Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 27, 2006

Evil settlers do another horrendous crime

The worst possible thing has happened to the PalArab cause:

Jews stepped in and bought ambulance supplies for a Palestinian Arab town in the territories that needed them desperately.

Not only that, but they did it when the Palestinian Arab so-called "leadership" told them that they can't help them and need to "find another donor."

Not only that, but the Jews who bought the equipment are "ultra-Orthodox."

Not only that, but they are ultra-orthodox settlers.

Here's the whole, sorry episode:

Thursday, residents of the Modeiin Elite settlement donated NIS 30,000 worth of medical equipment to an ambulance from the neighboring Palestinian village of Naleen.

The ambulance itself was purchased by village residents, but they didn't have enough money for equipment inside the ambulance. Resident Husseini Nafar said that they originally appealed to Palestinian Authority sources, who told them to "find another donor".

Their next appeal was made to head of Modeiin Elite's security Shuky Guterman, who remains in constant contact with village residents. "In the current situation, there's not much for the ambulance to do other than hauling dead people," he was told.

The ambulance did not even have a gurney and all of the drugs inside had expired. Town mayor Yakov Guterman, a charity organization, and residents of the settlement immediately took action to rectify the situation.

A ceremony in honor of the donation - coordinated by the IDF's coordination and liaison branch - was held at the Modeiin Elite fire station, which afforded village residents a view across the fence.

A delegation from Naleen, including village mayor Muhammad Srur, was escorted through the nearest crossing by IDF representatives.

Modeiin's mayor, the first speaker at the event, emphasized that "saving lives is important to both faiths and is mentioned both in the Torah and the Quran. We hope that the people in Naleen will have cause to use the ambulance for happy occasions such as births."

"Neither the left or right-wing can create discourse between us and our neighbors, particularly Naleen," Guterman continued, recounting that some thousand village residents work in Modeiin Elite, thus creating a daily connection between the villages.

Husseini Nafar, the leader of one of the village clans, also spoke and asked in his speech "to stop the building of the fence that will disrupt our life. We aren't willing to be separated from Hashmonaim and Modeiin Elite.

So folks who are routinely described as the most evil, racist people on the planet do more to help the PalArab people than their "leaders" do. The evil settlers employ a thousand of them, they give them medicines and medical equipment, and they treat them like respectable human beings.

It is only a matter of time before some PalArab terrorist, suffering from cognitive dissonance, will attempt to blow up the Jews of Modiin Elite for having the audacity to do such a shameful act that offends Arab honor.

If you think I am joking, look at the Fatah attack on the Efrat medical center in March, 2002. Efrat had raised thousands of dollars for its neighboring Arab villages to have decent medical care and was rewarded with a suicide bombing against the very people who helped the Arabs the most:

In January, without warning, Channel One of Moscow filmed footage in the Arab villages near Efrat, expecting to hear stories about the 'Israeli occupation' and tensions between the small Arab village and the 16 expanding Jewish settlements of Efrat and the Etzion bloc. However, the Russian TV crew heard the opposite message. They heard only praise for the people of Efrat and the Etzion bloc of settlements and seething anger against Arafat and the "PLO occupation" of their fellow Palestinian Arab brethren in the Bethlehem region. Family after family in these Arab villages told Russian TV that they were getting the best medical treatment possible from their friends in Efrat, while their families in Bethlehem had to bribe officials just to get the basics of treatment from the PA. They also spoke with pride about the school that Efrat had built for them.

All of this was aired on Russian TV Channel One very recently. It would seem that the PA was watching. The clear purpose of the recent suicide bombing attack was to disrupt the existing, proper relationship between the Jewish city and the nearby Arab villages. Yet, despite the threats to their lives from Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the people of the Arab villages near Efrat gathered in an emergency town meeting to issue a statement denouncing the attack in the strongest of terms.

It surprised nobody in those Arab villages that Arafat's police force took credit for the attacks.

I won!

Thanks to the Watcher's Council for voting for my article "Archaeological Temple Artifacts Drive PalArabs Crazy" as this week's best non-council link!

Thanks also to ShrinkWrapped for nominating me, and allowing me to publicly correct my wrong guess in that matter.

PalArabic articles of note

Some things that caught my eye as I continue to over-use Google's auto-translate seature:

WAFA reports that A leader of the first intifada, named Alaa Aldali, was assassinated by another PalArab, I think in Khan Younis. Fatah condemned the killing (Fatah is mistranslated as "open", as apparently it is cognate to the Hebrew "P T KH" root which also means "open.")
Al-Quds mentions that another Arab named Ala Swaileh was also shot and killed in Tulkarem on the eve of the Eid celebrations. His friends responded by smashing dozens of shops, although of course that doesnt contribute to the economic crisis in the territories, because that is wholly Israel's fault. (Our count of violently killed PalArabs by PalArabs is now at 126.)
A Falasteen writer is taking notes from the MoveOn crowd, with a classic headline: "Crazy Bush is waging a total war to destroy the world"
Al-Manar points out that Israelis (or, as the headline says, Jews) are investing in Bahrain and getting chummy with the royal family there. Surprisingly, this story is reported straight.

Cultural immaturity of Islam

Muslims for a Safer America took a survey of American Muslims at an Islamic Society of North America convention in September. While this is not a scientific survey, it is probably a good representation of the thoughts of the more committed Muslims of America who are likely to attend these sorts of conventions.

The conclusion one can draw from this survey is that educated, Western Muslims are living in a complete fantasy world, where they are the perpetual victims and have no responsibility for any problems. In their twisted universe, Muslims didn't do any terror attacks, except maybe London; the US routinely lies and goes to extreme lengths to make Muslims look bad, and in fact the US is at war with Islam itself.

These paranoid fantasies do not come out of a vacuum. They are a direct result of the mindset of Islam, where the ascendancy of the West since the Middle Ages is a direct contradiction to the Islamic assumption that its philosophy was inherently superior. The fact that Islam descended into third-world status and irrelevance for centuries is a source of deep anguish and embarrassment. The more recent reinvigoration of Islam due to petrodollars has not seeped into this collective shame, where Andalusia is still mourned. Muslims are thirsty for relevance and evidence that their beliefs are superior to others'.

The US is everything that Islam is not. This is not a completely good thing - there are definite problems in American society, and some aspects of Islam are praiseworthy. But in real terms, the US dominance of the world scene, militarily and culturally and economically, is a focus for Muslim anger (which is simply a manifestation of embarrassment.)

Today's Muslims would rather react with fear, denial and paranoia to the challenges of the modern world symbolized by the US, rather than introspection about how modern Muslims can evolve Islam to meet today's challenges.

In many ways, it is a cultural immaturity. A mature culture is one that is secure in its own beliefs and confident enough that it can hold its own in the marketplace of ideas. An immature culture is fearful of other beliefs and standards and not certain of the validity of its own. The denial, projection and paranoia are all logical outcomes of this core insecurity.

Immature cultures crave relevance. Lately, the Arabic WAFA website has been filled with articles about Mahmoud Abbas taking telephone calls from leaders of some nations, like Spain or Jordan or Zambia. These press releases are a way to shout to the world that Abbas himself is a world leader, in that he can speak to other world leaders as equals. In reality, he looks more like an autograph seeker, basking in the reflected glory of a Tom Cruise. But this obsession is an indication of his desperate quest for relevance, and ironically it is a true indication of his irrelevance.

Terror is just a manifestation of this quest for relevance. It is the equivalent of a temper tantrum from a two-year old with deadly weapons. If you have insulted me, if you have disrespected me, if you have ignored me - then I will make you pay.

Another example of this immaturity: Muslims are rightly concerned with the saturation of sex in American culture. One cannot look at a sitcom nowadays without being barraged with fairly explicit sexual messages. They are offended by this part of American culture, and they have a right to be.

Now, it just so happens that a large number of Christians are equally offended by the same problem. There are far more Christians in the US than Muslims. Why doesn't organized Islam try to reach out to other groups and deal with what is clearly a core issue for them? Mature groups would work together to reach a common goal. But one gets the impression from Muslims that they would never work with others - whether the reason is xenophobia or an unwillingness to compromise on small issues to gain a greater victory, either way it is a result of immaturity.

There is no more pluralistic society than America. People from countless cultures, religions and nations manage to live here and thrive. America doesn't just tolerate diversity, it celebrates it. It isn't perfect but in American culture, success and hard work are rewarded. To think that the US is targeting Islam is the height of delusion. This delusion is not just psychotic but it is dangerous, and ultimately it is more dangerous to Islam than to the West. The unspoken American contract is that you can do your own thing as long as you are one of us, and American Muslims do not consider themselves American nearly as much as they consider themselves Muslim.

Islam needs to grow up, and one way or another it will have to. The question is how many innocent people will die as it struggles through adolescence.

Academic wackjob of the day

Daniel McGowan, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, just wrote an article at Counterpunch vilifying Elie Wiesel.

He also is a supporter of "RighteousJews.org", where a "righteous Jew" is anyone who wants Israel to be replaced with Palestine and who thinks that the idea of a Jewish state is unforgivably racist, while any number of Muslim states are just fine.

He is obsessed with Deir Yassin, thinking it is on par with Jewish suffering throughout history, and is working to build a memorial.

He wrote a letter to the editor pretending to condemn Wafa Idris' suicide bombing but concluding "The most chilling thing about Wafa Idris and her final act as a Palestinian martyr is the energy, hope, and pride she has given her people, and the realization by others that Israel's helicopter gunships, F-16s, and atomic weapons cannot stop those who will follow her in their struggle for human rights."

We have here another example of someone who toiled anonymously in academia but found some measure of fame by bashing Israel, and the feedback loop goes on, making him want to say more and more outrageous things for his newfound terror-supporting audience.

And his obscure college has a web page praising him and his activities as well, because his fame extends to them.

Weasel watching

I want to thank those on the Watcher's Council who have nominated articles of mine for the weekly Watcher of Weasels awards. (Presumably, the nominators are AbbaGav and/or Soccer Dad.)

This week, I was nominated for "Archaeological Temple Artifacts Drive PalArabs Crazy".

Last week, I was nominated for "Very Interesting Arabic Editorial in Falasteen" (which Carl very nicely wrote about.)

I was nominated in the past as well, for "Abbas Is Now the 'Political Wing' of Hamas" and "The Perfect Weapon".

Though I haven't won yet, I appreciate the nominations and votes from the august Council members.

West ignores Qods Day threats in Iran - against America

From the New York Sun:

It is disturbing when the entire leadership of one nation, along with hundreds of thousands of its citizens, comes out with celebrations and parades every year that call for the annihilation of another country.

It is more twisted that no world leaders or international bodies, including the United Nations, have denounced the activities surrounding Quds Day, an Iranian holiday introduced by Ayatollah Khomeini that is marked on the last Friday of Ramadan.
Isfahan University's Mechanical Energy College took first place in a Quds Day competition for its design of a pilotless plane that can be used for "suicide attacks." The director of the Iranian Broadcasting Organization of Music Production, Mohammad Mirzamani, composed a symphony dedicated to "the victory over the Zionist regime," and the country's religious Web logs were told to report on all the festivities.
Iranian press outlets featured hundreds of photographs from the celebrations in Tehran. Among the notable scenes captured were children in Condoleezza Rice costumes; effigies of President Bush, Prime Minister Olmert, and Prime Minister Blair being lit on fire and dragged through the streets; the burning of American and Israeli flags; and hundreds of posters of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah featuring the caption "I swear to Allah that Israel is weaker than [a] spider house." The posters called for a boycott of such "Israeli" goods as McDonald's, Kit Kat bars, Intel, L'Oreal, Nestlé, Disney, and Marlboro.

Mr. Ahmadinejad delivered his Quds Day speech under a banner that read, "Israel must be wiped off the face of the world." He described the holiday as "a day for confrontation between the Islamic faith with the global arrogance."

The words "the Zionist regime is a cancerous gland that needs to be uprooted" were written in a communiqué from the Iranian Foreign Ministry in honor of the holiday. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki held a meeting for other Islamic countries' ambassadors to Iran and told them that Israel's existence would be shattered and that death bells were tolling for the Zionists. At the meeting, the Palestinian Arab ambassador to Tehran, Salah Zawawi, said, "The day for the liberation of Quds Day is close at hand."

A who's who of the Iranian leadership marched in the main Quds Day parade before crowds chanting "death to Israel" and "death to America." The marchers included a former Iranian president, Mohammed Khatemi, and a spokesman for the parliament presidency board, Mohsen Kouhkan, who predicted a quick "final and total defeat of America and the Zionist regime."

The chief of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, praised "the fasting people taking part in the rally [who] are chanting slogans such as ‘death to America' and ‘death to Israel.'"

"The world arrogance and Zionism today are shivering from Muslim vigilance and are on the threshold of annihilation," he added.

Information Minister Hholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei explained that the holiday "is a proper occasion for people to declare their hatred of America and Israel," while a representative of the Islamic Consulate Assembly, Ahmad Pish-bin, promised that the "final defeat for world arrogance" is coming. ["World arrogance" is the consistent keyword for the United States. -EoZ]

We have a nation of 70 million people being incited daily to a holy war against America, but to refer to their leaders as "evil" gets nothing but smirks from the oh-so-sophisticated intelligentsia who patronizingly say that the world is much more complicated for simple concepts like "good" and "evil."

A couple of weeks ago, on Bill Maher's program, Danielle Pletka mentioned that Iran has threatened America. Maher said she was wrong, and that it only threatened Israel, and when she reiterated it he said "I missed that one," while Ben Affleck kept on getting crazed looks in his eyes as he whined that the world is "complicated". The audience was equally clueless - because the media completely ignores things like these massive rallies in Iran, or spins them as being only anti-Israel.

Of course, these same supposed sophisticates are targets as well. But they prefer to read the NYTimes over the NYSun, and any news that doesn't make it in the Times is not fit to print.

Hezbollah deputy: "Judaism is great, but Jews are pretty bad"

Good thing we have Hezbollah experts to clear up these terrible misconceptions.

From MEMRI:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Hizbullah Deputy Secretary-General Sheik Naim Qassem, which aired on Al-Kawthar TV on October 17, 2006.
Interviewer: Do you distinguish between Judaism, as a monotheistic religion, and Zionism, even though many Koranic verses refer to the Jews in a somewhat negative manner? They are depicted as miserly and cowardly, as the murderers of the prophets, as people who violate agreements, as usurers, or as people who use corruption to achieve their ends. Do you distinguish between Zionism and Judaism?
Sheik Naim Qassem: When the Koran talks about the Jews, and says: "You will find that the people most hostile to the believers are the Jews and the polytheists," it is describing the general condition of the Jews. In general, the Jewish path in history is replete with problems, such as hostility, slander, schemes, and conspiracies, going against human reality, and so on. When the Koran talks about the Jews, it is not referring to Judaism. Judaism, as a divine message, is part of the holy writings. Therefore, when the Koran talks about "the People of the Book," it is referring to the Jews, the Christians, and others of the People of the Book. Therefore, today, when we face the Israeli entity, when I when we concentrate on Zionism, and we refer to this entity, which was established through plunder, and to these Jews who defend this entity, we do not mean to get into a cultural or intellectual debate, which might conceal the facts. Today, if we say "the Jews," some will say that we refer to the religion, whereas we are referring to the people called Jews. We are not referring to their religion, but to them themselves. Therefore we often use words like "the Zionists" and "the entity" because we do not recognize it to be a state, and we do not recognize that they have such a right. As you know, to this day Israel has no [official] borders. Therefore, we prefer to talk about an "entity" and not a state. We prefer to talk about "Zionists" and "Israelis," instead of "Jews," to avoid confusion. Yet there is nothing wrong with using the term "Jewish entity" when referring to the sinning Jews who cause harm to humanity.

Half of young PalArabs want to get the hell out

The current Christian Science Monitor mentions that one third of the Palestinian Arabs and over half of the younger PalArabs want to emigrate to somewhere else.

A growing number of Palestinians are openly saying they'd like to leave the West Bank and Gaza if given the chance, raising concern about the possibility of a Palestinian brain drain. The sentiment, which flouts the long-held Palestinian belief that Israeli occupation can only be resisted by staying put, is yet another indication of the deepening despair since Hamas was elected to run the government.

Birzeit University pollster Nader Said, who has monitored emigration attitudes for 12 years, says the percentage of Palestinians willing to relocate once hovered just below 20 percent. When that figure jumped to 32 percent in a September survey, Mr. Said says he was shocked.

Even more telling, adds Said, is that the percentage surges to 44 percent among Palestinians in their 20s and 30s. Among young men, it surges beyond 50 percent.

Malik Shawwa, a consultant specializing in obtaining Canadian visas, says his workload has jumped by two-thirds over the past seven months as more Palestinians ask about leaving. "This is the most important subject in the Palestinian territories," he says. "It's not just a matter of a lack of jobs. It's the situation. They're not secure. They don't trust the government."

It seems that a mere generation of Palestinian Arab history is not enough to instill a deep love of the land. (The majority of today's self-proclaimed "Palestinians'" families emigrated to the area from other countries in the early 20th century in reaction to the phenomenal economic growth as a result of the Zionists.)

As I have mentioned before, most PalArabs just want to live in peace and dignity anywhere, and their "leaders" have a vested interest in keeping them miserable and close to Israel because their goal has nothing to do with what is best for the Palestinian Arabs themselves and everything to do with keeping themselves in power and trying to destroy Israel.

As it stands, if Palestinian Arabs would be welcomed with open arms and equal rights in other Arab countries or elsewhere, a large number would emigrate tomorrow. The idea that they can only be in Palestine is a fiction designed to pressure Israel. And the entire Palestinian Arab media machine is dedicated to this fiction.

It is ironic that supporters of the terrorists will write long articles about the "right" of PalArabs to "return" to Israel but will actively work against their right to move anywhere else in the world.

UPI has a reading comprehension problem

In an interview in Der Spiegel, Mahmoud al-Zahar reiterates Hamas' opposition to recognizing Israel. He makes it very clear that he is against Israel's existence and even suggests that Jews all pack up and move to Europe.

But notice how UPI synopsizes a portion of the interview:

In an interview, Mahmoud al-Zahar acknowledged there were differences within Hamas on the issue of recognizing Israeli sovereignty, "But the big majority supports the resistance" to a two-state solution.

Notice what UPI puts outside the quotes - it thinks that "resistance" means political resistance to a two-state solution. (And the sentence can also be read to mean the exact opposite, that they support the resistance in order to achieve a two-state solution.)

Anyone who ever read anything about Hamas (or any PalArab organization) knows that "resistance" means "terror attacks" (as well as attacks against the IDF, as they never distinguish between the two.)

For UPI to downplay a Hamas official's clear threat to destroy Israel is reprehensible.

Haveil Havalim #90 finally out!

It may be late, but it is great!

Soccer Dad hosts this week's Haveil Havalim, collection of the best of the JBlogosphere. He also kindly included 2 of my 3 posts on "Qods Day."

Check it out!

Pseudo-scholarly Jew-hatred

It is worth skimming this long, boring and heavily footnoted article in the far-left "People's Voice" webrag. (It evidently also was propagated to Al-Jazeerah.info.) Written by Curtis Maynard, one of those people whose entire existence seems to depend on vilifying Israel and Jews in articles written for publications that will publish anything, it breaks no new ground, but it shows that Jew-haters will desperately try to justify their hate with an avalanche of footnotes that they think can substitute for thought.

The author starts off by admitting that the dictionary definition of anti-Semitism is indeed Jew-hatred, and then goes on to disagree with the definition because Arabs are semites. One wonders if he uses "awful" and "awesome" as synonyms.

The writer then descends into absurdity, where he reviews a book by Joseph Bendersky that describes the latent and explicit anti-semitism of the US Army in the first half of the 20th century. Maynard mentions some of the generals who made statements against Jews, including Patton, and then expands it to other prominent Americans who made bigoted statements as well.

Maynard then quotes a critique of that book that mentions the background of the Army's anti-semitic statements, putting it in the context of the times. In no way was the critique itself anti-semitic, from what I can tell.

But Maynard then goes off into bizarro land, saying that if this book was subject to scholarly criticism, then somehow Jew-hatred must be justified. He brings as "proof" the more recent letter written by "5000" Russian "academics" that recommended closing all Jewish institutions in Russia (it was in fact 500 Russians), and then he ends off his huge article with this whopper:

In the end, the reader should take into consideration the fact that numerous seemingly intelligent, educated and patriotic Americans have believed that Jews for whatever reason have accumulated a considerable amount of influence in the United States and elsewhere around the world in a variety of different ways, through banking, the stock market, the news media, government, etc… it is up to the reader to decide if each and everyone of them was a complete crackpot, crank, racist and/or anti-Semite.

In the end, this 7500 word article boils down to the argument that "thousands of Jew-haters cannot be wrong."

More tellingly, the cartoon that was used to illustrate the article subconsciously shows the truth about today's anti-semitism far better than any number of quasi-intellectual arguments:

Naked Jew-hatred still exists, today, in the US. And its proponents are not shy about expressing it and justifying it. Just like the expression "anti-semitism" itself was coined to create a pseudo-scholarly aura around what was simply hate, so do today's anti-semites use the pretense of scholarship to justify their poisonous opinions.