Iranian 'news' gets its scare-quotes mixed up

It used to be that Iranian "news" sources would "report" about news from Israel and "Palestine" with a liberal use of "scare-quotes" around the word "Israel," usually referring to it as the "Zionist regime."

Today, for some strange reason, I am seeing that they are scare-quoting "Zionist" and not Israel.

Maybe next they'll start getting rid of the vowels of anything vaguely Jewish, so we'll be reading about "Z**n*sts" and "*sr**l".

LONDON, September 26 (IranMania) - Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi deplored new wave of extensive air raids of 'Zionist' regime against innocent Palestinian people, IRNA reported.

He condemned Israeli air raids against Palestinian activists and said that the extensive air attacks against defenseless Palestinians indicated that (Ariel) Sharon cannot abandon its nature of warmongering and murder.

"The Zionist regime's announcement of withdrawal from Gaza with US green light was a ploy to misuse inattention of the international community, especially those Islamic states which resumed diplomatic relations with the 'Zionists' to pave the way for new round of repressive moves against the Palestinians," Asefi said.

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The media's love affair with Hamas

As a followup to yesterday's media circus, with hundreds of articles breathlessly reporting Hamas' latest lie that they will stop all attacks from Gaza, there was another statement from a Hamas spokesman yesterday:

“We decided to participate in the elections as part of our legitimate struggle against the occupation”, Al Masry said, “Resistance is a legitimate and strategic right, Hamas will not disarm”

Even more explicitly, Hamas' leader Mahmoud A-Zahhar described in a recent interview the true goals of Hamas, going way beyond the destruction of Israel to the establishment of a pan-Muslim state throughout, presumably, the entire areas ever occupied my Muslims (probably including Spain):

TML: What is the final goal of Hamas?
A-Z: If you ask any Palestinian or Muslim, wherever he lives – in America or in Britain or in Indonesia – he would tell you that according to the religious point of view, this land is part of the Arab and Muslim nations. This means, that there is no other option but to reunify this land once again.

TML: What is 'this land' that you are talking about? Are you talking about the whole of Israel?
A-Z: I understand where you are headed, and I will answer you. First of all this Palestinian land, and all the Arabic nation, is all part of the same area. In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state; there was no independent Jordanian state; and so on. There were regions called Iraq or Egypt, but they were all part of one country. That is why it is not permitted to [agree to] establish separate countries, which was the case after the Sykes-Picot Agreement [1916]. Our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic. Therefore, it is not allowed to establish an Arabic state over the land of Palestine alone. Also, remember this land is still occupied. To sum up, the Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state. The European example is clear. Europe's history is filled with wars and blood. Its races are varied, its languages are varied, and nevertheless it established the European Union. The Islamists' view, which Hamas adheres to, is that a great Muslim state must be established, with Palestine being a part of it. Within this state, Israel has no place – its history is different, its language is different, its religion is different, its culture is different, and its security and political affiliations are different. This is the view of Hamas movement.

Why will the mainstream media never place as much importance on Hamas' aggressive statements as on its lies?

There are a couple of possibilities:
1. "Man bites dog" - it is not news when Hamas acts like terrorists, so their statements are not "newsworthy." This would be true, if the media indeed makes it clear in their other articles mentioning Hamas what kind of a record Hamas has in terror and breaking previous "promises" The media's failure to mention this context in Hamas-related article shows that this is not the reason.

2. Liberalism. The liberal media cannot philosophically accept the existence of evil third-world people, and holds that everyone is inherently good, and only circumstances make them do bad things. (Somehow, evil capitalists and Republicans are a given.) So naturally they will trumpet the news that fits their worldview and softpedal the news that contradicts it.

3. Wishful thinking. Related to #2, this is that the media reports the news that they hope is true, rather than the news that is true.

Either way, we are stuck with MSM that will report the news through their less-than-truthful filters, and this results in casual news consumers thinking that a liberal, open, democratic Israel is the aggressor and that Hamas and Fatah are legitimate freedom fighters.

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Media reports Hamas lies; ignores facts

Many hundreds of media outlets picked up on this story earlier Sunday:

GAZA (Reuters) - A senior Hamas leader said on Sunday that his militant group would stop launching rocket and other attacks against Israel, hours after Israel killed a top Islamic Jihad leader in Gaza in an air strike.

'The movement declares an end to its operations from the Gaza Strip against the Israeli occupation, which came ... in response to the assaults by the enemy,' Hamas's most senior leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, told reporters in Gaza.

How many bother to report these stories that came afterwards?

A mortar shell landed in the orchards of Kibbutz Erez near the border fence with the northern Gaza Strip Sunday after midnight.

Earlier Sunday night, a Kassam fell in an open area in the western Negev.

Of course, the media doesn't consider such attacks to be "news" when no one is killed, but how many times has the mainstream media mentioned that Hamas' promises are consistently broken?

On the contrary, despite the many violations of the "cease fire" by Hamas and other Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, the press keeps acting as if they are still abiding by it. See this example as well as this one from AP.

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George Galloway blames Zionists for Hitler

The wacky ramblings of George Galloway plummeted to new depth a couple of weeks ago, in this little reported interview with an obscure far-left blog.. It is hard, however, to distinguish between what is a paraphrase of Galloway and what are the editorial comments of the bizarre blog that interviewed him.(Hat tip to WW4 Report.)

Of course, the past masters of government sponsored terrorism were the Zionists, who created the condition in the Arab countries, and in some European countries to stampede the Jewish populations out of the countries they had been living in for many hundreds years and get them into a Zionist state. Galloway comments:

"Suddenly Jewish people who had been the victims of Christian persecution suddenly saw their Synagogues being blown up, their countries being attacked and all kinds of provocations being staged so packed their bags and moved to occupied Palestine, then to be called Israel."

It's well documented that the United States has adopted such provocation "dirty tricks" before and during the Vietnam war and ever since.

"It's always the case that in a big and complex State machine, there are all sorts of elements, they don't have to be endorsed by all of the political leadership, they can be people representing a trend in the political leadership." Galloway states. He went on to once again lambaste the disgusting Neo-Conservative war crazed movement that had recently attempted to falsify documents to implicate Mr Galloway in the very corruption that they consistently revel in:
[...]
Returning to staged terrorism and Zionism Mr Galloway pointed out that Zionism has nothing to do with Jewishness. The Zionist movement, as it is well documented, funded Hitler before World War Two and many of the figurehead of Zionism were not and are not Jews.

"The reality is these people have used Jewish people, and they have used them with this ideology of Zionism, to create this little Hitler State on the Mediterranean, to act as an advance guard for their own interests in the Arab world, and we're all paying for it, the Palestinians have paid for it, the Arabs have paid for it, and now the American people are paying for it, and why should we? We don't want to live our lives in a permanent state of warfare and division."

The danger in the Arab world is that the people their know we are not evil and corrupt like our governments are, but they also know that we democratically elect our governments, Galloway goes on to decree. They are supposed to act on our behalf and that's why this corrupt version of "democracy" is being flatly rejected across the Arab world.

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Catchy group title

This article makes clear that the sudden pretense of thawing in relations between Israel and some Muslim countries is more the results of US arm-twisting than any real change in attitudes.

But ya gotta love the name of the anti-Israeli group in Bahrain:

At the demand of the US, the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain has announced the removal of its boycott of Israelis goods. The US made canceling the boycott and closing down the boycott offices in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, a condition for a US-Bahrain free trade agreement. The significance of Bahrain’s announcement, however, is unclear.

The Society for Resisting Normalization with the Zionist Enemy in Bahrain criticized the announcement, saying that it was “a strategic decision that requires preliminary discussion in parliament."

I'd love to see a membership card of that "society." Maybe the logo has a hook-nosed Jew killing a dove.

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Gaza greenhouse looting continues unabated

Poor Mort Zuckerman. Imagine what Israel could have done with $14 million.

A week after they descended like locusts on the greenhouses that Jewish settlers nurtured in Gaza, looters continue to pillage what should be a prize asset for a fledgling Palestinian state.

And the Palestinian Authority, which took over Gaza after the Israelis evacuated the territory, appears powerless to stop them.

When a Daily News correspondent visited abandoned Jewish settlements in Gaza, he found brazen vandals dismantling farms that once produced some of the world's finest tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.

The now-gutted greenhouses were gifts to the Palestinian people from U.S. philanthropists, who raised $14 million to buy them from departing settlers.

Palestinian Interior Ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Qusa insisted the damage was limited to 30% of the 4,000 or so greenhouses - and blamed most of the vandalism on spiteful Jewish settlers. 'The Palestinians damaged so little you can't even count it,' he said. (As we've noted, AFP reported those claims as facts.)

One of the philanthropists, Daily News Chairman and Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman, called that assertion 'ridiculous.'

'We thought it was a chance to show the Palestinians that there were more benefits from cooperation than confrontation,' Zuckerman said. 'I'm just sad that they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. ... It's almost inexplicable.'

The World Bank reported 90% of the greenhouses were intact when the Israelis left. Facts on the ground reveal that much of that bounty is now gone.

"All over Gush Katif the greenhouses have been damaged and a lot was stolen from them," Karim said, referring to former Jewish settlements in southwest Gaza. In Gadid, much of the expensive equipment used to tend the crops was stolen. So were the water pumps, irrigation lines and all the fuse boxes.

At the former Katif settlement, a Palestinian soldier, Pvt. Mohamed Cidawi, said looters made off with most of the metal support beams and even stole the plastic and canvas coverings that protected the vegetables from the hot sun.

"Go away," Cidawi shouted when he spied a boy with a sledge hammer preparing to smash a fuse box. "If I see you here another time, I'll kick your ass!"

In the nearby Neveh Dekalim settlement, there were no soldiers to stop 29-year-old Samir Al-Najar and his eight-man crew from demolishing a half-acre greenhouse. Al-Najar insisted the land was his family's before Israel occupied it in 1967 and that he was reclaiming it.

"I want to reorganize the land so we're clearing it out for now," Al-Najar said as two workers carried off a stack of tall metal support beams. Asked whether he intended to sell the materials, Al-Najar shook his head. "We'll probably rebuild with them, but I want the greenhouses to be our own, not Jewish ones," he said.

Sounds like it is time to give them even more money!

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Hezbollah met with Fatah while Egypt border was open

From Maariv-Hebrew, via Daily Alert:

While the Gaza-Egypt border was open last week, senior Hizballah official Kais Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt where he met in El Arish in northern Sinai with leaders of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza, a Palestinian news agency reported.
Obeid is considered by the Israeli security services as responsible for the group's operations in the territories; he was directly involved in kidnapping IDF officer Elhanan Tannenbaum.">Israel News - Daily News Alert from Israel: "While the Gaza-Egypt border was open last week, senior Hizballah official Kais Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt where he met in El Arish in northern Sinai with leaders of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza, a Palestinian news agency reported.
Obeid is considered by the Israeli security services as responsible for the group's operations in the territories; he was directly involved in kidnapping IDF officer Elhanan Tannenbaum.

More evidence of the direction Gaza is going, despite the glowing reviews from wishful thinkers.

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Get ready for "Moderate Hamas"

One of the favorite Arab games in trying to destroy Israel is starting again.

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Hamas could one day amend a charter calling for the destruction of Israel and hold negotiations with the Jewish state, a political leader of the Islamic militant group in the West Bank said.

"The charter is not the Koran," Mohammed Ghazal told Reuters in an interview in Nablus on Tuesday.

"Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions ... The realities are different."

The unprecedented comments by Mohammed Ghazal clashed with recent pronouncements of more senior Hamas officials in Gaza.

But they reflected an apparent shift in Hamas toward the political mainstream and to winning greater world acceptance in the run-up to Palestinian parliamentary elections and after Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Here's the game:

• Kill Jews. The more, the better. Loudly advocate terror, proudly.
  
• While killing Jews, have a few "leaders" make statements that don't sound quite as genocidal as their true intent. Put them in jackets and ties. Trim their beards. The best ones are doctors - always a nice touch.
• Look at all those microphones! All that media attention just for saying what they want to hear!
  
• Have the world start to recognize and reward the meaningless, slightly less terroristic statements.
  
• Ensure that there are still groups that still explicitly call for the genocide of Jews and worldwide terror, so you can look better by comparison.
  
• Do a few more symbolic gestures with no substance whatsoever to solidify your newfound status as a "realist."
• Never, ever criticize the "more radical" groups. They might believe you and then kill you.
  
• Bask in your new political power, achieved with no real concessions whatsoever.
• Get money from gullible Europeans and others aimed at encouraging "moderate voices" and dutifully send the money to your terrorist friends.

It worked (and is still working) for the PLO, and for a while it was working well for Hamas (remember it's "political wing" and "military wing" that the world believed was separate?) Now Hamas is playing the same game again, a terrorist implementation of "good cop, bad cop" where the Western world is playing its part to the hilt.

Using these methods, Holocaust deniers can become "president," suicide bombers can be heroes, children can be taught to hate an entire religion, women can be subjugated, lies can become the official language of the "government," agreements never need to be honored, and you can stil rest assured that the world pressure will not be on you, but on the people you want to destroy. Because you are now moderate, and the "dangerous extremists" are the Jewish teenagers who dare to wear the color orange.

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Muslim scholars slam Egyptian Imam for allowing relations with Israel

This article from Egypt is interesting from a couple of angles.

It shows how Israel's existence is still not accepted, and never will be accepted, by religious leaders of Israel's "peace partner."

It also shows how the famous Al Azhar university, possibly the most influential Muslim institution in the world, will change its religious rulings to be in sync with the Egyptian government. (Read the entire article for more examples of that; this is just the beginning.)

Last week's Israeli withdrawal from Gaza appears to have received the approval of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, who was quick to rule that normalisation with Israel was religiously acceptable.

"Islam does not prohibit normalisation with other countries, especially Israel, as long as this normalisation is in non- religious domains and serves some worldly interests," Tantawi told a gathering at a festival held to mark the national day of Al-Sharqiya governorate.

Tantawi's statement immediately provoked heated debate inside and outside the Sunni world's most prestigious seat of Islamic learning.

Prominent Palestinian Islamic scholar Sheikh Hamed Al-Beitawi, who is also head of the Palestinian Scholars League (PSL), was quick to denounce the fatwa on the grounds that it "greatly serves the Israeli occupation, which is unacceptable in Islam," and urged the Grand Imam to retract it.

"It is obvious that the fatwa was issued following increased American and Israeli pressure on Arab leaders who already have relations with the Zionist state," El-Beitawi said in a PSL statement. He condemned the fatwa as contradictory to Islamic tenets "because it is the religious duty of all Muslims to help their brothers in driving the enemy out of their lands."

Tantawi's ruling seems to have created rifts within Al-Azhar where many scholars criticised the edict, saying it only reflected the personal opinion of the Grand Imam and not Al-Azhar as an institution.

Sayed Khodeir, former head of the research and translation section at the Islamic Research Academy (IRA), said Tantawi's ruling "was political rather than religious. "It is religiously correct to normalise relations with a country you have peace with but not when this country is usurping Muslim lands and killing Muslim brothers and children," Khodeir explained, saying it would perhaps be in the interest of Egypt to have peace and economic ties with Israel but from a religious viewpoint. "Those who don't care about the affairs of their Muslim brothers do not actually belong to them," Khodeir said.

"As Muslims we consider ourselves in a state of conflict with Israel so long as it insists on occupying Muslim lands, desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque and Islamic shrines and massacring Muslims," Khodeir said. "Egypt cannot be regarded as separate from what is going on in neighbouring Palestinian lands."

Prominent Al-Azhar scholar Abdel-Azim El-Mataani added that normalising relations with Israel "is not religiously -- or even logically -- acceptable at this particular time when it is using all sorts of aggression and tyranny against Muslims and posing a threat to Arab national security."

El-Mataani said the IRA had formerly issued an edict condemning normalisation with Israel. Former IRA member Sheikh Ali Abul-Hassan had previously issued a fatwa forbidding an Israeli judo team from playing in Egypt or any other Arab and Muslim country. He described such an invitation as an acceptance of what Israel has done and is still doing to Muslims, including usurping land, money and honour.

"This IRA fatwa sounds more logical because we should never accept the Israeli humiliation of Arab and Muslim nations," El-Mataani said.

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that Israel's very existence, no matter how much land is given to Arabs, is a major affront to Islam as interpreted by most "scholars."

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Poor terrorists don't get paid enough

The US and the EU are falling over themselves to give more money to the PA.

Secretary Rice is a little uneasy over the PA's foot-dragging on disarming Fatah, but not enough to actually stop sending them more money:

"Now, I think it would be a good start for the Palestinians, by the way, if they would disarm the militias of Fatah. That would be a good start. They have a roadmap obligation to disarm terrorist organizations and militias. But as a starting point, because I understand that there are complications with Hamas and there are questions about how capable they would be of actually insisting on disarmament of Hamas."

Abbas has other ideas:

The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday rejected an appeal from the Quartet to dismantle armed militias and called on the international community to stop meddling in the Palestinians' internal affairs.

Ministers of the Quartet – the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union – said in a joint statement Tuesday that following Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians needed to "dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructures."

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the appeal, saying the Palestinians knew how to handle their own affairs.

And where exactly is this money going? A little factoid buried in another article about Palestinian infighting may give us a glimpse:

Hani al-Hassan, a former interior minister in the Palestinian Authority, escaped an assassination attempt on his life Tuesday night when a group of masked men fired several shots at him during a visit to Nablus.

Hassan, who is a member of the Fatah central committee, was not hurt. Sources in the city said the assailants belonged to Fatah's armed wing, Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have issued several threats against Hassan in the past, accusing him of suspending their salaries when he served as interior minister under Yasser Arafat.

Isn't this interesting? Members of the terror group are angry because their salaries were suspended by the PA interior minister?

Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems to imply to me that there is still a relatively consistent funding source directly from the PA to the Fatah terrorists that neither Abbas nor Condi are bothering to address in public. So many "observers" are supposedly watching how the PA is spending its money and no one is uncovering the fact that terrorists are still getting funding straight from the PA?

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Gaza is paradise for Egyptians, hell for Reuters

How many stories have we read that mentioned how terrible the conditions are in Gaza, how overpopulated and destitute it is, how Arabs who live there are in such desperate straits that they have no choice but to turn to terror?

Evidently, Egyptians have a much different picture of Gaza.

Many Palestinian men who flocked into Egypt after the IDF evacuated the Philadelphi corridor have seized the opportunity to search for brides. Palestinian sources estimated on Tuesday that at least 100 Egyptian brides were smuggled into the Gaza Strip in the past week.

One of the brides, who identified herself as Samira, said she agreed to marry the man she met only hours earlier "because this was an opportunity that should not be missed." Samira, 28, lived with her family in Al-Arish.

"In Egypt, it's very difficult for a woman my age to get married because I'm considered too old," she said. "Moreover, the economic situation in Egypt is not as good as in the Gaza Strip."

Another bride from Al-Arish said that she always been dreaming of marrying a Palestinian. "Palestinian men are better than Egyptian men," the 27-year-old said. "They know how to look after their wives and provide for them a decent living."

So it appears that the horrible consitions that Israel forced Gazans to live in is preferable to the everyday conditions of the leading "moderate" Arab country
Meanwhile, Reuters publishes a bald faced lie about Gaza to add to the myth of how unbearable it is to live there:

Palestinians would build 3,000 homes for poor families in southern Gaza at Morag, once a stronghold of settler resistance to the Israeli pullout that Washington praised as a potential spur to renewed peacemaking.

The remainder of the housing will be erected elsewhere across the coastal Gaza Strip, the most densely populated place on earth and home to 1.4 million Palestinians.

As we have shown, this is not even close to true.

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Hamas converts synagogue to terror museum

Another Palestinian peace gesture.

The destroyed synagogue in the evacuated Gaza settlement of Netzarim is expected to be converted into a temporary Hamas museum in the next few days.

On Saturday members of Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades , Hamas’ military wing, plan to set up an exhibit of the terror group’s “military industry” in what used to be a synagogue.

The exhibit is set to be on display for three days, and will be open to the public from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

The group said in a statement that “all of the tools used by Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades to abolish the Gaza occupation will be on display.”

Hamas promises that visitors will be able to see all of the weapons, “from stones to instruments used in suicide attacks and the ‘tunnel war.’” Missiles and rockets will also be on display, the groups said.

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