Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 30, 2008

June Qassam calendar

As usual, this is far from complete, and it is more to show how ignored the Qassam issue is rather than to show how many are being fired. Many Qassams never make it in the news, and the rare times that the IDF publishes statistics shows that I am usually undercounting . Also, these are Qassams that don't make it to Israel; many that are fired explode in Gaza itself, often causing damage or even deaths.

This list does not include mortars being shot from Gaza, which are usually much more numerous on any given day. The mortars are turning deadlier as well. It also does not count the occasional rocket from Lebanon. It does attempt to count Grad/Katyusha rockets from Gaza.

June 2008

Previous calendars:

May 2008
April 2008

March 2008
February 2008
January
December 2007
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February

German sports knucklehead

From JTA:

A German sports expert has raised hackles for saying that Israeli Olympic athletes wanted to die to gain sympathy for Israel.

Arnd Krueger, director of the Sport Sciences institute at the University of Goettingen, said at a recent conference that this was the only way he could explain why the athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists in the 1972 Munich Olympic Village did not leave the village, even though they had felt insecure there. He later told Ha'aretz that he had been at the Munich games as a young reporter, and that one of the Israeli athletes had told him the village did not seem safe.

At the conference, Krueger also suggested that Israelis had a "different concept of the body" from that in other western countries, which he also linked to their supposed "self-sacrifice." According to his thesis, Israel tries "with all possible means" to avoid disabilities, and he added that Israel has a higher abortion rate than other western countries.

According to Der Spiegel, Krueger repeated his theories in a written statement to the university, with the disclaimer that he is not an anti-Semite.

Nah, of course not. He's just projecting his own Aryan theories on Israel.

By the way, Israel's abortion rate is listed at #65 out of 95 countries listed on this website, well behind the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France and, of course, Germany. (It is still way too high, though. If you are interested in lowering that number, give generously here.)

See also SnoopytheGoon's take.

Palestinian Arab women killed in 2007

PCHR came out with a report last month on human rights violations in the PA. They significantly undercount the number of Palestinian Arabs killed by each other, but even according to their own numbers here is an interesting statistic:

Total number of Palestinian Arab women killed by their own people in 2007:	47
Number of Palestinian Arab women killed only by "honor killings" in 2007:	14
Total number of Palestinian Arab women killed by Israel in 2007:	4

(My own count was that 41 women were killed, so I will adjust my 2007 count upwards by 6.)

Those dastardly Western X-Rays

From AFP (h/t Global Freezing):

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the target of an "X-ray radiation plot" during his trip to Rome for the UN food summit earlier this month, the official IRNA news agency reported on Monday.
The news agency quoted Iran's ambassador to Italy, Abolfazl Zohrehvand, as saying that the plot was to use extreme radiation in the place where Ahmadinejad was due to stay.
The diplomat spoke out after Ahmadinejad himself charged that he had been the target of an assassination plot during his landmark trip to Iraq in March and his aides spoke of a similar attempt in Rome.
"One day before Ahmadinejad's trip, I checked and found out that the (security) X-ray machine set up in the place where he was staying gave off excessive radiation," Zohrehvand said.
He said that the regular radiation level of such equipment in Italy was "300" but on this machine it had reached "800".
He gave no indication of the units he was using but radiation is normally measured in millirems with the average American experiencing a total annual exposure of an average of 360, according to medical websites.
"First we suspected the machine was broken and after replacing it with another one it turned out that the radiation was controlled from another source," the ambassador said.
"When the president entered this place, the radiation increased and exceeded '1,000' so that the intensity of the radiation was completely felt inside the building," he added.
The diplomat did not say if the place where Ahmadinejad was staying was a hotel or official residence.
Ahmadinejad said in mid-June that enemies had planned to kidnap and kill him in Iraq but the plot was foiled after the Iranian delegation changed their travel plans.
Some reformist newspapers openly ridiculed his suggestion, with one daily saying that if the Americans had wanted to kidnap him they would have done it during Ahmadinejad's annual visit to the UN General Assembly in New York.

To quote the Kinks, "Paranoia, the destroyer."

Fatah accuses Hamas of "collaboration"

In the wake of yesterday's arrest by Hamas of the Fatah Gaza spokesman Abu Qusay (since released,) Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades accused Hamas of arresting him on the orders of "their Zionist masters."

Once again proving that anyone considering Fatah to be "moderate" is nuts.

Palestinian Police Phunnies XXXI

From Ma'an:

Israeli border police pursued and arrested a Palestinian man driving a stolen Israeli jeep on Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported.

According to Maariv, the man was a high-ranking Palestinian police officer from the Barghouthi family, who had been wanted by Israel.

Amit Louzin, the director of a company named "Autoran," which helped the police track the car electronically, said, "A new Mitsubishi Bajero jeep was stolen from Qisariya [in Israel] two weeks ago, just a few days after the owners received it from the company. It seems that robbers used a copy of the key, and that they knew the secret start-up code. Autoran knew that the jeep was taken to Ramallah, but the Israeli military did not allow the company to enter the West Bank and try to get the car back."

Autoran continued to monitor the car and until last Thursday it was seen traveling from Ramallah towards a village near Israeli settlement of Ofra. The company alerted the border police who tracked down the jeep and arrested the driver.

It is always heartening to know that not only are the police of Israel's "peace partners" the biggest criminals, but also that their crimes are far more innovative and organized than their policing.

UPDATE: It gets better:

The jeep had PA police license plates, a communications system, a siren and blue police lights.

h/t Yerushalimey

Now, we can say that Hezbollah won the war

It has always been problematic to say that Hezbollah won the 2006 Lebanon war, notwithstanding their bragging about it. After all, Hezbollah and Lebanon suffered far more during the war than Israel did, and the UN resolution that ended it did place severe restrictions on Hezbollah, even if they knew they were going to ignore it.

Unfortunately, in one sense, Israel just handed Hezbollah its victory.

In February, 2006, months before Regev and Goldwasser were abducted, Hezbollah chief thug said at a large public rally in Lebanon, "We are working on making this year the year to free our brothers in Israeli detention. Samir Kantar and his friends, which will in turn pave way to free our Syrian and Jordanian brothers detained in Israeli prisons."

In other words, Hezbollah planned to kidnap Israeli soldiers specifically to bargain them for the disgusting child-killer Samir Kuntar months before it happened. While he later stated that he did not anticipate that Israel would go to war over the issue, this was his explicit motivation.

Now, two years later, Israel is ensuring that Nasrallah's plan worked as well as he had hoped. And from all indications, he didn't even have to keep the two brave soldiers alive in order to effect this swap.

I cannot imagine the pain that the Regev and Goldwasser families have been going through, but giving Hezbollah their stated prize - in which they give up nothing that is of any value to themselves - is doing nothing less than giving them total retroactive victory in the Lebanon war, by their own stated goals. We know by now that the UN forces in Lebanon are not enforcing their own mandate and that Hezbollah has more than recouped their losses from 2006, and now Israel is doing nothing less than conceding defeat.

The sickening piece of filth called Samir Kuntar was the only thing that stopped Hezbollah from being able to declare total victory. Now, victory is theirs.

And now we need to examine the second half of Nasrallah's remarks from 2006, that Israel's release of Kuntar will "pave the way" for more such releases. Just as the Shebaa Farms is not the end of Hezbollah's territorial claims, neither is Kuntar the end of Hezbollah's goals in gaining prisoners. Nasrallah has already shown that he can get Israel to do whatever he wants, even if not as directly as he would wish. Kadima is Nasrallah's puppet, albeit a reluctant one.

Israel's current government has just made the lives 121 soldiers and 44 civilians who were killed during the Second Lebanon War to be worthless. They died, literally, for nothing. Not only that, but Israel has just created circumstances where it is a certainty that there will be more attempted abductions and murders.

This exchange is the height of immorality, ensuring the suffering of countless future Regev and Goldwasser families. Their pain, as heartbreaking as it is, does not justify this capitulation of Israel to the demands of Nasrallah and the pigs he commands.

The most reliable PalArabs are the most bloodthirsty

Despite the mounting number of violations of the "cease fire," all indications are that Hamas is really trying to adhere to its terms. This is evidenced not only in Hamas statements made in Arabic but also in their actions.

Hamas has gone on a spree of arresting members of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, which perhaps is nothing new, but their latest arrest is noteworthy: they abducted Abu Qusay, the Fatah spokesman who on Thursday and Friday criticized Hamas for the truce.

While Hamas has acted in duplicitous ways in the past, they have always been comparatively far more honest than their Fatah counterparts. Even in the "truce" of late 2006, Hamas could argue that they had never formally accepted a truce nor had they agreed to enforce one among other groups.

Obviously Hamas continues to smuggle explosives and weapons into Gaza in opposition to the Israeli understanding of the "calming" (Hamas never publicly accepted that position, as far as I can tell.) And it is entirely possible that Hamas considers this truce minimally binding because they made these promises to fellow Muslims in Egypt and not to the Jews directly. It does, however, bring up an interesting question:

What should a state that cares about democracy and human rights do when its most credible negotiating partner has zero concern for democracy or human rights? What is the moral course to take when the conditions of the agreement involve the partner acting immorally?

For better or for worse, both ancient and modern Israel is situated in a really bad neighborhood, and it has enough of a hard time existing in relative security without adding concerns about how the neighbors act towards themselves. On the other hand, any ultimate peace - if it is remotely possible - will be based on all the actors in the region accepting basic human rights for everyone else, and any short-term solutions might endanger the longer-term ones.

I don't have a good answer.

Turkish TV star responsible for 6 Arab divorces

Firas Press reports on a Turkish TV drama that stars a handsome character named Muhannad (when dubbed into Arabic.) Apparently, he is so good looking that he is now responsible for 6 divorces in the Arab world.

The most recent case was ion Saudi Arabia, where a woman complained that her husband didn't show emotion the way her dreamy Muhannad does. This caused the husband to get upset and he divorced her on the spot.

In Jordan, a man divorced his wife after seeing that she put a picture of the Muhannad character on her cell phone.

Four cases occured in Syria, including one where a man overheard his wife jokingly say that she just wanted to spend one night with "Muhannad" and then she could die.

If my research is correct, the actor playing that part is a former "Best Model of the World" named Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ. The name of the show is Noor, which is the name of Muhannad's wife in the Arabic version (translated as "Light" in the Firas autotranslated article.)

Clan clashes!

From Ma'an:

Akram Abu al-A'atayah, 60, was killed by a relative Saturday afternoon in what appears to be a family fued.

Sources close to the family said that Abu al- A'tayah, a resident of the al- Sheja'iyah neighborhood east of the Gaza city, was stabbed with a knife by a family member and was killed instantly.

Tulkarem – Ma'an - Security sources in Tulkarem said that a local man had burned his uncle during a family clash Saturday.

The police in Tulkarem arrested the attacker following an initial investigation. According to the police, the man poured petrol over his uncle during a family clash. The Thabet Thabet Hospital reported that the man has third degree burns all over his body.

The police have opened a file for continued investigation into the incident.

Our 2008 PalArab self-death count rises to 101.

Man tortured to death in Hamas prison

PalPress reports on a 57-year old man who was arrested six days ago by Hamas, and whose family was informed by Hamas today that he had unfortunately died in custody.

He was in good health before this sudden, coincidental deterioration that just happened to occur while he was under Hamas' benevolent control.

The 2008 PalArab self-death count now hits the grim milestone of 100.

UPDATE: Firas Press says the man was 72.

Friday links

YNet: 3 female paramedics save lives in Gaza

MEMRI: Liberal Syrian Journalist Abi Hassan: My Day in Haifa

PalPress (autotranslated): Attempted bombing at Islamic University in Gaza

Israel eNews: Israeli Musician Idan Raichel Stars On Al-Jazeera