Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Holocaust Memorial Day "offends" British Muslims

Of course, the very existence of Jews and Westerners not living under dhimmitude seem to offend Muslims as well.

Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair - Sunday Times - Times Online:
Abul Taher
ADVISERS appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims.

They want to replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths. (Notice how the author of this article doesn't put scare quotes around "mass murder" of Muslims in Palestine, as if this is a fact. - EoZ)

The draft proposals have been prepared by committees appointed by Blair to tackle extremism. He has promised to respond to the plans, but the threat to the Holocaust Day has provoked a fierce backlash from the Jewish community.

Holocaust Day was established by Blair in 2001 after a sustained campaign by Jewish leaders to create a lasting memorial to the 6m victims of Hitler. It is marked each year on January 27.

The committees argue that the special status of Holocaust Memorial Day fuels extremists’ sense of alienation because it “excludes” Muslims. (Perhaps they will go after Easter next? -EoZ)

A member of one of the committees, made up of Muslims, said it gave the impression that “western lives have more value than non-western lives”. That perception needed to be changed. “One way of doing that is if the government were to sponsor a national Genocide Memorial Day.

“The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.” (Sounds like one they are already exploiting - EoZ)

The recommendation, drawn up by four committees including those dealing with imams and mosques, and Islamaphobia and policing, has the backing of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. (Another "moderate" Muslim. -EoZ)

He said: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’, and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”

Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.” (Again, an outrageous statement printed with no comment by the Times of London. Maybe a link to dictionary.com? -EoZ)

The committees are also set to clash with Blair on his proposal to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamic group. Government sources say they will argue that a ban is unjustified because the group, which is proscribed in much of the Middle East, neither advocates nor perpetrates violence in the UK. (Advocating violence against Jews is fine according to these British "moderate" Muslims, as long as they are not on Jewish soil. -EoZ)

A Home Office spokesman said it would consider the proposals for a separate Genocide Day for all faiths but emphasised that it regarded the Holocaust as a “defining tragedy in European history”.

Mike Whine, a director of the British Board of Deputies, said: “Of course we will oppose this move. The whole point is to remember the darkest day of modern history.”

Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside and a Holocaust Memorial trustee, said: “These Muslim groups should stop trying to evade the enormity of the Holocaust.”

The seven committees finalise their recommendations today at St George’s House, Windsor, and will submit them to Blair and Charles Clarke, the home secretary, on September 22.

Could the naked anti-semitism of Muslims be any more obvious?

Hat tip to Israpundit.

Palestinians now disputing Gaza borders

Guess what? The "moderate" PA claims that Gaza is much bigger than the area that Israel is withdrawing from, despite the fact that the borders have been quite well documented since 1950.

The Palestinian culture is so heavily invested in victimhood that they honestly have no clue how to act any other way - even when they have a golden opportunity to show that they can act like adults, they regress into a temper tantrum. They are allergic to responsibility. It is much easier to be a spoiled toddler and endlessly demand more and more rather than grow up and actually do something that deserves reward.

Unfortunately, the world keeps rewarding the babies and punishing the adults.

The Nativ Ha'asarah Intifada
By Aluf Benn
The Palestinian Authority has not yet taken control of the territories being evacuated by Israel in the Gaza Strip, and it is already asking for more.

Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has adopted the argument that Israel is continuing to occupy Palestinian lands in the northern and eastern Gaza Strip. When PA Civil Affairs Minister Mohammed Dahlan first made this claim to Vice Premier Shimon Peres a few weeks ago, the Israelis were surprised, but tried to ignore it. When Abu Mazen speaks about it, the demand becomes the official Palestinian position.

The territorial claim is not just a public relations exercise. It has consequences: The Palestinians are refusing to discuss upgrading the Erez crossing on the grounds that it is located in occupied territory. Tomorrow, someone will shell Moshav Nativ Ha'asarah, which lies within the disputed area, and claim the action is part of a just war of liberation - "the Nativ Ha'asarah Intifada."

These are the facts as determined by Shaul Arieli, who helped draw up the maps for the Geneva Accord: The 1949 cease-fire line, according to the Rhodes agreement between Egypt and Israel, was different from the current border of the Gaza Strip. However, a territorial exchange agreement was signed a year after Rhodes. Israel received the area in the northern Gaza Strip, where Erez and Nativ Ha'asarah are located today, in exchange for a larger parcel in the eastern Strip (which on maps looks like a hump). This altered border remained in effect until 1967, and United Nations soldiers were deployed along it. It appeared in the maps that were part of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, without any complaints from the Palestinians. It also appeared on the official Palestinian maps used in the Geneva Accord talks.

Now Abbas wants to return to the original 1949 boundary. He has ignored the fact that all of the peace agreements and UN decisions were based on the status that existed on the ground before the 1967 War and not on the Rhodes agreement. For him, the point is that he can show that the Israeli occupation in Gaza is not ending with the completion of the disengagement.

Hat tip to SoccerDad.

The culture of lies

A topic we have covered before, but it is important to stresss the utter inability to make agreements with psychopathic liars.

Speaking in Jerusalem, former Shin Bet chief says Palestinian Authority failed to live up to even one agreement reached during past five years, provides examples of lies uttered by PA leaders
Roee Nahmias

The Palestinian Authority has failed to live up to even one agreement reached with Israel over the last five years, former Shin Bet Chief Avi Dichter charged Thursday.

During a lecture in Jerusalem, the former security chief addressed the five years of intifada and developments in the Palestinian arena. In his talk, he extensively described the Palestinian culture of lies and failure to deliver on agreements.

“This cannot go on,” he said. “It’s important not to allow the Palestinians to work with us while resorting to the culture of lies.”

Dichter said Israeli trust in Palestinian pledges has been gravely undermined in the past five years as a result of the Palestinian tendency to bend the truth.

“We must not accept their culture of lies, but we must be familiar with it,” he said. “They are our partners for better or for worse. Lately, it was more on the ‘worse’ side.”

When asked to provide concrete examples for his charges, Dichter shared two stories.

“In October 2001 we sat with the Palestinians in the presence of CIA Director George Tenet and Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman.
We submitted a list of 114 terrorists who were in Palestinian prisons and but were released when the intifada started. Jibril Rajoub (currently the PA’s national security advisor), who was in the meeting, knew the details were accurate, but his colleague, Yasser Abed Rabbo, insisted that all of them were still in jail. As the argument continued, I suggested that Abed Rabbo put down a 100 dollar bill for every name of the list that’s in jail. Abed Rabbo replied: ‘I don’t occupy myself with money.’”

“Another, more serious example, was when Yasser Arafat pledged to President Bush that an activist who fired mortars was detained…I arrived at a meeting and heard the news from the Palestinians: ‘Avi, you can be certain, the man is in prison,’ Abu Ala (Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia) told me. PA negotiator Saeb Erekat added: ‘definitely.’

“The thing is, Jibril Rajoub attended that meeting, and he knew the man wasn’t in jail, he knew that I know that the man isn’t in jail, and he knew that I know that he knows the man isn’t in jail. When he was asked whether the man was detained he replied ‘sort of’ – covering the entire range between yes and no. The next day, that man reached heavens after a missile hit his car in Bethlehem.”

Today's Palestinian Police Phunnies

Guess who murdered Moussa Arafat?

The Palestinian "Police"!

Palestinians say PA security forces involved in Arafat assassination
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
Many Palestinians in Gaza City said Wednesday's assassination of General Moussa Arafat, the former commander of the PA's Military Intelligence, and a nephew of Yasser Arafat, could not have been carried out without the involvement of at least one of the PA's official security branches.

Eyewitnesses reported that some of the gunmen who participated in the raid on Arafat's two-story villa in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood used armored vehicles belonging to one of the security organizations.

To protect, serve, terrorize and assassinate!

Today's Palestinian Police Phunnies

The only good policemen are the ones that know how to terrorize innocent civilians!

Abbas has voiced concerns of Palestinian civil war should he use force to disarm gunmen and in recent remarks U.S. President George W. Bush has steered clear of demanding he do so.

But Palestinian Interior Minister Nasser Youssef, who has wide security powers, has been hammering home a message that weapons militants have paraded through the streets in the past 4-1/2 years of fighting with Israel will no longer be tolerated.

"In the Gaza Strip after the Israelis leave ... there can be no arms but that of the (Palestinian Authority) and the security institutions," Youssef said on Sunday.

Hamas, which advocates Israel's destruction but has signed on, at least until the end of the year, to a truce Abbas brokered with Israel last February, said the issue was not up for discussion.
[...]
Youssef, meanwhile, renewed an invitation to gunmen to join the security forces after the Israeli pullout, promising to "put them in the positions they deserve".

The positions they deserve? Doesn't it sound like the PA Interior Minister has a great and abiding respect for Hamas, and is just so anxious for their seasoned terrorists to join the PA police?

Somehow, the author of the Reuters article (the always entertaining apologist for terror, Nidal al-Mughrabi) doen't notice the utter incongruity of these two statements from the same Palestinian official. But, hey, Reuters reporters on the Palestinian beat haven't exactly been known to ask the tough questions.

In Reutersvillle and the rest of La-La-Medialand, the idea of a terror organization trading in their AK-47s for the AK-47s of a quasi-official army-in-training, as a crucial step on the "roadmap to peace", makes perfect sense.

The definitive Al-Dura article

Commentary magazine brings us up to date with the Al-Dura affair where the death of an Arab child was staged in front of cameras at the onset of the intifada.Commentary - Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair

Today's amazing Arab lie

In a story about what Israel will do with the synagogues still left in Gaza, the Iranian Islamic Republic News Agency says a howler:

PA: Israel is trying to entrap us by leaving synagogues in Gaza - Irna: "'This is a very sensitive issue. We are Muslims and our religion and traditions don't allow us to desecrate or destroy places of worship.

'But we feel the Israelis are trying to entrap us by leaving these places intact and then tell the world 'look, the Palestinians are destroying Jewish holy places, the Palestinians show no respect for Jewish holy places,' he told aljazeera.net.

Abdullah said Israel should dismantle all these synagogues and transfer them to Israel and not try to get the PA involved in its internal problems with the rabbis of the settlements.

'We are willing and ready to help the Israeli government and army dismantle these places respectfully and with dignity.'
Earlier, Muslim officials warned that Israel might want to deliberately leave the synagogues intact so that Palestinians would demolish them in order to justify possible future attacks on or destruction of Muslim holy places, such as Jerusalem's Aqsa Mosque."

In one breath the Arabs claim that they must respect synagogues and would never destroy them under Islamic law, and in the next they admit that there is no way in hell they'd ever let a synagogue stay intact in Gaza. (And later in the article they even reject the idea of converting them to mosques!)

But beyond that, the idea that Islam doesn't allow the destruction of other houses of worship is a bald-faced lie. In fact, in a Muslim country, it is mandatory! From a fatwa at IslamWeb:

Thus, we have mentioned the general ruling, i.e. when there is a Muslim ruler who leads Muslim armies and manages Muslims' affairs and as long as Muslims have the ability to defend themselves or to wage Jihad. But, if Muslims are weak or there is no an independent Muslim state and entity, or they live as a Muslim minority, then the Muslims' interest should be the criterion. In simple words, if it will be a good advantage for Muslims to destroy non-Muslim places of worship and build new mosques instead of them, then Muslims have to do so. On the other hand, if such a work may lead to worse actions such as killing and destruction by fire, Muslims have to do nothing. Here, we apply the ruling that states: 'Warding off an evil is preferred to getting benefit'.

A good reason to blame Bush

This post is the first one I've seen that really does give good reasons to blame the Bush administration for the delay in helping out during Katrina. It turns out that Bush had changed the rules in 2004 as to how to respond to an emergency, and it didn't follow its own rules.

Israel's "Ambassador" winner talks to the American radical left

The winner of Israel's popular reality TV show "The Ambassador", Eytan Schwartz, is spending this year in the US. Here is an excerpt from a Ynet article he wrote about the radical American left-wing and what they know - and don't know - about Israel.

Last week I had occasion to enter the building of one of the American socialist parties and to speak with one of the party’s main activists. When he heard that I’m from Israel, a stormy political debate began.

What can I say - this guy was a walking encyclopedia of the history of Israel, and for minutes he recounted every detail, date, and fact that Israel’s opponents like to bring up in order to attack the country: He asked how it is possible that Ariel Sharon became prime minister after his involvment in Sabra and Shatilla, he wondered how it is that people accuse the Palestinians of terrorism when members of the Jewish underground during the British Mandate also used violence against Arabs.

He asked why Jews insist on dispossessing the Palestinians of their land when even Herzl was prepared to consider the Uganda Plan. These are things that I’d managed to forget since I took my high school Jewish history exams.

All these statements had one clear intention: to show Israel in a negative light and to convince me that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is to establish one democratic socialist state for everyone.

At a certain point I began to speak about Arab members of Knesset and I saw that the guy had no idea what I was talking about. I mentioned the fact that 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, and he looked at me in amazement. I spoke about freedom of expression, about homosexuals in the army, about the High Court’s independence, about minority rights - in short, all the things that American leftist organizations are fighting for, and which are an intrinsic part of Israeli life.

And then I realized something incredible: that this intelligent guy did not know everything I was saying. And he was not pretending; he really didn’t know.

He was able to reel off all the negative or dubious things that could be said about Israel without batting an eyelash, but the positive things, the progressive things, the humane things, the liberal things, he simply did not know about.

It is a shame that Eytan didn't make the next logical leap - that liberalism is not the driving factor of the radical left vis-a-vis Israel, but it is Jew-hatred masquerading as a pretense to caring about Palestinians. Because any true liberal would be far more sympathetic to Israel than to any Arab entity, for the reasons Schwartz mentioned.

More Israeli aid for Katrina

Two more articles:

The Israel Foreign Ministry has called on Israeli companies and organizations to donate vital goods and equipment for hurricane victims in the southern U.S.
By request of the American authorities, the items needed are: plastic sheeting, water, baby food, disposable diapers, cleaning agents, large tents, medical equipment (excluding medicines), and food.

Israeli volunteer divers are heading to New Orleans to help look for bodies in flooded homes.
Coordinated by IsraAID (the Israel Forum for International Aid), the Israeli volunteers have extensive experience in rescues and complex emergencies garnered from work around the world.
Some 20 to 25 volunteers, including four doctors, expect to depart Tuesday.

Partisanship in the face of tragedy

One of the most distressing parts about watching the news and reading blogs is how partisanship trumps clear thinking. A catastrophe like Katrina only highlights this problem.

People who are otherwise very smart will automatically blame and demonize "the other side" no matter what the issue is. Irrational hatred almost always beats intelligence.

Taking Katrina as an example, the blame game started immediately - somehow it was Bush's fault. When the tragedy was only a day old, Kyoto was the reason to blame Bush; now it is the delays in getting aid to the victims. But the Bush-haters were foing to blame him and Republicans no matter what happened.

As I write these words, I have no idea whether New Orleans' mayor and Louisiana's governor are Republican or Democratic. But from seeing other disasters over the years, it is clear to me that the local and state authorities are the first people that need to make decisions - and that is how it should be. Imagine the outcry that would happen if the Federal government would take over responsibility for every disaster over the objections of the town and state! Picture the criticism that would have rained down had Bush unilaterally imposed martial law on New York City after 9-11!

No, during 9-11, New York City had competent leadership. From seeing him rant and rave on TV, New Orleans had no leader. I am also not seeing any effective leadership from the governor. We are seeing results now that the military has taken over - no other institution on the planet has as much experience in quickly building an infrastructure from scratch - but no one can doubt that there were unacceptable delays in getting aid to those who need help. There is plenty of blame to go around, and very few people who care more about truly finding out the real reasons for the problems instead of assigning blame to whomever they are hating this year.

There is just as much irrational hatred and partisanship on the red side of the divide. There is as little thought behind knee-jerk hatred of George Bush as there is behind visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton. To be sure, there is plenty to criticize about both of those people, but throughout the blue-red divide most of the criticism is emotional, with intellectual underpinnings coming only as an afterthought. Both sides will latch onto strange conspiracy theories and never let go. And it is also somewhat understandable that the party in power will be criticized more while the ruling party can afford to act above it all, so the smug self-congratulatory tone that the right sometimes shows is also misplaced - they were blaming Bill Clinton for everything not so long ago.

Perhaps the funniest and most egregious example where partisanship overruled even the fundamental philosophies of each party was during the 2000 election fiasco, when Republicans who are all for states' rights and limiting the power of the federal government were forced to argue the exact opposite to the Supreme Court; and Democrats all of a sudden became the states' best friends. Ironically, a truly ideological right-leaning Supreme Court would have been far less likely to help make Bush president.

Right now the nation faces an unprecedented challenge. Energy that goes towards irrational and unthinking blame would be far better used in coming up with ways to help the victims of Katrina.