Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 28, 2006

The challenge has been met - but is still ongoing

Mazel tov!

This morning we reached our goal of matching $1000 in contributions towards various Israeli charities. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

I'm keeping it going for now, so I will still match anything given at least through the beginning of Shabbos. I am speaking with others who are interested in continuing this challenge; it would be nice to coordinate a larger project with multiple matchers but I'm not a very good organizer and this was mostly on the honor system anyway. If anyone wants to pledge their own matching contributions, let me know at the elderchallenge-at-gmail.com address and I will, IY"H, try to find the time to increase the scope.

Another idea is if anyone wants to donate gifts (like T-shirts or other tchatchkes) for people who contribute a minimum amount.

But for now, let's see how high we can go today! Thanks again to my readers - you rock!

The elephant in the room of international law

There is a fair amount of literature concerning violations and grave breaches of international law, mostly centered on various Geneva Conventions. For example:

Article 85.-Repression of breaches of this Protocol

3. In addition to the grave breaches defined in Article 11, the following acts shall be regarded as grave breaches of this Protocol, when committed wilfully, in violation of the relevant provisions of this Protocol, and causing death or serious injury to body or health:

(a) Making the civilian population or individual civilians the object of attack;

(b) Launching an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects in the knowledge that such attack will cause excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects, as defined in Article 57, paragraph 2 (a) (iii);

International law also addresses how those involved in a conflict should treat prisoners from enemies who do not subscribe to Geneva and some other peripheral issues.

And it addresses how war crimes are determined and tried in an international court.

But, as far as I can tell, international law does not address the possibility of one party of a conflict that continuously and explicitly ignores all the norms of war - one that uses its civilians as human shields, one that specifically and deliberately targets civilians, one that would use illegal means such as chemical weapons if it had the means.

In other words, if a state is fighting against a rogue terrorist entity that does not accept Geneva and in fact flouts it, the state still is bound by its own acceptance of Geneva. So terrorists have an automatic advantage in methods and tactics against any signatory of international law conventions.

On the face of it, it seems ridiculous. The purpose of international law of war is to place restrictions on warfare for everyone's benefit, for humanitarian and practical reasons. But if one party has a tactic that violates international law, it would seem reasonable that the war should be fought according to the rules that the violator themselves made. If the violator uses poison gas, for example, they can no longer expect to be protected from being attacked by poison gas.

This does not mean that the state has a right to do anything immoral, and there should be rules restricting what a state can do in this case. But from what I see, interntional law has failed miserably in this regard in the current Lebanon/northern Israel conflict. The idea of an eventual war-crimes trial for Nasrallah being a disincentive for him to continue to endanger Lebanese civlians and target Israeli civilians is laughable.

International law is giving terrorists a great tactical advantage and it needs to address this issue adequately.

Intel in Haifa produces the "world's best processor"

The people who follow these things are buzzing about the new Intel Core 2 Duo processor that was introduced today.

Intel had been falling behind rival AMD over the past couple of years, both in processor speed and in power consumption. The only bright spot was the Pentium M, which was designed in Intel's Haifa labs.

Intel is now betting the company on the same wizards who designed the Pentium M, and from early reviews, the new architecture out of Israel appears to blow AMD and all other competitors away.

More amazing is that Intel's Haifa workers have remained on the job continuously even while under constant rocket bombardment. Some worked from home, some worked from bomb shelters with Wi-Fi connections, but all of them continued to work with no loss of productivity.

Intel never explicitly trumpets Israel as the source of its innovations, but a small acknowledgment comes from the name of the laptop version of this chip: Merom, named after a lake in Israel during Biblical times.

How to deal with adversity, part 2

Three months ago I posted about how the Jewish hydroponic farmers expelled from Gaza took only six months to re-create their industry and turn a profit again. I wrote then:

Yes, Jews were forcibly kicked out of their homes, 16 years of their work and livelihoods destroyed, and six months later they are completely back up to speed - without the EU or the UN giving them a dime, without whining constantly to the world about how bad their lot is, without insisting on handouts and resolutions.

How many decades will it take Arabs to learn the same lesson?

Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of Israeli refugees forced out of their homes again, this time by Iranian rockets. Some of them ended up in refugee camps - but these hastily constructed camps have nothing in common with the ones we hear so much about in the Middle East:

"Check her out, she's the most beautiful girl from northern Israel," Ilan Faktor says, practically swooning, his white teeth beaming from his tanned face. He's girl-hunting with his buddies, and the women are everywhere -- all in bikinis and most with long, curly hair. "The best part," Ilan says, "is that they can't run away."

Ilan and his buddies live in a crowded refugee camp set up on the beach in Ashkelon, Israel. All along the street, flags flap in the breeze from the sea. People here seem to love showing off their gym-toned bodies. Tents have been set up everywhere. In one, people practice yoga; next to it others are getting their bodies painted. In another tent Orthodox Jews try to recruit young people. One could easily mistake the place for a nightclub if it weren't for the fact that everyone here has been displaced by a war. Hordes of young people under 25 mill around wearing the same kind of colorful armbands you might see in a hip urban club.

Ilan isn't happy with the color of his armband -- the blue has already faded. Worse yet, blue means he's scheduled for the day's earliest meal-time. Organizers in fact adopted the idea of arm bands from night clubs; here, though, it's a way of arranging staggered mealtimes. In the end that's only difference between this camp at the Israeli beach resort of Ashkelon, just south of Tel Aviv, and an all-inclusive holiday resort.

Make no mistake, though -- it's no holiday resort. It's a refugee camp, in spite of the sun and the sound of waves pounding the beach. Everyone here has fled the rain of Hezbollah rockets that are showering northern Israel. First they came from Nahariya, then Carmiel and later from Haifa and Tiberias. In total, more than 2,600 have converged here. On Monday the camp was expanded, with new tents and toilets being set up on the white sand dunes right next to the sea.

Still, for those fleeing the north, there are worse places to land than Ashkelon. A Russian immigrant generously allowed the camp to be set up on his property; he hired Ilan Faktor to help run it. Normally Faktor works as a rave promoter, and he's brought a lot of those ideas along with him. Live bands play each night, and during the daytime, the thumping base of techno music can be heard along the beach. On Friday, the stars of Israel's "Pop Idol" stopped by. "We have to keep the people entertained," says Faktor.

Now as before all of this was done without a single penny of aid from the UN or the EU, without whining to the world about how horrible life is, and without insisting on handouts and resolutions.

We hear so much about the famed "Arab hospitality" and yet Palestinian Arabs have been rotting in "refugee camps" for decades in their hospitable host countries of Egypt and Syria and Lebanon, not to mention Gaza and the West Bank. What Israel accomplishes in two weeks is completely beyond the abilities of these Arabs, it seems.

Nasrallah thinks he is hurting Israeli morale, but he has no concept of the meaning of the word. He defines morale as the ability to kill and terrorize others, but morale is keeping one's spirits up in times of trouble - and it is something he and his thugs are utterly incapable of.

Once again, one side proves that they are all about creativity and happiness and the other side is all about destruction and inflicting pain. Israelis can rightly feel proud at how they react in the face of terror.

(H/T OceanGuy, who writes a wonderful posting about the same topic.)
UPDATE: OceanGuy, in the comments section, expanded my theme much better than I did:

No running to the UN...
No whining for refugee status...
No begging the EU for help taking care of a genocidal humanitarian crisis...
No claiming victimhood...
No display of gory dead and wounded people...
No militant children parading around as suicide bombers...
No screaming for vengeance...
Always accepting responsibility for ourselves, even when hardships are caused by others...
Not even asking to be loved...
Just to be left to mind our own lives...
Only asking to live in peace.

Muslim terror envy

Hamas gets power, kidnaps an Israeli soldier and shoots some rockets into Sderot and Ashkelon.

Hezbollah gets jealous and kidnaps 2 Israeli soldiers and shoots thousands of rockets into Kiryat Shmona and Haifa.

What's a self-respecting uber-terror gang leader supposed to do?

al-Zawahri wants some of this action! It's an insult to see these small-time Shi'ites grabbing the headlines!

As if to emphasize the point, his little al-Jazeera exclusive interview showed him in front of a picture of the burning World Trade Center.

Apparently, all terrorists never got over their teen years, as they preen and try to prove their masculinity by who can kill the most infidels. And it is not hard to imagine what deficiencies they may have that they are trying to compensate for.

We're reaching our goal

Thanks to all who helped contribute to the Elder Tzedakah Challenge. If you didn't do it yet, all you have to do is click on one of the charities listed on the sidebar, or one of the others listed in this posting, give money, let me know about it by sending me a receipt (after you remove your personal information) to elderchallenge -at- gmail.com and I will match that amount to the same charity.

Boruch Hashem we have raised over $800 since last Friday and I want to get to at least $1000 by tomorrow. Every little bit helps so give today to the charity of your choice!

Also, a big yasher koach to the bloggers that have contributed so far:
Life-of-Rubin
Garbanzo Tunes
Bat Flattery
Boker tov, Boulder!

(apologies if I missed someone - let me know)

Hezbollah's "honor"

From a comment by "Hassan" on a Lebanese-American blog "From Beirut to the Beltway": (HA probably stands for Hizb Allah, "Party of God")

I just finished talking to an old friend of mine back in Lebanon. He is shia from Tyre and as long as I can remember, he has always been sympathetic with HA. I always related this sympathy to the fact that he was in a HA elementary school.

Our brief discussion quickly turned into him "lecturing" me about the importance of not being swayed by the propaganda and aligning my position with HA since, due to the lack of choice, I was born a shia, "a 220" Volt (yes, in lebanon, the shia run on 220 volt AC power, unlike the rest of the population who run on 110 volts). The fact that I don't believe in God (a precursor to I don't believe in Shia, Sunni, Islam, Christianity, Judaism) never registered in his brain.

Anyways, after our blame game and my "disappointing" stance, my friend reverted to reminding me of the pictures of death and destruction that have befallen Lebanon due to the Israeli aggression. But after I questioned how someone (HA) that was there to (allegedly) protect us, ended up bringing all this destruction from "the enemy", and questioning what we gained from the destruction, his answer was brief and swift: "Honor"

So to my HA shiite friend, Honor is the vice that would make a community die, leave their homes, and starve. It's sad to see an entire community live and die by such a definition of Honor. It's even sadder to see an entire country being dragged into serving such Honor.

I for one choose not to be Honorable.

AFP's fractured history lesson

AFP publishes a nice convenient chart for newspapers to reprint:

For some reason, AFP can't seem to mention that it was the Palestinian Arabs who created the civil war in Lebanon, or any of their rocket attacks against Israel, or anything else relevant. Let's fill in some of the missing pieces and try to see why AFP chose the events they did, and chose to ignore the events they did: (Most of these are from CNN.)

November 1969: Lebanese army commander in chief Emile Bustani and Arafat sign an agreement in Cairo that recognizes the "Palestinian revolution" and allows Palestinians in Lebanon "to join in the armed struggle without undermining Lebanon's sovereignty and welfare." This agreement will stay in effect for nearly 20 years, until Lebanon rescinds it in May 1987.

1970-1971: Faced with fighting in Jordan that left thousands dead, the PLO moves its base to Lebanon, where it carries out raids on Israel. A Palestinian terrorist group linked to the PLO is formed. Its name is "Black September" -- a reference to the Jordanian crackdown on Palestinians in September 1970.

1975: Civil war breaks out in Lebanon, pitting Palestinians and pro-Palestinian Lebanese militias against Lebanon's Christian militias. The war would last nearly 15 years, officially ending in 1990.

1976: Syria sends military peacekeepers during the early months of the civil war to help end it. The troops would remain there nearly 30 years, until April 2005.

March 1978: A PLO attack on a bus in northern Israel prompts Israeli military forces to move into Lebanon to push the PLO back from the border. Israel withdraws after the U.N. Security Council passes a resolution for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces. Under the leadership of Lebanese army Maj. Saad Haddad, an Israeli ally, a 12-mile wide "security zone" is established to protect Israeli territory from cross-border attacks.

1981: The PLO repeatedly violates a US-brokered cease fire by firing rockets into Israel.

May 17, 1983: Lebanon and Israel sign a U.S.-brokered peace agreement, spelling out terms of Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, conditional on the withdrawal of Syrian forces. Syria opposes the agreement.

October 23, 1983: A Hezbollah suicide bomber blows up the headquarters of U.S. Marine and French forces in Beirut, killing 298 people -- 241 of them U.S. Marines and other military personnel. U.S. troops are withdrawn from Lebanon a few months later.

January 18, 1984: American University of Beirut President Malcolm Kerr is assassinated.

March 1984: With pressure mounting from Syria, Lebanon cancels the May 17, 1983, peace agreement.

September 20, 1984: The U.S. Embassy annex in East Beirut is bombed, and 23 people are killed.

June 1985: Israel withdraws from most of Lebanon but keeps control of the 12-mile-wide security zone in the south. Israel remains there until May 2000.

July 2006: Hezbollah militants cross into Israel, kill three Israeli soldiers and kidnap two others in a bid to negotiate a prisoner exchange, a demand rebuffed by Israel. Another five Israeli soldiers are killed after the ambush.

So, can the astute reader find any pattern whatsoever in the AFP's choices for its timeline? Why the PLO is not mentioned, nor Hezbollah? Why the only times Palestinian Arabs are mentioned are for Sabra and Shatila (with the AFP inflating the likely figures)? Why the only protaganist mentioned is Israel?

Anyone notice any, shall we say, consistency in the AFP message?

Hezbollah fundraising in America

The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, MI has an "emergency relief fund for the victims in Lebanon."

A gathering will be held on Friday, July 28, 2006 at 6:30 p.m at the Islamic Center of America (Ford Road) to raise donations.

If you are unable to attend please donate today by,
Transfer:
Beneficiary: Islamic Center Lebanon
Relief Fund
Bank Name: Comerica Bank
PO.Box 75000 Detroit, MI 48275
Account #: 1850029784
Routing Number #: 072000096

It goes on the print a letter from the mosque's imam, condemning Israel's attacks and not saying a single word about "terror", "rockets" or "Hezbollah." It is also interesting that they accept direct wire transfers - the same methods that Hezbollah terrorists use to transfer money.

Since Dearborn is the US center of Hezbollah supporters, with its local Arab newspaper printing articles that lionize terrorists, where a local Muslim "cultural center" is named after the "capital" of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is a safe bet that not all of the money raised is going to food and shelter.

Hooray for Hezbywood

Kudos to Anderson Cooper for telling the truth as he was showing Hezbollah-chosen sites for the news:

As the video showed a group reporters and photographers interviewing a single woman on a blanket, Cooper explained, “Civilian casualties are clearly what Hezbollah wants foreign reporters to focus on. It keeps the attention off them — and questions about why Hezbollah should still be allowed to have weapons when all the other militias in Lebanon have already disarmed.

“After letting us take pictures of a few damaged buildings, they take us to another location, where there are ambulances waiting.

“This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they've been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians. That's the story that Hezbollah wants people to know about.

“These ambulances aren't responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.”

This is as opposed to CNN's Nic Robertson, who dutifully reported Hezbollah's viewpoint and only days later admitted that he was manipulated.

Here's that other famous picture again:

(H/T Atlas Shrugs)

It is obvious to anyone with a brain that Israel has no incentive to directly target the UN, but it is equally obvious that the UN has been firmly on the terrorists' side for decades.

Arabs love Ben Franklin - they can't stop printing his picture

I blogged last month about my theory that some of the $20 million that Zahar's "fundraising tour" raised may have in fact been counterfeit US currency. I had no evidence besides the fact that pristine $100 bills are not found in large quantities in the countries he visited.

Now, NBC news accidentally seems to have found another source for mint-condition US currency in the Middle East: (video from LGF, story from OpinionJournal):

(Video player requires Flash Player 8.)

As James Taranto notes:

A reader noticed something curious in a video from last night’s “NBC Nightly News.” Richard Engel, the network’s Beirut bureau chief, is reporting from southern Lebanon, and at 1:07 in the video, as he’s saying, “In Sidon, we found part of the financial district flattened,” you briefly see an image of what look like uncut sheets of U.S. hundred-dollar bills.
Now, it’s possible to buy uncut sheets from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, at premiums ranging from 12.5% to 275% over face value—but apparently only in denominations of up to $50. Anyhow, somehow we doubt these were collectibles.

A Treasury Department press release dated June 10, 2004, reports that Hezbollah has been involved in counterfeiting American money:
One of the most prominent and influential members of the Hizballah terrorist organization, along with two of his companies, was designated by the Treasury Department today under Executive Order 13224. Assad Ahmad Barakat has close ties with Hizballah leadership and has worked closely with numerous Islamic extremists and suspected Hizballah associates in South America’s tri-border area (TBA), made up of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. . . .
Barakat has also been involved in a counterfeiting ring that distributes fake U.S. dollars and generates cash to fund Hizballah operations. As of early 2001, Barakat was one of two individuals reportedly in charge of distribution and sale of the counterfeit currency in the TBA.
Was this funny money in Engel’s report from Sidon? We don’t know, but it’d be a good question for him to investigate.

It is a fair bet that much of the cash that made it to Gaza also originated in the "Sidon financial district."

UPDATE: An LGF reader pointed out that these look more like photocopies for the serial numbers rather than counterfeit currency.