Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Vanity 59

This week Daled Amos hosts Haveil Havalim #59, the latest excellent selection of notable posts in the Jewish blogosphere.

Another excellent collection of articles, including links to blogs that I've never seen before. I don't even have enough time to read all of these blogs, and the amount of time it takes to put HH together must be huge.

I am fortunate that one of my postings was included as well.

So check it out!

MEMRI does it again:

On February 19, 2006, Iranian TV channel 4 covered a film seminar that included a lecture by Professor Hasan Bolkhari. In addition to being a member of the Film Council of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), Bolkhari is a cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, and active on behalf of interfaith issues.

The following are excerpts from Bokhari's lecture.

Hasan Bolkhari: There is a cartoon that children like. They like it very much, and so do adults - Tom and Jerry.
[...]
Some say that this creation by Walt Disney will be remembered forever. The Jewish Walt Disney Company gained international fame with this cartoon. It is still shown throughout the world. This cartoon maintains its status because of the cute antics of the cat and mouse – especially the mouse.

Some say that the main reason for making this very appealing cartoon was to erase a certain derogatory term that was prevalent in Europe.
[...]
If you study European history, you will see who was the main power to hoard money and wealth, in the 19th century. In most cases, it is the Jews. Perhaps that was one of the reasons which caused Hitler to begin the anti-Semitic trend, and then the extensive propaganda about the crematoria began... Some of this is true. We do not deny all of it.

Watch Schindler's List. Every Jew was forced to wear a yellow star on his clothing. The Jews were degraded and termed "dirty mice." Tom and Jerry was made in order to change the Europeans' perception of mice. One of terms used was "dirty mice."

I'd like to tell you that... It should be noted that mice are very cunning...and dirty.
[...]
No ethnic group or people operates in such a clandestine manner as the Jews.
[...]
Read the history of the Jews in Europe. This ultimately led to Hitler's hatred and resentment. As it turns out, Hitler had behind-the-scene connections with the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion].

Tom and Jerry was made in order to display the exact opposite image. If you happen to watch this cartoon tomorrow, bear in mind the points I have just raised, and watch it from this perspective. The mouse is very clever and smart. Everything he does is so cute. He kicks the poor cat's ass. Yet this cruelty does not make you despise the mouse. He looks so nice, and he is so clever... This is exactly why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty and has these traits.

Writing satire of these guys keeps getting harder and harder when they keep topping themselves.

Insane Muslim Protesters of the Day - German Edition

This stuff is like crack to me.

The latest protests in Hong Kong and Germany have at least been peaceful, but the hypocrisy of the message remains incredible.

This means "Press freedom - yes, press rudeness - no."

And somehow they are referring to relatively mild cartoons about Islam and not the daily demonizing of Jews, America and the West in the Arab press.

'Who insults the Prophet, insults us all' and 'Islam respects all religions'.

As long as they are not Hindus and others who worship multiple gods, Jews who will be destroyed in the final battle, or Christians who must pay their poll tax to live under Islamic domination.

Finally, Reuters has to try to softpedal the insanity by egregiously mistranslating the German here:

Reuters tranlates it as 'The Islam is not the enemy - the enemy is called Bush'. Now, look at the German words, and wonder why the Reuters reporter decided that "Terrorist" means "enemy" in German.

Insane Muslim Protestor of the Day

Who says women in Islam have less rights? Their traditional garb allows them much more advertising space than Muslim men have!

Imagine how much she could get for her forehead rights on eBay...

Cart00ns

Soon, in Muslim lands, you will not be allowed to whisper the word "cartoon" because the very word will whip up he listener into a murderous frenzy.

Don't believe me? Then listen to the saga of the New Straits Times, a Malaysian newspaper.

Malaysia is about 60% Muslim, and the NST is quite on board with the whole "blame the West for insulting the Prophet" nonsense.

The newspaper also publishes Non-Sequitur, a comic strip by Wiley Miller that is syndicated worldwide.

Here was the Non-Sequitur comic strip from Monday, and the New Straits Times agreed to run it:

No caricatures of Mohammed, nothing remotely making fun of Mohammed.

Of course, the Islamists went crazy.

After the cartoon was published in the New Strait Times, police received complaints from Malaysia's Islamic opposition party (Parti Islam SeMalaysia) and three nongovernmental organizations. The Times got a show-cause letter from the Internal Security Ministry and was given three days to explain in writing why action shouldn't be taken against it for running the cartoon, which the ministry said breached the conditions of the newspaper's publishing permit.

"Once again, it seems the ironically challenged have just validated
the point of the satire," said Miller, when reached today by E&P.

The New Straits Times' defense is hardly a stirring call for freedom of speech:

If this cartoon were to mock Islam and the Prophet, then, certainly, the newspaper that publishes it, in this case the New Straits Times, its executives responsible should be held accountable. Just as the editors and publishers of the Sarawak Tribune and Guang Ming were held accountable.

The reference here is to two other Malaysan newspapers - one published the cartoons but blurred them out, and the other published a photo of someone reading a newspaper with the cartoons.

And both newspapers got shut down.

Now the NST is fighting for its own rights, such as they are in the backwards nation of Malaysia.

Insane Muslim Protester Bonus!

I can't get enough of these.

These charming young Pakistani women are very upset. After all, a Danish newspaper published a couple of cartoons and some Sunni Muslims in Iraq bombed a major shrine.

So, naturally, they must protest against America.

Humorously enough, while the signs say "Down with America" in English, in Arabic and Urdu they helpfully elaborate it as "Death to America."

And then there are the Mohammed groupies just dying to show their great love for their prophet:

Can't you feel the love?

I wish I could read the trenchant political humor that these wild Pakistani college girls came up with. (Although the one in the middle looks like a guy in drag to me. Who knew they were so progressive?)

The best I can see is that a dog, representing Europe and called George, ate something bloody that may or may have not been Muslim pride and is still hungry. The physics of the gravity force on the drops of blood elude me, but perhaps it has something to do with relativity.

Hamas terror-apologists increase in Europe

The "united front" against a Hamas-led PA continues to crumble, only weeks after the election and without Hamas doing anything remotely peaceful. It is truly an amazing scenario and one that is more pessimistic than I expected - even without Hamas having to lie about being interested in peace, the innate Jew-hatred and sympathy for those who want to wipe out all Jews continues unabated.

The new terrorist supporters barely even attempt to address Hamas' own explicit statements of how they will never accept Israel and will continue terror and war. In the absence of any Hamas lies to hang their arguments on, they simply make up their own:

It is worth noting that Hamas has maintained a ceasefire, which means no suicide bombings or other attacks on Israel, for a year. Such control over its own militants might be seen as a hopeful sign, alongside its anti-corruption stance, but only the Russians, who have invited Hamas officials to Moscow, seem to see the opportunity rather than the danger. They have offered a "long-term ceasefire", just as Sharon suggested an interim solution before the creation of a Palestinian state, but this too is dismissed.

In the meantime Hamas is combing the Muslim world for funds. On Monday its political leader, Khaled Mishaal, was in Tehran meeting Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who will happily plug the financial gap if Hamas adheres to his anti-western agenda. "Palestinian people knew that their vote for Hamas meant the fight against the Zionist occupier regime," he said. (In fact, most people I met in Gaza last month voted Hamas because they were angry with the corrupt Fatah leadership. "Ideology accounted for less than 15 per cent of votes," said the Gazan psychologist Eyad Serraj. "People voted on corruption and social issues.")

Last week, this magazine revealed Foreign Office plans to engage with "political Islam" in the form of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, a close ally of Hamas. This acknowledges reality without endorsing terror. Hamas is not about to become the Liberal Democrats, but it came to power in a legitimate election. It may yet descend into corruption or return to violence, but right now there is all to play for.

I left Gaza through the Erez crossing. Palestinians lined up in concrete corridors and the voices of teenage Israeli conscripts ordered them, through loudspeakers, to wait, turn around and put their hands above their heads. More security, more humiliation. Now Israel talks of closing Erez, too, cutting off Gaza completely, as punishment for the election of Hamas. Such measures will radicalise Palestinians further, as the Americans endorse the Israeli line and Europe misses a chance to challenge US policy and gain credibility in the Arab world.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

Amazing!

First, the explicit lie: Hamas has been responsible for fatal attacks in Israel during the "cease fire." Not to mention the dozens of rocket attacks that luckily weren't fatal. The fact that this terror-apologist chooses to ignore facts and prop up murderers shows a complete disregard for truth as well as human lives. (But Palestinians standing in line are a major crime against humanity, according to the sickening logic of this idiot.)

Then comes the usual worthless comparisons between Hamas and Sharon, to try to justify the bizarrely untenable pro-terror position.

Then the implicit threat that if the West doesn't fund Hamas, then Iran will! As if Hamas will act differently with Western money.

Following that comes the crazy illogic that, "sure, it is a gamble to trust people who explicitly call for genocide, but it is worth a shot." As long as the potential victims are Jews, that is. Somehow I doubt that the writer would extend the same courtesy to Al Qaeda, which incidentally hasn't killed many British recently.

This insane train of thought continues with the notion that while Palestinian Arabs electing a government based on terror is meaningless, but withholding money from them will radicalize them and turn them into terrorists.

Finally, we get to the good part: all of this twisting of facts and calling to fund terror is meant to increase Europe's fading influence and to stick it to America. And if supporting terror is the price that has to be paid to atain this noble goal, well, what are a few dozen more dead Jews?

A small Oslo history lesson

Thanks to MEMRI:
Following are excerpts from an interview by Al-Quds Al-Arabi Editor-in-Chief Abd Al-Bari Atwan, aired on ANB TV on February 16, 2006.

Abd Al-Bari Atwan: When the Oslo Accords were signed, I went to visit [Arafat] in Tunis. It was around July, before he went to Gaza. I said to him: We disagree. I do not support this agreement. It will harm us, the Palestinians, distort our image, and uproot us from our Arab origins. This agreement will not get us what we want, because these Israelis are deceitful.

He took me outside and told me: By Allah, I will drive them crazy. By Allah, I will turn this agreement into a curse for them. By Allah, perhaps not in my lifetime, but you will live to see the Israelis flee from Palestine. Have a little patience. I entrust this with you. Don't mention this to anyone. Always remember this. Sometimes, when I would criticize him strongly, he would say to me: Do you remember the promise I made, Abd Al-Bari?

He was very amicable, and had a great capacity to forgive. I never let him down in crucial moments. For example, when the Americans tried to force Abu-Mazen on him as prime minister, and to take away all his authorities, I stood by Yasser Arafat. I was convinced, because of what he entrusted with me, and because I knew him, that he would not betray [the Palestinians], and would not make concessions.

That is why I knew that it was he who founded and armed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, in order to redress the balance with the historic mistake of the Oslo Accords.

This is the "peace process" that the West worships more than any deity. The entire Oslo farce was meant as a means to wage war, not peace, on the part of the Palestinian Arabs against Israel.

And it has been successful. Israel has, from the Arab perspective, abandoned land to terrorists because of the good cop/bad cop pairing of Oslo and terror, both of which had the same goal - the destruction of the Jewish state.

The West still thinks that the "peace process" is a desirable state of affairs, when it is in fact one of the biggest misnomers in history, one whose goal from the Arab side is anything but peaceful.

Isn't unity wonderful?

Muslims across the Middle East – Sunnis and Shiites alike – largely ignored sectarian divides today to unite in condemnation of the the bombing that destroyed of the golden dome that graced one of Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrines.

King Abdullah II, the Jordanian monarch, call it “a heinous attack … (that) has greatly angered us and has provoked our strong feelings as direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.”

Radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who was touring the region, cut short a visit to Lebanon to return to his troubled homeland.

At a news conference when he reached Damascus, Syria, al-Sadr laid blame either with the Americans or the Iraqi government.

“If responsibility is not in the hands of the Iraqi government, then I consider the responsibility for this event lies with the occupation forces which should either leave immediately or according to a timetable,” the firebrand cleric told reporters.

Influential Egyptian Sunni cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi said the blast was “a very dangerous action that kindles the fires of sedition.”

He refused to accept that fellow Sunnis were behind the bomb blasts that ripped apart the golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

“We cannot imagine that the Iraqi Sunnis did this. So who did do it? Who planned with such slyness and precision and got away without being arrested?” he said.

“No one benefits from such acts other than the US occupation and the lurking Zionist enemy.”

Lebanon’s powerful Shiite militant Hezbollah organisation blamed the US.

“We call upon Muslims everywhere, and especially in Iraq, to avoid falling into a major trap of sedition designed for them by the American occupation and their agents inside Iraq,” Hezbollah said in a statement.

Free Speech

What exactly are the limits of free speech?

Many Muslims are convinced that there is a double-standard in the West: while Holocaust denial and hate speech are illegal in some countries, making fun of Mohammed is not.

A recent LA Times editorial says that the Austrian laws against Holocaust denial are counterproductive:

Free speech, even if it hurts
# Protecting the rights of a Holocaust denier ultimately protects us all.

By Michael Shermer, MICHAEL SHERMER is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and the author of "Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?"

That Irving has been, and probably still is, a Holocaust denier is indisputable. In 1994, I interviewed him for a book on Holocaust denial, and he told me that no more than half a million Jews died during World War II, and most of those because of disease and starvation. In 2000, Irving lost his libel suit in Britain against an author, and the judge in the case called him "an active Holocaust denier … anti-Semitic and racist." And in April 2005, I attended a lecture he gave in Costa Mesa at an event sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the leading voice of Holocaust denial in the U.S. There he joked about the Chappaquiddick line and, holding his right arm up, boasted: "This hand has shaken more hands that shook Hitler's hand than anyone else in the world."

The important question here is not whether Irving is a Holocaust denier (he is), or whether he offends people with what he says (he does), but why anyone, anywhere should be imprisoned for expressing dissenting views or saying offensive things. Today, you may be imprisoned or fined for dissenting from the accepted Holocaust history in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland.[...]

Austria's treatment of Irving as a political dissident should offend both the people who defend the rights of political cartoonists to express their opinion of Islamic terrorists and the civil libertarians who leaped to the defense of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill when he exercised his right to call the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns." Why doesn't it? Why aren't freedom lovers everywhere offended by Irving's court conviction?

Freedom is a principle that must be applied indiscriminately. We have to defend Irving in order to defend ourselves. Once the laws are in place to jail dissidents of Holocaust history, what's to stop such laws from being applied to dissenters of religious or political histories, or to skepticism of any sort that deviates from the accepted canon?

No one should be required to facilitate the expression of Holocaust denial, but neither should there be what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the "silence coerced by law — the argument of force in its worst form."

Call David Irving the devil if you like; the principle of free speech gives you the right to do so. But we must give the devil his due. Let Irving go, for our own safety's sake.

His arguments are eloquent, and as a believer in free speech I am sympathetic. (Even Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust researcher who won a lawsuit against Irving, does not believe that he should be in jail.)

However, to give a famous example, free speech does not give you the right to yell "Fire!" in a movie theatre. Incitement to violence is not covered under free speech.

There are serious Holocaust researchers who cast doubt on certain details. Some "facts" about the Holocaust have been shown to not be true by real historians. As in other cases, one must apply a reasonable standard for the intent of the speaker when determining whether his words are meant as a call for truth or a call for genocide.

It is a reasonable assumption that the people who deny the Holocaust happened are the people who most want it to happen again. As such, their denial is nothing more than window dressing for their desire for a world that is Judenrein.

The cartoons of Mohammed were in no way, shape or form an incitement to violence against Muslims. The only violence that occurred in the wake of the cartoons were by Muslims, not against them.

The level of offensiveness should not affect free speech. If speech is restricted by how much people are offended, then everyone has veto power over everything. The intent of the offender is all that matters, not the thinness of the skin of the offended.

The line is still blurry between free speech and incitement, but the editorial above didn't even consider the possibility of Holocaust denial as incitement to rid the world of Jews. And that is the fundamental issue that needs to be addressed.