Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Rashi's 900th Yahrzeit

Today is the 900th anniversary of Rashi's death.

I only mention this because the picture I chose for myself is actually supposed to be a portrait of Rashi:

Also, the Shlock Rock version of the Association's Windy, called Rashi, is very catchy.

August 4, 1935: Persian Crypto-Jews arrive in Palestine

In 1839, the Muslims in Persia instituted a pogrom against the Jews in Mashad. As a result, the hundreds of Jewish families who lived there were given a choice of conversion or death. Many chose to outwardly convert, but they kept their Judaism not only individually but also collectively, maintaining what is considered a remarkably close-knit community even today as they are spread throughout the world.

Their story is not well-known, and even on the Internet it is not easy to find out details. And it is important to know that while Jews have lived in Persia relatively peacefully for a long time, the Muslim attitude towards Jews before Zionism was not always as benign as some would have you believe.

Cross-posted to Palestine Post-ings.

Challenge to moderate Muslims

I have mentioned before that the Islamic fatwas issued against suicide bombers, both British and American, although they seem to be categorically against them, may not apply to suicide bombers who target Jews in Israel.

This question needs to be answered by every so-called "moderate" Muslim, and by every Muslim organization that claims to condemn suicide terror. The only place I have seen suicide bombings in Israel to be condemned by Muslims on moral grounds (as opposed to tactical grounds) has been at Muslim WakeUp.com, a very secular and liberal Muslim site that is nevertheless rabidly anti-Israel and filled with absurd articles. (Even then, they ascribe a sickening moral equivalence between suicide bombers and Israeli defensive actions.) From what I can tell, the liberalism of MWU is considered left-wing fringe among most Muslims.

Meanwhile, the PA continues to glorify murderers of the Jewish elderly:

The Gaza Center for Culture and Arts on Wednesday launched a popular folklore course named after Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian female suicide bomber.

The 60-day course is being held in a local college for female students in Gaza City. At least 15 women have enrolled for the course to study several art-related subjects, including folklore dancing.

Idris, a 28-year-old paramedic from the Amari refugee camp near Ramallah, in January 2002 became the first female suicide bomber when she blew herself up on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, killing an 81-year-old man and wounding several others.
Ashraf Sahwil, director of the center, said the decision to name the course after Idris was aimed at 'emphasizing the longstanding role of Palestinian women in the struggle [against Israel].'

Although the PA has condemned the attack carried out by Idris, some of its institutions have since turned her into a valued heroine in Palestinian society.

The Union of Palestinian Women presented Idris as a role model for Palestinian feminism, a parade for young girls was held in her honor, summer camps for children, university courses, and Fatah programs have been named after her, and a concert honoring Idris has been broadcast numerous times on PA-controlled television.

A truly depraved, sick culture, that the world wants to reward for its supposed "moderation" compared to Hamas.

The Saudi princes' Israeli urologist

I wasn't going to post this; but at least two people found my blog by Googling for this story!

August 2, 2005 -- JERUSALEM — Did you hear the one about the Jewish doctor who helped the Saudi crown prince make it big-time with ravishing Riviera babes?
Well, it's no joke.
A prominent Israeli urologist regularly slipped into Saudi Arabia dressed in Arab garb to secretly treat King Fahd, who died yesterday, and other royal princes for their impotency problems.
Dr. Moshe Many told The Post he made frequent top-secret medical missions to Saudi Arabia — and to the posh playgrounds of the randy royals — to help them overcome a problem they had bedding European women.
His visits, which started in 1978, when Fahd was crown prince, were arranged by Saudi gazillionaire playboy-arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi shortly after the Camp David peace accords.
The royals "didn't know I was an Israeli. They thought I was Italian," Jerusalem-born Many told The Post.
He said the princes had an inferiority complex that rendered them impotent when they tried to have sex with European women.
He helped them out by prescribing a prosthesis, he said.
Many, 70, said he ended his clandestine doctoring after Fahd was crowned king in 1982.

Interestingly, this was reported in the Arab press, without the sordid details, based on a Yediot Aharonot article. Of course, they assume that the doctor was a Mossad spy.

My letter to Condoleeza Rice

Dear Madam Secretary:

I am growing alarmed at the recent media reports saying that you are consistently pressuring Israel - to accelerate her unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, to limit natural growth in the settlements, to allow contiguous access between Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, to provide weapons to the Palestinian Authority, and now to give the Shebaa Farms area to Lebanon - going beyond what even the UN asked of Israel.

This pattern is very disturbing, to say the least.

President Bush made a clear statement in 2001: either you are with us or against us in the war on terror. Israel has consistently been America's staunchest ally, and her sacrifices have saved American lives with anti-terror technology and methodologies. Meanwhile, Palestinians celebrate when American and Israeli civilians die. It is mind-boggling that in the context of the war on terror, the US State Department can even conceive that it is a good idea to reward Hezbollah and Hamas by pressuring Israel to give them land. It is disingenuous to think that somehow Palestinian "moderates" are strengthened by Israeli concessions

Any realistic look at the situation in the Middle East shows that Abbas has shown little desire to stop terror against Israel. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are still associated with his own political party and its members are "policemen" on the Palestinian payroll. Mahmoud Abbas has learned from his mentor Arafat how to give half-measures when his back is pushed against a wall, but fundamentally he has yet to condemn a terror attack on moral grounds. This is not an ally who deserves to be rewarded. And it is only wishful thinking that Hamas is not strengthened by Israeli concessions.

It is equally bizarre to demand that Israel arm her enemies. Only ten years ago, Israel saw her citizens murdered with the very weapons that she gave them. No one can account for the thousands of M-16s that were given to the PLO in the 90s. Somehow, Palestinians are claiming to you that they are short on ammunition, yet they seem to have enough to fire indiscriminately in the air during funerals and weddings.

Pressuring Israel goes against the Bush Doctrine. It rewards the terrorists and their supporters. It is strengthens those who are against freedom, who are against democracy, who are against women's rights, and who are fundamentally against what America stands for. We have unfortunately already seen how the world's apathy towards terror attacks on Israel has directly led to terror attacks on other Western nations. Signalling the terrorists that the US can help their agendas makes America less safe. Perhaps more disturbing, the impression being given by the State Department is that the US is willing to gamble Israeli lives on a longshot bet that somehow so-called Arab "moderates" can be strengthened, and that we are willfully blind to the obvious and blatant support for terror exhibited even by the "moderates."

Those who support terror, implicitly or explicitly, are the ones who need to be pressured, not those who stand side-by-side with us to fight terror.

Thank you!

Joos poisoning bananas!

I guess that if Jews are the brothers of monkeys, there is a certain logic that we'd be poisoning bananas.

The teacher could not believe what he overheard. The 'visiting' imam was launching into a tirade against the Jews and Americans that bordered on the ludicrous.

But then came the clincher, he recalled. 'The imam told the students that the Jews were putting poison in the bananas and they should not eat them.'

The imam was told to ease up on the inflammatory language after staff objected.

Werribee College is from all accounts an Islamic school with a difference. According to former staff it was a longstanding practice of the school principal, Omar Hallak, to have Muslim staff sleep on the premises after big international terror attacks such as those in Bali and the London tube bombings to prevent retributive attacks.

The Sunday Age has been told that Werribee College appears intent on exporting its particular brand of Islam to Indonesia, an achievement made possible by generous commonwealth and state grants — estimated to be in excess of $3 million a year.

Canberra's big spending laissez-faire approach to non-government school funding, intended by former education minister David Kemp to boost the numbers of Christian schools, has fuelled an increase in community-based Islamic schools across Australia which qualify for the same subsidies.

Although the vast majority of these schools — established schools such as King Khalid Islamic College in North Coburg or newer schools such as Mount Hira College in Keysborough — are run openly and with regular contact and activities with students from non-Muslim schools, there are a small number, including Werribee, that shun scrutiny and contact.

Haveil Havalim #31 is up

The latest round-up of the best of the Jewish blogosphere is up, at Soccer Dad. Mentioned within are this post here, as well as the latest in my continuing series of Palestine Post-ings.

As usual, it is an excellent compilation, so check it out!

The flip-sides of Arab honor

One of the driving factors of Arab behavior is a twisted, almost perverse sense of "honor."

You will see Arabs talking obsessively about honor, including bizarre concepts about their "honor" of women. (The fact that something called "honor killings" exists at all is powerful evidence to this.)

Beyond that, the entire idea that the concept of hated Jews owning their own land in the Middle East being so unacceptable is mostly because of this twisted sense of honor - the very existence of Jews controlling land that once was administered by Muslims is an affront to their honor. It is no coincidence that Bin Laden referred to Andalusia as well, as the 15th century eviction of Muslims from Spain was a similar offense to Islamic honor.

I can see a few corollaries to such extreme concepts.

One is that, since the Western world has so completely dominated the Islamic and Arab worlds in all spheres of influence (miltarily, culturally, scientifically), it is inevitable that a people obsessed with honor would get a massive, cumulative inferiority complex, and have an extreme need to "prove" themselves over and over again that they are still relevant. Hence, things like suicide bombings against Western targets are in some ways a way to grab the world stage, to show relevance of a culture that has been utterly and repeatedly defeated.

Another corollary is that Muslims will obsessively use Western concepts of freedom to protect their "honor," demanding rights for themselves in the name of their religion when in fact these rights are meant to protect honor. Examples would include the fight over the hijab in France and the idea that Muslims should be able to have public calls to prayer in Western cities.

A third, and under-reported corrolary is that a people obsessed with honor will inevitably want to use honor to humiliate their enemies. What is a beheading if not a way to humiliate one's enemy? And here is a story, mis-reported by the Reuters' Arab correspondent, which is ultimately about honor:

Tens of thousands of white-black-green-and-red Palestinian national flags are being sewn in workshops in Gaza City to fly over the 21 settlements, hated symbols of occupation, once the pullout starting in mid-August is complete.

Abu Dayya said the Palestinian Authority had ordered 60,000 flags for the pullout. Workers at one factory have been sewing some 3,000 pennants a day, labouring to meet an Aug. 7 delivery deadline.

Some 35,000 other flags will carry the logo of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement and 20,000 will be imprinted with white-and-black headresses and pictures of Abbas and the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

Abu Dayya said sales at his PLO Flag Shop increased during the revolt, thanks to orders by Palestinian militant groups for national flags and banners bearing the symbols of armed factions. He also sold Israeli flags to be burnt at anti-Israeli rallies.

What is not reported is the fact that thousands of Palestinian flags flying over Jewish-built homes is not only meant to instill Arab pride, but more importantly it is to humiliate Israel.

Qurei again shows that Israel's destruction is the goal

Once again a Palestinian "leader" shows that his commitment is to destroy Israel. Once again a "pragmatic, moderate" man shows utter disregard for what is best for his people and shows his true colors.

And once again the world media, including Israel's media, chooses to ignore what he says clearly and what he broadly implies, in favor of wishful thinking.

With just 19 days left to disengagement, the Palestinians have already set their sites on a new goal: Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said Wednesday that the prize is a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as is its capital. (In other words, anything less than that is unacceptable - he'd rather have his people under "occupation".)
"We are telling the entire world, today Gaza and tomorrow Jerusalem. Today Gaza and tomorrow and independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital," he said while reviewing Palestinian forces in Gaza. (Don't leaders usually review their military troops, not "police"?)

Qureia said that the Palestinians would not establish a state without Jerusalem: "We won't establish a country with the racist separation fence; there won't be a (Palestinian) state with aggressive settlements and a state will not arise without our achieving all the rights of our Palestinian nation and the right of return." (So this so called "pragmatic moderate" leader says explicitly that compromise is completely unacceptable, and that his position is indistinguishable from that of Yassir Arafat.)

Qureia turned to Palestinian security personnel and said, "Our faith in you is great … We are facing great challenges and we'll succeed in overcoming this one and we'll bring an end of the occupation of our land, an irreversible withdrawal. " (Who exactly are "we"? It sure sounds like the Palestinian "police" are being treated exactly like an army meant to fight Israel. )

His message couldn't be clearer, and yet this story is just a tiny footnote and his reputation as a moderate is solid. The media is again completely negligent in doing its job of exposing truth in favor of going along with their agenda of giving Palestinians everything they want.

Meanwhile, Hamas says the goal a little more explicitly:

A senior Islamic Hamas movement leader announced on Thursday that the upcoming Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank is "a Palestinian national achievement."
Isma'eel Haneya told reporters that the withdrawal from Gaza and northern West Bank came as a result of "the armed resistance", adding that "it is the first step towards the liberation of the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories."

And we all know what that means.

Egypt bomber group says they were targeting Jews

For some reason, a major part of the message from the group claiming responsibility for the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings is not being reported by the news media.

Dubai - An unknown group calling itself Mujahedeen Egypt has claimed the deadly triple bombings in Sharm al-Sheikh and given the names of five "martyrs" who allegedly died carrying out the attacks.

Its claim, which included a warning for Jews to leave Egypt, followed a statement from a group calling itself the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Levant and Egypt which said it carried out the bombings that killed 88 people.

The Mujahedeen Egypt statement posted on an Islamic website and dated July 23, the day of the attacks, mentioned seven bombings. Initial police reports also mentioned seven blasts.

"Your brothers in the Mujahedeen Egypt carried out the blessed earthquake in Sharm al-Sheikh," the group said in a statement which was not on usual sites used by Islamist militant groups to make announcements.

"Do not believe what is being said about the claim made by al-Qaeda, may God protect it," it said.

The group said the five "martyrs" carried out seven bombings against hotels and tourist buses used by "Zionists."

"As long as the Zionists do not get out of the land of the Muslims, they will be digging their own graves with their own hands," it said.

The statement identified them as Faisal Khalil, Hassan Abi Rawa, Mohamad Abdel Majid, Nader Mohamad Abdel Ghani and Mohamad Hammoudi al-Masri, said to be the son of the general common with a booby-trapped car that targeted the Ghazala Gardens in Naama Bay which is a resort crowded with Jews, and the hotel was totally destroyed," it said.

"The second (explosion) targeted the old commercial centre area with a second booby-trapped car.

"After 15 minutes, five explosions occurred, three of them with booby-trapped cars and two of them with explosive charges that targeted Jewish hotels and tourism buses."

A second statement by the same group, dated from Sunday, said the five men drove "one local car, three others from abroad and a bus".

It also gave "not more than 60 days for the Zionist Jews to get out of Egypt or else you will see what you have never even seen it in your dreams," said the statement posted on the same Islamic website.

Canadian Imam threatens Canada

This is a variant of the old threat that the "Arab street" will rise up and do things out of the control of their leaders. It is all complete bull, of course, but Muslims seem to like this threat, because it has a history of scaring Westerners.

But what is noteworthy is that now they are threatening that Muslim citizens of Western countries will cause problems ( demonstrate? Riot? Blow people up? It seems to be purposefully ambiguous.)

Meaning that this Imam is implying that Muslim Westerners have more loyalty to Muslim concepts of 'honor' than to the law of their land.

How many times have Jews been accused of "dual loyalty?" Well, this Muslim leader is seeming to brag about Muslim dual loyalty.

A controversial Toronto imam warned Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan at a closed-door meeting to stop 'terrorizing' Canadian Muslims.

'If you try to cross the line I can't guarantee what is going to happen. Our young people, we can't control,' Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough's Salaheddin Islamic Centre, recalls telling the minister at the May meeting she held in Toronto with dozens of Muslim leaders.

The meeting was part of an effort by Ms. McLellan to reach out to Canadian Muslims amid complaints that the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service are engaging in racial profiling.

The minister and her officials have been meeting community leaders to explain they are not targeting Muslims generally, only individuals with possible terrorist links.

By many accounts, the meetings have been positive and are contributing to a thaw in relations between Muslims and security agents, even if the exchange in May was a little heated.

Mr. Hindy, who has long complained that CSIS is spying on him, his family and his mosque, told Ms. McLellan that a young Muslim woman complained to him she was roughed up by Canadian spies while her husband was away at prayers. This allegation could spur reprisals because 'our women are the most valuable thing to us' and 'for a Muslim, honour is more important than his life,' Mr. Hindy said in a recent interview.

He made the point to the minister. Several people who attended shrugged off the imam's remarks, but some Muslims and government agents later approached Mr. Hindy asking him to explain himself.

'The police came to me and said, 'This is a kind of threat,' and I said yes,' he said. 'But it's for the good of this country.

'And they said, 'Do you know some of the names of those people you expect to cause some problems?' And I said, 'You just open the telephone directory.' "

Pavlov and the Terrorists

Why do Palestinian leaders and press lie? Why did Palestinians switch from hijacking airplanes to package bombs to suicide bombs? Why did they seem to accept Camp David and then turn around and start the second intifada?

In short, why do Palestinian terrorists act so seemingly irrationally?

This question has been asked in various ways thousands of times over the decades. And in many cases, I have looked at these questions from a goal-oriented approach: if the Palestinian goal is to have an independent Palestinian state, none of the actions make sense. If the goal is the destruction of Israel, then all of their actions are consistent.

But one can also look at the problem, especially some of the specifics, with a behavioral approach. In short, actions that are rewarded tend to be repeated, while actions that cost more than their rewards tend to be abandoned.

As has been noted, Palestinian spokespeople and press lie continuously. Just to give two examples from the past week: they described the two murdered grandparents as "settlers" and they claimed that "witnesses" saw Gaza settlers kill a 12-year old Palestinian boy when it was later proved that it was Palestinians themselves who killed him.

If Israel's spokespeople lied, you can be sure that the world media would not hesitate to call them on it - and rightfully so. Israel's government and army have volumes of information on their websites and even a single purposeful error would make them useless.

But Palestinian media, even their English websites, are so full of holes that they are a joke. Their spokespeople have lied so often that they are completely unreliable. Yet the Western press continues to quote them seriously, without so much as a single caveat that they are known to have made up facts out of thin air in the past.

In short, lying works for Palestinians. It is rewarded with news stories that either never get retracted or get corrected so silently that the damage can never be undone. When a behavior is rewarded, it gets repeated; this is simple behavioral psychology.

On the flip side of the coin, Palestinian terrorists first made headlines with their famous series of airplane hijackings in the 1970s. For a while it got them rewarded with world press, and free publicity for their cause of destroying Israel. But soon, the reward turned into a punishment as the world governments who they wanted sympathy from turned against them. So they started their diplomatic offensive and abandoned explicit international terror, because the rewards had dried up.

For a while there, Israel could claim to have won the intifada war against Palestinian terrorists - Israel's building of the fence combined with pro-active targeted killings against terror leaders curtailed terror attacks dramatically. Terror leaders were in hiding and even the Palestinian people were turning against them in some circumstances.

But now, Israel has turned a punishment into a reward. The retreat from Gaza is the biggest reward that Palestinians could have asked for - it directly gives them a piece of what they always wanted, control over land that Jews had control over. No amount of doubletalk can deny that the Palestinian terrorists perceive that they are now being rewarded for terror. And as in countless other situations, the reward ensures that the behavior that caused the reward will continue.

The only way to stop terror, whether in Tel Aviv or London or Egypt, is to ensure that the cost is higher than the reward. "Proportional" and "measured"responses do not punish terror, it needs to be disproportionate and immediate.

This is how you train a dog, and this is how you train terrorists.

Disgusting AP idolizes terrorists

AP - Sun Jul 24,10:54 AM ET

This picture released by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement on Sunday, July 24, 2005, shows Islamic Jihad activist Yahea Abu Taha, 22, right, and Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades activist Tareq Yassin, 23, getting ready prior to attacking an Israeli target at the Kissufim crossing, between Israel and the Gush Katif.

AP doesn't bother mentioning that the "Israeli target" was a car with two Israeli grandparents, Dov and Rachel Kol, who were murdered by the laughing "activists" :

AP also doesn't bother to point out that the terrorists affiliations prove that the Al Aqsa group, who gets paid by Abbas' PA, is clearly working hand in hand with Islamic Jihad and Hamas (while Condi Rice was praising Abbas for his pretense of fighting Hamas, his own people were planning terror attacks.)

(Hat tip to Boker Tov Boulder)

Friday, July 22, 1938: Another day of Arabs murdering Jews

The sheer number of terror attacks by Arabs against Jews in Palestine in the 1930s is astounding. The atrocities are reported in the Palestine Post with revulsion but also somewhat matter-of-factly; this day was not particularly unusual for the time period - before "occupation", before "settlements", when most of the land was still empty. The methods are eerily familiar to those who look at current terror attacks. The chaos and lawlessness that we now see daily in Gaza and in Arab areas of the West Bank were happening then - but the targets were mostly Jews.

All these events took place in one day. All of the following articles came from the July 22, 1938 Palestine Post.

The headline was for an especially gruesome act of terror, with the "bandits" murdering women and children at point-blank range while shouting praise to Mohammed.

Meanwhile, an attack against a vineyard resulted in another Jew being killed before the attackers were driven off:

Near the Dead Sea, another attack killed three more Jews doing surveying:

A man who was attacked by a mob in Haifa died of his injuries:

Another Arab Haifa mob attacked Jews as well:

Arabs were stopped while trying to bomb Tel-Aviv:

Of course, Jews weren't the only targets when tolerant, civilized Arabs went wild:

And for some strange reason, even Jews in neighboring countries were considered legitimate targets:

The British had an interesting punishment for Arabs who attacked them. Amazingly, there is not one record of international condemnation for this "crime":

At that time, Jews had a most appropriate response to Arab terror.

It is a shame that today's Zionists don't understand the power of such a move anymore. For those who fell, the early Zionists created a new settlement in their memory.

The only way terror can be fought is to make it counterproductive, and if every terror attack in the name of real estate would have a firm response of "Fine, now you lose more land," it would cease.

Giving away land for free would appear to have the opposite effect.

Cross-posted to Palestine Post-ings.

Electric Shabbat scooters?

This isn't my normal kind of topic, but it would be interesting to see what other bloggers think.

This isn't talking about Razor-type scooters but rather devices that are closer to electric wheelchairs for people who cannot move around on Shabbos otherwise.

Orthodox Jews now have a friend on the Sabbath.

Bridgeport Township-based Amigo Mobility International Inc. has devised a scooter that will give Orthodox Jews, forbidden by faith from turning on electrical devices on the Sabbath, wheels on the holy day.

The 'Shabbat' scooter -- a name derived from the Hebrew word meaning Sabbath -- is specially designed to keep users from switching circuits on or off.