Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The stupidity of the "who stands to gain" argument

A certain Alan Hart, former BBC and ITN reporter and rabid anti-Zionist, says in his blog that it is entirely possible that Israel kidnapped (and already killed) Alan Johnston. His reason for believing that?

...what can be said for certain is that the Palestinians were the party with absolutely nothing to gain and much to lose from Alan's permanent removal from the scene. And they had much to lose on two counts.

On Count One, Alan was not only the BBC's man, he was the only permanent foreign correspondent in Gaza. He was, in short, the best and most informed provider of news about the Palestinian side of the story; a story which, in many of its details, is an embarrassment to Israel and those governments, most notably the Bush and Blair regimes, which support Israel's efforts to break the will of the Palestinians to continue their struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice.

On Count Two, and if he has been murdered, Alan's death, if it could be blamed on a Palestinian or a pro-Palestinian Arab and/or other Islamist group, would be a huge political setback for the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and the present leadership of it. (The Al Qaeda franchise would not give a damn about harming the Palestinian cause).

There is a case for saying (repeat a case) that the party with most to gain from Alan Johnston's permanent disappearance was Israel. It would not be the first time that Israeli agents had dressed as Arabs to make a hit.

Media Backspin put together a funny list of equally plausible kidnappers, explaining what they have to gain, like Rachel Corrie's parents and the royal family.

The argument of "who stands to gain the most" is very popular among conspiracy theorists, and their explanations always leave Occam's Razor in the dust. Once a person comes from an anti-Israeli viewpoint to begin with, along with fantasies of an all-powerful Mossad and impermeable cabal of Elders who never reveal their secret plans to the goyim, it is ridiculously easy to come up with ways to blame Israel for everything on the planet. In fact, this is exactly what Arabs do routinely:

Every single disaster from WTC to earthquakes are attempts by Israel to divert attentiojn from its daily crimes against humanity.
Suicide bombs in Israel are attempts by Israel to gain world sympathy and allow Israel to go on with its business of daily crimes against humanity.
"Accidentally" killing Palestinian Arab children allows Israel to practice genocide against PalArabs while pretending that it is an accident.

Every person ever killed worldwide can be blamed on Israel using one of the arguments above. It means that Jews, the most talkative people on the planet, manage to hide their nefarious plans from scary-intelligent all-knowing blowhards like Alan Hart, until he gets a hold of an Ilan Pappe and finds out the ugly truth.

UPDATE: Asharq Alawsat reports that Johnston's kidnappers are demanding $5 million for his release. I can't wait for Hart's next blog entry about those greedy Zionists.

Freedom of the press, PalArab style

From Ma'an:

Five Palestinian journalists were injured after being attacked by police guarding the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) building in Gaza.

The journalists were demonstrating against the abduction of BBC reporter Alan Johnston.

The police attacked the journalists with rifles and many sustained bruises. The journalists were forced to return to the strike tent in the centre of the city.

Ma'an's reporter said that he and dozens others of his colleagues "were protesting and then were attacked by the police and obliged to return to the tent".

Some other reporters confirmed the attack and said that the guards threatened to shoot the journalists if they continue their protest in the area.

No word on any reaction from the British National Union of Journalists.

Another day, another PalArab death you won't hear about

For the third time since the PA announced their new internal security plan over the weekend, a man was murdered (‘Abed Mohammed al-Wahesh.) This one was in Bethlehem, not Gaza, and it appears to be another "family dispute."

This brings the number of PalArabs violently killed by PalArabs this year, by my count, to 176.

UPDATE: A 55-year old man, Izzat Rashid Hassan, was found dead from gunshots near Jenin. I think he is the father of the the con man who scammed millions from gullible PalArabs a couple of weeks ago.

UPDATE 2: A 25-year old man killed in another clan clash near Gaza City.

Robert Novak's self-delusions

Robert Novak's latest column is another prime example of what can happen when one's personal opinions and wishes interfere with the truth.

I don't think that Novak is stupid, but the self-delusion in this column is emblematic of all that is wrong with well-meaning people who are starving for "peace" - no matter how illusory. (I would tend to believe that it is related to egomania as well - to my mind, the credibility of a commentator is inversely proportional to how much he injects himself in the story. Much like Thomas Friedman and Bill O'Reilly.)

In this column, Novak tells of his difficulties in finding someone from Hamas to interview. Then he somewhat dishonestly mentions:

I arrived in Jerusalem again April 3, two weeks after Hamas brought the more moderate opposition Fatah party into a new National Unity government. The Los Angeles Times had just run a remarkable op-ed column by political independent Salam Fayyad, finance minister in the new government who lived in Washington for 20 years, served as a World Bank official and is well respected in the West. He wrote that the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1993 acceptance of Israel and disavowal of violence is "a crystal-clear and binding agreement" that "no Palestinian government has the authority to revoke." He added that the unity government's platform "explicitly" pledges to honor all PLO commitments.

Over dinner in a Ramallah restaurant April 4, Fayyad told me he offered his column simultaneously to several major American newspapers to get this story out quickly. But do his Hamas colleagues accept his reasoning? Fayyad made clear he was not flying solo.

Note that Fayyad is not a Hamas member. He doesn't mention any specifics about who in Hamas might agree to a peaceful solution. Novak does mention that he is an "independent" but a cursory reading of this episode, right next to his description of how hard it was to find someone from Hamas, implies that Fayyad is representing Hamas in some way.

Just before my trip ended, the Palestinian Authority at long last put me in touch with an official who was no low-level bureaucrat. Nasser al-Shaer was deputy prime minister in the all-Hamas regime last Aug. 19 when he was seized in an Israeli raid on his home in Ramallah and held for a month without charges or evidence.

In his ministry office April 7, he looked nothing like the shirt-sleeved, tie-less Shaer photographed when he was released last Sept. 27. Holder of a doctorate from England's University of Manchester, he was dressed in a stylish suit. More telling than his appearance was what he said.

When I asked whether Hamas agreed with Fayyad's formulation, Shaer said it did not matter: "We are talking about the government, not groups." He said Hamas was no more relevant to Palestinian policy than the views of extremist anti-Palestinian Israeli Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman are to Israeli policy. Unexpectedly, Shaer expressed dismay that "previous attempts at peace were ruined by suicide bombers. Now, we look forward to a sustained peace."

While avoiding Israel-bashing, Shaer conjectured: "I don't think the Israeli government wants a two-state solution. Without pressure from the president of the United States, nothing is going to happen."

Novak exhibits a complete and utter lack of cynicism for Shaer's semi-peaceful words. He finally found his Hamas spokesman and any facts that disagree with this man's assertions do not even rate a mention.

Comparing Hamas, the ruling partner in the coalition, with Lieberman is intellectually dishonest.
Not mentioning Hamas' charter, its repeated description of its purpose as the destruction of Israel, it clear support for terror attacks is equally dishonest.

It is especially ironic that he approvingly quotes Shaer's "I don't think the Israeli government wants a two-state solution" and doesn't deign to mention that Hamas explicitlydoesnt' want a two-state solution. One would expect a reporter to ask at least a couple of basic questions: how can Shaer be a Hamas member and then disavow himself from Hamas' very raison d'etre? Is this not similar to the PLO's historic two-faced positions where they say one thing to gullible Western journalists and diplomats and the complete opposite to their own people? Is Shaer not afraid to saythese things publicly when Hamas has a habit of making dissenter's lives a bit uncomfortable?

Novak does none of this. His personal agenda and narrative has been confirmed by a single member of Hamas in English and that's all the evidence he needs to push it as fact, and blame the Bush administration for not talking to these reasonable sounding people.

Israeli professor, Holocaust survivor, a victim and a hero at Virginia Tech

From YNet:

WASHINGTON – Prof Liviu Librescu, a senior researcher and lecturer at Virginia Tech, is among the 32 people who were killed during a shooting rampage at the university Monday.

One of Prof Librescu's students, Alec Calhoun, who was with him at the classroom when the shooting started, told AP that at about 9:05 am, he and classmates heard "a thunderous sound from the classroom next door, what sounded like an enormous hammer."

When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, they started flipping over desks for hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of the room.

Calhoun said that just before he climbed out the window, he turned to look at the professor (Librescu), who had stayed behind to block the door.
Prof Librescu and his wife are both Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1978.

Librescu was an accomplished scientist in Romania, and the Communist regime had tried to prevent him from making aliyah to Israel. He was allowed to leave the country only after the Israeli prime minister at the time Menachem Begin appealed the matter to President Nicolae Ceausescu.

Several years later, Librescu left for a sabbatical in the United States and has remained there since. His first son, Arieh, lives in Israel, while his other son, Joe, resides in the US.

Librescu's colleagues described his as a "true gentleman."

Many more humiliating checkpoints coming to territories

Over the weekend, the PA Interior Minister presented his plan to reduce the chaos and murders in the Palestinian Arab territories.

Yesterday, the first details of the plan emerged:

In a press conference held in Gaza City on Sunday evening, Al-Qawasmi explained that the plan would be gradually implemented through the massive deployment of domestic security forces in the central and northern Gaza Strip. Pedestrian and vehicular patrols would be deployed in addition to checkpoints in order to impose law and order and minimize the spread of arms in the streets.

This will be accompanied by a campaign to impose law in general through organizing the traffic and the marketplaces. That will be the duty of the Palestinian internal security forces in cooperation with the national security forces and the municipalities, explained the Palestinian interior minister.

Oppressive checkpoints? I wonder if the UN and NGOs will be obsessively tracking them - the UN counted 237 Israeli checkpoints last week.

Finally updated to new Blogger template

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my template to the new Blogger. Please let me know if anything is not working. I am seeing some glitches but hopefully the problems that some people were having viewing the blog in IE will go away.

I tried to reproduce the old format as much as possible, although there are some font and color changes.

For some reason, Feedburner (which should add a Digg and Reddit and email link at the end of each post) is still not working, and I seem to have lost my nifty tab icon graphic that looked like this:

If anyone knows how to make these work in the new Blogger, please let me know.

UPDATE: Got the icon working. The Feedburner stuff is driving me nuts.

1.6 million Palestinian Arabs alive because of Israel

In 1967, after the Six Day War, Israel introduced modern health care to the territories, as well as an electrical grid and sources for safe drinking water. As a result, the Palestinian Arab mortality rate plummeted and their life expectancy soared.

I am no demographer, but I thought it would be interesting to see roughly how many fewer Palestinian Arabs would be alive today if they had remained under Egyptian/Jordanian rule after 1967.

I based my numbers on the West Bank and Gaza populations as of 1970 (Palestine Remembered) and 2004 (CIA Factbook) to calculate growth rates, and the natural growth rates of Jordan and Egypt today (2.5% and 1.75%, respectively.) The CIA Factbook growth rates for Palestinian Arabs today (3.06% in West Bank, 3.71% in Gaza) are much smaller than what the real population growth during these dates were, so I used the Factbook current population numbers, ignoring the problems that some Israeli demographers have found with these numbers.

I did not account for emigration or immigration into the territories, making the oversimplistic assumption that the population growth is mostly the same as the natural growth. I also did not have accurate historical growth rate data for Egypt and Jordan so I assumed today's rates as being constant over the decades, another gross oversimplification.

Given this back-of-the-envelope calculation, and based again on current population numbers that Palestinian Arabs accept as accurate, I estimate that 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs exist today in Gaza and the West Bank that would not be alive had Israel not occupied the territories after 1967.

In other words, "occupation" was the best thing to ever happen to Palestinian Arabs in their short history.

(If you accept the criticisms about PalArab demographics, these numbers go down to only about 200,000 PalArabs alive because of Israel.)

For what it's worth....

Bargaining with semantics

Syria says that they want to revive the "peace process" with Israel....

"Syria wishes to revive the peace process with Israel with the help of US and Russian mediators," the Syrian Information Minister was quoted as saying by Israel Radio, Monday.

The minister immediately added a threat that "If Israel rejects the Arab peace initiatives, the only way to get the Golan Heights back would be the way of resistance."

In a crystal clear manner, Syria has defined for us its definition of "peace," and it has nothing to do with ending hostilities.

The "peace process" is just one way to get the Golan, and Syria otherwise exhibits not the slightest interest in what the word "peace" normally means. Peace is not a goal or even desirable to Syria - it is just a way to get what they really want, which is the high ground from which they can resume shooting at Israel and access Israel's main water source.

How peaceful was the Israeli/Syrian border before 1967, and how peaceful was it afterwards? If "peace" is the goal, then all should agree that Israel should hold onto the Golan.

Arabs are highly adept at the art of bargaining, as anyone who ever enters a souk can tell you. They know that Israel desperately wants a real peace so they use the word with impunity as a dangling carrot in order to get what they want - any land they can that Jews control in the area. Since most Westerners think of the word "peace" the way Israel does, no one thinks that when the Arabs say the word that they could possibly mean anything else.

But here we see here explicitly that "peace" is not a goal for the Arabs - it is a bargaining chip, that is infinitely valuable because it is worthless to the seller and highly prized by the buyer.

Another type of bargaining is evident from this story, showing an unusual unity among terror groups:

A number of Palestinian factions, including Hamas, have called for more Israeli soldiers to be captured in order to ensure Palestinian prisoners are released in exchange. They say that this action is necessary following the failure of the diplomatic efforts to release the Palestinian prisoners.

In a statement, Hamas said that their movement urges the armed brigades of Al-Qassam (Hamas), Al-Aqsa (Fatah), An-Nasser (Popular Resistance Committees), Al-Quds (Islamic Jihad), Abu Ali Mustafa (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and others, to work together to capture more Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them with Palestinian prisoners .

The statement confirmed that Hamas "intends to release all the prisoners, regardless of their faction or affiliation, by all means available and at any cost, especially after the failure of the diplomatic efforts, the weak agreements and the false promises."

Hamas also called on the Israeli leaders to "comply with the factions' demands, accelerate the exchange deal and avoid deception."

In this case as well, it all comes down to bargaining and peace is the furthest thing from the Arab minds.

Israel would be wise to take a chapter from the Arab playbook and start grabbing things that they value - land, specifically - so that Israel's bargaining position can be enhanced. Imagine how much more leverage Israel would have if it, for example, took a few square miles of Gaza, name it Kfar Gilad, and announce plans to build settlements there in two weeks unless Shalit is released.

Real peace is not in the playbook, so it is time Israel started playing the game the way that the Arabs want to play it themselves.

UPDATE: Joe Settler agrees.

Thomas Friedman's "Petropolitics"

The NYT's Thomas Friedman, who is a bit too egocentric for my tastes, mentions something interesting in the middle of a much longer article about the necessity of the US to be a leader in energy conservation and alternate energy (something I've been talking about for years):

No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.

That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.

Look what’s happened: We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and for about a decade it did just that. But those years coincided with oil in the $10-to-$30-a-barrel range. As the price of oil surged into the $30-to-$70 range in the early 2000s, it triggered a countertide — a tide of petroauthoritarianism — manifested in Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Angola, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. The elected or self-appointed elites running these states have used their oil windfalls to ensconce themselves in power, buy off opponents and counter the fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall tide. If we continue to finance them with our oil purchases, they will reshape the world in their image, around Putin-like values.

You can illustrate the First Law of Petropolitics with a simple graph. On one line chart the price of oil from 1979 to the present; on another line chart the Freedom House or Fraser Institute freedom indexes for Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela for the same years. When you put these two lines on the same graph you see something striking: the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated. As oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in these countries — as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started and companies privatized. That’s because their petroauthoritarian regimes had to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income. But as oil prices went up around 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs all eroded in these countries.

The motto of the American Revolution was “no taxation without representation.” The motto of the petroauthoritarians is “no representation without taxation”: If I don’t have to tax you, because I can get all the money I need from oil wells, I don’t have to listen to you.

It is no accident that when oil prices were low in the 1990s, Iran elected a reformist Parliament and a president who called for a “dialogue of civilizations.” And when oil prices soared to $70 a barrel, Iran’s conservatives pushed out the reformers and ensconced a president who says the Holocaust is a myth. (I promise you, if oil prices drop to $25 a barrel, the Holocaust won’t be a myth anymore.) And it is no accident that the first Arab Gulf state to start running out of oil, Bahrain, is also the first Arab Gulf state to have held a free and fair election in which women could run and vote, the first Arab Gulf state to overhaul its labor laws to make more of its own people employable and the first Arab Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with America.

People change when they have to — not when we tell them to — and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq — a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East without going to war again — there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy among petroauthoritarians, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a neocon or a radical lib. If you’re not also a Geo-Green, you won’t succeed.

There is some truth here, but Friedman pointedly tries to avoid making this an Arab issue and tries to generalize it to any authoritarian regime heavily dependent on oil.

Obviously if dictatorships have the ability to act without worrying about the consequences, they will be emboldened to act in ways that will keep them in power.

But there is a flip-side to his observation that he doesn't want to mention: when enlightened societies become richer, their citizens and other nations benefit. The US is not only the richest nation but also the most generous, and this is a direct result of being built with ingrained ideals of freedom and democracy. Israel's economic might pays dividends to not only her citizens but also to the entire world in the areas of scientific research, help during disasters and anti-terror training.

Friedman is specifically applying this "rule" to oil-rich nations but it would apply to any nation with a fundamentally immoral outlook and access to any valuable resource.

Oil isn't the problem; it is the underlying mindset of the entire nation that encourages corruption.

Egypt and Jordan may indeed have been more amenable to signing a peace agreement with Israel because they do not have huge oil reserves, but the point is that acting in peaceful ways goes against their very nature and only economic incentives could push them into reluctantly abandoning their pan-Arab, anti-Israel "principles." While this is probably better than no peace at all, one must remember that it was not based on a natural longing for peaceful co-existence with their neighbor, but rather on external economic factors. This is starkly apparent in that Egypt is literally being paid off by the US to the tune of billions of dollars a year just to maintain the paper peace treaty with Israel.

So while I agree that economics, and specifically energy economics, is a hugely important vector in minimizing tyranny, it is fundamentally cosmetic and coerced. These societies, and specifically those that are based on Arab/Muslim honor/pride ideas, are inherently against transparency in leadership, freedom, equal rights and democratic principles and

Economic coercion is a tool but it will not fix the real problems they have.

Background information: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

There was a brief kerfuffle over the weekend when the Vatican threatened to boycott a Holocaust ceremony in Israel because they were upset that Yad Vashem captioned a picture of Pope Pius XII with the words "even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest." Yad Vashem stands by its research, and invited the Vatican to open its archives if it had evidence to the contrary.

A very good and fair article about Pius' role during the Holocaust can be seen at the Jewish Virtual Library. While there are some of accounts showing that the Pope did save a number of Jews and that the Vatican itself sheltered 477 Jews, the overwhelming evidence is that he refused to do anything to save the Jews that he clearly knew were being systematically murdered until it was obvious that the Allies were going to win the war. Even then his actions were half-hearted and seemed to be more motivated by politics than by any true concern over human beings being butchered. Read the whole thing.

Interestingly, a joint Catholic/Jewish commission appointed by the Vatican itself issued its own preliminary report on Pius' actions in 2000 showed clearly that the Pope was aware of Nazi atrocities as early as 1941. The report poses a series of questions that the Vatican apparently failed to answer and the Commission itself disbanded shortly thereafter. Two of the unanswered questions were:

14. On several occasions Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, had vainly appealed to the Pope to protest specific Nazi actions, including those directed at the Jews. On 17 January 1941 he wrote to Pius XII, noting that "Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and the neighboring countries. I wish to mention that I have been asked both from the Catholic and Protestant side if the Holy See could not do something on this subject, issue an appeal in favor of these unfortunates.²⁷" This was a direct appeal to the Pope, which bypassed the nuncio. What impression did von Preysing's words make on Pius XII; what discussions if any, took place about making such a public appeal as the German bishop requested, and was any further information about Nazi anti-Jewish policy sought?

10. At the end of August 1942, the Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Lviv (Lwow), Andrzeyj Szeptyckyj, wrote to the Pope and described with stark clarity the atrocities and mass murder being carried out against the Jews and the local population.²⁴ No other high-ranking Catholic Churchman, to the best of our knowledge, provided such direct eye-witness testimony and expressed concern for Jews qua Jews (and as primary targets of German bestiality) in the same way. Moreover, he indicated to the Pope that he had protested to Himmler himself. Finally, he publicly denounced the massacres of Jews in circumstances in which some Ukrainian Catholics themselves were collaborating with the Germans in these murders. Is there evidence of a discussion or a reply to Szeptyckyj's plea? (In a separate citation: "The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to 'bear adversity with serene patience.'⁽⁸⁾)

A separate chapter of Pius' attitude towards Jews opened after the war, as thousands of Jewish children who had hidden in convents throughout Europe had to be dealt with.

In 2005, the New York Times published a letter that originated in the Vatican instructing Catholic institutions on how to handle requests from Jewish families and institutions to take Jewish children back. A critique of that letter's translation and veracity was printed in Beliefnet.

Even if the critical article cited is 100% accurate, it still shows that there was a concerted effort on the part of Pius' church to stop orphaned children from being taken care of by Jews, and almost certainly from even letting them know that they were Jewish to begin with. Not to take away from the bravery of those who hid these Jewish children, but in the end these children were not to ever know their true heritage.

The Vatican is now going through the process of promoting Pius to sainthood. It is even possible that the Vatican wants to mollify Yad Vashem to help make its case for sainthood.

But by any yardstick, he had the ability to actively appeal for the lives of Jews before millions of them were murdered - and he refused.

This is not how a saint would act.

British reporters condemn Israel as BBC reporter reported executed

Ya gotta hand it to British leftist journalists - they have a great sense of timing.

The day after the National Union of Journalists called for a far from even-handed boycott of Israeli goods, and in another vote called Israeli actions "savage," a previously unknown terror group in Gaza claimed that they executed BBC reporter Alan Johnston and said a video will be released soon.

The NUJ had nothing to say about their fellow British journalist in their orgy of condemnations. After all, why pretend to be fair when your pre-defined agenda is so much more important? After all, isn't that the underlying premise of British journalism to begin with?

Christian bookstore bombed in Gaza

From YNet:

Three explosions rocked Gaza City early Sunday, damaging two Internet cafes and a Christian bookstore.

No one was hurt and no group claimed responsibility for the blasts, which took place around 3 a.m. local time, Palestinian security officials said.

Heavy external damage was visible at the three stores. At the bookstore, which is funded by American Protestants and known as the Bible Society, a number of books were also burned in the explosion.

This is not the first time that the Bible Society has been threatened or bombed. It is a proselytizing group.

The irony is, as documented by Michael Oren in his book about America's history in the Middle East, that the pro-Arab tilt of the State Department is a result of the early American Protestant missionary involvement there as their children gravitated towards jobs at State. Now the spiritual descendants of the original missionaries are reaping the results of the influence of their forefathers.

A somewhat more direct irony is that one of the activities of the Society has been:

Visiting Palestinian injured during the Intifada uprising, and helping them with moral and financial support.

One wonders if this organization distinguishes between innocent victims and terrorists themselves when supporting them financially. Could some of the "victims" paid by the PBS have been behind this bombing?

On another note, I wonder how long it will take for thousands of enraged Christians worldwide to violently protest the purposeful desecration of many Christian Bibles.

Iranian nuclear accident watch

Here's the earthquake activity in Iran for just the past few days:

Quake jolts southern Iran Thursday April 12, 2007
Shiraz, Fars prov, April 12, IRNA
Iran-Quakes-South
There are no reports of any casualty or damage to property caused by the quake.

Quake hits southeastern Iranian city Thursday April 12, 2007
Iran-Quake
The seismological base of the Geophysics Institute of Tehran University registered the quake at 16:29 hours local time (12:59 GMT).
The quake was epicentered in an area measuring 56.09 degrees in longitude and 32.17 degrees in latitude, the report added.

Quake jolts southeastern Iranian city Saturday, April 14, 2007
Iran-Quake
The seismological base of the Geophysics Institute of Tehran University registered the quake at 16:36 hours local time (1306 GMT).
The quake was epicentered in an area measuring 57.35 degrees in longitude and 30.73 degrees in latitude, the report added.

Quake hits southwestern city Sunday April 15, 2007
Iran-Qal'e Khajeh-Quake
The seismological base of the Geophysics Institute of Tehran University registered the quake at 07:26 hours local time (0356 GMT).
The quake was epicentered in an area measuring 49.44 degrees in longitude and 32.16 degrees in latitude, the report added.

More proof of UN worthlessness

On Saturday, Mahmoud Abbas met with the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy.

According to Wafa (Arabic only):

Ms. Coomaraswamy was pleased to hear about a deal to exchange prisoners, and that the deal would include the release of prisoners of children.

She added, "I am also happy to hear from Mr. President and his commitment to promoting the culture of peace among children and the development of sports activities."

She said : "Peace is the most important thing at this moment, we in the United Nations support the Palestinian president in his efforts to bring peace to this region."

A small reminder of the great efforts that Mahmoud Abbas has undertaken to promoting a culture of peace among Palestinian Arab children: (all examples from Palestinian Media Watch):

Mohammed Al-Dura music video includes

Narrator: "How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids [people who have died for Allah]. How sweet is the fragrance of the earth. Tts thirst quenched by the gush of blood flowing from the youthful body. How sweet is the fragrance of the earth."

Vocalist: "The boy cried, 'O father, 'til we meet, O father, 'til we meet, 'til we meet, father, 'til we meet. I will go with no fear and without crying. How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids. I will go, father, to my place in heaven. How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids. O father, 'til we meet, O father, 'til we meet."
[PATV 2000-2003, and PATV June 28-29, 2006]
Interview with an 11-year old girl on PATV:
Interviewer: You described Shahada as something beautiful. Do you think it is beautiful?

Walla: Shahada is a very beautiful thing. Everyone yearns for Shahada. What could be better than going to paradise?

Interviewer: What is better, peace and full rights for the Palestinian people or Shahada?

Walla: Shahada. I will achieve my rights after becoming a shahid. We won't stay children forever.
PATV February 2006:
"Daddy brought me a present
A machine gun and a rifle
When I am big I will join the liberation army
The liberation army has taught us
How to liberate our homeland"
[PA TV, February 26, 2006]
Tarashibo, a talking chicken:

Girl: If a boy comes in front of your house, where a tree is planted, and cuts it down, what would you do?

Tarabisho: I have two trees in front of my house.

Girl: If a little boy cuts them down, what will you do to him?

Tarabisho: What will I do to him? I'll fight him and make a big riot! I'll call the whole world and make a riot! I'll bring AK-47s and the whole world. I'll commit a massacre in front of the house.
[PA TV, October 22, 2004]

This is all PA TV, made mostly under Fatah leadership (even after Hamas was voted into power, the PA TV remained pro-Fatah.)

The UN representative had a golden opportunity to pressure Abbas to do something about inciting children to war, and instead she praises him as teaching them about peace.

Once again, the UN is shown to be a worthless organization on every level.

Who are those masked men? Terror webpage banner gallery

See if you can see all the things these have in common.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) website:

Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas):

Al-Quds Brigades (Islamic Jihad):

Yup - they all feature those scary ski masks!

Just like these members of the "special forces" that were training today in Gaza:

Notice the liberal use of jungle camouflage - on a beach. You can hardly see them.

But nothing beats these Fatah terrorists, who are so intent on covering their faces while they wear their faek suicide bomb belts that they don't even bother with holes for their eyes:

Nothing says "I'm proud of who I am and what I do" like covering your face in public.

Want some refreshing Zionist MelonAIDS?

Not dyslexic lemonade, but only the latest insane rumor going around Saudi Arabia:

"Beware of Israeli melons infected with AIDS arriving in Saudi Arabia!" is the latest rumor being spread throughout Saudi Arabia like a wildfire.

An SMS message being sent around the country this week said, "The Saudi Interior Ministry warns its citizens of a truck loaded with AIDS infected melons that Israel brought into the country via a 'ground corridor.'"

The Interior Minister's spokesman General Mansour al Turki responded to news of the message and made it clear to a-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper that the Ministry "did not issue any such announcement. This is just a rumor."

The rumor, despite being denied several times, has gained so much steam in the Arab world that it made it to the front page of one of the most important Arabic language newspapers.

But is it so unreasonable when Jews are "known" to gouge out Arab kids' eyes for transplants, fly poison balloons over Lebanon, and create a virus that only attacks Arabs?

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.)