Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, June 27, 2014

Hamas' "Kidnappers Handbook"

The Israeli Embassy of New Zealand issued this press release:

Hamas has published three versions of a kidnapper's handbook, guides that provide practical and doctrinal information for carrying out attacks. The following analyses of the handbooks are based on open-source materials.

1. On 23 February 2010, the Palestinian Information Center, run by Hamas, reported the distribution of the first edition of a 200-page book entitled, “An Inside Perspective of the Resistance (Al-Muqawama).” The book deals extensively with the subject of the abduction of Israelis as a means to securing the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons.

A report on the book was also published on 5 March 2010 by the Islamic Bloc at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, a group of students identified with Hamas.

The book was written by Muhammad Arman, a senior Hamas member imprisoned in Israel. Arman was the commander of the Silwan Squad, which carried out horrific terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada (including the attack on the Moment Café, an attack in Rishon Lezion and the attack on the Hebrew University in Jerusalem). He was arrested in August 2002 and sentenced to 36 life sentences. Due to the severity of his crimes and the danger he posed, Israel refused to release him as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.

In the book, Arman offers detailed operative suggestions, including on kidnapping, together with an analysis of the processes and the difficulties facing the “resistance” (the Palestinian code-word for terrorism). In general, he lays out the recommended combat doctrine for the “resistance” in the West Bank. For example, he recommends firing rockets and mortar shells towards Israeli targets from the West Bank. He also advises how to exploit the various communications mediums (cell phones, the Internet, etc.), while taking the necessary precautions.

Arman also elaborates on the subject of the abduction of “Zionist soldiers” in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. His instructions constitute a detailed combat doctrine on the subject of kidnappings. Among the wealth of operative tips that he lays out in his book, Arman states, for example:

• That it is definitely possible to hold an Israeli abductee on the West Bank for long periods of time (years), as long as the kidnappers use common sense and plan the operation meticulously;

• That the kidnappers must be “sleeper” Hamas activists, that have been secretly nurtured from a young age without being exposed to [Palestinian] collaborators with Israel;

• That it is worthwhile to kidnap certain kinds of Israeli soldiers in order to increase the effectiveness of the abduction. According to Arman, the desired characteristics of a soldier that it would be worthwhile to abduct are: an Ashkenazi Jew, married, the father of children, whose parents are alive;

• That an underground hideout should be prepared well in advance (such as a pit that is prepared as a room to hold the abductee), far away from houses. Alternatively, it is possible to place the hideout in the vicinity of houses whose residents are not known to be collaborators and neither are they suspected, from the security point of view, by the enemy [Israel] so that there is no reason to believe that they will be arrested or their homes and surrounding areas searched.

2. On 28 April 2013, Dr. Adnan Abu Amer, a lecturer at the Al Ummah University Open Education, published an article on the Arabic language Al Monitor media website called “The Countdown to the Next Abduction against the Israeli Army.” The Al Monitor English version of the article is entitled "Is Hamas Planning to Kidnap More Israelis?"

3. Abu Amer, who also publishes opinion articles in Palestine, the mouthpiece of the Hamas movement, writes in his article that in 2013 the Hamas leadership - from Khaled Mashaal overseas down to the leaders of the movement in the Gaza Strip - disseminated many more messages than is usual to the terrorist arm of the movement. The terrorists had been given a free hand in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip to again force Israel into a prisoner swap. The article presents a few examples of these messages.

According to Abu Amer:

• Khaled Mashaal, the head of the Political Bureau of Hamas, declared at that time that the only means to release Palestinian prisoners was by forcing Israel to exchange prisoners.

• Ismail Haniya, till recently the prime minister of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, gave Hamas' Izz al-Din al-Kassam Brigades a free hand in one of his speeches during that same period to bring the suffering of the Palestinian prisoners to an end. He gave the Gilad Shalit kidnapping case as an example.

• Hamas' Ahmad Bahar, deputy speaker of the Palestinian parliament, called on the “armed factions” to set in motion their options to secure the release of the prisoners by all means.

• Atalla Abu-al-Sabah, the Hamas Minister of Prisoner Affairs, also emphasized the need to activate the "resistance option" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

4. Abu Amer also states that Hamas distributed, amongst the Izz al-Din al-Kassam Brigades, an 18-page booklet entitled “The Kidnapper’s Handbook,” containing the combat doctrine of the field of abductions.

Reportedly, the manual details methods of conducting kidnapping operations. Among the recommendations:

• The kidnappers should learn Hebrew until they speak it fluently;
•
• They should target a soldier with a weak physique;
•
• The vehicle used in the operation should be immediately replaced.
•
5. It is important to note that a 16-page Kidnapper’s Handbook, similar to that mentioned by Abu Amer, had already been distributed in 2002.

It appears that over the years Hamas has been systematically engaging in the abduction doctrine. This while improving and honing its operative aspects pursuant to the lessons learned from actual abductions and attempted abductions, expending efforts to introduce this combat doctrine into the consciousness of the activists and motivating them to act when the need arises.

[It should be noted that although references were made in the handbooks to kidnapping operations targeting Israeli soldiers, the 12 June kidnapping of three Israelis involved two 16-year-old high school students and a 19-year-old seminary student. Hamas has made many efforts to falsely portray these teenagers as soldiers, including in the June 23rd Al-Jazeera interview with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.]

Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades mentions the "Guide for Kidnapping" in an article they published after the abductions, but that article was taken down. In the cached version they go into more detail of the booklet:

Perhaps the most important success of the fighters in the capture of the soldier, is to get him out of the battlefield "alive and kicking", thus opening the floodgates for scenarios ranging from the serious and the least dangerous, and the costly! ...

The success of any kidnapping coming to a soldier or settler depends primarily in the management of what is considered a "war of nerves" with Israel, straining hearts of the leaders of the army, which would show hunger for any information no matter how small, and in time Israel, which will launch threats and warnings, will fold...

If Hamas is considered to be an essential part of success in the conclusion of the exchange deal next is the ability to access the heart of Israel's public opinion, and the creation of public differences among the pillars of military and security establishment, to exchange the generals and ministers accusations of negligence that enabled the Palestinians to carry out their operation, they know that the successful conclusion of this deal will be a great tool to pressure the Israeli government to be repeated in future cases, even if it included a hefty price tag for Israel...

...

The Kurds and Israel continue to strengthen their relationship

From i24News:

As the Iraqi state takes what appears to be its last breath, Iraq’s Kurds continue to gain momentum. Taking over oil-rich Kirkuk a few weeks ago symbolized the beginning of a new era for Iraqi Kurds, who have been demanding for years that Baghdad establish a proper profit sharing system for the black gold. Now the Kurds have to wait no more, given that patience in today’s Iraq is not a virtue, but a flaw. They followed the takeover of Kirkuk with the exporting of oil to interested customers – and according to Reuters, the first batch of Kurdish oil ended up in Israel's Mediterranean port of Ashkelon.

Those who monitor Kurdish-Israeli relations were not surprised. The ties between Israel and the Kurds began in the early 1960s, when Israeli intelligence agents operated in Iraqi Kurdistan and helped local authorities. The level of cooperation increased significantly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with Israeli contractors and companies entering Iraqi Kurdistan and routine reports in Iraqi media about Israeli commandos training the Kurdish peshmerga.

However, official ties were never established, partly because of the Iraqi Kurds’ relations with Iran, an important regional actor that doesn't favor a Kurdish rapprochement with Israel. This is perhaps the reason for the furious denials published by the Kurdish ministry of natural reserves of the report about oil sales to Israel. "We have never sold oil to Israel, directly or indirectly," a source in the ministry told the Kurdish media network Rudaw. Israel, too, has been reluctant to publicize the relationship so as not to endanger its relations with Turkey. However, now that geopolitical circumstances have changed significantly, both sides might reconsider.

...Many Kurds draw close parallels with Israel, also a non-Arab nation encircled by enemies who oppose its independence. Israel’s technological prowess, its well-armed military and the dynamic nature of Israeli society are all major draws for the Kurds, who had never stopped dreaming about an independent Kurdish state. The supporters of rapprochement with Israel believe that they also have something to offer the Jewish state – a close partnership based on mutual interests as well as values. This partnership, some say, could create a new balance of power in the Middle East and would be highly beneficial to Israel.

In this context it might be interesting to examine the situation in Syrian Kurdistan, where the Kurds are also trying to carve out an autonomous region. A draft constitution that was presented by the ruling Kurdish party doesn't view the sharia as a basis of legislation, unlike the constitutions in Arab countries. While radical Islamic organizations such as "The Islamic State in Iraq and Levant" (ISIL) gain popularity among Sunni populations in Syria and Iraq, the Kurds are generally drawn to much more moderate versions of Islam and strive to a modern state where women have equal rights.

However, Israel is neither the closest nor the most important ally for any future Kurdish state. Economically, Iraqi Kurdistan depends on Turkey – Kurdish oil is piped to the Turkish port of Jihan. Turkey is both the largest market for any Kurdish production and one of the largest importer of its goods. Iran is also important to the Kurds in Iraq, both as an immediate neighbor and a country with a significant Kurdish population. Kurdish leader Masoud Barazani visited Iran recently to discuss the insurgency of the ISIL jihadists in Iraq and possible measures to counter it. Iran has an interest in containing the Kurds in Iraq to dampen any nationalistic fervor it its own Kurdish-populated areas. The Kurds in Iraq strive to achieve independence but would like to avoid a direct clash with such a serious regional power like Iran.

What effect will these considerations have on relations between the Kurds and Israel? For now it seems that the parties will increase the volume of their ties. However the clandestine nature of relations will remain. If Iraqi Kurds finally achieve independence, their state, at least in the beginning, will be too weak and vulnerable to establish official relations with Jerusalem, so for the time being an Israeli embassy in Kirkuk – the city known as Kurdish Jerusalem – is unlikely.

Support for Kurdish independence came from a seemingly unlikely source:

'The Kurds of Iraq can decide for themselves the name and type of entity they are living in." With those lapidary words, a spokesman for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan formalized a historic shift in Turkish policy. For the past five years, Turkey has been investing in Iraq's increasingly autonomous Kurdish region and even opened a consulate in its capital, Erbil. The Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol recently noted that Ankara, long fearful of Kurdish political ambitions at home and abroad, now regards Iraqi Kurdistan—and perhaps its Syrian counterpart—as a force for regional stability and security.

...[T]he Kurds are a distinct people. They have their own language, culture and history. They have been oppressed by every country in which they have languished as a minority. They were promised independence in 1920, only to have that promise rescinded three years later. They have made wise and patient use of the autonomy they have gained in Iraq. It is hard to think of a people who more deserve their own state.

The case for Kurdish independence is more than moral. Despite persistent corruption in Iraq, the Kurds there have governed themselves effectively and have attracted significant foreign investment. Their army has proved to be disciplined and effective. With the Kurds' recent takeover of Kirkuk, they have what they have long regarded as their true capital, their Jerusalem. And the Iraqi Kurds' entente with Turkey allows them to export oil without Baghdad's cooperation, securing their economic independence.

As Ofra Bengio, head of the Kurdish Study Program at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, recently noted in the Jerusalem Post, this appears to be the Kurdish moment in the Middle East. Syria is "neutralized by its own struggle for survival" and "will not . . . raise a finger against the Kurds." It is hard to imagine that Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait would do so either. Turkey is willing to accept an independent Iraqi Kurdistan, and its control of the oil pipeline would give the new Kurdish state incentives not to meddle with Turkey's Kurds. As for Iran, says Mr. Bengio, Tehran is "up to its neck with business and relations with the Kurds."

06/26 Links Pt2: As Europe slides into a Dark Age, Jews must review their future; Z Street and the IRS

From Ian:

Isi Leibler: As Europe slides into a Dark Age, Jews must review their future

Recent developments signal that the prospect of Europe sliding into a new Dark Age is now a horrifying reality. It is as though all the elements negating the open society have been blended into a witches’ brew to undermine Europe’s liberal cultural ethos.
First in line to suffer are the Jews, attacked from all sides, isolated, friendless and unable to adequately defend themselves. Their greatest threat is the rabidly anti-Semitic Muslims supported by anti-Semites from the far Left. This unholy alliance of religious and secular extremists employs radical anti-Israelism as a surrogate for traditional anti-Semitism and is now a fixture at Hezbollah and anti-Israeli demonstrations, where they wave placards and shamelessly accuse Israelis of emulating Nazis.

A Pro-Israel Arab Londoner At A Palestine Solidarity Campaign Meeting (video)

Here's the indefatigable young Arab supporter of Israel who calls himself Orim Shimshon; he introduces the video thus:
"I went to a meeting by Hamas/Palestinian supporters in a conference room in the British Library. No longer shall I wait for Q and A to speak. I decided to resort to different tactics. Rather than heckling the director (Sarah Colborne, who was at the podium speaking as I went up; she is the director of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign), I brought signs instead, so people can read and respond rather then talking over each other!"
Note the repetitive question he's asked by PSC heavies as he's escorted out; note too the racist insults that he's been subjected to on this video's YouTube page. (h/t Yenta Press)

Palestinian supporters shocked by one supporter of Israel at a Hamas meeting

The Universal Answer: Boycott Israel

Since virtually everything that is wrong in the world is Israel’s fault, we have no choice but to boycott Israel or at least follow those brave Presbyterians and disinvest. Reading the world media, I have to believe that Israel, like Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, is a spider weaving an immense and complex web of evil and criminality. Okay, if that seems just a little over the top, how about the premise that the suffering and death in the Muslim World is directly attributable to Israel’s policies and existence?
Take Black September when nearly 15,000 Palestinians were slaughtered. A true moral outrage. The world’s response? Hate Israel. But the killing was done by King Hussein of Jordan and his Hashemite Bedouin army. Still, that doesn’t fit the narrative, so boycott Israel.

A year ago, I decided to fire Spongebob Squarepants from his job hanging out on my former sidebar logo. It was a difficult decision, as he had been an honored member of the team for many years. I even protected him from a fatwa on his life. But it was a decisionI felt I had to make, and when you run the world, sometimes you have to make difficult decisions.

Soon after, I awkwardly ran into Spongebob as he was panhandling on the Las Vegas Strip. However, I pulled a few strings in the smoky backrooms of Elders Central and got him a good gig at Sabra Hummus, the hummus that Israel haters love to hate.

I didn't keep in touch since then, assuming that he was as happy as ever, but then I was stunned to read this story:

SpongeBob SquarePants fans alert! A real life version of the Krusty Krab, the iconic fastfood restaurant that SpongeBob works at in the Nickalodeon cartoon is set to open up in Ramallah, on the West Bank in Palestine.

The family restaurant has been designed to be an exact replica of Mr Krabs' establishment in Bikini Bottom, from the fixtures outside the building to the Krabby Patty burgers on the menu.

(The Facebook page for the restaurant is here.)

Poor Spongebob! He was apparently so furious with me that he decided to defect! And I couldn't tell because of that damned smile of his!

On the other hand, I always knew there was something fishy about him...

It seems doubtful that the restaurant has permission from Nickelodeon to build this, so if I really need to, I can always pull some Hollywood and legal strings to take care of this. (I of course have the military option too, but the IDF doesn't like when I ask them to bomb non-terrorist targets.)

(h/t Ian)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is amazing. Because a simple search finds:

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

Militär letar försvunna tonåringar (VK.se)

Tre israeliska pojkar befaras ha kidnappats (Expressen)

Israel söker kidnappade tonåringar (SVD.se)

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Poll: Most Palestinians want to eliminate Israel

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

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

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

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

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

Intrafada news: Gaza government employees go on strike

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egypt's army making a fool of itself this Monday

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

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

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

Egypt Independent did a little checking on that esteemed journal:

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

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

Nature magazine blogged about the device in March:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about "a hoax?"

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

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

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

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

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

According to Egyptian paper Youm7 and translated here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Haaretz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other evidence is listed in the main Wikipedia Khazar article.

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

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

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

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

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

Sand is a fraud.

(h/t Yenta)

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

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

The excellent Mida magazine just reviewed the book.

Excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple. He is a liar.

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

From Ian:

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

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

Israel Lobby Is Playing Mind Games With Stephen Walt Again

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

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

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

Amnesty's false charge of "collective punishment"

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

Here was their answer:

Dear Sir/Madam,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards,
Gordon Bennett

Supporter Care Team
Amnesty International UK

I asked a couple of lawyers to respond.

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

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

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

Another lawyer replied:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(h/t Mike)

More from the humor site PreOccupied Territory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Before the Kidnappings, There Was a Massacre

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

Mother of Abducted Teen in Strirring Address at Geneva Shul

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

Hashtags are not enough

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

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

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

The antisemitic Jordanian national dish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(h/t Ibn Boutros)