Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, April 15, 2007

More proof of UN worthlessness

On Saturday, Mahmoud Abbas met with the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy.

According to Wafa (Arabic only):

Ms. Coomaraswamy was pleased to hear about a deal to exchange prisoners, and that the deal would include the release of prisoners of children.

She added, "I am also happy to hear from Mr. President and his commitment to promoting the culture of peace among children and the development of sports activities."

She said : "Peace is the most important thing at this moment, we in the United Nations support the Palestinian president in his efforts to bring peace to this region."

A small reminder of the great efforts that Mahmoud Abbas has undertaken to promoting a culture of peace among Palestinian Arab children: (all examples from Palestinian Media Watch):

Mohammed Al-Dura music video includes

Narrator: "How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids [people who have died for Allah]. How sweet is the fragrance of the earth. Tts thirst quenched by the gush of blood flowing from the youthful body. How sweet is the fragrance of the earth."

Vocalist: "The boy cried, 'O father, 'til we meet, O father, 'til we meet, 'til we meet, father, 'til we meet. I will go with no fear and without crying. How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids. I will go, father, to my place in heaven. How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids. O father, 'til we meet, O father, 'til we meet."
[PATV 2000-2003, and PATV June 28-29, 2006]
Interview with an 11-year old girl on PATV:
Interviewer: You described Shahada as something beautiful. Do you think it is beautiful?

Walla: Shahada is a very beautiful thing. Everyone yearns for Shahada. What could be better than going to paradise?

Interviewer: What is better, peace and full rights for the Palestinian people or Shahada?

Walla: Shahada. I will achieve my rights after becoming a shahid. We won't stay children forever.
PATV February 2006:
"Daddy brought me a present
A machine gun and a rifle
When I am big I will join the liberation army
The liberation army has taught us
How to liberate our homeland"
[PA TV, February 26, 2006]
Tarashibo, a talking chicken:

Girl: If a boy comes in front of your house, where a tree is planted, and cuts it down, what would you do?

Tarabisho: I have two trees in front of my house.

Girl: If a little boy cuts them down, what will you do to him?

Tarabisho: What will I do to him? I'll fight him and make a big riot! I'll call the whole world and make a riot! I'll bring AK-47s and the whole world. I'll commit a massacre in front of the house.
[PA TV, October 22, 2004]

This is all PA TV, made mostly under Fatah leadership (even after Hamas was voted into power, the PA TV remained pro-Fatah.)

The UN representative had a golden opportunity to pressure Abbas to do something about inciting children to war, and instead she praises him as teaching them about peace.

Once again, the UN is shown to be a worthless organization on every level.

Who are those masked men? Terror webpage banner gallery

See if you can see all the things these have in common.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) website:

Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas):

Al-Quds Brigades (Islamic Jihad):

Yup - they all feature those scary ski masks!

Just like these members of the "special forces" that were training today in Gaza:

Notice the liberal use of jungle camouflage - on a beach. You can hardly see them.

But nothing beats these Fatah terrorists, who are so intent on covering their faces while they wear their faek suicide bomb belts that they don't even bother with holes for their eyes:

Nothing says "I'm proud of who I am and what I do" like covering your face in public.

Want some refreshing Zionist MelonAIDS?

Not dyslexic lemonade, but only the latest insane rumor going around Saudi Arabia:

"Beware of Israeli melons infected with AIDS arriving in Saudi Arabia!" is the latest rumor being spread throughout Saudi Arabia like a wildfire.

An SMS message being sent around the country this week said, "The Saudi Interior Ministry warns its citizens of a truck loaded with AIDS infected melons that Israel brought into the country via a 'ground corridor.'"

The Interior Minister's spokesman General Mansour al Turki responded to news of the message and made it clear to a-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper that the Ministry "did not issue any such announcement. This is just a rumor."

The rumor, despite being denied several times, has gained so much steam in the Arab world that it made it to the front page of one of the most important Arabic language newspapers.

But is it so unreasonable when Jews are "known" to gouge out Arab kids' eyes for transplants, fly poison balloons over Lebanon, and create a virus that only attacks Arabs?

Ba'al and the Palestinian Arabs

Commenter ER mentioned a strange chapter of PalArab history that I was unaware of.

Palestinian Arabs, especially their terror leader Arafat, have always claimed that today's PalArabs are descendants of the ancient Canaanites. Just as the PalArabs want to deny Jewish history they also have a habit of making up their own. While the Canaanite claim is of course nonsense (Canaanites were not Arab,) a funny episode occurred as a result.

Embracing their fake Canaanite origins, the PA issued a postage stamp honoring an ancient Canaanite god, known as Ba'al.

There were in fact a number of local dieties named Ba'al, but the characteristics of the Ba'al worshipers are perhaps appropriate for today's Palestinian Arab death cult.

Ba'al Hammoun and Ba'al of Moloch were said to sacrifice their children. This could be why Ba'al was such an attractive symbol to Arafat, as the PalArab tradition of sacrificing their own children in the name of Jihad is entrenched if not quite as ancient.

Ba'al Peor, in Jewish tradition, was worshipped via excrement, also an appropriate symbol for a people who prefer to use sewage pipes to create rockets.

Interestingly, the Italian Muslim Association known to be pro-Israel issued a fatwa against any Muslim owning or using this stamp. What is amazing is that no principled Arab Muslim issued any similar fatwa as far as I can tell, which makes it appear as if Muslim religious law is more concerned about politics than religion. It cannot be denied that Islam would consider Ba'al as a false god and the sin of blasphemy is deserving of death in Islamic law.

18 weeks in a row

For the 18th consecutive week, according to PCHR statistics and my own, more Palestinian Arabs have been violently killed by their own actions than by Israeli actions.

This week was close, though - from last Thursday to Wednesday of this week, PCHR reports 2 killed and 3 dying from previous wounds that they blame on Israel. I count 6 killed in PalArab self-violence.

Ironically, the PalArab media still refers to this time period after the Mecca agreement between Fatah and Hamas as "the calm." While most of the deaths this week were not from Fatah/Hamas fighting, there still were some non-fatal clashes between them this week.

Another "honor killing" in Gaza

From PCHR:

PCHR’s preliminary investigation indicates that at approximately 1:00 on Thursday, 12 April 2007, medical sources in Shifa Hospital in Gaza City announced the death of Amna Maher Kalloub (19) from Beach Camp in Gaza City. She died of a serious bullet wound to the head sustained at approximately 10:15 on Monday, 9 April 2007. According to Police investigations, her brother shot her in what is known as an “honor” killing.

I could not find any mention of this murder in any Palestinian Arab newspaper, English or Arabic.

The PalArab self-death count is now at 171 for 2007.

UPDATE: Unidentified body found buried off central Gaza coast. It appears that he was killed a few days ago. (Also another video store in Gaza bombed.) 172.

UPDATE 2: Fatah terrorist killed by those unknown gunmen, and another dude was killed as well in Khan Younis. 174.

UPDATE 3: In a cryptic autotranslated article that only appeared on Maan Arabic, a story is told of a murder that took place on April 6. Unfortunately, Google translates rather than transliterates his name, so he is called "citizenship ostrich Fahmi spring." But since I cannot find anyone murdered in that time frame in the West Bank, it seems to be another one for the books. 175. (Another update: It was a woman.)

Heroism, Islamic Jihad style

The crushing self-image that PalArab terrorists have of themselves can be seen in how low they set their expectations.

Here's a story from Arutz-7 today:

Israelis who drove past Tekoa on Thursday afternoon reported hearing gunfire. None of the drivers were injured. IDF soldiers are scanning the area.

The army says the two cars were damaged. It is unclear at this time if the damage was caused by bullets or by rocks.

And here is the Islamic Jihad press release shown on the Saraya.ps website, the official website of the Al-Quds Brigades:(autotranslated)

Military statement issued by the Al-Quds Brigades

The targeting a convoy of cars settlers east of Tekoa East Bethlehem

Praising God and God declared Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, claimed responsibility for today's attack on the car near the settlement of the settlers "Tekoa" east of the city of Bethlehem.

In this today, Thursday, approved the first 24 spring 1428 H, approved April 12, 2007, managed a group of Al-Quds Brigades mujahid attack from automatic weapons on cars east of Tekoa settlers east of the town of Bethlehem.

Zionist sources acknowledged as one of the cars back injury, alleging lack of casualties among the herds of settlers.

We in the Al-Quds Brigades declare our responsibility for this heroic operation, which comes in the framework of the series of natural reply to the continuous Zionist aggression against our people in the West Bank territories, and stress the choice of resistance and struggle till the liberation of the entire territory of Palestine.

...God is great victory of the mujahideen ... Shame on the Zionists and the criminals

It is a Jihad, Jihad .. Victory or martyrdom

They managed to shoot a car and this is worthy of a hugely self-congratulatory press release?

Is there any greater evidence that the terrorists have reached the depths of low self-esteem after being so spectacularly unsuccessful at killing Jews as they would like? Even they admit that Israel's active targeting of them is making their attempts to kill Israelis more difficult.

Reading between the lines, one can see that Israel's policies of aggressively going after terrorists is paying off every day.

Goodwill gestures never work with Arabs

Today, an Arab member of Knesset suggested that Israel release every Israeli-Arab terrorist in jail - some 150 of them - as this move would "open a new page in Israeli-Arab relations."

On Tuesday,

Jordan's King Abdullah II urged Israel to end its occupation of Arab land to guarantee peaceful coexistence with the world's Muslims. "Israel, the European states and the United States should realize that the Palestinian issue does not only concern the Palestinians but also has the sympathy of all Muslims from Indonesia to the Maghreb states," the king said in an interview with AFP. "If Israel wants to coexist with more than a billion Muslims, it should end its occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands."

In both cases the Arabs are advocating Israel make unilateral concessions to gain the goodwill of the Arab world and therefore peace will result.

Sounds great, right?

Except for the fact that pretty much every single concession Israel made in the past for peace has been met with more hatred and terror, not less.

Israel withdrew from large areas of the West Bank after Oslo - and was rewarded with a huge terror infrastructure being built there.
Israel withdrew from Lebanon behind UN-drawn boundaries - and was rewarded with a more powerful Hezbollah that turned southern Lebanon into a terror statelet.
Israel withdrew from Gaza - and was rewarded with a terrorist haven that attracts Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda as well as many other homegrown Palestinian Arab terror groups.
Israel unilaterally stopped essentially all operations in Gaza for four months - and was rewarded with hundreds of rockets being sent almost daily into Israel.
Israel has released thousands from prison in the past for very few abducted Israelis - and was rewarded with more terror, more kidnappings, and 20%-25% of the released terrorists reverting to terror again.

So, "goodwill gestures" simply do not work.

They are treated not as confidence-building measures, but rather as signs of weakness that can then be exploited.

Which means that Arabs asking for "goodwill gestures" do not plan to reciprocate in the least. Even King Abdullah's statement is a joke - he knows as well as anyone that most of the billion Muslims he is backhandedly threatening Israel with will not accept Israel even within the Green Line. And the 10% or 25% or whatever that may feel slightly better about Israel after such a suicidal move will revert to their hate as soon as Palestinian Arabs find another al-Dura or Koran desecration or wild rumor to rile up the Arab street against Israel again.

The romantic Western notion of how good deeds will inevitably follow good deeds simply does not apply in this region of the world, and it is always a fatal error to ascribe Western notions of reciprocity to Arabs.

Let's see some real goodwill on the part of the Arabs - real concessions. Because the fact is, only Israel will respond to goodwill gestures favorably.

Let's see how those anti-Israel boycotts are doing

From Globes:

The IMF has raised its growth outlook for Israel by 0.3 percentage points in a new World Economic Outlook report published today, on the eve of the World Bank Group and IMF 2007 Annual Meeting. ...It now predicts 4.8% growth in 2007, and 4.2% growth in 2008. The IMF’s growth forecast for Israel is one of the highest for developed countries; the IMF categorizes Israel as such. The IMF predicts higher growth rates in 2007 for Hong Kong and Singapore, at 5.5% each, and for Ireland, at 5%. It predicts 4.4% growth for South Korean, 2.9% growth for the UK, 2.3% for Japan, 2.2% for the US, and 1.8% for Germany. The IMF also predicts 0.1% deflation for Israel this year; the only developed country for which it predicts this. The IMF predicts that Israel’s unemployment rate will fall to 7.5% of the civilian labor force in 2007 and 7.2% in 2008, down from 9% in 2005 and 8.4% in 2006.

I've mentioned before how when Arab nations enforced a boycott against Palestinian Jews in 1946 it backfired spectacularly. One would think that they and their Jew-hating colleagues would learn by now.

PalArab news accidentally shows Israeli sensitivity to Arabs

The Ma'an News headline says:

Israeli soldiers force women wearing 'niqab' to reveal their faces at Huwwara checkpoint

Sounds like an insult to Islamic law is being perpetrated! Sounds like there's going to be some rioting over Islamic women's "honor!"

But then the story actually gives some details:

Nablus - Salfit - Ma'an - The Israeli female soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint, south of Nablus city in the north of the occupied West Bank, intend to search women wearing the face veil, the 'niqab', who wish to pass through the checkpoint.

One of the women wearing niqab told our Nablus correspondent, "The women soldiers asked the women in niqab for their identity cards and detained them to one side."

They added that the female soldiers forced every woman wearing niqab to enter a special room near the checkpoint where they were body-searched.

The female soldiers asked the veiled women to uncover their faces and lift their clothes to reveal their abdomens while the female soldier stays outside the room and gives orders through a small opening in the door of the small room.

So is there any Islamic law against Islamic women being seen by other women? Obviously not. Is this any worse than what happens at airports every day? Obviously not.

So why exactly is this a news story? Unless it is to show how the monstrous Zionists are bending over backwards to show cultural sensitivity towards those who would love to see them all dead.

A true, religious, moderate Muslim leader

Reading this, one can almost have hope.

BY BRET STEPHENS
JAKARTA, Indonesia--Suppose for a moment that the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world openly says "I am for Israel." Suppose he believes not only in democracy but in the liberalism of America's founding fathers. Suppose that, unlike so many self-described moderate Muslims who say one thing in English and another in their native language, his message never alters. Suppose this, and you might feel as if you've descended into Neocon Neverland.

In fact, you have arrived in Jakarta and are sitting in the small office of an almost totally blind man of 66 named Abdurrahman Wahid. A former president of Indonesia, he is the spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members. Indonesians know him universally as Gus Dur, a title of affection and respect for this descendant of Javanese kings. In the U.S. and Europe he is barely spoken of at all--which is both odd and unfortunate, seeing as he is easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism.

Conversation begins with some old memories. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wahid, whose paternal grandfather founded the NU in 1926 and whose father was Indonesia's first minister of religious affairs, won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which for 1,000 years had been Sunni Islam's premier institution of higher learning. Mr. Wahid hated it.

"These old sheikhs only let me study Islam's traditional surras in the old way, which was rote memorization," he recalls, speaking in the excellent English he learned as a young man listening to the BBC and Voice of America. "Before long I was fed up. So I spent my time reading books from the USIS [United States Information Service], the Egyptian National Library, and at the cinema. I used to watch three, four movies a day."

As Mr. Wahid saw it, the basic problem with Al-Azhar was that the state interfered in its affairs and demanded intellectual conformity--a lesson he carries with him to the present day. In 1966 he left Cairo for Baghdad University, where he encountered much the same thing: "The teaching [suffered from] conventionalism. You were not allowed to go your own way."

Here Mr. Wahid digresses into Islamic history. "In the second century of Islam, the Imam al-Shafi'i began remodeling the religion," he says. "He put into place the mechanism of understanding everything through law [Shariah]. Now people can't talk about that anymore. We cannot attack al-Shafi'i."

The point is crucial to Mr. Wahid's understanding of Islam as being something broader, deeper and better than the tradition-bound view of life imposed by traditional schools of Islamic law (all the more striking because Mr. Wahid is himself a leading theologian of the Shafi'i school). It is equally crucial to Mr. Wahid's politics, not to mention his relaxed approach to social issues.

"The globalization of ethics is always frightening to people, particularly Islamic radicals," he says in reference to a question about the so-called pornoaksi legislation. For the past three years Indonesian politics have been roiled by an Islamist attempt to label anything they deem sexually arousing to be a form of "porno-action." Mr. Wahid sees this as an assault on pancasila, Indonesia's secularist state philosophy from the time of its founding. He also sees it as an assault on common sense. "Young people like to kiss each other," he says, throwing his hands in the air. "Why not? Just because old people don't do it doesn't mean it's wrong."

Mr. Wahid is equally relaxed about some of the controversies that have recently erupted between Muslims and the West. Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech from last September was "a good speech, though as usual he pointed to the wrong times and the wrong cases." As for the furor over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, he asks "why should we be angry?" And he dismisses Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the al-Jazeera preacher who helped incite the cartoon riots, as an "angry, conventional" thinker.

What really concerns Mr. Wahid is what he sees as the increasingly degraded state of the Muslim mind. That problem is becoming especially acute at Indonesian universities and in the pesantren--the religious boarding schools that graduate hundreds of thousands of students every year. "We are experiencing the shallowing of religion," he says, bemoaning the fact that the boarding schools persist in teaching "conventional"--that word again--Islam.

But Mr. Wahid's critique is not just of formal Islamic education. He also attacks the West's philosophy of positivism, which, he says, "relies too much on the idea of conquering knowledge and mastering scientific principles alone." This purely empirical and essentially soulless view of things, broadly adopted by Indonesia's secular state universities, gives its students a bleak choice: "Either they follow the process or they are outside the process."

As a result, Western-style education in Indonesia has come to represent not just secularism but the negation of religion, to which too many students have responded by embracing fundamentalism. At the University of Indonesia, for example, an estimated three in four students are members or sympathizers of the "Prosperous Justice Party," or PKS, an ultra-radical Islamic party.

This raises the subject of religion and politics. "For us, an Islamic party is not a thing to follow," he says, adding that "religion and morality is tied to person, not a party." To illustrate the point, he observes that religious parties in the Muslim world have more often been the handmaids of dictatorship than democracy. "Whenever governments tried to enforce their institutions they use 'Islamic' people as potential allies." The Front for the Defense of Islam (FPI), a radical vigilante group that uses violent means to suppress "un-Islamic" behavior, was, he observes, originally a creature of the Indonesian military.

So why did Mr. Wahid, as a religious leader, make the choice to go into politics himself? He demurs at the suggestion of choice. "I am against politics, so to speak. In 1984 I tried hard to convince people that the NU should not be in politics." He was overruled by others in the organization, and eventually he founded the Party of National Awakening, or PKB. Yet the party, he insists, is "based on non-Islamic principles," a fact he illustrates by pointing to a nearby aide who is an Indonesian Protestant. "We have to go for plurality, for tolerance."

He also believes that the "only solution" to the challenge of Islamic radicalization in Indonesia is more democracy. But what about the example of Hamas, which came to power through democratic means, and of other groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood that would probably do the same if given the chance? Mr. Wahid's answer is to distinguish between what he calls "full democratization" and the "hollow imitation of democracy" that he sees taking place in Indonesia as well as among Arabs in Palestine and Iraq.

"The problem is not personalities, it is institutions," he says. "For the past 250 years the Americans have had not just Jefferson's concept of the rights of the individual but also Alexander Hamilton's belief in a strong state." In order to function properly, democracy requires competent government that can effectively uphold the rule of law. It also requires a broadly understood concept of self-rule, which is missing in too much of the developing world: "Here, ordinary citizens expect the government to do everything for them."

He therefore takes a fairly dim view of Iraq's democratic prospects. "Iraqis understood that Saddam had caused them trouble," and were grateful to be rid of him, he says. "But as for the U.S. concept of democracy, they don't understand it at all." The problem, he adds, goes double in the rest of the Arab world, where, he says, the prevailing view is that being a democracy is an expression of weakness, while being a dictatorship is a sign of strength.

What's needed, in other words, is for countries like Indonesia and Iraq to find a way to combine effective government with a powerful respect for the rights of the citizen. But how one goes about doing that is itself a deeper problem, a problem of culture. "How do we follow the West without [becoming] Westerners? How do you do that? I don't know."

In fact, Mr. Wahid has begun to develop an answer through two organizations he chairs, the Wahid Institute, run by his daughter Yenny, and LibForAll, an Indonesia- and U.S.-based nonprofit run by American C. Holland Taylor, which works to discredit Islamism's ideology of hatred. "It's up to LibForAll to introduce both sides to Muslims; to show that common principles are also the principles of Islam," Mr. Wahid says. "Hundreds of thousands of Muslim youth learn in countries where there is technological modernity. We need to [nurture] the emergence of a new kind of people who think in terms of being modern but still relate to the past."

In fact, that perfectly describes Mr. Wahid, who is keenly aware of his own roots in both Islamic and Javanese traditions. Among his ancestors are the last Hindu-Buddhist king of the Javanese Majapahit dynasty, and Sunan Kalijogo, a Sufi mystic who married Islamic and local traditions and, according to lore, defeated Islamic extremism in the 16th century. Can Mr. Wahid, heir to this venerable tradition, accomplish the same feat? "Right now, the fundamentalists think they're winning," he once told a friend. "But they're going to wake up one day and realize we beat them."

Possibly the most unbelievable part of his website is a joke page, filled with religious humor (some stolen Jewish jokes reworked as Muslim, but still...)

Unlike the Muslims that too many people pin their hopes on (see my comments here,) who generally have much larger numbers of Western followers than Muslim followers, this guy seems like the real deal - someone who can speak about Islam in the Islamic playing field and not be dismissed easily as a heretic or crackpot.

40 million followers is of course only a small percentage of the Muslim world, and he probably has no Arab followers at all, but this is the sort of person who could truly effect change and show the world's Muslims that there is another way to remain Muslim and not have to blindly follow the corrupt, immoral and shortsighted sheikhs and ayatollahs.

(Robert Spencer disagrees, saying that Wahid's views of the religion are so against a literal reading of the Koran as to make him meaningless. But in any religion that has reformed and changed over time there are going to be new ways to adapt the religion and parts that end up being all but ignored, which is effectively what Wahid is doing - and more importantly, succeeding at. If he has millions of followers, that indicates that his message is being accepted as being a valid interpretation of Islam; that is more important than finding Koranic texts that seem to disprove him. Both Christianity and Judaism have source texts that contradict themselves when read literally; this does not stop the religions from continuing on. Similarly, Islam can thrive with a less-literal interpretation of the Koran as long as there are respected leaders espousing it.)

The next best thing to killing Jews

When Palestinian Arab terrorists get frustrated that they aren't killing as many Jews as they did in the good old days, they sit back and start thinking:

"Jews are smart. Jews like to read. Jews are cultured. Jews are progressive.

"Let's attack all the Palestinian Arab institutions that remind us of Jews!"

And so they do.

In Beit Hanoun one can find the "El-Ata Charitable Society," which offers social and cultural services to people in the area. El-Ata has a library and, today, El-Ata was to open up a new computer lab.

At 1:00 PM, people broke in and burned down the computer lab and library.

Back in February, a theatre and another library in a cultural center was burned down, that time in Jabalia.

What a great society!