Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 20, 2007

Canadian reporter attacked over Islam article

Journalist Jawaad Faizi says he can still feel broken glass showering over him in his car as he fended off blows from a cricket bat in a surprise attack he blames on "religious fanatics."
A writer for the Pakistan Post, Faizi said he was beaten by three men because he mocked a Pakistani cleric in a column.
Faizi said the men smashed the windshield and driver's window of his car as he arrived at his editor's home about 8:45 p.m. Tuesday. He said he was struck by the cricket bat and was cut on his forearm.
"They were smashing and smashing, hitting and hitting," Faizi said. "I could not stop them."
Faizi said both he and his editor, Amir Arain, recently received phone calls warning them to stop writing defamatory articles about the religious group Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran and its leader, Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri.
Faizi said he wrote a column two weeks ago mocking the cleric, who he said told a gathering in Pakistan "that he could write the name of Mohammed on the moon with his finger."
"He is always trying to fool the people," Faizi said.
The columnist said his three attackers screamed at him in Punjabi and Urdu to stop writing about Minhaj-ul-Quran.
He said they fled when he dialed 911 on his cellphone. He was treated at Mississauga's Trillium Health Centre and released the same night.
Constable Jodi Dawson said Peel Region police have assigned the case to detectives in 12 Division.
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, a Toronto-based association of more than 300 journalists, editors, publishers, producers and students, condemned the attack.

Hat tip Zionist Spy.

Hamas: We don't give no respect

Remember when the EUdiots and others were falling over themselves to explain that the Mecca agreement between Hamas and Fatah meant that Hamas was moderating? It was based on language that Hamas promised to "respect" previous agreements of the PA.

An interview with "Dr." Mahmoud Al-Zahar, co-counder of Hamas and current deputy in the Palestinian Legislative Council (as well as former foreign minister for the PA), explains the Mecca agreement a bit further from Hamas' perspective:

Dr, Zahhar said that "what happened in Mecca agreement were four issues; firstly , the agreements and laws that are related with the Palestinian issue which was signed by Arab countries and the PLO, but we didn’t mean (Oslo agreements), because it is known here that we did not recognize the Oslo Agreement and we will not recognize it at all. Also, the international agreements is the Geneva agreement which related to the international law. The humanitarian law which are war, prisoners of war and others. In addition, there are Arab cooperation agreements in security, economic and others.

"Regarding the word " respect" or " accept" .. if I respect your views , it doesn't mean that I accept your views. So , the saying that we are accepting the Oslo agreement is not true"

Q: You mention the word " respect" which evoked the debate recently that it is an introduction to recognize " Israel" ?

A: What does commitment mean in Law ?? does respect mean commitment ?? If respect means commitment , then why the two words are different in Language ..they are surely different". If Hamas wanted to recognize "Israel" , we will say it frankly. Hamas does not have the intention to recognize "Israel" at all because we will contradict the Quran with that in the Israa' verse "7" and will contradict ourselves that the occupation should be eliminated.

Q: Some said that "Accepting Hamas of Palestinian State on 67 borders is considered a retreat of the Hamas project " Palestine From Sea to River" ?

Zahar : If you read Hamas Charter , we were ready to establish a state on any "Span". That mean : we are ready to establish that state on less than 67 borders or more than that but that doesn't mean that we will leave the whole land… this is a clear point. The interpretations are Zionist interpretations and some other Palestinian factions , who leave the Palestinian issue at all , took these interpretations.

Q: What is the distinction between the political program of Hamas and the political program to the unity government, Which led by one of Hamas leaders Ismail Haniya?

A: The unity government duration of time is three years but Hamas program is not linked to time. Hamas even after the liberation of Palestine, is looking to the Arab and Islamic world as an Islamic state, forming the Arab-Islamic forces unity.

A couple of observations:

Islam is a legal-based religion, and therefore since the word "respect" is meaningless in a legal context, Hamas could claim to "respect" agreements knowing full well that they were not agreeing to anything. Zahar is explicit about that.
When he claims that accepting Israel's existence is against the Koran, he is tying Hamas' terror with religion. This means that the Saudi "peace" proposal where the "entire Arab world" would recognize Israel is known initially to be a sham - obviously, the large percentage of the Arab world that accepts Hamas' interpretation of the Koran can never recognize Israel - theologically.
The ultimate goal (which is clear in the Hamas charter) is not getting rid of Israel but establishing a global Islamic 'ummah, similar to Iran's goal.

Happiness is.... shooting a machine gun

In an Arab wedding in Hebron yesterday, the brother of the groom celebrated in the usual PalArab fashion: by shooting a machine gun in the air.

He was lucky - he only injured 7 guests, one seriously.

The PalArab leaders are struggling with the difficulty of wanting to limit weapons while at the same time making sure that there are plenty of weapons around to kill Israelis easily available.

The cult of death is so ingrained that it literally doesn't even occur to them that Israeli actions against them are proportional to their own violence against Israel, not inversely proportional as they seem to think. They honestly think that all they need are more weapons and things will then be hunky dory.

A different reaction to mass murder

I didn't really want to comment on the VA Tech massacre because it really has nothing to do with the normal themes of the blog. But Dry Bones makes an acute observation:

Indeed. Islam has been used as inoculation against outrage. When Muslims do something crazy in the name of Mohammed, it is not regarded as a mental illness, rather as freedom of religion.

That extra sympathy doled out by terror sympathizers, that "but..." that always accompanies every Muslim "denouncing" terror acts, not to mention the sheer quantity of Islamist mass murders (in Iraq, a day when 32 civilians are killed would be considered a pretty good day) all combine to give Muslims, if not quite a free pass, at least a much less critical eye for their terror.

7000 concentration camp prisoners killed in one day in 1945 - by England

Holy crap:

On May 3, 1945 - in the worst friendly-fire incident in history - Britain's Royal Air Force killed more than 7,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps who were crowded onto ships in L beck harbor, Germany. The ragged masses that had survived the Holocaust stood no chance against the guns of their liberators.

This tragic mistake occurred one day before the British accepted the surrender of all German forces in the region. Reports of the incident were quickly hushed up - as a jubilant world prepared to celebrate the Allied victory in Europe.

Despite the bitter irony of dying in hellish fires on sinking ships just hours before liberation, the tragedy was quickly forgotten or resolutely ignored. The anniversary of this dark day will soon pass by again - largely unnoticed or unmentioned.
By early May 1945, the rumors of Hitler's suicide had rekindled hope for beleaguered prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. The Red Army had just conquered Berlin, the British held Hamburg and Americans were in Munich and Vienna. After surviving unspeakable horrors and deprivations for years, the battered prisoners could finally dare to hope that their day of deliverance was at hand.

In the closing weeks of World War II, thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, the Mittelbau-Dora camp at Nordhausen and the Stutthof camp near Danzig were marched to the German Baltic coast. Most of the inmates were Jews and Russian POWs, but they also included communist sympathizers, pacifists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, prostitutes, Gypsies and other perceived enemies of the Third Reich.

At the port of L beck almost 10,000 camp survivors were crowded onto three ships: Cap Arcona, Thielbeck and Athen. No one knew what the Nazis were planning to do, or what plans the Allies had already set into motion.

Although the final surrender was imminent, British Operational Order No. 73 for May 3 was to "destroy the concentration of enemy shipping in L beck Bay." While thousands of camp prisoners were being ferried out to the once-elegant Hamburg-Sud Amerika liner Cap Arcona, the RAF's 263rd, 197th, 198th and 184th squadrons were arming their Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers with ammunition, bombs and rockets.

At 2:30 p.m. on May 3, at least 4,500 prisoners were aboard the Cap Arcona as the first attack began. Sixty-four rockets and 15 bombs hit the liner in two separate attacks. As the British strafed the stricken ship from the air, Nazi guards on shore fired on those who made it into the water. Only 350 prisoners survived.

The Thielbeck - which had been flying a white flag - and the poorly marked hospital ship Deutschland were attacked next. Although Thielbeck was just a freighter in need of repairs, it was packed with 2,800 prisoners. The overcrowded freighter sank in just 20 minutes, killing all but 50 of the prisoners.

In less than two hours, more than 7,000 concentration camp refugees were dead from the friendly fire. Two thousand more would have died if the captain of the Athen had not refused to take on additional prisoners in the morning before the attack.

MOST WHO were familiar with the Cap Arcona disaster believed that the Nazis intended to sink the ships at sea to kill everyone on board. Hundreds of prisoners had already been killed on the forced marches from the camps. In this case, however, RAF Fighter Command did their killing for them.

In the Cap Arcona/Thielbeck/Athen disaster, the tragic deaths of so many who had suffered so much for so long were quickly forgotten. After years of unprecedented bloodletting and destruction, the nations involved were in shambles, their populations numbed by suffering and death. The unfortunate victims who perished at the close of history's worst conflagration were quickly lost in the fleeting euphoria of peace.

...Britain has never officially apologized for its tragic mistake at L beck Bay, nor has it honored the innocent victims with a proper memorial.

The RAF records of the disaster are sealed until 2045, one century after the attack. No British government document has referred to the estimated 7,500 victims of its mistake.

In an age when the words "coverup" and "massacre" are thrown around like so much confetti, it helps to put things into perspective.

Even in the context of the war, it is unconscionable that Britain does not even acknowledge what it did, let alone investigate this unimaginable tragedy.

UPDATE: Wikipedia adds some detail:

The ships were carrying from 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners from the German concentration camps in Neuengamme, Stutthof and Mittelbau-Dora, half of whom were Russian and Polish POWs, others from 24 nationalities, including French, Danish, and Dutch. Those reaching the shore after the sinkings were shot by SS troops, but about 350 managed to escape from the massacre; others were cannoned by the British pilots while trying to get ashore.

For weeks after the sinking, bodies of the victims were being washed ashore, to be collected and buried in a single mass grave at Neustadt in Holstein. For nearly three decades, parts of skeletons were being washed ashore, the last find, by a twelve years old boy, was in 1971.

This is one game the PalArabs win every week

For the 19th consecutive week, more Palestinian Arabs were killed by their own actions than by Israeli actions.

Those aggressive, genocidal Israelis with their sophisticated war machines managed to only kill a single Palestinian Arab during the week from April 12-18, according to the "Palestinian Center of Human Rights."

In that same time period 5 PalArabs were murdered by each other, including a woman in an "honor killing." In addition, two bodies were found of people murdered in previous weeks, including another woman, which makes last week's revised score 8-5, not the 6-5 squeaker we reported.

Of course, the PalArabs have a perfect record against the Israelis this year in how many PalArabs can be killed in any particular week.

As a people who are always so jealous of Israeli accomplishments while their own society literally wallows in its own sewage, this record should cause some much-needed pride for the oppressed Palestinian Arabs.

Did US lose Saddam's WMD?

Melanie Phillips speaks to a man who claims that he found Saddam's WMD bunkers back in 2003, but the army ignored him and the materials ended up getting smuggled out to Syria.

His story has made it into various right-wing websites and newspapers and his credentials seem stellar (although his web design skills are pretty bad.) He certainly deserves to be taken more seriously, no matter how circumstantial the evidence.

Mahmoud Abbas lies again

A couple of hours ago, Reuters reported:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has reached an agreement with militant groups that they will stop rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel, an aide said on Wednesday.

"President Abbas is doing everything he can to stop the attacks," said Nabil Amr, accompanying Abbas on a visit to Poland as part of a diplomatic offensive to convince the EU to lift a freeze on financial aid to the Palestinian government.

"He has reached a real agreement with all forces that occasionally fire rockets," Amr told Reuters in an interview.

It took only a few minutes for even Reuters to show that Abbas was lying:

In Gaza, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, which advocates the Jewish state's destruction, said his group's [sic] had no plan to stop firing rockets and was bound only by tactical considerations.

"There is no decision to stop firing," the spokesman, Abu Ahmed, said. "It increases and decreases according to security conditions on ground."

But what about Hamas? Surely the newly-moderate coalition partner will agree to stop rocket attacks?

Not according to Hamas' "military wing":

Al-Quds Brigades Denied what the Zionist media claimed about reaching an agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas to stop firing rockets, Abu Ahmed, the spokesmen said in a statement "the Zionist media claims are untrue".

For Hamas to call Reuters the epithet "Zionist" must mean they are really ticked off.

UPDATE: YitzchokGoodman of Judeopundit correctly points out that Al-Quds is Islamic Jihad, not Hamas. I mixed them up because I read it on a Hamas website. Sorry!

Novak's great white hope, redux

I wrote yesterday about the phenomenal self-delusion of Robert Novak as he seemingly found a single sort-of moderate Hamas voice and he played it to the hilt, implying that Hamas was ready to make peace with Israel and that not speaking to Hamas was foolhardy and wrong.

Today, his Hamas hero has backtracked on his moderate words:

Jenin - Ma'an exclusive - Palestinian Education Minister Nasser Addin Ash-Sha'er has denied the declarations which the US daily newspaper Washington Post ascribed to him.

In an interview with Washington Post columnist Robert Novak published on Monday, Ash-Sha'er was quoted as saying that bombing attacks by Palestinians on Israeli targets had ruined past peace attempts.

Ash-Sha'er reportedly said that "previous attempts at peace were ruined by suicide bombers. Now, we look forward to a sustained peace."

On Wednesday, in conversation with Ma'an, he depicted the newspaper's allegations as imprecise.

The minister highlighted, "electronic websites took portions of a long interview, and what they took was absolutely out of the real context." It was misinterpreted, he explained.

Ash-Sha'er explained, "Every people in the world has the right of self defence, and nobody can incriminate his own history or his own right to self defence."

So it seems that he really doesn't think that suicide bombings had a negative effect on peace efforts. And that terror attacks against civilians is every Palestinian Arab's right.

Poor Robert Novak. He wasted an entire year searching for the legendary Moderate Hamas leader. Perhaps he'll have better luck looking for the Easter Bunny in Bethlehem.

PalArabs 133, Israelis 34

According to the UN's OCHA statistics, from January through the end of March, 34 Palestinian Arabs were killed by Israel.

And 133 were killed in PalArab violence.

(I had counted 159 PalArab self-deaths at that time, but I am not sure if they include things like honor killings, deaths during tunnel cave-ins and murders during robberies, for example.)

Although there are no good statistics, it appears that more Palestinian Arabs were killed by Arabs in Iraq than by Israelis during that time period.

Still waiting for any NGOs that claim to care so much about the Palestinian Arab people to start mentioning the Arab-caused deaths as prominently as they mention Israeli activities.

All you need to know about Hezbollah/Syria can be seen at Shebaa Farms

A clueless EUdiot visits Lebanon:

Hezbollah would be ready to transform its armed resistance into a political movement, if all occupied Lebanese territories are freed, a Spanish representative to the European parliament said Sunday.

"One of the positive elements of our meetings with Hezbollah was that they declare that they would like to become a political movement ... when the occupation of Lebanese land end," David Hammertzein told reporters at the end of a three-day visit by an EU delegation to Lebanon.

"When asked when the occupation ends, they said clearly the 'Shebaa Farms'," Hammertzein added. "We all clearly support such an idea of placing Shebaa under the temporary jurisdiction of the UN and urge Syria and Israel to cooperate with this idea which will end the tension at the borders between Lebanon and Israel," he added.

A little more context on Hezbollah's peaceful intentions can be found in this article from today:

Lebanon's Hezbollah group on Tuesday accused the Lebanese March 14 majority coalition of seeking to "normalize" relations with Israel and backing an alleged scheme to create a U.S.-controlled Middle East.

Mohammed Raad, leader of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, said that the Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc of Saad Hariri, leader of the parliament majority, "went too far with a scheme to reconcile with the Zionists and the Americans who want to create a new Middle East by describing the resistance weapons as illegitimate."

Such a new Middle East, according to Raad, "is based on recognizing the Zionist entity's (right to exist), normalizing relations with it and abolishing any opposition to or resistance of Israeli aggressions."

The first thing to understand is that the Lebanese claim to the Shebaa Farms is completely and utterly worthless. There is no "dispute" - the border was as clearly drawn as is possible, by the UN based on overwhelming map evidence. See Wikipedia for a fair and exhaustive discussion of all claims and their worth.

The second thing to understand is that the crux of the entire problem Arabs have with Israel has nothing to do with refugees, or "apartheid," or "occupation" - it is all about eliminating the shame of inferior, dhimmi Jews controlling land that the Arabs consider their own (namely, all of Israel.)

When Sadat was negotiating for the Sinai, he insisted on every grain of sand - or he would start another war. Every negotiation with Israel is based on the idea that the Arabs want the amount of land that Jews own and control to get smaller and smaller. The entire existence of the "Palestinians" as a separate Arab people was a fiction by the Arab powers as a means to force Israel to give up land. (Today, there are indeed a Palestinian Arab people, and the only thing they have in common is the fact that they were thoroughly screwed by their brethren.)

Land is the key.

So there is no contradiction between Hezbollah telling the EU that their only desire is the Shebaa Farms, and them accusing the Lebanese government of the hideous crime of wanting to actually have peace with Israel and not another war. In both cases, their goal is to get some land away from Jewish control - politically, by getting naive EUdiots to consider their demand for Shebaa Farms to be a reasonable and tiny request, and militarily by insisting that they will keep attacking Israel indefinitely.

The cynicism exhibited by Hezbollah, and especially the Syrian government supporters vis a vis Shebaa Farms is breathtaking. Syria is trying to say both that the Shebaa Farms should be returned as part of UN resolutions 242 and 338 (which would imply that they are Syrian land) and also that they are Lebanese lands. Again, the intended result is not to gain land, but to ensure that Jews lose land. Hezbollah and Syria don't want the land - chances are pretty good that they would agree to giving it to the UN.

They just cannot accept the idea of Israel controlling it.

The stupidity of the "who stands to gain" argument

A certain Alan Hart, former BBC and ITN reporter and rabid anti-Zionist, says in his blog that it is entirely possible that Israel kidnapped (and already killed) Alan Johnston. His reason for believing that?

...what can be said for certain is that the Palestinians were the party with absolutely nothing to gain and much to lose from Alan's permanent removal from the scene. And they had much to lose on two counts.

On Count One, Alan was not only the BBC's man, he was the only permanent foreign correspondent in Gaza. He was, in short, the best and most informed provider of news about the Palestinian side of the story; a story which, in many of its details, is an embarrassment to Israel and those governments, most notably the Bush and Blair regimes, which support Israel's efforts to break the will of the Palestinians to continue their struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice.

On Count Two, and if he has been murdered, Alan's death, if it could be blamed on a Palestinian or a pro-Palestinian Arab and/or other Islamist group, would be a huge political setback for the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and the present leadership of it. (The Al Qaeda franchise would not give a damn about harming the Palestinian cause).

There is a case for saying (repeat a case) that the party with most to gain from Alan Johnston's permanent disappearance was Israel. It would not be the first time that Israeli agents had dressed as Arabs to make a hit.

Media Backspin put together a funny list of equally plausible kidnappers, explaining what they have to gain, like Rachel Corrie's parents and the royal family.

The argument of "who stands to gain the most" is very popular among conspiracy theorists, and their explanations always leave Occam's Razor in the dust. Once a person comes from an anti-Israeli viewpoint to begin with, along with fantasies of an all-powerful Mossad and impermeable cabal of Elders who never reveal their secret plans to the goyim, it is ridiculously easy to come up with ways to blame Israel for everything on the planet. In fact, this is exactly what Arabs do routinely:

Every single disaster from WTC to earthquakes are attempts by Israel to divert attentiojn from its daily crimes against humanity.
Suicide bombs in Israel are attempts by Israel to gain world sympathy and allow Israel to go on with its business of daily crimes against humanity.
"Accidentally" killing Palestinian Arab children allows Israel to practice genocide against PalArabs while pretending that it is an accident.

Every person ever killed worldwide can be blamed on Israel using one of the arguments above. It means that Jews, the most talkative people on the planet, manage to hide their nefarious plans from scary-intelligent all-knowing blowhards like Alan Hart, until he gets a hold of an Ilan Pappe and finds out the ugly truth.

UPDATE: Asharq Alawsat reports that Johnston's kidnappers are demanding $5 million for his release. I can't wait for Hart's next blog entry about those greedy Zionists.

Freedom of the press, PalArab style

From Ma'an:

Five Palestinian journalists were injured after being attacked by police guarding the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) building in Gaza.

The journalists were demonstrating against the abduction of BBC reporter Alan Johnston.

The police attacked the journalists with rifles and many sustained bruises. The journalists were forced to return to the strike tent in the centre of the city.

Ma'an's reporter said that he and dozens others of his colleagues "were protesting and then were attacked by the police and obliged to return to the tent".

Some other reporters confirmed the attack and said that the guards threatened to shoot the journalists if they continue their protest in the area.

No word on any reaction from the British National Union of Journalists.

Another day, another PalArab death you won't hear about

For the third time since the PA announced their new internal security plan over the weekend, a man was murdered (‘Abed Mohammed al-Wahesh.) This one was in Bethlehem, not Gaza, and it appears to be another "family dispute."

This brings the number of PalArabs violently killed by PalArabs this year, by my count, to 176.

UPDATE: A 55-year old man, Izzat Rashid Hassan, was found dead from gunshots near Jenin. I think he is the father of the the con man who scammed millions from gullible PalArabs a couple of weeks ago.

UPDATE 2: A 25-year old man killed in another clan clash near Gaza City.

Robert Novak's self-delusions

Robert Novak's latest column is another prime example of what can happen when one's personal opinions and wishes interfere with the truth.

I don't think that Novak is stupid, but the self-delusion in this column is emblematic of all that is wrong with well-meaning people who are starving for "peace" - no matter how illusory. (I would tend to believe that it is related to egomania as well - to my mind, the credibility of a commentator is inversely proportional to how much he injects himself in the story. Much like Thomas Friedman and Bill O'Reilly.)

In this column, Novak tells of his difficulties in finding someone from Hamas to interview. Then he somewhat dishonestly mentions:

I arrived in Jerusalem again April 3, two weeks after Hamas brought the more moderate opposition Fatah party into a new National Unity government. The Los Angeles Times had just run a remarkable op-ed column by political independent Salam Fayyad, finance minister in the new government who lived in Washington for 20 years, served as a World Bank official and is well respected in the West. He wrote that the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1993 acceptance of Israel and disavowal of violence is "a crystal-clear and binding agreement" that "no Palestinian government has the authority to revoke." He added that the unity government's platform "explicitly" pledges to honor all PLO commitments.

Over dinner in a Ramallah restaurant April 4, Fayyad told me he offered his column simultaneously to several major American newspapers to get this story out quickly. But do his Hamas colleagues accept his reasoning? Fayyad made clear he was not flying solo.

Note that Fayyad is not a Hamas member. He doesn't mention any specifics about who in Hamas might agree to a peaceful solution. Novak does mention that he is an "independent" but a cursory reading of this episode, right next to his description of how hard it was to find someone from Hamas, implies that Fayyad is representing Hamas in some way.

Just before my trip ended, the Palestinian Authority at long last put me in touch with an official who was no low-level bureaucrat. Nasser al-Shaer was deputy prime minister in the all-Hamas regime last Aug. 19 when he was seized in an Israeli raid on his home in Ramallah and held for a month without charges or evidence.

In his ministry office April 7, he looked nothing like the shirt-sleeved, tie-less Shaer photographed when he was released last Sept. 27. Holder of a doctorate from England's University of Manchester, he was dressed in a stylish suit. More telling than his appearance was what he said.

When I asked whether Hamas agreed with Fayyad's formulation, Shaer said it did not matter: "We are talking about the government, not groups." He said Hamas was no more relevant to Palestinian policy than the views of extremist anti-Palestinian Israeli Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman are to Israeli policy. Unexpectedly, Shaer expressed dismay that "previous attempts at peace were ruined by suicide bombers. Now, we look forward to a sustained peace."

While avoiding Israel-bashing, Shaer conjectured: "I don't think the Israeli government wants a two-state solution. Without pressure from the president of the United States, nothing is going to happen."

Novak exhibits a complete and utter lack of cynicism for Shaer's semi-peaceful words. He finally found his Hamas spokesman and any facts that disagree with this man's assertions do not even rate a mention.

Comparing Hamas, the ruling partner in the coalition, with Lieberman is intellectually dishonest.
Not mentioning Hamas' charter, its repeated description of its purpose as the destruction of Israel, it clear support for terror attacks is equally dishonest.

It is especially ironic that he approvingly quotes Shaer's "I don't think the Israeli government wants a two-state solution" and doesn't deign to mention that Hamas explicitlydoesnt' want a two-state solution. One would expect a reporter to ask at least a couple of basic questions: how can Shaer be a Hamas member and then disavow himself from Hamas' very raison d'etre? Is this not similar to the PLO's historic two-faced positions where they say one thing to gullible Western journalists and diplomats and the complete opposite to their own people? Is Shaer not afraid to saythese things publicly when Hamas has a habit of making dissenter's lives a bit uncomfortable?

Novak does none of this. His personal agenda and narrative has been confirmed by a single member of Hamas in English and that's all the evidence he needs to push it as fact, and blame the Bush administration for not talking to these reasonable sounding people.

Israeli professor, Holocaust survivor, a victim and a hero at Virginia Tech

From YNet:

WASHINGTON – Prof Liviu Librescu, a senior researcher and lecturer at Virginia Tech, is among the 32 people who were killed during a shooting rampage at the university Monday.

One of Prof Librescu's students, Alec Calhoun, who was with him at the classroom when the shooting started, told AP that at about 9:05 am, he and classmates heard "a thunderous sound from the classroom next door, what sounded like an enormous hammer."

When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, they started flipping over desks for hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of the room.

Calhoun said that just before he climbed out the window, he turned to look at the professor (Librescu), who had stayed behind to block the door.
Prof Librescu and his wife are both Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1978.

Librescu was an accomplished scientist in Romania, and the Communist regime had tried to prevent him from making aliyah to Israel. He was allowed to leave the country only after the Israeli prime minister at the time Menachem Begin appealed the matter to President Nicolae Ceausescu.

Several years later, Librescu left for a sabbatical in the United States and has remained there since. His first son, Arieh, lives in Israel, while his other son, Joe, resides in the US.

Librescu's colleagues described his as a "true gentleman."

Many more humiliating checkpoints coming to territories

Over the weekend, the PA Interior Minister presented his plan to reduce the chaos and murders in the Palestinian Arab territories.

Yesterday, the first details of the plan emerged:

In a press conference held in Gaza City on Sunday evening, Al-Qawasmi explained that the plan would be gradually implemented through the massive deployment of domestic security forces in the central and northern Gaza Strip. Pedestrian and vehicular patrols would be deployed in addition to checkpoints in order to impose law and order and minimize the spread of arms in the streets.

This will be accompanied by a campaign to impose law in general through organizing the traffic and the marketplaces. That will be the duty of the Palestinian internal security forces in cooperation with the national security forces and the municipalities, explained the Palestinian interior minister.

Oppressive checkpoints? I wonder if the UN and NGOs will be obsessively tracking them - the UN counted 237 Israeli checkpoints last week.

Finally updated to new Blogger template

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my template to the new Blogger. Please let me know if anything is not working. I am seeing some glitches but hopefully the problems that some people were having viewing the blog in IE will go away.

I tried to reproduce the old format as much as possible, although there are some font and color changes.

For some reason, Feedburner (which should add a Digg and Reddit and email link at the end of each post) is still not working, and I seem to have lost my nifty tab icon graphic that looked like this:

If anyone knows how to make these work in the new Blogger, please let me know.

UPDATE: Got the icon working. The Feedburner stuff is driving me nuts.

1.6 million Palestinian Arabs alive because of Israel

In 1967, after the Six Day War, Israel introduced modern health care to the territories, as well as an electrical grid and sources for safe drinking water. As a result, the Palestinian Arab mortality rate plummeted and their life expectancy soared.

I am no demographer, but I thought it would be interesting to see roughly how many fewer Palestinian Arabs would be alive today if they had remained under Egyptian/Jordanian rule after 1967.

I based my numbers on the West Bank and Gaza populations as of 1970 (Palestine Remembered) and 2004 (CIA Factbook) to calculate growth rates, and the natural growth rates of Jordan and Egypt today (2.5% and 1.75%, respectively.) The CIA Factbook growth rates for Palestinian Arabs today (3.06% in West Bank, 3.71% in Gaza) are much smaller than what the real population growth during these dates were, so I used the Factbook current population numbers, ignoring the problems that some Israeli demographers have found with these numbers.

I did not account for emigration or immigration into the territories, making the oversimplistic assumption that the population growth is mostly the same as the natural growth. I also did not have accurate historical growth rate data for Egypt and Jordan so I assumed today's rates as being constant over the decades, another gross oversimplification.

Given this back-of-the-envelope calculation, and based again on current population numbers that Palestinian Arabs accept as accurate, I estimate that 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs exist today in Gaza and the West Bank that would not be alive had Israel not occupied the territories after 1967.

In other words, "occupation" was the best thing to ever happen to Palestinian Arabs in their short history.

(If you accept the criticisms about PalArab demographics, these numbers go down to only about 200,000 PalArabs alive because of Israel.)

For what it's worth....

Bargaining with semantics

Syria says that they want to revive the "peace process" with Israel....

"Syria wishes to revive the peace process with Israel with the help of US and Russian mediators," the Syrian Information Minister was quoted as saying by Israel Radio, Monday.

The minister immediately added a threat that "If Israel rejects the Arab peace initiatives, the only way to get the Golan Heights back would be the way of resistance."

In a crystal clear manner, Syria has defined for us its definition of "peace," and it has nothing to do with ending hostilities.

The "peace process" is just one way to get the Golan, and Syria otherwise exhibits not the slightest interest in what the word "peace" normally means. Peace is not a goal or even desirable to Syria - it is just a way to get what they really want, which is the high ground from which they can resume shooting at Israel and access Israel's main water source.

How peaceful was the Israeli/Syrian border before 1967, and how peaceful was it afterwards? If "peace" is the goal, then all should agree that Israel should hold onto the Golan.

Arabs are highly adept at the art of bargaining, as anyone who ever enters a souk can tell you. They know that Israel desperately wants a real peace so they use the word with impunity as a dangling carrot in order to get what they want - any land they can that Jews control in the area. Since most Westerners think of the word "peace" the way Israel does, no one thinks that when the Arabs say the word that they could possibly mean anything else.

But here we see here explicitly that "peace" is not a goal for the Arabs - it is a bargaining chip, that is infinitely valuable because it is worthless to the seller and highly prized by the buyer.

Another type of bargaining is evident from this story, showing an unusual unity among terror groups:

A number of Palestinian factions, including Hamas, have called for more Israeli soldiers to be captured in order to ensure Palestinian prisoners are released in exchange. They say that this action is necessary following the failure of the diplomatic efforts to release the Palestinian prisoners.

In a statement, Hamas said that their movement urges the armed brigades of Al-Qassam (Hamas), Al-Aqsa (Fatah), An-Nasser (Popular Resistance Committees), Al-Quds (Islamic Jihad), Abu Ali Mustafa (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and others, to work together to capture more Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them with Palestinian prisoners .

The statement confirmed that Hamas "intends to release all the prisoners, regardless of their faction or affiliation, by all means available and at any cost, especially after the failure of the diplomatic efforts, the weak agreements and the false promises."

Hamas also called on the Israeli leaders to "comply with the factions' demands, accelerate the exchange deal and avoid deception."

In this case as well, it all comes down to bargaining and peace is the furthest thing from the Arab minds.

Israel would be wise to take a chapter from the Arab playbook and start grabbing things that they value - land, specifically - so that Israel's bargaining position can be enhanced. Imagine how much more leverage Israel would have if it, for example, took a few square miles of Gaza, name it Kfar Gilad, and announce plans to build settlements there in two weeks unless Shalit is released.

Real peace is not in the playbook, so it is time Israel started playing the game the way that the Arabs want to play it themselves.

UPDATE: Joe Settler agrees.