Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Is Gideon Levy a liar or does he just ignore the news he doesn't want to see?

I wasn't going to comment on Gideon Levy's latest idiotic piece in Haaretz, where he says:

Now Israel is discovering that it’s no longer the center of attention as it always was before, and that the fate of its kidnapping victims no longer stops the world in its tracks, not even in the United States. The world is sick of Israel and its insanities. Unfortunately, the world has also lost interest in what happens here. When Israel was a more just country, the world identified with its victims. It continued to do so even when Israel became less just. But now, when Israeli rejectionism is hitting new heights and its oppression of the Palestinians is returning to what it was during the very worst periods, the world has started getting tired of it all.

Really? The world isn't interested in Israel anymore? That's great news! Let's dismantle all the UN committees and NGOs that exist solely to demonize Israel - because no one cares!

Oh, Levy means that the world doesn't care about Israeli victims anymore. Did they ever? Was there ever a UN resolution condemning atrocities against Israelis?

(I would argue that the world has lost interest in Palestinian Arabs. The prisoners' hunger strike just ended with a whimper because, according to some, there was no international interest in the story. Their stunts are what bores the world. Unfortunately, interest in demonizing Israel remains quite high.)

At any rate, the article is idiotic, and like most of Levy's anti-Israel screeds, worthless and repetitive. However, one part caught my eye:

Over the last two weeks, which I spent in Sweden, I didn’t run across a single mention of the abduction in the media. Not one.

That is amazing. Because a simple search finds:

Tre israeler kidnappade - al-Qaida tar på sig ansvar (Aftonbladet)

Militär letar försvunna tonåringar (VK.se)

Tre israeliska pojkar befaras ha kidnappats (Expressen)

Israel söker kidnappade tonåringar (SVD.se)

These are only the initial articles on the abduction, there are plenty more about the IDF search for the teens over the past two weeks.

It is possible that Levy, a supposed journalist, didn't bother reading any Swedish newspapers during his trip there. Which means that he is not a liar but simply a willful ignoramus.

All of which just goes to prove....Israel-haters don't have facts on their side, so they just make them up.

06/26 Links Pt1: Most Palestinians want to eliminate Israel; Terror Victims could ‘own’ Iran’s Internet

From Ian:

Poll: Most Palestinians want to eliminate Israel

Palestinian support for a two-state solution with Israel has dropped to below the 30 percent mark, according to a new poll commissioned by the US-based think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, though most respondents said they were opposed to violent resistance.
Marking a notable shift in Palestinian public opinion, 60 percent of the population surveyed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (55% and 68%, respectively) said that the five-year goal “should be to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea,” according to the poll, a position meaning the elimination of Israel. Meanwhile, less than 30% (31% in the West Bank, 22% in Gaza) would like to “end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to achieve a two-state solution.”
In contrast, 53% of Palestinians supported the two-state solution in a December 2013 poll conducted
by the Hebrew University.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas Prepares for War as Abbas Talks Peace

The Fatah-Hamas reconciliation accord has had no moderating effect on the Islamist movement. On the contrary, Hamas seems headed toward more extremism, and its recent actions and statements show it is preparing for war against Israel, despite Abbas's assurances that the new government would reject violence.
Former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh announced this week that, in the West Bank, the intifada against Israel has already begun.
As in previous years, summer camps are being used to give Palestinian schoolchildren training in guerrilla warfare.
Abbas has thus far failed to condemn his Hamas partners for threatening to fire rockets at Israel. Like many in the international community, Abbas is continuing to bury his head in the sand by refusing to see what his Hamas partners are up to.

Israeli, US terror victims could ‘own’ Iran’s Internet

A United States court on Tuesday effectively awarded a group of American and Israeli victims of Iranian terror the rights to the .ir domain, the suffix used to identify Iranian websites, along with all of Iran’s IP addresses.
As a result, said the group’s attorney, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of the Shurat Hadin Law Center, Iran could find itself kicked off the Internet by ICANN, a Los Angeles-based organization that manages the web.
The United State District Court decided that the .ir domain name, along with Iran’s IP addresses — without which Iranian websites cannot be included in the World Wide Web — were assets that could be seized to satisfy judgments against the Islamic state of more than a billion dollars, owed by Iran to Israeli and US victims of terror perpetrated by the Hamas and Hezbollah organizations, among others.
As a result, Shurat Hadin, representing those victims, could collect the fees Iran pays to keep its Internet going — or force an auction of Iran’s Internet assets to satisfy the judgment. (h/t Yenta Press )

Intrafada news: Gaza government employees go on strike

Workers in the Hamas Gaza government are striking today, closing down all government offices, as a protest for their not being paid by the PA.

The supposedly unified PA has only agreed to pay the old, non-working "workers" who were employed in Gaza before the Hamas coup, not the Hamas workers.

This one day strike is meant as a warning, with more drastic moves planned if the Hamas workers do not get paid.

Generally whenever there is a crisis like this in Gaza, Gulf countries like Qatar will step in and place a band-aid on the problem by tossing a few million dollars their way. Then everyone can stop any pretense of acting responsibly for the next few months until the next crisis.

Hamas certainly engineers some crises - like the fuel issues - in order to force Arab governments to pony up cash or goods. It is not out of the question that this strike is part of that strategy to keep Hamas as financially independent as possible, as there is no oversight or auditing of these one-time donations.

Either way, it is clear that there is no "unity" in the PA, and the PLO is not anxious to push any real unity forward.

Egypt's army making a fool of itself this Monday

Last February, the Egyptian army announced that it had developed an incredible device that could diagnose and cure hepatitis C, AIDS and perhaps cancer - all without touching the patient.

On Monday, the army will start treating patients with it.

The miracle device was not described in any major scientific or medical journals. Instead, the paper describing it was published in the World Academy for Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET).'

Egypt Independent did a little checking on that esteemed journal:

As part of the investigation, Egypt Independent's editors made up an obviously incoherent research paper: a merge of plagiarized material from previously published papers on mathematics and some Wikipedia articles. The paper was then sent to the academic journal called World Academy for Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET). In less than 24 hours, the paper was accepted and WASET congratulated the author.

After the good news reached our inbox, WASET, registered in Azerbaijan and ran from Turkey, prompted us to pay a fee of EUR 400 so that the paper gets published and potentially presented in conferences that the author would be invited to. While we did not do that, social media websites abound with complaints from enthusiastic scientists and researchers who have sent their papers to WASET, got published and were asked to pay a fee for an upcoming conference which they did, only to receive nothing in return.

Nature magazine blogged about the device in March:

The miracle machine apparently diagnoses and treats patients non-invasively. The videos shown in the press release show a handheld device with a protruding antenna that follows patients as they walk around the room. Abdul Atti says that the device somehow remotely draws blood from the patient, destroys the virus, and returns it as “nutrients” to the patient. “”I will take it away from him as a disease and give it back to him in the form of a cure,” he said.

...There are several warning bells that leave little room for anything other than skepticism about this claimed discovery.

1) Such a discovery, if it was true, would have possibly been one of the biggest breakthroughs in history. This would have easily been published in one of the highest impact journals, such as Nature, Science or Cell. Instead, this paper appears in a little known journal with no impact factor called World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, which is listed as a potential predatory publisher, publishing hoaxes and poorly peer reviewed or non-reviewed papers.

2) The paper is poorly written. The language is poor, details are lacking, there is no proof of principle offered and no logical explanations. They just talk about tests on patients without even outlining the steps taken before starting to experiment on humans. There is no clear explanation of the processes followed either.

3) The researchers claim they have received a patent for their invention. However, a quick search shows that the patent review team commented that the “description undoubtedly lacks a clear and complete disclosure of the claimed invention and cannot be allowed under Article 5 PCT.” They claim in the paper that they have patented their invention, but that is a lie.

4) With a little basic understanding of science, one cannot help but be completely skeptic about how the device works due to the large number of question marks surrounding it. The device is claimed to work remotely through electromagnetic waves. Somehow it is the first process that uses biological electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) to detect signature marks of the viruses. This is something unheard of in any of the past science literature, yet there is nothing offered in the paper on the research or the principles used.

Then, there’s the question of how is the blood drawn out of the body, and then inserted back in again afterwards? How does it recognize the signature of the virus with the incredible 100% accuracy claimed? So many unanswered questions.

All in all, the paper does not follow any scientific methodology, jumping straight to clinical tests that they claim to have performed using the new device.

This is just a few of the problems with the paper, the research, and the methodology attached to this outrageous claims. The research is too poor to even be taken in consideration.

For now, this is not science. I do not know what this can even be called.

How about "a hoax?"

In May, an Egyptian doctor went to a science exhibition and debunked the device in about ten seconds:

There was a group of people surrounding a young man's whose only job was to present and test the device. One man held a C-Fast device while another held a bit of plastic on which was written "Virus C". I understood that there is a Virus C sample in the bit of plastic.

The antenna really did move towards the bit of plastic. The man would move the bit of plastic and the antenna would move in its direction. I asked them, in front of the crowd, to do the experiment again while the man holding the C-Fast had his eyes closed. He agreed without hesitation and they did the experiment again in front of the crowd. The man moved the bit of plastic and the antenna didn't move in its direction. He moved it left and right and the antenna didn't move. In the end it moved to the left. I asked the man to open his eyes so that he could see where the antenna was and where the bit of plastic was - both in completely different directions.

I did this because I know that the device works according to the ideomotor effect, a psychological phenomenon whereby a subject makes unconscious physical responses to thoughts, i.e. the device user moves his hand very slightly and imperceptibly and the antenna moves towards the target. The device will not therefore work if the user is unable to see the moving target.

The young man responded to me saying that the device requires two weeks training and that he was only trained on it while his eyes were open.

According to Egyptian paper Youm7 and translated here:

70,000 applied for treatment by email
The device treated 1000 patients till now. Including judges, deputy ministers and doctors
Treatment started in Abbasseya hospital (not clear which one) and Almaza military hospital. 100% of cases of HIV were cured. 97% of Hepatitis C.
Foreign patients will be received in special hospitals until a tourist resort is dedicated to foreigners with HIV
Every day 30 doctors are trained on using the devices. By June 30 a trained doctor will operate each device.
Another source said the device treated 50 Hepatitis C cases and 30 HIV.

Unfortunately, thousands of Egyptians who are seriously ill are betting their lives on a worthless plastic and metal gadget.

There is a tiny ray of hope for Egypt's Hepatitis-C sufferers, though, in this story from March:

Gilead Sciences, facing mounting criticism over the high price of its new hepatitis C pill Sovaldi, has offered to supply the medicine to Egypt at a 99 percent discount to the U.S. price.

While the drug will still cost $900 for a 12-week course of treatment, that is a fraction of the $84,000 charged for a course of treatment in the United States.

The high price tag in America prompted questions from U.S. lawmakers on Friday, after U.S. health insurers said they were seeking help from state health officials to foot the bill.

Gilead said it was "pleased to have finalized an agreement" for the introduction of Sovaldi in Egypt, which has the highest prevalence rate of hepatitis C in the world.

"We believe Sovaldi could have a major impact on public health in Egypt by significantly increasing the number of people who can be cured of hepatitis C," Gregg Alton, head of corporate and medical affairs at Gilead, said in an emailed statement.

Does Egypt realize that the device is worthless and it negotiated this deal to save face by curing some Hep-C victims, pretending that the Complete Cure Device is what is really curing them?

Official Egyptian media continues to insist that the CCD is legitimate.

Whatever happens, Egypt will become the laughingstock of the world this Monday.

From Haaretz:

The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian.

The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that book, which became a best seller and was translated into several languages, Sand argued that the “Jewish people” is an invention, forged out of myths and fictitious “history” to justify Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel.

Now, another Israeli historian has challenged one of the foundations of Sand’s argument: his claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the people of the Khazar kingdom, who in the eighth century converted en masse on the instruction of their king. In an article published this month in the journal “Jewish Social Studies,” Prof. Shaul Stampfer concluded that there is no evidence to support this assertion.

“Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened,” Stampfer said.

Stampfer, an expert in Jewish history, analyzed material from various fields, but found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.”

As a historian, he said he was surprised to discover how hard it is “to prove that something didn’t happen. Until now, most of my research has been aimed at discovering or clarifying what did happen in the past ... It’s a much more difficult challenge to prove that something didn’t happen than to prove it did.”

That’s because the proof is based primarily on the absence of evidence rather than its presence – like the fact that an event as unprecedented as an entire kingdom’s conversion to Judaism merited no mention in contemporaneous sources. “The silence of so many sources about the Khazars’ Judaism is very suspicious,” Stampfer said. “The Byzantines, the geonim [Jewish religious leaders of the sixth to eleventh centuries], the sages of Egypt – none of them have a word about the Jewish Khazars.”

In all probability Haaretz is not synopsizing Stampfer correctly (UPDATE: See comments, apparently Stampfer is saying that the entire story is a myth.) There are a couple of pieces of evidence of a debate/disputation in Khazar, and reports that at least some people converted. Wikipedia says:

At least some Khazar rabbinical students appear to have studied in Spain. Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo, in his Book of Tradition (1161), writes:

"You will find the communities of Israel spread abroad... as far as Dailam and the river Itil where live Khazar peoples who became proselytes. The Khazar king Joseph sent a letter to Hasdai ibn-Shaprut and informed him that he and all his people followed the rabbinical faith. We have seen descendants of the Khazars in Toledo, students of the wise, and they have told us that the remnant of them is of the rabbinical belief."

Other evidence is listed in the main Wikipedia Khazar article.

But evidence of conversion of the entire Khazar people, or even the bulk of them, is thin indeed. There is no archaeological evidence of synagogues or yeshivot in Khazaria despite the "Khazar correspondence" that claims many of them.

Whether or not some Khazars converted, that is a far different claim than saying that all Ashkenazic Jews are descended from Khazars, which is obviously absurd. As I have mentioned previously, Jews must keep track of who descends from Aaron (Kohens) and more generally Levi (Levites.) Converts obviously aren't Kohanim or Leviim, yet there are plenty of Ashkenazic families who trace back their lineage to those families. A Khazari synagogue would have a tough time finding a Kohen to bless the people on Jewish holidays! To say that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from converts means that there was also a vast yet unknown conspiracy to "convert" tens of thousands of them to Kohens and Levites, which is insane.

Moreover, such a mass conversion would have involved numerous Jewish legal responsa as the supposed new Jews spread throughout Europe. That lack of evidence is stunning - Judaism would not automatically accept the conversion of people forced to convert and the literature would certainly discuss the legal issues involved.

Shlomo Sand is not a historian of the time period - his courses are on "French Intellectual History, Political History of the 20th Century, Cinema and History, Nation and Nationalism, History and Theory." His books prove that he is an ideologue more than a researcher.

Stampfer, on the other hand, specializes in East European Jewry, Jewish demography, migration and education.

Sand is a fraud.

(h/t Yenta)

Review and excerpts of Mahmoud Abbas' Holocaust denial book (Mida)

Back in January, I noted that Mahmoud Abbas' writings were all available on his official presidential website - including his book denying the Holocaust.

The excellent Mida magazine just reviewed the book.

Excerpts:

How often have you heard that Abu Mazen is a Holocaust denier? Ever since Mahmoud Abbas rose to top of the Palestinian leadership, the issue has come up again and again. But on the 27 April, 2014, in an unprecedented move, the Palestinian President publicly declared that the Holocaust was "the most horrible crime committed against humanity." Abbas argued that the Holocaust was the result of ethnic discrimination and racism, which the Palestinians reject.

Abbas' words, alongside his rejection of the idea that his book explicitly denies the Holocaust, strengthen the need to do an in-depth review of his controversial work. First, we need to point out that Holocaust Denial isn't just the denial that any murders happened, but also the minimizing of its true dimensions, the hiding of facts, as well as the blurring of the responsibility of the actual perpetrators. Abu Mazen may not do the former, but does the latter openly and explicitly.

We can already see this in the subtitle of the book itself "The Secret Contacts Between Nazism and Zionism." In addition, throughout the whole book, he weaves many anti-Semitic threads, describing Zionism as being ultimately responsible of the destruction of European Jewry, a statement that the Nazis themselves would no doubt have endorsed. Abbas also touches on Jews in Arab lands, ignoring their suffering and creating an ahistorical politically-motivated fantasy. Anyone with any knowledge of history would easily recognize this to be a tendentious, propagandistic work saturated with open and hidden anti-Semitic messages.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, the book continues to sell in Arab countries, is taught in the Palestinian Authority and can be fully read in an online version at Abbas' website. The text itself, and the fact that he still makes it available without reservation on his personal website, make clear that Abbas' statements to the media are nothing more than a smokescreen.

...But after paying homage to the need to denounce the crime, he goes on the offensive: "Many researchers have discussed the number of those who died – six million – and arrived at amazing results, according to which the number of Jewish victims numbers hundreds of thousands." On the same page, Abbas quotes the known Canadian Holocaust denier, Rojeh Dilorm:

There is no proof so far that the number of Jewish victims in the Nazi camps reached four million or six million; at first the Zionists spoke of 12 million who were wiped out in the camps, and afterwards the number was reduced and shrank significantly and became half that is only six million, and later the number it shrank further and became four million. After all, it cannot be that the Germans killed or exterminated more numbers than was actually in the world at the time. And the truth is that the number is far less than the millions that are argued.

Later Abbas ostensibly quotes the eminent Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg's classic The Destruction of European Jewry (1961), where he erroneously claims that Hilberg puts the number of Jewish victims at only 896,000 (p. 670). But Hilberg's estimate was nowhere near that low; he estimated the number of Holocaust victims at five million: "World Jewry lost a third of its number and slid from an all-time high of 16 million to about 11 million." An innocent mistake? Doubtful.

How does the eminent Dr. Abbas explain the alleged inflation of victims? According to him, the fault lies with the Zionist movement:

It seems that it was the interest of the Zionist movement to inflate the numbers of those who died in the war, so that the profits it desired would be as high as possible. This caused it to establish this number [six million] for world opinion, so that the latter would feel more pangs of conscience and sympathy for Zionism.

Even when it comes to the gas chambers themselves, Abbas continues to rely on "facts" and "studies" of Holocaust deniers, quoting for instance Robert Faurrison:

These chambers, [which have been said to] de designed to kill live Jews – in a scientific study published by French professor Robert Faurisson, he attacked the existence of such chambers for those alleged purposes, and stated with certainty that they were solely for cremating bodies, for fear of the spread of disease and bacteria in nearby areas.

..."How can one believe that the Zionist movement, which set out to protect a nation, would later become the reason for its destruction?" Abbas wonders. The answer is just as outrageous as the question:

When one discusses declared Zionist thought, which acolytes of Zionism deeply believe in with great conviction, we find that the Zionists believe in the purity of the Jewish race, just as Hitler believed in the purity of the Aryan race. Zionism calls for a fundamental and final solution to the Jewish Question in Europe via their immigration to Palestine. Hitler also calls for this and implements this […] David Ben Gurion defined the Zionist movement as solely a movement of immigration, and anyone who doesn't immigrate is a heretic and not considered a Jew (p. 4).

The Zionists and the Nazi are thus not just partners – they are almost one and the same.

...Thus, per Abbas, the Zionists thought anything that would cause Jews to immigrate was justified, including anti-Semitism and cooperation with Hitler:

It is well known that the motivation of anti-Semitism is persecution and repression, and this is definitely desirable for the Zionist movement. The conclusion from these ideas is that every racist in the world was given the green light, and first and foremost Hitler and the Nazis, to do with the Jews as they wish, as long as it ensures Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Zionist movement did not suffice with just giving a green light – but demanded even more victims, in order to be equal with the victims of other people in the war. This because it believes that raising the number of victims will increase its stock at the end of war, when the spoils are divided. (p. 5)

So how could Abbas pretend to be horrified by the Holocaust today?

Simple. He is a liar.

06/25 Links Pt2: Israeli doctors perform life-saving heart surgery on 5 Palestinian children

From Ian:

Israeli doctors perform life-saving heart surgery on 5 Palestinian children

As Israel carries on its search for kidnapped teenagers Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Fraenkel, Israeli doctors of Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) continue to save the lives of Palestinian children at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon.
Since the beginning of Operation Brother’s Keeper, five Palestinian children have undergone life-saving heart surgery at Wolfson, eight Palestinian children were admitted, including two urgent cases brought by ambulances from the West Bank and from Gaza, and 15 children are expected to arrive this week to the SACH free weekly cardiology clinic for Palestinian children.
“Children are children”‘ says Dr. Lior Sasson, SACH chief surgeon, “for us it doesn’t matter where the children come from, every child deserves to receive the best medical treatment and children from both sides, shouldn’t be a part of the conflict.”

Israel Lobby Is Playing Mind Games With Stephen Walt Again

Wait — those aren’t drums of war. Israel opposes American intervention in Iraq.
How can this be? The answer is that Israel’s primary rival is Iran, and its client Hezbollah, both of which are Shiite. Iran is backing the Iraqi government, which is fighting the Sunni ISIS rebels. Israel may not like ISIS, but it does not want to increase Iran’s power, and aiding the Iranian-backed government in Baghdad would do that. And so the neoconservatives currently demanding American intervention in Iraq are acting not in the service of Israel’s interests but against them. Indeed, Israel was always far more ambivalent about war with Iraq in 2003 than Walt’s crude argument ever allowed.
Anyway, Walt’s column today is about how people who have been proven to be ignorant about foreign policy should no longer have prestigious outlets in which to disseminate their ill-informed beliefs. (h/t Zvi)

Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep It There

It’s not that our policy makers—and here I speak of not only Israel but the democratic West—don’t take account of honor-shame dynamics. They just don’t take it seriously. For them, what they regard as childish, superficial concerns can be palliated with polite words and gestures, and then these good people will behave like rational choice actors, and we can all move forward in familiar, sensible ways. So, when the Pope Benedict’s remark about an “inherently violent Islam” set off riots of protest throughout the Muslim world, the onus was on the pope to apologize for provoking them. Only thus could one spare Muslims global derision for randomly killing—killing to protest being called violent.
But culture is not a superficial question of manners. In the Middle East, honor is identity. Appeasement and concessions are signs of weakness: When practiced by one’s own leaders, they produce riots of protest, by one’s enemy, renewed aggression. Benjamin Netanyahu stops most settlement activity for nine months. Barack Obama goes to Saudi Arabia for a reciprocal concession he can announce in Cairo. King Abdullah throws a fit and the Palestinians make more demands. And too few wonder whether basic logic of the negotiations—land for peace—has any purchase on the cultural realities of this corner of the globe. If only Israel would be more reasonable …
When we indulge Arab (and jihadi Muslims’) concerns for honor by backing off anything that they claim offends them, we think that our generosity and restraint will somehow move extremists to more rational behavior. Instead, we end up muzzling ourselves and thereby participating in, honoring, and confirming their most belligerent attitudes toward the “other.” They get to lead with their glass chin, while we, thinking we work for peace, end up confirming and weaponizing the Arab world’s most toxic weaknesses—their insecurity, their embrace of all-or-nothing conflicts, their addiction to revenge, their paranoid scapegoating, their shame-driven hatred. And there is nothing generous, rational, or progressive about that. (h/t Herb Glatter)

Amnesty's false charge of "collective punishment"

An EoZ reader wrote to Amnesty International about their characterization of Israeli actions in Hebron as being "collective punishment" as well as asking if they condemn the kidnapping of Israeli civilians.

Here was their answer:

Dear Sir/Madam,

International humanitarian law and human rights law applies to all civilians - Israeli and Palestinian.

Our statement makes clear that the abducted teenagers must be released - the abduction of civilians and the taking of hostages is prohibited by international law at all times (Article 34 of the Fourth Geneva Convention).

The statement also goes into detail on how Israel is breaking Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention by carrying out collective punishment, including:

- the imposition of a complete closure on the Hebron district of the West Bank, which prevents some 680,000 Palestinians from moving between villages and the city of Hebron, as well as within the city.

- thousands of residents of the Hebron district who have permits to work inside Israel or in Israeli settlements cannot reach their places of employment.

- residents of the Hebron district under the age of 50 have also been prevented from leaving the West Bank via the Allenby Crossing to Jordan.

- the Israel Prison Service has cancelled family visits for Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

- the Israeli authorities are also considering transferring Hamas officials or prisoners who are residents of the West Bank to the Gaza Strip. The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits an occupying power from forcibly transferring or deporting people from an occupied territory.

- the Israeli authorities have also closed the Erez Crossing, the only crossing for people between the Gaza Strip and Israel, to the limited categories of people who have permits to use it, except for patients needing urgent medical assistance. The Kerem Shalom Crossing, the only entry point for goods, has also been closed except for the transfer of limited amounts of fuel.

Regards,
Gordon Bennett

Supporter Care Team
Amnesty International UK

I asked a couple of lawyers to respond.

Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor quoted the major text in the field, Yoram Dinstein's "The International Law of Belligerent Occupation." He writes:

363. The issue of collective penalties also came up before the Court, in the Shua case, in the setting of a prolonged night curfew imposed on the Gaza Strip for a cumulative period of two years."' The Court (per Justice G. Bach) conceded that, ordinarily, such a protracted curfew might appear to amount to an improper collective penalty; but it reached the conclusion that this was not so in the present instance, given the special circumstances of the intifada." The ruling was confirmed by the Court (per Justice I. Zamir) in the Sruzberg case.'

364. Evidently, a drawn-out night curfew seriously upsets the life of the civilian population in an occupied territory. The legality of a curfew therefore depends on its purpose in the concrete circumstances. The real aim of the military government, in imposing the measure, is liable to contravene the Geneva prohibition of collective penalties in an occupied territory." Yet, as long as a curfew is directly associated with the exigencies of a specific security situation, there is nothing legally wrong with it.

Another lawyer replied:

Since the best information Israel has indicates that the hostage-takers are members of a cell of the Hamas terrorist organization operating in Hebron and that the terrorists took their hostages to Hebron, it is obviously a vital security measure to restrict movement in and out of Hebron until the hostage-takers and their accomplices are apprehended and the hostages safely released from captivity. The measure is not intended as punishment, and Israel has explicitly and repeatedly said so. Amnesty International is claiming the power to read minds and insisting that it detects an evil intent in order to transform legitimate security measures into “punishment.” Or does Amnesty International have evidence to show that the measures are not related to apprehending terrorists or recovering the hostages?

There’s almost nothing to be found defining the prohibition.

In my opinion, collective punishment is criminal or quasi-criminal punishment of the innocent (e.g., convicting someone of the “crime” of being related to a war criminal), especially actions against civilians that would be war crimes in any event (like Nazis rounding up villagers and shooting them as punishment for someone else’s resistance). Here are the only two cases that appear in the ICRC manual on customary law: Nazis killing hundreds of civilians in response to partisan attack on German army; and a US officer who ordered the My Lai massacre (summary execution of Vietnamese civilians as reprisal for killings carried out by North Vietnamese combatants). The rest is opinions outside of legal proceedings, or prohibitions without definitions.

The ICRC manual section is entitled “Individual Criminal Responsibility and Collective Punishments.”

In all cases, the intent is key – if the measure is not intended as punishment/penalty/disciplinary measure but as something else (e.g., securing an area), it is not collective punishment.

This second lawyer also notes Amnesty's inconsistency on their fifth point (which has nothing to do with "collective punishment"):

Amnesty says that Israeli authorities are considering transferring Hamas officials or prisoners who are residents of the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, and that this would be forbidden since the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits an occupying power from forcibly transferring or deporting people from an occupied territory.

However, Amnesty International also claims that Gaza is currently belligerently occupied by Israel. If that is the case, transferring Hamas officials who are residents of the West Bank to the Gaza Strip is simply a reassignment of residence of persons within occupied territory that is explicitly permitted by article 78 of the Geneva Convention. In any event, transfer to Gaza could not possibly be a "deportation" from occupied territory.

Is Amnesty International now finally admitting that the Gaza Strip is not belligerently occupied by Israel?

(h/t Mike)

More from the humor site PreOccupied Territory:

Jerusalem, June 25 - Palestinian religious scholars and military experts alike remain baffled at Israel's continued failure to mount an actual effort to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, despite years of warnings by Palestinian and Arab leaders that such attempts are imminent.

This week marked the 74,554th warning by prominent Muslims that the Jewish State seeks to tear down the historic shrine, along with the 74,554th case in which Israel's manifest military might, disregard for human life, and evil nature, all obvious to those leaders, have somehow proved inadequate to the task of demolishing a building, which the IDF otherwise does with some frequency and in defiance of international opinion.

The experts concede they are at a loss to explain how a country so morally corrupt and convinced of its own superiority would neglect to subject Muslim shrines to the same treatment that Muslims meted out to Jewish synagogues upon conquering the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City in 1948. Mustafa Nenema, a cleric at the mosque, admits he cannot account for the inconsistency in the behavior of the Zionists, to whom Muslim blood is cheap but who apparently can be repeatedly dissuaded from actually destroying the mosque by the presence of Muslims.

"Israel killed dozens of Palestinian Muslims at Al-Aqsa in 1990," said Nenema, referring to an event during the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, when Israeli soldiers and police used lethal force to suppress a violent demonstration at the Temple Mount. "And the immoral Zionist forces continue to kill Palestinians indiscriminately, so I'm not exactly sure what they're waiting for when it comes to Al-Aqsa." He suggested that perhaps Israel was trying to lull the Muslim world into complacency, a strategy that evidently began in 1967 when Israel declined to harm any of the Islamic structures or institutions in the Old City when it would have been least problematic to destroy them, and even granted the Islamic Waqf control over the site of the Temple Mount.

"It's almost as if they don't really want to destroy Al-Aqsa," says Nenema. "And that notion I simply cannot accept."

06/25 Links Pt1: Benny Morris: Before the Kidnappings, There Was a Massacre

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Before the Kidnappings, There Was a Massacre

The slaughter on May 13, 1948, by Arab militiamen from nearby villages and Jordanian Legionnaires of dozens of surrendering Jewish troops in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion was probably the biggest Arab massacre of Jews in the first Arab-Israeli War.
A year later, in the early morning hours of the fourth day of Iyar, 5709 (May 3, 1949), the first anniversary, in the Hebrew calendar, of the fall of the kibbutz, Col. Shlomo Goren, the IDF chief rabbi, accompanied by a minyan of young Jerusalemites, held a commemorative service on an Israeli hilltop from which could be seen, in the distance, the ruins of the Etzion Bloc. The “bloc” of four kibbutzim—Kfar Etzion, Ein Tzurim, Massu’ot Yitzhak, and Revadim—had been established between 1943 and 1947 in the Judaean hills, amid a cluster of Arab villages in the southern part of the West Bank, which Jordan had occupied in May 1948 and which Israel was to conquer in June 1967. The bloc was located in the heartland of the biblical Land of Israel, between Abraham’s Hebron and King David’s Bethlehem. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Mother of Abducted Teen in Strirring Address at Geneva Shul

Rachel Frenkel, the mother of abducted teen Naftali, addressed a Jewish congregation in Geneva Tuesday and told the audience that the abduction of her son and two other yeshiva students by Hamas has brought unity to the nation of Israel.
Frenkel was in Geneva along with Bat Galim Sha’ar and Iris Yifrah, the mothers of the other two abductees. She had addressed the UNHCR and made an impassioned plea to help all three captured boys return home.

Hashtags are not enough

It is a clever and well-executed campaign which has not only highlighted the plight of the three kidnapped Israeli teens, but has hopefully contributed to pressuring the Palestinian Authority to cooperate and provided comfort to the victims’ families.
But for all its merits, “#BringBackOurBoys” cannot bring back our boys.
Only the Israel Defense Forces has the capacity to accomplish such a feat by physically entering Palestinian cities, like Hebron, searching for the kidnapped teens and capturing and interrogating terrorists to gain information that will lead to their rescue.
This is the only hope that these teenagers have.

Israel Was Not Created To Teach Morals To Enemies – Let The IDF Win!

In these days in Israel, the people are united in their desire to see the three missing Jewish teenagers re-emerge safely. Each passing day sees peoples’ patience waning – and uniquely, a desire to see the strongest army in the region do what needs to be done. As Naftali Frenkel, an American citizen, and two other Israeli teenagers are missing, the United Nations condemns Israel, and the American State Department demands that Israel “exercise restraint” in its search for the Hamas kidnappers.
And in Israel, it’s a major yawn – these are flies swatted off with an annoyance – a non-factor. All that matters is doing all that can be done to ensure the safe re-arrival of the missing boys.

The antisemitic Jordanian national dish

Ammon News of Jordan tells a legend of the origin of mansaf, regarded as the Jordanian national dish.

According to the article, some historians say that the name of the dish comes from the root NSF which means "blowing up", "blasting", "destroying." A legend is told of an ancient "Arab" Moabite king from 885 BCE, Mesha, who asked that this dish be created as a way of expressing his animosity towards the Jews, whom he knew were planning to betray him.

Mansaf is made of lamb cooked in a yogurt-based sauce and is not kosher because of the Jewish prohibition of eating meat cooked in milk. Therefore, the article claims, the dish was originally created to insult Jews.

The article then says that Jordanians still eat this dish, and through this act they express their animosity towards the Jews until the Day of Judgment.

The origin story is nonsense, of course. Wikipedia says that according to some the current version of mansaf was only created in the 20th century, but variants have been eaten by Bedouin for centuries.

Yet by creating this myth of the origins of mansaf, Jordanians are showing that antisemitism is ingrained in their culture.

One commenter said, "If this is true, then eating mansaf is a sort of jihad against the Jews."

There is no discomfort at an origin story for a food that entrenches Jew-hatred into Jordanian culture. No one is calling for a symbolic boycott of mansaf in order to show that Arabs love Jews but are only against Zionists. And no one will.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Muslims on Temple Mount taunt Jews with three-fingered kidnap gesture (video)

A video taken this morning on the Temple Mount shows hundreds of Muslims attempting to intimidate Jews who are peacefully visiting the holy spot, shouting Allahu Akbar.

Dozens of them are there gesturing at the Jews with the three-fingered gesture celebrating the kidnapping of three Israeli teens.

(h/t Elihu)

Jordan threatened by ISIL jihadists - and only Israel can help

Last week, the jihadist group that is destabilizing Iraq and has caused chaos in the Syrian revolution made an appearance in Jordan:

AMMAN — Dozens of supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) rallied in Maan on Friday marking the upstart jihadist movement’s first public appearance in Jordan.

The jihadists gathered in the southern city, some 220km south of the capital, to celebrate ISIL’s recent military gains in Iraq, praising what they described as “victories for Islam”.

Raising the banners of ISIL, some 60 supporters marched in downtown Maan and chanted: “Today Iraq, tomorrow the caliphate” in reference to the group’s stated goal of re-establishing a greater Islamic state, eyewitnesses said.

Participants — the bulk of whom comprised young Jihadi Salafists and former ISIL fighters chanted: “The caliphate is coming to Jordan.”

According to Islamist sources, the rally was organised by the recently established Islamic State-Jordan, a loose gathering of some 200 current and former ISIL fighters devoted to “recruiting and raising support” for the group.

According to those close to the ISIL offshoot, the pre-planned rally is the first of a series of steps to “raise ISIL’s profile” in Jordan to rally support among Jordanians.

“We want to counter accusations and misinformation that the Islamic State is a foreign movement, or a movement that is being directed by the Assad regime or Iran,” said Abu Mohammad, an ISIL supporter.

“This march aims to show that we are a genuine, independent movement that has true support in Jordan.”

That may be the first public appearance by ISIL, but it looks like they have been quietly building their network in Jordan. According to Israeli experts, Jordan is in serious danger from the jihadists:

A range of experts on the Middle East say that the repercussions of the Sunni militants’ victories in Iraq will be felt beyond the borders: in Syria, where an emboldened ISIL might attack Damascus; in Jordan, which shares a long border with Iraq and is fragile enough to be destabilized; and in Israel, which will act against any ISIL power-grab in neighbouring Jordan.

Kobi Michael and Udi Dekel, senior research fellows at the INSS, also say Baghdad for now is not the biggest concern. The major gain for ISIL from its advances in Iraq has been in Syria where its dominant position had been eroded by rival opposition forces such as the Nusra Front, a group still linked to al-Qaeda. This force had pushed ISIL into the northeast corner of Syria, and even continues to control some border crossings to Iraq.

Now, however, armed with money seized from Iraqi banks and captured U.S. weapons including anti-tank missiles and armoured vehicles, ISIL can start to push back.

It is “only a matter of time” before the group launches an attack on Damascus, say the two Israelis in a report published Tuesday.

And that is not the only Arab capital in danger.

“If the recent events spill over into Jordan and ISIL forms strongholds in the Hashemite kingdom … Jordan is liable to be engulfed in chaos with the survival of the kingdom threatened,” say Mr. Michael and Mr. Dekel. Already it is being threatened by a growing number of jihadist cells “infiltrating the state under the guise of refugees.”

Saudi Arabia has announced that if necessary it would dispatch tanks to defend Jordan. But that won’t be enough to stop the advance of an insidious force such as ISIL. Nor can Jordan count on Washington to do the right thing in time, according to the Israeli researchers.

“Jordan needs a clear strategic military ally,” they say. And “although it cannot admit it openly, its only practical strategic military ally is apparently Israel.”

Indeed, the last thing Israel wants is a jihadist group such as ISIL camped on the border across the Jordan River, and it will do whatever it must to keep Jordan free of these forces.

(h/t Yoel)

3-year old girl killed by a terror rocket - in Gaza

Ma'an reports:

A young Palestinian girl died and three family members suffered injuries late Tuesday in an explosion in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, medics said.

Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, said four people including two children arrived at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The two children were in critical condition.

Residents in the area said they believed the explosion was caused by a homemade rocket.

Palestine Press Agency confirms she was killed by a rocket that fell on the family home.

In March, a 2-year old boy was killed in Gaza when a rocket being built by Hamas exploded near his home.

Also in March, a 52-year old woman was killed by a rocket falling on her Gaza home.

There have been lots of other Gaza civilians killed by rocket fire before this year as well, most of them children.

By my count there have now been 29 people killed in Gaza this year from terrorist explosions and rockets.

The Gaza terror groups believe that the many people they have killed in Gaza is a good price to pay for the wonderful feeling of seeing Israelis running to shelters.

(h/t Josh K)

Antisemitism in Britain, by George Orwell (1945)

Written by George Orwell, April 1945.

There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition some thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees who have entered the country from 1934 onwards. The Jewish population is almost entirely concentrated in half a dozen big towns and is mostly employed in the food, clothing and furniture trades. A few of the big monopolies, such as the ICI, one or two leading newspapers and at least one big chain of department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but it would be very far from the truth to say that British business life is dominated by Jews. The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to keep up with the modern tendency towards big amalgamations and to have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on a small scale and by old-fashioned methods.

I start off with these background facts, which are already known to any well-informed person, in order to emphasise that there is no real Jewish “problem” in England. The Jews are not numerous or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called “intellectual circles” that they have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted that antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable circumstances it could have political results. Here are some samples of antisemitic remarks that have been made to me during the past year or two:

Middle-aged office employee: “I generally come to work by bus. It takes longer, but I don't care about using the Underground from Golders Green nowadays. There's too many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line.”

Tobacconist (woman): “No, I've got no matches for you. I should try the lady down the street. She's always got matches. One of the Chosen Race, you see.”

Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: “No, I do not like Jews. I've never made any secret of that. I can't stick them. Mind you, I'm not antisemitic, of course.”

Middle-class woman: “Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They're so abominably selfish. I think they're responsible for a lot of what happens to them.”

Milk roundsman: “A Jew don't do no work, not the same as what an Englishman does. ’E's too clever. We work with this 'ere” (flexes his biceps). “They work with that there” (taps his forehead).

Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected way: “These bloody Yids are all pro-German. They'd change sides tomorrow if the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them in my business. They admire Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They'll always suck up to anyone who kicks them.”

Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with antisemitism and German atrocities: “Don't show it me, please don't show it to me. It'll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.”

I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on with. Two facts emerge from them. One — which is very important and which I must return to in a moment — is that above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are careful to draw a distinction between “antisemitism” and “disliking Jews”. The other is that antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse than useless. As the last of the above-quoted remarks shows, people can remain antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues.