Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Links. Here.

From Ian:

Israeli Prime Minister meets with Google Executive

“(Google Chairman) Schmidt noted that an Israeli engineer created the database for organizing artefacts is now used by museums worldwide. He described how Israelis have a unique blend of discipline, motivation and creative thinking. Together these form a competitive advantage that is unlike any society in the world. Schmidt said, “The decision to invest in Israel was one of the best that Google has ever made.”

Brian Lilley Interviews Glenn Beck –Video, he talks about Israel at 14min

Media bias in Australia Danby tackles the ABC over its Israel coverage
Michael Danby has written twice to the ABC complaining about two separate reports, one on an Australian man jailed in Israel for assisting Hamas and the second on a Four Corners Program in which Robert Fisk was invited on as an and made his usual crass, ill-informed attacks on Israel falsely claiming ( without host Kerry O’Brien demurring ) that Israel supported the massacres in Syria.

Media bias against a Palestinian hunger striker.........in Norway!
Palestinian woman on hunger strike for 3 weeks. She’s not in Israel, so the Guardian yawns
Palestinians on hunger strike in Israel attract world’s attention; in Norway we just let them die

Alice Walker reactions:
Alice Walker's Bigotry by Alan M. Dershowitz
Pulitzer winning writer Alice Walker sets shocking new low for anti-Israel boycotters Boycotting a whole language

From Peter Beinart’s ~~Death to Israel~~ Open Zion page at The Daily Beast.
Some Context For The Rockets From Gaza

“But there are other facts to this story, facts that are no less important but which tend not to be discussed when rockets start flying out of Gaza. To wit: On Monday evening, the IDF carried out strikes in several locations in Gaza, and Palestinian[s] reported that five people were wounded. Shortly afterward, the IDF carried out two more strikes and killed four Palestinians.”

In other words Israeli victims of terror like Saeed Fashafshe don’t count.

Muslim couple planned to bomb Jews in al Qaeda inspired plot

"A Muslim couple were assembling components of a home-made bomb to attack Jewish neighbourhoods after becoming radicalised by al Qaeda propaganda on the internet, a court heard."

Belgium calls for Olympic ceremony to commemorate Munich massacre

"Flemish sports minister joins officials from Israel, US, Canada and Australia in supporting moment of silence"

Editor of pro-Israel Kurdish magazine vanishes in Iraq
Mawlud Afand’s co-workers suspect he was kidnapped by Iran

Syrian fighter jet lands in Jordan, pilot requests asylum

Website Of Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood: The Days Of The Zionist Entity Are Numbered

Also, Michael Totten: Winter in Cairo

Assad using cyber warfare against rebels

Pro-Israel Kurd goes missing in Iraq, may have been kidnapped by Iran

Israeli help when you need it!

(h/t Missing Peace, Yoel, O.)

The Gaza tunnels that are nowhere near Egypt

From IMEMC:

Palestinian medical sources reported that twelve residents were wounded, on Thursday before noon, after a siege-busting tunnel collapsed, east of the Sheikh Zayed area, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

I'm not sure if it is the same one, but the tunnel collapse that killed 2 Hamas members earlier today was also in northern Gaza.

Which means that these were not tunnels to smuggle weapons from Egypt.

So what are they?

Hamas builds tunnels outside of Rafah for one of three reasons.

One is that they are used to travel between buildings in a town without going outside and being seen by the IDF.

Another is that they build underground bunkers with weapons, which makes their claim of the Hamas members being killed by "poisonous gas" most interesting.

And the third reason is that they build tunnels under the border to Israel in order to kidnap Israelis and hold them hostage.

Either way, they are legitimate military targets, and they aren't "siege busting" tunnels as the ridiculous IMEMC says.

(h/t YM and Elliott.)

An incomplete list of rockets that fell short in Gaza

From the Gaza NGO Safety Office's SMS alerts, an unfortunately incomplete list, but representative:

20 JUN, 0805hrs: Pal. ops fired 3 HMRs from Deir El Balah, MA. 1 of the rockets dropped short.

20 JUN, 0840hrs: Pal. ops fired 4 HMRs from Deir El Balah, MA. 1 of the rockets exploded prematurely. 1 Pal. injury reported.

20 JUN, 1550hrs: Pal. ops. fired 1 HMR from Nuseirat, MA. The rocket dropped short near Salah Ad Din St.

21 JUN, 1615hrs: Pal. ops. fired 1 HMR from N-E of Nuseirat, MA, toward the Green Line. The rocket exploded at the launching site.

Life magazine argues against a Jewish state, 1946

This is an earnest editorial published in Life in August, 1946, urging that Jewish refugees not be settled in Palestine (mostly because it would upset the Arabs.)

Other notable parts of the editorial are the perfect belief in the conventional wisdom of the day:

There is no way that Palestine can absorb so many people;
The Jewish lobby is pushing Truman to do things thatare against American interests;
The Middle East is not an American interest anyway;
The reasons the Arabs hated the Jews of Palestine is because of their higher standards of living;
Nationalism, at least in the case of Jewish nationalism, is wrong.

The most amazing part is the conclusion, where the editors of Life say that rather than create a Jewish homeland where Jews can live in safety, we should instead push for a utopian world where there is no discrimination, so Jews can feel free to live anywhere.

Except Palestine!

When you read reasonable-sounding editorials today spouting what passes for conventional wisdom and coming to conclusions based on them, keep in mind how wrong the accepted facts can be to begin with.

In a World unutterably wearied of seeing people pushed around, there is an understandable, though wishful, tendency to believe in some easy solution for the problem of Europe’s homeless Jews. The notion is being broadcast that the solution is merely to let 100,000 more Jews into Palestine where they can be cared for by their own people. Thus they would be lifted from the world conscience. lt is also suggested that in a true, independent Jewish state, not just a "Home,” the Children of Israel would continue to build out of arid wastes a land of hydroelectric milk and industrial honey so rich and so charming as to attract and provide for all unwanted Jews.

The Zionists are superb organizers; they are also religious idealists, with all the virtues - and_°someof the blind spots—-of zealots through-out history. It could only he wished they had the right answers. But they haven’t.

lt is hard to say this, not only because of the immense humanitarian efforts of the Zionists but also because the situation is so tense and so full of domestic and international emotions and bitterness that it has almost become impossible to express an honest, dispassionate opinion. Yet the time has plainly come for some blunt
American speaking. The U.S. must adopt a Palestine policy and hold to it.

...The difficulty the Jews face, both as to immediate immigration and as to the long-range dream of a homeland, is primarily with the Arabs. Specifically it is with the l,000,000 Arabs in Palestine, hut generally it is with the 50,000,000 Arab population of the Middle East, now banded together in the Arab League and threatening that if they fail to obtain justiee in London they will turn to Moscow.

The differences between the Jews and the Arabs are such they can scarcely be understood unless one is an Arab or a Jew. The present obvious nub of friction is simply that the Jews in Palestine have come to enjoy a much higher standard of living than their Arab neighbors.

This View of the matter was reaffirmed only last spring hy the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry as a part of its long report on Palestine. This report also urged that l00,000 of the Jews currently in assembly camps in Germany and Austria—and most of them in or trying to get into the American zones-—should be immediately and humanely transported to Palestine.

The Arabs’ response was such that Britain’s Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin estimated that it would require dispatch of a British division and expenditure of $800,000,000 to effect the immigration. So he rejected the proposal.

When President Truman insists, in the face of British objections, that the 100.000 Jews be let in at once, he may have a nervous eye on the Jewish vote. But the President should approach it with the same bipartisan strategy he employed when the United Nations was organized at San Francisco. Otherwise the Palestine question, by becoming the price of a Zionist-led Jewish vote, could enter our politics in such a way that an entire national election might turn on how a few New Yorkers feel about an entirely extraneous issue. That wouldn't go down so well in Oklahoma.

...Britain and Zion are virtually at war today. Yet the Zionists must realize that the British, through the years, have been their truest friends and that removal of the Tommies now would probably tesult in the Arabs quickly pushing the Jews into the sea. This is what spoils the analogy between modern Palesttine and the Ireland of 25 years ago.

...It is clear that the immigration of the 100,000 Jews still in camp cannot really be decided until the central problem of Palestine's future is answered. To admit 100.000 more Jews - almost one fifth of the total Jews already there- without provision for land and industrial expansion to take care of them would only tend
to ghetto-ize the Jewish community. So, what of a Jewish state’? The Arabs regard it as an "exotic movement. internationally financed, artiﬁcially stimulated, holding no hope of ultimale or permanent sueeess.” Unfortunately there is something to this point of view. Palestine is not self-supporting. Perhaps given land expansion. great power and irrigation projects and, above all, internal peace, the Jewish community might become self-supporting in a generation or two. That is a moot point and almost irrelevant, because prospects for such expansion, projects and even peace are slight.

Aside, however, from the physical limitations, there is the higher moral question that divides the Jews themselves: namely, is religious nationalism any more the answer to the over-all Jewish problem than is any other sort of nationalism the answer to any part of the world problem?

What the Jews really need is not a national state but the right sort of world. Probably there will always be a certain number of Jews who prefer segregation in the Holy land, but we hazard the opinion that it the nations carried out that provision in the United Nations Charter, presumably not lightly adopted, for "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,” it would do far more to solve the Jewish problem than any multiplication of the Jewish population in Palestine.

Among other things this would mean the re-establishment of the 100,000 Jews in the assembly camps on the same basis, and with the same regard, as the resettlement of all of Europe's millions of displaced persons. If the remnants of Hitler's evil anti-Semitic brew precludes this in Eastern and Central Europe. then, assuredly, humanitarian gates must he opened. but not only in Palestine. The whole world must share the task. including the US.

This makes a bipartisan approach to the problem all the more desirable.
All this—a humane world and one in which a Jew ean live and prosper equally with all—is an easy solution, surely. It is only as hard as the human heart.

Jordanian rapist marries 15-year old victim to avoid jail

Ammon News has the sickening story.

The owner of a mobile phone store befriended a 15-year old girl who hung out at his store and he promised to marry her. Then he asked her to come to his shop to discuss their marriage plans. He then drugged her, drove her to another location and raped her while she was unconscious. She woke up outdoors, naked.

She filed a complaint with the police and they went to arrest the store owner. He freely admitted the rape, but he said that he would marry her - so they let him go.

According to Jordan's penal code article 308, a rapist can go free if he agrees to marry his victim.

There is a disgusting catch: he must remain married to her for at least five years, thus further victimizing the girl.

There are no words.

I imagine it will only be a few months before The Guardian also starts to put "militants" in scare quotes when referring to people who purposefully fire rockets at Israeli civilians.

Hamas buries 2 year old girl it killed as a "martyr"

Two days ago, a 2-year old girl was killed in Gaza from a Hamas rocket that misfired. Ma'an gave the details and a Hamas official privately admitted that this is what happened to a BBC reporter.

Publicly, however, Hamas insists that the girl was killed by an Israeli airstrike. So Hamas staged a funeral for a girl they killed as a "martyr," wrapping her body in a Hamas flag.

And the locals ate it all up:

Sick, depraved people.

Nice shooting (and intelligence) (update)

The IDF struck a smuggling tunnel, killing two Hamas members and reportedly injuring 21 others.

Which means that it was a tunnel for smuggling weapons.

Of course, being the liars they are, the Gazans are accusing Israel of somehow injecting poison gas in the tunnels as they were bombing them.

UPDATE: Ma'an reports that Hamas is claiming not that Israel bombed the tunnel today, but that Hamas members went to inspect a damaged tunnel and died from inhaling poisonous gas. (h/ t Tam)

Palestine Press Agency reports that on Wednesday, Israel shipped 268 trucks filled with goods through the Kerem Shalom crossing, including 9 trucks of aid, 152 trucks for the commercial sector, including 11 trucks of wheat and 20 trucks of feed, 30 trucks for the agricultural sector, 5 trucks for the transportation sector, including, 30 vehicles, 9 trucks loaded with cement and iron for construction and 61 truckfuls of gravel for UNRWA projects, and also been pumping 159,510 kilos of cooking gas and 240,097 liters of diesel from Qatar, as well as 38,000 liters of diesel for transportation.

Gaza responded by"exporting" dozens of rockets towards Israeli civilians.

Today, after eight more rockets were fired overnight, Israel is sending another 310 trucks of aid through the crossing, including supplies to help upgrade the electric grid of Gaza.

Islamic Jihad is coming after me, so I must defend myself.

From the Saraya.ps website of Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades:

According to this tweet from Michael Nahum, the translation is

"O Elder of Zion: Fear the Charge of the Resplendent Insurgent!"

They are threatening me with a graphic??? Clearly, they don't know who they are messing with.

You see, this week was the annual Israeli Fat and Beautiful pageant, where Israeli women who weigh between 80-100 kilos (176-220 lbs) compete for the coveted title.

So my answer to Islamic Jihad is:

Game, set and match.

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar, Ron)

Stolen Kremlin documents show Soviet involvement in Arab strategy

An amazing article by Claire Berlinski at Tablet:

Russian exile Pavel Stroilov argues in his forthcoming book, Behind the Desert Storm, “It was the Soviet Empire—not the British Empire—that was responsible for the instability in the Middle East.”

Stroilov, a historian now living in London, fled Russia in 2003 after stealing 50,000 top-secret Kremlin documents from the Gorbachev Foundation archives, where he was working as a researcher. He was given access to the archive in 1999, but Gorbachev refused him permission to copy its most significant documents. Having observed the network administrator entering the password into the system, Stroilov reproduced the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.

Stroilov’s cache includes hundreds of transcripts of discussions between Gorbachev and foreign leaders, politicians, and diplomats. (The originals are still sealed under Kremlin pressure.)....

Stroilov’s book about these documents, many only now translated into English, challenges the conventional wisdom that Western colonialists are to blame for the chaos in the region. All of its major conflicts, he argues, were caused by Soviet expansionism. Terrorism and the rabid anti-Israeli animus of the Arab world were Soviet inspirations. And the revolutions we are seeing now were inevitable, for the Soviet client states were socialist regimes, and sooner or later socialism exhausts economies and thus the patience of the people who live in them.

Stroilov focuses upon Gorbachev’s intrigues in the Middle East, explaining the Arab Spring as the “final act of the Cold War.” This thesis is overstated—Stroilov is a bit too enamored of his own collection to admit the complexity of these events—but there is nonetheless much in his archives to support this description. The documents clearly suggest that many contemporary conflicts in the Middle East were fomented by the Soviet empire, particularly in the final years before its break-up. And the events he describes have had a significant impact upon the current state of the region—from the conflict in Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, to the development of a de facto alliance between the European Union and the Arab states. Perhaps most significantly, there is much here to suggest that it is past time to reexamine Gorbachev’s reputation as a reformer and liberalizer. Stroilov’s book suggests that in the Middle East, Gorbachev’s policy was old-school Kremlin imperialism, all the way to the end.

From the close of World War I, the great prize of the Middle East has been the Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, America and its allies in Europe and Asia depended upon its oil for 90 percent of their energy needs; developing countries would be instantly crippled by a sharp hike in oil prices. But for the Soviets, attaining control of the Gulf could be achieved only by direct military aggression. Following the return of British forces to Kuwait in 1961 to defend the Emirate from Iraq’s Abd al-Karim Qasim—whose ambitions for Kuwait were subsequently, if temporarily, realized by Saddam Hussein—it became clear to the Soviets that the West would go to any length to defend the oil. “And so the comrades postponed the conquest of the Gulf,” writes Stroilov, “although some of them were sorely disappointed with that decision.”

What, then, was Plan B? It was “the subversion and eventual destruction of Israel.”

Though not as good as the Gulf oil fields, Israel would also be a big prize. It was the only democracy in the region, the strongest military power in the pro-Western camp and, indeed, the bridgehead of the Western world. Even more importantly, the very process of crusading (or jihadding) against Israel offered fantastic political opportunities. A besieged Israel effectively meant millions of Jewish hostages in the hands of the comrades, and the threat of genocide could intimidate the West into making great concessions in the Gulf or elsewhere. On the other hand, by making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the central problem of the Middle East, the Soviets could exploit Arab nationalism, anti-Semitism, and even Islamic religious feelings to mobilize support for their policies. Indeed, under the banner of Arab solidarity, the socialist influence in the region grew far beyond the socialist regimes and parties.

The code-name for this operation against Israel, according to Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet Bloc, was “SIG”—Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments.” In a National Review article, Pacepa recalls a conversation he had with KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who envisioned fomenting “a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world. … We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.”

In the mid-1970s, Pacepa recalls, the KGB ordered its Eastern European sister agencies to scour the Middle East for trusted agents, train them in disinformation and terrorism, and export a “rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism.” They showered the region with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and KGB-fabricated documents alleging that Israel and the United States were dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.

Following the defeat of the Egyptians in the Six Day War, the Soviets came to a second realization: A conventional military confrontation with Israel, and by extension the West, carried too great a risk of escalating into nuclear war. A change of tactics was required. Gen. Alexander Sakharovsky, then head of the KGB’s intelligence arm, explained this to his East European colleagues: “[T]errorism should become our main weapon.” Sakharovsky boasted that airplane hijackings were his own invention; he decorated his office with a world map, covered in flags, each marking a successful hijacking. Though the PLO managed to unite various terrorist organizations, “the supreme headquarters of the whole network was, of course, the Kremlin,” Stroilov writes, and “the evidence accumulated at this point leaves no doubt that the whole system was invented by Moscow as a weapon against the West, and the PLO was a jewel in their crown.”

Pacepa lists examples of KGB-sponsored acts of terrorism:

November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded; May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded; December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded; March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded; May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded; July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded; April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded; May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.

Stroilov’s documents indicate that the Soviets and Syrians also took credit for blowing up the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1984.

Read the whole thing.

I've noted before a PLO document that was essentially a blueprint for delegitimizing Israel from 1968, and how it appeared to be influenced by the Soviets. This strengthens that case a great deal.

Although it is obvious that Arab hate of Israel (and Jews) came way before the Soviets started meddling. But they knew how to direct that anger.

(h/t Petra)

Meanwhile, in Egypt...

Besides Mubarak's seemingly imminent death, which some Egyptians are saying is not such a big deal, we have....

According to an Egypt state television report, some 100 surface-to-surface missiles were captured in the Baheira governorate on Tuesday by security personnel. It is unclear how the missiles made their way into Egypt, but the state TV report said those responsible have been detained.

The state television report said Egypt’s Anti-Drug General Administration discovered the missiles, a launching pad, and dozens of hand guns loaded in two cars.

Beheira is in the center-north of Egypt where the Nile Delta is.

And:

Witnesses confirmed the spread of large forces belonging to the Egyptian Third Army at the entrances of the [Rafah] tunnels; searching (in cooperation with the police) at the tunnel entrances for those coming from North and South Sinai, in search of Hamas members.... They are checking all the identities of departures and arrivals in the Sinai Peninsula, whether Egyptians or otherwise, and are also checking their passports to acertain their true identity, whether they belong to Hamas or not.

And:

Four armed men seized a car containing the weapons and personal belongings of five police officers who were driving from North Sinai to Cairo.

The incident took place five kilometers from a toll station on the Cairo-Ismailia Desert Road. The four armed men, who were riding in a truck without license plates coming from the opposite direction, reportedly forced the police to get out of the car.

And:

Five Egyptian political parties have jointly called for the establishment of a pro-civil-state political force to stand against "repression" by the military and Islamist groups.
In a statement released Sunday, the parties said attempts by the ruling military council to rehabilitate the regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak is "state despotism."

They also condemned what they said were plans by Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, to establish a religious dictatorship through the control of state institutions and by excluding other political factions from power.

The statement was signed by the Free Egyptians Party, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, the Egypt Freedom Party - three parties established after the 2011 uprising - as well as the older Democratic Front Party and Nasserist Karama Party.

And:

Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson Mohamed Ghozlan warned of a "dangerous faceoff" between the people and the army if Ahmed Shafiq, described by opponents as the "military's man," is declared Egypt's new president.

A Shafiq victory would be "a direct military coup by the military council," Ghozlan added.

The official presidential election results are due tomorrow. And no matter who is declared the winner, all hell may very well break loose.

Midweek Links by Ian

Islam is ‘a religion of war,’ says son of Hamas founder on a visit to his ‘beloved Israel’
Mosab Hassan Yousef rejected his Islamist upbringing to help Israel fight terror. If he had the chance, he says, he’d tell his father: ‘Leave Hamas. You have created a monster’

"Mosab Hassan Yousef has a knack for controversy. The son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, he has already broken every taboo in the Palestinian book. He has worked for Israeli intelligence and converted to Christianity. Now he is developing a new film which is sure to be no less sensational: a biography of the life of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam."

British MP George Galloway: The Syrian Revolutionaries Are "Servants of the Crusader Powers"

Why Is the Peace Process Dead?

The peace process is dead because a majority in the Arab and Muslim world still has not come to terms with Israel's right to exist.

Jew Hunting Season Open in France by Guy Millière

These organizations remain blindly silent : for them, Muslims are "victims of racism" and therefore cannot be racist.

Man claiming al-Qaida link takes hostages in France

TOULOUSE, France - A man claiming to be a member of al-Qaida has taken four hostages in a bank in the southwestern French city of Toulouse, including the bank manager, police officials said on Wednesday.

Index Ventures Raises $442 Million Sixth Early Stage Fund

The firm, founded in 1998 with headquarters in London, focuses strictly on technology companies and will invest two-thirds of the fund in Europe and Israel and the rest in the U.S.

Israel's neighbors are the biggest human traffickers

This map comes from a new report from the US State Department on human trafficking.

The Middle East is even worse than Africa in this regard.

The categories:

Tier 1: Countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards.
Tier 2: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
Tier 3: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.

There seems to be only one Tier 1 country in the entire region.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

For World Refugee Day: Abolish UNRWA

1.

From the PA's official WAFA news agency:

RAMALLAH, June 20, 2012 (WAFA) – Number of refugees registered in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) totaled 5.1 million in 2012, according to a statistical review on the current status of the Palestinian refugees published Wednesday and prepared by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) on the eve of the International Day of Refugees.

UNRWA's statistics this year say that there are 5,115,755 registered "persons," but only 4,797,723 "refugees." As a footnote states:

Recent digitisation of UNRWA’s registration records enables us to present more detailed beneficiary statistics. Other registered persons include those eligible to receive services.

Which means that UNRWA is providing services to 318,032 people that even UNRWA does not consider refugees!

2.

Out of those 4.8 million UNRWA "refugees," 1,979,580 live in Jordan, 727,471 live in the West Bank and 1,167,572 live in Gaza.

Nearly all of the Jordanians - lets say 1.8 million - are Jordanian citizens, and cannot be considered refugees.

All of those living in Gaza and the West Bank live in what they consider Palestine, so they cannot be considered refugees by any definition.

Which means that we can cut out 3.6 million from the rolls, today, leaving 1.1 million left.

3.

The remaining "refugees," live in Lebanon and Syria. 436,154 are registered in Lebanon and 486,946 registered in Syria.

But UNRWA itself admits that the number of "registered" refugees in Lebanon does not reflect reality. Even though it gets funding for 436,000 refugees in Lebanon, there are only about 240,000 Palestinian Arabs who are actually receiving UNRWA aid there. The other 200,000 or so are gone - many became citizens, many moved out of Lebanon to Europe.

Ever since the early days of UNRWA, the Palestinian Arabs have lied to the agency to inflate their numbers. They didn't register deaths and they added people who were not refugees to the rolls.

In Jordan, most of the stateless Palestinian Arabs are from Gaza who left in 1967. They weren't expelled, they weren't threatened, they weren't forced out: they left for the simple reason that they didn't want to live under Israeli rule. (Most of those who left the West Bank for Jordan felt the same, most of those left after the war, not during. Of course, they were already Jordanian citizens.) Which means that they aren't refugees either, by the official definition of the term - "A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality..."

While I don't know if the Syrian statistics are as skewed as the Lebanese, we can assume a large error in these statistics altogether; perhaps only 700,000 people who are truly deserving of UNRWA aid in Syria and Lebanon.

4.

Of course, descendants of refugees are not considered refugees forever by any definition besides UNRWA's. The UNHCR has specific cessation clauses that define how a refugee loses that status; UNRWA has none. In reality, the only people who can remotely be considered refugees are those who were born in Palestine before 1949, who live outside the territories and who do not have citizenship.

In the West Bank, 3.7% of the Arabs are over 65 years old. If that number is roughly accurate all over the Middle East, that means that there are, at most, 30,000 Palestinian Arab refugees today. (This is not counting the refugees who are of Palestinian descent who were expelled from Iraq, Kuwait and elsewhere; UNHCR counts about 94,000 of those.)

The number that UNRWA uses is inflated by over 160 times the reality. And they do it for only one reason: to keep their bloated bureaucracy alive.

5.

It is worth reading the UNHCR Global Trends report released for World Refugee Day. While it mentions the UNRWA "refugees" in passing, it seems almost embarrassed to include them in the statistics of real refugees in the world.

UNHCR's report make it clear what a refugee organization is supposed to do: to solve the problem, not to perpetuate it. UNHCR manages to resettle or repatriate hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons every year, an astonishing record.

And from reading the literature from UNHCR and comparing it to that of UNRWA, one can only come to one conclusion:

UNRWA must be abolished.

Israel's desalination miracle

The amazing thing about this article is that it was originally written in Arabic, at Lebanon's As-Safir:

Since the beginning of the Zionist project, Israel's founding fathers drew up a roadmap so that the rising entity would not only survive, but flourish. Water played a central role in how this entity was shaped, whether it involved underground or surface water — such as the Tiberias or Al-Hawlah Lakes — or salt water, like that found in the Mediterranean Sea or the Gulf of Aqaba.

Over time, the conflict between Israel and the Arab countries over both freshwater and salt water intensified, whether it was over the Jordan River tributary or the Straits of Tiran. For decades, many predicted that the war over water resources would become the most virulent in the region.

However, after combining technology with money and political, regional and international changes, the water resources issue has been revisited from another angle. It is possible that the talk about gas discovery in the Mediterranean Sea and the possible outbreak of conflict over gas — whether between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, or even Egypt — has overshadowed the issue of water. Talking about fresh water as a probable cause of conflict has ceased.

Clearly, part of the reason why the focus on fresh water has shifted, at least from the Israeli side, is due to Israel’s successful investment in water desalination projects.

Some people in Israel talk about this issue as if it were a miracle. The state, which would have gone to war for water resources, realized that desalinating water is not only less expensive than war, but it can also become a profitable investment.

[Israel], a state once desperate for fresh water, has now become a country wishing to export it — or at least the technology that can produce it.

Media reports have emphasized Israel’s satisfaction with the water issue after seven austere years during which it faced scarcity, especially in surface water and groundwater. For years, water experts had been adjusting the “red line” for water in Israel. However, their satisfaction stems mainly from the water desalination projects that were established on the Mediterranean shore, described by some as one of the “largest in the world.”

Currently, there are five desalination facilities in Israel that are either complete or nearly complete, the largest of which is in Hadera city. In addition to these, there are two facilities in Ashkelon, Palmachim, Soreq, and Ashdod. By 2013, these facilities are expected to desalinate approximately 600 million cubic meters of water annually. This is nearly four times the amount pumped from Tiberias Lake each year.

At this point, half of the running water in Israeli homes comes from water desalination plants. Israelis stopped relying on rain water years ago; now they resort to sea water to meet their needs. The IDE Company (a subsidiary of Delek Group) and Kail Company played an important role in transforming Israel into a major player in the desalination field. The two companies have established desalination plants not only in Israel, but also in many countries around the world.

Ironically, Israeli experts said that the idea of water desalination is very old, and that the Phoenicians were the first to come up with it. “The first scientific article written about water desalination in history was published by Arab chemists in the eighth century,” they added. An Israeli expert said that, despite the great difference between today’s facilities and those set up in the past, the underlying principle “has existed for hundreds of years, at least.”

J-Street endorsed congressman sponsored anti-Israel resolution

Yesterday, I reported on a one-sided anti-Israel resolution that was considered (and tabled for further consideration) by the North Carolina Democratic Party st their state convention this past weekend.

The resolution, which blames only Israel for all problems of the area and calls to recognize Hamas as a peace partner, was sponsored by the 4th Congressional District of North Carolina, which includes Chapel Hill.

(See Page 12, name of resolution:
26. BRINGING A JUST PEACE TO THE MIDDLE
EAST: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE (4TH CD) )

The member of Congress representing that district is David Price, an eleven term congressman.

J-Street, the purportedly pro-Israel organization, enthusiastically endorses Price:

Apparently, J-Street agrees that US military aid to Israel must be eliminated, that Hamas must be recognized, and that the PLO bears no responsibility for anything.

Can J-Street explain to us exactly what makes this one-sided joke of a resolution "pro-Israel" and why they are soliciting money to donate to this nutcase? I'd really love to know.

(h/t Hard Little Machine and Bella Center)

Reuters vs. the truth about the Temple Mount

From Reuters:

Jews call the raised ground at the eastern edge of Jerusalem's Old City the Temple Mount, while Muslims know it as the Noble Sanctuary.

Jews "call" it the Temple Mount, but Muslims "know" what it really is.

A senior Muslim official involved in the plan said one to two million foreign pilgrims could visit Al-Aqsa annually if access were free and unimpeded.

"It would protect Al-Aqsa and also provide an enormous boost to the Palestinian economy," he said. He asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Jerusalem was traditionally a stop for Muslims on overland routes to or from the annual Haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

What they found was a tranquil esplanade with two jewels of Islamic architecture, an elegant mosque highlighted by arabesque stained glass windows and the octagonal Dome of the Rock clad in ornate tiles and topped by a gilded cupola.

Millions could visit, just like the good old days before the Jews came along, right?

I've already shown how damaged and forsaken the Dome of the Rock was in the late 1800s and early 1900s in two web posts and a video.

But I found a color image of the Temple Mount taken in the 1950s, when millions of Muslims were free to visit as much as they wanted on the way to Mecca, or otherwise.

It doesn't look at all the way that Reuters makes it sound: (Click to enlarge.)

The dome wasn't golden - it was gilded in 1960 (and again in 1994.)

The plaza wasn't filled with pilgrims, but with weeds. And the Dome was in disrepair.

You can see it was even in worse shape in these two videos I spliced together, made in 1954 and a small part in the late 1940s or 1950:

Does it look like Muslims were flocking to the "Noble Sanctuary"?

Reuters keeps going:

This is also where Judaism's two Bible-era Temples once stood, the first destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the second leveled by the Romans in 70 AD. The Western Wall, the last remnant of the second structure, is one of the most sacred sites in Judaism.

Oh, as an afterthought, a couple of Jewish temples also happened to be on top of that hill.

And what might the most sacred site in Judaism be, hmmm? Considering that this is an article about the Temple Mount, it seems as if Reuters is deliberately avoiding the tiny little fact that it it Judaism's most holy spot.

(Also, the Kotel is not the only remaining remnant from the retaining wall of the Temple Mount, as much of the entire western wall - far beyond the Kotel - and much of the southern wall are still there. There may be other remnants of the Temple under the Mount if the Waqf hasn't yet destroyed them. )

Links!

From Ian:

Elie Wiesel rejects Hungarian award over Nazi memorial
Nobel laureate outraged by Budapest’s May 27 ceremony for Jozsef Nyiro, a WWII parliamentarian

"Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel says he’s repudiating a Hungarian award he received in 2004 because top officials from Budapest recently attended a ceremony for a Nazi sympathizer."

BDS Fails
Israel to host 2013 under-21 soccer championships

Facebook Acquires Facial Recognition Technology Company Face.com For Nearly $60 Million

“Founded in 2007, the Israel-based start-up offers both desktop and mobile products which scan a user’s photos to identify faces, essentially making tagging photos with people’s names much simpler. And Facebook has no dearth of photos to scan — at last count, users on average upload approximately 300 million new photos to Facebook’s site every day.”

Chalk this up as a win too, an overrated book.
Only Israelis speak Hebrew right? Alice Walker says no to Hebrew ‘Purple’

Well worth a read, from 2011: Howard Jacobson: Why Alice Walker shouldn't sail to Gaza
“Human beings are seldom more dangerous than when they are sentimentally overcome by the goodness of their own intentions. That Alice Walker believes it is right to join the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza I do not have the slightest doubt. But beyond associating her decision with Gandhi, Martin Luther King and very nearly, when she talks about the preciousness of children, Jesus Christ, she fails to give a single convincing reason for it.”

Also, Fresno Zionism's highly amusing story of Palestinian Arab rapture.

I reported on Sunday that there was a protest at the US embassy in Amman over the weekend against reclassifying Palestinian Arab refugee status to be in line with the UN's definition for all other people.

I had the feeling that it was staged and that the protesters were far from representative of the vast majority of Jordanian Palestinians, most of whom prefer to stay in Jordan. As I had noted in an Independent article from 2009:

He seems perplexed when asked which is his country – Jordan or Palestine. "We have no security here, but we are Jordanians," replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. "Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be'ersheba?" he declares. "My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here."

That determination, echoed repeatedly through the dilapidated cement homes that line Baqa'a's gravelly streets and dust-filled shops, is precisely what terrifies Jordan's East Bank establishment.

Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian Palestinian and well-known writer, added a comment to give context to this demonstration:

Less than 35 people attended this protest. This is a fake Jordanian-intelligence backed protest, this was called for by the Jordanian intelligence service, and the majority of Palestinians refused to attend as I have advised them openly not to so. This protest of 35 people was organzied by the my own cousin, Omar Abu Latifa, a known-intelligence agent operating at Hitten refugee camp, who has been instructed by his officers to confront my effort, nonetheless, the turn out number...less than 35, from two million refugee camps residents. Please spread my response.