Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 20, 2012

For Jerusalem Day, AP pushes a Muslim lie

On the occasion of Jerusalem Day, AP has an article about how Jerusalem is important - to Muslims. (As of this writing, there is no AP article about Israel's celebrations of Jerusalem Day.)

Here is one part of the article that shows how lazy wire service reporters are in researching basic history and believing false Muslim narratives:

After decades of shying away from an ancient pilgrimage route, Muslims are visiting Jerusalem to pray at Islam's third-holiest site, the revered Al-Aqsa mosque....

While Islam's birthplace is in the Arabian Peninsula, Jerusalem is intimately tied with Islam's beginnings. Muhammad's first followers prayed toward Al-Aqsa and only later turned their prayers east to Mecca.

Muslims did indeed pray towards Jerusalem when they were trying to recruit Jews in the new religion around the year 625. (They changed this prayer direction to Mecca when the Jews refused to join them.) But the Al Aqsa Mosque wasn't built until 690.

AP, by implicitly claiming that the Al Aqsa Mosque was a holy site during Mohammed's time, is denying the Jewish claim to the site and upholding a false interpretation of the Koranic story of Mohammed's mystical night journey, where he says he traveled to "the farthest [al-Aqsa] mosque" on a flying horse, a site not identified as Jerusalem in the Koran itself.

(The classic article on this topic is by Daniel Pipes.)

An exercise for would-be hasbarists

Tomorrow night I will be part of a panel discussion held by the American Zionist Movement called "Israel in the Write Light" in New York City. Along with Commentary contributor/Tweeter extraordinaire Noah Pollak and Tablet senior editor Bari Weiss, we will be discussing how to effectively communicate pro-Israel messages.

I believe that knowing history is essential to being an advocate for Israel, and it takes practice to hone the historical arguments down to a form that can be read in a couple of minutes.

So here is a challenge for people who want to be good at Hasbara:

In an obscure newspaper called the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, someone named George Smith ("a nonreligious member of Congregation Beth Shalom") wrote a polemic against Israel for the occasion of Nakba Day. It is literally filled with the usual anti-Israel lies, compressed in the space of an op-ed. Over the years, I have disproved these lies many times on this blog.

The challenge is to write an effective response that is no lengthier than the original.

Taking the time to actually go through something like this - sentence by sentence - and disproving the lies yourself, briefly but thoroughly, is a most valuable use of time. The first time you do it it would probably take a few hours, but by the end of that time you will know how to answer the lies quickly and devastatingly.

If you want to send your resulting response to the newspaper (or to me) is up to you. The point here is that while many Zionists know that this article is absurd propaganda, not as many know enough to actually prove it. Proving it and boiling that proof down to something readable is a very valuable skill, one that you can only get from practice.

So if you can, this might be a good way to spend some time this Sunday.

The Iranian version of "pinkwashing"

From Iran's FARS:

Kossari is spooked

A senior Iranian legislator blasted a gay parade planned to be held in the Muslim state of Azerbaijan on May 26, warning that Baku will soon regret holding the event.

"The parade has been planned based on the goals of the Zionists and the world arrogance (the US)," member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Esmayeel Kossari told FNA on Saturday.

"The Azeri government which paves the way for the gathering of such immoral groups as homosexuals through this method (of action) should know that it will be struck by problems in the near future and the country's political and state officials will regret this move," he added.

Kossari lamented that the Azeri statesmen act based on the Zionist thoughts and views instead of paying attention to the Islamic thoughts and their people's beliefs.

Even Iranians say that Israel is gay-friendly!

The funny part, of course, is that groups like "Queers Against Israel Apartheid" side with Iran against Israel.

The bureaucracy of censorship in Kuwait

From the Kuwait Times:

Proud of her job to keep others ignorant

Different professions have different tastes. Sometimes we wonder how the work of some people goes on, especially if it is not very common. The censors who are responsible for censoring books and other publications do an interesting job, which becomes harder during some periods of the year, yet it seems they enjoy it. In Kuwait, freedoms are respected yet within certain limits. “The limits of freedom in the press, TV, radio or other media is organized by law no. 3/2006 concerning Press and Publications, law no. 61/2007 concerning Visual and Audio Media, and related by-laws,” Dalal Al-Mutairi, head of the Foreign Books Department at the Ministry of Information told Kuwait Times.

These laws set the basic rules to deal with right and wrong acts announced or published in the media. “This is also related to books, electronic publications and games and many other things. There are certain red lines that should not be crossed by the publishers, writers, authors and others. In order to check the application of the laws and that it’s not violated, there are inspectors and censors working at the Ministry of Information,” she added.

Dalal started her career as a censor at the Foreign Books Department and became the head of the department after a few years. “Many people consider the censor to be a fanatic and uneducated person, but this isn’t true. We are the most literate people as we have read much, almost every day. We receive a lot of information from different fields. We read books for children, religious books, political, philosophical, scientific ones and many others,” she pointed out.

“As a censor, I read a book from beginning to the end, word by word. In case the censor makes a mistake, the head of the department will be responsible for this mistake, as they should also read the book. The time to finish censoring a book depends on the kind of the book. For instance, a philosophical book needs about four days to read,” Dalal added.

...According to the law, if there is a violation, the censor writes a report about it. “Nobody can distribute any book unless he has a license to do so. The distributor should bring a copy of the book to our department. Sometimes we receive complaints from people regarding some books. Then we investigate with the printing press that published and printed this book. The printing house is responsible for the material and books printed by it and they should inform the Ministry of Information that they are printing a book, and then the book is not distributed without a license. There are some censors and inspectors from our department who inspect different printing presses to check their license,” Dalal stated.

...The greatest load on the department is during the Book Fair. “We start censoring the books in this fair about three months before it is held. We receive about 7,000 to 8,000 books to read. There are about 15 censors working on this fair. These censors take the books home with them to finish their reading. If we find a book containing restrictions, we write a report that is passed to a committee which decides that certain books will be banned from the fair,” she highlighted.

...Working as a censor is interesting. “I like this work. It gives us experience, information and we always learn something new. It takes about a year or a year and a half to become a censor, as the person is first employed as a censor assistant. The employee first starts slow in reading and it takes him a week or days to finish a book. Also, beginners are not given political or religious books in the beginning as these are difficult. Instead we give them children’s books or some scientific books, which are easy,” said Dalal.

In some religious books, the censorship department cooperates with the Ministry of Endowments. “Religious opinions may differ and that’s why we demand a professional explanation, although we have some censors who are graduates of the Faculty of Islamic Law. Some religious issues are transferred to the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs. The banned books include publications printed in Israel, Christian missionary and Jewish books and other similar books,” she noted.

(h/t @georgehale)

Latest Latma

Didn't get a chance to watch it yet....

"The End of the Jewish Left" (Tablet)

A very interesting article:

[T]he softening mainstream liberalism of American Jews can be seen as the feeble remnant of what was once a fiery and uncompromising leftism. Indeed, as historian Tony Michels said at the YIVO conference, the history of American Communism “cannot be understood without Jews.” But the mood of the conference was best summed up in the title of the keynote address, by the political philosopher Michael Walzer: “The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism.” What was once a proud inheritance now seems like a problem in need of a solution. For many Jews, it remains axiomatic that Judaism is a religion of social justice and progress; the phrase “tikkun olam” has become a convenient shorthand for the idea that Judaism is best expressed in “repair of the world.”

In his speech, and in his new book In God’s Shadow: Politics and the Hebrew Bible, Walzer offers a contrary vision of traditional Judaism, which he argues “offers precious little support to left politics”—a truth that he recognized would surprise those who, like himself, “grew up believing that Judaism and socialism were pretty much the same thing.” If a leftist political message cannot readily be found in the traditions of Judaism, it follows that the explosion of Jewish leftism in the late 19th century was actually a rupture with Jewish history, and potentially a traumatic one.

Walzer’s reluctance to associate Judaism too simply with leftist politics, or indeed with any politics, represents a break from his earlier thinking. In his influential 1985 book Exodus and Revolution, for instance, Walzer argued that the Exodus narrative had provided a template for generations of revolutionaries and progressives in Western society, offering a model of how to escape an oppressive past and create a better future. The contrast with his new book could not be sharper. In this work, Walzer reads the Bible with an eye to its explicit and implicit teachings about politics and finds that its most eloquent message on the subject is silence. “The political activity of ordinary people is not a Biblical subject,” he writes, “nor is there any explicit recognition of political space, an agora or forum, where people congregate to argue about and decide on the policies of the community.”

Coming from Walzer, who co-edited a multivolume treatise on “The Jewish Political Tradition,” and who has been one of the leading theorists of mainstream left-liberalism for decades, this emphasis on the antipolitical nature of the Bible is striking. In his YIVO speech, he listed six central features of traditional Judaism that made it a conservative force, including the very idea of Jews as a chosen people—an idea that cannot easily be made to harmonize with universalism and egalitarianism.

...The left’s rejection of Judaism, Walzer concluded in his speech at YIVO, was both “necessary and profoundly wrong.” Necessary, because traditional Judaism did not offer a basis for a social justice movement; but also wrong, because the severance with tradition rendered the Jewish left culturally disoriented and spiritually impoverished.

While a number of speakers at the YIVO conference invoked Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the “non-Jewish Jew”—figures like Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg, who rejected on principle any definition of themselves or their goals in Jewish terms—both Walzer and Ezra Mendelsohn warned against the idea that identity could be so abstract and universalized. Walzer called instead for a renewed critical engagement with Jewish tradition, including a return to the Jewish calendar and Jewish lifecycle events.

If this represents a kind of retrenchment on the part of the left, it is partly because the Jewish left has lost any certainty that the future is on its side. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is the strongest and most popular leader in decades; in both Israel and America, the fastest-growing section of the Jewish population is the Orthodox, a right-leaning group who 50 years ago, Mendelsohn recalled, seemed headed for extinction. Still, political fortunes can always change, and Mendelsohn concluded his speech, and the conference, with a wan prophecy that the Jewish left would return: “Maybe I won’t see it, but my grandchildren will.”

...The problem for the left today is that it has gone over largely—but not, Geras and others insisted, wholly—to the negative view of Judaism as an obstacle to human progress. Israel, Geras held, “has been an alibi for a new climate of anti-Semitism on the left,” a development whose full venomousness can only be seen in Europe. (“I don’t think people here realize,” he said mournfully, “what it’s like to be a Jewish leftist in Britain today,” comparing it to living in a sea of poison.) This is the atmosphere that the Anglo-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson evoked so powerfully in his recent novel The Finkler Question: one in which hostility to Israel is a reflex and insinuations about Jewish power and the “Jewish lobby” go unchallenged.

(h/t @WarpedMirrorPMB)

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia discovered to be Zionist

As if you needed any more evidence after my post this morning about a Saudi company buying software from Israel, we have this from Hezbollah's Al Manar:

Thousands of people demonstrated in Tehran on Friday to protest a proposed union of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

The authorities had urged citizens to protest the American plan to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia and express their anger against the “lackey regimes of Al-Khalifa and Al-Saud”.

Media reports said demonstrators in the capital, many brandishing the Bahraini flag, shouted "death" to America, Israel, the "traitors" Al-Saud and Al-Khalifa. Official media also reported protests in other cities.

This week’s Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said the "US-Zionist plot" to create a union between will fail. "Recently ... (Riyadh and Manama) came up with this plot to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia ... They call it a union but they want Bahrain to lose its identity instead of giving in to its people's demands," the cleric said on state radio.

"This is US-Zionist conspiracy and they should know that the Muslim people of the world and the Iranians will not tolerate this plot ... Saudi Arabia did not prevail by its military presence there, and will gain nothing in this plot except disgrace," he added.

The plan, floated last December, was Saudi Arabia's idea, not America's. And the smaller Gulf states are not too keen about it anyway.

But this hysterical reaction by Iran (and its Lebanese proxies) is interesting, mostly because of Iran's own territorial designs on Bahraini territory.

Muslims create a myth to claim Joseph's Tomb

Ma'an reports:

Israeli soldiers escorted hundreds of Jewish worshipers to Joseph's Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday, witnesses said.

Clashes broke out as locals threw stones and soldiers fired tear gas, witnesses told Ma'an.

Jews believe that the tomb is the final resting place of the biblical figure Joseph. Muslims believe that an Islamic cleric, Sheikh Yussef (Joseph) Dawiqat, was buried there.

So who was the fortunately named Sheikh Yusuf Dawiqat?

Well, either he is fictional or he is incredibly obscure. There is no entry for him in Wikipedia Arabic.

Apparently, this sheikh was made up as the inhabitant of the tomb only in recent decades, specifically to weaken the Jewish religious claim to the site. Jews have identified the site at that location since at least the fourth century CE. In the past, Muslims were known to refer to the site as "Qabr en-Nabi Yūsuf", the Tomb of the Prophet Joseph, not any obscure sheikh from the 18th century.

This sounds a bit familiar. This is exactly what the Muslims are trying to do with Rachel's Tomb by claiming it is an ancient mosque, when it never was.

Israel haters freak out over the hoopoe bird

From JPost:

Anti-Israel activists sharply criticized the socialist British daily the Morning Star for referring to Israel’s national bird the hoopoe in its daily quiz.

In a letter to the newspaper, Linda Claire, the chairwoman of Manchester’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign, asked why it had referred to the bird after it has “always been the newspaper you could rely on to support the cause of the Palestinians.”

“Maybe you don’t support the methods chosen by the international solidarity movement of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel] to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and justice,” she said, adding that this included any reference to Israel’s wildlife.

“Despite its condemnation of zionists [sic] it yet finds space to include an item in its daily quiz about Israel’s national bird. Is the Star not aware there’s a cultural boycott going on?” Claire’s husband, George Abendstern, asked in another letter.

“And then, despite it’s [sic] condemnation of the Bahrain Grand Prix and rightly so, it then goes on to tell us who won. For goodness sake comrades, get your act together,” Abendstern continued.

After a letter appeared condemning the couple’s stance, the anti-Israel activists said, “It was not the bird we object to but what this bird represents – the racist and apartheid State of Israel.”

CiFWatch has the actual two letters written - by a husband and wife using different last names to try to make it look like there was a groundswell of concern over this important issue:

The Morning Star has always been the newspaper you could rely on to support the cause of the Palestinians, so why of all the birds in the world did you choose the Israeli national bird to include in your quiz?

Maybe you don’t support the methods chosen by the International Solidarity Movement of BDS to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and justice – a demand that came from them originally.

This includes any reference to their wildlife.

Linda Clair

Rochdale

I had no idea that BDS includes a ban on mentioning Israel's wildlife!

Maybe they shouldn't say the word "Israel" at all, as that is a form of normalization. So is the word "Zionist." It would make their campaigns a little more difficult, but its the principle of the thing.

(h/t Zvi and Ian)

Arutz-7 (Hebrew) reports that a Saudi oil products company, Yanar, recently purchased an online tool for managing large business organizations - that was developed in Israel.

The software, called TBM, was developed by the Israeli Daronet company, and is said to be unique among cloud management platforms.

Yanar purchased the software through a branch in Australia after Daronet exhibited it in a Melbourne software show.

The Saudis insisted that their men will complete training on the software in order to avoid the using Israeli support services it normally provides its customers. The support center is in Elad, a religious Jewish community, and is mostly staffed by women.

The Daronet CEO stated that the entire transaction value is estimated at 700 thousand shekels.

The BDS movement was unavailable for comment.

Jordanian newspapers fall for spoof news report

From the spoof site the Pan Arabia Enquirer:

AMMAN: British Glamour model and renowned children’s author Katie Price yesterday issued a warning to government officials in Amman over the name ‘Jordan’, claiming that her celebrity profile was now enough to secure its full global trademark. [She was formerly professionally known as sinply "Jordan." - EoZ]

“I can’t believe that them Jordanese folk have been using my name for so long,” the disgusted model told reporters yesterday at the launch of her own range of charcoal, or weapons-grade plutonium or something, before going on to describe the time when she first found out.

“I hadn’t not never heard of it before, then one of my nan’s friends said she going Jordan on holiday and knew she wasn’t not talking about me.”

Katie Price’s solicitors, Bed, Knobs & Broomsticks, are claiming that, with 185 autobiographies and 65 reality TV shows already under her belt, the model has a far greater international connection to the name ‘Jordan’ than the country of Jordan, which has so far only been the setting for Laurence of Arabia and a few rubbisher films.

“We strongly feel that Jordan is using the fame and enormous goodwill of Jordan’s name to attract people to its country,” they said in a statement, adding that they were calling for “damages of $1 billion or an immediate cessation of the name ‘Jordan’ by King Abdullah and his fellow countrymen”

The first few comments on the story, seemingly from Arab readers, assumed that it was true.

And now at least two Jordanian newspapers are running this story as if it is true. The first was Assawsana on Wednesday, followed by Ammon News early Friday, both headlining that Price is suing Jordan for one billion dollars over the use of "her" name.

An important anti-Israel Arab meme

A Jordanian newspaper, Assabeel, has published an op-ed that rehashes a theme that I have seen before in the Arab world but that rarely gets mentioned in English.

The article, by Salah al-Khalidi, states that while Israel may be 64 years old now, that is still very young in terms of history. Israel, to Khalidi and most Arabs, is a minor aberration of history that will ultimately disappear and be forgotten.

A Jewish state in Palestine is a bizarre cacophony, ...it is like a festering strange virus that appears in the human body, and acts as a parasite from the body's organs...The State of the Jews on the land of Palestine is a rotten infestation in the body of humanity and does not have any justification for its survival; despite the lapse of these years it has existed - and it will go through more years yet - but those years are short, and humanity will get rid of it, God willing, at the hands of the Mujahideen God willing.

Ages of nations is analogous to ages of individuals, and if the age of individuals is measured in years, or tens of years at most, the age of nations is measured by centuries. History tells us that the pre-Islamic nation Israel did not last for centuries on the land of Palestine, that is, they did not live the lifetime of even one individual, and the state of Israel ended after the death of Prophet Solomon peace be upon him.

History tells us that any nation invading and occupying another nation will not last for long...The Crusaders went to the Holy Land for permanent residence therein; but they didn't last even two centuries, before they were expelled by the Muslim Ummah to wake up the spirit of jihad for the sake of God, mere years in human terms.

We must learn from history. We live with a Jewish-based challenge, to truly witness history, and we must look ahead, and not remain prisoners of the Arab reality, and in fact the Jewish might is transcendent and empty!! The signs and signals that indicate the short life of the Jews in Palestine are many, and is growing, but Muslim seers must deftly pay attention to it, and draws the attention of the nation to it!!

History will record that the State of the Jews on the land of Palestine, died in her childhood crawling, before standing on the her feet, God willing.

This way of thinking - in terms of centuries and millennia, not years and decades - is part and parcel of the Arab world. This is why they can talk about non-permanent truces with Israel - as long as the direction is that Israel is losing its land, then the Arabs can afford to be patient. They know that Westerners think in terms of election cycles and not eras.

Sacrificing a few generations of Palestinian Arabs to being stateless is a small price to pay in the long run for the ultimate good of reclaiming "Palestine."

And this is why they are not afraid of Zionism. They regard Zionism as a temporary political phenomenon like Communism, and political fashions don't last too long. But they are deathly afraid of Judaism. Judaism is far older than Islam, and committed Jews have the ability to think in terms of centuries - and look at the Arab conquest of Palestine as a temporary phenomenon that only lasted a few centuries itself, before the Ottomans and then the British. Jews can look at Islamic history as an anomaly, and their continued existence as a nation is what scares Arab Muslims silly.

When Zionists base their territorial claims on international law, the Arabs are happy; as that is another fad that can change over time. But when Jews assert their claim based on their history and faith, Arabs go crazy - because they have no answer to that, and no realistic hope that Judaism will fade away the way they think Zionism will.

But they remain hopeful that the Jews will disappear as well. The name of the essay, after all, is "The brief age of the Jews."

Proctor and Gamble loves Israel

It is not only high-tech companies like Google and Intel who invest heavily in Israel. Proctor and Gamble, the consumer products and pharmaceutical powerhouse, also looks to Israel for innovation. From Forbes:

I visited P&G office in Tel Aviv. Lital Asher-Dotan, who established Procter & Gamble first R&D hub in Israel called “P&G Israel House of Innovation”, explained why P&G calls Israel a “startup nation.”

Image of P&G office in Tel Aviv by Shannon Reaudeau

In the entry lobby of P&G office, which is 20 minutes away from Google’s office in Tel Aviv, there are a few samples of different products sold by P&G in Israel. Among the usual health and beauty brands (Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Oral B, Gillette, Tampax, Pampers …) and brands of household cleaners (Ariel, Lenor, Swiffer, Tide …) there were also different prizes and trophies P&G Israel has received for the development of innovative products. However, what surprised me the most was that besides all these products and prizes there was a copy of the acclaimed book Startup nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.

Procter & Gamble takes Research and Development seriously: it invests $2.8 Billion annually and has 9,300 employees in R&D worldwide. The Israel House of Innovation (IHI) was created five years ago by CEO Bob McDonaldand one of the key goals is to create alliances between P&G and Israeli innovators.

Procter & Gamble’s Israel House of Innovation collaborates with Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NASDAQ: TEVA; TASE: TEVA), the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which carries out more than 1/3 of all academic scientific research in Israel;Powermat, which has only 70 employees and is developing wireless battery rechargers. By the way, Jay-Z participates in the JV with Powermat and P&G not only as a spokesperson but also as an investment partner. P&G has also signed on bilateral agreement with Israeli Chief Scientist providing Israeli start ups that collaborate with P&G favorable access to governmental funding.

Present in over 180 countries and with total revenues of about $80 Billion, P&G is the world’s largest Multinational consumer goods company. Procter & Gamble has promised to deliver 3-6 % of growth per year or about extra $5billion in annual revenue. Open innovation is the key to this growth: the giant established in 1837 aims to have 50% of all innovation (not only on new products but also on internal systems) having elements from outside of the company. Jeff Weedman, P&G Vice President, External BD:

Our JV with TEVA represents the lessons learned that we need better access to Innovation and global abilities while we can provide the in-depth consumer knowhow.”

Read the whole thing.

French news site publishes Arab street theater as IDF abuse

Here is a screenshot from L'Express from last month:

It is captioned "Palestinian prisoner" and appears to show an AFP photo of IDF soldiers abusing a Palestinian Arab.

However, it was no such thing.

As the French IDF blog notes, the "soldiers" were not wearing standard IDF uniforms or helmets.

In fact, this photo was taken at a demonstration on Land Day in Lebanon! The actual caption from AFP read:

Palestinian refugees pose as Israeli soldiers arresting and beating a Palestinian activist during celebrations of Prisoners' Day at the refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh near the coastal Lebanese city of Sidon on April 17, 2012.

L'Express silently removed the photo with the offending caption from its website without an apology.

Par for the course.

More here.

(h/t Rudi)

More intra-Arab fighting gets downplayed

From Al Arabiya:

One person was killed and five were wounded on Thursday in fresh clashes between pro- and anti-Syrian regime districts in the north Lebanon port city of Tripoli, a security official said.

“Sporadic clashes involving the use of rockets and machineguns began at around 4:00 am (0100 GMT) between the neighborhoods of Bab al-Tebanneh and Jabal Mohsen,” said the official, who requested anonymity.

Battles first erupted on Saturday between residents of the rival neighborhoods after security forces arrested Shadi al-Mawlawi, an Islamist, on alleged charges of belonging to a terrorist organization.

Mawlawi’s supporters say he was targeted because of his help for Syrian refugees fleeing to Lebanon.

Some 500 of them blocked a main road leading into Tripoli on Monday and said they would leave only after Mawlawi was released.

A total of ten people, including a soldier hit by sniper fire, died in the port city and dozens were wounded in the fighting.

When you think about the Middle Eastern countries where the most Arabs are being killed, Israel is pretty far down the list. Just ask people from Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Bahrain, as well as Lebanon, all of where Arabs have been killed over the past month by government forces.

But according to PCHR, not a single Palestinian Arab was killed by the IDF in the same time period.

"Israel among countries with most negative global influence"

The BBC published a new Globescan poll and, as usual, most news media are misunderstanding it.

Ha'aretz gets it almost right but is still not quite there:

Israel has been ranked in the top four countries that most negatively influence the word, according to a global public opinion poll conducted by the BBC.

The poll, which surveyed citizens from 22 countries around the world, places Iran in first place, with 55 percent of those surveyed rating it as a negative country. Pakistan ranked second with 51 percent, and in joint third place were Israel and North Korea, with 50 percent of respondents negatively evaluating both countries.

The broad international survey was an initiative of the BBC World Service, and carried out by GlobeScan, in collaboration with the the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland – Program on International Policy Attitudes. Over 24,000 people from 22 countries took part in the poll, which was conducted from December 2011 to February 2012.

The survey’s findings on global attitudes toward Israel are worrying indeed. Last year’s survey already that attitudes toward Israel were negative, but the situation has become more serious this year: Some 47 percent of participants in the 2011 survey had negative views of Israel’s influence on the world, but this year the number has gone up to 50 percent.

The problem with the articles about this is that they don't notice the countries that are not in the survey.

Only 16 countries, plus the EU, were subjects of the survey. No Arab countries were asked about. Neither was Turkey.

Only two Muslim countries were in the questionnaire - and both of them were at the bottom (Iran and Pakistan.)

Also, the poll found:

Fifty per cent of Americans have a favourable view of Israel in 2012, and this proportion has increased by seven points. At the same time, the proportion of negative ratings has gone down six points to 35 per cent and, as a result, the US has gone from being divided in 2011 to leaning positive in 2012. These are the most positive views on Israel’s influence expressed in the US since tracking began in 2005. Apart from the US, the most favourable views of Israel are found in Nigeria and Kenya, where views have also shifted since 2011. A majority of 54 per cent of Nigerians (up 23 points) rates Israel positively, and the country has moved from being divided to leaning positive in 2012 (54% positive vs 29% negative). In Kenya, negative ratings have fallen ten points (to 31%), while positive views have risen by 16 points (to 45%), shifting the country from leaning negative in 2011 to leaning positive in 2012.

At least YNet didn't repeat last year's mistake when reporting on this poll.

This is not to say that the poll isn't worrying. It generally reflects the media bias against Israel in the same countries surveyed, and that disproportionately negative coverage is the engine driving these results. People's attitudes reflect their exposure to information, and if the information is bad, their opinions would follow suit.

Here are the main results for countries' attitudes towards Israel's influence in graphical format.

Oh, by the way, Iran's leader said he wants to destroy Israel

And defeat the US, too.

From Israel HaYom:

Israel has, for years, cautioned against Iran's intentions and the dangers of its nuclear ambitions, but on Wednesday former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar gave the world yet another reason to heed those warnings. Aznar, speaking to a crowd in Jerusalem, recalled a meeting with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in which he expressed his intention to destroy Israel.

"In a private discussion we held in Tehran in October of 2000, Ali Khamenei told me that Israel must be burned to the ground and made to disappear from the face of the Earth," Aznar told the audience. The former Spanish prime minister went on to say that Iran's spiritual leader also said that "Iran's war against the United States and Israel is inevitable."

Aznar was in Israel as a guest of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, currently headed by former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dr. Dore Gold.

Gold asked him, "When Khamenei was talking about wiping Israel off the map, was he referring to a gradual historical process involving the collapse of the Zionist state, or rather its physical-military termination?"

Aznar answered, "He meant physical termination through military force." The former Spanish leader also told the crowd that Khamenei described Israel as "an historical cancer, an anomaly," and said that he was "working toward Iran defeating the United States and Israel in an inevitable war against them."

This is only surprising to Juan Cole's acolytes, who won't believe it anyway.

Abbas targets corruption - but only of his enemies

Ma'an reports:

A former adviser to late President Yasser Arafat is accused of embezzling tens of millions of dollars, the head of the PA anti-corruption commission said Wednesday.

Rafiq Natsheh told Ma'an his commission sought an international arrest warrant for Muhammad Rashid after he failed to respond to earlier summons by the foreign and justice ministers.

Rashid, who was an economic adviser to Arafat, is accused of embezzling money from the Palestinian Investment Fund by setting up front companies.

Corruption in the Palestine Investment Fund? That rings a bell:

[T]he Palestine Investment Fund [is] a sovereign wealth fund that Abbas controls through a board he handpicked and whose by-laws he rewrote. Since 2006, the PIF has awarded contracts exclusively to Abbas’s cronies, including his sons, Yasser and Tareq. The PIF-backed Wataniya cellular phone company, which drew on international-donor funding, inked a lucrative advertising contract with Tareq, while his brother Yasser sat on its board.

The Abbas family is now said to be worth millions, with lavish property holdings and investments throughout the Middle East.

Moreover, the Abbas machine quietly enriches Hamas as it enriches itself. According to a former Palestinian Authority adviser, Yasser Abbas staffed the Karni Crossing cargo terminal in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip with the stated purpose of ensuring that goods and aid reached Gaza without reaching Hamas. But the customs and border unit at the crossing is not on the Palestinian Authority payroll, and it abuses its monopoly on Gaza’s only cargo terminal to pocket fees and kick them back to Hamas.

The pieces all fit together when you read Challah Hu Akbar's great reporting of the issue:

In February I reported that the Palestinian Authority was targeting Mohammad Rashid, a former advisor to Yasir Arafat. At the time Rashid was being targeted for his alleged ties to InLightPress, a website critical of the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas, which the Palestinian Authority blocked access to along with a number of other websites.

However, the targeting of Rachid has been ongoing for a number of years.

Mohammed Rashid is an Iraqi Kurd, who was Yasir Arafat’s senior economic adviser. He was formerly the head of the Palestine Investment Fund, however, he resigned in October 2004. In March 2008, Ahmad Al-Mughani, the Attorney General of the Palestinian Authority, began an investigation into Rashid’s finances.

It isn't that the PA is rooting out corruption. They are only going after people who are already on their enemy list and using corruption as an excuse. (Not that Rashid isn't corrupt - he probably is. But so is Abbas.)

Latest nonsense from Shlomo Sand - "The Land of Israel is a myth"

Shlomo Sand, the academic with no background in history who wrote an absurdly ridiculous book "The Invention of the Jewish People" to much acclaim by anti-semites, has now come out with a new piece of fiction masquerading as scholarship.

And the anti-Zionists are lapping it up.

I don't have the book, titled "The Invention of the Land of Israel," but Yossi Gurwitz's worshipful review at 972mag shows enough to prove that this book is as absurd as Sand's previous work (and that Gurwitz is as much of a fraud as Sand is.)

As with the previous book, when Sand makes a blanket statement as fact, all one needs to do is provide a single counterexample to prove that he is a fraud. And as with his previous work, it is trivial to do exactly that.

The heart of Sand’s thesis is the intentional confusion in Zionism between the Halachic – Jewish law – concept of Eretz Israel (“The Land of Israel”, EI) and the concept of a place which is under Jewish sovereignty, and yearning for such a place. “Eretz Israel” is, originally, a Talmudic concept – not a biblical one – which delineates it as a territory that imposes extra religious obligations on Jews living in it, which Jews living outside of it are unburdened of.

Really? There was no concept of Eretz Yisrael in the Bible? It originated in the Talmud?

Tell that to Ezekiel, who quoted God as using that exact term when delineating the borders of the Land in Ezekiel 47.

The term is also used in Ezekiel 40:2, in 1 Samuel 13:19, and in 2 Chronicles 34:7.

Of course, for much of the times of the Prophets, it was divided into two kingdoms - Israel and Judah. The latter phrase is used another half dozen times in the Bible. Moreover, the phrase "Kingdom of Israel" was used a number of times, as it was more specific designation than "Land of Israel."

Is that enough to show that Sand is just making stuff up? Well, there's more:

The rabbis came up with the Three Vows, which forbade Jews from massively emigrating to Eretz Israel, forbade them from rebelling against the nations of the world (it’s worth noting the rabbis, servitors of the emperors, gave divine sanction to their rule), and the third vow is directed at the nations: “That they should not enslave Israel too much.” Rabbinical Judaism left Eretz Israel behind. Sand quotes some later rabbis who opposed emigrating to EI since the Halachic demands on those living in it are very high, and failure to meet them would make the land impure.

The Three Oaths are based on a Midrash and it is far from clear that they are legally binding. But even here Sand is being deceptive, because the relevant oath was not against Jews "massively emigrating to Eretz Israel" but against "storming the wall." What that exactly means is not clear but it probably means forcibly returning to Israel by war.

The Talmudic discussion about this Midrash was referring to the desire of a single rabbi to move to Israel, not a "massive emigration."

It was clearly not forbidden for Jews to move to Israel, because many of these rabbis who Sand say ignored the Land did in fact make aliyah. Encyclopedia Judaica gives details:

During the time of the Second Temple there were many immigrants to Ereẓ Israel. A famous example is the aliyah of Hillel, who went from Babylonia (Pes. 66a) poor and without means, and later became the head of the Sanhedrin (Suk. 20a), founding a long line of nesi'im (see *nasi). One of the high priests appointed by Herod was Hananel ha-Bavli, i.e., of Babylonia. Aliyah, mainly from Babylonia, did not cease after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 c.e.). Sources cite many immigrant scholars who achieved a prominent place in the Jewish community of Ereẓ Israel. In the third generation of tannaim after the destruction of the Temple (110–135 c.e.), Hanan ha-Miẓri ("of Egypt"; Yoma 63b) and Yose b. Dormaskos, who went from Damascus (Sif. Deut. 1), are mentioned. The next generation (135–170 c.e.) included R. Johanan ha-Sandelar of Alexandria (tj, Ḥag. 3:1, 78d) and R. Nathan ha-Bavli, who was the son of the exilarch in Babylonia. Among the fifth generation of tannaim are (170–200) R. Ḥiyya the Great, the disciple and colleague of Judah ha-Nasi (Er. 73a), and Issi b. Judah (Pes. 113b), both of whom emigrated from Babylonia, and Menahem the Gaul (i.e., France; tj, Ber. 4:4, 8b).

Aliyah from Babylonia did not cease in the amoraic period, despite the fact that the great centers of Jewish scholarship were located there. Of the first generation of amoraim (220–250), R. Ḥanina b. Ḥama, a disciple of Judah ha-Nasi and one of the greatest amoraim in Ereẓ Israel, emigrated from Babylonia (tj, Pe'ah 7:4, 20a). In the second generation (250–290), Eleazar b. Pedat, rosh yeshivah in Tiberias (Ḥul. 111b), R. Zakkai (tj, Shab. 7:1, 9a) and R. Ḥiyya b. Joseph (Ḥul. 54a), who emigrated from Babylonia, and Ḥinena Kartigna'ah (of Carthage; tj, Shab. 16:2, 15c) are mentioned. The latter attests emigration from Africa. Two amoraim called Rav Kahana also emigrated from Babylonia (Zev. 59a). There was a particularly large aliyah among the third generation of amoraim (290–320), some of the immigrants forming the leadership of the Jewish community in Ereẓ Israel. Prominent among them were: R. Abba (Ket. 112a); R. Avina (tj, Shev. 4:2, 35a); R. Oshaiah and his brother Hananiah (Sanh. 14a); R. Assi, the colleague of R. Ammi, who was rosh yeshivah of Tiberias (mk 25a); R. Zera, a central figure of both Talmuds (Ket. 112a); R. Ḥiyya b. Abba (Shab. 105b); and R. Ḥelbo (Yev. 64b; tj, Ta'an. 2:1, 65a); R. Yudan of Gaul (Lev. R. 20:4); R. Jeremiah, who later became rosh yeshivah at Tiberias (Ket. 75a); R. Samuel b. Isaac (tj, Ber. 3:5, 6d); R. Samuel of Cappadocia in Asia Minor (Ḥul. 27b); R. Simlai (tj, Pes. 5:3, 32a); and others. In the fourth generation (320–350) the well-known immigrants included: Ray Huna b. R. Avin (tj, rh 2:2, 59a), R. Haggai (mk, 25a), R. Yudan of Cappadocia (tj, Ber. 3:1, 6a), and R. Kahana (tj, rh 2:6, 59b).

So far from Sand's thesis that the rabbis abandoned Israel and discouraged aliyah, many prominent members of their ranks actually moved to Israel themselves. If the Land of Israel was unimportant in Talmudic times, why would they do that?

Oh well, Sand is proven a liar again. And his selective quoting of "some later rabbis" discouraging aliyah is shown to be more of an anomaly than a mainstream view, and proves that he is using sources selectively.

As the article goes on to say, it was Christian persecution of Jews in Israel that slowed aliyah down dramatically after this, not any supposed "oath" based on a non-halachic midrash. Indeed, Maimonides himself - who counseled the Jews of Yemen not to rebel against their rulers based on his interpretation of the three oaths - moved to Israel himself, and Nachmanides declared moving to Israel to be obligatory.

All of this of course predated Zionism by the better part of a millennium.

So Sand is again shown to be an academic fraud, cherry picking sources that he pretends proves his point and even taking them out of context when it suits him.

The only people who take him seriously are those who desperately want to believe him, because they have already made up their minds that Zionism is the world's biggest evil.

Israel's space program (Scientific American)

Pretty cool:

The Israeli space program is a minuscule operation compared to NASA or the European Space Agency—not surprising for a nation with about the land area and population of New Jersey. “The Israeli Space Agency does not have its own industries,” Hershkowitz says. “It’s just a very small body that coordinates in the activities of the other industries, and also coordinates between the civilian and the military applications.” To do that, he says, the agency has an annual budget of about $50 million. Israel’s presence in space is defined primarily by a network of Earth observation, communication and reconnaissance satellites. But Hershkowitz notes that his nation takes the overall enterprise of scientific research quite seriously. Israel leads the world in terms of percentage of GDP spent on research and development, and he notes that by some criteria its space program is fairly advanced:

"In fact, nowadays Israel belongs to the very exclusive club of about 10 countries in the world that have all capabilities in space. When we say all, I mean producing satellites, both the bus and the payload, launching them and communicating with them. There are only about 10 such states in the world, and Israel belongs to that exclusive club."

Hershkowitz estimates that “close to half of what we invest nowadays in space has to do with scientific applications and civilian applications,” such as monitoring water pollution and soil conditions for agriculture. But he acknowledges that Middle East turmoil will ensure that reconnaissance remains a top priority:

"I think that Israel will continue to be in a leading position in observation satellites, and that’s because of our strategic needs. With observation satellites, of course I would focus on the TecSAR satellites, which are based on radar. This is today the cutting-edge technology; Israel is very much in a leading position. Some of the abilities are still even secret, because you don’t want to reveal the ability of what you can see through."

This is about Israel's official space program. It doesn't even cover the Israeli entry for the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Here's their webpage, although I don't see any recent updates.

(h/t Brian at Israellycool)