Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 21, 2012

Anti-semitism is alive and well among soccer-fan tweeters

Two small Israeli flags were displayed in the crowd during a major televised soccer game in Germany:

And the Jew-haters came out of the woodwork on Twitter:

WTF....do u see those Israeli flags at mid pitch....muthfukers r everywhere....even in germany

RT @Ali_ElMaestro8: Them jews with the Israeli flags are pissing me off.

Dean whitney

2 days ago

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Hardly surprising there's Israeli flags either. The Jews blackmail Germany cos of what they did and will do it for ages.

Ryan

2 days ago

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I'm pretty sure the two fellas waving Israeli flags at the CL final have been sent on a PR mission. Infuriating.

Azero

2 days ago

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them guys waving the israeli flags on the halfway line are mocking the Germans on a different level #ChampionsLeagueFinal

Majid Freeman

2 days ago

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@goldman1007 abramovich is Jewish - the Israeli flags on the halfway line were possibly a reference to the massacre at Olympics 40 years ago

Armchaireverton

2 days ago

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You can read the whole thing at Storify.

(h/t Daniel F)

Links, links and more links

Zvi's linkdump:

Pressure for arts boycott of Israel condemned

The Irish government's #2 man (and FM) criticized the IPSC's bullying of Irish artists who want to visit Israel.

Why the cultural boycott of Israel is a blunt and backward instrument

This author is plainly not a friend of Israel. I suggest reading this mostly because this is a non-friend who seems to have realized that the "cultural boycott" of Israel is not only disingenuous but cruel and completely unfair.

Israeli kibbutz takes bite out of Iran's caviar exports

Algerian author sparks uproar with Israel visit

South Sudan, world’s youngest nation, develops unlikely friendship with Israel

"JUBA, South Sudan (JTA) – This city in the world’s newest country is not your typical Arabic-speaking capital. For one thing, most of the city’s inhabitants are Christian. For another, the Israeli flag is ubiquitous here."

Israel attracting Chinese students

"When Zhong Weichao, a doctoral student at Harbin Institute of Technology in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, started a yearlong exchange in Israel five months ago, he soon thought you can never judge a country by its size.
...
"The coolest thing here is that the environment is very open. You can challenge the teacher by asking whatever questions interest you, and they are capable of and willing to answer them all. And the technology you are engaged in is world-class," he said."

N.Y. mural contrasts gay rights in Israel with neighboring countries

A mural created by gay Birthright alumni contrasts gay rights in Israel with repression in the Arab countries.

And finally, a satirical look at the way the media report on Israel:

How to Write About Israel

From Yoel:

Tantawi (in hint to Israel?): we'll cut off the tongue of whoever turns against us...we're ready to fight (Hebrew)

Nasrallah: we can hit Tel Aviv, Israel will be annihilated

Iran to Hezbollah (in response to above?): Don't strike Israel

Israeli detention was ‘five-star’ compared to Syrian jail — freed Turkish journalist who was on Marmara

Egyptian paper: Egyptian nuclear scientist defected to Israel (Hebrew)

Palestinian, African migrants brutally rape two Israeli girls

Archaeologists discover ancient olive press in Modiin

Israeli may become next world chess champion

Also, Report: Israel to deploy 20,000 commandos in Greek Cyprus (h/t Dan)

Jacob responds to my Hasbara Challenge from yesterday

How Bedouins are systematically stealing land in Area C (series translated from Makor Rishon) (h/t zozosophie)

"Very dangerous" Israeli candy infiltrates Lebanon

While Lebanese citizens are killing each other over their Syrian loyalties, an even more important story has come out of Lebanon:

A joint national and security forces committee has seized Israeli made candies in the southern Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Hilweh, al-Liwaa newspaper reported on Monday.

The candies had wrappers with Hebrew inscriptions on them and another layer of Arab writings about the name of the alleged Syrian factory that made them. They were stashed in hundreds of bags, it said.

The committee is now questioning the trader who smuggled the candies to the camp.

“This is a very dangerous phenomenon which should be resolved responsibly,” the head of the committee of social affairs for popular committees in the southern city of Sidon, Fouad Othman, said.

“This requires the reunification of all Palestinian efforts inside the camp,” he added.

Othman also urged the Lebanese authorities to investigate how the candies were smuggled to Lebanon and then to Ain el-Hilweh.

They have a photo of this "candy:"

These wrappers say "Tnuva Butter."

Maybe it tastes so good that they thought it was candy.

Or maybe it just had the same physical effects of other Israeli products smuggled to Arab areas.

Iranian commander confirms Iran's commitment to destroy Israel

How much more explicit can they get?

From Iran's official FARS news agency:

Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Hassan Firouzabadi said threats and pressures cannot deter Iran from its revolutionary causes and ideals, and stressed that the Iranian nation will remain committed to the full annihilation of the Zionist regime of Israel to the end.

Addressing a defense gathering here in Tehran on Sunday, General Firouzabadi said that nations should realize the threats and dangers posed by the Zionist regime of Israel.

He reiterated the Iranian nation and Supreme Leader's emphasis on the necessity of support for the oppressed Palestinian nation and its causes, and noted, "The Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."

The top military official reminded that the Iranian Supreme Leader considers defending Palestine as a full religious duty and believes that any kind of governance and rule by anyone other than the Palestinians as an instance of usurpation.

Earlier this year, Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei stressed in explicit remarks Iran's direct involvement in the Palestinian and Lebanese confrontation with Israel, including the Lebanese Summer 2006 33-day resistance against the Zionist regime.

"Wherever Iran interferes, it announces it in a very straightforward manner. For instance, we interfered in confrontations against Israel, which resulted in the (Lebanese) victory in the 33-day war and (Palestinians' victory in) the 22-day (Gaza) war," Ayatollah Khamenei said, addressing millions of Friday Prayers worshippers on Tehran University Campus in February.

"In future too, we will support and help everyone who opposes the Zionist regime," the Leader underscored.

"The Zionist regime is a real cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut, God Willing," Ayatollah Khamenei underscored.

Time for Iran's Western apologists to work overtime to parse these words as if they aren't aggressive or threatening.

(Lots of hat tips but Challah was first)

Wafa Sultan vs. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad

Worth watching:

(h/t Israel Matzav via Cheryl)

Two lessons from the barn owls

Al Arabiya English last week aired a very nice story about cooperation between Israel and Jordan in using barn owls as a natural way to control pests.

Seven barn owl chicks nestled together in a wooden box in Israel's Beit Shean valley are not fuzzy and cute exotic pets, but they have become functional as they are the success of a decade-long project to use their species as biological pesticides.

In 2002, Jordanian and Israeli farmers wanted to end the use of poisons and toxic pest controls but still needed a way to safeguard their products from rats and mice.

The farmers, along with Israel's Society for the Protection of Nature and Jordan's General Mansour Abu-Rashid, began placing nesting boxes where the barn owls would breed in, up to 2,600 boxes in fields on the Israeli side of the border, hundred which are used by Jordanian farmers.

According to Ornithologist Dr. Motti Charter from Haifa University, around ten years would pass until an Israeli male owl and Jordanian female owl coupled up and bred.

"For them, they don't know that the border is here and they probably met, you know, not like people at a bar or something like that, they met one night and decided to have -- that they fell in love and they started a nest here," Charter said. "The whole concept is that, you know, it doesn't matter if it's Jordanian or Israel, they're barn owls. And for us it's a great success story because it shows, because of the Jordanians started thinking differently, started using the barn owls, they succeeded."

I'm not sure who had the story first, Al Arabiya or Reuters or the BBC. Green Prophet seems to be the source for the story.

It is a very nice story, and one that is tailor-made for Western audiences. It shows that Israels and Arabs can and do cooperate on projects that are mutually beneficial.

It would be nicer if the Arabic media would cover this story as well.

So far I haven't found a single article about this Arab-Israeli cooperation in Arabic-language media. (Jordan's Ammon News published the English Al Arabiya story.)

If there will ever be real peace, articles like this must be published in the Arabic media where ordinary Arabs can see that Israel is not as one-dimensionally evil as it is usually portrayed.

(The story can also help stop incidents such as this one where Jordanians bragged about killing an owl, and videotaped themselves doing it.)

Jews visiting Temple Mount again freaks Muslims out

On Jerusalem Day, a group of Jews visited the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount.

Here are photos of them from Qudsmedia:

As usual, Muslim Arabic media is freaking out over the "usurpers" who are "defiling" and "profaning" this indisputably Jewish holy place.

The proper response, of course, is to ensure that such peaceful visits happen multiple times a day.

Stunning Jerusalem webpage from JCPA

JCPA made a great webpage about Jerusalem, featuring a nice high resolution panoramic photo of Jerusalem with annotations, as well as a video and other information. Great for Yom Yerushalayim!

Video of IDF capturing Temple Mount, 1967

JTA links to this video for Jerusalem Day, showing not only the famous scenes of soldiers at the Kotel but on the Temple Mount as well.

It is to Israel's everlasting shame that the keys to the Mount's gates were given back to the radical Muslims of the Waqf almost immediately.

Even so, this is a day of celebration when Jews finally regained sovereignty over the only capital they have ever had.

For Jerusalem Day, AP pushes a Muslim lie

On the occasion of Jerusalem Day, AP has an article about how Jerusalem is important - to Muslims. (As of this writing, there is no AP article about Israel's celebrations of Jerusalem Day.)

Here is one part of the article that shows how lazy wire service reporters are in researching basic history and believing false Muslim narratives:

After decades of shying away from an ancient pilgrimage route, Muslims are visiting Jerusalem to pray at Islam's third-holiest site, the revered Al-Aqsa mosque....

While Islam's birthplace is in the Arabian Peninsula, Jerusalem is intimately tied with Islam's beginnings. Muhammad's first followers prayed toward Al-Aqsa and only later turned their prayers east to Mecca.

Muslims did indeed pray towards Jerusalem when they were trying to recruit Jews in the new religion around the year 625. (They changed this prayer direction to Mecca when the Jews refused to join them.) But the Al Aqsa Mosque wasn't built until 690.

AP, by implicitly claiming that the Al Aqsa Mosque was a holy site during Mohammed's time, is denying the Jewish claim to the site and upholding a false interpretation of the Koranic story of Mohammed's mystical night journey, where he says he traveled to "the farthest [al-Aqsa] mosque" on a flying horse, a site not identified as Jerusalem in the Koran itself.

(The classic article on this topic is by Daniel Pipes.)

An exercise for would-be hasbarists

Tomorrow night I will be part of a panel discussion held by the American Zionist Movement called "Israel in the Write Light" in New York City. Along with Commentary contributor/Tweeter extraordinaire Noah Pollak and Tablet senior editor Bari Weiss, we will be discussing how to effectively communicate pro-Israel messages.

I believe that knowing history is essential to being an advocate for Israel, and it takes practice to hone the historical arguments down to a form that can be read in a couple of minutes.

So here is a challenge for people who want to be good at Hasbara:

In an obscure newspaper called the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, someone named George Smith ("a nonreligious member of Congregation Beth Shalom") wrote a polemic against Israel for the occasion of Nakba Day. It is literally filled with the usual anti-Israel lies, compressed in the space of an op-ed. Over the years, I have disproved these lies many times on this blog.

The challenge is to write an effective response that is no lengthier than the original.

Taking the time to actually go through something like this - sentence by sentence - and disproving the lies yourself, briefly but thoroughly, is a most valuable use of time. The first time you do it it would probably take a few hours, but by the end of that time you will know how to answer the lies quickly and devastatingly.

If you want to send your resulting response to the newspaper (or to me) is up to you. The point here is that while many Zionists know that this article is absurd propaganda, not as many know enough to actually prove it. Proving it and boiling that proof down to something readable is a very valuable skill, one that you can only get from practice.

So if you can, this might be a good way to spend some time this Sunday.

The Iranian version of "pinkwashing"

From Iran's FARS:

Kossari is spooked

A senior Iranian legislator blasted a gay parade planned to be held in the Muslim state of Azerbaijan on May 26, warning that Baku will soon regret holding the event.

"The parade has been planned based on the goals of the Zionists and the world arrogance (the US)," member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Esmayeel Kossari told FNA on Saturday.

"The Azeri government which paves the way for the gathering of such immoral groups as homosexuals through this method (of action) should know that it will be struck by problems in the near future and the country's political and state officials will regret this move," he added.

Kossari lamented that the Azeri statesmen act based on the Zionist thoughts and views instead of paying attention to the Islamic thoughts and their people's beliefs.

Even Iranians say that Israel is gay-friendly!

The funny part, of course, is that groups like "Queers Against Israel Apartheid" side with Iran against Israel.

The bureaucracy of censorship in Kuwait

From the Kuwait Times:

Proud of her job to keep others ignorant

Different professions have different tastes. Sometimes we wonder how the work of some people goes on, especially if it is not very common. The censors who are responsible for censoring books and other publications do an interesting job, which becomes harder during some periods of the year, yet it seems they enjoy it. In Kuwait, freedoms are respected yet within certain limits. “The limits of freedom in the press, TV, radio or other media is organized by law no. 3/2006 concerning Press and Publications, law no. 61/2007 concerning Visual and Audio Media, and related by-laws,” Dalal Al-Mutairi, head of the Foreign Books Department at the Ministry of Information told Kuwait Times.

These laws set the basic rules to deal with right and wrong acts announced or published in the media. “This is also related to books, electronic publications and games and many other things. There are certain red lines that should not be crossed by the publishers, writers, authors and others. In order to check the application of the laws and that it’s not violated, there are inspectors and censors working at the Ministry of Information,” she added.

Dalal started her career as a censor at the Foreign Books Department and became the head of the department after a few years. “Many people consider the censor to be a fanatic and uneducated person, but this isn’t true. We are the most literate people as we have read much, almost every day. We receive a lot of information from different fields. We read books for children, religious books, political, philosophical, scientific ones and many others,” she pointed out.

“As a censor, I read a book from beginning to the end, word by word. In case the censor makes a mistake, the head of the department will be responsible for this mistake, as they should also read the book. The time to finish censoring a book depends on the kind of the book. For instance, a philosophical book needs about four days to read,” Dalal added.

...According to the law, if there is a violation, the censor writes a report about it. “Nobody can distribute any book unless he has a license to do so. The distributor should bring a copy of the book to our department. Sometimes we receive complaints from people regarding some books. Then we investigate with the printing press that published and printed this book. The printing house is responsible for the material and books printed by it and they should inform the Ministry of Information that they are printing a book, and then the book is not distributed without a license. There are some censors and inspectors from our department who inspect different printing presses to check their license,” Dalal stated.

...The greatest load on the department is during the Book Fair. “We start censoring the books in this fair about three months before it is held. We receive about 7,000 to 8,000 books to read. There are about 15 censors working on this fair. These censors take the books home with them to finish their reading. If we find a book containing restrictions, we write a report that is passed to a committee which decides that certain books will be banned from the fair,” she highlighted.

...Working as a censor is interesting. “I like this work. It gives us experience, information and we always learn something new. It takes about a year or a year and a half to become a censor, as the person is first employed as a censor assistant. The employee first starts slow in reading and it takes him a week or days to finish a book. Also, beginners are not given political or religious books in the beginning as these are difficult. Instead we give them children’s books or some scientific books, which are easy,” said Dalal.

In some religious books, the censorship department cooperates with the Ministry of Endowments. “Religious opinions may differ and that’s why we demand a professional explanation, although we have some censors who are graduates of the Faculty of Islamic Law. Some religious issues are transferred to the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs. The banned books include publications printed in Israel, Christian missionary and Jewish books and other similar books,” she noted.