Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 13, 2007

Ba'al and the Palestinian Arabs

Commenter ER mentioned a strange chapter of PalArab history that I was unaware of.

Palestinian Arabs, especially their terror leader Arafat, have always claimed that today's PalArabs are descendants of the ancient Canaanites. Just as the PalArabs want to deny Jewish history they also have a habit of making up their own. While the Canaanite claim is of course nonsense (Canaanites were not Arab,) a funny episode occurred as a result.

Embracing their fake Canaanite origins, the PA issued a postage stamp honoring an ancient Canaanite god, known as Ba'al.

There were in fact a number of local dieties named Ba'al, but the characteristics of the Ba'al worshipers are perhaps appropriate for today's Palestinian Arab death cult.

Ba'al Hammoun and Ba'al of Moloch were said to sacrifice their children. This could be why Ba'al was such an attractive symbol to Arafat, as the PalArab tradition of sacrificing their own children in the name of Jihad is entrenched if not quite as ancient.

Ba'al Peor, in Jewish tradition, was worshipped via excrement, also an appropriate symbol for a people who prefer to use sewage pipes to create rockets.

Interestingly, the Italian Muslim Association known to be pro-Israel issued a fatwa against any Muslim owning or using this stamp. What is amazing is that no principled Arab Muslim issued any similar fatwa as far as I can tell, which makes it appear as if Muslim religious law is more concerned about politics than religion. It cannot be denied that Islam would consider Ba'al as a false god and the sin of blasphemy is deserving of death in Islamic law.

18 weeks in a row

For the 18th consecutive week, according to PCHR statistics and my own, more Palestinian Arabs have been violently killed by their own actions than by Israeli actions.

This week was close, though - from last Thursday to Wednesday of this week, PCHR reports 2 killed and 3 dying from previous wounds that they blame on Israel. I count 6 killed in PalArab self-violence.

Ironically, the PalArab media still refers to this time period after the Mecca agreement between Fatah and Hamas as "the calm." While most of the deaths this week were not from Fatah/Hamas fighting, there still were some non-fatal clashes between them this week.

Another "honor killing" in Gaza

From PCHR:

PCHR’s preliminary investigation indicates that at approximately 1:00 on Thursday, 12 April 2007, medical sources in Shifa Hospital in Gaza City announced the death of Amna Maher Kalloub (19) from Beach Camp in Gaza City. She died of a serious bullet wound to the head sustained at approximately 10:15 on Monday, 9 April 2007. According to Police investigations, her brother shot her in what is known as an “honor” killing.

I could not find any mention of this murder in any Palestinian Arab newspaper, English or Arabic.

The PalArab self-death count is now at 171 for 2007.

UPDATE: Unidentified body found buried off central Gaza coast. It appears that he was killed a few days ago. (Also another video store in Gaza bombed.) 172.

UPDATE 2: Fatah terrorist killed by those unknown gunmen, and another dude was killed as well in Khan Younis. 174.

UPDATE 3: In a cryptic autotranslated article that only appeared on Maan Arabic, a story is told of a murder that took place on April 6. Unfortunately, Google translates rather than transliterates his name, so he is called "citizenship ostrich Fahmi spring." But since I cannot find anyone murdered in that time frame in the West Bank, it seems to be another one for the books. 175. (Another update: It was a woman.)

Heroism, Islamic Jihad style

The crushing self-image that PalArab terrorists have of themselves can be seen in how low they set their expectations.

Here's a story from Arutz-7 today:

Israelis who drove past Tekoa on Thursday afternoon reported hearing gunfire. None of the drivers were injured. IDF soldiers are scanning the area.

The army says the two cars were damaged. It is unclear at this time if the damage was caused by bullets or by rocks.

And here is the Islamic Jihad press release shown on the Saraya.ps website, the official website of the Al-Quds Brigades:(autotranslated)

Military statement issued by the Al-Quds Brigades

The targeting a convoy of cars settlers east of Tekoa East Bethlehem

Praising God and God declared Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, claimed responsibility for today's attack on the car near the settlement of the settlers "Tekoa" east of the city of Bethlehem.

In this today, Thursday, approved the first 24 spring 1428 H, approved April 12, 2007, managed a group of Al-Quds Brigades mujahid attack from automatic weapons on cars east of Tekoa settlers east of the town of Bethlehem.

Zionist sources acknowledged as one of the cars back injury, alleging lack of casualties among the herds of settlers.

We in the Al-Quds Brigades declare our responsibility for this heroic operation, which comes in the framework of the series of natural reply to the continuous Zionist aggression against our people in the West Bank territories, and stress the choice of resistance and struggle till the liberation of the entire territory of Palestine.

...God is great victory of the mujahideen ... Shame on the Zionists and the criminals

It is a Jihad, Jihad .. Victory or martyrdom

They managed to shoot a car and this is worthy of a hugely self-congratulatory press release?

Is there any greater evidence that the terrorists have reached the depths of low self-esteem after being so spectacularly unsuccessful at killing Jews as they would like? Even they admit that Israel's active targeting of them is making their attempts to kill Israelis more difficult.

Reading between the lines, one can see that Israel's policies of aggressively going after terrorists is paying off every day.

Goodwill gestures never work with Arabs

Today, an Arab member of Knesset suggested that Israel release every Israeli-Arab terrorist in jail - some 150 of them - as this move would "open a new page in Israeli-Arab relations."

On Tuesday,

Jordan's King Abdullah II urged Israel to end its occupation of Arab land to guarantee peaceful coexistence with the world's Muslims. "Israel, the European states and the United States should realize that the Palestinian issue does not only concern the Palestinians but also has the sympathy of all Muslims from Indonesia to the Maghreb states," the king said in an interview with AFP. "If Israel wants to coexist with more than a billion Muslims, it should end its occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands."

In both cases the Arabs are advocating Israel make unilateral concessions to gain the goodwill of the Arab world and therefore peace will result.

Sounds great, right?

Except for the fact that pretty much every single concession Israel made in the past for peace has been met with more hatred and terror, not less.

Israel withdrew from large areas of the West Bank after Oslo - and was rewarded with a huge terror infrastructure being built there.
Israel withdrew from Lebanon behind UN-drawn boundaries - and was rewarded with a more powerful Hezbollah that turned southern Lebanon into a terror statelet.
Israel withdrew from Gaza - and was rewarded with a terrorist haven that attracts Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda as well as many other homegrown Palestinian Arab terror groups.
Israel unilaterally stopped essentially all operations in Gaza for four months - and was rewarded with hundreds of rockets being sent almost daily into Israel.
Israel has released thousands from prison in the past for very few abducted Israelis - and was rewarded with more terror, more kidnappings, and 20%-25% of the released terrorists reverting to terror again.

So, "goodwill gestures" simply do not work.

They are treated not as confidence-building measures, but rather as signs of weakness that can then be exploited.

Which means that Arabs asking for "goodwill gestures" do not plan to reciprocate in the least. Even King Abdullah's statement is a joke - he knows as well as anyone that most of the billion Muslims he is backhandedly threatening Israel with will not accept Israel even within the Green Line. And the 10% or 25% or whatever that may feel slightly better about Israel after such a suicidal move will revert to their hate as soon as Palestinian Arabs find another al-Dura or Koran desecration or wild rumor to rile up the Arab street against Israel again.

The romantic Western notion of how good deeds will inevitably follow good deeds simply does not apply in this region of the world, and it is always a fatal error to ascribe Western notions of reciprocity to Arabs.

Let's see some real goodwill on the part of the Arabs - real concessions. Because the fact is, only Israel will respond to goodwill gestures favorably.

Let's see how those anti-Israel boycotts are doing

From Globes:

The IMF has raised its growth outlook for Israel by 0.3 percentage points in a new World Economic Outlook report published today, on the eve of the World Bank Group and IMF 2007 Annual Meeting. ...It now predicts 4.8% growth in 2007, and 4.2% growth in 2008. The IMF’s growth forecast for Israel is one of the highest for developed countries; the IMF categorizes Israel as such. The IMF predicts higher growth rates in 2007 for Hong Kong and Singapore, at 5.5% each, and for Ireland, at 5%. It predicts 4.4% growth for South Korean, 2.9% growth for the UK, 2.3% for Japan, 2.2% for the US, and 1.8% for Germany. The IMF also predicts 0.1% deflation for Israel this year; the only developed country for which it predicts this. The IMF predicts that Israel’s unemployment rate will fall to 7.5% of the civilian labor force in 2007 and 7.2% in 2008, down from 9% in 2005 and 8.4% in 2006.

I've mentioned before how when Arab nations enforced a boycott against Palestinian Jews in 1946 it backfired spectacularly. One would think that they and their Jew-hating colleagues would learn by now.

PalArab news accidentally shows Israeli sensitivity to Arabs

The Ma'an News headline says:

Israeli soldiers force women wearing 'niqab' to reveal their faces at Huwwara checkpoint

Sounds like an insult to Islamic law is being perpetrated! Sounds like there's going to be some rioting over Islamic women's "honor!"

But then the story actually gives some details:

Nablus - Salfit - Ma'an - The Israeli female soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint, south of Nablus city in the north of the occupied West Bank, intend to search women wearing the face veil, the 'niqab', who wish to pass through the checkpoint.

One of the women wearing niqab told our Nablus correspondent, "The women soldiers asked the women in niqab for their identity cards and detained them to one side."

They added that the female soldiers forced every woman wearing niqab to enter a special room near the checkpoint where they were body-searched.

The female soldiers asked the veiled women to uncover their faces and lift their clothes to reveal their abdomens while the female soldier stays outside the room and gives orders through a small opening in the door of the small room.

So is there any Islamic law against Islamic women being seen by other women? Obviously not. Is this any worse than what happens at airports every day? Obviously not.

So why exactly is this a news story? Unless it is to show how the monstrous Zionists are bending over backwards to show cultural sensitivity towards those who would love to see them all dead.

A true, religious, moderate Muslim leader

Reading this, one can almost have hope.

BY BRET STEPHENS
JAKARTA, Indonesia--Suppose for a moment that the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world openly says "I am for Israel." Suppose he believes not only in democracy but in the liberalism of America's founding fathers. Suppose that, unlike so many self-described moderate Muslims who say one thing in English and another in their native language, his message never alters. Suppose this, and you might feel as if you've descended into Neocon Neverland.

In fact, you have arrived in Jakarta and are sitting in the small office of an almost totally blind man of 66 named Abdurrahman Wahid. A former president of Indonesia, he is the spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members. Indonesians know him universally as Gus Dur, a title of affection and respect for this descendant of Javanese kings. In the U.S. and Europe he is barely spoken of at all--which is both odd and unfortunate, seeing as he is easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism.

Conversation begins with some old memories. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wahid, whose paternal grandfather founded the NU in 1926 and whose father was Indonesia's first minister of religious affairs, won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which for 1,000 years had been Sunni Islam's premier institution of higher learning. Mr. Wahid hated it.

"These old sheikhs only let me study Islam's traditional surras in the old way, which was rote memorization," he recalls, speaking in the excellent English he learned as a young man listening to the BBC and Voice of America. "Before long I was fed up. So I spent my time reading books from the USIS [United States Information Service], the Egyptian National Library, and at the cinema. I used to watch three, four movies a day."

As Mr. Wahid saw it, the basic problem with Al-Azhar was that the state interfered in its affairs and demanded intellectual conformity--a lesson he carries with him to the present day. In 1966 he left Cairo for Baghdad University, where he encountered much the same thing: "The teaching [suffered from] conventionalism. You were not allowed to go your own way."

Here Mr. Wahid digresses into Islamic history. "In the second century of Islam, the Imam al-Shafi'i began remodeling the religion," he says. "He put into place the mechanism of understanding everything through law [Shariah]. Now people can't talk about that anymore. We cannot attack al-Shafi'i."

The point is crucial to Mr. Wahid's understanding of Islam as being something broader, deeper and better than the tradition-bound view of life imposed by traditional schools of Islamic law (all the more striking because Mr. Wahid is himself a leading theologian of the Shafi'i school). It is equally crucial to Mr. Wahid's politics, not to mention his relaxed approach to social issues.

"The globalization of ethics is always frightening to people, particularly Islamic radicals," he says in reference to a question about the so-called pornoaksi legislation. For the past three years Indonesian politics have been roiled by an Islamist attempt to label anything they deem sexually arousing to be a form of "porno-action." Mr. Wahid sees this as an assault on pancasila, Indonesia's secularist state philosophy from the time of its founding. He also sees it as an assault on common sense. "Young people like to kiss each other," he says, throwing his hands in the air. "Why not? Just because old people don't do it doesn't mean it's wrong."

Mr. Wahid is equally relaxed about some of the controversies that have recently erupted between Muslims and the West. Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech from last September was "a good speech, though as usual he pointed to the wrong times and the wrong cases." As for the furor over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, he asks "why should we be angry?" And he dismisses Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the al-Jazeera preacher who helped incite the cartoon riots, as an "angry, conventional" thinker.

What really concerns Mr. Wahid is what he sees as the increasingly degraded state of the Muslim mind. That problem is becoming especially acute at Indonesian universities and in the pesantren--the religious boarding schools that graduate hundreds of thousands of students every year. "We are experiencing the shallowing of religion," he says, bemoaning the fact that the boarding schools persist in teaching "conventional"--that word again--Islam.

But Mr. Wahid's critique is not just of formal Islamic education. He also attacks the West's philosophy of positivism, which, he says, "relies too much on the idea of conquering knowledge and mastering scientific principles alone." This purely empirical and essentially soulless view of things, broadly adopted by Indonesia's secular state universities, gives its students a bleak choice: "Either they follow the process or they are outside the process."

As a result, Western-style education in Indonesia has come to represent not just secularism but the negation of religion, to which too many students have responded by embracing fundamentalism. At the University of Indonesia, for example, an estimated three in four students are members or sympathizers of the "Prosperous Justice Party," or PKS, an ultra-radical Islamic party.

This raises the subject of religion and politics. "For us, an Islamic party is not a thing to follow," he says, adding that "religion and morality is tied to person, not a party." To illustrate the point, he observes that religious parties in the Muslim world have more often been the handmaids of dictatorship than democracy. "Whenever governments tried to enforce their institutions they use 'Islamic' people as potential allies." The Front for the Defense of Islam (FPI), a radical vigilante group that uses violent means to suppress "un-Islamic" behavior, was, he observes, originally a creature of the Indonesian military.

So why did Mr. Wahid, as a religious leader, make the choice to go into politics himself? He demurs at the suggestion of choice. "I am against politics, so to speak. In 1984 I tried hard to convince people that the NU should not be in politics." He was overruled by others in the organization, and eventually he founded the Party of National Awakening, or PKB. Yet the party, he insists, is "based on non-Islamic principles," a fact he illustrates by pointing to a nearby aide who is an Indonesian Protestant. "We have to go for plurality, for tolerance."

He also believes that the "only solution" to the challenge of Islamic radicalization in Indonesia is more democracy. But what about the example of Hamas, which came to power through democratic means, and of other groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood that would probably do the same if given the chance? Mr. Wahid's answer is to distinguish between what he calls "full democratization" and the "hollow imitation of democracy" that he sees taking place in Indonesia as well as among Arabs in Palestine and Iraq.

"The problem is not personalities, it is institutions," he says. "For the past 250 years the Americans have had not just Jefferson's concept of the rights of the individual but also Alexander Hamilton's belief in a strong state." In order to function properly, democracy requires competent government that can effectively uphold the rule of law. It also requires a broadly understood concept of self-rule, which is missing in too much of the developing world: "Here, ordinary citizens expect the government to do everything for them."

He therefore takes a fairly dim view of Iraq's democratic prospects. "Iraqis understood that Saddam had caused them trouble," and were grateful to be rid of him, he says. "But as for the U.S. concept of democracy, they don't understand it at all." The problem, he adds, goes double in the rest of the Arab world, where, he says, the prevailing view is that being a democracy is an expression of weakness, while being a dictatorship is a sign of strength.

What's needed, in other words, is for countries like Indonesia and Iraq to find a way to combine effective government with a powerful respect for the rights of the citizen. But how one goes about doing that is itself a deeper problem, a problem of culture. "How do we follow the West without [becoming] Westerners? How do you do that? I don't know."

In fact, Mr. Wahid has begun to develop an answer through two organizations he chairs, the Wahid Institute, run by his daughter Yenny, and LibForAll, an Indonesia- and U.S.-based nonprofit run by American C. Holland Taylor, which works to discredit Islamism's ideology of hatred. "It's up to LibForAll to introduce both sides to Muslims; to show that common principles are also the principles of Islam," Mr. Wahid says. "Hundreds of thousands of Muslim youth learn in countries where there is technological modernity. We need to [nurture] the emergence of a new kind of people who think in terms of being modern but still relate to the past."

In fact, that perfectly describes Mr. Wahid, who is keenly aware of his own roots in both Islamic and Javanese traditions. Among his ancestors are the last Hindu-Buddhist king of the Javanese Majapahit dynasty, and Sunan Kalijogo, a Sufi mystic who married Islamic and local traditions and, according to lore, defeated Islamic extremism in the 16th century. Can Mr. Wahid, heir to this venerable tradition, accomplish the same feat? "Right now, the fundamentalists think they're winning," he once told a friend. "But they're going to wake up one day and realize we beat them."

Possibly the most unbelievable part of his website is a joke page, filled with religious humor (some stolen Jewish jokes reworked as Muslim, but still...)

Unlike the Muslims that too many people pin their hopes on (see my comments here,) who generally have much larger numbers of Western followers than Muslim followers, this guy seems like the real deal - someone who can speak about Islam in the Islamic playing field and not be dismissed easily as a heretic or crackpot.

40 million followers is of course only a small percentage of the Muslim world, and he probably has no Arab followers at all, but this is the sort of person who could truly effect change and show the world's Muslims that there is another way to remain Muslim and not have to blindly follow the corrupt, immoral and shortsighted sheikhs and ayatollahs.

(Robert Spencer disagrees, saying that Wahid's views of the religion are so against a literal reading of the Koran as to make him meaningless. But in any religion that has reformed and changed over time there are going to be new ways to adapt the religion and parts that end up being all but ignored, which is effectively what Wahid is doing - and more importantly, succeeding at. If he has millions of followers, that indicates that his message is being accepted as being a valid interpretation of Islam; that is more important than finding Koranic texts that seem to disprove him. Both Christianity and Judaism have source texts that contradict themselves when read literally; this does not stop the religions from continuing on. Similarly, Islam can thrive with a less-literal interpretation of the Koran as long as there are respected leaders espousing it.)

The next best thing to killing Jews

When Palestinian Arab terrorists get frustrated that they aren't killing as many Jews as they did in the good old days, they sit back and start thinking:

"Jews are smart. Jews like to read. Jews are cultured. Jews are progressive.

"Let's attack all the Palestinian Arab institutions that remind us of Jews!"

And so they do.

In Beit Hanoun one can find the "El-Ata Charitable Society," which offers social and cultural services to people in the area. El-Ata has a library and, today, El-Ata was to open up a new computer lab.

At 1:00 PM, people broke in and burned down the computer lab and library.

Back in February, a theatre and another library in a cultural center was burned down, that time in Jabalia.

What a great society!

Witness the birth of an Arab lie

On the Hamas website, they report on Israel arresting 19 people connected with a plot to bomb Tel Aviv on Passover:

Zionist sources reported that its forces arrested 19 of Hamas members claiming that they were planning to explode e a car in Om Khalid city ( Tel Aviv).

The implication is that Tel Aviv was built on top of an ancient Arab city named "Om Khalid".

Of course, Tel Aviv was built on land purchased by Jews from Arabs. (See Wikipedia for details.)

A Google of "Om Khalid" found almost nothing. The only hit I saw was from the same Hamas source, where they called Netanya "Om Khalid" as well!

I couldn't find any mention of this Om Khalid in any maps that pre-dated Tel Aviv.

The town or village may be a complete fiction. More likely it is a forgotten hamlet that had nothing to do with Tel Aviv or Netanya.

So we may be in a position to witness exactly how Arab lies about Palestine have started. Just as other lies about Israel become commonly accepted "facts" in time due to Arab repetition, it will be worth looking at how this lie starts and spreads.

"Destitute" PalArabs lose millions to con man

This story has a little of everything. From YNet:

Gun-battles ravaged Nablus on Tuesday as Palestinian security forces attempted to prevent members of the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades from seizing property belonging to a local con man who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from dozens of Palestinian families.

The man is reportedly being held in a Palestinian Intelligence facility in Jericho where he is being questioned about his involvement in the alleged crimes.

A senior al-Aqsa source told Ynet that the man, who owns several exclusive auto-dealerships among other businesses, offered his victims lucrative investment deals. The man promised the potential investors they would receive over 10 percent in interest every month in return.

Many Palestinians – including families of members of al-Aqsa – bought into the scheme and gave the man large sums of money. The source told Ynet that his family gave the con man $97,000 and indeed, the next month they received a check for over $107,000.

Word spread quickly throughout Nablus and beyond the city limits, the businessman was heralded as an 'investment genius' and dozens of families rushed to offer him millions upon millions of dollars.

However for over a fortnight no one could locate the man, who had stopped answering phone calls and was nowhere to be found. In response members of Al-Aqsa seized control of homes and businesses owned by the con man, evicted the tenants and assumed ownership of them.

According to the source he himself took control of an auto-dealership, a house and three additional stores. "I don't know if this will compensate us," he said, "my family and the families of three other members gave him almost $500,000, but the dog vanished. We will bring him in and deal with him."

Palestinian security forces tried to prevent the takeover and exchanges of fire broke out between them and the Al-Aqsa gunmen.

When asked how their families were able to recruit such large sums of money at a time when most Palestinians are destitute, the al-Aqsa source said that the families sold their jewelry.

"My brother sold his Mercedes, the women sold their gold and the families spent every last cent they had. Now everything is gone. We are left with real estate we don't know the value of or who it will compensate."

Those poor, starving Palestinian Arabs who are forced to become Al Aqsa terrorists because of their extreme poverty and Israel's oppression were forced to liquidate their luxury cars and huge amounts of jewelry chasing a classic con.

The con man himself owned a luxury car dealership. In the poverty-stricken PA territories.

And now the families lost their gold although they seized his property. They must be really hungry by now as they are forced to drive their old, beat up BMWs to get their UN food handouts.

Here's an idea - sell the real estate to those Jews who are happy to pay double the going rate. A win-win! The only downside is that selling land to Jews is a crime that gets the death penalty. Very progressive, these PalArabs!

"Boy" electrocutes himself hanging Hamas flag

Sometimes, the autotranslated Arabic cannot be improved upon:

Boy died Sameh Mahmoud Khalilih Raja (17 years) after exposure to electric shock while trying to raise the banner of the Hamas movement, one of the pillars of electricity in the town of Deir al Ghusun north of Tulkarm.

The correspondent quoted security sources as saying that the Boy Khalilih one of the Hamas activists, died instantly when exposed to a high-pressure electric waves on an electric pole in the town of Deir al Ghusun, where the public hospital in the city of Tulkarem lifeless corpse.

This brings the count of PalArabs violently killed by each other (in this case, by their own stupidity) to 163 for this year.

UPDATE: Clan clash! 3 dead. 166. (One more died Tuesday from the Clan Clash - 167.)

UPDATE 2:

Palestinian Preventive Security officer Tahsin Ghalban, 33, has died hours after he was shot by unknown gunmen in east Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources have reported.

168.

UPDATE 3: Clan clash! 2 more dead. 170.

HEBRON, West Bank: A Palestinian attacker stabbed and wounded two Israeli police officers Sunday at a checkpoint outside a Hebron shrine that has been a flashpoint for violence in the past, the Israeli army said.

Israeli forces responded by shooting the attacker in the leg, the army said.

The attack — during the weeklong Jewish holiday of Passover — occurred at a checkpoint outside the shrine, known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque.

In the early afternoon, a Palestinian, who appeared to be about 17 years old, pulled out a knife and stabbed two policemen at the checkpoint, the army said. One was lightly wounded and the other was more seriously injured, the army said.

The news media doesn't refer to this teenager as a "child," and for good reason - he was acting as an adult and tried to murder two people. It would be silly to call him a child. The word "child" evokes a pre-teen, not a 17-year old.

Yet "human rights" organizations routinely use the word "child" to refer to any Palestinian Arab victim who is under 18 years old. This is consistent across B'Tselem, the UN, PCHR, DCI and all others. The age 18 is a convenient though arbitrary benchmark.

As far as I can tell, not a single one of these "human rights" organizations records the circumstances of what exactly the "child" was doing at the time of death. The only attempt that I have seen by anyone was by the ICT in 2002, so its data is quite out of date.

When looking even at Palestinian Arab statistics on "child fatalities" one can see that only 30% of them are under 13, hardly a random distribution. Couple this with the fact that over 50% of PalArabs are under 18 and it would appear that the number of both teenage and preteen victims is relatively small considering that the terrorists work in urban areas.

In other words, it is remarkable that the IDF has kept the number of noncombatant child victims as low as it has, and the percentage of teenage victims that are also combatants is simply never measured.

But somewhere in the air-conditioned offices of so-called human rights organizations today, a spreadsheet is being updated with another "child victim." And next month or next year, when "human rights" organizations issue press releases of "child victims of the intifada," the would-be murderer in Hebron will be counted as another "child injured by the IDF."

UPDATE: The always disgusting IMEMC reported the story this way:

Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron shot and wounded Sunday a Palestinian boy after two soldiers were stabbed near the Haram Alibrahimi mosque “Cave of Patriarch”.

In paragraph 3 does the story allow that it is possible that the "boy" is the one who stabbed the soldiers.

Some Muslim Brotherhood facts

In the wake of the Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood head in Egypt, it makes sense to look back at the Brotherhood itself and what it stands for.

First, here is an article about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism from the October 19, 1948 Palestine Post that gives an excellent background of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Egyptian fundamentalist movements at that time:

Since then, the MB became the ideological godfather to Hamas and Al Qaeda, although as it has risen in power politically it has officially distanced itself from terror.

Which doesn't mean that it no longer advocates terror - it is just a bit more circumspect. Its current web page is slick and seems downright mainstream.

However, the truth comes out a bit clearer in this other webpage that spells out more explicitly the movement's goals:

A huge tree of "sub-goals" branches from these main objectives which are derived from the Quran and the tradition of the prophet (pbuh) [3,4]:
1- Building the Muslim individual: brother or sister with a strong body, high manners, cultured thought, ability to earn, strong faith, correct worship, conscious of time, of benefit to others, organized, and self-struggling character [3].
2- Building the Muslim family: choosing a good wife (husband), educating children Islamicaly, and inviting other families.
3- Building the Muslim society (thru building individuals and families) and addressing the problems of the society realistically.
4- Building the Muslim state.
5- Building the Khilafa (basically a shape of unity between the Islamic states).
6- Mastering the world with Islam.
Only world domination - no big deal, right?

Here's their theme:

Allah is our objective.
The messenger is our leader.
Quran is our law.
Jihad is our way.
Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

So while they are all smiles (the current website features an article showing their smiling leader with a baby!) and have effectively hijacked the language of liberalism (democracy, free speech, freedoms) they are aiming at nothing less than a world-wide Islamic caliphate where non-Muslims are second-class citizens, at best.

This may not be the best people for Democratic leaders to meet with.

New PalArab "military group"

It is hard enough to keep track of the al-Aqsa Martyrs, Al-Qassam Brigades, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP, Popular Resistance Committee, Abu Raish Brigades, Force 17, Tanzim, Abu Nidal group and the Swords of Truth.

Now there's a new group with the catchy title of "The Committee for Recruiting and Guiding:"

A new Palestinian military group announced responsibility for stealing two intelligence cars in the central Gaza Strip.

The group is called 'the Committee for Recruiting and Guiding'.

The group issued a statement claiming that they released all the men who were in the two cars but they have kept the two cars, the incident was confirmed by the intelligence department.

No deaths yet can be claimed by the CRG, so we'll have to see if they can make it to the big leagues.

No doubt the tens of thousands of "security forces" will quash that group immediately. Any...minute...now.

Meanwhile, we had the usual shootings and bombings and kidnappings this weekend, but no PalArab self-deaths so far.

Venezuelan Jew-haters didn't get the memo

From JTA, in a larger article about Venezuelan Jewry under Chavez:

Chavez repeatedly compared Israel's behavior to that of the Nazis, a stance that locals say encouraged a wave of similar slanders. Sammy Eppel, a Jewish journalist in Caracas, catalogued a host of violently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic writing and cartoons in the local government and pro-government media.

In one article, which appeared last September in Diario de Caracas, a pro-government newspaper, journalist Tarek Muci Nasir wrote of the "Jewish race" that "the only resource they have left to stay united is to cause wars and genocide."

A cartoon that ran last year in Diario VEA, a state-owned newspaper, depicted Hitler saying, "How they've learned from me, these Israelis!"

One worrying trend is the extent to which these sentiments appear to be approved and encouraged by the government. The Ministry of Information last year organized a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas.

After the demonstration, the wall outside the synagogue was daubed with "Jews, killers – leave" and "Zionist baby-killers." At other times, graffitti has appeared there with slogans such as "Jews go home" and "Here are the murderers of the Palestinians."

Apparently the Venezuelan anti-semites didn't get the memo telling them to try to appear to only dislike Israel, not Jews. Too bad...versions of the memo are all over the place.

Thinking Bloggers Meme

The Thinking Blog started a meme called The Thinking Blogger Awards. They are not really awards, even though they have a neat graphic:

But since it is a meme, and all "winners" are requested to list 5 additional blogs that make them think, the value of the award goes down exponentially with every generation. And since the meme started in February, chances are that the entire blogosphere has been already named at least once.

Nevertheless, I am honored that Garbanzo Toons chose to nominate me on his iteration, and keeping with the rules of the meme, I'll be happy to mention five other blogs that make me think:

On the Main Line (plus its sister blogs)
Vital Perspective
ShrinkWrapped
Mere Rhetoric
Gates of Vienna

If any of these want to participate in this meme/social virus, the participation rules are:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to the original Thinking Blog post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

Dallas Muslim women, just acting naturally

Here's a classic case where two women, acting suspiciously under any circumstances, yell "Islamophobia" when confronted: (H/T: Jihad Watch)

Dallas police and federal terrorism officials are investigating two women, both dressed in camouflage pants under their traditional Muslim robes and scarves, who were seen conducting what appeared to be surveillance and acting suspiciously at Dallas Love Field.

One of the women, Kimberly "Asma" Al-Homsi, 42, of Arlington, who is on probation for a 2005 Garland road rage incident involving a fake grenade, is said to have long-range assault rifle and explosives training, according to a Dallas police intelligence bulletin issued March 5.

"I'm a trained sniper and proud of it," Ms. Al-Homsi said in an interview Thursday after first refusing to comment on whether she has any terrorism ties. She then said no.

Police officials said they have no direct evidence the women have ties to terrorism.

"I am not a dangerous individual," said Ms. Al-Homsi, who said she is an accountant who has dual Syrian-U.S. citizenship.

On the afternoon of Feb. 25, Ms. Al-Homsi and a friend who could not be reached for comment, Aisha Abdul-Rahman Hamad, 50, of Irving, were spotted at Love Field wearing Muslim robes and camouflage pants and "acting suspiciously," the bulletin states. The surveillance video shows one of the women walking back and forth, apparently pacing off distances.

When confronted, the women told officials they were looking for the Frontiers of Flight museum. They left in a red Honda. Descriptions of the incident and the car were circulated at the airport.

Two days later, the museum executive director was leaving for the evening when he noticed the Honda parked facing the runway. A woman, later identified as Ms. Al-Homsi, was sitting on the hood, looking through binoculars at the airplanes. He told the women the museum was closing, and they left.

Dallas officers stopped the car nearby, but the women refused to let police search their car, , according to a police report. The women had digital camera memory cards, binoculars, a flashlight and several lighters on them.

Police issued one of them a citation for having no front license plate and failing to change her address on a driver's license. They were released.

"We were watching the airplanes," Ms. Al-Homsi said. "That's not a crime, unless you're Muslim."

On Dec. 20, 2005, Ms. Al-Homsi was arrested after a report that she waved a grenade at a motorist on Central Expressway near LBJ Freeway. Richardson police stopped her car and arrested her. The Garland bomb squad determined the grenade was a fake. She was released the next day, after officials charged her with making a bomb hoax. She was placed on probation.

Law enforcement sources acknowledge that activities of both women have garnered substantial attention.

"We are aware of the activities that occurred at Love Field in February and are giving it appropriate consideration," said Lori Bailey, spokeswoman for the Dallas FBI.

Ms. Al-Homsi said that she has been questioned by local authorities "maybe a dozen times."

She said that she practices her rifle skills at the Alpine Shooting Range in Fort Worth. An employee confirmed that she's been going there for years.

"In all the Muslim garb, shooting an assault weapon, it seemed at first like she was trying to draw attention," said Dave Rodgers. "But then she came out so much, it became normal."

He said federal agents have talked to range employees about Ms. Al-Homsi, which is not uncommon of their clientele. He recalls seeing the fake grenade hanging from Ms. Al-Homsi's rearview mirror before she was arrested.

Just ordinary peaceful Muslim women who like to go out (unaccompanied by a Muslim male, as per shari'a) and shoot rifles, decorating their car with a hand grenade ornament, wearing camouflage pants, with citizenship in a nation that arms terrorists.

Nothing unusual about this at all.

British teachers not teaching the Holocaust to avoid upsetting Muslims
Many more Israeli Arabs volunteer for National Service
Israeli Arabs love to eat Matzah!
Anti-semitic incidents over Passover:

Chicago synagogue defaced with Arabic graffiti
A bomb exploded outside a Jewish community center in Montreal
UK Chelsea soccer team warns fans not to shout anti-semitic slogans during games
Anti-semitic graffiti in a park in Northern New Jersey
Swastika painted on a liberal San Francisco synagogue
Swastika and crude cartoon on chalkboard at Princeton University
10% of Swiss said to be anti-semitic; another 28% harbor some anti-semitic attitudes
White supremacist and anti-semitic literature distributed in Berkeley

The ninth Abu-Ghanem honor killing victim

Ha'aretz has a followup of a story I linked to here about eight women in one Ramle family being murdered in "honor killings."

It appears that the main witness herself has become a victim, and as a result the case is now falling apart.

I scoop the Jerusalem Post

Last Monday I posted about PalArab fears that the UN would declare Gaza "a dangerous area" and would withdraw as a result.

Today, the Jerusalem Post has an "exclusive" of the same story, adding some interviews mentioning how bad things are in Gaza, and even adding a flaming hoop picture.

Still worth reading, though.

The sources of Palestinian Arab suffering

Richard at Augean Stables gives a brilliant survey of the sources of Palestinian Arab suffering. Even strong supporters of Israel will not know all the facts he mentions and links to.

This is an absolute must-read. (Hat-tip Israellycool.)

Psychotic Israel-bashing in NJ newspaper

Opinion pieces in newspapers can and should have points of view. But it is unconscionable for newspaper editors to allow such opinion pieces to be filled with lies.

Here are just the first two paragraphs of an absurd screed printed in the Home News of Central New Jersey, written by a Hassan Mahmoud, published on the first day of Passover:

A civil discourse about ideas is anathema to fanatics, whether they are al-Qaida followers or Zionism espousers. Both practice bigotry and intimidation against their opponents and commit unspeakable violence to achieve their sinister goals.

Al-Qaida wants to establish an archaic form of Muslim caliphate empire from Spain to Indonesia, and the Zionists want to establish a biblical kingdom from the "river of Egypt unto the great river, the Euphrates," Genesis 15:18. The current Israeli flag, which exhibits two blue parallel lines (the Nile and Euphrates) dominated by the Star of David in the middle, thus encompassing the land from Egypt to Iraq, symbolizes that fantasy. Both enterprises are based on religious intolerance.

This theory about the Israeli flag has currency among rabid Jew-haters and people who froth at the mouth at the mere mention of Israel. It is nothing less than a lie. The ignorant author uses it as evidence of Al-Qaeda-like extremism not only among those dreaded Likudniks but for every single Zionist, from Peace Now to the settler movement.

Readers of the newspaper will expect that the editors will do some basic fact-checks before printing such garbage. Alas, most newspaper editors are as ignorant about the history of the Middle East as the author himself.

The Home News, in propagating this myth, does a grave disservice to its readers.

Latest state-of-the-art in flaming hoop jumping

We've all seen the photos of Palestinian Arab "policemen" training by using the tried-and-true Flame Hoop Jumping Course:

But no one has really tracked the progress made by these innovators in the ancient circus art.

Originally, the hoop-jumping was merely for stationary flaming hoops, as seen above. But by 2003, the PalArabs had graduated to leaping through movable hoops while someone shoots a machine gun on the ground:

This was OK for a couple of years, but to really put fear into the Zionist infidels, a new dimension was needed. And, in 2006, the braintrust of the PalArab Security Forces came up with it:

Multiple hoops.

We don't have a picture of the actual exercise of multiple terrorists jumping simultaneously through adjacent flaming hoops, but it can be inferred from this picture:

But we are three months into 2007 now, and it is time for a enw wrinke on hoop-jumping. After months of preparation, the PalArabs are finally able to unveil their latest secret weapon:

Two jumpers through a single hoop.

One can only imagine what will come next. Three jumpers through a movable fiery hoop while trying to dodge live hand grenades? Jumping through flaming hoops backwards while reciting the Koran?

One shudders at the skill of these security professionals.

17 weeks in a row. Plus some other stats.

For the 17th consecutive week, the number of Palestinian Arabs killed by other PalArabs has exceeded the number killed by Israeli defensive actions.

PCHR claims 4 killed by Israel this week, and I counted 7 killed by other PalArabs from last Thursday to Wednesday.

PICCR, whose website has not been updated in months, keeps its own counts of internal PalArab violence, and its numbers for March are very close to mine (29 deaths, I counted 30.) They also added that in March there were 46 kidnappings in the PA territories.

Also, the utterly immoral "Defence for Children Internation- Palestine Section" has a press release vilifying Israel for everything terrible that happens to children in the territories, yet buried in the middle they admit that 17 children under 18 have been killed in internal PA violence this year, versus 8 killed by Israel (most of whom were 16-17.)

Home is where the violence is

The Palestinian Bureau of Central Statistics came out with a bunch of stats, on PalArab children, on the occasion of something called Palestinian Child Day.

Among the notable statistics (such as 52% of the PalArab population is now under 18) came this one:

The indicators showed that the majority of children were exposed to assault mainly at home followed by school and then the streets.

In the topsy-turvy world of Palestan, the most dangerous places for children to be are their own homes. And their schools are safer than "the street."

On the other hand, 52.2% of the households said that they are able to provide security for their children.

Which of course means that 47.8% of the households cannot provide security for their children.

Sounds like we should give these guys a state!

Chag kosher v'sameach

Thanks to all my readers, and I wish all my Jewish readers a wonderful Chag.

UN declares Gaza "dangerous." Erekat upset.

In a society where lies are truth, Saeb Erekat can do this:

Bethlehem - Ma'an - Head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)'s negotiation's department, Dr Saeb Erekat, appealed against the United Nation's classification of the Gaza Strip as one of the world's most dangerous areas.

Erekat said that this labelling "affects Palestinian lives, and economy in particular."

Erekat added that "such a decision will be destructive and the withdrawal of the UN's employees and programs from Gaza Strip will be disastrous and will hinder the donor countries' projects."

He told Ma'an that such a trend by the UN "will have a catastrophic impact on Palestinian society, which might generate a further collapse in the already deteriorated Palestinian economy."

Erekat called on the UN to retract their decision.

The fact that Gaza is in fact one of the world's most dangerous areas is utterly irrelevant. Rather than working to actually fix Gaza, Erekat wants the UN to endanger its own workers and other foreigners.

Par for the course.

Another peaceful PalArab weekend

Besides the killing of a Salafist sheikh, another PalArab was shot in the head and killed Saturday. There were also some severe clan clashes with many injuries, 2 in critical condition last night.

Also a Hamas member was injured "accidentally."

Our count of PalArabs violently killed by each other so far in 2007 is now at 159.
UPDATE:

At approximately 20:30 on Friday, unknown gunmen in a car fired at Adnan Mansour El-Manasra (35) and Ahed Medhat El-Manasra (22), both from Sheja’eya Quarter in Gaza City. The shooting took place in El-Mentar Street in Sheja’eya. Adnan was killed by several bullets and Ahed was injured by a bullet in the right foot.

160.

UPDATE 2: On Tuesday, a man in Hebron was murdered in front of his house by those infamous "unknown persons." Is the West Bank starting to turn into Gaza? 161.

UPDATE 3:

Palestinian security sources announced on Thursday that the dead body of a Palestinian man, Muhammad Abu Hijaila, was found near the Shuja'iyya market in north-eastern Gaza Strip. The sources reported that the corpse was found riddled with gunshots and the reasons for his death remain unclear.

162.

For Muslims, co-existence=submission to Islam

Every so often, a Muslim writes an article that comes straight out of the liberal playbook, showing oh-so-logically why Jews and Arabs should co-exist peacefully. But scratch the surface and the message is anything but peaceful:

Muslims and Jews: Let us coexist

Azzam Tamimi

Until the Zionist project of creating an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine began in earnest in the latter part of the 19th century, Jews lived in many parts of the Muslim world and enjoyed living conditions not available to their fellow European Jews until recently.

For many centuries, and apart from the first two or three decades of Islamic history when Muslim-Jewish relations were plagued with a series of crises, Jews constituted a natural component of Muslim societies.

The Islamic civilisation was built with Muslim, Christian, Sabian and Jewish hands, by scientists and philosophers from all faiths and religious denominations who found in Baghdad, Cordova, Sicily and so many other cities unprecedented opportunities to think freely, translate literary, scientific and philosophical works of earlier civilizations and produce a corpus of knowledge that became the foundation upon which Europe set up its own enlightenment project.

In fact, Jews - on many occasions - fled European lands where they had been persecuted and sought refuge in Muslim lands.

The centuries-long harmonious coexistence between the Muslims and the Jews could have gone on. However, it was shattered, regrettably, when the Western European powers decided to solve their own Jewish problem by banishing the Jews to Palestine. Western Europe feared an influx of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, and the idea of sending the Jews to Palestine seemed to some Christian-Zionist leaders in London to pave the way for the second coming of Christ.

...
To assume that the Jews cannot survive without a state of their own called Israel is extremely foolish. The Jews have been around for thousands of years without a state of their own. There are many nations who similarly see themselves as distinct, whether as a faith community or a race or an ethnicity, but have been in existence, and will continue to be so, without a state of their own.

Jews have a future and a place in the Muslim world; but the future of an exclusively Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world is in doubt. What is more certain is a reality in which Muslims, Christians and Jews can live together again in peace and harmony enjoying equal citizenship rights; none should be superior to another.
...
Jews can once again put their hands in the hands of the Arabs and the Muslims to build a better future for all provided they dissociate themselves from the injustices inflicted upon the Palestinians by Zionism.
...
Originally published at http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/azzam_tamimi/2007/02/ijv_a_noble_jewish_initiative.html and reprinted with permission.

The subtext, of course, is that for all the talk of equal rights and coexistence, the author is advocating Jews and Christians live under Muslim rule.

Perhaps a counter-proposal is in order:

Jews and Muslims: Let us coexist

Elder of Ziyon

For centuries, the Arab and Muslim worlds have been plagued by infighting and bloodshed. Tribal wars, religious conflicts and battles between Islamic states have been constant and endemic. Even the newfound wealth of petrodollars has not significantly improved the Muslim world as corruption and theft have become the norm in the richest oil states.

There is only one place in the Middle East where Muslims enjoy equal rights, where Muslims can vote for the country's leaders, where Muslims can expect exceptional medical and social services. And that place is Israel.

For nearly six decades, over a million Muslims have lived in peace and harmony in the Jewish state. Significantly, almost none of them have chosen to emigrate to neighboring Arab countries. Their lives are far better in Israel than in any Muslim nation worldwide.

Not only is Israel a great place for Muslim citizens, but even non-Israeli Muslims who live under Israeli control enjoy better lives. The "golden age" of Palestinian Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, was when they lived under Israeli sovereignty, as their life expectancy zoomed and their birth mortality rates plummeted, as universities were built and Palestinian Arabs became the most educated and versatile members of the Arab world.

One only has to look at how the Muslims' lives have gotten worse as Israel withdrew from Gaza and parts of the West Bank to see that even under occupation, Palestinian Arabs had better lives than those of their neighbors. When Arabs have control over their own lives, their citizens suffer.

Let us live together. Let the Arabs and Jews co-exist under a benevolent Jewish regime stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates and beyond. Just imagine the heights such a society can achieve, as industrious Jews can turn oil revenues into a new Golden Age of Islam, where hundreds of millions of Arabs can all benefit from the newfound opportunities that would come in wake of a Jewish-ruled Middle East. Just imagine the flowering of Muslim women, finally allowed to reach their potential in a Jewish state. Islam will be not only tolerated but celebrated and the world will no longer look at Muslims as potential terrorists but rather as full members of civilized society.

Arab nationalism has failed and brought untold misery and bloodshed. Muslims can reap the benefits of living in a Jewish society as Israeli Arabs have learned. Isn't it time to put aside our differences and live together?

There - now doesn't that make more sense?

Car bomb history not quite accurate

Last month, a book by Mike Davis called Buda's Wagon was released, on the history of the car bomb.

While the book itself does not seem to be particularly partisan (a much-shortened version of the book can be read here), one of the author's points is that the first modern car bomb was exploded by the Stern Gang in 1947 (and was immediately copied by the Arabs later that year.) Some Israel-bashers latched onto this fact as evidence of Jewish immorality.

Well, Mr. Davis may have missed some.

I found this in the Palestine Post, July 25, 1938:

Although the attack was not fatal, an Arab apparently purchased the car for the purposes of blowing it up among Jews in 1938.

Notice that the bomb included "screws, bolts, spikes and other iron scraps" - the same recipe that today's Arab terrorist suicide bombers use.

My apologies to those who thought they had another reason to demonize Jews, but it seems that Arabs took the initiative at least this time, and may have been the inventors of an entirely new terror weapon.

The sewage weapon

YNet points out that Gaza sewage pouring into the Mediterranean is far worse than Qassams.

But even more worrying is the fact that this situation will inevitably bring about a spate of improvised and haphazard initiatives from the local inhabitants to contend with the problem - without any planning, supervision or regard for the hydro-strategic damage these initiatives will cause the hated Zionists. Very soon - courtesy of the disengagement and its architects - Israel will find itself impaled on the horns of a nasty dilemma being forced to choose between two very unpalatable choices:
A hydrological/ecological disaster that threatens to cripple the national water system and pollute a large section of its coastline; or

A political/diplomatic nightmare where Israel is obliged to use military force to "physically stop" (in the words of the Water Commission Report) that crippling disaster from taking place, while being portrayed as a callous monster coercing multitudes of unfortunate, fate-stricken Palestinians to endure a life of squalor in swamps of sewage and stench.

Read the whole thing.

Another set of Iranian hostages issuing canned statements

The British hostages aren't the only people in Iran who are writing statements that were clearly written by authorities for propaganda purposes.

Look at this statement supposedly by the Jewish community in Iran, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency:

The Association of Iranian Jews here on Sunday renewed its commitment to defend the national interests of Iranians with the advent of the Iranian new year (1386), which the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution declared to be year of "national unity and Islamic solidarity."

The association renewed its commitment in a message issued on the threshold of the Jewish religious festival of the Passover, which starts Monday night.

"In obedience to the instructions of Jesus, in the new Iranian year, which has been declared year of national unity and Islamic solidarity, Iranian Jews voice their readiness to defend all national interests of Iranians and to observe the guidelines set by Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei) for the sake of strengthening national unity and solidarity in the fight against present-day pharaohs," the message said.

It further said that Iranian Jews gave significance to the remarkable coincidence of the Passover festival with the advent of the Iranian new year.

Pesach (Passover) begins on the night of the 15th day of the month of Nissan. This annual Jewish festival celebrates the escape of Jews from the slaughter of the first-born in Egypt.

Of course, in the Iranian fantasy of Islamic supremacy, Jews would issue statements for Passover saying that they follow the instructions of Jesus and the Islamic Supreme Leader to strengthen Islamic solidarity!

Qassam Calendar for March (final)

As with the February calendar, the numbers for each date represent the number of Qassams fired on that day. The numbers in parentheses are those I saw reported by Palestinian Arab media, outside of parentheses are those reported in Israeli media.

The one day highlighted in red is the single day since the "cease-fire" started that Israel reacted to Qassams in Gaza.

March

Liberal admits leftist thinking encourages terror

I disagree with Ha'aretz' columnist Bradley Burston often, but he hit the nail on the head here. Excerpts:

Not a simple issue. Especially for those of us Jews and leftists who were educated at places like Berkeley, where we received our degrees in Selective Blindness, with a minor in Understanding the Roots of Violence when practiced by Muslims.

We were taught to sniff out, publicize, and condemn every instance of racism, violence, injustice, and humiliation practiced by Israeli Jews against Palestinian Muslims. And that was as it should be.

But we were also taught that it was racist to impose our Western values on the acts of Muslims, even, or especially, when it came to the most extreme of Muslims.

We can, with facility, therefore, comprehend all Muslim atrocities against Muslims in Iraq as the direct, understandable, and legitimate response to the American-British occupation.

We were taught wrong.

We can understand terrorism in Bali, in London, in the Twin Towers, as an outgrowth of anger over American expansionism and Israeli military repression.

We were taught wrong.

This is what we should have been taught: Violations of human rights are violations of human rights, regardless of the cultural background of the perpetrator, regardless of the background of the victim.

This is what we should have retained: One way to demonstrate compassion for victims is to stop showing sensitivity to their tormentors. Even if both are Muslims. Because it's our business to cry out. Because the victims are human beings. Because villains deserve to be denounced.

We were taught to feel guilt, when we should have been taught that wrongdoing is the work of the wrongdoer.

In the end, those of us who excuse Muslim fanatics their outrages against their own, those of us who explain away their crimes by blaming them on the West, or on ourselves, are guilty of racism as well.

We are saying, in effect, that they cannot be considered responsible for their actions, as would any other human being.

We are saying, in effect, that we made them who they are.

We are saying, in effect, that the suicide bomber who kills his own, lacks the ability to discern right and wrong. We are also saying, in effect, that they can do what they like, to their own.

There is racism in our view, and megalomania, and arrogance, and cowardice, and weakness. Terrorists know this. They feed on it.

They were taught well.

This is similar to a theme I've mentioned many times, that liberals treat Arabs as if they are mentally ill and need to be "understood," not as if they are adults who have the ability to understand right and wrong. This is racism, as Burston says.

The way to erase terror is to hold people responsible for terror, and for the environment that romanticizes terror. This simple lesson is lost on much of the Left.

Major Microsoft vulnerability

Sorry for being off-topic, but Microsoft yesterday announced a "zero-day" vulnerability (animated cursor files, .ANI) for Windows that is very, very nasty. I expect that this weekend there will be many attacks, and Microsoft does not yet have a patch available.

It affects Windows Internet Explorer, including Vista. Even worse, it affects email, and just viewing an email message can allow someone to do anything they want to your machine.

Every major computer security organization is listing this as a critical flaw. Updated anti-virus software will help with known variants but if someone comes out with something new, you're still in trouble. Details can be read at the Internet Storm Center.

I would not interrupt my blog about this if I didn't think this was a biggie.

There is an unofficial patch from eEye. I recommend installing it until Microsoft gets its act together.

Get it at http://research.eeye.com/html/alerts/zeroday/20070328.html .

Otherwise, have a Shabbat Shalom!

Times-UK editor needs to learn English

Gerard Baker, US editor for the Times of London, writes about Barack Obama:

Of much more interest is the flak that the Democratic senator is taking for some remarks he made about the Middle East. Hillary Clinton, his main opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination in next year’s election, has seized upon them as proof that the senator cannot be trusted with US national security nor as a true friend of Israel.

What exactly, was the young senator’s offence? Did he, in an unguarded moment of adolescent radicalism, say something nice about Yassir Arafat? Did he call on Israel to give back the occupied territories?

Here, for the record, is precisely what he said, in a speech in Iowa a few weeks ago: “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”

The response to this little aside, the shower of invective heaped on Mr Obama from all sides of the political arena, is instructive and depressing. In American political debate, saying something sympathetic about the Palestinians is evidently now deemed unsayable. Even as mild and neutral an observation as noting that Palestinians are “suffering” is considered a gaffe somewhat akin to expressing a kindly word for KGB pensioners.

The potential political penalties for such dangerous talk are well demonstrated by Mr Obama’s own rather pitiful response to the incident. Under pressure for his remarks, his spokesman “clarified” them, saying that what Mr Obama meant was that Palestinians were suffering because of the cruelties of their own, Hamas-dominated leadership. Phew! Thank goodness he cleared that one up. We thought for a horrible moment he might have been offering just the minutest criticism of Israeli policy.

One would expect a British editor to have a slightly better command of the English language than is demonstrated here. One would also expect the United States editor of a major newspaper to understand the US a bit better.

Somehow, he interprets the statement "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" as "The Palestinian Arab people are suffering." Of course, the first statement is an absurd lie and the second statement is 100% accurate. Yet this paragon of the editorial page cannot seem to distinguish between the two.

For a presidential candidate to say something so stupid is, of course, noteworthy. Perhaps it was disproportionately criticized, especially by Hillary, but somehow I think that Mr. Baker would have been somewhat upset if a major presidential candidate had in decades past declared that "Nobody is suffering more than the Irish people" or "Nobody is suffering more than the Falkland Islanders." In fact, I think that Mr. Baker would be a bit upset if Obama had said that no one is suffering more than Israelis, and he would not have misinterpreted that statement as being just an expression of sympathy for terror victims.

Mr. Baker might be amazed to see that people do criticize Israel every day in the US. He may be astonished that the current Secretary of State is heavily pushing for a Palestinian Arab state and pressuring Israel towards final-status negotiations even with an entity that wants to see Israel destroyed.

But this is nothing that a little remedial English and history cannot solve for the esteemed editor.

PalArab self-death count methodology

Since late June, 2006, I have been keeping track of how many Palestinian Arabs have been violently killed in the territories by each other.

For the purposes of this count, I include:

Deaths in internal fighting
Deaths in clan clashes
"Honor killings"
Accidental or negligent deaths from playing with weapons or explosives
Deaths during terror or criminal activities, such as while digging smuggling tunnels
Deaths from gunshots during weddings and funerals
Extrajudicial killings for "collaborators" or various Koranic crimes

I am not counting suicides, true accidents like car crashes that have nothing to do with terror, or indirect negligence like the sewage "tsunami" deaths.

There is no shortage of "human rights" organizations that obsessively count PalArab casualties from Israeli sources, but essentially no one else seems to count internal Palestinian Arab killings. If they are truly concerned about Palestinian Arab lives, they would show the same attention to detail and accuracy that they do for deaths at the hands of Israel (and even then, they never show context for Israeli actions.)

There are some organizations that partially count some of these deaths. For example, B'Tselem only counts deaths directly related to the intifada, including Hamas/Fatah clashes. Yet their numbers get quoted as authoritative.

My reasons for maintaining this count is to show the hypocrisy of those who pretend to care about Palestinian Arab lives. In fact, my thesis is that they only care about Israeli actions that they can call criminal, and the victims are only important in how they can implicate Israel, not as tragedies in themselves. The fact that Palestinian Arabs have less regard for their own lives than Israel has for PalArab lives is rarely reported.

The sources for these statistics are many Palestinian Arab newspapers (both English and Arabic, using Google auto-translation) and human rights organizations, as well as Israeli papers and other sources. All my postings about this topic include links to the original articles. I far prefer to only count deaths for people that are named, although during particularly violent periods of time this can prove almost impossible so I may rely on reported aggregate figures.

I do try for accuracy, so for example I did not count all of the honor killings mentioned in this article for the reasons I wrote there. On the other hand, when there is a dispute as to who is responsible for some PalArab deaths I will make a decision and I will tend to believe the Israeli accounts more, if only because they have historically proven to be far more accurate (a good example is the killings of the Ghalia family on the Gaza beach last year, which I counted as PalArab self-deaths based on the evidence I saw.)

I have no doubt that these numbers are undercounted. There seem to be many deaths that are never reported, particularly inter-family killings, although things have improved since last year. Ma'an News, in particular, has been fairly honest about reporting internal Palestinian Arab killings.

Terrorists killed in former Gaza settlement

At least one Hamas terrorist was killed and several more injured this morning in a large explosion. According to Ma'an English, it was in a Khan Younis "military post."

Wafa (Arabic) adds that it was in a Hamas "training camp" in the former settlement of Netzar Hazani, and the early reports make it sound like the number of casualties may increase.

This brings the number of PalArabs violently killed by each other in 2007 so far, by my count, up to 157.

UPDATE: Ynet reports one dead, seven injured, some critically. Ma'an now reports eight injured, including a child.

UPDATE 2: A Salafi sheikh was murdered in Gaza City by four gunmen, a relative was injured and an Internet cafe was blown up. 158.

16 weeks in a row

Israel was more aggressive this week against terrorists, and the IDF killed three of them. PalArab sources blame settlers for another death, although I have seen no evidence of that.

Even so, more PalArabs were killed this week by PalArabs than by Jews, for the 16th week in a row. (There were about 10 killed from Thursday to Wednesday, the time period that PCHR uses in calculating their weekly stats.)

PA and Jordan arrest Arabs who sold Hebron building to Jews

Last week we mentioned the story about a building in Hebron that Jews moved into, where Arabs disputed that it was ever sold to Jews.

Today, the PA arrested one man and Jordan arrested another man for selling that very building to Jews.

The Palestinian Authority and Jordan earlier this week arrested two Palestinians suspected of selling a house in Hebron to settlers who have been occupying it since March 19.

One of the suspects is being held in Jordan, and the other in Jericho. PA laws call for a death sentence for anyone found guilty of selling land to Jews.

Hebron's Jewish Committee condemned the arrest, saying, "The arrest exposes once again the anti-Semitic nature of the PA. We call upon the government to accept the racial hatred prevalent in the PA."

MK Uri Ariel (National Union-National Religious Party) called on the government to act for the release of the arrested Palestinians. Orit Struk of the committee said the arrest is proof the house legally belongs to the Jewish community.

Committee members told Haaretz that police and army officials said off the record the house purchase was legitimate, adding: "Despite this, Defense Minister Amir Peretz has instructed the Military Advocate General to come up with a pretext for our eviction."

Meanwhile, several well-known leftist academics have called on Peretz to issue an order to evict the settlers from the building. "The decision not to evict the settlers is not only asinine and wrong, but also a violation of international law and public order," they wrote.

The academics warned that the presence of the settlers could disrupt security in Hebron and in the entire area. They said: "The settlers' presence is a violation of basic morals, requiring security forces to allot resources to protecting the Palestinians from the settlers."

Of course, the presence of Jews in Israel seems to disrupt security as well, so I guess these "academics" will be moving away very soon.

Beyond that, the fact that Arabs are arresting people for selling this building to Jews sure makes it look like Jews legally own the building.

Now, what human rights activists will protest these arrests?

How crowded is Gaza City?

In 2005, I posted an article that debunked the idea that Gaza was ridiculously overpopulated, comparing the population density of Gaza with Macau, Monaco, Singapore and other countries.

In honor of "Land Day," the Palestinian Arab Central Bureau of Statistics came out with new statistics that showed that Gaza City itself is the most densely populated part of the PA.

Let's see how badly overcrowded Gaza City is compared to a representative sampling of major world cities:

City	Population/km²
Cairo	35,420
Dhaka	30,403
Mumbai	29,042
Seoul	17,008
New York City	10,439
Moscow	9,644
São Paulo	7,247
Gaza City	6,834
London	4,697
Los Angeles	2,980