Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 04, 2015

Have Great Britain and the US changed their ROE against ISIS to justify their criticism of Israel in Gaza?

Hamas terrorist preparing rocket fuse with kids

Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq are using human shields to stop British RAF pilots killing them with drones operated from nearly 3,000 miles away, it can be revealed.

Barbaric militants are exploiting Western rules of engagement by travelling around the war-torn region with women and children or moving in civilian crowds so laser-guided Hellfire missiles are not fired to wipe them out.

New tactics mean high value targets on a British kill list may be watched by an 'unblinking eye in the sky' at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire for days on end waiting for an opportunity to strike.

Last week, RAF personnel seated behind screens from the comfort of a high-security hangar in either Lincolnshire or Nevada in the US took part in a US-led top secret mission to wipe out Jihadi John.

Although they did not fire the missiles that killed him - as they came from a US drone - they helped watch him for months until an opportunity came to strike him without injuring any civilians.

He was nearly killed twice before but on one opportunity he entered a crowded street and on the second he was deemed too close to women and children.

A defence source said: 'It is fairly obvious that the West prides itself on its strict adherence to international law and that is clear to anyone with common sense.

'It doesn't take rocket science for those who are medieval enough to exploit that and use women and children as human shields.'

As I wrote recently in light of the news that the US was also refusing to launch attacks unless there were no civilians around, this is an absurd and wholly incorrect interpretation of international law when dealing with high value targets.

The UK Laws of Armed Conflict Manual (2004), as amended in 2010, states:

[C]ivilian immunity does not make unlawful the unavoidable incidental civilian casualties and damage which may result from legitimate attacks upon military objectives, provided that the expected incidental casualties and damage are not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. This is the principle of proportionality.

As the ICRC documents, Great Britain has never had a policy of "no civilians killed" but rather that the target must be a military target and the damage to civilians not be excessive in proportion to the military advantage:

In 1991, in reply to a question in the House of Lords concerning the Gulf War, the UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence stated:

The Geneva Conventions contain no provisions expressly regulating targeting in armed conflict. The Hague Regulations of 1907 and customary international law do, however, incorporate the twin principles of distinction between military and civilian objects, and of proportionality so far as the risk of collateral civilian damage from an attack on a military objective is concerned. These principles and associated rules of international law were observed at all times by coalition forces in the planning and execution of attacks against Iraq

Some 3000 civilians were killed in the first Gulf War.

In 1993, in reply to questions in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons about the launching of “around 40 Cruise missiles by the Americans which resulted in the killing of innocent civilians in places like the Al Rashid Hotel”, the UK Minister of Foreign Affairs stated:

I do not believe the action was disproportionate. You know what it was aimed against; it was aimed against a plant that the Iraqis had themselves admitted was producing material for their nuclear programme … It seemed to me a proportionate target. It looks and sounds as if … one of the Cruise missiles went astray and killed innocent civilians in the Al Rashid Hotel. That clearly is to be deplored but I do not think the action as a whole can be regarded as disproportionate

In 2003, in reply to a written question in the House of Commons, the UK Secretary of State for Defence wrote:

The military campaign is crafted around the principle of minimum use of force. We attack only military objectives and combatants subject to the constraints of proportionality. If there is any expectation that harm will be caused to civilians, this must not be excessive when set against the direct and concrete military advantage anticipated from the attack.

But when discussing Israel in more recent operations, something funny happened. The British position changed from minimizing civilian casualties to avoiding civilian casualties:

In 2006, in a written answer to a question concerning, inter alia, “the implications under the Geneva Conventions of the targeting by Israel of civilian facilities and infrastructure in Gaza”, the UK Minister of State for the Middle East, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, stated:

We are opposed to the targeting of civilian facilities and call upon Israel to respect international law and, in particular, the requirement of proportionality and the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.
In 2006, in a reply to a question in the House of Lords concerning “[w]hat representations [the UK Government] have made to the Government of Israel regarding their military response to the kidnapping of one Israel Defense Force soldier”, the UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, stated: “Any military steps taken should avoid civilian casualties, abide by international law and observe the principle of proportionality.”

In 2006, in a written ministerial statement, the UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, stated:

While Israel has the right to defend itself and to secure the release of Corporal Shalit, its actions should be proportionate and in accordance with international law, as we, the G8 and the EU have made clear. We call on Israel to exercise restraint and to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that both Great Britain and the US have changed their rules of engagement so as not to look like hypocrites for condemning Israel for doing what they themselves had done in the Gulf wars, in Iraq and in Bosnia.

The Geneva Conventions allows for civilian deaths in war as long as the target is military and the number of deaths is not excessive, as determined by the military commanders. To change that rule into one where civilian casualties are to be forbidden might make HRW and Amnesty happy, but it results in the ability for ISIS to mimic Hamas' use of human shields to avoid being targeted altogether. And we are seeing that now.

Wars cannot be won this way.

(h/t Elchanan)

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The joke of the day, translated

Everyone's been sharing this so I decided to actually translate it.

By the way, I am speaking on Sunday morning somewhere in the northern half of New Jersey. If you want to come, send me an email and I'll forward you the info. (Suggested donation to the venue is $10.)

12/03 Links Pt2: Why It Matters That Iran Lied; Blaming Jews gets you in the news

From Ian:

Why It Matters That Iran Lied

With the leak of an International Atomic Energy Agency report about Iran’s work on military research to the Associated Press, the last obstacle to implementation of the nuclear deal struck by the West with Tehran has been removed. The good news for the deal’s advocates is that the IAEA says there is no proof that Iran worked on creating a nuclear explosive device after 2009, although it admits its work is inconclusive. There are reasons to doubt that Iran stopped working on nukes at sites that we don’t know about. But even if we accept the notion that they did stop at face value the UN agency’s work gives us plenty of reasons to worry. After a decade of denying that it had ever worked on a nuclear weapon, the IAEA’s conclusions about the pre-2009 period are definitive. There is no longer the slightest doubt that Iran was working to create a nuclear weapon before 2009. In other words, the Iranian government lied. And it continued to lie throughout the negotiations with Obama administration and Western allies. The question the president and others who actually think the nuclear deal is a reasonable solution to the problem of the nuclear threat must answer is if Iran lied for so long, what makes them think the Islamist regime is willing or even capable of telling the truth and abiding by the terms of the pact they’ve signed with it?
There are two big problems with the IAEA report.
One is that we know that the IAEA’s access to the one Iranian site where work on “possible military dimensions” — PMD — of their nuclear program was limited due to the terms of a side deal struck with Iran. As we learned over the summer while the debate over the deal was going on, the IAEA agreed to serious restrictions on its access to the Parchin military site. Even more troubling, when the IAEA did their best under the circumstances to find out what had happened at Parchin, they discovered that there had been new construction had taken place at a place that apologists for the agreement claimed had long been moribund. Just as bad was the fact that during the course of their investigation, the IAEA discovered that some important equipment known to have been at the site was now missing. That makes it more than obvious that Iran was making efforts to sanitize the site and make it difficult if not impossible for the UN to test the site for activity. Yet it doesn’t appear that the new report will solve either of these mysteries. It seems that the nuclear watchdogs have simply thrown up their hands

Think you're on the moral high ground by opposing air strikes in Syria? Sorry but you couldn't be more wrong

Somehow, we have allowed the doctrine of inaction to claim monopoly on morals. While the last Iraq War was declared and fought on a false premise, a perpetual dispute on whether Blair lied in 2003 is meaningless in today’s terms. For two wrongs do not make a right. If we become a pacifist nation now, we will not resurrect the lives lost in Iraq, yet may well cost lives that could otherwise have been saved from Isis.
“Ah, but we must learn the lessons of history,” opponents of air strikes would say. But what lessons are we learning exactly? Who is learning from the history of 1990s, when up to 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda as the world watched on? Who is learning the lessons of the Srebrenica Massacre, where more than 8,000 Muslims were massacred, again amid the apathy of the world? Above all, who will listen to the Syrian activist who lived under Assad who could not afford to choose between two evils?
While Parliament voted for military action last night, the public debate has indicated that the monopoly on morals is now a disease running in our collective memory. 12 years on, it is high time we learn the right lessons of Iraq, for our moral compass has been pointing in the wrong direction for far too long.

Col Kemp: Ex-army head: ISIS negotiation is fools option but we'll need troops on ground for victory

Airstrikes must be part of a wider strategy encompassing ground operations, economic warfare and the political landscape at the end of the conflict. But if we wait until everything is in place before we join the fight we will be too late, as we sit and watch IS gain momentum and support.
Denying that support is crucial. Muslims from across the Middle East, Asia and Europe are flocking to fight with IS. They do so because they see jihadists standing up victoriously to the ‘apostate’ Arab regimes and to the West. Only when IS are exposed as bloodied losers, and fighting with them a path to certain death, will this life-blood of new recruits be cut off.
Will British air strikes in Syria provoke terrorist attacks at home? Yes, because the publicity-obsessed IS will be desperate to be seen to hit back at us. But they are trying to kill us anyway. Seven attacks in the UK have been foiled by MI5 in the last 6 months alone.

Jewish Student Under Ethics Probe for Confronting Anti-Israel Demonstrators: ‘I Acted for Those Who Felt Marginalized, Unsafe’ (INTERVIEW)

The Jewish University of Michigan student at the center of an ethics probe for arguing with anti-Israel demonstrators on campus told his side of the story to The Algemeiner on Wednesday.
“My actions came from my own place of hurt and that of a sizable portion of my constituency’s,” said Jesse Arm, a University of Michigan sophomore and Central Student Government (CSG) representative. “I am saddened that my fitness for office has been called into question by virtue of my opposition to a purposefully inflammatory protest.
“To suggest that I am not suited to be a member of Michigan’s Central Student Government because of my public opposition to Students Allied for Freedom and Equality’s protest on the Diag [quad] would be to undermine the core principles of democracy and pluralism on which our nation was founded and our University rooted.”
Last month, Arm confronted fellow protesting students who assembled an anti-Israel display on campus. The demonstration took place on Nov. 19, the day that 18-year-old American student Ezra Schwartz was killed in a Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel.
The altercation between Arm and the demonstrators was caught on video and resulted in SAFE, the group responsible for the display, calling on the student government’s ethics committee to dismiss Arm. During a CSG meeting on Tuesday, a number of university students and former student government representatives spoke in defense of Arm.

"Dancing Israelis" lie is revived after Trump comments

In the wake of Donald Trump's comments that he saw hundreds of Muslims celebrating on 9/11, some anti-Israel websites are saying that he was remembering a mythical story of "dancing Israelis" that you can find all over the Internet.

Mondoweiss, while not directly saying there were any "dancing Israelis," uses the phrase as if it is true (it also calls them "laughing Israelis."

Albawaba refers to them as "grinning Israelis" and calls them "dancing Israelis" several times.

I described the facts a few years ago when a +972 writer accused Israelis of celebrating 9/11:

Apparently, Gurvitz likes to spend time on 9-11 truther websites, because those who actually remember the story know that there were no dancing Israelis on 9/11. The woman who reported them to the police described them this way:

MARIA: Like a few minutes must have gone on, and all of a sudden down there I see this van park. And I see three guys on top of the van, and I'm trying, you know, to look at the building but what caught my attention, they seemed to be taking a movie.

MILLER: (VO) Maria says the three young men were kneeling on the roof of a white van. It was parked right here. They were taking pictures of each other with the World Trade Center burning in the background.
MARIA: And I could see that they were, like, happy, you know? They--they--they weren't--they didn't look shocked to me, you know? They didn't look shocked. I thought it was very strange.
If I would have had a camera with me that day, I would have been taking photos as well - and hundreds of people did. But there was no dancing and no celebration (although there does seem to have been excitement at witnessing such an event, and somewhat bad taste at taking tourist-type photos in front of the smoke.)

The Israelis denied dancing to the US authorities and went on Israeli television and denied it again. But "truther" websites started the rumor that there were "dancing israelis" - and 972 mag now pushes that lie as well. And, of course, they weren't arrested for "dancing," as pseudo-journalist Gurvitz asserts.
...
To be fair, I have no doubt that Israelis have mixed feelings at terror attacks abroad. They hope against hope that the victim country will now have an inkling of the fear that Israelis had to go through for years, before going on the offensive to stop daily terror attacks. In other words, they naturally hope that Europeans will start to empathize with what Israelis have had to live with and notice that they have common enemies. This is human, but it is a not close to the happiness that Gurvitz is describing in this sickeningly vile piece of garbage.

Then, after spending paragraphs about five supposedly happy Israelis, Albawaba mentions this:

Then in a CNN segment Tuesday, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani said his city had actually witnessed some Arabs celebrating on the day.

"We had pockets of celebration," he told the CNN, including one situation in which a "candy store owned by a Muslim family was celebrating that day."

But these were groups of 10 or 20 people, the former mayor said. Still a pretty far cry from Trump's thousands.

Actually, Giuliani said between 10 and 40.

Trump is certainly wrong in saying that thousands of Muslims were celebrating publicly in the New York area. But the man who would know confirms that there were perhaps dozens of Muslims known to be celebrating. So why is that not getting anywhere near the the same coverage as the mythical "dancing Israelis?"

Of course, there were thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 - in the Middle East and even in Europe as this Wall Street Journal article from 2001 showed in grim detail and as these videos from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC showed on that day.

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

The headline story in today’s Israel Hayom is about how the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorists tortured and mutilated their Israeli hostages.

I didn’t bother to read it. I don’t need further reinforcement about the degree to which the Palestinian movement is all about hate. Mahmoud Abbas, who organized the financing for the Munich attack, and Yasser Arafat, who approved it, went on after Oslo to create a hate-education apparatus probably matched only by Pol Pot’s indoctrination of child soldiers. While Israel changed its school curricula to “educate for peace,” de-emphasizing Zionism and emphasizing the new ‘reality’ of coexistence brought about by Oslo, the Palestinian Authority went full speed in the opposite direction, teaching their students that ‘Palestine’ would be redeemed from the Jewish usurpers by their blood.

In the 22 years since Oslo, the PA/PLO hasn’t backed off one iota in its campaign to make its children candidates for martyrdom, despite agreeing to stop numerous times. That’s why today Arab teenagers in Jerusalem go looking for Jews to stab as an after-school activity.

The diverse Arabs that have called themselves ‘Palestinians’ since the 1960s talk a lot about their cultural traditions. But what are they, in addition to the Arab culture they brought to the land from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Yemen, and other places, mostly after the beginning of Zionism? The unique Palestinian part of their culture is the mythic presumption of victimhood at the hands of the Jews, their burning hatred of us, and their intention to get revenge. Their heroes are terrorists, and the most important qualification for a Palestinian politician is how strongly he opposes Israel (and how many Jews he has personally murdered). Their founding fathers were pogromist and Nazi supporter Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Yasser Arafat, a man responsible for several wars and countless acts of terrorism.

The rest of the world has consistently made wrong decisions in its relationship with them, and as a result massively increased the number of Palestinians, fed their grievances and encouraged them to continue their conflict. And it paid the price. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Palestinian terrorism was international in scope; the PLO was not the first group to hijack airplanes for political purposes, but it popularized this form of terrorism, as well as attacking airports and even cruise ships. In 1968, a Palestinian terrorist named Sirhan Sirhan even assassinated American presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Literally billions of dollars every year are pumped from the pockets of Western taxpayers into the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA and EU initiatives, out of alleged humanitarian concern. Most of this money pays the salaries of thousands of policemen, teachers, bureaucrats, and soldiers whose primary function is to support the Palestinian movement to destroy Israel and only secondarily to provide services to the Arab refugees and the populations of the territories. Much of it is siphoned off to support the various terrorist militias and the lavish lifestyles of the leadership.

Palestinians are the only group of people in the world for whom refugee status is hereditary. By providing per-capita welfare payments to them, UNRWA insures that the dependent, disaffected, frustrated, angry and often murderous population will continue to grow over the years. As a result, the number of Arabs with refugee status has increased from about 700,000 in 1948 to about 5,000,000 today. The total number of ‘Palestinians’ in Israel, the refugee camps and the rest of the world is claimed to be more than 12 million! Meanwhile, the millions of non-Palestinian refugees from WWII were resettled within about 10 years, as were the 850,000 Jews forced out of Arab countries after 1948.

The UNRWA educational system is no better – probably worse – than that provided by the Palestinian Authority. This isn’t surprising, because many of its employees are members of Hamas.

This is a sick society, a very sick society, which openly worships death and sends its children out to die in the service of its hatred. And yet, the West has coddled it, supported it, fed it and helped it grow – and then come back time and again to pressure Israel, the target of Palestinian hate, to give up land, to release murderers that it has imprisoned to protect itself, and to pretend that Palestinians are a normal people, not a hate-filled fanatical cult whose reason for being is to kill the Jewish state.

The Palestinians have found an effective strategy to attract left-wing support, which is to claim that Israel is guilty of every social ill that is opposed by progressive people anywhere. So they claim absurdly that Israel is a racist and apartheid state, that it oppresses women and children, and that it is an environmental polluter. Recently, Mahmoud Abbas told the climate summit in Paris that Israel was “destroying the Palestinian environment.”

Palestinians often falsely accuse Israel of precisely the crimes that they themselves commit. The world ignores the facts that the PLO’s and Hamas’ essence is anti-Jewish racism, that they wish to establish a Jew-free state, that Palestinian Arabs are often guilty of honor killings and sexual violence against women and children, and that the Palestinians massively pollute their environment (funds given to them to mitigate environmental problems have been stolen by corrupt officials or used for military purposes).

One of their favorite accusations is that the IDF deliberately targets Arab children. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but what is true is that there have been numerous Palestinian terrorist attacks aimed at Israeli children, schools, nurseries, school buses, outings, and young peoples’ clubs. For a Palestinian, a Jew is a Jew and a child is a soft target.

Palestinians inject their Israel-hatred everywhere. Palestinians have even assimilated the grievances of the Ferguson, MO protests to their movement, claiming that both are “fighting a common system of injustice, control and racism.” Regardless of the absurdity of their claims, Western academics, religious leaders, trade unions, and other organizations eat them up and pass resolutions to boycott or divest from the Jewish state.

Why does the most of the world consistently take their side? There are multiple reasons, including some brilliant PR decisions – to appropriate the anti-colonialist mantle from the Jews, to claim to be an oppressed indigenous people seeking national liberation, to turn the racism/apartheid label around and apply it to the Jews – and some practical tactics, like intimidating the West with terrorism. And of course there is always the advantage that they have the right enemy, the Jew among nations.

But in any event, it is stupid for the West to continue feeding this monster. And it is even stupider for Israel to do so.

I would like to see Israel publicly denounce the fake Palestinian historical narrative, and refute their claims to be the original indigenous people of this land. I would like Israel to officially end the farce of the Oslo ‘peace process’, shut down the Palestinian Authority, outlaw the PLO, throw its leaders out of the country and dismantle the indoctrination system established by Yasser Arafat. I would like to see Israel assert its historical, moral and legal rights of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

Now everyone will come up with reasons why this is impossible. How can we rule over these Arabs? Do we give them citizenship? Do we administer a loyalty oath and kick out the ones who don’t sign it? Where to? Nobody wants to do reserve duty in the territories. And on and on and on.

I don’t have the answers. But this is what we need to do. We can’t cooperate with the monstrous culture of cruelty whose reason for being is to destroy our state. We can’t let them keep getting stronger while we pretend that some day we will be able to live at peace with them.

Nothing has changed since 1972 except now they have produced a generation of children who can stick a knife in a Jew as easily as kicking a football.

It won’t get better. The lesson we should have learned since 1972 is that ultimately it’s going to be them or us. Let it be us.

12/03 Links Pt1: PA: Killing Israelis is good, but must choose place and time so world accepts it

From Ian:

Fatah Knives and ISIS Knives: Palestinian Child-Sacrifice

Instead of educating our children, as they do in the West, to be part of the Startup Generation, we follow the lead of darkest Africa, where children are armed with assault rifles and sent out to kill other children.
If the Palestinians really want to pick a fight with Israel, why do they send children to fight a "holy war" instead of fighting it themselves, like men?
The only difference is that the members of ISIS go out themselves to kill; the Palestinians send their young. Why are these not "war crimes"?
We sacrifice our sons and daughters in the name of Allah, as though Allah were a pagan statue with an altar and had to be appeased with the blood of children.
Here, the Islamists want to "liberate" Jerusalem from the infidel Zionist-Crusader occupation. Next, they want to "liberate" occupied Spain, once Muslim Andalusia, and return it to the bosom of Islam. After that, they want to occupy the Vatican and establish the Islamic Emirate on the ruins of Christianity.

PMW: Abbas’ Fatah honors “heroic” killer of “11 Zionists”

PA Chairman Abbas' Fatah movement never misses an opportunity to glorify terrorists who have murdered Israelis. Fatah found such an occasion last week, when the movement released a new photo of a "heroic" terrorist who killed 11 Israelis 13 years ago.
Thaer Hammad is a Palestinian terrorist who is serving 11 life sentences in an Israeli prison for shooting and killing 7 soldiers and 3 civilians with a sniper rifle from a hilltop in Wadi Al-Haramiya in the West Bank on March 3, 2002. Fatah posted two photos of the murderer Thaer Hammad on its official Facebook page:
Text on right picture: "The first day in captivity"
Text on left picture: "After 13 years in captivity"
Text below pictures: "The heroic prisoner Thaer Hammad, who carried out the Wadi Ah-Haramiya operation (i.e., terror attack), in which he killed 11 Zionists, in a new picture after 13 years in captivity. He is still sitting in the Zionist enemy's prison."[Official Facebook page of the Fatah Movement, Nov. 21, 2015]

PMW: PA: Killing Israelis is good, but must choose place and time so world accepts it

Jibril Rajoub, Head of PA Sport and Youth Affairs: "The international community does not agree to a bus exploding in Tel Aviv. But the international community does not ask what happens to a settler or soldier in the occupied territories at the wrong time and in the wrong place. No one asks about him! Therefore, we want to fight in such a way that the world and the international community will remain by our side." [Official PA TV, Oct. 17, 2015]
Hafez Barghouti, columnist and former editor of official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:
"After the events of September [9, 2011] in New York, [Ariel] Sharon
applied the term 'terror' used to refer to those attacks, to our national struggle (i.e., terror campaign - Intifada). I warned about this at the time, and called to keep a low profile until the New York turmoil had passed...
Now, after the Paris attacks, we must keep a low profile so that we are not charged with the crimes of ISIS... We must learn our lessons and wait." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 24, 2015]

PA official on Palestinian terror attacks: They are “acts of bravery, I am proud of them”

An addition to the Palestinese Lexicon - "Surrounded"

In 2012, Philippe Assouline wrote a brilliant piece in Times of Israel called "A BDS Palestinese Lexicon" where he shows how words that have one meaning in English have completely different meanings in Palestinese. Here are his first five entries:

Aboriginal/Native: Any non-Jew, preferably Arab, who has immigrated to Israel/Palestine within the last 150 years or is a remnant of Arab colonial conquests. For example, Yasser Arafat and Edward Said who were both born or raised in Egypt are “Native” Palestinians.

Apartheid: The only system in the Middle East which is democratic and grants Arab citizens full equality under the law, including the right to become a Justice of the Supreme Court, an ambassador, a military officer or a Minister in the Cabinet., i.e. a form of “Racism.” Not to be confused with the widespread discrimination and exclusion of Palestinians on ethnic grounds in Lebanon, which is not “Apartheid.”

Apartheid Wall: A separation fence erected in response to countless terror attacks in order to protect both Jews and Muslims from suicide bombings as a manifestation of “Zionist Aggression.”

Checkpoint: An absolutely gratuitous, cruel and malicious security measure erected in the West Bank in response to years of deadly suicide bombings, which saves countless innocent lives and is therefore to be equated with the worst forms of human torture. Not to be confused with security checkpoints at airports and international borders which, though identical in the inconveniences they cause, are perfectly acceptable.

Civilian: To BDS, an armed Palestinian terrorist in the act of planning or staging a terror attack who is targeted or killed by Israel.

The Judean People's Front recently wrote their own version on Israellycool:

While it is funny, it is also serious. When the very meaning of words is routinely twisted, the truth is lost.

Which brings us to an article in Ma'an about Hizma, where a non-violent protester (another example of Palestinian newspeak) shot two Israelis:

The town of Hizma [is] completely surrounded on the west side by the Israeli separation wall.

By definition, nothing can be "surrounded" on only one side. But in Palestinese, not only can you be surrounded on one side - you can be completely surrounded!

While the articles I linked to are humorous, this hijacking of language itself is deliberate, and insidious.

We've seen the same misuse of "surrounded" in reference to Bethlehem a number of times.

Continuing on reposting some of my articles for NewsRealBlog in 2011. This was very popular. Alas, I don't have the pictures that accompanied it.

Arabs and Muslims know that the Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are brilliant and diabolical. They use their scientific knowledge to advance their nefarious cause, building ever-increasingly sophisticated weapons whose only purpose is to harass and annoy Arabs.

But the Zionist brilliance is not limited to chemistry, electronics and medicine. Apparently, the Zionist Jews are experts at weaponizing animals to do unspeakable acts of espionage and vandalism.

Every couple of months, the Arab media describes such schemes in detail.

Here, for the first time, is the most complete known list of Zionist animal plots.

1. Evil Zionist Poison-Resistant Super-Rats

In 2008, the official Wafa Palestinian Arab news agency - under the direct control of PA president Mahmoud Abbas - reported that Israel is using rats to drive Arabs out of the Old City of Jerusalem.

"Rats have become an Israeli weapon to displace and expel Arab residents of the occupied Old City of Jerusalem," Wafa reported.

"Over the past two months, dozens of settlers come to the alleyways and streets of the Old City carrying iron cages full of rats. They release the rats, which find shelter in open sewage systems."

Wafa went on to quoted anonymous Arab residents as saying that they had tried to poison the rats but nothing worked.

Hasan Khater, secretary-general of the Islamic-Christian Front in Jerusalem, said that the goal was to "increase the suffering of the [Arabs] in Jerusalem by turning their lives into a real tragedy and forcing them to evict their homes and leave the city."

Palestine Today added that the rats were damaging Arab shops and homes.

As we speak, evil Zionist scientists are breeding these super-rats. Poisons and traps cannot kill them.

But more impressively, the rats are trained to distinguish between Jewish and Arab homes and shops in Jerusalem, and only attack the Arabs. This is no doubt the result of years of genetic research combined with micro-chips implanted in the rats' brains to ensure that the victims are all 100% Arab.

2. The Zio-Boars: Resistance is Futile

In February 2007, the anti-Israel IMEMC released this "news" item:

Palestinian sources in Salfit, in the northern part of the West Bank, reported on Thursday that Israeli settlers released boars in Palestinian farmlands near Salfit, in the northern part of the West Bank.
Resident Abdul-Fattah Al Ghazzawi, 43, stated that the settlers released at least twenty boars that attacked his farmland and several surrounding farmlands and ate the plants.
The settlers kept the boars in the farmlands overnight and only moved them away on Thursday morning.
Al Ghazzawi added that the settlers have carried out several similar attacks against the farmlands recently, and that the number of attacks has significantly increased.

Amazing! Religious Jewish Israeli settlers are raising wild pigs specifically so they can release them to destroy only Palestinian Arab crops! While boars are far from kosher, the hate of the settlers knows no bounds, so instead of trying to make a living or raise a family, many of them apparently decided to go with the "raise and train wild boars to harass Arabs" route.

This particular rumor was repeated many times. From the Palestinian Arab Ma'an News in April 2007:

A herd of wild boars on Tuesday attacked the cleaning workers of Salfit municipality while they were emptying a garbage truck.

The wild boars are being released by Israeli settlers in order to destroy the plants and crops of Palestinians.

How does one tame a wild animal enough to return to home base after doing its damage? This is another Zionist scientific mystery.

In June, 2007, the Palestine Today website added a new twist. Now there were "hundreds" of the well-trained wild pigs, but we also learned that there were so many of them because of the "racist wall" Israel was building to keep Arab terrorists out! It seems that the wall did double-duty, because it also kept the boars out of Jewish areas. Even though, you know, the Jews had trained them not to eat Jewish crops. But no matter - it is now a war crime! (The June article also added wolves to the list of Zionist animal attackers.)

The evil Zionists didn't rest on their laurels, though. Soon they weren't only training the pigs to specifically attack crops at the most critical times in their growth, but also what time of day to attack. From 2008:

Herds of wild pigs dumped in the outskirts of the West Bank city of Salfit by residents of the nearby Ariel Israeli settlement, are preventing civilians from leaving their homes in the evening, for fear of being attacked.
Eyewitnesses from the Al-Freiz neighborhood near the settlement said that in the evening after the sunset prayer the pigs attack gardens.

The pigs have now become smarter than their Arab enemies. But they had one more trick up their sleeve, perhaps inevitable in 2009 but devastating nonetheless: they were suspected of carrying swine flu.

The secret settler pig program was a rousing success. Everyone could agree that these amazing creatures had struck terror in the minds of the enemy. In fact, they were so successful that the Israeli government and army started taking over the program from the settlers, as this 2009 article from Palestine Today revealed:

Witnesses in the town of Arraba affirmed to the news agency that the Israeli occupation forces and the so-called Israeli Nature Protection Service brought a tanker full of pigs inside the town, under the protection and guard of military patrols of the army of occupation, and placed them on Arraba-Ya'bad street in a garbage dump near the town of Arraba.

So now we have implicated settlers, the Israel Nature Protection Service and the IDF.

The fact that the Mossad has not yet been suspected is proof of how good they really are.

3. The Amazing Tree-Eating Sheep

It is well known that the only people in the entire world who harvest olives are Palestinian Arabs, usually old women who happen to be caught in the act by enterprising photographers from wire services. After all, Palestinian Arabs have been harvesting their olives for dozens of years now, proving their ancient claim to the land.

This naturally enrages Israeli settlers, who cannot stand to see any olive trees in the entire area.

So they came up with a new trick to get rid of them: unleash the Zionist Sheep of Terror!

From Ma'an:

Settlers attempting to impede Palestinian olive harvests initiated a bizarre new tactic on Thursday, apparently leaving flocks of sheep at olive groves to feed on the small trees .
Residents told Ma'an that Israeli settlers "dumped dozens of sheep" on Palestinian farmland neighboring the illegal settlement of Itamar, where the animals damaged and devoured dozens of olive and fig trees.
57-year-old Jamil Daraqshah claimed that he saw an Israeli shepherd at his farm in the village of Awarta, which is south of Nablus, just days before. Also evidence, he said, is that Palestinians are not permitted to enter the area without first coordinating with the Palestinian-Israeli liaison office in Nablus.

In retrospect, it is so obvious. I mean, why wouldn't Jews living in the area send their sheep to eat trees that would hurt their digestive systems and possibly ruin them for being sold? After all, they must get rid of the olive (and fig) trees, and how efficient sheep are to do the job!

5. The Lion of Zion

In 2007, Arabs had a new fear: the Zionist Lion!

From IMEMC:

Israeli soldiers on Saturday told villagers from al-Fourdess village, located near the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem, that a Lioness had escaped from the nearby settlement of Qedumem.
Witnesses reported that a large number of Israeli soldiers were seen looking for the escaped lioness on Friday night, but did not tell villagers of the dangerous animal until Saturday.
The witnesses added that the soldiers used light flares during the night to illuminate the sky in their search for the animal.
Osamah, a resident of the village of Al Fourdess, told IMEMC that a Palestinian shepherd from the village had saw the animal approaching the area.
Villagers added that they now feared both settler attacks and attacks from the potentially ferocious animal.

Note how the soldiers were careful to keep the Arab village in the dark for an entire night, no doubt hoping for a few maulings and a good meal for the lion (whose name was probably Yehudah Aryeh Leib.)

6. The Zio-Cows of Destruction

The Lebanese border is usually a quiet place. Sometimes, though, an international incident erupts: a Hezbollah ambush and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, an Israeli patrol wanting to clear trees or perhaps something far more diabolical: Zionist cows.

From The Daily Star Lebanon:

Israeli cows guided by Israeli shepherds have been crossing the border in an act southerners are condemning as a violation of the country's sovereignty, especially since the cattle is being protected by the Israeli Army. The bovine "incursions" have even provoked Lebanese dogs that have now made it their mission to make the cows return where they came from.
Lebanese shepherds are also very concerned with falling water levels in the area as a result of the straying Israeli livestock.
Ismail Nasser, from Kfar Shuba, described how the Israeli cows have been crossing the border on a daily basis on their way to Baathail Lake without any consequences, while a commotion would erupt if any of his dogs were to approach the Blue Line, which was drawn by the United Nations in 2000, after Israel's withdrawal from almost all of the south.
As Nasser spoke, three cows appeared in the distance and were soon chased by the shepherd's barking dogs. As the dogs appeared to close in on their targets, an Israeli Merkava tank made its way to the combat zone only to disappear few moments after.
Nasser sighed with relief.
"There's barely enough water for me and my fellow Lebanese shepherds and each Israeli cow drinks more than 40 of our goats put together. Why doesn't UNIFIL consider this as an violation of the Blue Line?" Nasser asked.

Indeed, why hasn't the UN convened yet on the thirsty Joo-cows, taking away precious water from Arab farmers? Where's Amnesty International? Where's J Street?

The world's silence in this matter only proves that the Jews control everything!

7. Egyptian Remote-Controlled Tourist-Eating Sharks

Not all of Egypt's tourists visit the Pyramids. Lots of them like to hang out in beautiful, sunny Sharm el-Sheikh.

But last year the Zionists hatched their most deadly plan yet.

A German tourist was mauled to death by a shark off Egypt's Red Sea coast Sunday, but if popular rumors on the street are to be believed, it was the Israelis who did it.
The attack came days after authorities claimed they had hunted and killed a shark believed to have injured three foreign tourists in previous incidents.
A popular account has it that Israel is "dumping" hungry sharks in the Red Sea in a bid to weaken Egypt's thriving tourism industry.
One tourism company operator who owns a small fleet of mini-buses that cater to Cairo's tourist spots told me that Israel wants Egypt to lose one of its most vital economic resources so that it can toe the line on the Palestinians.

An Egyptian official thought there was merit to the theory:

"What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm," South Sinai Gov. Muhammad Abdel Fadil Shousha told egynews.net.

A diving instructor went on Egyptian TV to add more expert testimony:

Mustafa Ismail: The fish that caused the problem is not a sea fish. This type of shark is not a sea shark.
Interviewer: What kind of shark is it?
Mustafa Ismail: An ocean shark. This type of shark migrates from South Africa all the way to the top of the Earth. They don't enter alleys. The Red Sea is an alley compared to the ocean.
[An Israeli diver] told me that they had found a baby shark of a certain species opposite the Eilat port. Whey they found it, they saw it had a GPS device on it.
Interviewer: A guiding device?
Mustafa Ismail: Yes, on its back. Anyone else would have ignored it, but not us.

Remote controlled killer sharks! The only thing missing are the frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!

8. Spy Vultures of Doom

The most recent of the Zionist Attack Zoo members, discovered early this year:

Saudi media reported on Tuesday that a vulture tagged with the words, “Tel Aviv University,” had been detained for being a Mossad spy.

A report in the Saudi paper, Al-Weeam, claimed that the vulture, bearing a leg bracelet and transmitter, apparently placed by Israeli bird scientists studying migration patterns, had been found in a rural area of the country.

The paper said the flight appeared to be “a Zionist plot.”

The report triggered a plethora of posts on Arabic websites, claiming that “Zionists” had trained birds for espionage.

The vulture was eventually pardoned by a Saudi prince, who foolishly believed the Zionists at Tel Aviv University who said the markings that mentioned that school really meant that the school was responsible for the bird. How gullible he was!

Now the vulture, known by its spy name of R65, is free to spy on other Arab countries. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

9. Secret Squirrel Espionage

Iran has had great success in infiltrating Israeli spy agencies and foiling Zionist plots against the great Islamic Republic. Perhaps its most notable victory, however, was when it busted the Squirrel Spy Ring:

Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation's borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic.
"In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran's borders," state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. "The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services."
Iranian police commander Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqadam confirmed the report, saying that a number of squirrels had been caught bearing foreign spy gear within Iran's borders.

Tragically, Iran did not make their trial public. As far as we can tell, the squirrels did not enjoy even basic prisoner rights such as the right to a lawyer or even a phone call. The Red Cross never visited the squirrels. We are afraid that the poor rodents are no longer with us.

Forget Human Rights Watch - where is PETA when we need them?

10. Pigeons with Invisible Strings

Only a year after the ever-vigilant Iranians discovered the squirrels with spy equipment, they stumbled across another Zionist animal spy plot.

One of the pigeons was caught near a rose water production plant in the city of Kashan in Isfahan province, the Etemad Melli newspaper reported. It said that some metal rings and "invisible" strings were attached to the bird, suggesting that it might have been somehow communicating what it had seen with the equipment it was carrying.
"Early this month, a black pigeon was caught bearing a blue-coated metal ring, with invisible strings," a source told the newspaper.
The source gave no further description of the pigeons, nor what their fate might be.
Natanz is home to Iran's heavily-bunkered underground uranium enrichment plant, which is also not far from Kashan.

Iran has extraordinarily sensitive spy equipment, meant to find things as hard to detect as invisible strings. Being invisible, they are also weightless, so presumably they could be followed back all the way to the secret Zionist animal facilities in Haifa (oops! Forget I said that!)

These invisible strings have an entire host of military and civilian applications, most famously to spin clothing for great emperors.

11. Jewish Jellyfish

Sharks were not the only deadly sea creature hiding off of Egypt's coast. They also have special Mossad-trained lethal jellyfish. From Egyptian TV, from the same diving instructor who talked about the remote-controlled sharks:

Mustafa Ismail: Do you remember that when we were kids, the jellyfish in Alexandria would sting? Back home, in Al-Ghardaqa and in the Red Sea, you could roll the jellyfish in your hands and nothing would happen. Okay? There are all kinds of jellyfish. We would cut them up with a knife and use them for fish bait.
For some years now, there is a phenomenon nobody is talking about. Killing, paralyzing jellyfish have appeared in Al-Ghardaqa and on the Red Sea. Who brought these jellyfish there?
Interviewer: Who?
Mustafa Ismail: Who indeed?

Ah, that's the question. Who, indeed, is responsible for the lethal, paralyzing jellyfish of the Red Sea?

Hmmm. That's a toughie.

Or, maybe the jellyfish were just sick of being cut up for bait, and wanted their revenge. Hard to say.

12. Basra badgers

Not directly Zionist, but pretty close:

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.
But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.

Maybe it was Bigfoot?

13. Slithering Zio-snakes:

Arabs in the West Bank are not only concerned for sheep, lions and wild Zionist pigs. They also have to worry about Israeli snakes:

Eyewitnesses said a snake at least one meter long bit a woman on farmland near Salfit.
Locals, who have often accused Ariel settlers of releasing wild boars into villages and farmland, said the snake might have escaped from the nearby settlement.

As with the other creatures, the snakes are well trained to distinguish their Arab prey from other humans. My guess is that they use pheromones.

14. Mosquitoes of Mass Destruction:

From oxymoronically-named website Islamic-Intelligence (turn your speakers down when you visit):

Israel is now using mosquitoes as a vector for bioweapons. This is far more dangerous than any nucelar [sic] weapon and can kill entire populations on a continent.

Their proof was that a mosquito researcher committed suicide, and why else would he have done such a thing if he wasn't secretly working on mosquito WMD? I mean, it is simple logic.

Also, the Mossad has been accused of infecting mosquitoes with HIV to infect Arabs.

-------

How are the Jews so successful at training animals to do such spectacular feats of harassment, espionage, and assassinations?

Almost certainly the answer can be found in the Koran, where evil Jews were turned into apes and pigs. Clearly, that experience acclimated Jews to being part of the animal kingdom, and they learned over the centuries how to communicate with other animals and teach them to do their bidding.

Which just goes to show that no matter what you do to the Jews, they always manage to find a way to make it work out for them.

Arab media notice that Egyptian delegation attended Jewish refugee conference at UN

JPost reports:

The Permanent Israeli Mission to the UN held an event on Tuesday to honor the untold stories of some 850,000 Jewish refugees who were forced to flee their native Muslim countries following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

In Israel, November 30th marks the official annual commemoration of the expulsion of Jews from Muslim countries during the 20th century.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon opened the event by stressing that Jews from Muslim lands have suffered an “historical injustice” that has been going on for years.

“Facing violent, and even murderous anti-Jewish riots, government confiscation of wealth, nearly a million Jews were forced to flee the places their families had called home for generations, leaving behind everything they had,” he told the gathering. “We are here tonight to ensure that the world finally recognizes the stories of these forgotten refugees.”

Danon pointed a finger at the United Nations for differentiating between Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees from the same conflict.

Jewish refugees, he said, “do not have a special UN agency, and several UN organizations acting as a lobby on their behalf. The reason is simple: While the Arab countries refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, the State of Israel opened its doors to fellow Jews.”

Arab media would have ignored this, except for a detail reported by Yediot Aharonot in Hebrew:

The event was also attended by the German Ambassador to the UN and official delegations of Canada, Italy, Egypt, Colombia and Uruguay.

The fact that Egypt sent a delegation is causing some ripples - but no outrage - that I have seen.

Arab media also reported on the commemoration in Kurdistan of the expulsion of Jews from Iraq. AFP reported:

A ceremony marking the deportation of Jews from Iraq seven decades ago was held for the first time on Monday in the country's autonomous Kurdish region.

It also marked the beginning of Jewish representation in the Kurdistan region's religious-affairs ministry as a result of a law passed in May to promote minority rights.

"The law says that if there was one person from the followers of any religion, his rights are preserved," said Sherzad Omar Mamsani, the Jewish representative at the Kurdish regional ministry.

The ceremony in Kurdistan capital Arbil was attended by Kurds of Jewish origin and officials who also visited an exhibition of old photographs and records documenting Iraqi Jewry.

According to Mamsani, the ceremony is the first of its kind and marks what is known as the "Farhud", the dispossession that led to the flight and deportation of Jews from Iraq.

Mamsani, who has Jewish origins, said he estimated that the families who self-identify as Jews in Kurdistan -- but are still officially registered as Muslims -- numbered around 400.

He added that the number of families who converted to Islam but "are Jews in origin" was in the thousands.

This story was also played straight in Arab media as far as I can tell.