Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 28, 2011

Hamas apologist thrilled with Islamist victory in Tunisia

Tunisia's main Islamist party Ennahda was officially declared winner of the national vote on Thursday, the first election of the Arab Spring.

Prominent Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh lauded the democratic vote, and said Ennahda's victory demonstrated the "resilience and tenacity of Islam" in the nation where the moderate Islamist group was banned before its January revolution.

Amayreh, writing for Hamas-affiliated news site Palestinian Information Center, said Tunisia can be "a model to be followed and emulated throughout the Arab world."

Ma'an fails to mention that Amayreh is a virulent anti-semite, liar and nutcase .

Nevertheless, it is useful to read exactly what Amayreh wrote that Ma'an ignored, and read between the lines of what he desires to see in Tunisia:

We Muslims are not against true democracy, a significant, accumulative human experience which can't be dismissed lightly. None the less, we are convinced a million per cent that Islam is inherently superior to democracy.

...With all due respect to the committed believers in western democracy, we Muslims don't believe in this way of thinking because peoples and nations ought to be answerable to values that are higher and more sublime than simple majorities.

Muslims in particular ought to seek Islamic democracy where human rights and civil liberties are guaranteed while general moral values of society are preserved and encouraged. Thus moral vices shouldn't be accorded the same freedoms as moral virtues.

Meaning, Islamic law is far more important than the "simple majority" will of the people.

Amayreh pointedly ignores the fact that while the Ennahda party won a plurality, it did not win the majority - nor can it put together a majority coalition with only Islamist groups. It will need to partner with some hated secularists. So his concept of "true democracy" seems to indicate that when Islamists win less than half the vote, they can impose their will on the "simple majority." I doubt that he would be as happy with coalition politics if somehow the secular parties of Tunisia could put together a larger coalition than the Islamists.

Amayreh's - and Hamas' - concept of "Islamic democracy" is one where democracy is only useful as long as it pushes an Islamic agenda. If not, then it is illegitimate.

Which means that "Islamic democracy" has nothing to do with democracy.

Ma'ariv reports of Abbas plan to dissolve PA

I reported Wednesday that there were rumors that Mahmoud Abbas might announce that he would dissolve the Palestinian Authority if he doesn't get his state, in the Palestinian Arab version of a temper tantrum.

Ma'ariv is quoting a senior Palestinian Arab official as saying that the PA has created detailed plans in case it decides to do just that.

According to the article, Abbas requested a contingency plan be drawn up on how to transfer various responsibilities from the PA to Israel, starting with health, education and tourism and ending with security.

There is an interesting subtext here. Many Israelis have said publicly that "occupation" is a disaster for Israel and that it would ultimately result in the destruction of the state. Abbas is not threatening Israel with war or terror; he is threatening it with the fear that Israeli liberals have instilled in some parts of Israeli society.

If an Israeli government would simply say that it is willing to accept the responsibilities of controlling the territories, then this entire plan would blow up.

Israel's leaders could go beyond that, mentioning that it would be nice for Israelis to be able to go shopping in Nablus and Ramallah again - as they did before the first intifada. It would help the economy of Arab communities in the territories. More Arabs could be employed in Jewish communities.

Whether or not this is true, calling Abbas' bluff publicly would be the fastest way to kill it. There is no way that Palestinian Arabs would accept their leader saying that he will do something Israel likes.

Arab lives really are cheaper - to Arabs

Ha'aretz publishes a ridiculously anti-Israel piece by Alon Idan that mirrors Deborah Orr's absurd, antisemitic Guardian article.

Idan writes:

The fact is, the release of one Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners is not normal; certainly it does not represent an inferior love felt by a Palestinian mother for her son compared to an Israeli mother.

As it turns out, such price lists and equations reflect the Israeli consciousness and what's inside. In the Israeli consciousness, the relation between the life of a Palestinian and the value of a Jewish Israeli is derived with mathematical certainty, 1:1,027, meaning that an Israeli life is as important as that of 1,027 Palestinians. This equation derives from the way we, not Hamas, view reality: 1,027 Palestinians are worth one Jewish life not because the Palestinians minimize the importance of their own lives, but because we diminish the value of their lives. This is a mirror image of the prejudice we Israelis harbor and which has enabled the immoral activities we have sponsored for dozens of years.

The equation inherent in Gilad Shalit's release is a trivial by-product of market economics that features the price of a Jew and the price of an Arab, according to how these values are rated by the wealthy buy-side, the Israelis. This is the capitalism seen in the cottage cheese controversy, only this time it features human beings. Its racist foundations are exploited by the oppressed side to gain bargaining power.

The Shalit deal is, in fact, a public display of Israel's racist price index. The ceremony occurs every few years, and the index is designed to update the market values of the region's various races. As of October 2011, in the Israeli market, the price of one Jew equals 1,027 Arabs. And the price increases every day.

In Idan's crazy mind, Israel is happy to exchange more and more terrorists in every such deal because it regards their lives as worthless anyway. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the value that Israel places on her own people; it is only about racism.

Beyond that truly insane logic, Idan is willfully overlooking the simple fact that, by any yardstick, Palestinian Arabs do not value their own lives as much as Israelis do. And this is not a racist statement - it is provable.

Why else would they demand to trade 1000 Arab prisoners for 1 Israeli to begin with?
Why else would they be killing their own civilians (as they were in Gaza in 2006) by the hundreds?
Why else would they produce TV shows encouraging their children to want to die?
Why else would they celebrate whenever they kill Jewish civilians in Israel, while no Jews celebrate the death of Arab civilians?
Why do they teach Palestinian Arab mothers to rejoice when their sons die while killing Jews?
Why does the Palestinian Arab culture even consider the idea of honor killings to somehow be less reprehensible than murder?

In fact, the one nation that seems to care the most about Arab lives is Israel. Israel spends enormous effort and money to minimize civilian deaths in its operations, and the ratio of civilians to militants killed in Cast Lead, about 1:1, is far lower than in any war ever waged by Arabs - and indeed lower than any war waged by Western nations as well. Israel literally spends millions on smart bombs that they can and do divert at the last second if they see a civilian, rather than just aiming and firing and hoping for the best. In Jenin, Israel recklessly risked its own soldiers lives to minimize Arab civilian deaths. Israel continued to provide medical services to Palestinian Arabs even after their terror leaders in Gaza took advantage of that fact by sending a female suicide bomber to blow up the hospital she was being treated at. Israel spends thousands of man-hours painstakingly investigating the deaths of Arab civilians killed during conflict, and punishes soldiers who are reckless with the lives of Arabs - something you simply will not see on the Arab side of the conflict.

So yes, Mr. Idan, I am afraid that Palestinian Arab lives really are cheaper to Arabs than they are to Israelis - by any measure.

(part of this was written in a 2006 post. See also this 2005 post on the same topic, as well as this Israellycool post today.)

(h/t Avram P)

The amazing time-traveling stone thrower

Ma'an reports:

Israeli authorities released on Tuesday Omar Jaradat, 11, from Saeer village north of Hebron after five months in the Israeli prison Ofer. He also paid a 5,000-shekel fine.

Israeli forces tried to forbid people who were waiting for the child near the checkpoint from welcoming him and tried to remove Palestinian flags that were on cars near the checkpoint.

The released prisoner spoke of harsh conditions inside the jails. He said that as winter approaches, there are few clothes for the prisoners and the authorities prevent families from providing them.

Naturally, the idea of an eleven year old kid being in jail for five months was too delicious for the anti-Israel crowd to resist. You can find tweets and articles about the poor kid.

So where were the headlines when he was put in jail to begin with?

From PCHR, last June:

At approximately 03:00, IOF moved into Sa’ir village, northeast of Hebron. They raided and searched a house belonging to the family of ‘Omar Mahmoud Jaradat, 17, and arrested him.

The Arabic version of the report also says he was 17, and was arrested for throwing stones.

A Ma'an Arabic article from last July quotes the Prisoners Society as saying that Jaradat was 17 at the time of his arrest as well.

I found a forum from his hometown congratulating him on his release, but it just calls him "young."

And this YouTube video slideshow of lots of photos of someone with his name was uploaded a few weeks after his arrest, so it may very well be a tribute to him as a prisoner.

This Omar Jaradat is not 11.

So how did a 17 year old turn into an 11 year old, in both the Arabic and English versions of Ma'an? Moreover, both versions imply that a reporter was there during the release - is it possible a reporter doesn't know the difference between an 11 year old and a 17 year old?

(Ma'an's editor tells me he will check this out and correct the article if he finds that the innocent 11 year old is in fact 17 or 18 now. As of seven hours later, there is no correction.)

UPDATE: Here's a different YouTube video made in September showing pictures of "the captive Omar Jaradat and his friends" with photos of a teenager along with Saddam Hussein, Arafat, guns and other interesting items.

Half a cheer - Ilan Grapel is in Israel

I'm glad he is out of Egypt, but I cannot find it in myself to be so happy that a stupid kid who was yelling anti-American slogans in Egypt is being treated with any honor.

He's an idiot whose misguided idealism and naivete cost Israel, the country he loves, a great deal.

I'm more worried about Egypt taking the next Grapel hostage than Hamas trying to find another Shalit.

UNRWA teachers' strikes in Gaza resume

The conflict between the Hamas-dominated teachers' union and UNRWA has resumed after a short period of time to celebrate the arrival of terrorists in the territory.

The union announced a teachers' strike next week from Sunday to Thursday, and there were more protests today.

As usual, UNRWA's website ignores the issue.

The major demand by the union is to be able to openly associate with terror groups. Their president was suspended from his job by UNRWA because of his open ties to Hamas, and the teachers are demanding he get his job back.

As I mentioned earlier this month, this is turning into a much larger issue, as Hamas is challenging UNRWA altogether because it is forced to adhere to a bare minimum of ethical behavior by its major Western donors. Hamas has challenged and defeated every potential rival in Gaza, and UNRWA - which is avowedly non-political although of course it has no problem insulting Israel at every opportunity - is the one major player that is still nominally independent of Hamas.

Iranian expelled from chess tournament for refusing to play an Israeli

From NYT:

One of Iran’s top grandmasters was expelled from an international chess tournament on Tuesday after he refused to play a match against an Israeli opponent, the director of the tournament said.

The Iranian, Ehsan Ghaem Maghami, was scheduled to play Ehud Shachar in the fourth round of the Corsica Masters, a pairing determined by computer. The director, Léo Battesti, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Maghami had asked him to change the pairing, but was told that doing so would violate tournament rules. Mr. Maghami then failed to appear at the scheduled time to play Mr. Shachar.

Mr. Battesti said Mr. Maghami should have told him beforehand that he would object to playing an Israeli. Given that five of the 186 players in the tournament were Israelis, the likelihood that he would face one during the tournament’s nine rounds was “99 percent,” Mr. Battesti said. “I told him, you cannot involve your rules in my tournament,” he said.

Jeffrey Goldberg links to Battesti's statement:

Iranian grandmaster Ehsan Gahem Maghami informed me of his refusal to play against his fourth round opponent, Israeli Fide Master Ehud Shachar. I told Mr. Gahem Maghami that as an organizer of a international sporting competition I could not accede to his request to change the pairings, so that he could play against another player. The presence of five Israeli players in this tournament was known to all participants since Saturday, October 22. It honors our competition, as does the presence of Iranian players and those from about thirty other nationalities. The motto of our Federation is gens una sumus, we are developing in Corsica an awareness of the positive aspects of the chess sport on our youth. Being complicit to any form of segregation would be unworthy, and in total contradiction with the foundations of our sporting activities. So regretfully I have to exclude the player who unfortunately has stuck to his choice, in spite of my entreaties. I regret it, but I could not shirk our responsabilities.

Since this is turning into a regular news story, and it is clear that no Iranian is going to participate in any match with an Israeli out of fear of retribution by his nation, perhaps it is time to ban Iran from sporting competitions altogether until it renounces this pretty-much official policy.

Free e-book: RAND analysis of Lebanon, Gaza wars

The RAND Corporation has released a 400 page e-book, Operations in Israel’s War Against Hezbollah: Learning from Lebanon and Getting it Right in Gaza, by Benjamin S. Lambeth.

I have only skimmed it but it appears to be a tremendous work of research. Lambeth has written other works, primarily about air campaigns.

He had access to many IDF and IAF officials in researching this.

Here are parts of a review by the Israel Defense website. Unfortunately, the website truncated the review.

Operations in Israel’s War Against Hezbollah: “Learning from Lebanon and Getting it Right in Gaza,” the new book from Dr. Benjamin Lambeth, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation, is a major contribution to the understanding of the Second Lebanon War of 2006 and the Gaza campaign of 2008-2009. ‏

It fulfills all the criteria for military-academic research and I believe it will undoubtedly serve as a springboard for further research in the field. ‏Dr. Lambeth presents his readers with a vast amount of information on the war, explains the key issues, and offers a balanced, tempered criticism. ‏The opening chapters describe the main combat operations, air power acheivements, central issues, and some sections of the Winograd Commission’s Final Report.

The material here is rather well known to most Israelis who are interested in the war and its concequences, but nevertheless, it is of great value to the target audience: foreign military persons, scholars, and politicians. ‏These chapters are certainly objective although one senses the author’s great sympathy toward Israel, the IDF, and the Israeli Air Force (IAF). ‏

A particular chapter deals with Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 through January 2009. The author carefully describes the preparations and particularly, the encouragement for cooperation between the air and ground forces. The campaign is also depicted accurately and in painstaking detail, beginning with the aerial attack that lasted six days, followed by the ineffective ground fighting, and later the ceasefire. ‏ I must admit that Lambeth’s conclusion that Operation Cast Lead was a success is puzzling. He completely identifies with the Israeli consensus that the lessons of the Second Lebanon

War had been learned and implemented; and that warfighting skills had vastly improved at the outcome of the campaign. Furthermore, the study goes to great lengths to exonerate Israel of any moral misconduct during the campaign. In my opinon both issues are open to debate. ‏The last chapter and the conclusions are the most important.

A basic approach toward the Second Lebanon War is the main factor for its radically different assessments—mainly between those who were responsible for the strategic decision-making, and those who meticoulusly study the war. ‏The first appraoch examined the war as an independent clash, and came to a balanced conclusion that, although far from a success story, Israel had made some important acheivements. ‏

The other approach compared it to previous successful wars, campaigns, and operations in Lebanon; beginning with Operation “Litani” (1978), through the First Lebanon War (1982), and finally, “Operation of Accountability” (1994). The Second Lebanon War is considered a resounding failure for its insignificant political and military achievements. Dr. Lambeth prefered the former approach.

‏The author bravely criticizes some of the military issues in the two wars. He denounces the critics who claim that Dan Halutz, then-chief of staff, was unsuited for his role, and outlines his experience, abilities, and suitability for the position. Dr. Lambeth argues that the decision for an aerial attack stemmed from the fact that, no one in the government wanted a ground operation that might incur many casualties. ‏He strongly condemns, and rightly so, the effects-based strategy (borrowed from the US by IAF and IDF ground forces), that caused considerable damage to the IAF’s aerial strategy. Commanders like Gal Hirsh (91st Division Commander) and Dan Halutz (Chief of Staff) always “pay the price,” whereas General Staff officers (who play a decisive role in modern wars) evade responsibility for their decisions and the consequences of their errors.

It looks like a very worthwhile read if you are a military junkie.

(h/t Yoel)

Report: Hezbollah preparing for war - and to conquer the Galilee

From Lebanon's Naharnet:

Hizbullah is preparing its military arsenal and fighters to launch an operation to occupy the Galilee area in Israel, al-Joumhouria newspaper reported on Thursday.

The party’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s on February 16 sent “military notification… declaring that preparations to occupy the Galilee is ongoing,” a source close to Hizbullah told the daily.

“Hizbullah began preparing after the 2006 war for any new confrontation with the enemy,” the source said.

Nasrallah called on the Resistance fighters in a speech on February 16 to stand ready to occupy the Galilee area should another war "be imposed on Lebanon," in a response to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s threats to invade Lebanon once again.

Al-Akhbar daily also reported that Nasrallah has warned that Tel Aviv will be the first target in any war Israel decides to launch against Lebanon.

Security sources told the daily that “the resistance leadership was secretly on high alert after receiving reports that Israel will probably launch a war on Lebanon.”

“Obtained information confirmed these reports, showing that it was supposed to take place in August, however, changes occurred at the last minute,” the source said.

Sources told al-Joumhouria that the “resistances’ military preparations are ongoing.”

According to information obtained by the daily, a delegation from Hizbullah military experts visited areas in Bekaa and the South to check on the resistances’ positions, while 727 fighters from Hizbullah finished their military training in Tehran.

“Israel will be surprised by attacks from within the Israeli towns via the Palestinian resistance cells,” sources told the daily.

They added that “the battles will be on the Israeli grounds; therefore targeting the Galilee is a definite option.”

The sources didn’t rule out Syria’s participation in the war “especially if the interior situation deteriorated further more.”

Iran’s Fars news Agency reported that Syrian President Bashar Assad has warned that he would “set fire" to the Middle East if foreign forces launched a military strike on his country and would ask for Hizbullah’s help to attack Israel.

The al Joumhouria article details the military objectives of different Hezbollah brigades, including taking over specific Israeli Arab villages in the Galilee.

Just another peaceful day in the Middle East.

(h/t Yoel)

Jordan's king worried Israel is pushing "Jordan is Palestine"

Jordan's King Abdullah was interviewed by the Washington post at the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea this week. He says some interesting things when he talks about Israel:

I heard that Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, is coming to Jordan.

Because of the loss of Egypt’s political leadership, the rest of us are having to step up. On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Jordan’s relationship with the Palestinians has had to take a step forward.

You support Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s request for U.N. membership?

Yes, we do. It is out of desperation and frustration that they are going to the U.N. I think part of the problem is that in the U.S., you have your other [domestic] priorities.. . .

I think the [Obama] administration would be very wary to step out front without guarantees on the Israeli-Palestinian process, which is a shame because it is desperately needed now.

[The Arab Spring] is a disaster for Israel, isn’t it?

Don't you love leading questions?

You have seen what has happened in Egypt [and] Turkey. We are actually the last man standing with our relationship with Israel.

The Israelis are worried the Egyptians will break the [peace] treaty.

That is a very, very strong possibility.

Do you intend to support Jordan’s treaty with Israel?

We have a peace treaty with Israel and will continue to do so because it helps both parties.

A lot of Israelis think your recent statements have been hostile.

What I am saying is they are missing an opportunity here and I am very concerned. This is the most frustrated I have ever been about the peace process. I think a lot of us have come to the conclusion that this particular [Israeli] government is not interested in a two-state solution.

What did you think of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deal with Hamas to release an Israeli soldier ?

It is politics at the end of the day.

It was strange for Israel to be negotiating with Hamas.

I think all of us have been asking each other, what is the Israeli government’s true intention right now? Since I am not convinced there is an interest in a two-state solution, the question I am asking is: What is Plan B?

According to Palestine Press Agency, Abdullah accused Netanyahu of pushing the "Jordan is Palestine" idea and overthrowing the Jordanian government to replace it with Palestinians.

I believe that the newspaper is misinterpreting a Ma'ariv article about the interview. Ma'ariv quotes some Western intelligence officials that Avigdor Lieberman is pushing the "Jordan is Palestine" idea where Arabs in the West Bank would become Jordanian nationals. The Ma'ariv report goes on to say that Hamas is looking to relocate its headquarters from Syria to Amman, which would pave the way for a Palestinian takeover of Jordan - and that Israel would support it!

I have been told by a well-known Jordanian dissident that the fear of the "Jordan is Palestine" plan is very high in Jordan - and that many secular Palestinian Arabs support the idea, as an alternative to Jordan falling to an Arab Spring-type theocracy. In other words, the theory goes, secular Palestinian Arabs would be a much better - and democratic - alternative to the Hashemites who are, they say, cooperating with the Islamists.

Obviously Israel would not want Hamas in Amman, and if Abdullah is making that claim then perhaps he is trying to stymie the secular Palestinian Arabs in Jordan by associating them with Hamas as well as with Zionists. Taken in this light, Abdullah's words turn from pragmatic-sounding to an Arab dictator who wants to save his own skin.

(h/t Yoel)

"Moderate" Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) gave a speech yesterday at a Revolutionary Council of Fatah meeting. He spoke about a wide range of topics, from the UN and UNESCO stunts to his bizarre and fictional recollections of history saying that Obama had promised a Palestinian Arab state by September.

One part of his speech was notable. He recalled fondly the Fatah kidnapping of Shmuel Rosenwasser in 1970 (he said it was in 1968) and how Fatah demanded that Israel release Mahmoud Bakr Hijazi, who was arrested while trying to blow up Israel's water infrastructure in Fatah's first terror attack.

He then said that the Shalit deal was not the first, nor would it be the last.

Since there are currently no Israelis in Palestinian Arab hands, this indicates that Abbas is not as much against kidnapping Israelis as he pretends to be.

Palestine Today reports that tomorrow, Hamas will hold yet another public celebration of the released terrorists with a "majestic procession."

Some 40 horses will parade through Beit Lahiya, and "Ismail Haniyeh and a large number of Hamas leaders and lawmakers and leaders of Palestinian factions and the notables and dignitaries" will attend.

Not only that, but the Qassam Brigades terrorist group will march as well.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Now, this is black humor

The anti-Israel "occupy" protesters in the video I embedded earlier today mentioned that there was an Israeli film festival in Chicago that they want to censor.

I just looked at the films being shown there, and one of them shows that terrorism has given Israelis the blackest humor on the planet.

Here is the description of short comedy feature Qassamba:

Yossi is a 3rd year student in the Sapir College near Sderot. One day, Yossi meets Michal in the Shelter during a “Red Color" alarm and he falls in love. The problem is that Michal rarely visits Yossi's Campus. Yossi reallizes that he will only be able to see her again if he arranges "Code Red" alarm during Michal's visits, therfore, Yossi and his roomate Simon close a deal with two Hamas activists.

Unexpectedly, it turns out that almost everyone in the campus, has an interest in having a "Code Red" alarm at a certain point in time. Including the College President.

The love story between Yossi and Michal leads to an upside-down world in which Qassam rockets play a positive role….

The trailer:

When you are always in danger of being blown up at random, one way to cope is by joking about it.

I happen to like this kind of humor, but I imagine it would offend a lot of people. (And that others would happily use it against Israel, but what else is new?)

(h/t Ian)

Tomorrow is Keffiyeh Day at Occupy Wall Street!

From Existence Is Resistance:

Leila Khaled, terrorist airplane hijacker

Friday, October 28 · 5:30pm – 8:30pm
Liberty Plaza: The Occupation Of Wall Street

In support of Palestinian political prisoners, most significantly Majd Ziada, EIR (Existence is Resistance) will be hosting a Kuffeya Day at Liberty Plaza to spread awareness and gather petition signatures which will later be delivered to Israeli authorities which are scheduled to release an additional number of prisoners within 2 months.

In solidarity with the people of Palestine, we are asking that on Oct. 28th everyone come to Liberty Plaza wearing their Kuffeya. EIR will be on site silk screening shirts for a $2 donation.

(Yes, the photo of terrorist Leila Khaled illustrates the posting.)

Majd Zaida drove the getaway car in the shooting of a mailman in an Israeli community in Yesha. The victim was in fact an Arab, which is being cited as a mitigating factor by the people who want his release - which shows that even they believe that Arab lives aren't as valuable as Jewish lives!

While explicit anti-semitism has occurred at the "occupy" protests, it seems to be somewhat fringe. However, the anti-Israel crowd is quite prominent at these protests. This is not surprising, because the major Western anti-Israel movements are led by socialist and communist groups who are also leading these anti-capitalist rallies.

Here's a video taken yesterday in Chicago, where the bizarre ritual of repeating whatever nonsense is stated by anyone with a megaphone is shown:

As I mentioned earlier this month, the biggest market for Palestinian Arab-manufactured keffiyehs is now anti-Israel activists, not Palestinian Arabs themselves. They stand to make a killing by selling their products to anti-capitalists - at a 600% markup!

(h/t Onion Tears News)

Report: Israel dropped opposition to F16 sale for Grapel, Tarabin

From YNet:

The Palestinian Maan news agency reported Thursday that the United States has agreed to sell Egypt several F-16 fighter jets in order to facilitate the release of Israeli-American Ilan Grapel. Israel had opposed similar sales in the past.

Grapel, who was arrested in June on espionage charges, is slated to be released later on Thursday. Israel will release 25 Egyptian prisoners in return.

According to the Ma'an report, Israeli Bedouin Ouda Tarabin - imprisoned in Egypt for a decade - was a large factor in the Grapel negotiations.

Originally, there were reports that Israel would trade all 81 Egyptian prisoners but Isrsel told Egypt that Grapel simply was not that important to them - but Tarabin was.

Under the previous Egyptian regime, Mubarak refused to deal Tarabin, claiming that Egyptians would rise up against him if he would.

Israel had been opposed to the F-16 deal for security reasons, and as part of this deal Israel is dropping its objections. In addition, the report says that Israel will also drop its Camp David demands of a limited Egyptian army presence in the Sinai. Israel's apology to Egypt for the deaths of several Egyptian soldiers during a terror attack in August also came into play in this deal, according to the report.

What this all comes down to is that Grapel, and Tarabin, are not prisoners. They are hostages. And while the price is not as high as in the Shalit deal, Israel is rewarding Egypt for acting like a terrorist group. (I cannot say that the US is doing the same, as it appears that America wanted to sell the F-16s to Egypt for a while and it was Israeli opposition that stopped it.)

It would be the height of folly for anyone with Israeli citizenship, or even for Jews with Israeli relatives, to visit Egypt.

(Palestine Today says that the deal involves F-16s "and other weapons.")

Tel Aviv U. scientists perform...levitation

We might still be able to make Marty McFly's 2015 hoverboard...

The science behind it:

(h/t jzaik)

What "justice" means (poster)

As a follow-up to this post last month about how "justice" is a code-word used to justify the destruction of Israel....

Indeed, the extremists are the ones who set the agenda by having veto power over anything they don't like. But beyond that, the very definition of "justice" used by the anti-Israel crowd is one where only one side is allowed to demand it and decide when or if they ever get it.

The New Libya - run by Sharia law (video)

Meet the new boss.

I like how the (male) crowd goes wild over the idea of polygamy.

(h/t Yoel)

A Muslim writes: What we can learn from Gilad Shalit

From Alt.Muslim (and at least one other Muslim site) by a Chicago doctor named Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa:

As Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas more than five years ago, was finally released in a vast prisoner exchange, it made me think about the relentless pursuit of his release by Israel. Such a pursuit by one's family is both natural and understandable. Yet, not only was his family behind him, but the entire nation of Israel was behind him. So many times, Israelis - from government on down - mentioned that they will never abandon one of their own. No matter how one feels about the Arab-Israeli conflict, it must be said that the tenacity of the Israeli people over Gilad Shalit is truly admirable. I even saw someone wearing a shirt saying "Free Gilad Shalit" during the 2011 Chicago Marathon this year. And it begs a very important question: do we as Muslims have this same tenacity over "our people"?

Sadly, the answer is "no." In so many places around the world, Muslims are being slaughtered like animals, and the Muslim world hardly lifts a finger for their aid. Ideally, NATO warplanes should not have had to intervene in the Libyan civil war, because it should have been Muslims on the ground and in their air helping their own brothers and sisters defeat a maniacal and murderous madman. Rather than help the people of Bahrain gain more freedom for themselves, the Saudi government sent in its own troops to make sure the people's voices were not heard at all. Yes, Muslims all over the world rightly decry the injustice being committed against the Palestinian people. Yet, when some Muslims commit the very same injustices against their own people, the cries of condemnation by other Muslims are sometimes not as fierce or loud.

When Muslims were being massacred by fellow Muslims in Darfur - the silence of the worldwide Muslim community was deafening. And now as the Arab Spring turns into the Arab Autumn and Winter, there does not seem to be a credible response of the Muslim world to the daily murder of people in Syria and other places. Gilad Shalit knew that, no matter what, the entire Israeli nation had his back. Does the Muslim world have the back of its own, as its Lord had commanded it to do? Sadly, the answer is "no."

And what's worse, the response of some Muslims to the slaughter of their fellow Muslims around the world is - in and of itself - horrific and barbaric. A newspaper publishes provocative cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), seeking to intentionally provoke Muslims, and some Muslims respond with violence and property damage: the very thing the publishers of the cartoons wanted to show the world. Elsewhere, pitiful bands of misguided "holy warriors" claim to be defending Muslims by committing mass murder and mayhem, causing much more damage and strife to the entire world Muslim community. With "friends" like these, as they say, who needs enemies? Again I ask the question: does the Muslim world have the back of its own, as its Lord commanded it to do? Sadly, the answer is "no."

The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was reported to have said, "Wisdom is the lost property of the believer, so wherever he finds it, he has more of a right to it." There is nothing wrong with learning from the good qualities of another people and seeking to make them our own.

Michael Oren, Israel's Ambassador to the United States, told NPR: "Israel is a democracy that has a citizens army. And when we send our sons and our daughters off to defend our country, they have to know that if they fall captive or, God forbid, anything worse happens to them, that the state will do everything in their power to get them back. And that is the source of our strength." We would be all the stronger if we had that same sort of commitment to our own people as Israel had to Gilad Shalit.

(h/t Callie)

Saddam, Israel and the Bomb. And Pokemon.

A few months ago an article was published by Hal Brands and David Palkki that took a detailed look at secret Iraqi documents to understand Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions. There is a lot of good information in there. Excerpts:

On March 27, 1979, Saddam Hussein, the de facto ruler and soon-to-be president of Baathist Iraq, laid out his vision for a long, grinding war against Israel in a private meeting of high-level Iraqi officials. Iraq, he explained, would seek to obtain a nuclear weapon from “our Soviet friends,” use the resulting deterrent power to counteract Israeli threats of nuclear retaliation, and thereby enable a “patient war”—a war of attrition—that would reclaim Arab lands lost in the Six-Day War of 1967. As Saddam put it, nuclear weapons would allow Iraq to “guarantee the long war that is destructive to our enemy, and take at our leisure each meter of land and drown the enemy with rivers of blood.” Saddam envisioned that this war would cost Iraq some 50,000 casualties, to say nothing of Israeli losses.

Until recently, scholars seeking to divine the inner workings of the Baathist regime were forced to resort to a kind of Kremlinology, relying heavily on published sources as well as the occasional memoir or defector’s account. This is now decreasingly the case. The transcript of the March 1979 meeting is one of millions of Baathist state records captured during and after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. These records, many of which are now being made available to scholars, include everything from routine correspondence to recordings and transcripts of top-level meetings between Saddam and his advisers. When combined with previously available primary and secondary sources, they illustrate the dynamics of the regime and the logic of Saddam’s statecraft to an unprecedented degree.

The Iraqi records indicate that the views Saddam expressed in March 1979 did not constitute a mere rhetorical flourish or an aberration in his strategic thought. In meetings and discussions with his top military and civilian advisers between 1978 and 1982, Saddam repeatedly returned to the subject of how an Iraqi nuclear capability could be used against Israel. This was a critical strategic and identity issue for Saddam. Although Saddam styled himself as the transcendent leader who would unite the Arabs and defeat the “Zionist entity,” in private he concluded that Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East made taking major military action to accomplish this goal an unacceptably risky proposition. In the face of an Iraqi or Arab attack, Saddam believed, Israel could simply threaten to use nuclear weapons against its enemies, thereby forcing them to halt their advance.

Saddam came to see nuclear weapons as a powerful coercive tool for dealing with Israel. Saddam’s aim was not to launch a surprise first strike against Israel; rather, he believed that an Iraqi bomb would neutralize Israeli nuclear threats, force the Jewish state to fight at the conventional level, and thereby allow Iraq and its Arab allies to prosecute a prolonged war that would displace Israel from the territories occupied in 1967. In short, Saddam expected that an unconventional arsenal would permit Iraq to achieve a conventional victory, thereby weakening Israel geopolitically and making him a hero to the Arab world. Although Saddam expressed this view most frequently in the period before his regime suffered two major geopolitical setbacks in the early 1980s—the Israeli attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and the downturn in Baghdad’s military fortunes in the Iran-Iraq War— he did return to this same basic logic at least once in the late 1980s, and he seems to have reluctantly relinquished the idea only after the 1990–91 war and its aftermath crippled Iraq’s advanced weapons programs and severely constrained Iraqi power.

While various observers have argued that the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 merely convinced Saddam of Israel’s hostility and led him to redouble his efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, the captured records do not indicate that the opposite course—permitting Iraqi nuclear development to proceed—would have been the wiser choice for Israeli offcials at that time.Indeed, in these records Saddam makes the case for preventive Israeli action far more persuasively than Israel’s own ofªcials could have done at the time.

Because Saddam believed that he was destined to lead the Arab world in confronting Israeli designs, for him it followed logically that the Jewish state placed special emphasis on targeting his regime. During the roughly thirty years in which Saddam dominated Iraqi politics, he and his advisers identifed a wide variety of nefarious Israeli intrigues. ...One of the more ludicrous accusations of Zionist perfidy came in 2001, when the Directorate of General Security (DGS) reported to Saddam that the television series Pokemon was in fact an Israeli plot to contaminate the minds of Iraqi youths. “Pokemon” was Hebrew for “I’m Jewish,” the DGS reported.

Saddam’s perceptions of Israeli perfidy were also colored by the anti-Semitism that suffused his worldview. Saddam often claimed in public that his opposition to Israel was based on anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism, a stance that was well suited to the international political climate of the 1970s, when the “Zionism is racism” campaign was at its height. As a review of the Iraqi records makes clear, however, there was no clean divide between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Saddam’s thinking. Saddam often referred to Israelis as “the Jews,” and anti-Semitic ideas were ubiquitous in his private comments on Jews and Israel. Discussing Israeli politics, Saddam referred to “the Jews” as nefarious, clever characters. “This is the way the Jews are,” he said. “I mean, they are smart, or, rather, wicked.”

The sense that Jews and Israelis were devious individuals motivated by sinister designs was a virtual article of faith within the Iraqi regime. At Iraq’s Special Security Institute, students were told that “spying, sabotage, and treachery are an old Jewish craft because the Jewish character has all the attributes of a spy.” This assessment fit nicely with Saddam’s own beliefs. In one extended monologue on the subject, Saddam told his inner circle that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a notorious anti-Semitic forgery) was an accurate representation of Jewish/Israeli aims. “The Zionists are greedy—I mean the Jews are greedy,” he said. “Whenever any issue relates to the economy, their greed is very high.” Indeed, Saddam believed that the Protocols provided a blueprint of sorts for understanding Israeli designs: “We should reflect on all that we were able to learn from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. . . . We should identify the methods adopted by these hostile Zionist forces; we already know their objectives. "

Saddam believed that the conflict would be a pan-Arab war under Iraqi leadership. On some occasions, he indicated that the outright destruction of Israel was envisioned; more often, Saddam seemed to foresee military action designed simply to force Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. [Footnote: For evidence of the more extreme aim of destroying Israel, see SH-SHTP-A-000-635, “President Saddam Hussein Meeting with Ministers”; SH-PDWN-D-000-341, “Speech at al-Bakr University”; and Kevin M. Woods, Williamson Murray, and Thomas Holaday, with Mounir Elkhamri, Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Military Perspective of the Iran-Iraq War, McNair Paper, No. 70 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2009), p. 94..]

...In 1981, an Israeli air raid destroyed the Osirak reactor, setting the Iraqi program back by several years.

After the destruction of the Osirak reactor, Saddam acknowledged that the Israeli airstrike was a reasonable response to Iraqi nuclear development. In one meeting, he bragged that Iraq’s technological progress “made Begin spend sleepless nights.” At another gathering with his advisers, he conceded, “Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq. . . . They might hit Iraq with an atomic bomb someday if we reach a certain stage. And we are prepared, and if God allows it, we will be ready to face it.”

In Saddam’s view, Israel had good reason to feel alarmed by Iraq’s growing power and technological advancements. The destruction of the Osirak reactor did not put an end to Saddam’s desire for a nuclear capability and an eventual collision with Israel. Saddam’s government reinvigorated the nuclear program during the 1980s, and by early 1990 Iraq was perhaps only a few years away from developing a rudimentary nuclear weapon. In a meeting in early 1990, Saddam predicted that Iraq would have “one or ten” nuclear weapons within a half-decade, and as before, he argued that these capabilities would make possible the liberation of Arab lands. “Now, if the Arabs were to have a nuclear bomb,” Saddam hypothesized, “wouldn’t they take the territories that were occupied after 1967?”

During the period between late 1988 and early 1990, in fact, Saddam again began to tout the idea of waging a war of liberation against Israel. Hamdani recalls that Saddam instructed the Republican Guard leadership to prepare for the eventual launching of such a conflict, and that his unit “continued training, attending lectures and workshops to raise our army’s standards in preparation for the war with the Zionists.”

During the Persian Gulf conflict in 1991, Saddam thus viewed his arsenal of chemical weapons, complemented by biological weapons and delivery systems, as a deterrent to Israeli nuclear retaliation. Saddam recognized that his chemical weapons were not as powerful as Israel’s nuclear weapons, yet told his advisers, “If we want to use chemicals, we will exterminate them, you know.” He boasted that Iraq had acquired chemical weapons whose destructive power was “200 times more” than that used against Iran, adding that at most one or two countries could match the quality or quantity of Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons arsenals.

As one of Saddam’s advisers told him prior to the Gulf War, Iraq’s acquisition of binary chemical weapons and longrange delivery systems had ended Israel’s regional dominance and replaced it with a balance of forces. This new “balance of forces” increased Saddam’s confidence in 1991 that he could attack Israel with conventional warheads without facing WMD reprisal. “Iraq is in possession of the binary chemical weapon,” Saddam told an interviewer a month before invading Kuwait. “According to our technical, scientific, and military calculations, this is a sufficient deterrent to confront the Israeli nuclear weapon.” The West was furious about Iraq’s acquisition of binary chemical weapons, he explained on another occasion, because “they thought they could strike us. Well, let them try.”

According to the state-controlled Iraqi media, the imperialists and Zionists had recognized Iraq’s new “parity with the Arab nation’s enemies.” For Saddam, chemical weapons were now playing the deterrent role that he had earlier intended for nuclear weapons.

The article does make clear that Iraqi work on nuclear weapons was severely curtailed after the 1991 Gulf war, but Saddam's obsession to acquire WMDs was no myth.

(h/t Zach N)