Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Ynet To Limit Anti-Religious Articles To 8 Per Week (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Tel Aviv, December 3 - The popular internet news site Ynet announced today that in the coming election season it would cap the number of articles bashing religion and religious people at a little more than one per day.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu dismissed two of his top cabinet members yesterday, and early elections are scheduled for March. The run-up to national elections invariably sees the news media engage in more incitement against the religious than usual, but Ynet management fears overkill, and will implement a policy of quotas until the elections are over. No more than 8 articles inciting hate for religious Jews will be published each week in the interim.

The limits will apply only to skewed coverage of actual news, but not to opinion or analysis. Thus, while barely-concealed hatred for religious Jews and religious rituals will be disbursed with a modicum of restraint, the publication will continue to feature columnists or outside opinion pieces brimming with anti-religious prejudice.

Balance is the principle, says Ynet CEO Api Koress. "Our readers have grown more sophisticated over the years, and can tell when we're trying too hard," he explains. "We'll still have our weekly column by Ruchama Weiss distorting the sources and engaging in naked polemic against the Rabbinic establishment and tradition - that's just basic Israeli journalism. But there will be less focus in news articles per se on ways to portray Haredim and other religious Jews as negatively as possible."

As an example, Koress cited a story last week about a man from the north of the country who was arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing children. "In the past, we would automatically mention the fact that the suspect was Haredi, or kippah-wearing, if that were the case, and if it were somebody with no obviously religious accessories or dress, we'd simply not say anything about that. Now we have to cut back on that, because the growing worldliness of the Ynet audience means there's less tolerance for overt hate of that sort in news."

Other Israeli publications are considering similar policies. "We've thought about it, but aren't sure yet what direction to go," said Shabtai Tzvi, President of NRG, which operates Maariv's website. "There's always a tradeoff between catering to what the public wants, which is to bash people who are different and whose adherence to tradition challenges the secular public's ethos of pursuing instant gratification and wantonness, and sending our reporters to cover other news that might be important." Tzvi declined to elaborate on what that other news might consist of.

Haaretz editors briefly experimented with a cap on anti-religious incitement earlier this year, and are still analyzing the results. "We have fewer qualms than the other major dailies about compromising journalistic integrity since we're an advocacy organization first and a news source maybe third or fourth," said publisher Aluf Benn. "We don't answer directly to market forces - our agenda is set primarily by the board of the New Israel Fund, which doesn't dictate policy week-by-week. It's much more general and gradual. We had the latitude to try limiting our anti-religious pieces to as few as 35 per week, but I can't see getting approval for anything less than that for an entire election campaign."

"That would just be too much to give up."

12/03 Links Pt1: ICRC: World holds Israel to legal double standard; Who needs Abbas' approval?

From Ian:

ICRC: World holds Israel to legal double standard

The head of the International Red Cross in Israel and the Palestinian areas said Tuesday that the world was holding Israel to a double standard when it came to war crimes allegations.
Jacques De Maio was one of a number of non-Israeli officials speaking at an Institute for National Security Studies conference on the law of armed conflict in urban areas.
“Why is there so much more focus on Israel than on Syria [and] other places where many more civilians are dying?” the ICRC official asked rhetorically, pointing out that “in other ongoing wars, more civilians die in one week than in Israeli wars in a full year.”
While De Maio made that argument without using the phrase “war crimes” to refer to the IDF’s actions in this summer’s Gaza operation, he added that both Israel and Hamas “violated international law” during the fighting.
He also defended his dialogue with the IDF and Israel regarding its actions and the law of armed conflict. He said there had even been a petition to cancel his speech at the conference so he would not appear to be endorsing the IDF’s conduct during the summer operation.
But De Maio said the dialogue was not endorsement, as “we don’t endorse Israel, and when we talk to Hamas, the Taliban and other terrorists, we don’t endorse them, either.”
The ICRC official said that “our goal is to influence those fighting to be more humanitarian.”

Israel Should Get Its Retaliation In First

To defend itself while also bolstering the long-term interest of other liberal democracies engaged in the struggle against transnational terrorism, Israel should undertake a preemptive strike, both in the legal arena and in the court of public opinion. The facts and the law are on Israel’s side.

In this hostile international environment, knowledgeable Israelis are concerned about the March 2015 publication of the Schabas report. Either from lack of familiarity with the international laws of war or out of misplaced sympathy for the conventional view, some intellectuals here, including law professors, are tempted to conclude that Israel has few legal responses. They seem to believe that Israel should contritely accept the UNHRC's factual findings, legal conclusions, and practical recommendations and concentrate on damage control.

There is no chance that Netanyahu's government will adopt that approach, nor should it. Whether it will launch an offensive against the UNHRC’s kangaroo court is another question.

Here are five defective claims likely to inform the Schabas commission, and outlines of the replies that Israel should be honing for a preemptive strike in advance of the commission's forthcoming report.

Livni: We must join world in fight against terrorism

Speaking at the same INSS conference, IDF Advocate-General Maj.- Gen. Danny Efroni said there was no precedent for the extent to which Hamas systematically endangered civilians directly and indirectly as human shields during Operation Protective Edge this summer.
Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 had a relatively extremely low civilian casualty toll, Efroni said, adding that he had warned in an article following the war that low casualties could not always be achieved because of Hamas’s tactics.
The IDF had to rework its tactics in real time due to Hamas tactics, even as Israel is at the forefront of Western nations in developing tools to comply with international law in urban environments, fighting against terrorists who intentionally endanger their own civilian populace, he said.
Efroni said that the army was internationally criticized – unfairly and for political reasons, in his opinion – for three aspects: the IDF’s striking of Hamas members’ private homes, the large cumulative number of civilian casualties, and the use of artillery in urban fighting.
Hamas members used their houses as command centers, in which they also gave orders regarding the firing of rockets at Israel, he said, adding that criticism of the IDF for hitting them would simply encourage Hamas to continue its illegal tactic.
Next, Efroni slammed the IDF’s critics for leaning hard on Israel, which at least tried to take precautions, as opposed to on Hamas, regarding the high civilian casualties.

Hamas takes credit for bringing down Israeli government!

The "Palestinian Mujahideen Movement," another name for Hamas, claims that Israel's call to hold early elections is proof of the effectiveness of the "resistance" in "confronting the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip for 51 days."

Hamas spokesman Salim Atallah issued a statement on Wednesday saying that "the overwhelming evidence that emerged after the end of the aggression on Gaza confirms that effective option in dealing with the enemy is resistance."

Yet more evidence that Palestinians have the emotional maturity of toddlers who are certain that the entire world revolves around them.

Gaza hospital cleaners have gone on strike this morning for at least the third time since September because they haven't been paid since the "unity" government was announced.

They struck for three days in September and three more days in November, and today started a new strike that is open-ended

The Gaza health ministry declared an emergency, because without these hospital workers they cannot schedule surgeries. It also affects the care of hundreds of people on dialysis, intensive care and pediatrics wards.

Even though this is a legitimate health crisis, the hundreds of reporters in and around Gaza are simply not interested in writing any articles about this for Western audiences.

During wartime, the news media are filled with human interest stories of ordinary Gazans facing trials and troubles. Injured patients are interviewed multiple times. Statistics are published and Gaza remains the top story for weeks.

But when Gaza hospital patients are in clear danger - a danger that can be solved with the help of a little publicity to urge funding for hospital workers instead of, say, the families of terrorists - the story is simply not covered by the huge press corps.

The bias is clear. A health crisis in Gaza is only important if there is a way to blame Jews. Otherwise, editors and reporters and management of news media outlets really don[t give a damn about the lives of Gazans.

In retrospect, this story proves that the tearjerker articles of the summer were not meant to get news consumers to care about Gazans. If the media cared about Gazans, this would be a story.

No, the stories of the summer were meant to get the world to hate Israel.

And no amount of justifications from news editors about their coverage can erase the simple fact that human interest stories of Palestinians are only important if somehow there is an Israeli angle. Corruption, infighting, incitement, and stories like these aren't interesting to the media if they cannot blame Israel.

(Previous "Is This Newsworthy" post)

Gaza cement being diverted to black market - and taxed by Hamas (update)

You know how all the cement that is being imported to Gaza is supposed to be used only for specific international projects? How the UN says it created a mechanism ensuring that the cement will not be diverted?

Yesterday, Gaza journalist Hazem Balousha tweeted this:

Yesterday, 600 tons of cement were sent into Gaza. Assuming that Balousha is telling the truth, here's where some of it ended up.

The other big news in the Palestinian Arab press is the Ministry of Finance in Gaza, controlled by Hamas, has started taxing every ton of cement a fee of 20 shekels. The PA denounced the move but there are reports that customs agents in Gaza are imposing the tax, and as a result the shipments of cement today have been suspended.

These articles also make clear that cement that is supposed to be earmarked for specific projects have already been diverted, as they talk about cement traders and private buyers who are selling and buying cement. The UN mechanism to control the distribution of cement is clearly failing.

And this almost certainly means that Hamas is using this new cement to rebuild its terror tunnels.

UPDATE: Hamas has apparently relented and stopped imposing the tax after complaints. But the undersecretary of finance said that there was a monopoly by a certain company to sell the cement and it adds its own fee of 150 shekels per ton, so why cry crocodile tears over the Hamas tax when this company makes more?

The Gaza Ministry of Housing is apparently in charge of which citizens can get the cement and construction materials, and they have published a list of nearly 6000 homeowners who qualify. This sure seems like a system that is ripe for corruption and diversion of the materials.

Playing soccer on the Temple Mount is OK. Complaining about it, though...

According to this Facebook post, a young Jewish man visiting the Temple Mount saw some Muslims respectfully using the holiest site on Earth as a soccer stadium. He asked the police to do something about it, since Israel's Supreme Court has said that such sports are limited to very specific places.

So the police jumped to action - and escorted the whiny Jew off of the Temple Mount.

Post by ‎ארנון סגל‎.

(h/t Bob Knot)

12/02 Links Pt2: Respected journalists expose bias against Israel; Jon Stewart’s Betrayal of Israel

From Ian:

Missing Peace: Respected journalists expose media bias against Israel

Let’s move to Abeer Ayyoub, who (NYT correspondent Judy) Rudoren also praised (in November 2012, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza) as her “wonderful fixer/journalist.” At that time, Ayyoub was getting reporting credit on stories written by Rudoren, even as she (like Akram) served as a consultant at the Israel-viperous Human Rights Watch.
Ayyoub no longer reports for the Times, but earlier this year she stated publicly that she has been boycotting all Israeli products for three years, which would cover her period at the Times.
In a Facebook post on July 29th, Ayyoub parroted the Hamas line. She said she was asked in an interview “why Palestinians in Gaza are not feeling angry because of Hamas using the building materials for their tunnels and not for building houses and schools.” Her response was straight-up Hamas propaganda. “My answer was: why people in Israel [sic] won’t feel angry about Israeli government spending more money on enhancing its army instead of raising the level of education and health there? More importantly, why the U.S. wouldn’t save the money it supports the Israeli army with for sheltering its [America’s] thousands of homeless there in the U.S.” It went on like this. She never really answered the question, but it was plain: Hamas diverting cement from kindergartens to terror tunnels was fine with her.
It gets worse.
In a particularly vile Facebook post on August 3rd, she attacked “so-called journalists” who “posted stuff and gave interviews that they left because they were threatened by Hamas to be kicked outta [sic] country if they don’t report what Hamas wants.” While excoriating those brave journalists, she defended Hamas. But she went beyond that. Using the term “we,” she actually implied that she was complicit in the cover-up of Hamas launching sites: (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Blacklisting of pro-Israel watchdog organization NGO Monitor by the Associated Press

Long-time readers will recall that I’ve relied on NGO Monitor’s work in the past. Indeed, one of the most consequential “scoops” I’ve had as a blogger, that Human Rights Watch Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson fundraised among rich Saudi Arabians with a pledge to use the money to counter pro-Israel forces in the West, came from NGO Monitor. My blog post on this, reprinted at the Wall Street Journal’s website, set off a controversy about HRW’s anti-Israel bias that has yet to fully recede (and assuredly won’t until someone less maniacally anti-Israel than Whitson and her boss Kenneth Roth is in charge).
More generally, Steinberg and NGO Monitor are huge players in the debate over the role NGOs play in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and has been particularly effective in revealing how many NGOs in both Israel and the territories that are hostile to Israel’s existence receive the bulk of their funding from European governments, creating significant controversy in Israel and Europe. I’ve been following NGO Monitor for years, and have yet to see the organization tell any lies or make any significant errors, which is much more than one can say for, e.g., Human Rights Watch and other anti-Israel organizations routinely relied upon by the media as objective sources. I’ve also met Steinberg and worked with his staff; they are professional, dedicated, and, based on my conversations with them, quite moderate in terms of the Israeli political spectrum.
Given all this, it’s hard to come up with an innocent explanation for the AP banning its reporters from talking to Steinberg, assuming Friedman is correct. There are many possible non-innocent explanations, and none of them reflect well on the AP and how it covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jon Stewart’s Betrayal of Israel

As for Israel and Gaza, “Stewart”‘s position has crystallized long ago, and it is a one of studied moral equivalence. For each Palestinian atrocity (upon which “Stewart” usually glosses over anyway) he finds a reason to apportion equal blame to Israel, and since Israel is stronger and enjoys this “great American leeway,” Israel usually comes out as the guilty party.
“Stewart”‘s moral failure to condemn Hamas and defend Israel has nothing to do with his fickle Judaism and everything to do with his liberal dogma, which simply cannot stomach the fact that people in the Middle East can be guilty of anything. It is always the white man’s fault, and in this case – Israel’s. During one of his previous interviews, “Stewart” had no problem with his host Jonathan Dekel, another specimen of the same sort, denigrating Israeli democracy. Stewart never uttered a bad word about the Palestinians.
“Stewart” is correct on one thing. The Jews who “helped” the Nazis did so because, in their mortal peril, they’d abandoned their moral principles for the glimmer of hope of personal survival. “Stewart” – a pampered, self-centered, deluded king of his world – is nothing like those wretches in his attacks on the Jewish state and its defenders.
He is incomparably worse.

Firas Press reports that PA president Mahmoud Abbas has been insulting Hamas more and more lately.

He said that Hamas is merely a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and takes its directions from them, implying that Hamas is not a Palestinian Arab movement at all.

Abbas also says that Khaled Meshal lied to him when he said that Hamas had nothing to do with the kidnap/murder of 3 Israeli teens last summer, when it was later revealed that Hamas in fact was behind the attack. He concluded that no one lies as much as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The head of Hamas' rival Fatah terror organization is clearly attempting to shore up his support in Egypt, where the people hate the Muslim Brotherhood and support the army's crackdown on Gaza smuggling.

At the same time, Hamas says that the PA has been arresting Hamas members in the West Bank for political purposes, and has also summoned a number of Hamas reporters for questioning.

JCPA just released a paper claiming that Hamas is considering rethinking its policies in order to remain relevant and some Hamas leaders have even called for it to change its antisemitic charter and to avoid all violence for five years, although it is doubtful that Hamas would actually follow through.

From Ma'an:

Egyptian authorities closed the Rafah crossing with the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after it was open for two days to allow Palestinians stranded in Egypt to return home, a statement said.

The Palestinian department of borders and crossings said in a statement that 554 travelers were allowed to return to Gaza throughout the two days the crossing was open.

Rafah was only open for Palestinians entering Gaza via Egypt, and not vice versa.

Egypt also opened the crossing for two days last week, when some 500 stranded Palestinians were allowed to enter.

Before last Wednesday, the terminal had been closed for more than 30 consecutive days.

So Egypt only allowed Gazans back in, but didn't allow anyone to leave.

This also means that the "aid" convoys that Egypt used to regularly allow into Gaza, like Miles of Smiles, have been barred as well.

Egypt has real security concerns in the Sinai, and they have every right to close the border with Gaza. Everyone understands this and there is little criticism.

But Israel, whose citizens are directly threatened every day by Gaza leaders, does not seem to have the same benefits s Egypt concerning its much more liberal policies about imports, exports and people movement from and to Gaza.

The double standards continue...

12/02 Links Pt1: PM: Palestinian failure to recognize Jewish links to Israel is a 'tragedy'

From Ian:

PM: Palestinian failure to recognize Jewish links to Israel is a 'tragedy'

It is a “tragedy” that many Palestinians deny any Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday at the start of a meeting with visiting Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.
This marks the first ever visit to Israel by a Serbian prime minister.
“Here, in the State of Israel, the Jewish people have achieved their self-determination in a democratic state that guarantees equal rights for all its peoples, all its citizens, regardless of race, religion or sex,” Netanyahu said, as the debate over the Jewish State Bill seemed to animate part of his welcoming comments to Vucic.
“It is indeed a tragedy that so many of our Palestinian neighbors still repudiate the basic facts of history.
They deny the more than 3,000-year-old connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel,” he said.
Netanyahu bewailed what he said was the Palestinian denial of Israel’s right to national self-determination, even as they demand that right for themselves.

Students Urge Gov't: Recognize Abbas's Role in Munich Massacre

Israel must formally declare Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre, the Students for Israel movement appealed to the Ministry of Defense Tuesday.
From September 5-6 1972, masked terrorists stormed the apartments where Israeli athletes were staying in the Olympic Village for the 1972 Munich games. The terrorists took the athletes as hostages and demanded the release of 200 Arabs from Israeli prisons.
After several tense hours, the terrorists killed the Israeli athletes. Nonetheless, the Games continued for several hours afterward.
Over the past several years, it has been revealed on multiple occasions that Abbas was closely linked to Munich mastermind Abu Daoud.
Abbas praised Abu Daoud in 2010, saying "he was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people's just causes."
Later, attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center, has exposed that Abbas in fact provided the financing for the Munich attack.
But the State of Israel must formally recognize Abbas's role in financing the attack, Chairman of the Students for Israel movement Eliyahu Nissim stated Tuesday.

Israel's foreign affairs budget among lowest in West

Israel's investment in its foreign affairs apparatus is significantly lower than that of other OECD countries, MK Ronen Hoffman (Yesh Atid), who chairs the Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy Subcommittee of the Knesset's powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, revealed on Monday.
According to the figures, Holland invests 4 percent of its budget in its foreign affairs deployment; Belgium invests 3.8 percent; Norway 2 percent; Turkey 0.9 percent; Greece 0.4 percent; and Israel, at the bottom of the list, invests a mere 0.38 percent of its national budget in its foreign affairs deployment abroad. On average, OECD countries invest five times more than Israel in their foreign affairs deployments.
The Foreign Ministry's total budget in Israel stands at an amount equal to only 3 percent of the country's defense budget, lower not only in comparison to Western countries but also to Iran (whose foreign affairs expenditure equals 8 percent of its defense budget) and Jordan (5 percent).
The Palestinian Authority maintains some 100 embassies and consulates worldwide, with a budget estimated at approximately 200 million shekels ($50.8 million). Israel, meanwhile, invests less than half that amount in its foreign affairs relations apparatus.

If you can't join ISIS, at least you can kill Jews

From NYT:

French intelligence officials got in touch with the parents of a shy, 15-year-old Muslim girl in this depressed town in eastern France last May to convey some shocking news: Their daughter had become a frequent visitor to websites preaching jihad.

The parents asked the French authorities to take steps to block their child from leaving the country and took possession of her passport, according to local officials. In the months that followed, the girl showed no sign that she intended to head for Syria or Iraq. She took off her veil to go to school, as French law requires, and she spent her days close to her mother.

Then in October, she disappeared. The surveillance cameras in the Mulhouse airport, 50 miles from her home, showed her moving confidently and alone as she used her older sister’s passport to fly to Istanbul and then on to Gaziantep, a Turkish city known as the gateway to Syria for jihadists.

...Another 15-year-old girl, who was intercepted by French intelligence officers as she tried to go to Syria months ago, has since told the authorities that once her recruiters realized she was unlikely to be able to leave the country anytime soon, they began pressing her to strike at home against Jews. She told them she had begun looking for weapons and targets.

...The 15-year-old who told the authorities she was pressed to attack Jews in France said she had already picked a location and figured out how to arm herself before the police arrested her, according to Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who founded an anti-radicalization center in Paris.

Amazingly, her 15 years of being brought up under the religion of peace didn't stop her from eagerly wanting to kill random Jews.

(h/t Ronald)

Palestinian human rights icon blasts UNRWA

From Bassam Eid in the Jerusalem Post:

We Palestinians can no longer deny our responsibility for the destiny of our people. For 26 years I have been devoting my life to the mission of defending human rights. I have seen wars and terror. I live in Jerusalem and was brought up in an United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camp in Shuafat, a refugee camp like 58 other UNRWA refugee camps created for the sole purpose of keep Palestinian Arab people in “temporary” conditions, for 65 years, under the false pretense and specious promise of the “right of return” to pre-1948 villages that do not exist.

As a proud Palestinian, I must take responsibility for what will happen to our people.

We can no longer deny our responsibility for the future of our people.

UNRWA, to continue its operation, depends on death and the visual suffering of five million Palestinians who continue to wallow in and around UNRWA facilities.

The more Palestinians suffer, the more power goes to UNRWA, which allows it to raise unchecked humanitarian funds and purchase munitions.

People ask: Why not abolish UNRWA? Well, this cannot be done.

The only agency that can abolish UNRWA is the UN General Assembly, which has never had the interests of the Palestinian people at heart. After all, the UN rakes in more than $1.2 billion a year as an “incentive” to continue our status as refugees.

People ask: Why not ask the donor nations to defund UNRWA? Do they not realize that a Western defunding of UNRWA would allow nations like Qatar to enter the vacuum, leaving the West with no leverage over UNRWA policy? The point is to influence donor nations to reform UNRWA and predicate future aid to UNRWA on reasonable conditions:

1. Audit all funds allocated to UNRWA, which operates with a $1.2b. budget.

2. Introduce UN High Commissioner for Refugees standards to UNRWA, to encourage permanent refugee settlement.

3. Cancel the UNRWA war curriculum, based on principles of jihad, martyrdom and right of return by force of arms.

4. Demand that UNRWA schools conform to the UNRWA slogan: “Peace Starts Here.”

5. Dismiss UNRWA employees affiliated with Hamas, defined by the donor nations to UNRWA as a terrorist entity.

It is therefore the responsibility of the Palestinian people to rebel against the arbitrary administration of UNRWA, which seeks to perpetuate our refugee status instead of helping our people to strive for a better future.

...In my opinion, it is essential to carry out a comprehensive investigation within the refugee camps throughout the entire Middle East, not only to ascertain the precise numbers of refugees, but also to understand what the Palestinian want for themselves, what they wish for, and what they believe they can reasonably expect.

In the eyes of the Palestinians, UNRWA acts a state with its own foreign policy.

And that foreign policy does not serve the best interests of the Palestinian refugees.

I’m saying this as a loyal Palestinian. I’m saying this because I am concerned about my people’s future.

These are all points that I have been making for years. But UNRWA will have a harder time ignoring Bassam Eid, who is founder and director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

This article will be part of a special presentation to the British Parliament sponsored by the London-based Henry Jackson Society and the Jerusalem-based Center For Near East Policy Research.

(h/t EBoZ)

From Al Jazeera:

The United Nations' food agency has announced that it is suspending its food programme serving more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees because it has run out of money.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday that it "immediately needs" at least $64m in December alone to support the displaced Syrians now living in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.

"A suspension of WFP food assistance will endanger the health and safety of these refugees and will potentially cause further tensions, instability and insecurity in the neighbouring host countries," said WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin, in an appeal to donors.

"The suspension of WFP food assistance will be disastrous for many already suffering families."

Since the war in Syria began in 2011, over three million people have fled to neighbouring countries.

Under the UN programme, the refugees use vouchers to buy food in local shops. The UN provides basics like flour, cooking oil and sugar. But it also gives vital food vouchers to pregnant and nursing mothers.

"Without WFP vouchers, many families will go hungry. For refugees already struggling to survive the harsh winter, the consequences of halting this assistance will be devastating," the UN said.

Every month, the UN feeds over four million people inside Syria, and over a million more now temporarily sheltered in other countries.

Muhannad Hadi, the UN coordinator of the food programme, told Al Jazeera the refugees would face a harsh winter without support from the world body.

"It's definitely a catastrophe," he said, speaking from the Jordanian capital Amman. "If we cannot deliver the food voucher, they simply would not be able to eat."

"We are asking the world [to help]. This is an international crisis."

There is only so much international aid to go around, and one reason why the World Food Program is running out of money is because the bloated, superfluous UNRWA keeps on manufacturing its own "crises" every couple of months to keep its own cash flow coming.

Last week, UNRWA declared an "emergency" because of flooding in Gaza that did not kill or injure a single person.

While the WFP needs some $64 million a month to stop people from starving, UNRWA is demanding $1.6 billion from the international community on top of $300 million it demanded earlier this year.

While Syrian refugees cannot eat, UNRWA goes fundraising in Japan and Azerbaijan.

Even crazier is that UNRWA also solicits money for the relatively small percentage of Syrian refugees who fall under its mandate. Rather than a single UN fundraising effort for all Syrian refugees to ensure fair distribution, UNRWA has a separate program because the UN makes a distinction between refugees who happen to have some ancestors who lived in British Mandate Palestine in 1947 and all others. The UNHRC and WFP are struggling to give Syrian refugees the basics of food and medical care while the Palestinians who fall under UNRWA's mandate receive much higher levels of aid per capita, including schooling and medicine. "Palestinian" refugees from Syria go o different camps in Jordan than the rest of the refugees because of Arab bigotry against Palestinians that gets swept under the rug.

The inefficiencies from having UNRWA doing the same work as other UN agencies, and the Arab nations insisting on discrimination against Palestinians, is wasting huge amounts of money.

Hezbollah kids' magazine glorifies war and martyrdom; AFP waters it down

AFP gives us an object lesson into how to downplay even the most despicable acts by a terror group.

It’s aimed at children, but instead of princes and princesses, fairies and magicians, the heroes of Lebanon’s “Mahdi” magazine are the “fighters who fell resisting the Israeli enemy.”

Produced by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement for the last 11 years, Mahdi aims to teach a new generation the militant Shiite group’s ideology of “resistance” to the Jewish state.

Packed full of stories inspired by the lives of Hezbollah militants and terrorists, its cartoons represent bearded fighters and its puzzles teach children how to avoid Israeli landmines.

Critics accuse it of glorifying violence, but its publishers insist the monthly magazine is not about indoctrination or military propaganda.

“What we want to do is teach children the values of the resistance,” the magazine’s general manager Abbas Charara told AFP.

“We don’t encourage carrying of weapons, we’re just making sure they know about the exploits of the resistance,” he added.

Before the readers of this AFP article knows what the magazine includes, they are exposed to Hezbollah's denials that there is anything wrong.

You have to read all the way down to paragraph 15 before reading anything specific about the content, and even further to read what a critic actually says - and that critic is still equivocal.

And AFP does not illustrate the article with a single page image of the magazine,and its examples of what the magazine includes does not include the worst parts.

Here is the reality, from blogger Khaled Alameddine who first exposed the magazine in July. This is the version of the magazine aimed at 4-7 year olds.

A children’s rhyme about defending your land, victory and how the enemy will reap defeat;

Color the weapons inside the big bomb!

Kids love stickers...

Help the bunny cross the minefield, and then count the different kinds of mines it avoided.

The Hezbollah spokesman in the AFP article said “We don’t encourage carrying of weapons," You decide if he is telling the truth. AFP can't figure it out.

There was also a poem addressed to "my father the martyr."

Effectively, a sickening piece of propaganda aimed for kids as young as 4 is being whitewashed because AFP is more interested in being "even-handed" than in showing the truth. Part of the problem seems to be that the AFP reporter was given exclusive access to the magazine editing facilities, and it appears that he or she wants to maintain a good relationship with Hezbollah as a source in the future.

By highlighting the Hezbollah defense of the magazine before mentioning what's wrong with it, and by ignoring the worst parts of the magazine, AFP is effectively being a mouthpiece for Hezbollah indoctrination of children into religion-based terror and hate.

Latest Gaza tally shows 52% militant, 48% civilians killed of those identified

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has released (in Hebrew only) part 8 of its series analyzing the people killed in Gaza and (using Palestinian Arabic sources) determining whether they were terrorists or not.

The latest report covers those reported killed between July 25-29.

So far, they have examined 1,165 fatalities. 157 of them are not yet identified as civilian or terrorist. Out of the remaining 1017 names, 528 were terrorists and 480 were civilians, a 52%-48% ratio.

Another interesting statistic comes out from this. Since the center is analyzing the deaths in chronological order, the people that were killed between July 25-29 are found to be 90 terrorists vs. 42 civilians, which is over 68% terrorists. (Many of the terrorists were from bodies found from the earlier battle in Shejaiya.)

Here are a few of the dozens of photos of terrorists that the Meir Amit Center found for this batch, including some "martyr posters" that were released as late as last week, including two that they got from me!