Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

08/26 Links Pt2: Exposing Edward Said as academic fraud; Survivors for Hamas – Really?

From Ian:

In Making David Into Goliath, Joshua Muravchik dissects many of the myths and frauds that Edward Said built up around himself. And yet the myths can never be entirely destroyed because of the crucial role that he played in the alliance between the New Left and Third World nationalists. His ideas helped assign intellectual credibility to the intertwining of two reactionary totalitarian movements struggling to remain relevant by denouncing every newer system of government and thought.
Like many racists, Edward Said’s denunciations of others were really expressions of his own limitations. Said condemned his academic enemies for failing to see the diversity of the east, when it was Said who refused to see the diversity of the west. Edward Said reduced his opponents to crude stereotypes while accusing them of reducing Arabs and Muslims to crude stereotypes.
Edward Said accused his opponents of constructing colonialist myths, but his obsession with Israel led him to promote a colonialist myth in which his imperialist ancestors were the true indigenous people and the Jews, the majority of whom were Middle Eastern refugees, were foreign usurpers.

Anti-Israel Activist Ali Abunimah Accused of ‘African-Hating’ After Comparing President Obama to White Supremacist

An outspoken anti-Israel activist has found himself in the cross-hairs after comparing comments made by President Obama to white supremacist rhetoric.
Late last week, Ali Abunimah, the founder of the controversial Electronic Intifada blog, tweeted, “When Obama says Israel is in a ‘tough neighborhood,’ he’s echoing the white supremacist rhetoric that justifies the killing of Black men.”
Responding to the tweet in a Facebook post, Dumisani Washington, Director of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, said Abunimah was himself guilty of racism.
“In typical Arab supremacist, African-hating fashion, Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah compares ‘Black men’ to genocidal, misogynistic, child slaughtering jihadists like Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” Washington wrote, “Maybe he thought we were too stupid to notice.”
In an email to The Algemeiner Washington added, “Thank you, Mr. Abuminah for proving once again that there is no difference between White supremacists and Arab supremacists – right down to the enslavement and subjugation of Black people. Oh yes, go find your own narrative and stop trying to steal ours.”
Another African-American activist and commentator, Chloé Valdary, also took exception to Abunimah’s assertion.
Describing Abinumah’s comment as “extremely offensive,” Valdary told The Algemeiner, “Unless Abunimah doesn’t think racist bigoted organizations like Hamas and ISIS threaten Jews, he’s essentially justifying Arab supremacism by claiming that its victims are racists.”
“But in the same way blacks were threatened by white supremacists,” Valdary said, “Jews are also threatened by Arab supremacists. Abuminah’s inversion of reality and colonialist revision of history does not change that fact.” (h/t MtTB)

Finance Minister Yair Lapid at the dock 17 in Germany (h/t dabney)

Arab writer claims "Zion" is Arab

Salah al-Sayer, writing in Al Arabiya, says that "Zionism" refers to the Jews wanting ownership of Mount Zion, that ancient Arab mountain.

He says that there are Arab families with the name "Zion" who originally lived on the mountain.

So I researched further and found an article by an apparent member of that family, insisting that it is an ancient Arab name and that there is also a "Zion" castle on the Syrian coast. The Jews, under the name of the Elders of Zion, usurped the honorable Arabic name of Zion.

There is indeed a castle in Syria known today as the Citadel of Saladin, but originally called Sahyun, the Arabic equivalent to Zion. It was apparently built by the Byzantines on an old Phoenician fortress site and much enlarged by the Crusaders; I cannot determine who named it Sahyun or when.

Wikipedia notes that while the Mount Zion did apparently have that name before it is mentioned first in Samuel II 5:7, it is pretty clear that the Muslims took the name from the Jews well over a thousand years later, and not from the Jebusites.

In fact, Mohammed referred to the Kaaba in Mecca as "Zion" to supplant Jerusalem as "the new Zion."

It is always amusing to see Muslims - whose religion is based more on Judaism than anything else - claiming that Judaism stole from them.

The "genuine facts" of Mira Bar Hillel

Mira Bar Hillel is a reporter about property or something like that for The Evening Standard. Yet her self-avowed anti-semitism and crazed hate for Israel has also apparently qualified her for writing at The Independent as well, as some sort of expert, since she has a Hebrew name.

She trolls me often and I ignore her, since it is clear that she is starved for attention. But a little Twitter conversation from today caught my eye.

This supposed journalist re-tweeted a Photoshopped, fake IDF tweet created by one of the many Israel-hating liars on the Internet:

Of course, many people pointed out to her that she fell for a hoax. But to Bar Hillel, the truth isn't important: it is "truthiness." She actually defended her propagating a lie this way:

A genuine fact! From a pseudo-journalist!

Others asked her where she got this "fact" from, and she answered:

@MarcsWords UN/Gaza Ministry of Health. Are you also disputing the 560 children Israel killed over the past few weeks?
— Mira Bar-Hillel (@mirabarhillel) August 26, 2014

So I went to PCHR, which records every incident in Gaza, real or imagined. I looked at every incident that happened during the night of August 20 and early morning of August 21.

Guess what? Not a single child was killed in Gaza during the time period that this idiot claimed 20 children were killed. (At 2:30 AM on Thursday, the IDF attack that killed 3 major Hamas leaders also killed 3 children who were being used as human shields for the terrorists.)

I'm certain that the Gaza Ministry of Health did not say that 20 kids were killed that night either. Bar-Hillel, when forced to defend her lie, just made up another one.

There you have it: the truth is completely irrelevant to the hateful, bigoted anti-Israel crowd.

See also CifWatch.

CORRECTION: I had written that Bar Hillel wrote for The Guardian. She hasn't.

08/26 Links Pt1: Israeli killed by mortar; Hamas Terrorists Admit Using Civilian sites for Attacks

From Ian:

Over a Dozen Hamas Terrorists Admit to Use of Hospitals, Kindergartens and Mosques for Military Activity

A number of Hamas operatives who were arrested and detained by Israel during Operation Protective Edge admitted to the use of civilian establishments, such as mosques, schools and hospitals, as covers for terrorist activity, according to a report released on Monday by the Israel Security Agency (ISA).
The report cites extensive and detailed testimony from the Hamas members to support Israel’s long maintained assertion that the group operates behind human shields, which often accounts for civilian casualties as it exchanges blows with the Jewish state.
The report came as the Hamas controlled Gaza religious affairs ministry claimed Israeli fire throughout Monday destroyed four mosques, raising to 71 the alleged total number of mosques targeted over the past seven weeks.
Khan Yunis native Muhammad Alqadra told ISA that mosques in his hometown were used to conceal war material such as RPGs, heavy PKC machine guns and AK-47s. Additionally, he confirmed that local schools and hospitals, including the Nasser and Halal hospitals, are used as weapon arsenals. It is also well known that senior Hamas leaders and their armed bodyguards, who usually wear police uniforms, use hospitals as hideouts, he said.
According to Alqadra, guards are stationed at the admission department in the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis. He also believes the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip, including senior official Ismail Haniyeh, is hiding in Gaza City’s Shifa hospital in an area closed off to civilians and guarded by plainclothes armed men.

IDF hits Gaza school used in mortar attack that killed 4-year-old

A Gaza school cited as the source of mortar fire that killed an Israeli 4-year-old was hit by Israeli forces early Tuesday.
The Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday that it hit over 15 targets in the Gaza Strip during overnight airstrikes, and Palestinians said two high-rise apartment buildings were hit and badly damaged by airstrikes.
The IDF said it targeted several Hamas command and control sites, including two schools in the central and northern Strip. Terrorists had been firing rockets at Israel from within the compounds.
On Friday, Daniel Tragerman, 4, was killed when a mortar shell exploded near his home on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, near the Gaza border. The army said the mortar was fired from inside a Gaza school.

David Horovitz: On Day 50 of war with Hamas, much diplomatic ado about nothing

A delegation led by retired US Marines Gen. John Allen is in Israel, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Since Allen is the man who drew up American security proposals designed to enable an Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank under a peace accord — proposals publicly and privately castigated by Israeli leaders – his visit has sparked speculation of a renewed push for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as part of the endgame for the current conflict.
The sense of imminent drama was enhanced by PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s mysterious promise, in an Egyptian television interview on Sunday, that he would shortly unveil a “surprise initiative” to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that it would be one the Americans — and thus, by extension, Israel — wouldn’t like.
Various unnamed Palestinian officials have been quoted intimating that this initiative, timed to capitalize on Abbas’s return to center stage as a potential key player in resolving the Gaza conflict, will involve seeking a UN-mandated timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 lines, with the threat of filing war crimes allegations against Israel at the International Criminal Court if the Palestinians’ demands are not met. The Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported on Tuesday that Abbas “has made clear to all sides that he has no intention of taking any responsibility for Gaza unless there is a simultaneous diplomatic process aimed at culminating in a two-state solution based on the ’67 lines.” According to this report, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is backing Abbas’s bid to utilize the Gaza crisis in order to advance a new, comprehensive diplomatic bid.
All very dramatic, and all firmly played down in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Beer Festival upsets Islamists

The Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation has condemned this:

Not only are they offended by the celebration of alcohol and the concerts, but they claim - of course - that Independence Park is actually an ancient Muslim burial ground.

This the the typical way that they try to gain control over the parts of Jerusalem that are west of the Green Line.

(The pun "Ir Ha-Beera" is great!)

If you follow the mainstream media, you would think that only Hamas is shooting missiles, rockets and mortars at Israel. This is fairly remarkable considering there are hundreds of reporters in the area.

Over the past two days, however, other groups have taken credit for shooting rockets and mortars not only at Israeli towns (as it has done throughout the war) but also for shooting rockets at the Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings.

Erez, of course, is where injured Gazans exit the sector to go for medical treatment. And Kerem Shalom is where thousands of tons of food, fuel and other aid enters Gaza.

Who are these terror groups that target Gaza's lifeline? Why, they are members of Fatah - the political party that PA president Mahmoud Abbas leads!

You see, Fatah are the Moderate Terrorists.

A press release from the Nidal Al-Amoudi group of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades claimed today to have shot 3 120mm mortars at Kerem Shalom at 11:07 AM today.

The Abdul-Qader al-Husseini Brigades, also part of Fatah, took credit for shooting a rocket at Kerem Shalom yesterday at 1:38 PM and also for shooting 120mm mortars at the Erez crossing at 7:55 PM and 9:29 PM.

These are besides the rockets being shot at Ashkelon and many Negev communities.

It is entirely possible that Fatah terror groups were responsible for the injuries at Erez a couple of days ago.

Pointing out that Fatah terror groups exist is apparently media kryptonite. Out of the thousands of dispatches from Gaza over the past fifty days, I am aware of only a single mention of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in an international news article, in the middle of a piece from the Globe and Mail. The Daily Beast listed the group as now being allied with Hezbollah in an analysis.

That's about it.

The idea that Mahmoud Abbas' "moderate" Fatah is shooting rockets just like Hamas and Islamic Jihad does not fit the lazy narrative of Hamas being not so good but Fatah being wonderful peacemakers. This is why human rights groups and reporters are aghast at the idea of saying anything negative about this terror group, complete with masks and rockets and mortars, shooting rockets at Israeli civilians.

The truth is inconvenient so it must be suppressed.

A former AP reporter blows the whistle on media bias against Israel

This article in Tablet by Matti Friedman is a must-read. Here are some excerpts:

Between 2006 and the end of 2011 I was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s two biggest news providers. I have lived in Israel since 1995 and have been reporting on it since 1997.

Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel.

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate.

Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)

The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)

But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.

The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.

...In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.

Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.

This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.

...A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.....Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.

...When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.

Read the whole thing, now.

(h/t JW)

Egypt still destroying Hamas smuggling tunnels. It also destroyed a Jihadist hospital.

From Egypt Independent:

Military spokesperson Mohamed Samir said the Second Army arrested four wanted terrorists in Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah, destroyed a vehicle and six motorcycles without license plates that were allegedly used in carrying out terrorist attacks, and destroyed five tunnels in Rafah.

Samir added that 14 militants were killed in northern Sinai in an exchange of fire in the districts of al-Nosraniya, al-Zawraa and al-Quwaiaat, pointing out that the army arrested a very dangerous terrorist named Sweilam Mohamed Salem Salama.

Clearly, Egypt regards the Islamists it is fighting to be the same as Hamas. It has stopped Gazans in the Sinai attempting to fire rockets towards Israel.

Oh, one other thing: The Egyptian army happily admits that it destroyed a hospital:

Also, a field hospital that was allegedly used by terrorist elements was destroyed and equipment, such as a device to sterilize surgical instruments, an oxygen cylinder, a filter for surgical operations, a device for measuring blood pressure and a furnace for sterilization, were seized.

Yes, the Egyptian army is bragging about targeting and destroying a hospital!

Because they know that the world doesn't care when some people violate international law.

08/25 Links Pt2: Why Israel has an absolute right to defend its people; The Massacre in Ma’alot

From Ian:

Why Israel has an absolute right to defend its people

Today in Britain we have our own army of useful idiots, made up of those self-styled progressives whose obsessive hatred of Israel leads them to collude with the vicious excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement.
In the twisted narrative of the anti-Israeli brigade, the Hamas rulers of Gaza are battling for their oppressed people against the brutal, racist military regime run by Binyamin Netanyahu.
But this is a complete moral inversion of reality. In truth, Israel is a bulwark of democracy forced by the lethal forces of anti-Semitic Islamism to fight for survival.
Far from representing liberation and progress, as many progressives absurdly claim, Hamas is a brutal organisation that aims to impose totalitarian Islamic rule.
Along with other jihadist out-fits like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, it forms part of a monstrous theocratic death cult that wants to destroy our civilisation.
Genocidal aggression towards the non-believer is a key element of this cult.

Douglas Murray: Just a Bit More Beheading than We Are Used To

Who is surprised? That is one question I have most wanted to know since the video was released of the murder of American journalist James Foley. The politicians keep expressing it. And interviewers have kept asking people whether they feel it. But who can honestly say that he was surprised to learn that the murderer of the American journalist turned out to be a "British" man?
Did anyone really still think that a British Islamist would not be capable of doing this? Why wouldn't he do it in Iraq or Syria if his allies had already done it in London? After all, it was only last year that two other Islamists beheaded one of our own soldiers – Drummer Lee Rigby – in broad daylight in London. And it is only twelve years since another Londoner – Omar Sheikh – arranged the abduction and decapitation of another American journalist, Daniel Pearl.
What is shocking is that expressions of "shock" seem to be regarded as an adequate response. Prime Minister David Cameron has pronounced himself "appalled" by the act, and made clear that he "utterly condemns" it. As though anyone should ever have expected him to think otherwise. But this is to a great extent what government policy is reduced to in Britain, as in the United States. Politicians briefly break off their holidays in order not to do anything much, but to be seen to be doing "something." And they then make sure to stand in front of the cameras and say how opposed they are to "something." It is the denigration of people in positions where they actually could do something, to the level of the commentariat.

Andrew Bolt: Muslim leaders’ radical unity - against Tony Abbott

AS news broke of the beheading of US journalist James Foley, 80 of Australia’s Muslim representatives issued a statement denouncing the extremism of ... Tony Abbott.
Last week’s statement is the most frightening yet from our Muslim “leaders”.
It attacks the Prime Minister for proposing anti-terrorism laws it falsely claims “specifically target Muslims”.
It ludicrously claims the threat from Muslim jihadists returning from Iraq or Syria is “trumped up” and then savages the true villains — the West and the Jews.
“Racist caricatures of Muslims” are being peddled by a government which won’t crack down on “Jews travelling to train or fight with the Israeli Defence Force”.
“We are not fooled by those who speak against violence and terrorism but are its proponents at an institutional level through military and foreign policies.
“We are not fooled by those who speak of peace but ... support and justify the most heinous of violence inflicted on innocent people as seen recently in Gaza.”
The message is clear. There can be no co-operation on laws to save Australians from being blown up unless Australia abandons Israel and stops fighting jihadists abroad.

HRW not quite sure who is executing "collaborators" in Gaza

This HRW press release reads like a parody:

Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip should urgently act to stop executions of Palestinians accused of providing information to the Israeli military and appropriately punish those behind the executions, Human Rights Watch said today. News reports said unidentified gunmen believed to be acting on instructions from Hamas executed three people on August 21, 2014, 18 people on August 22, and four people on August 23.

Hamas officials told journalists that local courts had tried and sentenced some of the men to death for “collaborating with the enemy” but gave no details and did not release their names, ostensibly to protect their families. Gunmen carried out executions in an empty park and in a public square in Gaza City, and near a mosque in Jabalya, not at the Interior Ministry location where local regulations authorize carrying out judicial executions.

“Amid all the carnage in Gaza, it’s abhorrent that Hamas officials are adding to it by permitting, if not ordering, the summary execution of Palestinians deemed to be collaborators,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Hamas authorities need to stop these extrajudicial killings.”

Hamas and its armed wing, the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, have not officially taken responsibility for the killings. However, a statement on a Hamas-affiliated website, Al Rai, said that, “The current circumstances forced us to take such decisions.” The statement did not elaborate. Earlier on August 21, Israeli airstrikes killed three senior members of the Qassam Brigades, and targeted the home of Mohammed Deif, the leader of the armed group, whom Israel has unsuccessfully targeted in multiple attacks over the years.”

Another Hamas-affiliated website, Al Majd, reported that the “resistance” had killed three alleged collaborators and arrested seven others on August 21. Citing a “security source,” the website claimed the victims had been tried by “revolutionary procedures,” but did not provide further information.

On June 2, Hamas had formally withdrawn from its role governing Gaza with the creation of a “technocratic” unity Palestinian government, consisting largely of officials from the rival Fatah political faction. However, Hamas continues to exercise de facto authority in Gaza. Hamas’s failure to investigate or prosecute anyone for public executions in the past, including executions for which its armed wing claimed responsibility in 2012, has, at the least, created an enabling environment for such gross abuses.

On the morning of August 22, 11 people whom Hamas officials later described as alleged collaborators were executed in al-Katiba Park, near al-Azhar University in Gaza City, according to news reports. A Gaza-based journalist told Human Rights Watch that the park was empty of other people at the time. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported that two of those executed were women. Unnamed security officials in Gaza told journalists that local courts had convicted some of the 11 people, news reports said.

Several hours later, hooded gunmen in black clothing without identifiable markings executed another seven men whom the gunmen had lined up against a wall outside the Omari mosque in Gaza City, before a large crowd, a local journalist and news reports said. Accounts from witnesses reported in the media said that the names of the men executed were not given. Photographs published in the media show the victims with their heads covered and their hands tied.

Human Rights Watch viewed a printed notice stating that the “ruling of revolutionary justice was handed down” against the men killed outside the mosque. It was signed by “the Palestinian Resistance,” not by any official body, suggesting that Hamas may not have carried out these executions. However, Al Majd website said that “revolutionary military trials” had convicted the seven men. The website also stated: “The resistance has begun an operation called ‘Strangling the Necks,’ targeting collaborators who aid the [Israeli] occupation” and “kill our people.”

Hamas staged the "trials," Hamas pronounced them guilty, Hamas groups have taken responsibility in the past for executions of people in Hamas jails, all this happened after major Hamas leaders were targeted - but HRW is still not quite certain if Hamas was behind these executions. Perhaps it was a completely new group that just sprang up out of nowhere that found these alleged spies against Hamas and decided to mete out Hamas justice against people Hamas sentenced to death.

All HRW notices is that the "resistance" is taking credit.

Guess what Hamas means?

It is an acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah - which means "The Islamic Resistance Movement."

Oh, and by the way - Hamas did admit that they did the executions before this was published.

HRW is never this careful when accusing Israel of supposed human rights violations. The organization has no problem hurling accusations without caveats and without reasonable evidence against Israel all the time - for example, by saying flatly that Israel attacks civilian areas with no military value, or that everyone killed is a civilian even when they are not.

For terrorists who brag about targeting civilians, though, HRW is very, very careful not to hurt their feelings. The "human rights" organization is protective of the people who hide behind masks yet don't even give Israel an opportunity to answer accusations before rushing to publish anti-Israel reports.

Now, why would that be?

To his credit, Ken Roth did squarely blame Hamas in his tweet linking to this report.

Amid all the carnage in #Gaza, it's abhorrent that #Hamas is adding to it w/ 25 summary executions. No justification. http://t.co/oIfUBFB2Nw
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) August 25, 2014

To his discredit, he pretended that the "Hasbara crowd" was upset that he said something normal for once. (They weren't.)

Funny how unhappy Hasbara crowd is whenever I criticize Hamas. It upsets their narrative that criticism of #Israel reflects bias, not abuse.
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) August 25, 2014

Must be a "biased human rights NGO crowd" thing.

Here's the newsflash, Ken: You limit your criticism of the Hamas terror group as much as you can, only condemning what cannot possibly be denied and interpreting international humanitarian law in the most conservative way possible for them. You do the exact opposite for Israel. That's how we know you are biased.

By the way, given how many times he tweets a day, the impression one gets is that Roth's actual job is the operator at HRW's social media desk, not the person who runs the entire organization.

The terrorists who used their own families as human shields

We have been looking at B'Tselem's list of families who were killed in airstrikes. We showed that 42 people were killed when hey "hosted" terrorists in their homes.

What about families who had a terrorist member? How many were killed because the terrorists stayed with them?

B'Tselem lists:

The Hamad family (6 members, including terrorist Hafez)
The al-Batsh family (18 members, including terrorist Yazid)
The al-Ghanam family (5 killed including terrorist Mahmoud)
The a-Shaer family (4 killed including terrorist Salah),
The al-Astal family (3 killed including terrorist Ashraf)
The Hasanein family (3 killed including terrorist Salah)

To this we can add (from the Meir Amit Center list)

The al-Hayya family (5 killed including terrorist Osama)

That is 37 more civilians killed because Hamas and its partners choose to fight in civilian areas. Chances are pretty good that these homes also served as major Hamas command and control centers.

With only a little effort we have now identified 79 civilians killed because terrorists and terror infrastructure were in their houses.

I just accounted for about 5% of all Gaza deaths (79 civilians plus 12 terrorists), and probably 8% or so of civilian deaths, being a result of military targets in civilian areas, only from looking at one B'Tselem page.

Why isn't the professional media doing this sort of analysis?

Max Fisher says Hamas isn't seeking a caliphate. Hamas disagrees.

From Max Fisher at Vox.com:

While Hamas and ISIS are both rightly classified by the US as terrorist groups, both target civilians, and both espouse Islamic and Arab supremacism, that does not make them at all linked, much less identical.

The two groups are totally distinct. It's not just that there is no known connection, operational or otherwise, between Hamas and ISIS, although there isn't. They ultimately follow very different ideologies: Hamas will talk about Islamist extremism, but it is ultimately a Palestinian nationalist group first and foremost, one that is fighting to establish its vision of a Palestinian state.

...ISIS, on the other hand, comes from the same ideological strain as al-Qaeda, a jihadist movement called Salafism, which rejects the idea of nationalism and seeks a pan-Islamic caliphate.

Fathi Hammad, Hamas' interior minister, begs to differ.

We anticipate further victories, in which we shall liberate our land, Allah willing. We shall liberate our Al-Aqsa Mosque, and our cities and villages, as a prelude to the establishment of the future Islamic Caliphate. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are at the threshold of a global Islamic civilization era. The fuel and spearhead of this era will be Gaza, and its mujahideen and leaders will be from Gaza, Allah willing.

A Hamas cleric in 2008 said:

The blessing of Palestine is dependent upon the annihilation of the pit of global corruption in it. When the head of the serpent of corruption is cut off here in Palestine, and its octopus tentacles are severed throughout the world, the real blessing will come. The annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine is one of the most splendid blessings for Palestine. This will be followed by a greater blessing, Allah be praised, with the establishment of a Caliphate that will rule the land and will be pleasing to men and God.

In 2012, Al Hayat al Jadida reported:

Head of the Hamas government in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said yesterday that the meeting held two days ago between the President of Egypt and the head of the Hamas Political Bureau was a product of the Arab Spring that 'will introduce the era of the Caliphate'.

The Hamas Charter does not list statehood in Palestine as an objective. Here is what it says:

The Islamic Resistance Movement found itself at a time when Islam has disappeared from life. Thus rules shook, concepts were upset, values changed and evil people took control, oppression and darkness prevailed, cowards became like tigers: homelands were usurped, people were scattered and were caused to wander all over the world, the state of justice disappeared and the state of falsehood replaced it. Nothing remained in its right place. Thus, when Islam is absent from the arena, everything changes. From this state of affairs the incentives are drawn.

As for the objectives: They are the fighting against the false, defeating it and vanquishing it so that justice could prevail, homelands be retrieved and from its mosques would the voice of the mu'azen emerge declaring the establishment of the state of Islam, so that people and things would return each to their right places and Allah is our helper.

As the Islamic Resistance Movement paves its way, it will back the oppressed and support the wronged with all its might. It will spare no effort to bring about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this place and everywhere it can reach and have influence therein.

Hamas' goals are explicit - for those who bother to read and listen to what they say, instead of what they want to believe.

No one is saying that Hamas and Al Qaeda and ISIS are operationally connected - that is a red herring that Fisher throws in. And as I pointed out recently, the three groups have different focuses on how to achieve their goals. But their actual goals, and violent strategies to reach those goals, are quite similar.

08/25 Links Pt1: Daniel Tragerman’s war; Ron Prosor: Qatar is Club Med for Terrorists

From Ian:

David Horovitz: Daniel Tragerman’s war

Daniel Tragerman is the inadvertent symbol of a war that has now lasted 49 days — a seven-week harvest of hatred and bloodshed, courtesy of Hamas.
His heartbroken mother Gila said, as she leant on his small-child’s coffin for support at his funeral on Sunday, that Daniel had “iron discipline” when it came to the rocket alerts. He was resolute and mature about taking shelter, because he knew that his little, loving family — parents Gila and Doron, younger sister Yuval and baby brother Uri – would be safe only once they reached that protected room.
There’s symbolism there, too, of course — in a nation reestablished too late to offer safe refuge to the Jews of Europe, and adamant about ensuring safe refuge for subsequent generations. Because when all is said and done, that’s all we want here: safe refuge. Peace and security in our historic national homeland, alongside, not instead of, the Arab peoples around us.
That’s all we want. That’s what was denied to four-year-old Daniel Tragerman. “We were the happiest family in the world,” said Gila Tragerman. Until Friday.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Will Hamas Be Held Accountable for War Crimes?

What Khaled Mashaal forgot to mention was that Hamas and the Islamic State do have at least one thing in common: they both carry out extrajudicial executions as a means of terrorizing and intimidating those who stand in their way or who dare to challenge their terrorism.
According to Hamas's logic, all members of the Palestinian Authority government are "traitors" who should be dragged to public squares to be shot by firing squads. According to the same logic, Mahmoud Abbas himself should be executed for maintaining security coordination with and talking to Israelis.
As for the two executed women, the sources said that their only fault was that they had been observed asking too many questions about Palestinians who were killed in airstrikes.

Ron Prosor: Club Med for Terrorists

Today, the petite petroleum kingdom is determined to buy its way to regional hegemony, and like other actors in the Middle East, it has used proxies to leverage influence and destabilize rivals. Qatar’s proxies of choice have been radical regimes and extremist groups.
In pursuit of this strategy, the gulf state is willing to dally with any partner, no matter how abhorrent. Qatar has provided financial aid and light weapons to Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria, and a base for leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban.
The emirate has also used the Arabic service of Al Jazeera news network to spread radical messages that have inflamed sectarian divides. In the early days of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera’s coverage of popular uprisings earned the network millions of new followers and solidified its status as a mainstream global news network. Qatar capitalized on this popularity by advancing its own agenda — namely, using the Arabic network to promote the views of extremists who were undermining the region’s more pragmatic elements. In particular, Qatar’s open support for the Muslim Brotherhood angered its gulf state neighbors. In March, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Doha in protest.
This hasn’t stopped the Persian Gulf monarchy from serving as a Club Med for terrorists. It harbors leading Islamist radicals like the spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who issued a religious fatwa endorsing suicide attacks, and the Doha-based history professor Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi, whom the United States Department of Treasury has named as a “terrorist financier” for Al Qaeda. Qatar also funds a life of luxury for Khaled Meshal, the fugitive leader of Hamas.

Why would the NY Times publish an uncorroborated allegation from the son of a top Hamas official?

Surely, it’s not an impossible story to believe, though, as Elder of Ziyon points out, some of the details don’t make much sense. Meanwhile, as the authors themselves acknowledge, (a) there is no corroborating evidence; (b) the father is a high-level Hamas official, so the family has a very obvious motive for lying. Most telling, Israeli soldiers are alleged to have beaten Abu Raida repeatedly, yet he can’t he show the Times’s reporters any evidence of his injuries, whether photographic or lingering scars/scabs/welts/wounds.
If the Times’s reporters could actually corroborate the story, more power to them in publishing it. But at this point, they are just repeating unconfirmed allegations from a dubious source, in other words, passing along wartime propaganda as news.
Richard Behar recently noted that the co-author of the story, Gaza correspondent Fares Akram, is hardly an objective observer, happily also working for Al Jazeera and taking its pro-Hamas line. But why would Jerusalem bureau Jodi Ruderon put her name on this dreck, and how did it get past the Times’s editors?

A question of intent

As we have seen, under international law, in many cases the question of intent is paramount to determine whether one is guilty of war crimes. In the two major accusations against Israel by the anti-Israel crowd, of violating the principles of distinction and proportionality, that intent is clearly not there.

On the contrary. Israel has great disincentive to kill civilians, and great incentive to keep them as safe as possible while targeting terror targets.

Hamas, however, makes no secret of its intent, at least in Arabic. It is instructing its members, and indeed all Palestinian Arabs, to kill every Jew they can.

We've seen Hamas claim that they are legally allowed to attack every Israeli:

...[W]e hurried to strike anywhere in Israel - from Dimona to Haifa - and we made you hide in shelters like mice. . .

Again, we warn you - if your government does not agree to all of our conditions, then all of Israel will legally remain open to our weapons fire.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum:

Our rockets are aimed at the Hebrews, the murderers, the Israelis, the criminals.

Barhoum again:

Anyone who has a knife, a club, a weapon, or a car, yet does not use it to run over a Jew or a settler, and does not use it to kill dozens of Zionists, does not belong to Palestine.

When one factors in the essential feature of intent, then the "scorecards" that we have been seeing for the past six weeks are proven to be deceptive. Because the only scorecard that matters is the intent of the attackers, and when that is factored in, it looks like this:

(This only counts the targets of the rockets, not the terrorism that Barham called for to attack every Jew.)

When people accuse Israel of "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" or "targeting civilians" or "indiscriminate bombing" or "war crimes" they are knowingly inverting both international law and simple morality.

Not only that, but they are proving their own bigotry, because there is no ethical difference between falsely accusing a racial or religious group of being bloodthirsty and falsely accusing a national group of the same.

Any discussion of the relative morality of Israel and Hamas that ignores intent is in itself immoral.

Look how traumatized he is

Yesterday I wrote that +972 Magazine had swallowed, without skepticism, an absurd story of a Gaza teenager, Ahmed Abu Raida, who accused the IDF of forcing him to search for and dig (!) tunnels for five days with hardly any food and without clothing.

Besides the obvious holes in the story, the more lurid details were clearly coaxed out of Abu Raida by the thoroughly discredited DCI-Palestine, a group that says outright that it will work overtime to smooth over any inconsistencies in the "testimonies" it prompts from Palestinian children. The same group has significantly inflated numbers of children killed according to other Palestinian human rights groups, and it ignores cler evidence of children acting as militants that are noted by these other groups. Moreover, it creates statistics based on the coaxed testimony it elicits, claiming that an impossible 75% of children detained by the IDF are tortured.

Today, Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram in The New York Times published the story with the same lack of skepticism as the Zionism-hating +972mag.

Not only that, but the NYT didn't even discount the additional details that further prove that this story is fantasy for any real reporter:

His assertions, of actions that would violate both international law and a 2005 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, could not be independently corroborated; Ahmed’s father, Jamal Abu Raida, who held a senior position in Gaza’s Tourism Ministry under the Hamas-controlled government, said the family forgot to take photographs documenting any abuse in its happiness over the youth’s return, and disposed of the clothing he was given upon his release.

Seriously? His father is a Hamas official and "forgot" to photograph the alleged bruises or to keep the alleged ill-fitting IDF clothes as evidence - a goldmine of anti-Israel material?

The NYT notes that the story first surfaced in a report from the equally one-sided Euro-Mid Observer, an organization that works closely with DCI in fabricating facts and statistics.

But there are significant differences between the initial report from Euro-Mid and the later, more lurid report from DCI-P:

On July 23, 17-year-old Ahmad Jamal Abu Reeda, says he was restrained by Israeli troops who threatened to kill him. After harshly interrogating and beating him, the troops ordered Abu Reeda to walk ahead of them at gun point, accompanied by police dogs, as they searched houses and other buildings. Several times, they demanded that he dig in places they suspected tunnels to exist. Abu Reeda was forced to remain with the Israeli forces for five days.

In this report, Abu Raida claims that he accompanied IDF troops while they searched for tunnels, a week later he is claiming that they sent him inside by himself to search for tunnels - because, of course, the IDF would trust a 16-year old son of a Hamas official to accurately pinpoint and report back on hidden tunnels in houses in the middle of a war zone.

The New York TImes didn't note the inconsistencies. The New York Times didn't research the record of lies and subterfuuge from DCI-P and Euro-Mid Observer. Instead of researching the history of those two groups, The New York TImes pretended that only the IDF finds DCI-P to be unreliable, making it a case of "he said, she said" instead of verifying easily found facts as real journalists would. The New York Times didn't think that the complete absence of corroborating evidence from the family was enough to cast doubt on the story, writing it as if the coaxed testimony had credibility.

To be sure, the NYT pretended to be even-handed, asking the IDF to respond and not getting an answer. But given the known biases and history of flat-out lies from DCI-P and Euro-Mid Observer, Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram went the lazy route.

Let's be clear: quoting anti-Israel propaganda organizations that masquerade as "human rights" organizations is not reporting. It is recycling propaganda. And they rely on an interview with a teenager whose own testimony is not only ridiculous on the face of it, but self-contradictory (besides the "searching for tunnels" accusation, DCI-P claimed that he was threatened sexually, one of their favorite accusations, but Abu Raida did not say that to the interviewer in two lengthy interviews.)

Real journalists would be more than skeptical with over-the-top claims that have no independent corroboration whatsoever. Certainly a real journalist wouldn't headline a story based on such meager evidence. And real journalists would know that even Amnesty International admits that Palestinian Arab testimony is often suspect.

But lazy journalists, and journalists with an agenda, are a whole different breed. Instead of ignoring or abandoning a story that has little credibility, they decide to go ahead and use little caveats to cover their behinds, caveats that the average reader will discount because the story is written in a way to give credence to the incredible.

(h/t YMedad, PreOccupied Territory, EBoZ)