Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 05, 2008

Tunnel collapse!

From AP:

Palestinian officials said Monday two Gaza men were killed when a cross-border smuggling tunnel collapsed on them.

The Gaza Health Ministry says five other people were wounded in Monday's collapse. One body was found soon after the collapse and the other several hours later. Security officials said the tunnel was under construction at the time.

Our count of Palestinian Arabs violently killed by their own actions this year rises to 68.

Al Jazeera: Israel forcing Gazans to burn 1.5 million chicks alive

This is one of the more ridiculous pieces of propaganda I've seen yet, as Palestinian Arabs claim that they must burn 1.5 million chicks alive because they have no electricity for incubators.

It makes one wonder how people managed to raise and feed chickens before there was electricity. It also raises the question of why a supposedly starving people cannot eat 1.5 million chicks.

PETA has yet to weigh in on the situation.

Meanwhile, those peace-loving Gazans shot 11 mortars towards the Nahal Oz crossing today alone, where they get their fuel from.

Technical note

All morning I have not been able to get to Imageshack, which had been my preferred image hosting site for at least three years. Many of my pictures are not appearing on the site, which is frustrating. I changed hosts for my latest previous re-posting of "Plastics" so I could show the images, but if things don't fix themselves I might be spending a lot of time fixing old posts.

"Plastics" (repost)

As Yom Ha'atzmaut is this week I will be reposting some of my earlier articles that highlight how amazing the State of Israel is.

This post was originally written in September, 2005, and has been slightly expanded. It is an old favorite of Soccer Dad's (and I imagine that EBoZ will like it too.)
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Israel in 1946 was in that strange state between World War II and statehood. It was still unclear if the world would allow the Jews to establish their own sovereign nation. Jews and Arabs still lived under occupation, and the British had control over both groups in practical day-to-day matters.

But the Jews were always looking towards building their own country, their own infrastructure, their own future - no matter what the politicians or generals or bureaucrats did.

Here is one small example that is not so small.

The Jews realized that they live in a tiny area with practically no natural resources. Anything they would create would have to be made from only the crudest of ingredients together with brainpower. And in the 1940s, twenty years before Mr. Mcguire was to give his famous advice to Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate", one of the brightest areas of research and manufacturing growth was in...plastics.

The amount of planning necessary to build an entire industry from scratch is immense. To even think of doing it during a time of terror and war could almost be thought of as foolhardy. Yet the Weizmann Institute continued on in its plastics research throughout the decade, gaining important partners and allies:

As partition and war loomed, threatening the Jewish state before it could even have a chance, the Jews of Palestine continued to do what they had to do: to prepare for the day after. From a research and development initiative, these Zionists started to think bigger, moving from research into creating an entire new industry:

The foresight that a few Palestinian Jews had in 1946, that they kept planning and laying the groundwork for during the War of Independence, allowed them to move from R&D to actual products while the embers of conflict were still glowing:

Two groups of people, both with ostensibly the same aims of their own independent country - yet how they went about actually building it could not be more different. One group chooses terror and hate, while the other just quietly builds what has to be built - no excuses, no whining, just results.

The truth about 1948

Midstream Magazine has an article this month by David Guttman, who fought with the Palmach in 1948. While the article is not online, it is an expanded version of one he had written for FrontPage a few years ago.

The Midstream article expands on the severe paucity of guns and ammunition in the first phase of the war. But three main points from both articles are critical:

Some facts I can swear to:

A. The Palestinians initiated the war that led to their Naqba. Troops from Tel-Aviv eventually conquered Jaffa, but it was Arab fighters in Jaffa who, from the towers of their mosques, first fired into Tel-Aviv, and turned the intercity border areas into a battleground.

B. The first refugees were not Arabs but Yemenite Jews, from the Tel Aviv-Jaffa No-Man's Land that Arab aggression had created. Unlike the Palestinians, theirs was only a temporary refugee status. Instead of packing them away and forgetting them in squalid refugee camps, their Ashkenazi compatriots took them into their own neighborhoods. For the most part the Yemenites camped out in Tel Aviv apartment lobbies, and used the cooking and sanitary facilities of the permanent residents. When Jaffa fell to Irgun soldiers, they went back home.

C. The Palestinians fled for many reasons and from many threats, both real and imaginary, and that thousands upon thousands fled when nobody pushed them. As an example, when my unit occupied the abandoned British police station at Sidn'a Ali in the Sharon Plain, British troops were still stationed in the vicinity, and we had to train and patrol with our few guns (antiquated or homemade) concealed. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Sidn'a Ali were long gone, way before we could have pushed them out, and while the Brits were still in place to protect them from us. Needless to say, in the absence of any Palestinian targets (save for some abandoned camels) we committed no rapes.

I don't know why the Sidn'a Ali people fled, but they did leave a caretaker in place, as a sign that they intended to return once those pesky Jews had been ethnically cleansed. They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well.

They guessed wrong; and the Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women; and because there were so many Sidn'a Alis. To relieve their shame they stridently and continually demand that their unsavory history be rewritten and reversed.

This is the real "Nakba." While some Arabs were indeed driven from their homes, and some indeed left at the behest of their leaders, the vast majority voluntarily left out of fear of fighting combined with the expectation that they would return as victors; with the idea that if things don't work out they could always integrate into the neighboring Arab countries and start anew.

But their neighbors had other ideas.

Hamas has killed almost 60 "Mohammeds"

Firas Press (Arabic) reports:

A media spokesman for the Fatah movement issued a list of nearly sixty people carrying the name of the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) who they said that Hamas killed in Gaza between the elections in December/January 2006 until their coup on June 13, 2007.

The article goes on to list all of them.

Apparently, profaning the name of Mohammed is much worse for Islamists than actually killing people with that name.

UNRWA runs out of fuel - guess whose fault it is?

Once again, the UNRWA in Gaza will have to curtail some of its operations due to a fuel shortage.

Whose fault is it?

AFP writes:

The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees is to suspend its food aid distribution in Gaza on Monday because of a lack of fuel caused by the Israeli blockade, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Sounds like Israel's fault, right?

Reuters adds a little more info:

The United Nations is set to halt delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip on Monday because its vehicles have run out of fuel, a U.N. official said.
Gaza has been facing a fuel shortage because of Israeli restrictions on supplies and a strike by Palestinian fuel distributors.

Slightly better , but go down a few more paragraphs to the end of the article and all of a sudden you learn a couple of tiny, salient facts:

An Israeli official said some diesel fuel intended for Gaza's power station had passed through on Sunday, but the transfer was halted when militants attacked the Nahal Oz fuel depot on the Israeli side of the Gaza border with mortar bombs.

The official added that as well as diesel for electricity and cooking gas, Israel was prepared to transfer petrol and diesel for vehicles but he said Gazans were not able to take delivery.

The Gaza fuel association said it went on strike to protest over Israel's supply limits which were cut back sharply after Palestinian militants attacked the Nahal Oz depot last month killing two Israeli civilians.

One would think that Gazans, supposedly so desperate for fuel, shooting mortars at their fuel suppliers would be somewhat more newsworthy than a throwaway paragraph at the end of a story implying Israel is withholding fuel to cause a humanitarian crisis. In fact, Israel tried to send the needed amounts over and were stopped by terrorists. Shouldn't that be made clear in the lede?

But then again, AFP and Reuters might have a little bit of an agenda.

UK Holocaust-denying professor loses job

Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, a professor of astronomy at University College, London, has been fired for his rather interesting views.

For example, he wrote about visitors to Auschwitz:

Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some forty-five thousand volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its the theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there. Let’s hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, some of which still exist, where the postman would collect the mail twice-weekly.

Not surprisingly, he is also a 9/11 (and 7/7) "truther" claiming that both attacks were done at the behest of Zionists.

No doubt he will bitterly complain about his loss of "freedom of speech," although no one is stopping him from continuing to publish at "revisionist" sites like CODOH.

Palestinian Arab lie #82,512

Spotted at a "Comment is Free" article at the Guardian, which should probably be renamed Comments are Worthless...

Last week in Gaza, Israel not only continued depriving the people of fuel and cooking gas, it held back supplies to UN agencies such as Unrwa - the agency devoted to the health, education, food supplies and more of Gaza's poor and deprived population. In hindering the operations of the UN, Israel was hindering the Quartet, of which the UN is a part.

Of course, it was Hamas that stopped fuel from going to UNRWA, not Israel - a fact that even UNRWA admits, and excuses.

Iran threatens Europe, no one notices

From IRNA:

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki here on Saturday warned European countries not to cross Iran's red lines.
Mottaki made the remark in response to the new proposal made by Group 5+1 in London.
The European countries are well aware of Iran's red lines, he underlined.
During his joint press conference with his Yemeni counterpart Abu Bakr al-Qurbi, Mottaki referred to his recent meeting with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in Kuwait and said he was informed that on May 2nd the Group 5+1 would gather in London to write a letter for Tehran.
"I told him that you are quite familiar with Iran's red lines, therefore, you should avoid crossing those lines," Mottaki said.

It's only been three weeks since reports surfaced of a new Iranian missile launch site that had the range to reach most of Europe.

The 1920 "Nakba" (Steven Plaut)

From the Jewish Press (excerpts):

The authoritative source on the origin of “nakba” is none other than George Antonius, supposedly the first “official historian of Palestinian nationalism.” Like so many “Palestinians,” he actually wasn’t – Palestinian, that is. He was a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years afterward was the official text used at British universities.

The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in 1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland.

Before World War I, the entire Levant – including what is now Israel, the “occupied territories,” Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – was comprised of Ottoman Turkish colonies. When Allied forces drove the Turks out of the Levant, the two main powers, Britain and France, divided the spoils between them. Britain got Palestine, including what is now Jordan, while France got Lebanon and Syria.

The problem was that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel colonial powers – one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed “Palestinians.”

The bulk of the Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently and murderously.

On page 312 of The Arab Awakening, Antonius writes, “The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”

The original “nakba” had nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba – at this catastrophe– because they found deeply offensive the very idea that they should be independent from Syria and Syrians.

In the 1920’s, the very suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic nationality was enough to send those same Arabs out into the streets to murder and plunder violently in outrage. If they themselves insisted they were simply Syrians who had migrated to the Land of Israel, by what logic are the Palestinian Arabs deemed entitled to their own state today?

Flag tilt

From the LA Times Middle East blog:

Israelis have a knack for doing things backwards, sideways and upside-down — anything but straight. The country's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was famous for standing on his head. And now, even the Israeli flag is upside-down.
Israel's Bank Hapoalim printed the flags, which were given out free with the weekend papers, as a well-meant gesture of corporate patriotism before Independence Day next week. Thing is, they're printed wrong. The Star of David is misaligned in reference to the stripes, and essentially it rests on its side rather than its tip. Oops. "This is what happens, apparently, when we leave our Zionist creation up to the Chinese," said Israel Radio's Amikam Rothman this morning.

The design of the flag was first displayed in 1885 and first used in 1897, until being adopted by the state in 1948.

This is the flag I got with today's Maariv newspaper.