Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 03, 2010

PalToday illustrates "European Jews" again today

Here is how Palestine Today illustrates today's news about Europe's version of J-Street:

I guess that they didn't want to use yesterday's image - too repetitive.

Al Quds University offers a course in blogging

Ma'an Arabic mentions that Al Quds Open University in Nablus offers a course on blogging.

The course includes "training concepts about the nature of blogging and its importance and prevalence in the world."

If they'd pay my airfare, I'd offer to be a guest lecturer.

Evil Jewish plot to indoctrinate Egyptian children

The Egyptian government and UNESCO has been working on a project for the past few years to reform and improve Egyptian education, called the "National Strategic Plan for Pre-University Education."

An opposition politician in Egypt is now warning about the dangers of this plan.

Ahmed Jebali, head of the People's Democratic Party of Egypt, has discovered a frightening fact - an American Jewish expert, from USAID, is involved in creating the new Egyptian school curriculum!

Now, Jebali says, a Jew is going to control the information that goes into the tender young heads of Muslims attending Islamic schools in Egypt - which is a huge disgrace.

In his words, "This is part of a major U.S. project that aims to provide entertaining and fun books for children, which will be introduced in three stages in 39,000 government schools in all governorates of Egypt, which requires the exclusion of any religious or Islamic history books, under the American plan to "dry up terrorism ", as the curriculum of Islamic education and Islamic history is a tributary of terrorism from the standpoint of America."

According to Jebali, the plan would reduce the amount of Quranic studies by 65% and the amount of education of Islamic conquests by 35%. (Exactly what percentage of time these schools spend on "Islamic conquests" as opposed to, say, arithmetic, is an open question.)

Jebali goes on to mention the shocking fact that in Jordan, the Ministry of Education has already approved the use of new textbooks that encourage students to distinguish between legitimate resistance to occupation and "terrorism."

This is an outrage!

Egyptian musician union bans "gay" Elton John

From the Hindustan Times:

Egypt's musician's union on Sunday rejected plans for British singer Elton John to perform a private concert scheduled for May 18, because of his "controversial remarks attacking religions".
"How do we allow a gay, who wants to ban religions, claimed that the prophet Eissa (Jesus) was gay and calls for Middle Eastern countries to allow gays to have sexual freedom," head of the Egyptian Musician Union, Mounir al-Wasimi told DPA.

The pop superstar, 63, stirred controversy after his remarks to US celebrity news magazine Parade in February, where he said "Try being a gay woman in the Middle East - you're as good as dead", after saying he believed Jesus was "gay".

Al-Wasimi said that he has begun coordinating with security bodies to ban John's concert, saying that the union is the only body "authorised to allow performances by foreign singers in Egypt".

Al Arabiya quotes al-Wasimi further, as saying "a concert in Cairo from Elton John sets a dangerous precedent..because he is a symbol for homosexuals in the world and his presence will open the doors to the rest of the homosexual artists to perform in Egypt."

Elton John is scheduled to perform in Israel on June 17.

Arabs upset at "Jew" Murdoch buying stake in Arab media powerhouse

Palestine Today has an article about how "Jew" Rupert Murdoch is buying a 9.1% stake of Arab media powerhouse Rotana Holdings, something I reported in late March.

Usually, PalToday attempts to put a slight sheen of objectivity in its articles, but this reporter went over the edge. The article repeatedly refers to Murdoch as Jewish, a fact that seems tenuous at best. It refers to the Wall Street Journal as an arm of the "Israel Lobby," and that Murdoch is the "Emperor of the Zionist Lobby."

Its analysis is that Tel Aviv is behind this purchase of a stake of Rotana, because Israeli are trying to change Arab perceptions of Israel. This is supposedly a two-track plan, one to increase how well Israel is looked at in the European and American media, and the other to make Arabs look as bad as possible. "American Zionist billionaire" Murdoch, of course, is a key part of this conspiracy. He even met with Jordan's Queen Rania together with Hollywood celebrities recently (or, perhaps, the queen was profiled in Hello! magazine - I'm not sure.)

Soon, Zionist dramas will replace the Arab dramas that Rotana produces, the article goes on to predict, subtly brainwashing the Arabs to love Israel - which would be, for blindingly obvious reasons that the reporter doesn't even have to mention, catastrophic.

The Return of the Zionist Attack Pigs

After a lull of a few months, Jews are again being accused of sending highly-trained wild boars to target Arab lands:

A heard of wild boars destroyed several dunums of Palestinian farm land in the Salfit district on Sunday, local farmers said, prompting accusations of settler involvement.

Afterwards, the boars returned to their secret high-tech lair to receive further instructions. Rumors are that they are set to assassinate a major PA figure in their next mission.

Just as they killed Arafat. Bwahahaha!

PalArab rocket kills Gazan

From Ma'an:

Palestinian resistance fighters from an unknown faction misfired a projectile Sunday night, hitting a Khan Younis home and critically injuring one man who later died in hospital, sources in Gaza said.

Eighteen-year-old Ibrahim Sulaiman Malalha was taken to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis then transferred to the European Hospital in Gaza City for treatment of injuries described as critical. He was announced dead on Monday morning, medical sources said.

Two others were taken to the Khan Younis hospital for treatment, medics confirmed.

Sources said resistance fighters were training in a field outside the city, when a projectile was misfired.

Oops!

Why should Arabs be afraid of Iran? (Zvi)

In response to my post about Iran's new term of "Iranophobia," Zvi wrote:

I don't suppose that "Iranophobia" in the region has anything to do with

* declaring sovereignty over Bahrain
* occupying the UAE's Tunb islands

* sending troops to seize control of the Fakah Oil Well 5 times this year (most recently last month)

* holding war games that involve seizing European shipping in the Gulf
* sponsoring insurgents in Yemen that threaten Yemen and, indirectly, the Saudis
* sending terrorist cells to infiltrate Egypt and carry out attacks in the Suez Canal Zone
* sponsoring the violent Hamas coup that took over Gaza
* sponsoring the violent Hezbollah coup that intimidated the elected government of Lebanon
* sponsoring the Syrian state that murdered Hariri and wishes to reoccupy Lebanon fully
* sending spies into Kuwait to facilitate attacks on Kuwait
* sponsoring violent Shia Iraqi groups like Hezbollah-Iraq
* Not to mention arming Hezbollah to attack Israeli civilians and threatening to use nuclear weapons against Israel (lots of Israelis, including Arabs as well as Jews, would die, of course, and due to the fallout in the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, Jordan, south Lebanon and Syria, there would be lots of dead Arabs. The Dome of the Rock would be vaporized - so much for Islam's third holiest shrine.)
* issuing numerous threats against the US and Israel
* abrogating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty after signing it, showing that Iran's signature on an international agreement has no value at all.

(Have I left anything out?)

No, I can't imagine why anyone would be concerned about the IRI.

Some other recent anti-semitic Arab cartoons

My readers seemed especially interested in the caricature of the hook-nosed Jew I posted earlier today. I guess that I am used to seeing these by now.

Here is one from today's Saudi Gazette:

This is one that MEMRI found from Egypt's Al Ahram Weekly this week:

Hamas refers to suicide terrorists as "smart bombs"

The Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades (Hamas) website has an article extolling the beauty of people who blow themselves up in order to hurt the Zionist enemy.

Hamas takes credit for pioneering suicide terrorism during the "blessed Al Aqsa intifada" and says that other Palestinian Arab factions imitated it, but weren't as good at it.

This article quotes a new Arabic book on the topic.

Here is some of their depravity:

Hamas has excelled in performance and excelled in proficiency, with development and innovation. Its results were characterized as distinctive, and their explosive power was increased with new, more effective materials, and added to the weapons the use of iron ball bearings instead of nails to make the impact more severe.

The attacks were professional and scientific..., and these facts combined to make losses of the enemy as large as possible, until observers and even the general people would attribute some operations to Hamas before any such announcement if it was clear that the losses of the enemy where great.

The martyr is a mobile, self-conscious, "smart bomb" that picks and chooses the time and place carefully so as to achieve distinctive success and confuse the enemy.

The article goes on to say that some other factions didn't put the same scientific controls around their terrorist bombers as Hamas, making the weapon not as effective as it could have been.

Iranophobia!

Yesterday, Kuwaiti authorities busted what they described as an Iranian spy cell that was meant to attack American and Gulf military targets in case of an attack on Iran.

I found Iran's reaction amusing:

In an interview with Al-Alam, {Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin] Mehmanparast said that making such baseless allegations is aimed at creating psychological war and expanding Iranophobia in the region to sow sedition among the regional nations.

He said these fabricated claims are also going to be used as a cover up for Israeli regime's war crimes in the region which are considered as a main threat to the regional stability and peace.

How long before Iran tries to get the UN to declare "Iranophobia" to be racism and illegal?

Report: Hamas manufactured "poison gas" claims against Egypt

Asharq al-Awsat, quoted by Palestine Today, is saying that the four Gazans killed last week in a smuggling tunnel were victims of a tunnel collapse, not the "poison gas" that Hamas claimed.

According to the article, the smuggling tunnel was built by a member of Hamas two years ago, to bring in building materials. A crack developed in the tunnel so the owner hired ten men to repair it. During the repairs, the tunnel collapsed.

The owner, not wanting to pay compensation to the families of the dead, started a rumor through his Hamas circles that they died from poison gas that came from Egypt. Hamas seized on this idea to pressure Egypt and Hamas then transported the victims to the Al Najjar hospital, where the group demanded that the head of surgery issue a statement that they were killed from toxic gas.

He refused, but his statement under pressure mentioned that there might have been a gas explosion in the tunnel, allowing Hamas to make their accusations.

How Arabs visualise left-wing Jews

Palestine Today has an article about a new European version of J-Street, called J-Call. Some left-wing Jews in Europe, whose public identification with Judaism is close to nil, wrote a letter to the EU parliament saying that they support Zionist capitulation to all Palestinian Arab demands and demanding that Europe cease continuing to support Israel.

In general, these Jews are the types who mightily try to distinguish themselves from the religiously committed Jews. They are the ones whose Passover Haggadahs are bowlderized to make them less Jewish and more "universal," deleting passages that are specifically Jewish and replacing them with passages for whatever the current fashion is - world peace, ecology, vegetarianism. They cringe at the fact that their grandfathers sported payos wore shtreimels. They would be far more comfortable in any church in Europe than in an Orthodox shul.

The PalToday article is headlined, "European Jewish intellectuals reject the Israeli occupation."

And this is how they illustrate these European Jewish intellectuals:

No matter how much these "progressive" Jews try to put distance between themselves and what they consider the primitive kind, the majority Jew-hating Arabs will never distinguish between these "enlightened" Jews and the ones who actually practice Judaism.

Oh, and Palestine Today also has a regular caricature of what Israeli Jews look like. What percentage of Israeli Jews wear hats and long beards, not to mention the classic stereotype hook-nose?

Pictures of Gaza laptops

Last week I mentioned that UNRWA was planning to bring 200,000 laptops into Gaza, which somehow Israel allowed even though the UN's official position is that the Zionists deliberately target children like these for death.

Here's a picture of poor, impoverished Gaza children receiving their new laptops that UNRWA has given to them during the crippling Gaza siege:

Here appears to be one of the UNRWA teachers showing one of the children how it works.

South African diplomat meets Hamas officials in Gaza

From the Global Times(China):

A South African official on Saturday arrived to the Gaza Strip and is scheduled to meet members of the deposed Hamas government which controls the coastal enclave.
A Hamas officer at Rafah crossing point between Gaza and Egypt said that Ibrahim Ibrahim, South Africa's deputy foreign affairs chief, arrived with a senior delegation to Gaza.

Western diplomats, including foreign ministers and the UN chief, have visited Gaza since Hamas took over the territory by force in 2007, but balked at meeting Hamas officials.

At odds with international government members, Ibrahim is scheduled to meet with Hamas' Prime Minister Ismail Haneya, whom Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has fired when Hamas routed pro-Abbas forces and seized Gaza.

Sure enough, Ibrahim did:

All talks and agreements made with Israel must include the Islamist movement, [Mahmoud] Az-Zahhar said following a meeting with a South African delegation at the office of de facto Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

The senior Hamas leader said the South African visit was "evidence of the country's support for the Palestinian issue."

Interestingly, I could not find this story in any South Africa newspapers.

Palestinian Arab demand ability to time travel

From YNet:

The list of the Palestinians' demands in negotiations with Israel is coming together. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he will demand already in the stage of proximity talks that Israel transfer vast areas in the West Bank, including those currently under full and partial Israeli control, to sole Palestinian control.

Abbas said that he would also demand that the Jordan Valley be included in the territories to be transferred to the Palestinians.

"The objective is to restore within a few months the situation in the territories to the way it was before the intifada with a gradual and significant addition of land that will be transferred to full Palestinian control," explained Abbas.

As I wrote last month:

What could possibly be wrong with turning back the clock to the day before a war began that killed a thousand Israeli civilians?
Starting and losing a war has consequences in every part of the world except for one. Since 1967, the world - and "international law" as interpreted by most - is fixated on the idea that the Arabs can start all the wars they want against Israel. If they lose, international pressure will ensure that the previous status quo can be returned to, so there are no consequences for losing.

In this case, Abbas is not only trying to ensure that his movement didn't lose by starting a murderous terror spree - he's trying to turn it into an after-the-fact victory, where the consequences of terror is a state.

No wonder the PA names streets, squares and camps after terrorists who sprang up after Oslo - those terrorists really are paving the way for a state, with help from the West.

Mearsheimer libels Zionists, panders to his Arab friends

John Mearsheimer, of "The Israel Lobby" fame, gave the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC yesterday.

His long speech is filled with unbelievable rhetoric where he accepts the Palestinian Arab narrative hook, line and sinker.

Like Goldstone and others, he builds his argument by first creating a framework that is false to begin with. Once he builds this straw-man edifice he can fill out his speech with "facts" that fit his fantasy worldview.

Here is one strawman:

To be viable, [a] Palestine state would have to control 95 percent or more of the West Bank and all of Gaza. There would also have to be territorial swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those small pieces of West Bank territory that Israel got to keep in the final agreement. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the new Palestinian state.

What is the relationship between "viability" and his list? They may be the Palestinian Arab minimum demands, which he accepts uncritically, but they have nothing to do with "viability." Other states are smaller, other states have fewer natural resources, other states somehow manage to exist without east Jerusalem. Why does an Arab Palestine require these things?

Mearsheimer also dismisses any problems with Palestinian Arab unity, subconsciously treating them like the children that liberals always do:

The Palestinians are badly divided among themselves and not in a good position to make a deal with Israel and then stick to it. That problem is fixable with time and help from Israel and the United States.

That's it. In a lecture that must have taken an hour, to an audience that actually has the power to help fix the biggest obstacle to a viable Palestinian Arab state, Mearsheimer dismisses it with two sentences - and doesn't even think that his heroes have the ability to fix their own problems without help from Israel and the US! Yet these infantile people, in his estimation, can responsibly run a nation-state.

It gets worse. Mearsheimer is convinced that Zionists are people who are just itching to murder and expel millions of people from their homes. Since he is convinced that Israel is going to create a Greater Israel (using more strawman arguments), he concludes:

...Israel could expel most of the Palestinians from Greater Israel, thereby preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. This is what happened in 1948 when the Zionists drove roughly 700,000 Palestinians out of the territory that became the new state of Israel, and then prevented them from returning to their homes. Following the Six Day War in 1967, Israel expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights. The scale of the expulsion, however, would have to be even greater this time, because there are about 5.5 million Palestinians living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

...Then there is ethnic cleansing, which would certainly mean that Greater Israel would have a Jewish majority. But that murderous strategy seems unlikely, because it would do enormous damage to Israel's moral fabric, its relationship with Jews in the Diaspora, and its international standing. ...Nevertheless, there is reason to worry that Israelis might adopt this solution as the demographic balance shifts against them and they fear for the survival of the Jewish state. Given the right circumstances -- say a war involving Israel that is accompanied by serious Palestinian unrest -- Israeli leaders might conclude that they can expel massive numbers of Palestinians from Greater Israel and depend on the lobby to protect them from international criticism and especially from sanctions.

We should not underestimate Israel's willingness to employ such a horrific strategy if the opportunity presents itself. It is apparent from public opinion surveys and everyday discourse that many Israelis hold racist views of Palestinians and the Gaza massacre makes clear that they have few qualms about killing Palestinian civilians. It is difficult to disagree with Jimmy Carter's comment earlier this year that "the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings." A century of conflict and four decades of occupation will do that to a people.

To Mearsheimer, Meir Kahane is not an aberration whose party was made illegal in Israel - he represents the majority viewpoint of committed Zionists.

Mearsheimer goes on to label his concept of who the good Jews are and who the bad Jews are. Using obscenely insulting language, he says:

American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories. The first two are what I call "righteous Jews" and the "new Afrikaners," which are clearly definable groups that think about Israel and where it is headed in fundamentally different ways. The third and largest group is comprised of those Jews who care a lot about Israel, but do not have clear-cut views on how to think about Greater Israel and apartheid. Let us call this group the "great ambivalent middle."

...To give you a better sense of what I mean when I use the term righteous Jews, let me give you some names of people and organizations that I would put in this category. The list would include Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Tony Karon, Naomi Klein, MJ Rosenberg, Sara Roy, and Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss fame, just to name a few. I would also include many of the individuals associated with J Street and everyone associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as distinguished international figures such as Judge Richard Goldstone. Furthermore, I would apply the label to the many American Jews who work for different human rights organizations, such as Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.

On the other side we have the new Afrikaners, who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state. These are individuals who will back Israel no matter what it does, because they have blind loyalty to the Jewish state. This is not to say that the new Afrikaners think that apartheid is an attractive or desirable political system, because I am sure that many of them do not. Surely some of them favor a two-state solution and some of them probably have a serious commitment to liberal values. The key point, however, is that they have an even deeper commitment to supporting Israel unreservedly. The new Afrikaners will of course try to come up with clever arguments to convince themselves and others that Israel is really not an apartheid state, and that those who say it is are anti-Semites. We are all familiar with this strategy.

I would classify most of the individuals who head the Israel lobby's major organizations as new Afrikaners. That list would include Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, just to name some of the more prominent ones. I would also include businessmen like Sheldon Adelson, Lester Crown, and Mortimer Zuckerman as well as media personalities like Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Peretz of the New Republic. It would be easy to add more names to this list.

The key to determining whether the lobby can protect apartheid Israel over the long run is whether the great ambivalent middle sides with the new Afrikaners or the righteous Jews. The new Afrikaners have to win that fight decisively for Greater Israel to survive as a racist state.

Again, he is spending the main part of a lecture about his perception of American Jews to a group of Arabs who fully accept his thesis that all of their problems can be blamed directly on Jews, as it supports their own bigoted worldviews.

He also doesn't disappoint with his comments on the all-powerful Jewish lobby, of course.

All in all, this is a despicable speech full of half-truths and a completely skewed viewpoint that ironically caters to Arab bigotry by accusing all Zionist Jews of that same trait.

Egyptian lawyers seek to ban "One Thousand and One Nights"

From Bikya Masr:

A new Hisba case has appeared in the Egyptian political arena this week after a number of lawyers calling themselves the Association of Lawyers Without Restrictions filed a complaint and submitted a copy to the Attorney General calling for the confiscation of the book “A Thousand and One Nights”. They are calling for the imprisonment of the publishers of the book from the General Authority of the Culture, claiming that the book “offends public decency.”
Hisba cases allow citizens to prosecute individuals who they deem to have insulted Islam, and, although fairly new to Egypt, they have been increasingly used against public figures.

A Thousand and One Nights does indeed have a number of passages that deal with matters that would make a Victorian blush.

But maybe the Egyptians are more upset at this story:

British press ignored attack on Israeli diplomat

A foreign diplomat is physically attacked in her host country by a screaming mob, and not a single media outlet in Great Britain outside the Jewish press has seen fit to mentioning it.

[Depiuty Ambassador] Ms Lador-Fresher had been asked back to the university after a previous arrangement to address students in February was cancelled when more than 300 protesters from the Action Palestine student society scuffled with Jewish students and police.

Speaking about Wednesday’s protest she said: “It was quite a shocking experience. I have had people stand up and shout and wave the Palestinian flag when I have spoken, but it was the first time I have been in this situation.
“When we finished I could not get out of the university building. The demonstrators saw me on the way to the car and they started running towards me.

“The security team rushed me back into the building and we were standing in the corridor for a few minutes.”

The diminutive deputy ambassador was eventually escorted through a back door to a security vehicle but the demonstrators discovered the evacuation plan and surrounded the car.

Ms Lador-Fresher said: “They were screaming and shouting. Two of them were on the bonnet trying to break the windscreen. It was very unpleasant.

“I don’t think they wanted to kill me but I genuinely believed they wanted to physically hurt me. If I had not had the police and security team I would have been beaten up.”
“No foreign diplomat should have to go through what I went through.”

The wire services have likewise ignored this story - and they were made aware of it.

Apparently, this sort of thing is not newsworthy.

Freedom of expression in Sweden

Let's see if we can figure out how these two news stories make sense together.

First, the Swedish government subsidizes an anti-semitic, racist and homophobic publication, giving it hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread hate, because it wants to encourage freedom of speech.

Yet at the same time, Comedy Central in Sweden will not be airing the South Park Mohammed episodes because of fears for the safety of its employees.

It's a mystery.

(h/t Zvi and Jihad Watch)