitted a legal brief on the case. The brief argued that the ICC’s jurisdiction is defined by the 1998 Rome Statute, which makes clear that only states can accept the Court’s jurisdiction. The Statute was adopted after years of careful diplomatic negotiations, and allowing the PA to fall under the Court’s jurisdiction would have essentially amounted to a re-writing of the Statute. In addition, the brief argued that, contrary to claims by NGO proponents of the PA initiative, the ICC was not established as a court of universal jurisdiction, and NGO attempts to transform it into such would be legally improper. The OTP used similar arguments to support its decision.

“The fact that the case even proceeded this far was clear legal overreaching, but it shows the strength of NGOs that lead the de-legitimization and demonization campaigns against Israel,” adds Herzberg. “The OTP’s decision today is a strong rebuke to these NGOs, their political agenda, and their campaign to isolate Israel from the international community,” notes Herzberg. “International arenas are routinely hijacked for political purposes, but today’s decision was markedly different.”

The original paperwork for this was filed over three years ago by the PA. It is amazing that it took three years for the ICC to determine the obvious fact that the PA does not represent a state. It is unfortunately not amazing that so many "human rights" organizations supported this attempt at lawfare.

NGO Monitor was not the only organization that submitted a paper opposing this instance of lawfare. The European Center for Law and Justice filed a couple, including an answer to Al Haq's submission, as did Dore Gold, a group of American legal scholars, an association of Jewish lawyers, and others.

It appears that the anti-Israel groups were arguing that Palestine is a state and therefore any Israeli actions on its territory can be prosecuted by Palestine; if Palestine wishes it can give that authority to the ICC. Since they clearly cannot prosecute Israelis in Palestinian Arab courts, this is obviously a big stretch.

One point that still seems problematic is this paragraph from the ICC in an earlier letter to the UNHRC:

In accordance with Article 12 (2) (b) of the Statute, the Court may exercise its jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed by nationals of a State Party to the Statute. In this regard, South African lawyers have communicated to the Office information on alleged crimes committed in Gaza by individuals possessing South African nationality.

Does that mean that people can dual-citizens of Israel can be prosecuted by the ICC at the request of their other countries? I think it would have to be from a request from the nation itself, but that seems like something that people who wage lawfare would try to use next.

(Usual disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.)

Hamas claims great influence at WB Bir Zeit University

Hamas' Palestine Times newspaper has a photo essay and article bragging about how Hamas is making early gains in the campaigns for student leadership at Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah.

According to the article, for the last three semesters Fatah did not allow Hamas to run in these student elections, but now Hamas is back and doing well. It notes that Hamas' green flag can now be seen all over the university.

Hamas caption: "Foreheads bowed to Allah, God willing, will not be defeated"

These are the best and the brightest of Palestinian Arab youth - university educated and dedicated to a genocidal death cult.

Abbas: New threats and old lies

From YNet:

The Palestinians plan to send [a letter to] Netanyahu next week which specifies the Palestinian Authority's conditions for jumpstarting the peace negotiations.

According to Abbas, the letter states that if Israel is not willing to return to the negotiating table, the Palestinian Authority will file a complaint with international bodies.

"Israel must accept international legitimacy and stop construction in the settlements," Abbas said in Cairo.

He said that in the letter, the PA leadership wrote to Netanyahu: "You have made the PA a non-authority. You have taken away from the PA all its commitments and what it was doing and supervising. Now we have been left with nothing."

Um, I forgot, who is refusing to go to the negotiating table again?

I also love "now we have been left with nothing." If Abbas had nothing, then he would have dissolved the government by now, or he would have pushed harder for "unity" with Hamas and elections.

In the end, the entire reason that Hamas and Fatah have kept their distance is the same reason they have been trying to keep things reasonably quiet with Israel. Both of them have something to lose.

Both the PA and Hamas are arresting members of the other camp, arresting journalists and others who say anything negative about them, and in general acting like dictators who will hold onto power for as long as they can.

And, as I've noted numerous times, Abbas himself has said "In the West Bank we have a good reality...the people are living a normal life." He only cries about how desperate he is when it suits him, but when it is politically expedient to say things are fine and time is on his side, he'll say that as well.

Merah's lawyer says he was innocent; Jihadi forum says he was pious jihadist

What do you get when you cross a Jihadist sympathizer with a lawyer? You get a really bad liar:

An Algerian lawyer said Monday that she has evidence that the young man accused of killing seven people in attacks on French soldiers and a Jewish school claimed his innocence to police.

Mohamed Merah, 23, was killed after a more than 30-hour standoff with authorities, who have said that during negotiations he confessed to the killing spree in southwestern France and refused to surrender peacefully.

But Zahia Mokhtari, a lawyer for Merah's Algerian father, told BFM television on Monday that she had two identical videos of Merah that contradict the police narrative.

"In these videos, he says, 'I am innocent. Why are you killing me? I didn't do anything,'" she said.

Mokhtari would not detail how she got the videos, saying she would reveal more on their origin once she files a lawsuit in French courts against the elite police force, RAID, that killed Merah.

In case you have only short-term memory, the AP article helpfully reminds us:

A police official with knowledge of the investigation cast doubt on her claims Monday, noting that Merah led police to evidence that proved he was the perpetrator.

Prosecutors say Merah spoke at length with negotiators from the RAID force throughout the long standoff last month while he was holed up in a Toulouse apartment.

During these conversations, authorities say, Merah told them where to find a video he took of the crime spree. Al-Jazeera television has said it received a copy of the video, which shows the deaths of three paratroopers, three Jewish children and a rabbi from the killer's point of view.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of police rules, added that Merah had toyed with police during the standoff, initially agreeing to surrender but later vowing to "die with his weapons in his hands."

Tipster Samson notes that the lawyer, Zahia Mokhtari, resembled both Death in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" as well as Igor in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein."

In related news, MEMRI translates a posting in a jihadi forum that claims that, contrary to news reports, Merah was a pious Muslim and dedicated jihadist:

In the post, Abu Al-Qa'qa' gives details about Merah's travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he allegedly heard from Merah himself. He strongly rejects the Western media's claims that Merah was a disturbed young man, describing him as a pious Muslim and praising his technological skills and his eagerness in training to be a mujahid. He adds that Merah was supposed to carry out a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, but that his plan was abandoned for reasons he is not at liberty to disclose.

According to Abu Al-Qa'qa', Muhammad Merah made two trips to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The first time, he traveled to Afghanistan through Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq and Tajikistan, but was arrested before he could join a jihad group. The second time he managed to obtain a visa to Pakistan, and while there, met with Taliban members who introduced him to Jund Al-Khilafa.

Will PA subsidize Gaza fuel going through Kerem Shalom?

Palestine Today reports that Hamas and the PA have reached a "partial agreement" to the fuel crisis in Gaza.

According to a senior political source in Gaza, power plant fuel and will enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing.

He said that the price of liter of industrial fuel to be supplied on a daily basis to Gaza would be 3.3 shekels (or 3.71 shekels), excluding tax.

If this is true, it means that the PA will heavily subsidize the cost of fuel to Gaza to a price similar to the price of smuggled Egyptian fuel, which is itself subsidized by Egypt for the use of Egyptians.

Assuming that the heavy-duty diesel is priced roughly similar petrol used in cars, the PA is agreeing to subsidize 60% of the cost, as Israeli fuel is now about 8 shekels a liter. (That includes high Israeli taxes, though - h/t Shtrudel)

This means that Hamas' blackmail has worked, and it has managed to use the threat of suffering Gazans to avoid paying market rates on fuel - and allowing Hamas to tax the cheap fuel for its own profit. And Western powers will now be paying for Hamas to be enriched by this political blackmail through PA subsidies.

According to this poorly translated and unsourced article, unemployed Gazans are waiting for hours at gas pumps to buy fuel at 3.75 shekels a liter in order to resell it for 5.2 shekels on the black market, earning about 350 shekels a day.

Next hearing on Palmer murders on April 18th

I received an email from Michael Craig Palmer, father and grandfather to Asher and Yonatan Palmer, who were murdered last year in a terror attack.

The next significant public hearing for the murderers of Asher and Yonatan Palmer הי"ד will be on Wednesday, April 18, 10:30 a.m. at Machane Ofer.

The strong public support at the hearing on March 11 demonstrated strongly that terror victims and Israeli society at large expect justice from the justice system. This was not the message at the February hearing where there was barely any Jewish presence and the murderers openly received encouragement from their supporters in the courtroom! It is, I believe, very important to show the prosecution and the court that Asher and Yonatan, and all victims of terror, are remembered and that we demand justice for their murderers.

Please do what you can to get the word out about the April 18 hearing. Anyone interested in being there should contact me at mcpfiveone@gmail.com [so he can submit the names to the army for security clearance - EoZ.]

Regards,
Michael

Haniyeh lies, blames Israel for "withholding fuel" from Gaza (updated)

Palestine Times reports that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister, holds the "Zionist occupation" to be "fully responsible" for the deaths of 3 Gaza children who died in a tragic fire when fuel their parents were storing in their house exploded, probably from a candle. Haniyeh said that Israel was at fault for its "siege of Gaza and preventing fuel for electricity," which is of course a complete lie: Israel is willing to provide all the fuel necessary, but Hamas is refusing to accept fuel from Israel.

Gulf News adds:

Speaking to Gulf News, Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas spokesman, said that the failure to deliver fuel to Gaza and the power shortage has paralysed life there.

"The death of the three children is a crime and Israel is responsible for it."

"The victims' family and Gaza will not forgive Israel for this crime," he said.

Barhoum said that Israel and some groups in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) were also responsible for causing a delay in delivering fuel to Gaza Strip.

"Egypt is required to act and come to the rescue," he said.

He called on Arab countries to immediately intervene to save the Gaza Strip from an environmental and humanitarian disaster that Hamas has deliberately caused.

Hamas is cynically promoting Gazan suffering in order to extort money and aid from Arab states. And still none of the leaders of those states are willing to publicly respond that they'll only help when Hamas acts like they care about their own people. The fear of Islamists taking Hamas' side seems to be enough to cause them to keep any of their reservations about Hamas' manipulations to themselves.

Meanwhile, Gazans are waiting in lines from morning to night to get a gallon of petrol.

(h/t Jeff T)

How to misuse statistics: Israel accused of jailing too many journalists (updated x3)

From Justin Martin at Columbia Journalism Review:

At the end of each year, the Committee to Protect Journalists counts the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide and lists the countries in which they’re locked up.

These data are very helpful, but I think we can consider them under a new lamp by taking into account each country’s size. China and Eritrea, for example, have about the same number of journalists rotting in prison, 27 and 28 respectively. But the population of China is over 250 times that of the small dictatorship.

Any country that unjustly arrests or imprisons a single journalist is democratically suspect, of course, and that includes you, America. Ratings of press freedom in the United States tanked after 2011, as counts of arrested journalists in this country soared. Still, though police in the United States tend to arrest journalists filming or otherwise documenting unrest, their bosses usually get embarrassed at the media blowback and drop the charges. Imprisoning journalists for months or years at a time is another matter and, other than the outright murder of journalists in places like Russia and Syria, the long-term jailing of reporters is the offense with which the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is most concerned.

For a new take on this scourge, I quickly calculated the highest twelve ratios of jailed journalists to a country’s population size.

So we see that according to this criterion, Israel jails more journalists per capita than any other nation except for Eritea.

Sounds damning, right?

Except that it is a meaningless statistic. The size of the country's population has nothing to do with how many journalists are in the country. Israel has far more journalists than most countries that are much larger, because there is such intense interest in Israel. Moreover, Israel is liberal in allowing journalists to have access to the nation, as opposed to, say, practically every other nation in the Middle East.

If you want to see which nations jail the most reporters per-something, you must compare it to the total number of reporters - not the total population of the nation. To restate the question - if you are a reporter in Country X, what are the odds that you will be arrested? Comparing the number of jailed journalists to the total population of the nation doesn't tell you anything meaningful.

This is not to blame Justin Martin at CJR - at first blush his metric sounds like it might be meaningful - but his initial assumption is completely wrong.

Unfortunately, I cannot find immediately how many journalists are in Israel. Here's a list of journalists per million in North America and here's one with newspaper journalists per million for many other countries, but not Israel. I would be willing to bet that if you find out those numbers, and look at number of jailed reporters per thousand reporters, you will see Israel going way, way down that list.

This is all besides the fact of the circumstances of the imprisonment, which is a whole other topic. Given that Arab media openly says that their journalists are part of the war against Israel, it is but a small step for some of them to step over that line. But even without going into that, this is a perfect example of a statistic that sounds like it is illuminating some truth - and in fact it is obscuring it.

UPDATE: I was too charitable. Martin really dislikes Israel and chances are pretty good that he gleefully published this metric just to castigate the Jewish state. (h/t Soccer Dad)

UPDATE 2: Comments from an email correspondent about the underlying CPJ study:

The CPJ report says that Hamas has jailed three journalists. Divide 3 by 1.5 million (the population of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip according to the Palestinian Authority) and you have a jail-rate that dwarfs Israel. Does the CJR (Columbia Journalism Review) article’s failure to mention this indicate anything about the author’s (Justin Martin) agenda? Does Martin’s statement that “Israel, though, wants to be called a modern democracy and gets cranky when critics point out that it is not” tell us anything about his agenda?

The CPJ report tells us nothing about its methodology: how it conducted its “census,” how it decided who to classify as a “journalist,” etc. Even if it had a reliable methodology for figuring out what journalists were arrested where, the CRJ would still not pretend to be comprehensive; it claims only to be “a snapshot of those incarcerated at midnight on December 1, 2011” that does “not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year.”

The CPJ report tells us nothing about how it examined the charges; there is nothing to indicate that all the persons who were arrested were in fact arrested due to journalistic activity, rather than say, contempt of court or activities on behalf of a terrorist organization. For instance, the CJR report lists Raed al-Sharif as a jailed journalist, while also telling us that Israel has stated that he was detained due to “involvement in terrorist activity.” It is worth noting that international law sometimes requires the jailing of journalists. For instance, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted several Rwandans for genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity committed by broadcasts on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. This is surely relevant to the detention of, for example, Walid Khalid Harb, director of the Hamas newspaper Falastin.

I noted last night in Twitter that the US arrested scores of journalists during the Occupy demonstrations. Also, I mentioned that just last month India arrested a journalist - an Iranian implicated in the terrorist bombing against Israeli embassy personnel. Being a journalist doesn't make one immune from being imprisoned when one does a crime.

UPDATE 3: Ahlam Tamimi helped plan and execute the Sbarro's massacre - and then came home to deliver the news on a PA TV show. Is she one of those "journalists" who must be protected according to the CJP? (h/t Arnold and Frimet Roth, parents of one of the victims)

A new book was published in Arabic that is getting some publicity in the Jordanian media, called "Jewish Hostility Towards Christ and Christians," by Assad Azzouni.

According to these articles, the book includes risible charges such as saying that Jews are trying to destroy Christianity and convert all Christians to Judaism. It also devotes much space to how the Talmud is dedicated to starting wars, and of course has complete faith in the autheticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as Jews being behind all Masonic activities.

None of the articles about this book show the slightest bit of skepticism about Azzouni's claims.

Beyond that, Azzouni wrote his own article in Al Watan Voice about the same theme. In that article, almost as an aside, he writes:

Do not forget the need to kill Christian children and use to knead their blood in a dough on their festival.

Then he goes beyond the standard blood libel to add a specifically Islamic twist:

According to Rabbi Moses Abu Alhafiyah, the Talmud analyzes two types of blood for the pure blood of the Passover. If Christian blood is not available, Muslim blood is acceptable, because they believe that many Christians converted to Islam.

No comments on the article, no one protesting this throwback to the anti-semitism of the Middle Ages in Europe. It is simply accepted as a fact in the Arab world. In English, they will stress how much they love Jews but in mainstream Arabic media opinions like these are accepted wholeheartedly.

And this is just from a quick search for the word "Jew" in Arabic newspapers published today.

Toulouse killer's neighbors say "he was one of us"

From Reuters:

In the neighborhood where Mohamed Merah grew up, and was last seen joking with friends days after he had killed three French soldiers in a pair of shootings, the message to outsiders is clear: he was one of our own, no matter what he did.

The self-styled Islamist militant tore a wound in France's fragile sense of community when he gunned down the soldiers, sons of North African immigrant families like his own, and then a rabbi and three Jewish children - all in the name of al Qaeda.

in Les Izards, the 1960s housing project where Merah, 23, felt most at home, the reaction to his rampage has been one of anxious defiance of outsiders trying to peer into what seems like a closed world, cut off from elegant downtown Toulouse by its poverty, by crime and, locals say, by racial discrimination.

"I'm going to tell you one thing: he was a kid from this neighborhood and we support his family no matter what people say on TV," said one middle-aged mother of Algerian origin who said she had known Merah when he was a child in Les Izards.

Typical of others in the area of low-rise blocks and tidy squares a 15-minute metro ride north of the city centre, she did not want to be named when speaking up for the man who was, briefly, public enemy No. 1: "He was one of ours," she said. "And we will never be sure of what really happened."

By one local account of a confrontation between youths and the authorities in the neighborhood, after Merah was killed trying to escape a siege of his apartment, one young man was arrested after yelling at the police ranks: "My friend Mohamed is a real man - too bad he wasn't able to finish the job!"

Hatem Ben Ismail, who runs several community centers in the area and describes himself as the "go-to guy on Les Izards", says he simply hesitates to discuss in public the mood among the youngsters he tries to help: "The situation with the young people," he concluded, "is just too explosive."

By the bakery where Les Izards residents said they last saw Merah hanging out, two days before his last attack, on a Jewish primary school on March 19, a group of surly young men in tracksuits and dark glasses glowered at oncoming cars.

When, on a reporting assignment this week, a Reuters photographer approached the youths, all in their late teens and early 20s, she was warned, with a stream of expletives, to leave - or have her car smashed up.

True to Reuters' philosophy, the article goes heavy on "understanding" Merah and the seething neighborhood he is a part of, emphasizing poverty and alienation and downplaying Islamic fundamentalism.

But even that is too much for news editors worldwide. Any article that might show Muslim youths as being supportive of a murderer is anathema. it doesn't fit the meme and must be suppressed. While typically Reuters articles can get posted at hundreds of newspapers and other media sites, this two-day old story was only picked up by two newspapers according to Google News search: The Chicago Tribune and the Jerusalem Post.

(h/t Jeffer)