Wednesday, July 09, 2008

  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
In a recent interview by the Petra news agency in Jordan, King Abdullah answered an interesting question:
Q: Another very hot topic around town is the Jordan Festival and the fact that a company called PUBLICIS is organizing the event. Some are saying that PUBLICIS has close ties with Israel. The minister of tourism and antiquities has denied that. Many are still calling for a boycott. It is important that we hear directly from you what the truth is.

A: I recently discussed this issue with the prime minister; PUBLICIS is not the company that is organizing the Jordan Festival. It is another company called Visiteurs Du Soir.

Today, Arab artists are contemplating canceling their performances and Arab tourists who were planning on visiting Jordan are canceling their trips. The government is now wasting its valuable time and resources trying to do damage control. All this because some so-called journalists are too careless and incompetent to do their basic work; it is shameful. This is a case study on how to shoot yourself in the foot, on how to be irresponsible, on how to do a massive disservice to your country and your people and on how to stop our development. Indeed, our worst enemies lie within. Should Jordan's future be held hostage to rumors and gossip? And should false information be the reference for our Jordanian press? Should we remain silent until the truth becomes the victim of irresponsible journalism?

Let us assume for a moment that it is in fact PUBLICIS that is helping to organize the event. In fact, I cannot think of a major company that does not do business with Israel. If all these companies are off-limits then we are in deep trouble. For example, Intel whose chips power 80 per cent of computers around the world has billions of dollars of investments in Israel; its closest competitor AMD also has large investments in Israel. Does that mean we should throw our computers away? This is nonsense. If we follow this line of thought, then we will be doing the best service to Israel. All it has to do is use the best technology and best talent in the world and automatically it would be off-limits to us.
This was a good answer, but it reveals a bit more than Abdullah intended.

It is good in the sense that it is refreshing for an Arab leader to acknowledge that the weapon of the Arab boycott against Israel has been, and will remain, counterproductive for all Arabs.

But notice how Abdullah frames it: "If we follow this line of thought, then we will be doing the best service to Israel. All it has to do is use the best technology and best talent in the world and automatically it would be off-limits to us." The assumption made here is that Israel considers Jordan to be a mortal enemy and only wishes for it to fail economically, which would be "the best service to Israel."

Even the most pragmatic Arab leader, and the one who most desires peace with Israel, still regards the Arab/Israeli conflict to be a zero-sum game where if one side gains, the other side loses and vice-versa.

Why on earth would Israel want Jordan to fail? Jordan, and specifically the Hashemite dynasty that rules Jordan, has been Israel's most reliable Arab neighbor for most of its history. Israel wants Jordan to thrive, and it wants all its neighbors to act more like Jordan does. If Jordan would have maintained its claim on the West Bank, 99% of WB Palestinian Arabs would now be living productive lives as full Jordanian citizens and there would be far less terror coming from the West Bank.

The only reason that Abdullah could possibly think that Israel wants Jordan to fail is if he, for all his positive attributes, is still projecting the deep Arab hatred of Israel onto Israel itself. He may be practical about Israel but he will never, ever truly accept its existence as a state with the same rights as his own. He still wants Israel to disappear, so he assumes that the feeling is mutual.

And if Israel's best friend in the Arab world thinks this way, the chances for a lasting peace are, unfortunately, infinitesimal.
  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday, 3 mortars were fired from Gaza to Israel in what I believe was the seventh violation of the "calm" from Gaza (at least six mortar/rocket attacks and one shooting.)

Unlike previous times during the "cease fire," however, Israel didn't close the crossings from Gaza today in response.

On the contrary - today Israel allowed nearly 200 Gaza businessmen to enter Israel and the West Bank, according to Palestine Press Agency.

Israel also allowed the Sufa crossing to open and is now allowing material for school uniforms to enter Gaza.

Now for a trip down memory lane.

June 21:
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev told Israel National News Saturday night, "The understandings with the Egyptians specifically state that there will be no hostile fire from any group into Israel, and there will be an end to the arms smuggling and the arms buildup.

"Anyone who says otherwise is either unfamiliar with the understandings or deliberately trying to undermine them," he said.

June 24:
"This is a blatant violation of the calm, and we will weigh options," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said after the rockets struck.


July 1:
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday warned that his country will make forceful response if Palestinian militants continue to violate the Gaza Strip ceasefire.

Israel has shown some patience with the ceasefire violations, while this should not be perceived as weakness, local daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted him as saying at a conference.

"Should the lull not be maintained, we will respond with full force," he was quoted as saying. "Nobody will shy away from the need to retaliate harshly."

July 8:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said recently that a truce "cannot be enforced in full immediately, and therefore Israel has and will show patience; but that patience should not be misconstrued as weakness. If the ceasefire is violated, we will know how to react."

Notice a trend?
  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday it was announced that the international community has paid $920 million to the PA in the past six months.

The PA has already admitted that 58% of its budget is spent in Gaza, despite the international sanctions against the terror group Hamas that controls it.

So the world has supplied Hamas with over a half billion dollars so far this year. Even if Hamas doesn't get it directly, it benefits mightily, allowing it to gain revenue from "taxes" as well as direct theft, not to mention making sure that none of the money that Hamas gets from other sources needs to be used for helping the people it has control over.

Hamas may gain more monetarily from international largesse than from Iran.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Jordan Times:
"Islam will defeat terrorism" was the title of an international conference that organised in Moscow last week by the “Fund for Support of Islamic Culture, Science and Education”.
Whew, that's a relief. Let's look at the details:
The final statement of the conference, issued at the end of two days of intensive, but cordial, deliberations by participants representing Islamic cultural and interfaith institutions and organisations from all over the world, affirmed the need to emphasise the sanctity of all people’s dignity, their life and their property, warning that any violation of these rights constitutes a grave religious sin, as well as a heinous human crime.
Translated into terms the Western audience might understand:
"Dignity" - if a Muslim is insulted, he is justified in killing you.
"Property" - if a Muslim ever owned property it belongs to Muslims forever, and anyone else who says he owns it may be killed. Think Spain (Andalusia).

Paradoxically, this statement is much more easily used to justify terrorism than to combat it. Of course, since they didn't bother to define exactly what "terrorism" means, saying that Islam is against terrorism is fairly meaningless.
The statement confirmed other significant principles, such as: 1) “peace and justice are basic standards for governing relations between individuals and societies, and war according to Islam is a state dictated only by the occurrence of aggression or injustice, and should cease with the disappearance of such causes”;
This means that the definition of "justice" and "injustice" is purely Islamic, and Islam will refuse to accept anyone else's definitions. Again, the result can easily be the support of what any sane person would call terrorism. The word "justice" is the most-used keyword against everything Israel does, because all actions are viewed through a lens that cannot accept - on an ideological level - the existence of a Jewish state on what is perceived as Islamic lands. Israel's very existence, in Islamic terms, is pure "injustice." It is not only a short journey from there to terror against Israeli civilians - it is a logical next step.
2) “Islam is a religion of life, peace, healthy environment, development and coexistence amongst all people”;
As we have seen in the past, Islamic conceptions of "coexistence" is usually "Islam will dominate, dhimmi religions will be tolerated as second class, infidels will be erased from the planet."
3) Islam does, in clear and absolute terms, reject and condemn terrorism, those who finance and support it and those who tend to exploit its horrifying consequences for their purposes and interests.
And as the article goes on to say:
In fact, many participants’ statements rightly included condemnation of terror, as well as virtuous calls for eliminating such evil from our world. They described terror as the pestilence of the time or as a barbaric human epidemic. But most were referring to terror as an abstract phenomenon, with the ambiguity allowing unrestricted opportunity for anyone to apply the condemnation to his own “terrorist enemies”.

But defining terrorism has never been an easy matter, and therefore it would be unrealistic to expect the Moscow meeting to accomplish what others for decades have failed to achieve. And despite the vagueness, the underlying objective was to distance a modern version of Islam not only from terror, but also from providing advocates of violence and terror with religious justification for their evil actions.

Unfortunately, the conference attendees' final statements could be used exactly for such justification.

Until Muslims realize the inherent contradictions between their stated stand against terror and the details that can be used to justify it, they will continue to be rightly blamed for not doing enough to fight true terror from a purely Islamic ideological/religious perspective.

OBL's justifications for his fatwa against the United States that led to 9/11 fit exactly into the statements that came out of this conference that supposedly preaches moderation. He felt that since US troops were on sacred Saudi territory and that the US was not treating Muslims with proper dignity.

It is not too heartening to see an Islamic "anti-terror" conference whose statements can be used to support the most heinous acts of terror.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Another "news"story that illuminates far more about the mental state of the writers than about any real facts, courtesy of AlterInfo.net (it was on uruknet as well):
In a dispatch posted at 6:55pm Baghdad time Saturday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that 55 "Israeli" companies were now working in Iraq under assumed names.

Yaqen reported that the Zionist firms operate in a variety of fields, including infrastructure and marketing. The Zionist Mossad secret police agency had established the Kurdish Lending Bank with its headquarters in as-Sulaymaniyah in the US-founded Kurdish separatist enclave in northern Iraq.

The report indicated that the Kurdish Lending Bank had a secret mission of purchasing vast tracts of agricultural land, oil fields, and residential areas in the vicinity of the cities of al-Mawsil and Kirkuk, both oil-rich cities in northern Iraq. The massive land purchases facilitate the effort by the US-backed Kurdish separatist Peshmergah militia to expel Arab and Turkoman residents of northern Iraq so that the oil-rich area can be annexed to the Kurdish separatist state under US and Zionist hegemony.
So the Mossad is in the banking industry and those wily Jews are buying sacred Arab land, which means (in Arabspeak) that they are stealing it.

Now you know!
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Arab News:
A news website in Saudi Arabia reported this week that “angry reactions hit the Saudi streets at the new extra charge under the name the Sept. 11 Security Charge” being imposed by British Midland International (BMI) on Saudi tourists traveling to London.

This is downright humiliation as the increase in the price of air tickets is only imposed on Saudi citizens,” the website quoted a number of Saudis as saying. It added that the move “has serious implications and that it destroys all the roads being built to maintain links with these people after 9/11.”

The website, sabq.com, said that some observers in the Kingdom believed that the charge might have been imposed for reasons other than those announced, namely to counter the steady increase in oil prices. “If this is the reason, it is also meant to punish Saudis since Saudi Arabia is the largest oil exporting country.”

Robert Lickley, commercial development manager for BMI in Saudi Arabia, explained to Arab News yesterday the exact cause of the problem. It too involved a website — this time BMI’s own booking page. “It is a requirement by law that notification of a 9/11 surcharge is put on the ticket of every Internet booking made for flights originating from the United States,” he said, adding that in updating their website, the information concerning the 9/11 surcharge had been carried across to the BMI site that included information and booking forms for the rest of the airline’s network.

“It was a simple clerical error, and when we discovered it, we corrected it immediately,” Lickley said. “However, the error was online for sufficient time that a number of observant Saudis saw it.”

What they were unaware of was that the 9/11 surcharge information is on every Internet ticket for every airline flight originating in the US, he said.

“There are absolutely no special surcharges for flights to or from Saudi Arabia,” Lickley said.

Security surcharges have been a fact of life on all airlines and therefore on ticket prices for several years. They are not specific to any group or nation and help meet the cost of tightened security for airlines since 9/11.
Isn't it interesting that all of British Midland's customers worldwide saw the surcharge, but only the Saudis assumed that it was directed at them alone?

Do you think that perhaps they are a tad sensitive that their wonderful kingdom spawned most of the 9/11 hijackers?

Finally, notice the irony as the Saudis claim to be the victims of bias at the exact same time they refer to all Westerners as "these people."

If the Saudis had any sense of true responsibility, they would have offered to pay the entire cost of the 9/11 surcharge and save millions of travelers the money that they have to spend now because of the culture of hate that Saudi Wahhabi ideology has wrought.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From JTA:
On the first day of class at a new kosher cooking school in Brooklyn, 22-year-old Erica Zimmerman carefully slices raw potatoes into a stainless steel bowl.

Zimmerman, a student at New York University, says she’s always been interested in cooking, but as an observant Jew only wanted a kosher school. Why learn to cook food she'd never be able to eat?

That limited her options.

“The only kosher cooking school is in Israel, and I can’t take off a year to go,” she says. “Then I heard about this new school on Facebook, and I jumped at the opportunity.”

On Monday, the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts opened in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush.

The six-week, $4,500 intensive course, run in cooperation with the continuing education department of Kingsborough Community College, is the only professional kosher cooking school in North America.

According to director Jesse Blondel and founder Elka Pinson, it is the only one in the world besides the Jerusalem Culinary Institute, a 5-year-old school in Israel.

Pinson, whose husband runs a housewares store on Coney Island Avenue, the main shopping street in the neighborhood, has been dreaming of establishing such a school for years. Last year she took over the top floor of the shop and advertised for a chef/teacher on craigslist.

Blondel, a 26-year-old Brooklyn native, responded. The kitchen manager at the Culinary Center of New York, he was seeking a new position. Organizing and directing a new cooking school seemed just the ticket.

“I realized there isn’t any other kosher cooking school, I’m Jewish, and I grew up not far from here,” he says.

Pinson and Blondel opened negotiations with Kingsborough, and ironed out the details in May. That left little more than a month to set up the room, build the curriculum and advertise for students.

Thirteen people showed up this week for class. On the first day, they sit around a large steel table intently watching chef Mark D’Alessandro, the school’s main teacher, demonstrate the finer techniques of chopping vegetables.

Holding up half an onion, D'Alessandro shows how to place it on the cutting board and dice it finely by making several horizontal slices before chopping vertically with his chef’s knife.

“There’s no machine that can do that for you?” one student asks anxiously.

D’Alessandro looks at her balefully.

“That’s the second time my heart has been broken,” he says to muffled laughter.

All of the students keep kosher to one degree or another. The class is about evenly split by gender, and range from a 16-year-old boy to a grandmother in her 60s.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Firas actually allowed my comment.

So far, the only response is "Here they are heroes you sons of conquest, not those who hand in their weapons to the Zionists"
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
A Syrian sheikh just issued a fatwa against T-shirts that show pictures of the stars of the phenomenally popular TV show "Noor."

The sheikh said that it is forbidden by the Prophet, that angels do not appear in rooms that show pictures like these and that her hair is uncovered so it is not allowed to look at her.

In addition, since angels cannot appear where these pictures are displayed, then if these youths wear such T-shirts to mosques for prayer they are stopping the angels from showing up, presumably making the prayers unacceptable to Allah.
  • Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Since the announcement that the body of terrorist Dalal Mughrabi would be involved in the "prisoner swap" with Hezbollah, Israel's Fatah peace partners have been celebrating and articles have been written to remind all Palestinian Arabs about their heroine.

The problem is that she was involved in a massacre of civilians, including 13 children as well as a female American photographer. How can Palestinian Arabs publicly celebrate a terrorist without feeling like hypocrites? After all, fatwa after fatwa claims that it is against sharia to target women and children, which is precisely what Mughrabi did. So how can Palestinian Arabs keep lionizing someone so despicable?

Simple. They lie.

Firas Press' biography of Mughrabi, and others I have seen, say that the bus that was hijacked and ultimately firebombed was filled with "Zionist soldiers" and not the families of bus drivers going to a picnic. They also claim that they killed or injured "hundreds" of Israeli soldiers during the attack, another piece of fiction.

This is a recurring motif - redefining every terror victim in Israel as being a "soldier," meaning that they are all legitimate targets. This way their celebrations and handing out candy doesn't cause any unnecessary angst among those who still might maintain shreds of morality.

Here is yet another example of the veracity of Palestinian Arab "news" and "history" sources.

UPDATE: I commented on the article:
She was not a martyr, she was a murderer. The bus she hijacked did not have soldiers, it had families going on a picnic. 13 children were murdered by her and her group. To praise her is disgusting.

You are lying to your readers.
I autotranslated it to Arabic (and then back to English to make sure that the message stayed roughly the same.) We'll see if they post it.
YNet:
Two people were killed and two were injured in an explosion at a Hamas training camp near the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, Palestinian sources reported Tuesday morning.

The circumstances of the blast were unclear, but a source in the Strip said it caused a building in the training facility to collapse.

The Israel Defense Forces has yet to comment on the incident, which is believed to be the result of a "work accident" during the production of weapons.
Ma'an adds:
The blast took place at the evacuated Israeli settlement of Gani Tal, west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
You see, it is the Zionists' fault! If only they hadn't left Gaza these mujahadeen would still be alive!

In other peaceful Palestinian Arab news, the PA Attorney General was injured in a car bomb/assassination attempt in Ramallah. He had previously been kidnapped by Hamas when he visited Gaza last year.

Gazans attempted to break down the Rafah crossing, and one unsuccessfully rammed a car at the gate.

Hamas stormed the house of a former PA culture minister near Gaza City, confiscating his computer and other material. This sort of thing is a daily event in Gaza.

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 105.

Monday, July 07, 2008

  • Monday, July 07, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
As a follow up to my post in May about the fighting between Yemen national forces and the Houthis, in the past few days hundreds more have been killed:
For the fourth day in a row, the Yemeni army has been attacking with heavy weaponry and fighter jets several villages in Mirran district and other areas in Amran governorate’s Harf Sifyan district, believed to be another stronghold of Houthi loyalists, tribal sources said Sunday, noting that hundreds on both sides were killed or injured.

“During direct clashes between the army and Houthi supporters, army fighter jets dropped bombs on Saturday, but they missed their targets, instead hitting military positions in the area of Mirran, resulting in an increased death toll involving troops,” the sources continued, pointing out that the same mistake was repeated Sunday morning.

According to the sources, bloody confrontations between army personnel and Houthis have continued for many days in the Mirran mountains as the Yemeni army attempts to score a ground victory and seize control of strategic positions in the area. However, despite backing from fighter jets, the army is facing fierce resistance by Houthis.
Recent events include a 14-year old suicide bomber killing between 4 and 7 people outside a government building, and another suicide bomber that killed a dozen in a mosque.

One would be hard-pressed to find these stories mentioned in most Arab newspapers, let alone the Western press. Because, once again, Arabs murdering Arabs isn't news - it is how everyone, including their darlings on the Left, expect them to act.

It is only newsworthy when there are non-Arabs around who can be blamed for the violence.

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