Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 20, 2007

A short note on airline security

I'm taking a flight today and decided to double-check on ID requirements. I saw an interesting section on ID requirements for children aged 15-17 traveling alone:

Driver's License
Passport
Credit card
School ID
Company ID
Library card
Birth Certificate
Social Security card
Organization ID (such as athletic club, etc.)
Proof of auto insurance in passenger's name

As we've seen in Israel and elsewhere, terrorists can be below 18 years old.

How hard is it to forge a library card or student ID?

"Human rights" roundup - none for Sderot residents

As of this morning, there is not a word on the Human Rights Watch website nor on the Amnesty International website about terror rockets being shot indiscriminately at Sderot's citizens.

Nor does the anti-war International Action Center have anything to say.

The only "human rights" organization that I could find that does condemn those rockets is Btselem.

Speaking of "human rights," there is an NGO in Israel itself called the Arab Association of Human Rights. Its purpose is to advocate for Israeli Arab human rights in Israel proper, which is a fine and worthy goal. Its English website is here.

When one enters its Arabic-language website, however, "human rights" becomes the furthest thing from its mind. Almost every article is about the 59th anniversary of the "Naqba." For Israeli Arabs, the "naqba" was just trading British dhimmi rule with Jewish dhimmi rule - it wa

s hardly a catastrophe, and they live in better conditions that any other Arabs in the Middle East. But the AAHR is trying mightily to incite Israeli Arabs against the State of Israel itself. This is clear from a photo on the front page shown here: a smiling presentation of a framed map where Israel does not exist between leaders of this group meeting in Nazareth last weekend.

The entire Arabic website is not advocating peace - it is nothing but incitement. Here are the results of a poll (Arabic only!), showing the types of people it is attracting:

How must the Palestinians inside Israel to revive Israel's Independence Day?
*Commemorating the day like other Israelis being citizens in Israel
*Ignoring celebrations and lack of participation by
*Remember Catastrophe and participate in activities that contribute to the marches and visits to villages deserted.

Not surprisingly, of the peaceful human rights advocates who visit this Arabic site, 87% want Israeli Arabs to consider the establishment of their nation as a catastrophe.

And, of course, this organization is registered with the same Israeli government that it is inciting against.

Muslims rioting at sacrilegious behavior!

Just joking:

On the streets of Gaza, members of the pro-Fatah National Security Forces were staffing checkpoints at which they made women lift their veils, worn for religious reasons of modesty. They also took away men with beards, which are often associated with members and supporters of Hamas. Those scenes have shocked many local Palestinians.

But it was reported by the crack MSM NYT - in paragraph 23 of its story.

Do we even need to mention what kind of reaction would occur if any Westerner would do the same thing?

The death of Oslo

James Taranto at Best of the Web Today makes a very good point:

With civil war raging in Gaza, an Associated Press dispatch includes this interesting observation:
Hamas mounted accusations on its Web sites, radio and TV that Abbas-linked forces were working with Israel--a charge dismissed as "absurd" by a Fatah spokesman.
Yasser Arafat is in stable condition after dying at a Paris hospital, and Mahmoud Abbas is his successor as head of the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah political/terrorist movement. Fatah says it's "absurd" that it would be working with Israel against the terrorists of Hamas--but that of course was the entire point of the Oslo accords. It's a sad little postscript to President Clinton's peace efforts.

People keep forgetting that the PA promised to stop terror as a condition of Israel withdrawing from territory. Now they still have the territory and the terror.

Updates

To keep up with the latest on the Qassam barrages and the Israeli reactions, check out Israellycool and The Muqata who are liveblogging. Israel Matzav, as usual, provides terrific analysis.

This morning a Qassam hit a gas station in Sderot.

A "high ranking IDF officer" says that Israeli actions have reduced the number of Qassams. Based on my counts, this pronouncement seems premature - at least 11 so far today.

Israel has killed 9 Palestinian terrorists so far in retaliation - and no civilians.

Ma'an News in Arabic is referring to these corpses as "martyrs." And Ma'an is by far the closest PalArabs have to real journalism. Goes to show how thoroughly messed up they are.

UPDATE: Hamas and Fatah each scored one, so our PalArab self-death count is now at 260 for the year.

UPDATE 2: A fisherman was killed in Gaza crossfire. 261.

UPDATE 3: A woman died of her wounds from the "unfortunate events." 262.

Hamas hurls the greatest insult possible to Fatah

In the Al-Qassam Hamas website in Arabic (autotranslated):

Pictures of a number of martyrs who Aleksameen Ela risen to at the hands of Zionists and the Zionists followers from the security apparatus proxy

They are showing the pictures of their dead terrorist member "martyrs" - and saying that the ones killed by Fatah were killed by a proxy for the Zionists.

The picture of the dead guy in the lower left is a nice touch.

Image is everything

From Ma'an:

Gaza – Ma'an – Unidentified gunmen opened fire on Thursday towards a rally organized in Gaza City by the leftist PFLP and DFLP movements. The Popular Front and the Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine were protesting the ongoing confrontations between Hamas and Fatah.

The two groups called on the rivals to respect the Mecca agreement, and to remove gunmen from the streets. Before the rally, several leaders of both factions gathered in the Unknown Soldier square in Gaza City.

They held President Abbas and Prime Minister Haniyeh responsible for the latest deterioration.
A leader in the PFLP, Kayid Al-Ghoul warned in a statement of new rounds of confrontations. He described the insistence of the rivals in continuing to fight each other as "shameful and harmful to the Palestinian image".

Palestinian Arabs are killing each other, an anti-war rally gets shot at, and the worst thing that the critic can say is that it is "harmful to the Palestinian image"?

It actually makes sense.

In a society where honor is prized above all and disgrace is worse than death, it follows naturally that real people dying is not an issue - but the shame that accompanies the fact that they are killed by their own people is a big deal.

Westerners need to have this hammered into our heads - we are talking about a culture that is utterly different from the one we are used to. If death at the hands of the West is honorable, then the way to dissuade them from acting like animals is not to kill them but to shame them. And the best way to shame them is to publicize the depraved acts that they do and try to cover up.

Organizations like MEMRI and PMW , by accurately publicizing the worst parts of Arab society, shame those societies. Being honest about calling them terrorists and not "freedom fighters" or "gunmen" shames them. Telling the world about honor killings and terror worship and anti-semitism and historical revisionism that is practiced by the Arab world is what the West needs to do, in plain language. The entire reason that the Palestinian Arabs keep using euphemisms in English for terror and depravity is to pre-empt the shame that they know themselves would accompany the publicizing of what they are doing, day in and day out.

The way to win the war against Islamic terror is to force them to play on the playing field of real morality and shining the light of truth on their sick and twisted priorities. And if they are so convinced that their morality is superior to ours, that suicide bombings and honor killings and targeting civilians is noble, force them to say it proudly in English.

They won't - because deep down they know that their actions are shameful and they need to desperately hide and obfuscate this fact.

Not a good week for human rights organizations

For the 23rd consecutive week, more Palestinian Arabs have been violently killed by other PalArabs than by the IDF.

This week's score wasn't even close - 49 to 6 (from PCHR.)

Even so, the "Palestinian Center for Human Rights" spends more effort and energy documenting, in the most minute detail, every perceived Israeli violation of what they call "international law" and all but ignoring the real problems that real Palestinian Arabs have, worrying about being shot by their neighbors.

Apparently "human rights" don't apply when the oppressor is not a Jew.

Similarly, another "human rights" organization, Doctors without Borders, is embarrassed this morning that one of their members was caught in a plot to assassinate Israeli leaders:

A Palestinian from the Gaza Strip who works for the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders has been arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) revealed Thursday.
Mazab Bashir, 25, from Deir el-Balah began working with Doctors Without Borders five years ago.
On April 19, he confessed during a Shin Bet interrogation that for months, he had been collecting intelligence on senior Israeli officials - including Olmert and a number of Knesset members.
Bashir met with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in September 2006, and said that the assassination was meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian civilians.
Bashir also underwent arms training with the PFLP, and was picked to carry out the planned assassination.
He told the Shin Bet that he had collected information on the Internet to use to target MKs, but then realized that the MKs in question did not live in Jerusalem, the only Israeli city to which his permit granted him access.
According to the officials, after he realized that the security surrounding Olmert was impenetrable, Bashir decided in December 2006 to kill David Be'eri, head of the Elad organization, a group involved in purchasing Arab homes in Jerusalem's Old City.
That same month, he underwent combat training in the Gaza Strip in order to learn to kill without using weapons.
In January 2007, Bashir again entered Israel again on behalf of Doctors Without Borders, and began collecting information on Be'eri. He made additional trips to Jerusalem in February and March, and on April 18. He was arrested on April 19.
During his interrogation, Bashir said he had planned to return to Gaza to complete his combat training and learn, among other things, how to break necks. He said he intended to use his skills to kill Be'eri....
Duncan Mclean, head of 'Doctors Without Borders' in the region, told Israel Radio, "I don't think embarrassed would be the right word. We are very sad for Bashir who has been working for us for almost six years. But we would like to make it very clear that we make a distinction between his professional work and what he does on his personal time in the sense that all our staff is hired for professional reasons and I don't think our organization can be held liable for every aspect of their life."

As Jameel points out,

If a humanitarian-medical organization would say that about Dr. Baruch Goldstein, don't you think they would immediatly lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the world (and media), yet they can say that about Mazab Bashir?

Also, this is just another reminder of how Palestinian terrorists use "medicine" as a cover, be it smuggling terrorists, bombs and weapons in ambualnces, or inflitrating Doctors without Borders...

As of this morning, the Doctors Without Borders website doesn't bother to mention this little incident.

SDEROT, ISRAEL: An Israeli fire fighter inspect the damage to a school following an attack by Palestinian militants with home-made rrockets on a school in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, a few kms away from the Palestinian Gaza Strip, 17 May 2007. JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Just a little reminder for those who like to say that Qassams are homemade, ineffective weapons.

Arab media reporting Israeli tanks in Gaza

Both Ma'an and Paltoday have bulletins saying Israeli tanks have entered Gaza for the first time since the withdrawal. Paltoday (Arabic) says they are in Jabalia.

IMEMC says a guard at the Islamic University was shot and killed by a sniper. Our 2007 PalArab self-death count rises to 249.

UPDATE: Terrorist died from wounds yesterday in Gaza hospital. 250.

Wafa reported 47 killed in the infighting before the one above which is exactly my number. They also report 210 injured and 28 in critical condition.

UPDATE 2: Ynet reports 1 killed during PalArab funeral; man and woman killed in Fatah/Hamas shootings. 253.

UPDATE 3: AP's Ibrahim Barzak, the guy who described how scary the violence was yesterday, is back in form spending more time on Israeli airstrikes than PalArab violence today. But he claims 22 were killed yesterday, I only had 18, so I am adjusting my count to 257.

UPDATE 4: Hamas blew up a Fatah terrorist. 258.

AP spins, lies, repeats

The Associated Press published a helpful guide to what's going in in Gaza. Too bad it isn't very accurate:

Q: Where is the Gaza Strip and how big is it?
A: It's on the Mediterranean coast, with Israel on two sides and Egypt on the other. The territory is 25 miles long and 6 to 9 miles wide. About 1.3 million Palestinians live there, making it one of the most crowded territories on Earth.

It is somewhat crowded, but as I've shown in the past, it is one quarter the population density in Macau or Monaco. And Gaza City is not close to the most crowded city.

Q: Who are the opposing forces?

A: The moderate Fatah movement, the traditional ruler, is on one side and controls most of the Palestinian security forces. On the other side is the militia set up by the Islamic hard-liners of the Hamas movement, which was voted into power a year ago. Palestinian militants also have joined the fight.

This is so misleading that it can be safely considered a lie. The "militants" that joined the fight are the Fatah terrorists who are not "moderate" at all.

Lifestyles of the rich and terrorist

On Wednesday, Hamas attacked the house of a Fatah "security chief" in Gaza named Rashid Abu Shbak. Because this made the house newsworthy, we now can see how some of the poor Palestinian Arabs live.

Here's an exterior shot of Chez Shbak:

Coming in through the nicely manicured garden, (I wonder how much of that scarce water it uses?) one sees the entrance foyer:

A bit further in one can relax in the sitting room:

And what would a poverty stricken shack be without the spiral staircase:

Marty Peretz at TNR contrasts the lavish homes of mid-level Fatah terrorists to the modest abodes of Israel's prime ministers. Batya at Shiloh Musings comments with links to pictures she took of Arab mansions outside Jerusalem.

(Hat tip Soccer Dad for the TNR link)

Journalists in Gaza under siege

Ma'an reports:

Gaza – Ma'an – Journalists, correspondents and other employees at Arab and international news agencies and satellite TV stations are currently under siege in a tower building which hosts the offices of several press agencies.

Satellite TV stations are transmitting live images from the spot, and the sounds of gunshots and explosions can be clearly heard inside and outside the besieged building. Fear is apparent on the faces of the journalists at the Shawwa, Husary and Juwhara tower in central Gaza City.

Cross fire continues between rival gunmen who occupied the roof of the building, and others, who are currently shooting at the building where the journalists are besieged.

Wael Dahdouh, a reporter for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV, said that more than 30 journalists are besieged in a small room, "where we are seeking refuge from the shelling and shooting inside our offices."

He added, "Another building with journalists in has been shelled by anti-tank missiles, while gunshots and shrapnel penetrate the walls of the place, every now and then."

The same journalists who have soft pedaled Palestinian Arab violence for years are now the main targets (and three have already been killed.) And now, on live TV, they are pleading for their lives from those who really don't care about human life.

UPDATE: The AP apologist for terror, Ibrahim Barzak, filed a report on how thoroughly screwed up Gaza has become. Too bad he waited until his own life was in danger before he wrote it:

With battles raging outside my building and my windows blown out by bullets, I sit in a dark hallway outside my apartment with my wife and baby. It's dangerous inside and outside.
Today I have seen people shot before my eyes, I heard the screams of terrified women and children in a burning building, and I argued with gunmen who wanted to take over my home.
I have seen a lot in my years as a journalist in Gaza, but this is the worst it's been.
Much of the fighting is taking place right here in my neighborhood. I went outside a few times to report, just around the house. I saw a building on fire after Hamas gunmen attacked, and I heard the screams of people who could not get out because of the gun battles.
My building is across from a Palestinian government complex, and both sides are fighting for control of the area. They're taking over rooftops. My apartment is on the top floor of this five-story building. This morning some Fatah gunmen tried to force their way into my apartment so they could shoot from my windows, overlooking the Palestinian government compound. I had an argument with them, and they left.
There have been clashes between Hamas and Fatah before, but there are dangerous new elements this time. Now they are arresting or even shooting people for the way they look. If you have a beard, you might be arrested by Fatah security for looking Islamic. If you have a chain around your neck or on your arm, Hamas gunmen might shoot you because you look secular.
The random use of weapons and explosives is out of control. People who consider themselves the elite, the politicians, sit with the Egyptian mediators at night and then come out with statements about a truce, and in the morning we see the opposite has occurred. These people are not controlling anything.
I saw several people shot right in front of my home today. I'm preparing myself for even worse violence.

"My own private Naqba"

I am working on a major series of posts to attempt to create a psychological history of the Palestinian Arabs from the birth of Zionism to today - to show how their mindset guides their actions and how external events change their mindsets. It is slower going than I would like but I think it will be valuable.

Articles like this that show the differences between ordinary PalArabs and their self-anointed leadership shed a lot of light on how they think:

"I've had it. I told my wife and kids that we are leaving the Gaza Strip," A., a businessman in his 40s who lives in Gaza City, said Monday. In the six and a half years since the intifada began he has never spoken about leaving and has remained optimistic, but now he has decided to get out.

"Why? Because I can," he said. With these three words, he summed up the reason why most Gazans stay put - because they, unlike him, cannot leave. "The situation is crap, I don't know what will happen to the kids. You can't send them to school for fear they'll be hurt in the crossfire. It's true that I have a successful business and own a few houses, but I'd rather know that the kids and I will remain alive."

A. says he recently realized that even though he does not belong to any of the organizations and is not in conflict with anyone, his life and those of his family are in danger. Militants have demanded money, threatened to hurt him and his children and tried to rob his car, obliging him to hire a bodyguard.

The events of the past several days were the last straw for him. "Enough, I can't take it any more. We'll go to Cairo or to Amman, we'll find a way to survive. Gaza can go rot, it can burn," A. said. When asked what he will do and how he will support his family, he says, "First off, I'll take my wife to a movie. We'll see people, we'll see women without hijab. Afterward - God is beneficent."

A. curses the "majnunim" [crazies] who he says destroyed Gaza and turned it into a hell. He says that Hamas and Fatah are fighting each other instead of battling against the chaos and the security vacuum, adding that even the hope that followed the establishment of the unity government has become a giant disappointment. "At the end, and ironically precisely on Yawm al-Nakba [the Palestinian term for Israel's Independence Day], what the Israelis failed to do to us, Fatah and Hamas did - to expel me from my home. It's my own private Nakba."

By the way, Israellycool is liveblogging the Qassams and other chaos.

Microsoft appealing to Palestinian Arab morality

They might be shooting rockets at innocent Israelis, and they might be murdering each other, but Microsoft clearly hopes that they don't copy software. From an ad in paltoday.com:(Arabic)