Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

When detente is better than "peace"

Israel and Syria have started "peace" talks in Turkey.

At the moment, Syria's stance against Israel is entirely passive-aggressive. Everything that it has been doing - arming Hezbollah, building a nuclear weapons site, hosting terror groups - has a veneer of deniability, no matter how implausible. Which means that any agreement to stop those activities is essentially unenforceable, because they cannot be officially monitored.

On the other hand, the Syrian/Israel border has been Israel's quietest border since 1973. Israel's annexation of the Golan was perhaps the best move Israel has ever done for its own security, and military experts are unanimous as to the huge strategic importance of the Golan to Israel.

In other words, Israel's "illegal occupation" of the Golan has created more real peace than any number of compromises that Israel has made for what the world calls "peace."

Any embarkation of negotiations - or indeed, and change of a status quo - needs to be preceded by a calculation of the upside versus the downside. There is no way that Syria will agree to a peace agreement without getting the Golan back, placing much of Israel's population - not to mention its water supply - at great risk.

What's the upside? Is there any realistic chance that Syria would ditch its Iranian sponsor, abandon Hezbollah, stop incitement against Israel and become friends with the US?

If Syria wanted to get into the US orbit, it could do it without the Golan, and Syria has no threats from Israel as long as it doesn't make any aggressive moves. Today's detente is better than any other realistic scenario.

This is yet another folly where the pursuit of a "peace process" is antithetical to real peace.

Palestinian Arab news roundup

Lots of stuff going on in the Palestinian Arab press tonight...

Mostly from Firas Press:

There are rumors that Hamas was planning to hold a demonstration, shoot a Qasssam rocket into the crowd, blame Israel and use the situation to open Rafah. The Popular Committees nixed the idea.

An AP report is elaborated on where Palestinian Arabs are reluctant to embrace Bin Laden's support. Hamas considers Al-Qaeda "too extreme" for them, which is funny because recently Al Qaeda criticized Hamas for being too extreme as well. Either way, even Hamas realizes that making Bin Laden a hero is bad PR.

Also in Gaza,Fatah's terror arm, the Al Aqsa Brigades, claim to have found an Israeli spy device (with American parts) meant to video, and possibly remotely explode, terrorists. It looks a bit crude to me.

Speaking of spies, Islamic Jihad claims to have broken up a major spy ring, arresting many "collaborators." The self-death count may rise yet again. They used this opportunity to appeal to the ones they haven't yet found to repent or else, Allah forbid, they would be punished in this world and the next.

Hamas is planning a mass demonstration - and possibly an attempt to break down the fence - at the Karni crossing on Thursday. It is possible that this is the demonstration that they considered shooting a Qassam at.

Also, Ma'an reports that a Fatah-linked group claimed responsibility for the bombing attempt that happened yesterday at the Huwara checkpoint where a 16-year old was shot when he was found to have explosives strapped on. The other Palestinian Arab media don't believe the story altogether, preferring to tell themselves that Israel just shoots teenagers at checkpoints for no reason.

Worse than honor killing?

The Saudi-based Arab News describes a truly horrific story, where a family kicked their young mentally handicapped daughter for reasons of "honor," leaving her homeless - and then raped a year later.

And they still won't help her:

Neighbors of Maryam, an 18-year-old girl who was raped in a pedestrian tunnel here recently, are claiming that her family will not take her back because of the stigma associated with victims of sex crimes. Maryam’s family would not speak to Arab News.
Meanwhile, local police claim they have no cause to investigate the crime or find the perpetrators unless they receive complaints from the victim or her family.
“We cannot do anything about the alleged sexual assault that she suffered so long as we do not receive a formal complaint from her or her relatives,” Makkah police spokesman Maj. Abdul Mohsen Al-Mayman told Arab News yesterday.
Maryam was admitted to the King Abdul Aziz Hospital a few days ago for treatment of trauma resulting from sexual assault. She is currently under the custody of local health officials. A doctor at the hospital confirmed that the young woman was undergoing treatment at the hospital and that she is thought to be suffering from mental problems.
“As we cannot keep her in the hospital any longer, we plan to send her to the Taif Mental Health Hospital or hand her over to the Social Care Department. Her case is compounded because she has developed some mental disturbances besides being mentally retarded,” the doctor said, pointing out that the hospital has only eight beds for women patients who are on long-term care.
According to one neighbor, who did not want to be named, the family kicked the girl out 18 months ago on suspicion of being involved with a boy.
Since then, locals say she has been homeless and has showed signs of mental problems.
Describing the case of Maryam as not uncommon, the doctor appealed to charitable organizations to make sufficient shelters for homeless women like her.

With "honor killings" the torture ends. Maryam can only look forward to more abuse.

Tomorrow, EoZ and the Zionist Lobby visit Congress

Sorry that blogging has been light; it looks like Real Life will be intruding quite a bit over the next month or so.

Tomorrow, I plan to join some 900 other Zionist Jews to visit almost every single member of Congress or their aides with NORPAC, a pro-Israel political action committee. I've never done it before, but both EBoZ and OBoZ tell me that it is very enlightening and gratifying. I understand that one can learn more about how the government works from a single trip like this than from years of study.

It will be a very full day and I hope to blog about it afterwards.

PalArabs glorify intrafada violence, but MSM blames the Jews

The Australian writes about the latest photo-sharing craze in the territories:

A POPULAR pastime in Gaza is swapping gruesome footage of dead or dying victims of the Strip's incessant violence.

The images used to be almost exclusive legacies of clashes with Israeli forces but last year that changed. Now being far more keenly traded are snapshots of Palestinian fratricide, gruesome images taken by "militia-cams' that record scenes for posterity.

Spend any time near the emergency ward of Gaza's Shifa Hospital and security staff or ward workers will offer a look at their mobile phones, which they'll quickly switch to video mode to show images of victims of intra-Palestinian clashes being wheeled in agony from ambulances.

Sit in a town square for more than five minutes and you'll be quickly encircled by youths clamouring to outdo each other with images of death and mayhem.

A veritable library of the "intrafada" now exists in Gaza among militias and clans. Most were added during 2007, when the numbers of intra-Palestinian deaths jumped by 800 per cent - from 55 to 439 - almost all of the deaths in Gaza.

Images of men being tossed from the towers trade particularly well, as does a sequence of a Fatah youth leaping from behind a corner to shoot a rifle at entrenched Hamas men nearby. He hadn't levelled his weapon before being shot through the chest.

...Writing last month in The Jerusalem Post, Bassam Eid from the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said, "Because Palestinians are accustomed to seeing weapons and are also exposed to verbal and physical abuse of the military occupation, verbal disagreements easily turn into fist fights and sometimes even escalate into gang or family feuds. Growing up in a spiral of violence means that individuals find it harder to determine the limits of aggression."

Of course, it has to be Israel's fault somehow, as if centuries of intra-Arab fighting never occurred before the Zionists came on the scene.

The trade in gruesome photos is not limited to kids trading them like baseball cards. The mainstream Palestinian Arab newspapers and terrorist websites delight in showing dismembered bodies - here's the latest collection of victims of Hamas terror in Firas Press, and it is not close to the most gruesome.

Yet this celebration of death is, of course, the Jews' fault.

(h/t EBoZ)

The Elder gets copied again

This time, my story on the "belly dancer torture" got picked up by Israel Today.

Unfortunately, they didn't credit me.

On the plus side, it is nice to know that reporters do occasionally read this blog and the stories get more circulation, even if they don't want to admit it.

Egypt finds 7 more Gaza tunnels, with American weapons

Palestine Press Agency (recently restored after a hacking attack) reports that Egypt has discovered seven more smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Hamastan in Gaza.

Egyptian police arrested two men who were found in the tunnels.

In addition, they found American-manufactured weapons and ammunition. They traced these to the multinational peacekeeping forces in the Sinai, and they are investigating the apparent theft.

UPDATE: Police in Rafah shot and killed a suspected drug dealer. Our 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 70.

Today's Palestinian Arab lie (#54,213)

Just because it caught my eye...

Ramzy Baroud, who writes obsessively anti-Israel pieces in many left-wing publications, just wrote another screed, and I noticed it contained this quote:

When Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, compared Palestinians in a Jerusalem Post interview (August 2000) to “crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more,” he was hardly diverting from a consistent Zionist tradition that equated Palestinians with animals and vermin.

Sure enough, throughout the Internet one will find this quote by Barak in a supposed August 2000 interview with the Jerusalem Post. See, for example, Wikiquote on Ehud Barak.

So, did Barak really say that?

Two minutes of research in the Jerusalem Post archives finds this:

Tibi is acting like the scorpion on the turtle's back, in the well- known story: The scorpion promises the turtle not to sting him if he carries him over the river. In the middle of the river, the scorpion stings the turtle, and says proudly: "It's a matter of character. "Jews are the turtle that brought Tibi to the Knesset, to Kol Yisrael, and to television. A high-ranking source close to [Ehud Barak] has said that if an agreement is not reached, the Palestinians will be like crocodiles: "the more you feed them, the hungrier they get."

This is quite different than the quote that supposed Palestinian Arab "scholars" bandy about as fact. In fact, this quote - not by Barak - was meant to push Israel towards compromise with Palestinian Arabs, not to insult them.

It is not worth fisking someone like Baroud, as he is simply not that important. But this just shows, yet again, that the truth is not on the Arab side, and they know that if they make stuff up that their audience will willingly believe it anyway.

Hamas attacks mosque; no one reports it

I mentioned over the weekend that Hamas thugs attacked and trashed a mosque in Jabalya, injuring many. More details have emerged from PCHR:

Gunmen belonging to Izzedeen El-Qassam Battalions and members of the Police raided Imam Mohammad Naser El-Deen El-Albani Mosque in Jabalia refugee camp two days ago. They took control of the mosque after expelling its caretakers, beating several of them.

At approximately 15:45 on Saturday, 17 May, masked gunmen headed to the Imam Mohammad Naser El-Deen El-Albani Mosque in Bloc 5 of Jabalia refugee camp. A vehicle carrying Izzedeen El-Qassam Battalions gunmen and two police cars accompanied the masked gunmen. The gunmen entered the mosque and demanded that the Imam, Abd El-Halim Abdallah Awad, and the Director of the Kitab and Sunna Association, Ashraf Wadi, to leave the mosque and stop managing it under order from Hamas. After a discussion between both parties, Wadi went to the police station in Jabalia refugee camp and submitted a complaint against the gunmen. Then he returned to the mosque. Several Hamas supporters gathered inside the mosque and started to perform afternoon (Aser) prayers. The gunmen used their gun butts to attack Wadi and Awad and other members of the Kitab and Sunna Associations. Then they threw them out of the mosque. Several neighbors, including women, gathered to protest what was happening inside the mosque. The gunmen beat several women.

Imam Awad took the remaining members of the Association out of the mosque through a door connecting the mosque to his nearby house. The gunmen destroyed part of the wall separating the roofs of the house and the mosque. The whole episode resulted in the injury of more than 20 people with bruises.

It is noted that the Imam Mohammad Naser El-Deen El-Albani Mosque was established by the Kitab and Sunna Association, which is a benevolent society of the Salafi movement.

Two days later there is not one story about this in the English-language press. Not even Maan's English edition mentioned it.

Isn't it strange that an attack like this - which caused severe damage to the mosque - gets ignored?

The story is newsworthy by any real standard. We have irony that an Islamic movement is attacking mosques, we see that Muslims routinely see mosques as political and military objectives while they insist that Westerners treat them strictly as religious sites, we can only imagine how many Korans were damaged and destroyed in the carnage. All of these are the types of "hooks" that reporters routinely use to make stories more interesting to their readers, and even though there are daily attacks by Hamas against Gazans that might be considered too boring to make it into the news, this attack does not fit that category.

The reason is obvious. Hamas threatens, arrests and injures reporters who do not report things to their liking. All reporters left in Gaza are Muslims who live there and who are biased anyway against Israel but are scared of Hamas. As a result, reporters are reluctant to report, the news gets skewed towards the terrorist point of view, and this percolates throughout the entire mainstream media and into the hearts and minds of ordinary readers.

News organizations are supposed to report the news, and if they cannot do so they should tell their consumers why. They should not just choose to ignore stories that would get a huge amount of coverage in any other context.

Nahal Oz diary

April 29: Fatah shoots two mortars at the Nahal Oz crossing, where Gazans get most of their fuel.
April 30: Islamic Jihad shoots four mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 2: The PRC shells Nahal Oz.
May 2: The DFLP shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 4: Israel ships fuel through Nahal Oz.
May 5: The Abu Ala Reesh Brigades shoots a mortar at Nahal Oz; Hamas shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz
May 9: Islamic Jihad shoots four mortars at Nahal Oz
May 10: Hamas shoots at least one mortar at Nahal Oz.
May 12: Israel ships fuel to Gaza through Nahal Oz.
May 15: Hamas shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 15: Islamic Jihad shoots five mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 16: The DFLP shoots two mortars at Nahal Oz.
May 19: Israel ships fuel through Nahal Oz.

As far as the two other major crossings into Gaza:

The Sufa crossing was attacked on May 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19.

The Kerem Shalom crossing was attacked on April 29, May 5, 11 and 14.

Just something for "human rights" groups to keep in mind as they demand that Israel supply Gaza with all its needs.

Just another peaceful day in Hamastan

Firas Press published some photos of Hamas' greatest hits, including the obligatory tortured dead bodies.

Here's an interesting picture that shows what a Gazan might see on a typical day in his neighborhood.

(They did not caption it so I don't know when this picture was taken.)

Iraqis freak over Israelis saving their lives

From the Jerusalem Post last week:

The Iraqi parliament is angry over reports that an organization in the capital has been sending Iraqi children for medical treatment in Israel.

A parliament statement confirmed reports about this enterprise, even though government sources previously said it was untrue, according to Al-Jazeera.

The statement, released by the parliament's Health and Environment Committee, said the activities of this organization, which is operating out of Baghdad's Green Zone, was harmful both to the Iraqi people and to the government, since there are no diplomatic relations with Israel at any level, and this practice is a violation of the Arab League's boycott policy of Israel.

The committee demanded the government investigate the matter and take the necessary legal measures against the organization, if the allegations prove to be accurate.

A source at the Iraqi Health Ministry told Al-Jazeera the organization included Iraqi and American medical doctors and that it worked in conjunction with an Israeli organization.

The Iraqi Health Ministry insisted it had no knowledge of this organization's operations and that all the sick people the ministry sent outside of Iraq for treatment were sent through legal channels.

Chances are pretty good that the organization they are all upset about is called Save a Child's Heart, which I blogged about last year.

According to SACH statistics, they have helped some 42 Iraqi children in the past few years, as well as many hundreds of others from around the world, many from the PA-administered areas.

Well, you can understand how the Iraqis would be upset at an Israeli organization trying to save their children's lives. It is obviously a well-hidden land grab, not to mention a way to get Zionist spies into Iraq.

Those sneaky Jews, always trying to save Arab lives!

Saudi Arabia's 1937 threat to Great Britain over Palestine

In 1937, Col H.R.P. Dickson, former British Political Agent in Kuwait, was granted an interview or audience with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and they discussed Palestine. Dickson transcribed the king's words into a report.

This report (reproduced here from the invaluable MidEast Web site)shows the real problem that the Arab world had with Jews moving to the area, and it had nothing to do with "Zionism" - it was pure bigotry against Jews.

It is notable that the Arabs would not dare to say these words in their official statements even then; they always pretended to Westerners that their problems with Zionism were strictly political. Here the mask falls off as Ibn Saud attempts to appeal to Christian anti-semitism in order to gain an ally against the "accursed and stiffnecked" Jews.

Notice also how the king, hardly in the position of power that Saudi Arabia enjoys nowadays, still effectively uses threats against the United Kingdom to get them to fall in line with the racist policies of the Arabs:

'O Dickson when will your London Government realize that we Arabs by our very nature can be bought body and soul by an act of kindness and vice versa become implacable enemies for all time of those who treat us harshly or deal unjustly with us.

Today we and our subjects are deeply troubled over this Palestine question, and the cause of our disquiet and anxiety is the strange attitude of your British Government, and the still more strange hypnotic influence which the Jews, a race accursed by God according to His Holy Book, and destined to final destruction and eternal damnation hereafter, appear to wield over them and the English people generally.

'God's Holy Book (the Qur'an) contains God's own word and divine ordinance, and we commend to His Majesty's government to read and carefully peruse that portion which deals with the Jews and especially what is to be their fate in the end. For God's words are unalterable and must be.

'We Arabs believe implicitly in God's revealed word and we know that God is faithful. We care for nothing else in this world but our believe in the One God, His Prophet and our Honour, everything else matters nothing at all, not even death, nor are we afraid of hardship, hunger, lack of this worlds goods etc, etc. and we are quite content to eat camel's meat and dates to the end of our days, provided we hold to the above three things.

'Our hatred for the Jews dates from God's condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa (Jesus Christ), and their subsequent rejection later of His chosen Prophet. It is beyond our understanding how your Government, representing the first Christian power in the world today, can wish to assist and reward these very same Jews who maltreated your Isa (Jesus).

''We Arabs have been the traditional friends of Great Britain for many years, and I, Bin Sa'ud, in particular have been your Government's firm friend all my life, what madness then is this which is leading on our Government to destroy this friendship of centuries, all for the sake of an accursed and stiffnecked race which has always bitten the hand of everyone who has helped it since the world began.

Latest Israeli torture techniques: Belly dancers

Ma'an "reports":

Beatings and sexual humiliation are among the torments suffered by Palestinian detainees at an Israeli prison located near the West Bank city of Ramallah, new testimony from prisoners indicates.

Twenty-one-year-old Ramallah resident Sultan Abdullah Sulieman was recently released from the Ofer Prison, officially known as Incarceration Facility 386. In interviews with lawyers from the Palestinian Prisoners Society, he said that he spent forty days in solitary confinement in the facility.

Sulieman said that during one interrogation session, Israeli soldiers brought an "Iraqi girl" called "Nora" into the room. "Nora" danced "seductively" in front of Suleiman, moving close to him before moving away, he said.

The Arabic version reported by Palestine Today teases out more lurid details:

Sultan Sulaiman Abdullah (21 years) from Ramallah that the Ofer prison warders in the new style used in the investigation, where the girl who came and entered the prisoner during interrogation, sitting semi-naked in front of the captive and begin issuing the voices and gestures for tempting him and was approaching the degree of contact with her body and then his body.

Of course, this one person goes on to mention lots of other examples of torture, each of which sound as plausible as this one.

This article from 2004 listing Palestinian Arab prisoner demands interestingly didn't ask for a stop of such "torture."

Firas Press reports that Hamas attacked a mosque in Gaza, injuring 25 worshippers. They also attacked and damaged the house of the 70-year old Imam of the mosque. Here's a picture of the damage. One can imagine that many Korans were damaged or destroyed, but no one seems to be rioting over those.

Also, in a related incident, 20 were injured in the Jabalya camp as Hamas surrounded and attacked the house of the Shaban family.

They also arrested 45 people on Abu Hasira Street.

Just another peaceful day in the Islamic mini-state of Gaza.

They sound very angry. I think we should talk to them and let them get it off their chests.

Nakba illustration in Palestinian Arab newspaper

The Palestine Today website illustrates its "Nakba" coverage with this graphic:

Looks like they are truly interested in peace.

Dow Jones: Israel means business

Probably the most effective response to Ahmadinejad's claims that "The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals assume that by holding celebrations they can save the sinister Zionist regime from death and annihilation" - is anyone writing articles like this about Iran?

From Dow Jones:

Israel was born not only into war, carnage and controversy but also into shortage. Shorn of cash and goods, it had to ration meat, eggs and cooking oil through a coupon system that soon generated undernourishment, bread lines and a thriving black market.
Worse, lacking allies, trade partners and natural resources while swamped by poor immigrants, the Israeli economy was also burdened by its leaders' rigorous socialism. Central planning initially generated growth, but Israel's protectionist duties, sclerotic financial system, high labor costs, bloated public sector and exorbitant defense spending soon proved untenable. By the 1980s the stock market had collapsed, the major banks were nationalized, inflation hit 440% and foreign-currency reserves all but vanished.
As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday memories of this economic desolation seem exotic.
The shekel is now one of the strongest currencies in the world, inflation is 2.5%, last year's 5% growth was the developed world's highest for the fifth consecutive year, while unemployment slid to a 15-year low of 6.5%. While analogous in some ways to other economic miracles, Israel's is still politically, socially and culturally unique.
...
While the reforms of the 1980s stabilized the currency and began the retreat from socialism, these measures globalized Israel's economy. With the budget deficit shrinking within five years from 7% to 0.8% of GDP, and with the debt- to-GDP ratio reaching a 40-year-low of 81%, the global financial community began to understand that Israel means business.
Yet there were factors at play that transcended macro-economic policymaking.
One is, paradoxically, Israel's defense burden. Though in every other respect a liability, Israel's initial lack of arms suppliers compelled it to build its own military industry, which eventually climbed from manufacturing bullets to inventing submachine guns and finally developing tanks, battleships and fighter jets.
The arms industry -- led by aerospace giant Israel Air Industries -- not only became a major exporter, it also mass-produced technicians, engineers and inventors. In the late-1980s, when Israel was forced to cancel an overly ambitious fighter-jet project, thousands of suddenly-jobless engineers and programmers unwittingly launched the hi-tech start-up industry that soon became the darling of foreign investors.
Already then, well before any of them made his first million, Israeli techies came to epitomize the daring, mobility and originality that have historically been hallmarks of invention in general, and of Jewish commerce in particular.
Fortunately for Israel, all this coincided with the end of the Cold War.
First, huge parts of the world that had ostracized Israel, including Russia and China, suddenly traded with it, and nearby India and Turkey emerged as strategic trade partners. More importantly, a million immigrants thronged to Israel. These bought with them entrepreneurial energy, professional skills and a consumerist hunger that produced the world's largest per-capita rate of engineers and scientists, a massive retail expansion and a spectacular housing boom.
All these combined made the hi-tech industry take off. By last year its $32 billion in exports comprised half of all Israeli industrial exports. Meanwhile multinationals like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Motorola, Inc. (MOT) and Google, Inc. (GOOG) set up R&D centers in Israel, and foreign buyouts of companies like software developer Mirabilis by AOL, now owned by Time Warner Inc. (TWX), for $407 million in 1998; or printing-technology developer Indigo by HP for $719 million in 2002; or disc-on-key inventor M-Systems by SanDisk Corp. (SNDK) for $1.5 billion in 2006 -- have become so common that they are no longer front-page news.
Success was not exclusive to the technology sector. Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries (TEVA), Tnuva Food Industries, the largest dairy products manufacturer in Israel, food giant Strauss Group and Iscar Metalworking, are but some instances of multi-billion-dollar companies excelling in such traditional industries as pharmaceuticals, food production and machine-tool manufacturing. Yet unlike the typical hi-tech success story, they employ thousands and focus on manufacture rather than invention.
Fairly or not, they are not automatically associated with the high-tech entrepreneur who has become a teen-ager's role model and the stereotypical Jewish Mother's dream child, unseating the historic doctor and lawyer.
Sixty years on, Israel's GDP is scratching $200 billion, nearly six times its original, relative per-capita level, while skyscrapers crowd Tel Aviv, multilane thruways, tunnels, fast trains and spaghetti junctions crisscross the country, and some 80 malls, the first of which only opened in 1986, are brimming with customers, turnovers and luxuries -- probably the happiest, and starkest, contrast to 1949's bread lines.

On the other hand, here is a round-up of recent news stories about Iran's economy:

Tahmasb Mazaheri, director general of the National Bank of the Islamic Republic, defies the executive order of the Iranian president and refuses to decrease the interest rate. More here.
Abrar says capital drain from the Islamic Republic's banking system has increased upon Ahmadinejad’s executive order to decrease the interest rate.
Government to increase loans to public servants, members of the armed forces, and people from the rural areas.
Donya-ye Eqtesad assesses the effects of lowering of the interest rate by presidential decree as "alarming."
Kayhan supports the Ahmadinejad government's decision to decrease interest rates.
Iranian economist Ahmad Shakiba says inflation in Iranian economy is due to incompetent management of the oil income.
Donya-ye Eqtesad calls Iranian economic decision makers "half-educated."

Which "regime" wil die first?

The UN's Nakba obsession

YNet reports:

Israel is demanding that the UN strike the word 'Nakba' from its lexicon, this after the world body's spokeswoman uttered it, apparently by mistake, in a press briefing she held Thursday night.

'Nakba', or 'catastrophe', refers to the refugee flight of Palestinian Arabs that followed Israel's inception in 1948.

The spokeswoman told reporters that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to stress his support for the Palestinian people on Nakba Day".

I was unaware that Israel protested every time the UN uses the word Nakba. If so, a cottage industry can be set up within the government just to protest every time UN agencies use the word.

Here's one from the UN Department of Public Information, one from the UN Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and countless times on the UNRWA page.

Palestinian Muslims' respect for other religions

The top story at Firas Press regards the supposed American shooting of Korans in Iraq, with these photos, captioned "Another crime against Islam":

Muslims often say that they care about the sanctity of all the three "revealed" religions (carefully avoiding the fact that they have no such respect for Buddhism or Hinduism.)

Yet in the past day, Muslims attacked a synagogue in Sderot - a crime that the religious-based Islamic Jihad was happy to claim responsibility for, greatly exaggerating the damage.

And a Christian school in Gaza was attacked by Islamists with a bomb as well.

Yet I have yet to see any Arabs concerned about the sanctity of any Christian or Jewish holy books that have been damaged in many attacks - let alone people.

The respect given to other religions is, as always, rhetorical - yet the respect demanded is absolute, and backed up with threats.

A curious Ma'an cartoon

Ma'an Arabic's illustration accompanying its article about President Bush's address to the Knesset is, um, interesting:

I'm really at a loss in trying to understand the symbolism here - who is injecting the Arab? Presumably "America," given the stars and stripes. But with what? Why is the needle bent?

And, of course: Why the hearts?

The Arab cartoons about Jews are so much easier to understand:

Simple, to the point, and utterly false.

Four London synagogues vandalized

From JTA:

Four synagogues were vandalized in two London neighborhoods.

Dozens of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slogans were spray-painted Wednesday night on shops, pavements and walls outside the synagogues.

Residents of the Stamford Hill and Clapton Common neighborhoods were "shocked" Thursday to see some 40 slogans such as "Jihad to Israel" and "Jihad to Tel-Aviv," according to media reports.

A spokesperson for the Community Security Trust, which provides for the safety of British Jewry, said the community already was on high alert after receiving threats from supporters of the al-Qaida terrorist group.

Police said investigators were looking into footage from surveillance cameras and that forensic teams had recovered a canister of spray paint.

24dash.com adds:

Anti-Semitic incidents in the UK remain "far too high" and the number recorded last year was the second highest ever, a minister said today.

Cohesion minister Parmjit Dhanda said there were 547 incidents last year and the Government had to continue to work to "bear down" on the problem.

For the Tories, Paul Goodman said all forms of hate crime were "an unqualified and unmitigated evil."

Mr Goodman said that many different places of worship had been attacked in the UK. "But only one religious institution in Britain is under threat to such a degree that those who attend are advised not to linger outside after worship, namely the synagogue."

Labour's Andrew Dismore, whose Hendon constituency has the largest proportion of Jewish people, said the Jewish community lived, in effect, in a "permanent state of siege and underlying fear".

Mr Dismore added that it was unfair for parents to be asked to contribute to funding security at Jewish schools.

"It's a voluntary contribution, but Jewish parents are expected to pay towards the cost of making sure their children are secure in school," he said.

The only other British media source mentioning this current spate of British anti-semitism (according to Google News) is This Is London. Nothing from the BBC, Guardian (although they do mention a recent report on anti-semitism on campuses), Times or other major news outlets.

As opposed to "Islamophobia."

AFP's scare quotes - when is terror 'terror'?

AFP has an interesting, inconsistent policy of when it puts scare quotes around the word "terror."

When performed against Israel, of course, terror is the ambiguous "terror":

Bush vows to support Israel against 'terror'

Visiting US President George W. Bush vowed on Thursday to support Israel in battling "terror" groups as the nation marks its 60th anniversary still struggling to find peace with Arab neighbours.

And against India, terror is also in the eye of the beholder:

Some 216 people were wounded in what police said was the first "terror" attack in the Rajasthan state capital.

But attacks against the US - which probably pays much of AFP's bills - are definitely terror:

Since 1970, Las Vegas saw gambling revenues fall only once -- in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, when gaming revenues in 2002 were less than 1 percent lower than 2001.

The United States has poured nearly 40 billion dollars in aid to South Asia since the September 11 attacks but the terror threat from the region remains a top problem, a congressional hearing was told Wednesday.

The trial is the first in Europe over the CIA's so-called "extraordinary rendition" programme under which it has secretly transferred terror suspects to third countries known to practise torture.

Colombian paramilitaries to be tried by US for terror, drugs

Obama has disowned Wright, denounced the terror campaign of Weather Underground, and says that his not wearing a flag lapel pin does not make him any less patriotic.

The UK definition of terror is also OK by AFP, as the scare quotes are nowhere to be found:

Ditching the 10 percent lowest tax bracket infuriated Labour backbenchers, while Brown faces further clashes with them over plans to let police hold terror suspects for 42 days without charge.

China also gets to define terror its own way without challenge from AFP:

The reports came a day after a top Olympic security official said the military would be involved in anti-terror efforts, and government confirmation earlier this week that China had introduce more stringent visa requirements.

So does Zimbabwe's critics:

Pressure mounted on Zimbabwe Thursday to admit foreign observers to oversee a presidential election run-off amid fresh claims that pro-government militias were deliberately instilling terror.

As does the UN:

Canada has asked the United Nations to take one of its nationals off a list of terror suspects, a Sudanese-Canadian who has been blocked in Sudan for five years, his lawyer said Friday.

It appears that most countries have the right to call terror terror without the AFP's editorializing scare quotes, but attacks against medical clinics in Israel or simultaneous bombs in India don't make the cut.

But there is one other case where AFP uses the scare quotes as it does against Israel and India: Vietnam.

Three pro-democracy activists including an American were handed jail terms of up to nine months on "terrorism" charges in a trial held under tight security Tuesday.
The three, all linked to a US-based party banned in Vietnam, were accused of "inciting riots threatening the national security" of the communist country by distributing leaflets.

Yes, AFP considers Israel and India uses of the word "terror" to be as ambiguous as that of Vietnam's.

When a policy is applied inconsistently in different situations, but consistently against Israel and India, what does that say about AFP's editorial policies?

Palestinians claim Israel shot own rocket at Ashkelon

Firas Press has a bizarre article claiming that Israel must have shot the rocket at Ashkelon in order to gain sympathy while George Bush is visiting:

Informed sources in the Palestinian resistance said that the resistance had not fired a Palestinian rocket at the shopping center in Ashkelon. The source who refused to reveal his name said that the Israeli game is to enlist worldwide support and an omen of imminent invasion of Gaza outline Zionist Israel exists and create the world public opinion. For Kasaba, the source added that this drama it made up for Israel earn the approval of Bush's interests are not obvious to one of the Palestinian people at the same time stressing that the Palestinians had not fired any missiles at Ashkelon, warning data intriguers to adopt practical Palestinians until there is no excuse from the occupation to commit new massacres against the Palestinian people.

It is worth mentioning that Al-Quds Brigades have denied any missile launched at Ashkelon today as did Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades.

Although a number of press sources said that Islamic Jihad and the PRC both claimed responsibility, I have not seen those claims in the Islamic Jihad webpage, although they did praise the people who shot the rocket ("injuring of Zionist usurpers.") (I do not know the URL of any PRC webpage.) Firas did have a separate report of the PRC denying shooting the rocket.

This is quite strange.

My guess is that this is related to the brief kerfuffle that occurred last month when Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri chided Hamas for targeting women and children with their rockets, and Hamas denied doing so. Perhaps (as we saw yesterday) the Islamists are starting to get embarrassed by attacks that hurt clear non-combatants while at the same time they want to continue to make the lives of Jews in the Negev hell. Since that event, terrorist claims of responsibility for rocket attacks now claim to be aiming at military targets, even when they shell the crossings that provide them with food and fuel.

UPDATE: Or perhaps Firas is just incompetent. A PRC leader told YNet explicitly that his organization takes responsibility. And the PFLP is also reported to have claimed responsibility.

Al-Alam: Ashkelon is "occupied"

Iran's Al-Alam made very clear that it considers all of Israel to be "occupied" territory, as it gleefully reports on the latest terror attack in Ashkelon:

ASHKELON, Israel, May 14--A rocket fired from Gaza exploded in a shopping center in the occupied southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, wounding at least 30 people, rescue officials said.

The rocket ripped through the roof of the mall, causing a large chunk of the roof to collapse in a huge pile of rubble and twisted metal. Four windows were blown out of the side of the building.

A hospital official said a woman and her young daughter were seriously wounded, along with another child. Another woman was seriously wounded, and several other people were slightly wounded, said the official, Leah Malul of Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon.

Two Palestinian resistance groups, the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, claimed responsibility. Earlier Wednesday, five Palestinians were martyred in military operations by the Israeli regime in Gaza.

While activists have fired homemade retaliatory rockets into occupied border towns for several years, only recently have they gained the capability to target Ashkelon, a city of 110,000 people about 15 kilometers (nine miles) from the Gaza border.

With Iranian Grad rockets, of course.

The rocket attack came as Bush was wrapping up talks in occupied al-Quds with Zionist Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Israel's high-tech military has been unable to find a way to stop the crude rockets.

Iran stands quite behind its proxies in Gaza.

Ha'aretz reporter brags of his lack of objectivity

From The Nation, by Ha'aretz Arab apologist Akiva Eldar, preaching to the choir:

There are journalists, including some prominent and well-known ones, who learn about distant lands and foreign peoples from casual conversations with taxi drivers. A chance exchange with a Manhattan cabby last fall taught me a few things I did not know about my newspaper and myself. The Alexandria-born driver, a veteran of the Egyptian navy, revealed that my colleagues and I at Ha'aretz were not speaking into a void. After he discovered my identity, he adamantly refused to take any money from me. Abe said that he had been a loyal reader of mine for years, and this was his modest way of expressing his esteem for a journalist who charges him up on a weekly basis with some hope for peace in the region where he was born.

Among the thousands of hate-mail messages I receive from people on the Israeli right wing, and the venomous talkbacks that Jewish Americans submit through the Ha'aretz website, the occasional word of encouragement slips through from Arab readers, both from neighboring countries and from the West. At international conferences I get pats on the back from pragmatic Muslim intellectuals as well as from left-liberal Jews and non-Jews. But the Egyptian cabby's warm words were the most precious gift I have received over the three decades--half of Israel's age--during which I have written more than 2,000 articles.

The Israeli ambassador to a major European capital once told me that David Grossman, whose articles appear frequently in the local press, and myself were "ruining his job." He complained that every time he attacked Israel's critics for their "anti-Israeli" stances, as he put it, they would argue that our own articles were far more critical. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt cite me in their controversial book, The Israel Lobby, as one of the Israeli journalists whose criticism of the occupation is even sharper than their own.

The prominent Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in November 2000 (in a publication of the Israel Democracy Institute) that "there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the 'lynch test.'" These, he wrote, are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Arabs even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a mob in Ramallah. Barnea, who last year was awarded the Israel Prize for journalism, went on to argue that our support for the Palestinian position is absolute. He concluded, "They have a mission." I was honored to be mentioned as one of those journalists, alongside my fine colleagues Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

I admit to being guilty as charged. I am a journalist with a mission, and also no small amount of passion.

Even though we already knew that Ha'aretz purposefully reports only the news that conform to its ideological objectives and downplays the news that does not, this is still an astonishing admission from a news reporter.

The bravado of Israel's enemies

Iran's President Ahmadinejad's recent statements include, "The era of the Zionist literature and the Zionist political mechanism and the Zionist bullying policies has come to an end," "I just want to tell you that holding a birthday party for a dead person is of no use. These gatherings can not revive a corpse," and "The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals imagine that by holding celebrations ... they can save the Zionist regime from death."

Mahmoud al-Zahar said today, "The Palestinians and the Arabs have crushed the Jews' assumption of supremacy… The Zionist legend of invincibility has been destroyed. Now more than ever I tell you – will never recognize Israel… We will form the Palestinian state on all of Palestine's territories and the sun of liberty will burn the Zionists. To them I say – you will lose. You will leave and we will keep hounding you. The blood of our slain sons will haunt you forever."

These sorts of statements are nothing new, and we've been hearing variants since before Israel even existed. It is valuable to recognize what makes people say things like this.

Obviously, Israel is not going anywhere. While there are political threats to its borders and terrorist threats to its citizens, Israel's existence is in no doubt for the foreseeable future.

The biggest testimony to Israel's strength and self-assurance comes, ironically, from its own self-criticism. Only a people who are secure can look at their own faults and admit mistakes publicly, and no one admits mistakes - real or imagined - more publicly than Israelis do.

The Second Lebanon War is a case study in the difference between how Israelis look at themselves and how Israel's enemies look at it. From a military perspective, the war was a draw - Israel inflicted a great deal of damage on Hezbollah and the cease fire agreement drove Hezbollah north of the Litani, but it was not the crushing defeat that Israel desired nor was it enough to stop Hezbollah from re-arming quickly. But by no stretch of the imagination was Israel "defeated" unless your definition of defeat is very unrealistic.

Yet, Israel underwent much public self-criticism and self-evaluation after the war to learn from its mistakes.

Conversely, Israel's enemies celebrated their "victory," masking the loss of hundreds of Hezbollah fighters with huge banners across Lebanon .

This is not a reflection of reality - this is bravado.

People who act this way are fundamentally insecure. They cannot distinguish between putting up a brave front and real bravery.

They tell their people about their impending victories in an attempt to shore up their own delusions and to avoid any real self-examination, which would lead to despair. They surround themselves with people who will agree with their public posturing. They inflate events that are meaningless as long as they support their fantasies, and they ignore any evidence to the contrary.

A hallmark of this institutionalized bravado hiding insecurity is not only the lack of self-criticism but deliberate acts against those who dare criticize. Hence we see Iran's brutal attacks against dissidents, Hamas' threats against journalists, and Hezbollah's total censorship in areas under its control.

This bravado is so institutionalized in the psyches of its practitioners - and so much a part of the honor-shame mindset that helps spawn it - that they cannot understand that Israeli self-criticism is a reflection of its strength. To them, any criticism is shameful and only an utterly defeated people can admit mistakes. The more delusional actually start to believe that Israel is weak and they then start thinking they can defeat it.

The bigger the bluster, the weaker the core that the blusterers are trying to hide.

This does not mean that they aren't dangerous. Of course, they can - and do - inflict damage.

But their bravado is not an indication of their strength. On the contrary, it proves their weakness.

Egyptians freak over goalie's shirt logo

MEMRI blog translates from Al-Arabiya:

Many accusations have recently been leveled against 'Isam Al-Hadri, Egyptian national soccer team player and goalkeeper for the Swiss soccer club Syon, for agreeing to wear a club shirt with the logo of a company that makes alcoholic drinks.
Muhammad Rafat 'Uthman, instructor at Al-Azhar University and member of its Center for Islamic Research, said that it was forbidden for Al-Hadri to wear the shirt, and that if the club insisted that he do so he must break his contract and quit.

In contrast, liberal Egyptian thinker Gamal Al-Banna said that Al-Hadri should not be accused, because he had acted like a Muslim minority member should act within a non-Muslim majority.

As the picture above shows, the sponsor in question is the Giroud Winery. Everyone on the club has to wear this shirt, as Giroud is one of the sponsors of the club.

Today's Gaza news you won't read anywhere else

Lots happening today:

- Hamas took over a mosque east of the Jabalya camp, and confiscated the keys to its library.

- Hamas signed an agreement with the local Internet provider to stop any access to pornographic websites starting May 15th.

- Hamas forces surrounded the home of the Azzam family in Jabalya and forced its way in, injuring two men and causing a pregnant woman to miscarry.

- Hamas also stormed a kindergarten in Jabalya.

- There was a mysterious explosion at the Right to Life headquarters in Gaza, which appears to be a facility for children with Down's Syndrome.

- Hamas' leaders announced that all schools must be closed on Thursday in commemoration of "Nakba day."

- The Palestinian Health Ministry warned Gazans on the consequences of using cooking oil as replacements for diesel and petroleum in cars. Due to the fuel shortage many people have converted their cars to use cooking oil (causing some car exhausts in Gaza to smell like falafel), but the Ministry warned of health and environmental problems that this could cause. They also warned that using oil is bringing the price of cooking oil higher in Gaza, making it harder for everyone to afford food.

How do 1948 Palestinian refugees compare to others?

We are in the midst of two solid weeks of "nakba" commemorations, each one further removed from reality than the last.

Yesterday, during yet another "nakba" celebration, PA prime minister Fayyad stated that the Palestinian Arab flight in 1948 was the "biggest tragedy of displacement in the modern era." (Ma'an Arabic) So I decided to do a quick check of the numbers of people who have been displaced in various wars and other events in the modern era, and compare them to the 711,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in 1948. Most numbers are from Wikipedia.

Event	Year	Number of refugees	Notes
Armenian	1915-21	1,100,000
Russian revolution	1917-21	1,500,000
Greece/Turkey	1923	2,000,000	Population exchange
Spanish Civil War	1939	500,000	Spanish Republicans to France
World War II	1939-45	7,000,000
Poland/Ukraine	1944-46	2,600,000	Population exchange
Potsdam conference	1945	12,000,000	Forced repatriation of ethnic Germans to Germany
Soviet Union	1945-47	2,500,000	Forced repatriation of Russians to USSR
Germany	1945-61	560,000	Flight from East to West Germany
India/Pakistan partition	1947	18,000,000	Population exchange
Palestinian Arabs	1948	711,000	UN count
Middle East Jews	1948-60	700,000	Arab countries to Israel
Korean War	1950-53	1,000,000
Algerian independence	1954-62	2,000,000	To Morocco, Tunisia
Pieds-Noirs	1962	900,000	Algeria to Europe
Bangladeshi Liberation War	1971	10,000,000	Bengalis to India
Sahrawis in Western Sahara	1975	150,000
Salvadoran Civil War	1975-82	1,000,000
Lebanese civil war	1975-90	900,000	Displaced from their homes
Khmer Rouge	1978-79	300,000	To US, Canada, Australia
Afghan War	1978-92	6,000,000	To Pakistan and Iran
Sri Lanka Tamils	1983-2008	800,000	to Europe and Canada
Kurds from Turkey	1984-99	378,000
Al-Anfal campaign	1986-89	1,000,000	Iraqi Kurds
Nagorno Karabakh	1988-89	750,000
Kashmir	1990-	300,000
Sudan war	1990?	930,000
Burundi	1990?	485,000
Democratic Rep. of Congo	1990?	462,000
Somalia	1990?	389,000
Russian Jews	1990-95	700,000	USSR to Israel
Persian Gulf War	1991	1,400,000	Iraq to Iran
Balkans	1991	2,700,000
Kuwait Palestinians	1991	400,000	expelled from Kuwait
Chechnya	1991-	2,000,000
Tajikistan	1992-97	500,000	Russians, excluding Jews who went to Israel
Abkhazia	1993	250,000
Rwanda	1994	2,000,000
Serbia	1999	1,000,000	Albanians
Darfur	2003-	2,500,000
Current Gulf war	2003-8	2,200,000	Iraq to Arab countries

The problem is not that there were so many refugees in 1948, although it is a significant number by any yardstick. The problem is that Palestinian Arab leaders and other Arab leaders, together with the UNRWA and so-called "human rights" organizations, have conspired to not only perpetuate the issue but even to exacerbate it.

By uniquely defining descendants of original Palestinian Arab refugees as refugees themselves, the "refugee" problem grown from 700,000 to over four million. Therefore, we see such nonsensical statement as this one from Human Rights Watch:

Palestinians are the world's oldest and largest refugee population, and make up more than one fourth of all refugees.

- a manifestly absurd statement, and one that serves to minimize the real refugee problems worldwide and give a single group preferred refugee status, generations after most of them are no longer refugees by any sane definition. The sheer number of displaced persons during the past hundred years is breathtaking, and in context the Palestinian Arab refugees from 1948 are barely a footnote.

Much larger refugee populations listed above have been forced to integrate and assimilate into the countries that they migrate to, but Arab countries who claim affinity with "Palestinians" have kept Palestinian Arabs separate and second-class.

No matter which historical narrative one believes, the 1948 refugee problem was indeed a disaster for Palestinian Arabs. But the fact that the problem still exists today is directly due to the conscious actions of their Arab neighbors and "supporters" for the past sixty years who want to see only one "solution" - destroying the State of Israel and replacing it with another giant refugee camp populated by people who mostly never lived there and who would be ecstatic to live as equals among their Arab brothers today.

Here's a nice litmus test to see whether people who claim to care about Palestinian Arabs: ask them if they would prefer to see millions of PalArabs in camps sixty years from now, or to have them become productive full members of the huge Arab world?

"Interfaith conference" in Qatar; Iran freaks out

From Peninsula On-Line:

The Sixth Conference for Dialogue Between Religions is due to kick off here today at Doha Sheraton hotel with prominent intellectuals, scholars, media persons and followers of three major religions participating.

The conference, to be inaugurated by the Minister of Awqaf (Endowments) and Islamic Affairs, H E Faisal bin Abdullah Al Mahmoud, will focus on three major topics: The peaceful relations among the three religions, the value of life in accordance with religion, including issues such as suicide, abortion, human trafficking, trafficking of human organs, clinical death and euthanasia, and insulting religious symbols. Many of these issues are medical issues with a religious dimension.

The third topic deals with violence, self defence and media and violence, in addition to questions over the suicide bombings taking place in Palestine and Afghanistan and whether they are violence or a type of self defence according to the viewpoint of religious scholars.

The conference, organized by the Doha International Centre for Interfaith Dialogue in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry and Qatar University, will host up to 200 delegates representing Islam, Christianity and Judaism as well as local research centres.

I don't know what rabbis are participating in Qatar, but I do know that the fact that they are there is enraging at least one nation:

Iran boycotts Qatar's International Conference on Dialogue between Religions in a bid to protest the participation of Zionist rabbis, PressTV reported.

Iran's representative, Ali Akbar Sadeqi Reshad has asked the organizers of the conference to withdraw his paper from the event.

The Egyptian scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi has also boycotted the conference, which will be held on May 13 and 14, 2008 in Doha.

And what exactly does "interfaith dialogue" mean to the hosts in Qatar?

To a question on the participation of the Jewish rabbis, she said that the annual visits of the participating Jewish rabbis have contributed to the change of their conception on Muslims.

“I remember that the Jewish rabbis who participated for the first time in interfaith dialogue were very scared and even asked for tightening security measure. They thought they were coming to a country of terrorists. We do not expect them to hand over Palestine to us after inviting them to such meetings. The important thing is that their perceptions have changed with their annual participation in the Doha Interfaith Dialogue,” she explained.

Notice yet again that the point of "interfaith dialogue" from the Muslim perspective is not to learn from other religions, but to force them to learn from you. In other words, it is a Muslim monologue disguised as a conversation.

Obama's anti-Israel friends

Barack Obama's recent pro-Israel statements don't reflect his pre-campaign thinking. From the NYT (h/t EBoZ)

He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.

“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.

Electronic Intifada is not just a Palestinian Arab advocacy periodical; it is a virulently anti-Israel publication that supports Hamas and advocates Israel's destruction.

As Mr. Obama moved closer to running, he paid a visit to James S. Crown and his father, Lester, billionaire investors who presided over a sprawling Chicago business dynasty and prominent leaders in the Jewish community.

As the meeting ended, the younger Mr. Crown said, his father — who is “fairly hawkish” about Israel’s security — was noncommittal about Mr. Obama. But, James Crown said, “I pulled him down to my office, and I said, ‘Hey, look, I think you should run, and I want you to win.’ ”

In courting families like the Crowns, Mr. Obama was gaining entree into the upper echelon of the city’s corporate boardrooms, a ripe source of campaign money. But he was also seeking to broaden his appeal to Jewish voters, and he was wading more deeply into one of the touchiest issues in American politics: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000, the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

My critique of Rashid Khalidi's work can be seen here and here. Khalidi considers all of Israel "occupied" and was critical of Arafat - as being too flexible on Israel.

A.J. Wolf, a Hyde Park rabbi who is a friend of Mr. Obama’s and has often invited Mr. Khalidi to speak at his synagogue, said Mr. Obama had disappointed him by not being more assertive about the need for both Israel and the Palestinians to move toward peace. “He’s played all those notes right for the Israel lobby,” said Mr. Wolf, who is sometimes critical of Israel.

During the Senate campaign, Mr. Obama joined in a “Walk for Israel” rally along Lake Michigan on Israel Solidarity Day. The Crowns and other Jewish leaders raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for him. Several days before the primary in 2004, some of his Jewish supporters took offense that Mr. Obama had not taken the opportunity on a campaign questionnaire to denounce Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or to strongly support Israel’s building of a security fence.

But in a sign of how far Mr. Obama had come in his coalition-building, friends from the American Israel Political Action Committee, the national pro-Israel lobbying group, helped him rush out a response to smooth over the flap.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that “none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.”

Notice that his letter didn't denounce Arafat or support the security fence.

Mr. Abunimah has written of running into the candidate around that time and has said that Mr. Obama told him: “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping that when things calm down I can be more upfront.”

The Obama camp has denied Mr. Abunimah’s account. Mr. Khalidi, who is now the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, said, “I’m unhappy about the positions he’s taken, but I can’t say I’m terribly disappointed.” He added: “People think he’s a saint. He’s not. He’s a politician.”

But for all of Mr. Obama’s attentiveness to Jewish concerns about Israel, Republican Party officials have made it clear that they think this is an area of vulnerability. Though Mr. Obama has condemned Hamas, a militant Palestinian group, as a terrorist organization, just last week Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, suggested that the group wanted to see Mr. Obama in the White House. Mr. Obama denounced that suggestion as a “smear.”

It was more than a suggestion. Hamas leader Ahmad Yousef said explicitly, “We like Mr. Obama and we hope that he will win the election.”

PalArabs seem ashamed about rocket attack

Few of the Palestinian Arabic-language press that I could find has mentioned that the victim of today's rocket attack was a 70-year old grandmother.

Palestine Today describes her as a "youth of American origin."
Ma'an does not mention it.
I couldn't find a mention in WAFA.
Firas Press describes her as a "settler."
Palestine News Network described her as an "Israeli settler."
And Islamic Jihad refers to her as a "settler."

Only Ramattan calls her a 70-year old woman.

It appears that when the victims can be spun into aggressors, the Palestinian Arabs are uniformly proud of their terrorists (as in the case of the Mercaz HaRav massacre, as they considered them all extremist settlers.)

But old ladies cannot be turned into monsters, so it is easier to just not mention that they are old ladies - easier to call them "settlers" or even "Americans."

There seems to be a small amount of embarrassment for terror, and that shame needs to be hidden well. They are proud for having killed but not quite so proud as to publicize who they killed.

Brave resistance fighters manage to murder a 70-year old woman

Islamic Jihad today gleefully took credit for the successful murder of a 70-year old women from a Qsssam rocket.

Their webpage describes the victim as a "settler". Perhaps they are slightly embarrassed at the identity of their victim (any man who gets murdered is automatically considered a "Zionist soldier.")