Monday, August 09, 2010
Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of ZiyonThe paradox is that some people only seem to like you once you become mean. A good case in point is the groups of German journalists, politicians and lecturers who are brought to Israel by their government and after having met a wide range of Israeli leaders and experts, come to Maale Adumim to meet settler Judah Ben-Yosef.Read the whole thing.
I began working for the German government (occasionally) about four years ago. I had no illusions that after two weeks of careful brain-washing by Arab spokesmen and far worse the Israeli Left wing, my two hours wouldn’t go a long way towards changing many minds. I am a chess player, so I defined for myself what I considered to be three realistic, realizable goals:
To physically show them the size of a 40,000 man strong city. I hoped this would go some way to denting the stereotype of the two tents, a goat and a flag Jewish settlement.
To demonstrate that historically Maale Adumim has never been part of any kind of Palestinian or Arab state, that nobody besides us and a few 13th century monks have ever lived here and that geographically there are plenty of other barren mountaintops.
To demonstrate that we are not all religious Right-wing fanatics (like me) but that the population of Maale Adumim contains a cross-section of Israeli citizens Religious, Secular and others; new immigrants and old-timers, Right, Center and even some Left-wingers.
My main objective is to try to dent stereotypes. I believe that when an intelligent person realizes that many of the stereotypes he’s been sold are incorrect, he or she may begin to question them all. This might lead to researching the subject more thoroughly, which in turn even affect some change in opinions.
In many ways it’s the first few minutes that will determine to what extent the tour influences each person. They all look out the windows and see a picturesque, peaceful, modern, well-run Western city. This sight is invariably the exact antithesis of everything they’ve been taught to expect. When stereotyping clashes with reality there is an immediate state of shock, or even crises. In very broad terms one can talk about three characteristic responses:
Some choose to look in the directions of the surrounding mountains rather than at the city. They will henceforth prefer to focus on the “bigger picture” having understood that they know precious little about the “details”
There are those who honestly seem to believe that Maale Adumim is some kind of clever scam that the Israeli government is running to trick visitors like themselves. “Everything here looks fine, but what about the real settlers? Why aren’t you all carrying guns? Is that a Bible?”
Occasionally I come across intellectually honest individuals who absorb what they are being told and ask questions not to try to catch me out, but because they really want to know. Surprisingly, two groups that stand out in this category are journalists from former East Germany and a group of German, Moslem journalists and lecturers.
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of ZiyonA day after Gaza's sole power plant shut down, the Palestinian Authority said it would deduct 25 percent from salaries to cover rising electricity bills.AP adds:
Palestinian media Sunday reported the Palestinian Ministry of Finance would reassess the situation in September.
On Saturday, power plant officials in Gaza said the shutdown was due to a fuel shortage caused by the Palestinian Authority's refusal to ship sufficient fuel into the coastal enclave for the latest crisis.
Palestinian media said the latest shutdown is the third since January.
A Gaza Power Authority statement said it held Ramallah's finance ministry accountable, because "the government in Ramallah has not paid for industrial diesel, as agreed with the delegation of independent figures who visited Gaza recently," Maan reported.
Gaza's rulers, the militant Islamic group Hamas, are meant to collect utility bills and send the cash to their rivals, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which use it to buy the fuel.Yet reporters never seem to blame the Palestinian Arab leadership for Gaza's woes. That seems to be exclusively Israel's fault.
Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib says Hamas isn't sending enough money, and on average, they were receiving only $1.3 million a month from the distribution company, while they were paying $9 million for the fuel.
"We need some transparency here. There has to be some kind of audit," Khatib said.
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of ZiyonEgyptian Minister of Religious Endowments Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq called on Muslims worldwide to visit Jerusalem and assert its Islamic identity.
In an interview with the Arab daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat, Zaqzouq attacked the traditional Arab policy of tourism boycott against the Jewish state. He warned Israel’s building in the city could smother Islamic sites.
"I say to those who insist on not visiting [Jerusalem] before its liberation: my worst fear is that you will have nothing to visit after Israel realizes its plans in Jerusalem and elsewhere,” Zaqzouq was quoted as saying.
Zaqzouq said his tactic of urging a worldwide conversion on Jerusalem could be used to expose any subsequent Israeli hypocrisy, should the Israeli government refuse to grant them entry permits. He said Muslims could then turn to the international community claiming religious discrimination.
"This would produce powerful leverage, in lieu of the current negative Islamic boycott," Zaqzouq said. "We are wrong to define Jerusalem as a Palestinian issue. Rather, it is a purely Islamic issue concerning 1.5 billion Muslims."
According to official data issued by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, only 1,870 Egyptians entered Israel in the first six months of this year. In comparison, some 77,000 Israeli traveled to Egypt during the same period.
"There are two sources of pressure preventing Egyptians from traveling to Israel," Sobhy Essaila, a researcher at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies told The Media Line. "The first is social and peer pressure placed on any individual wishing to travel to Israel. The second is the notion that the Egyptian security keeps a record of anyone traveling there."
Essaila denied that the Egyptian security apparatus outwardly pressured Egyptians not to travel to Israel, but the simple fact that they were being monitored put people off any visit. He added that traveling to Israel was regarded as a form of normalization which was widely rejected by the average Egyptian.
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of Ziyon |
| Even people with academic robes can lie. |
When I was in Gaza before the Second Intifada, there were many examples of entrepreneurial activity – factories and farms. Most of that has been stamped out. As the assault on Gaza ended in 2009, Israeli military bulldozers flattened factories. The imposition of a border zone has gobbled up 29% of the strip's agricultural land.
1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | |
Unemployment in Gaza | 17 | 19.5 | 34.1 | 38.1 | 29.2 | 35.4 | 30.3 | 34.8 |
The ICG is led by former EU Commissioner for External Relations and current Oxford University Chancellor, Chris Patten, along with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour. Patten you may recall, rejected an inquiry in 2003 into the diversion of European taxpayer funds to finance Palestinian suicide bombers because he "needed an investigation like a hole in the head". In recent years, Patten's Oxford has been the recipient of over $300 million in donations from the Saudis. Arbour is famous for having originally endorsed the wildly antisemitic and oxymoronic Arab Charter of Human Rights while with the UN.
Sunday, August 08, 2010Elder of ZiyonPalestinian Authority police have dispersed two fights in the southern West Bank city of Hebron and the nearby Nuba village, detaining 15 suspected of involvement.
Police said a fight broke out at a public swimming pool, where suspects used clubs and pelted one another with stones. Five sustained various injuries, and five others were detained.
You mean, Hebron - the town of 70,000 Arabs held hostage by a few hundred Jews - has a swimming pool? But I thought that the settlers stole all the water of the West Bank for their own wasteful swimming pools and the poor Palestinian Arabs had none to drink, let alone swim in!
Saturday, August 07, 2010Elder of ZiyonGAZA CITY—Aid officials in Gaza all recite the same statistics: "44 percent unemployment [actually, 34%, we cannot expect a Slate reporter to actually check the facts, can we? -EoZ], 80 percent food-aid dependent, and 60 percent living on less than $2 a day." It sounds like a script they've grown tired of delivering to passing journalists.Notice that the reporter went to what should be the worst place in Gaza - a refugee camp. Many Gazans live in their own houses, outside the camps. Her astonishment was at how good the worst part of Gaza was.
After multiple rounds of similar briefings, I'm staring at Kamla Joudah's parlor in Nuseirat refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The warm beige tones of the furniture reflect the heat, and the walls gleam. The frequently cut power is on today, so the fan whirls. Tea and coffee are brought out on a small tray.
Kamla catches me appraising her home. "What are you looking at?" she asks, with some pique.
"Your house," I reply, "It's very nice."
She looks at me quizzically, "This is not Darfur," she snaps. The family members in the room burst out laughing as I blush.
The oft-recited statistics paint a bleak picture of life in the territory. But Gaza is a lot more complicated than the numbers suggest.
Comments like Kamla's are common here; everyone I speak to insists the coastal enclave is nothing like Somalia, Bangladesh, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. And people are indignant that I suggested it might be in the same league as those places.
"There is food in Gaza. It's not a humanitarian crisis. There is no hunger, there is no starvation, but there is a crisis of another nature," says Mahmoud Daher, a World Health Organization official in Gaza, who was expressing his personal views, not those of his organization.Um, not exactly the same as starvation, is it? No flies buzzing around kids with distended stomachs and vacant stares. Instead, Gaza has to worry about the next 20,000 laptops that UNRWA is distributing to their kids.
As Daher explains, the blockade has dramatically altered the standard of living for Palestinians in the territory. In three years, he assesses, Gazans have lost 20 years of economic development. And in that decline lies the root of the crisis in Gaza as he sees it.
"Inability to access quality care is a crisis, inability for people to produce and have access to jobs is a crisis, inability of people to get the quality of education that they are used to is a crisis, and above all [it is] a crisis of dignity—a crisis of humanity," Daher tells me.
Saturday, August 07, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of ZiyonA Saudi groom was slapped by his mother on his wedding night when he tried , in a romantic Cinderella-inspired touch, to put a shoe on his bride’s foot.
“The shocked mother was so infuriated by the sight of her son helping the bride wear her shoe that she slapped him amid the laughter of the women guests,” Okaz daily reported on Thursday.
“The groom had reportedly agreed with his bride that she walks into the reception hall wearing only one shoe and that her sister would carry the second shoe. The plan was that he would later take the shoe and put it on the bride’s foot in front of the guests. His family was not told about the perceived romantic gesture,” the newspaper said.
However, the groom’s mother became so upset that she hit and insulted him on the grounds that he did not behave as “a genuine traditional oriental man.”
The groom eventually left the reception hall in Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia and took his bride to the airport to fly to Malaysia for their honeymoon, the paper said.
In a separate incident in the same city, angry wedding guests left the reception hall after the families of the bride and groom screened a short film “that failed to respect privacy.”
According to Okaz, the short clip highlighted the different stages of the lives of both the bride and the groom, from their early years throughout school and adolescence, and ended with the couple hugging and exchanging a kiss.
However, some guests were shocked, charging that the clip was not acceptable and that it was inspired by movies screened on private television channels.
An attempt by a group of Gulf national women to enforce a dress code led a British tourist to strip down to her bikini at Dubai Mall.
A group of Gulf national women recently tried to enforce a dress code morally acceptable to them by distributing leaflets to women they found to be dressed inappropriately, a Dubai Mall official said.
A British tourist who was approached objected to the gesture and stripped down to a bikini she was wearing underneath in defiance.
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of ZiyonFollowing the exclusive Arutz Sheva report Wednesday morning that Muslims were enlarging the Mamilla cemetery with fake tombs, authorities removed the tombs by Wednesday evening.The Wednesday report included video of the fake graves.
Dozens of false tombs were “planted” just west of the cemetery, on land that is part of Independence Park (Gan HaAtzmaut) at city center. There were no graves beneath the tombs.
The fake tombs were removed by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israel Lands Authority.
A municipality employee told Arutz Sheva that the faux graves were apparently part of a plan to have the Muslim Waqf submit a demand for the additional land to be placed under Muslim ownership.
The Jerusalem Municipality located the illegal activity at the site yesterday. The Municipality has contacted the Israel Lands Authority as the owner of the land to return things to their former state. The Municipality will not allow extremist elements to act illegally to change the status quo.
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of ZiyonAnother and more far-reaching issue, which should be of great significance to those who take seriously the claims of international law to govern the conduct of war, has scarcely been noticed. And that pertains to the disregarding of fundamental norms and principles of international law by the United Nations Human Rights Council (hrc), which authorized the Goldstone Mission; by the Mission members, who produced the Goldstone Report; and by the hrc and the United Nations General Assembly (of which the hrc is a subsidiary organ), which endorsed the report’s recommendations. Their conduct combines an exaltation of, and disrespect for, international law. It is driven by an ambition to shift authority over critical judgments about the conduct of war from states to international institutions. Among the most serious political consequences of this shift is the impairment of the ability of liberal democracies to deal lawfully and effectively with the complex and multifarious threats presented by transnational terrorists.The Goldstone report is not only flawed and biased - it is dangerous.
...Authoritative sources in international law assign primary responsibility for judgments about whether war has been conducted in accordance with the law of armed conflict to the judicial and other relevant organs of nation-states. That assignment is rooted in the larger liberal tradition’s teaching that nation-states — particularly those based on the consent of the governed and devoted to securing individual rights — are the best and most legitimate means of securing peace, exercising authority over the individual, and preserving political freedom. That teaching is bound up with the view that states are likely to be more sober in assessing the actions of other states than international organizations because states must bear the burden of any proposed reform or rule. In contrast, the Goldstone Report and its supporters appear to be animated by the conviction that judgments about the lawful conduct of war are best and primarily vindicated by international institutions, because of their superior objectivity, impartiality, and expertise. And they have shown themselves willing to disregard international law as it is in order to remake it as they believe it should be. One reason to prefer the allocation of responsibilities in international law as it currently stands to the Goldstone Report’s efforts to transform it are the report’s stunning defects. They illustrate that those who are responsible for the operation of international institutions are no less subject to the passions and prejudices that thwart the impartial and objective administration of law than the government officials in civilized nations, and in some cases may be more subject to such passions and prejudices.
...There is a danger that the spread of practices among international bodies and an accumulation of precedents concerning international law will weigh down the United States in the struggle that it shares with Israel and others to combat, in accordance with the law of armed conflict, transnational Islamic terrorism. Of course that will only happen if the U.S. recognizes such practices and precedents as authoritative. Encouragement to do so comes from powerful trends in American universities and law schools, where professors for going on a generation have been cultivating in their students the view, which animates the Goldstone Report, that critical judgments about the lawful conduct of war are indeed properly and in the first instance the province of international institutions.
That view is suited to a world in which all nation-states incline to peace and govern themselves in accordance with liberal and democratic principles. Unfortunately, that is not the world in which we live. Nor is it a world we can expect to emerge anytime soon.
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of Ziyon
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of ZiyonIn the aftermath of the July 2006 war, Ogero landline phone network sought a tender for the purchase a computer software called "mediation" which provides for the transfer of phone calls received from cellular phones to the landline network and vice versa, in addition to detailed bills, As-Safir newspaper reported Friday.UPDATE: commenter T34zakat notices that Kabira has a lot of investors, and Star Ventures is only one of them. Star Ventures is headquartered in Germany and has an office in Israel and Silicon Valley - not surprising for a VC firm specializing in software. This is far from a smoking gun; and there is zero indication from this that the Kabira software was created in Israel.
This attracted bids from six top companies, As-Safir said, until a French firm finally got the tender.
According to the daily, however, the French firm in turn put forward software that bears the name "Kabira" which operates under "Star Ventures," a leading Israeli venture capital fund.
The newspaper said the identity of the Israeli company was not clear at first, but the low prices it offered stirred up doubt by a Lebanese company, prompting it to search for the firm's "family tree."
Here's the surprise: well-known businessmen and Israeli officers are in charge of managing and financing Kabira.
The ministry under Telecoms Minister Marwan Hamadeh at the time gave a simple explanation to the flow of inquirers: "We chose this bid because it was less by $3,000,000 compared to other tenders, without looking into the corporate identity."
Friday, August 06, 2010Elder of ZiyonThe commander of Hamas' military wing in Rafah, Raed al-Atar, is responsible for ordering the firing of Grad-type Katyusha rockets at Eilat and Aqaba from Sinai earlier this week, Palestinian security officials say.Jordan has its own theories: an Al Qaeda offshoot.
Security sources told Haaretz that according to an investigation by Palestinian intelligence, Atar was behind the rocket attacks authorized by the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip, without the knowledge of the Hamas military commander there, Ahmed Jabari.
But Palestinian security sources said Atar carried out the attack with the approval of the Hamas leadership abroad and with the backing of Iranian intelligence agents, who appear to have initiated the mission.
The sources said the attack had been approved by the Hamas politburo chief, Khaled Meshal, based in Damascus.
Atar, who in recent years has greatly increased his power and influence in the Gaza Strip, particularly in Hamas' armed wing, is now asserting greater authority over the tunnels in which goods are smuggled from Sinai into Gaza.
According to intelligence sources, a number of militants under his control crossed into Sinai through the Rafah tunnels, where they were met by Egyptian drivers and the Grad-type Katyusha rockets. They drove in off-road vehicles toward Taba on the Red Sea coast, avoiding security checks by the Egyptians.
A Jordanian political source told Haaretz yesterday that Jordan has exchanged intelligence with Egypt; the information Jordan now has suggests that it was not Hamas that fired the rockets, but a radical religious group that opposes the Palestinian Islamist group in charge of the Gaza Strip.
The assessment is that the group is Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, which collaborates with Sinai Bedouin who are at odds with the Egyptian authorities. The Jordanian source says Egypt is also not blaming Hamas but mentions "Palestinian factions" as responsible for the rocket attacks.
In May, a group of Shi'ite separatists in Yemen sent Haaretz documents claiming that Sami al-Mutairi, a Kuwaiti citizen known as Abdullah al-Hajj, is in charge of Al-Qaida's activities against Israel from Palestinian territory. Mutairi was convicted of killing an American in Kuwait several years ago.
Mutairi, who was released from prison in 2007, sent to his supporters in the Gaza Strip a total of $850,000 through a Saudi citizen, Abdullah al-Dusri, who visited Gaza from Sinai carrying the money in a suitcase.
Mutairi gave orders to buy weapons in Sinai for militants in the Gaza Strip, and to purchase apartments in Khan Yunis and Rafah where the militants could hide.
The militant leader ordered his contacts in Gaza to hide the arms so they would not be confiscated by Hamas. One letter mentions that Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad had already acquired 25 Grad-type Katyusha rockets, which it hid in plantations in Sinai and Gaza.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
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