Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Hatikva at a Jethro Tull concert in Israel

From JPost:

Ask Ian Anderson a seemingly innocent “what’s new?” or “have you acquired any favorite sites or restaurants on your many trips to Israel?” and you’re likely to get a 10- minute multi-faceted treatise on global warming, the finite resources of the Earth and the noisy, disgusting habits of infants.

Just shy of his 63rd birthday, the gregarious front man of veteran British rockers Jethro Tull showed no signs of slowing down or mellowing as he prepared to leave home in England on Wednesday for two weekend Tull shows in Caesarea and Binyamina, and one more on Monday night in Jerusalem. In a phone conversation with The Jerusalem Post, he especially minced no words about efforts to convince him to join the loosely-knit artistic boycott of Israel – efforts which prompted him to write a note on the band’s official Web site defending his decision to perform here.

“I didn’t feel the need to make any statement until I started receiving some very hateful communication from people representing different sides of this ongoing issue – from supposed human rights supporters to individuals, bodies and groups… there was some pretty nasty stuff,” said Anderson.

“Basically what I wrote was, ‘don’t f***ing tell me what to do.’ And I have to say that since I posted the letter on my site, over the last two or three weeks, nobody has uttered a peep.”

What Anderson actually wrote was his commitment, ala Leonard Cohen’s initiative in 2009, to donate his proceeds from the three shows to “bodies representing the development of peaceful co-existence between Muslims, Jews and Christians, and the fostering of better Palestinian/Israeli relations.” The letter added that he didn’t “feel pressured by human rights groups, national interests or any individuals to perform or not to perform in Israel or anywhere else.

“I make up my own mind in light of available facts, with my own experience and a sense of personal ethics.”

Wow, an artist who actually thinks for himself! The fact that this is refreshing is scary.

Anyway, here he is performing last night with the band, with special guest keyboardist Shlomo Gronich. Gronich plays riffs from Israel's national anthem Hatikvah at about the 4:00 mark and then at about 5:10, bookending one of his own popular jazz pieces:

Send it to all your friends who support boycotting the only state with a decent human rights record in the Middle East. With luck, it will make their heads explode.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

The Gazans who are in an open-air prison - in Jordan

Did you know that there were well over 100,000 Gazans in Jordan with limited rights - and no easy way to get out?

An Arab researcher named Oroub El Abed has been documenting the plight of two little-known groups of Palestinian Arabs - the Gazans who live in Jordan and the PalArabs who live in Egypt.

Here is an excerpt from an article she wrote in Forced Migration Review about the Gazans in Jordan:

Gazans in Jordan are doubly displaced refugees. Forced to move to Gaza as a result of the 1948 war, they fled once more when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967. Guesstimates of the number of Gazans in Jordan range between 118,000 and 150,000. A small number have entered the Jordanian citizenship scheme via naturalisation or have had the financial resources to acquire citizenship.

On arrival in Jordan, the ex-residents of Gaza were granted temporary Jordanian passports valid for two years but were not granted citizenship rights. The so-called ‘passport’ serves two purposes: it indicates to the Jordanian authorities that the Gazans and their dependents are temporary residents in Jordan and provides them with an international travel document (‘laissez-passer’) potentially enabling access to countries other than Jordan.

The ‘passport’ – which is expensive – has value as an international travel document only if receiving states permit the entry of temporary passport holders. Few countries admit them, because they have no official proof of citizenship. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and some Gulf States are among those who refuse to honour the document. Any delay in renewing the temporary passport or in applying for one puts an individual at risk of becoming undocumented.

Since 1986 it has been harder for Gazans to compete for places in Jordanian universities as they must secure places within the 5% quota reserved for Arab foreigners. Entry to professions is blocked as Gazans are not allowed to register with professional societies/unions or to establish their own offices, firms or clinics. Only those with security clearance can gain private sector employment. Those who work in the informal sector are vulnerable to being exploited. Many Gazans are keen to leave Jordan to seek employment elsewhere but are constrained from doing so. Some have attempted to leave clandestinely.

Rami was brought up in Jordan, studied law and worked for over two years for a law firm in the West Bank city of Hebron. Lacking a West Bank Israeli-issued ID, he was forced to return to Jordan every three months to renew his visitor’s visa. Due to the high cost of living he returned to Jordan in 1999 only to find himself stripped of his Jordanian temporary passport. Now without any form of identity, he notes that “being Gazan in Jordan is like being guilty.”

In Jordan, as in most other Middle-Eastern countries, women cannot pass on their citizenship to their children. Neither is citizenship granted to a child born on the territory of a state from a foreign father. Married women are forced to depend on their fathers or husbands to process documents related to their children. Because of this patriarchal conception of citizenship, children of Jordanian women married to Gazans are at risk of being left without a legal existence.

Heba, a Jordanian national, married Ahmad, a Gazan with an Egyptian travel document. A year after their marriage, Ahmad was arrested for being in Jordan without a residence permit. Deported from Jordan, he was refused re-entry to Egypt and ended up in Sudan. Heba had a child but has been unable to register the birth due to the absence of her husband. She cannot afford to go to Sudan to be with him.

So there is a significant population of up to 150,000 Palestinian Arabs, living in the one Arab country that has granted other Palestinian Arabs full citizenship, who are left in legal limbo and danger of being deported. They are discriminated against and cannot leave. Even worse, most major Arab countries do not recognize their "travel documents" and effectively discriminate against them, forcing them to stay in Jordan or get deported forever.

How many times have you read about this "open-air prison?" How many human rights groups have championed the cause of Jordanian Gazans? What op-eds have ever been written, shaming the Hashemite Kingdom on how poorly they treat their Arab brethren? How many flotillas and convoys are being organized to help out the women and children? How many people are working to divest from Jordanian products because of this shameful discrimination?

Zero, zero, zero, zero and zero.

The obligatory Ashton Kutcher post

OK, so talking about celebrity airheads is not obligatory, but Jameel at The Muqata tracks Kutcher's visit to Efrat and Hebron where he is no doubt single-handedly ticking off thousands of BDSers.

Under the initiative of project "Mashiv HaRuach" which deals with strengthening the values of Zionism, Kutcher visited the community of Efrat, listened with great interest to a historical review of the community and the Gush Etzion area, dined at a Glatt Kosher restaurant, and even dipped in a local natural spring "Mikva" no less than 151 times! (151 is the numerical equivalent "gematriya" of "Mikva")

The project's director, Rafi Even D'aan briefed Kutcher and the history of settlement in Gush Etzion and spoke to him at length about the region's Jewish history. Rafi told Kutcher about the establishment of the new Jewish settlements after the Six Day War and explained the spiritual and historical significance of Gush Etzion.

Jameel also has photos and Ashton's tweets.

Jews planting the 'Tree of Jews'. ALL OVER THE PLACE!

"Jews planting trees. An abomination! How are we ever going to find them?" or a similar thought must have gone through this forum contributor's head when he posted this:

"I would like to show you the trees of the Jews (al-Gharqad) and now they have increased their cultivation in the occupied areas (...)"

He then refers to the following Hadith:

“The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews. The Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: ‘Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him;’ but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.”
(Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-Fitan wa Ashrat as-Sa'ah, Book 41, 6985)

And then he says:

"But few of us know the form of this tree."

Now you also know how the "Tree of the Jews" looks like. Go sit behind it. No need to worry.

Arab oil billionaires criticized in Arabic op-ed

Last month, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet started an initiative where the world's richest people would donate half their fortunes to charity.

They so far signed up some forty super-rich people to join this "Giving Pledge."

Pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi looked at this list and noticed one thing missing: Arabs.

Not only that, but the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, who ridiculed the entire idea, is an Arab - his father was a Maronite Christian.

Here is part of the scathing op-ed:

There is no accurate survey of the number of Arab billionaires and how rich they are, but there are several known names that emerge from time to time in the pages of foreign magazines that care about such things, some of them princes or kings or businessmen, not to mention the tens of thousands of millionaires. But we do know that that most of these are featured in the glossy magazines because their private jets are outfitted with gold faucets or toilets, or their luxury yachts moored in southern France or southern Spain, competing with each other on their length and number of rooms.

Even if they donated some of a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, these contributions are always done for PR, in front of an array of cameras that record this great event, and broadcast to dozens of television stations and newspapers that belong to the donor, which were established mostly for this purpose...

There are more wealthy Arabs than rich Americans, yet Westerners set aside a portion of their wealth to charity. Most of the Arab wealth is built up through illegal activities, or they got kickbacks for arms deals of weapons that have never been used...

The vast majority of Arab billionaires made their fortunes because of the massive corruption of the regimes that belong to, and lack of accountability, transparency, and the encroachment of looting public funds, or money laundering, or all of these methods combined.

We hear about the tens of millions were invested in the pornography channels but not about about the establishment or the construction of scientific or humanitarian cultural institutions.

More than half of the Arab world live under the poverty line, on less than two dollars a day, and we saw the Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz visited the slums surrounding the city of Riyadh, the capital of the richest oil state in the world, showing misery in the ugliest forms and manifestations, and in a manner can is unbelievable.

If we went to sister Arab countries such as Yemen, which occupies a prominent place on the list of the twenty poorest countries in the world, we find that hunger and disease is the common denominator for the vast majority of citizens, and all they get from their brothers are crumbs.

Meanwhile, foreign billionaires pledge half of their wealth to charity, wealth ways that they earned legitimately as the result of their creativity, and they paid taxes to the coffers of their country, under a strict, transparent accounting system - yet they did not hesitate to commit to helping the needy and the vulnerable not in their country only, but in all around the world, without distinction or discrimination.

Do not begrudge our millionaires, and do not be surprised if we say just the opposite: we feel for them when they live in mansions or yachts or private jets, isolated from humans, in lives of plastic with no taste or smell, surrounded by a group of hypocrites and hangers-on.

We write this essay on the occasion of holy month of Ramadan, the month of mercy and blessing and sacrifice, when we need to help the poor and disadvantaged. We are not preachers, but we are ringing a bell to awaken the public conscience of the sleepers, and remind them of the minimum level of their duties.

Stoning 101 (Slate)

Slate has a helpful article on what exactly is involved when women adulterers are stoned in Iran. Sort of like a "Stoning for Dhimmis."

First, you get buried. Iran's Islamic Penal Code states that men convicted of adultery are to be buried in the ground up to their waists; women, up to their chests. If the conviction is based on the prisoner's confession, the law says, the presiding judge casts the first stone. If the conviction is based on witness testimony, the witnesses throw the first stones, then the judge, then everyone else—generally other court officials and security forces. Stones must be of medium size, according to the penal code: Not so big that one or two could kill the person, but not so small that you would call it a pebble. In other words, about the size of a tangerine. The whole process takes less than an hour.

Something to think about the next time Ahmadinejad declares that Iranians have superior human rights to Westerners.

(h/t Israeligirl)

Nasrallah's "evidence" that Israel murdered Hariri is a joke - but....(UPDATED)

Yesterday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah went on TV for two hours, trying to spin a convoluted case that Israel was behind the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

The most interesting parts of his speech were where he said that Hezbollah had captured an Israeli drone in 1997, and they managed to analyze it in order to capture IDF surveillance footage.

"The secret I want to reveal tonight is that before 1997, Hezbollah was able to catch an Israeli spy plane photographing South Lebanon and sending them to an Israeli operations center," Sayyed Nasrallah went on to say.

"Before 1997, the Resistance managed to capture the transmission of an MK drone and we managed to access this transmission which enabled us of capturing the images transmitted by the drone as the enemy's operation room was receiving them," Hezbollah Secretary General explained.

"The capturing of the MK drone images by the Resistance's operation room led to the foiling of the enemy's amphibious assault on Ansariyeh on September 5, 1997," Hezbollah Secretary General revealed, before showing details of the Ansariyeh operation and explaining how this tactic helped the Resistance fighters foil the Israeli attempt.

He showed what looks like convincing aerial video footage of that failed 1997 assault.

Al Manar has the speech on video here.

Then he goes on to say that Hezbollah continued to capture video from Israeli drones up through at least 2005, and this footage supposedly shows that Israel was surveying the route that Rafik Hariri took when he was killed.

Hezbollah Secretary General then turned to the most sensitive part of the press conference: tangible proof showing the Israeli enemy carefully monitoring the movements of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and his locations.

In this regard, Sayyed Nasrallah unveiled footage intercepted from Israeli surveillance planes of the site of the 2005 murder of ex-Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri prior to his assassination.

"Israeli drones had carefully monitored the movements of Hariri's motorcade in Beirut and on the Farayya-Faqra road," Sayyed Nasrallah pointed out. "Was that a coincidence?" his eminence wondered. "Such footage generally comes as the first leg of the execution of an operation."

Several clips, each minutes long and undated, showed aerial views of the coastline off west Beirut on various days prior to the Hariri assassination. "Are there any Hezbollah offices in these areas monitored by Israel? Why is Israel monitoring these locations?" Sayyed Nasrallah wondered.

The videos are undated, so if Hezbollah did capture drone videos for years then they pretty much have aerial video from the IDF over all of Lebanon. Nasrallah does make a convincing case that certain turns in a specific roads that Hariri supposedly used were videoed from various angles.

Nasrallah also claimed to have evidence of exactly when Israeli planes were over Beirut on the day that Hariri was assassinated, and that an Israeli spy was in the area.

That's pretty much his evidence.

The evidence was far from convincing for at least some in Lebanon:

Commenting on the evidence that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah presented during his 2 + hours press conference Elias Zoghbi told “BBC:” What has Nasrallah presented was a political case . This is not the kind of concrete and convincing evidence that we expected from him that will prove Israel was behind Hariri’s murder. Nasrallah ’s presentation was interesting …. he acted like a news anchor ”

What I have not yet seen from Israel is any confirmation or denial that, for what may be years, Hezbollah was able to intercept Israeli drone transmissions. Clearly what Nasrallah showed indicated that Hezbollah captured video from multiple drones over a period of time. Some of the footage was in color.

This would be an outrageous security failure on the part of the IDF. It is not difficult to encrypt transmissions in such a way that they would be virtually unbreakable. If the IDF didn't change their methods of transmission or their encryption after the 1997 drone capture, someone should be fired.

UPDATE: See the comments. Apparently Israel radio is speaking about this; one IDF general says that Nasrallah's claims might be true, others seem to be denying it.

UPDATE 2: Apparently, you can intercept sensitive stuff yourself for $26 plus your satellite dish. Again, if this was known since the 1990s, why would transmissions remain unencrypted? (h/t Pesach)

The popular Tunisian singer Saleem Bakkoush has been forced to cancel a concert at the annual Carthage festival, after a video surfaced showing him performing at a synagogue.

Mr Bakkoush accused his rivals of publishing the tape to tarnish his reputation.

Tunisia is one of only two Arab states with a sizeable Jewish community.

But pro-Palestinian sentiments remain strong and the country has no diplomatic ties with Israel.

It's merely anti-zionism of course... nothing to do with anti-Semitism.... right?

Anti-Israeli sentiment in Tunisia - especially in cultural and artistic circles - was already running high following the emergence of another remarkable tape.

It showed another popular singer, Mohsen El Sharif, performing at the wedding of a Jewish couple of Tunisian origin in Israel.

What angered people most in Tunisia was Mr El Sharif's readiness to please the Israeli public by shouting "Long Live Netanyahu", referring to the Israeli prime minister.

He later tried to defend his action by saying that he thought that was the bridegroom's name.

The Other Side, part 3

The video series of Jews from Judea and Samaria continues.

This one interviews people familiar to the Jewish and Zionist blogosphere: Yisrael Medad of My Right Word, and his wife Batya of Shiloh Musings fame. They're not quite "typical" revenants, as Yisrael likes to refer to Jews of the area, but they speak English well and are articulate.

The project now has a website: http://www.theothersidevideo.com/

Latest Latma

I liked this one.

New video of Gazan suffering, starvation and prison-like conditions

Middle East News Watch captured an Israeli Channel 10 report on both the Crazy Water Park that we mentioned last week and the Al Mat-haf Museum and Restaurant we blogged about in late July.

Both of these torture chambers are in the prison camp known as Gaza.

I know it is hard to watch all these videos. I understand how many people want to turn away and pretend that these unspeakable places don't exist. But the world must be forced to see the suffering of the Gazans for themselves; the screams of the children frantically sliding down the long, cramped tube into the Waters of Hell will haunt you forever.

Brace yourself. It's ugly.

ITIC releases report on Lebanon incident

The ITIC released a report on the incident last week, with a little new information, some good background and some new analysis, including confirmation of my source's map showing the location of the IDF crane and where the officers were shot.

(h/t Joel)

PalArabs: "Frozen in time, addicted to pity"

An astonishingly good piece in the National Post (Canada):

Refugees? Canadians, even if their families have lived here for centuries, know something about refugees. We know Hungarians, we know Vietnamese, we know many others. We admire their energy and their accomplishments. Observing them can be a bracing lesson in human tenacity under adverse circumstances.

But that pattern doesn't cover Palestinian refugees. They are a special case. For many reasons, various populations across the planet are displaced; only the Palestinians cling to their "refugee" status decade after decade. They present themselves as helpless victims of Israeli aggression. They await rescue-- as they have been awaiting it for three generations, since Israel was founded in 1948. Members of other history-battered groups choose to live by an urgent ethic: Get up, get going, make a new life. Palestinians have a different approach: Sit down, wait, stay angry till the world provides for you.

Andrew Roberts, a much-admired British historian, raised the issue of Palestinian refugees in a speech excerpted in the National Post on Tuesday. He argued, correctly, that Arab governments "are rich enough to have economically solved the Palestinian refugee problem decades ago." The 5,000 or so members of the Saudi royal family could probably handle it by themselves.

Why haven't they done so? They much prefer to let Palestinians remain poor. Every wretched, ill-fed and ill-housed Palestinian can be used as a living rebuke to Israel.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Israel Matzav)

Der Spiegel notices Hamas infighting. Then it calls some of them "peaceful."

Der Spiegel (German only) has an interesting article about Hamas infighting. It starts off with some interesting facts, but then turns into a joke.

A young man whose body was found in a Rafah tunnel last year - it may have been this one - seems to have been murdered by Hamas and dumped there. The man was a whistleblower of Hamas corruption, but his problem with Hamas was that they had abandoned their Islamist roots, not that they were too extreme:

But his death is only one of many unsolved cases in which Hamas is accused of having executed dissidents from their own ranks. Human rights activists in the Gaza Strip, who wish to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the subject, speak of dozens of incidents in which such allegations are raised: "It is almost impossible to prove it, because Hamas covered up these cases."

The rulers of the Gaza Strip seem to purge people in their own ranks and prominent members are not spared. Munir [the man mentioned above], for example, was a major arms purchaser for the organization - a fact that his father admits with pride, but also with additional rage. "It is for them he traveled all over the world; he went for them to Iran, Syria, Ireland. And because he wanted to ensure that the pure doctrine of Hamas is not distorted, they have killed him."

There is a reason why Hamas seems to employ brutal violence to silence critics within its own ranks: Three years after coming to power, many radical Islamists in the Gaza Strip are turning away from their support in droves. Both the moderate and the extreme members of the organization are disappointed, and discontent is spreading on both the right and the left.

YNet also reports on these developments:

News stories about bodies found at sea are occasionally published by Gaza newspapers. The number of such bodies isn't huge, yet not all those drowning victims chose to go swimming voluntarily. The Gazans who found their death at sea include mid-level officials at sensitive government ministries, the Interior Ministry for example, alongside police and security officers.

Some of them were shot in the head before being sent on their swim.

There is a common denominator to these deaths: All of the victims were designated as traitors by the secret service of Hamas' military wing in charge of counter-espionage and executed as collaborators.

And these are not just simple collaborators, but rather, people who penetrated deep into Hamas' government; so deep that Hamas leaders are embarrassed to expose the failure and prefer to make these people disappear, with or without a brief court-martial.

Gaza's streets are teeming with rumors. Stories of people who disappeared at sea or elsewhere stay on the agenda. The whole of Gaza, as if amok-stricken, takes part in the hunt. Posters urging a war on collaborators hang in the streets; the issue is discussed on the radio and during sermons at mosques. In the upcoming school year, the topic will be added to the curriculum, with Gaza children learning about the dangers inherent in collaborators. Teachers will be asked to explain what good, suspicious children do: Turn in their parents.

This huge manhunt is not a sign of strength, says a senior Israeli security official – the opposite is true. These are clear signs of distress for Hamas' regime.

While YNet gives a decent analysis, the Der Spiegel article then descends into farce:

"The party split into hawks and doves," said Sajed Abu Musameh, one of the seven founders of Hamas and one if the more moderate critics of the movement. Many men of his generation had grown up with Jews, says the 63-year-old, who is still a member of the party leadership. Many of these elders believed in peaceful coexistence, not to the power of rockets and suicide attacks. "But the party is now influenced by the young radicals, they represent the majority of the members, our leaders say what they want to hear."

This is patently absurd. The early leaders of Hamas were not moderate by any measure - they gained prominence in direct proportion to the grisliness of their attacks on Jews. They are the ones who drafted the anti-semitic and genocidal Hamas Charter. Now we are hearing that they believe in peaceful co-existence?

The truth is that the Hamas leadership now has something to lose, and their newfound "moderation" is a direct consequence of them not wanting to lose power. Their suppressing of rocket fire is a function of fear, not moderation. That the younger generation, raised on a diet of calls to jihad, notices the hypocrisy is understandable - but it does not mean that the elders are any less extreme, just that they are somewhat wiser and more patient in how to achieve their goals.

To put the words "peaceful co-existence" and "Hamas" in the same sentence shows how far Western journalists have fallen. The only Israelis who would have that same sentence applied to them by the media would be the extreme Left, and the implicit equalization of the two is a major problem in the media. The fact is that "Hamas moderation" is an oxymoron, and using relative terms as absolute terms for both sides is one of the biggest distortions of truth that the world has been exposed to for many years.

Any unbiased look at the situation would show that the most extreme Israelis are more moderate in their goals than the most "moderate" Hamas members. The fact that this is not self-evident to the majority of the world audience shows the huge gap between what journalists report and reality.

(h/t Silke)

Ahmadinejad is a 9/11 "Truther." What a surprise.

From the JC:

The Iranian president has accused “Zionists” of knowing about the September 11 terror attacks in advance and reiterated his denial of the Holocaust.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a conference in Tehran that no “Zionists” were killed in the World Trade Center, because "one day earlier they were told not to go to their workplace".

Five Israelis were killed when the two planes were flown into the Twin Towers in 2001.

Mr Ahmadinejad also claimed that there were no reports that revealed the names of the around 3,000 victims.

He also said that in the aftermath of September 11 the United States and the media “created and prepared public opinion so that everyone considered an attack on Afghanistan and Iraq as [their] right.”

Nah, he's just a harmless crackpot. Nothing to see here. Move along.

The Onion on how to reduce stress

The Onion takes a darkly satiric stab at closet haters of a certain kind:

Overcome Stress By Visualizing It As A Greedy, Hook-Nosed Race Of Creatures

In the discussion group I saw this on, some thought that it was too offensive and that viewer wouldn't get it. But as a fan of The Onion, I'm pretty convinced that this is spot-on.

(h/t YM)

The mystery of Adaisseh, Lebanon

Last week's ambush of Israeli soldiers happened outside the village of Adaisseh, Lebanon.

It just so happens that I have seen that village once.

Last December, I went on a blogger's tour of the northern border of Israel sponsored by the IDF. I mentioned then that the Lebanese village we saw just across the border was being observed by the IDF day and night.

And what they didn't observe was more interesting than what they did see.

In a normal town, one would see children, cars, school buses, playgrounds and other indications of family life.

Yet in this village, there was none of that. The vast majority of vehicles in this village were trucks, entering and exiting.

The IDF told us that what we were seeing was, essentially, a giant weapons storehouse pretending to be a Lebanese village.

I hadn't realized until now that the village was Adaisseh (thanks to Israel Matzav for reminding me.)

Is is a coincidence that the place that the Lebanese army decided to attack Israel from was a fake Hezbollah village?

UPDATE: Here is a video of either Adaisseh or a similar Hezbollah village without people:

There was a brief kerfuffle as some UNIFIL troops from Indonedia abandoned their posts as soon as shooting started, and ran away to a nearby village. This was captured on video:

According to a story in an Indonesian newspaper quoting Al Manar, they took a taxi to this town.

It sure doesn't look like they went to Adaisseh, which would be the logical place to go (and was easily within walking distance.) This seems to indicate that the UNIFIL troops know very well what Adaisseh is all about, and they act as impotently as these Indonesian UNIFIL soldiers did.

For those who want to continue to analyze the event, this footage from a different Indonesian source seems to be different from what we had already seen before. Of course, the snipers who shot first were not with the UNIFIL troops or the camera operators.

Abbas wants a Judenrein Palestine

From the excellent Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, writing in YNet last week:

The Palestinians intend to demand the implementation of the UN resolution regarding refugees, from a Palestinian perspective, which gives the 5.5 million refugees and their descendants the right of return and to settle in the State of Israel. In his briefing to the Egyptian media, Abbas presented this strategy and denied the Jewish character of Israel. He maintains that Israel should, in fact, become a bi-national state, but on the other hand that Palestine must become a state “clean” of Jews.

The term “Israeli” used by Abbas means “Jew,” as the PA sees Israeli Arabs, Muslims and Christians alike as an integral part of the Palestinian people. The future State of Palestine, according Abbas, must resist any Jewish presence in its territory. In other words, the PA embraces a racist policy – Palestinian apartheid – directed at Jews, based on denial of Jewish history and the cultural and religious linkage of the Jewish people to the land.

The anti-Semitism embodied in Abbas’ words refers also to his position towards the NATO observers’ force that may be deployed in the West Bank to monitor the implementation of the peace agreement with Israel. He is opposed to Jews being included in this force; meaning, he will ask Germany and all other partner countries in NATO to use their own forces in the West Bank, in an effort to the exclude any Jewish soldiers.

He didn’t explain how these countries would determine who is a Jew, whether according to orthodox Jewish laws or just if one of the parents or grandparents was a Jew. But even Saudi Arabia didn’t dare oppose the deployment of American Jewish soldiers on its land during operation Desert Storm (1990-1), and no one in Israel ever demanded to disqualify Muslim soldiers from serving in the international observers’ forces in Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Sinai.

The racist language used by Abbas is particularly despicable as it doubts the loyalty of the Jews to their country. It is for this reason that his comments call for a firm Israeli and European response.

Note: Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency published on July 28 its version of Abbas’ briefing to the Egyptian media, quoting him as saying: “I'm willing to agree to a third party that would supervise the agreement, such as NATO forces, but I would not agree to having Jews among the NATO forces, or that there will live among us even a single Israeli on Palestinian land”. This version was reprinted by Palestinian newspapers al-Quds and al-Hayat al-Jadida on July 30 and by other Arab newspapers.

A few days later Wafa published a new version of Abbas’ interview to the Egyptian media, where he was quoted as saying: “We have no objection to the presence of a third party after the (Palestinian) state is established, and we don’t oppose that the third party will be NATO or any other force. However, I will not agree that an Israeli, even if he is a Muslim, will be present on my land, but I’ll agree only (to the presence) of a third party. The reason for that is stemmed in the fact that the Israeli is the heir of the occupation, while the presence of the third party is temporary as are the Multinational Forces in your country (Egypt) and UNIFIL in Lebanon.”

I could not find the original WAFA piece - neither their archive nor their search functions work.

The earliest place I could find the earlier, racist quote was July 29's Palestinian Media Center, quoting WAFA. My interpretation of the autotranslation is:

I am willing to accept the existence of a third party after the solution, such as forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and will not accept that Jews be a part of NATO troops, and I will not accept one Israeli to live among us in the Palestinian territory.

Egypt's Al Ahram had identical wording on July 30th, although it is not clear if they were at the briefing of Egyptian journalists or not.

UPDATE: Abbas, not surprisingly, denies these reports through a spokesman who says that it was only the American media that reported his anti-semitic diatribe. Well, as I have shown, it was reported widely in the Arabic media, and no one seemed to be too upset about it. (h/t Suzanne)

Follow-up on Arabs visiting Jerusalem

When I posted yesterday about the resistance in the Muslim world to visiting Jerusalem, I had missed a central conflict on that issue.

My post update showed that an Egyptian minister of religious endowments Zaqzouq is indeed asking Muslims to visit Jerusalem to strengthen ties to the city. What I didn't realize is that this is part of a month-long dispute between Zaqzouq and influential Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, who reacted to Zaqzouq's similar call last month with an explicit fatwa against any such visits. Here is a reproduction of an Al Quds al Arabi editorial about the issue last month:

Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, has constantly espoused a position opposed to the pro-sultan preachers, defending resistance and sacrifice of life for the sake of the nation's causes, faith, and rights, consistently guided by the Holy Koran, Prophet Muhammad's tradition, and the life of the Prophet's companions.

The other day, Dr Al-Qaradawi issued a firm fatwa condemning the calls sanctioning visits to Al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem under occupation, regarding such calls as disgrace, proscribed by the Islamic shari'ah, and legitimize the occupation forces. This fatwa came in response to a statement by the Egyptian Awqaf Minister, Hamdi Zaquq, in which he said that he is interested in getting a visa to visit occupied Jerusalem and that his visit constitutes "a great support for the Palestinian cause and people."

The Egyptian awqaf minister represents a ruling regime that has established close ties with Israel on all political, economic, and diplomatic levels. This regime exports gas to the Hebraic State at a very cheap price and imposes an oppressive blockade on two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in cooperation with the Israeli government. As such, it is only natural that he should see nothing wrong in travel to occupied Jerusalem and to put on record a precedent encouraging others to follow suit.

Regrettably, Dr Zaqzuq sticks to his position, desperately defending it and not hesitating to announce that he will visit occupied Jerusalem upon getting the necessary visa from the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. He denies that his step is within the framework of normalization of ties with Israel. This insistence on normalization of ties by the Egyptian awqaf minister comes at a time when the Coptic Pope, Shanudah, refuses to permit his church parishioners to visit occupied Jerusalem despite the enormous pressure on him by the Egyptian government, which reached the point of supporting calls to rebel against him and foment divisions among the followers of his church.

We in Al-Quds al-Arabi back Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi's fatwa which incriminates all calls for and all forms of normalization of ties with Israel as long as the territories remain under occupation and face continued grabbing by the successive Israeli governments, which reject peace and continue to commit war crimes in the Gaza Strip and in south Lebanon.

Visits to the occupied territories by Muslim religious clerics and senior officials will only serve to legitimize the Israeli occupation and give a misleading picture to the world about Israel's tolerance towards other religions at a time when it Judiazes Arab mosques and churches in the holy city, undermines the foundations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and implements plans to partition it, if not, in fact, it is seeking to demolish it by the excavations under its foundations.

So in fact Zuqzouq is way outside the mainstream of the Muslim world when he says that Muslims should visit Jerusalem. Qaradawi has a huge following.

Of course, the irony is that the leader of the Palestinian Arab Waqf also wants Muslims to visit Jerusalem. PA waqf minister Mahmoud Habash just released a statement saying that Qaradawi's fatwa plays into the hands of the "occupation."

Here is yet one more example where the Arab world will actively oppose doing what Palestinian Arabs want them to do - and they say they are doing it to help Palestinian Arabs! This fatwa helps isolate the PalArabs from their supposed brethren and it is meant to perpetuate the status-quo of millions of Palestinian Arabs in misery.

It reminds one of the Arab League's first act, to declare a boycott against Palestinian Jews back in 1946, a move bitterly opposed by the Palestinian Arabs of the day - yet the ones who broke the boycott ended up getting targeted themselves, many fatally. But it was all done in "solidarity" with the people who bear the brunt of that decision.

The Western world still cannot wrap their heads around the fact that Arabs have been the ones treating Palestinian Arabs like dirt for over six decades. The intra-Arab hate gets lost in the blinding brightness of their loathing of Jews/Zionists, so clueless Westerners think that Arab nations really stand in solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs.

In fact, they are the ones who are the architects of Palestinian Arab misery, and they have been for a long, long time.

A small example of self-censorship in Gaza

The Palestinian Arab Ma'an website has a short article:

Relations between Hamas and Islamic Jihad are "not tense at all," a Hamas spokesman said Monday.

Sami Abu Zuhri told journalists that the relationship between the two Islamist movements "is strategic. We believe there are stable relations with Islamic Jihad at the highest levels."

The spokesman said his movement consults Islamic Jihad on matters related to "the Palestinian people's interest, and there is field coordination between the movements as efforts to develop better relations are ongoing."

The Hamas official's comments follow a dispute between combatants affiliated to both movements.

The supposed news site, which Western journalists rely on, never had an article describing what the dispute between the movements was to begin with.

In reality, as I mentioned yesterday, there was a short but significant gunbattle between the two last Thursday as well as other recent incidents.

But Ma'an is loathe to report on anything that might anger Hamas, and has been since the Hamas coup when their offices were "visited" by the terror group in charge. Since then, the only time you can see any stories like this are when Hamas officially comments on the story - which they were forced to do because pro-Fatah Arabic newspapers, based out of the West Bank, did not face the same fear and reported about the incidents.

One can assume that Western reporters in Gaza share the same fear that Ma'an does, and would not report anything that makes Hamas look bad.

I've seen this scenario happen often, where the first time various stories get reported is when Hamas issues a statement.

In the end, Hamas ends up having nearly full control over the story. Westerners remain clueless of the real situation in Gaza, instead relying on "eyewitnesses" who are given guided tours of parts of Gaza by people with their own agendas and who spout off statistics that may or may not be accurate, but are invariably believed.

The irony is that Hamas will respond to media reports, as this story illustrates. But since Western reporters are too scared and lazy to challenge Hamas in any way, Hamas gets a free pass in English. In short, the Western media - which should be a watchdog and hold leaders accountable for their actions - is happy to ignore totalitarian leaders in cases such as these, in order to protect themselves and in order to keep their own false memes of Gaza alive.