Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 31, 2008

The richest Jew in Damascus, 1816

James Silk Buckingham wrote a diary of his travels in the early part of the nineteenth century, called "Travels Among the Arab Tribes Inhabiting the Countries East of Syria and Palestine."

He mentions the richest Jew in Damascus, Mallim Yusef, who was a very important member of the Damascus branch of the Ottoman government, "directing all the financial operations" there.

Buckingham then describes a visit to the "kihyah bey," or local prime minister, temporarily taking the duties of the late Governor of Damascus after the latter's untimely death returning from the Haj in Mecca:

[We] found the venerable Turk seated in a small but richly furnished apartment, guarded and attended by at least fifty handsome officers, all armed with sabres and dirks, and all superbly dressed. We were desired to seat ourselves on the sofa beside these chiefs, before whom stood in groups an equal number of armed attendants, and were treated with great respect and attention.

The rich Jew, Mallim Yusef, who conducted us to the presence of the kihyah bey, seated himself with the greatest possible humility on the floor beneath us, at the feet of his superiors who occupied the sofa, first kneeling, and then sitting back while kneeling, on the heels and soles of his feet, with these and his hands completely covered, in an attitude and with an air of the most abject and unqualified humiliation. Mr. Bankes was dressed as a Turkish effendi, or private and unmilitary person : I still continued to wear the less showy garments of the Christian merchant, with which I had replaced my Bedouin garb. The rich Jew was dressed in the most costly garments, including Cashmere shawls, Russian furs, Indian silks, and English broad-cloth : all, however, being of dark colours, since none but the orthodox Mohammedans are allowed to wear either green, red, yellow, azure, or white, in any of their garments, which are therefore, however costly in material, almost restricted to dark browns, blacks, and blues. Among the party was also a Moslem dervish, with a patchwork and party-coloured bonnet of a sugar loaf shape, and his body scarcely half covered with rags and tattered garments ; his naked limbs obtruding themselves most offensively, and his general appearance being indecent and disgusting.

It was impossible not to be struck forcibly with the different modes of reception and treatment adopted towards us, more particularly as contrasted with our real and apparent conditions. The Jew, who was by far the wealthiest and the most powerful of all present, who lived in the most splendid house in Damascus, and fed from his table more than a hundred poor families every day, who literally managed the great machine of government, and had influence enough, both here and at Constantinople, to procure the removal of the present bey from his post if he desired it, was obliged to kneel in the presence of those who could not have carried on the affairs of government without his aid, while the dervish, contemptible alike for his ignorance and arrogant assumption of superiority, was admitted to the seat of honour, and, with ourselves, who were of a faith as far removed from their own as the Jew's, was served with coffee, sherbet, and perfumes, and treated by the attendants with all the marks of submission and respect.

Here we have the very definition of dhimmitude: a Jew could reach great political heights and wield enormous power in the Muslim world, yet must always act with deference and abject humiliation to any Muslim. We see that in 1816 Damascus, every Muslim was considered higher in the social milieu than the richest Jew in the city.

UPDATE: I made a mistake in my last paragraph that Kashmiri Nomad takes me to task for; see here. Corrected here.

19 weeks in a row

For the nineteenth consecutive week, more Palestinian Arabs were violently killed by their own actions than by the evil IDF.

The score this week was 4-1. That one from this week, described by the PCHR only as an "elderly Palestinian man," happened to be firing at the IDF at the time with his rifle.

Since the beginning of August the score is 80-7.

We are now closing in on the 2006-7 streak of 23 weeks in a row of Palestinian Arabs managing to outkill each other versus the genocidal IDF.

How not to dismantle a bomb

From Ma'an:

A Hamas police officer was killed and several other Palestinians were wounded on Thursday when an explosive device detonated in a police station in Gaza City.

A spokesperson for the movement, Islam Shahwan, said the device had been discovered earlier in the day within the Hamas controlled territory and taken to a police station to be dismantled.

While experts took apart the bomb, it exploded, causing several secondary blasts, as well, Shahwan said.

I'm no expert, but if one was going to try to transport a bomb somewhere to be dismantled, wouldn't an open field be better than a place filled with weapons?

YNet adds:

Interior Ministry spokesman Ihab Elghseen later said that the man, a police officer and an engineer, died "as a martyr".

Which makes this good news all around.

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 207.

Egypt finds 8 missiles in the Sinai meant for Gaza

From Ma'an Arabic:

Egyptian police said Tuesday they discovered a cache of weapons in the northern Sinai Desert.

An Egyptian security official said police found the 8 surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles in an underground bunker in the northern Sinai Desert.

The police sources said that the missiles were on their way to the Gaza Strip.

JPost confirms this story.

There have been many recent stories about the smuggling tunnels run by Hamas in Gaza, yet none of these articles ever mention weapons smuggling any more. They only speak about fuel, toys, and livestock that are being brought through Rafah. It seems as if Hamas' stamp of approval on the "consumer goods" tunnels has made it easier to hide the more discreet weapons-smuggling operations that are still going full-blast.

This discovery of missiles being smuggled indicates that, if anything, Hamas' weapons-smuggling activities are accelerating.

Arab world screwing their own people

Nothing demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Arab world more than the fate of some 2300 miserable refugees from Iraq who are stuck on the Syria/Iraq border. From the UNHCR:

AL TANF, Iraq-Syria Border, October 30 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency has rushed assistance to hundreds of ... refugees stuck in camps on the Iraq-Syria border after heavy rain and flooding caused chaos and misery.

Rainstorms on Tuesday night left tents inundated with water and sewage, possessions soaked and electricity supplies cut at Al Tanf, a settlement housing almost 800 people in the narrow no man's land between Iraq and Syria. The small mosque was damaged by fire, but there were no human casualties

"This is the closest to hell I can imagine," said Mutassem Hayatla, a UNHCR field officer who stayed in the camp during the downpour. "With no electricity, the camp was full of the sound of crying, terrified children. We did our best, but it was a blessing when the night was over."

Nine-year-old Aya said she was terrified. "The lights were all off, there was water everywhere. My mother was crying. She is pregnant and the baby will come soon. Please get us out before my brother is born. I am scared he will die if we have to live here after she delivers."

The situation was even worse in Al Waleed, a nearby camp hosting more than 1,400 refugees just inside Iraq, where more than 100 families were left homeless after their tents were destroyed in the storm. UNHCR was rushing supplies on Wednesday to both sites, but it was taking longer to get to Al Waleed due to security considerations.
Some of the refugees have lived at Al Tanf for three years, barred from entering any of the countries neighbouring Iraq. "We cannot go forwards, nor back. We have a road on one side that threatens our children's lives daily, a high wall on the other; in front and behind we have two impenetrable borders," explained Abu Ziyad, a member of the Al Tanf refugee committee.

"Our only hope is resettlement. For the sake of our children, our wives, our elderly, we beg you, please get us out of here," he pleaded.

The Arab world has 325 million people and 5 million square miles. Why can't they find room for these poor people?

Because, even though they had been in Iraq for decades, they are considered "Palestinians."

And Arab countries will do anything possible to avoid resettling Palestinian Arabs in their countries. The reason they say is because it would fracture Palestinian unity, but the real reason is because they would rather use them as cannon fodder in the fight against Israel's existence than to treat them as if they have any human rights.

Some countries have taken in some of these Iraqis of Palestinian descent: Iceland, Brazil, Chile, Canada. But save for a PR-based offer from the Sudan, no Arab country has offered to let them in, even as refugees.

Syria has (very reluctantly) taken in 1.2 million Iraqi refugees, but they refuse to allow these 2300 to come in.

Because their great-grandparents lived in Palestine.

The brotherhood of the Arab peoples is something to behold.

Random thoughts and open thread

I just saw a pretty nifty Israeli invention for sale - called Vazu. It is, believe it or not, a foldable vase.

Check out Martin Kramer vs. Martin Peretz on Obama and Khalidi.

You can forget about trying to change my mind for the election - I already voted (I'm going on a business trip next week and wouldn't have been able to vote on Election Day.)

Trivia question: How many World Series has Philadelphia won? Answer: 7! (The Philadelphia Athletics won 5 times.)

Talk amongst yourselves about politics, sports and household furnishings.

Check out Ami Isseroff's review of Benny Morris' "1948"

Possibly the best reference site for the history of Israel and Zionism on the web is Ami Isseroff's zionism-israel.com , and its sister site MidEast Web. Without a doubt, Isseroff is the most knowledgeable blogger on Israel's history, and his websites are truly encyclopedic (although not as well organized as they should be.)

For a stellar example, see Isseroff's review of the new Benny Morris book, 1948: A History of the First Arab Israeli War. And check out his links.

PA admits it supports terror against Israel

Daniel Pipes notices how the PA argued to dismiss a lawsuit in US courts against the organization for terror acts that killed over 30 people:

The lawsuit, Sokolow v The Palestine Liberation Organization, brought by the intrepid David Strachman, alleges that the PLO carried out two machine-gun and five bombing attacks in the Jerusalem area between January 2001 and February 2004. The plaintiffs allege, in the words of U.S. District Judge George Daniels, that the PLO did so "intending to terrorize, intimidate, and coerce the civilian population of Israel into acquiescing to defendants' political goals and demands, and to influence the policy of the United States and Israeli governments in favor of accepting defendants' political goals and demands." The attacks killed 33 and wounded many more, some of them U.S. citizens; the victims and their families are seeking up to US$3 billion in damages from the PLO.
To this, the PLO, represented in part by none other than the appalling Ramsey Clark (who in a distant age, 1967-69, was attorney general of the United States), replied that the attacks were acts of war rather than terrorism. As Daniels summarizes the PLO argument: "defendants argue that subject matter jurisdiction is lacking because this action is premised on acts of war, which is barred under the ATA [Antiterrorism Act of 1991], and further is based on conduct which does not meet the statutory definition of ‘international terrorism'."

This response is noteworthy for two reasons: (1) Fifteen years after Oslo supposedly ended the state of war, four years after Mahmoud Abbas took over and supposedly improved on Arafat's abysmal record, the PLO publicly maintains it remains at war with Israel. (2) The PLO argues, even in the context of an American law court, that blatant, cruel, inhumane, and atrocious acts of murder constitute legitimate acts of warfare.

The court record seems to go a little even beyond this.

Firstly, the lawsuit is against both the PLO and the PA, so the defendants represent both entities. One cannot argue even facetiously that the PA is somehow not claiming to be at war with Israel, but only the PLO is.

Secondly, since the ATA does not apply to sovereign states, the PLO claimed that Palestine is a state for the purposes of this lawsuit:

An ATA action may not be maintained against a foreign state or the agencies, officers and employees thereof, acting within their official capacity or under color of legal authority....While the PLO and PA argue their sovereignty, they do not claim individual statehood status.Their assertion of immunity derives from the claimed sovereignty of the State of Palestine. Defendants claim that they are essential agencies of Palestine, performing core governmental functions and, as such, are entitled to immunity.

The Palestinian Authority is claiming in legal documents that bombing cafeterias, bus stops, buses and busy downtown streets in Jerusalem are "core governmental functions" as part of their war with Israel.

"Blind shiekh" depressed, whining in prison hospital

A truly saddening story from Palestine Today, quoting the website of the terror group Jemaah Islamiyah: (autotranslated and cleaned up a little)

Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Emir of Jemaah Islamiyah, jailed in a prison in America 16 years ago, told his wife in a telephone conversation, "I am in great distress, my health has deteriorated too, and I need the prayers of all the righteous brothers, I do not feel access to prayers , and I feel they do not du'aa (call out to God) remind me so."

According to the official website of the group, the Rahman said to his wife: "The U.S. authorities that the supervisor of the prison did not respond to any request of mine, no matter how simple..."

According to the official website of the group that is based out of Egypt,Dr. Abdul Rahman is in poor health, and that this is the first time he used the term "I'm in great distress" in 16 years in U.S. prisons. During this time he contracted a number of diseases including cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

Dr Omar Abdul Rahman confirmed that he has been mistreated in U.S. prisons, where he is in isolation from other prisoners and in solitary confinement.

Rahman was of course the ideological center of the plot to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993 and he was convicted of planning terror attacks.

Just for some background, Rahman is in a medical center that is a part of a prison, not in the prison itself, which would explain his "isolation." As far as mistreatment in prison, he is on the record as complaining that he didn't like the tea he was being served, threatening that if he doesn't get Tetley or Lipton tea he will stop taking insulin - or eat M&Ms.

Yes, he certainly sounds oppressed!

More of our tax money going to Gaza

Once again, Hamas maintains control over Gaza with no financial responsibility, which is happily taken care of by our tax dollars via the PA. From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority (PA) will pay compensation to civilians affected by the recent flooding there, according to a statement received by Ma’an on Thursday.

The governor of the central Gaza Strip said that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad had followed up with him on damage caused by the storms.

Governor Abdallah Abu Samahdanah noted that “the government will take all required measures to ease the suffering of civilians harmed by this disaster.”

In case it isn't clear, here's how it works:

Our tax money goes to the government, whether it is US, European or Japanese.

These governments now pay billions to the Palestinian Authority.

60% of the PA budget goes to Gaza, a territory that they lost in the violent Hamas coup and that now gets twice the money that the West Bank gets on a per-capita basis.

Hamas gets to control the police, the courts, the schools and the hospitals in Gaza, without having to worry about paying salaries or maintaining infrastructure or bailing out victims of flooding - normal functions of a government. Our tax dollars take care of all that stuff. So Hamas can spend its money (from taxing smuggled goods and from Iran) on weapons, on tunnels and on building a Hezbollah-like bunker network for terrorists and rockets.

Vapor stories

Even though the Palestinian Arab press will wildly exaggerate and completely mislead with their stories, usually there is some real event that happened that caused them to light up their imaginations.

Sometimes, though, I cannot find that real event.

Two recent cases, in which the first one sounds somewhat realistic and the second one a bit less so:

Yesterday, Firas Press wrote an article - which they said came from Yediot Aharonot - saying that Hamas was found to have been using Facebook as an intelligence tool, as IDF soldiers would inadvertantly be placing classified information and photos on their Facebook pages.

YNet did have two recent Facebook stories: one that the Defense Ministry warned against exactly this type of occurrence last April, and one where the IDF would use Facebook to find girls who claimed religious exemptions from the army doing decidedly non-religious activities.

It is possible that Hamas read the April article and decided to create a Facebook intelligence function, but I can't find any article saying that.

The second example is from today's PalArab newspapers where they claim that "Jewish extremists" went into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, tried to attack monks and smashed wooden crosses in adjacent shops. (Palestine Press Agency helpfully illustrated the story with a picture of a bearded Jew praying, captioned "Jewish extremist.")

I can't find this story anywhere.

I did find that a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a synagogue in Lod and another one in Acre within the past few days.

Maybe they just mixed those stories up.

Free Gaza isn't free for their passengers!

The Free Gaza freaks are so far in debt, they apparently charged their idiot passengers about $1000 each for this latest trip!

Look at this graphic on their site (they apparently had a typo which I correct):

The FGMers have so far spent $740,000 and have raised $325,000 - but $300,000 came from "donations" and $25,000 from "passenger fees".

There was no mention of "passenger fees" on their website when I previously looked at their bizarre thermometer graphic.

Since their latest trip to Gaza, where they were greeted by their Hamas terrorist pals and a tiny crowd, included 27 people, it appears that they are so broke that they are charging their "humanitarian" passengers about $1000 to get their publicity.

Comparing their numbers, they've spent $190,000 since September - and only raised $75,000, even including their passenger fees. And this was after the massive amount of publicity they received from their first trip.

What will they try next? Clearly their leftist pals aren't willing to pony up the bucks for them to continue these public relations stunts, and nobody is buying the boats they are trying to sell (for quite inflated prices.)

It's been a long 28 years!

The "scholarship" of Al Quds University

Al Quds University has on its website, in English, a "history" of Jerusalem aimed at erasing Jews. Quotes (after a section that claims that Biblical history is filled with lies):

The key to clarifying the history of Jerusalem and Palestine lies in distinguishing between literary tradition and recorded history, between imagined memory and material evidence. It is equally important that an effort be made to establish a history based on people and their continuity rather than a history based on which political power or religious ideology was present in the land and then left it.

Palestine was conquered in times past by ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Mamlukes, Ottomans, the British, the Zionists. [Note who is missing - EoZ].These are recorded conquests (not literary legends), whose facts and remains are documented. Meanwhile, another development was the evolution of monotheistic faiths that followed the "pagan" religions. It is crucial to keep these two developments as distinct as possible, for the sake of not confusing issues and identities. The people of Palestine may have become more mixed with each consecutive conquest, or may have changed religions, but essentially (especially in villages) the population remained constant-and is now still Palestinian, though many villagers were tragically dislocated in the 1948 Nakba.

The "temple" issue dominates the politics about Jerusalem today. An assumption is made that the present Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa compound is the same location of the "Temple Mount" or "Mount Moriah." But as Ernest L. Martin has demonstrated (working strictly within biblical scholarship), the Al-Aqsa compound cannot possibly be in the same place as the first or second temple. [Martin was a meteorologist and member of a religious cult that got some traction on this theory a couple of decades ago. - EoZ.]Further, what is called the "first temple," associated with the legendary Solomon, was in fact a pre-monotheistic place where many gods were worshipped. As scholars like Herbert Niehr document, the "first temple" was dominated by Syro-Phoenician traits and appealed to pagan worshippers living in the area. Various "pagan" sites existed until after Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4th century. At that time, Constantine's mother Helena determined many biblical sites, most coinciding with pagan temple locations.

The Wailing or "Western" Wall is a focus of Jewish veneration. It is a site associated with a past memory, as Moshe Dayan once noted. The Wailing Wall is assumed to be what remains of Herod's Temple. But that Herod was a Jew is debated by some and rejected by others (he came from tribes east of the Jordan and had a Hellenistic cultural background). Judaism was different from how some see it today; like Christianity and Islam, it should not be confused with "ethnicity."

Further, the Wailing or "Western" Wall is a most likely candidate for being the wall of a fortress built for Roman legions (as Ernest Martin reports, citing other scholarship). Even if we assume that Herod built a "second temple," the building was reportedly destroyed in the 1st century AD. The Romans, then the Byzantine Christians, had prevented people of the Jewish faith from living in the city for hundreds of years. At other times, the two then-contending religious groups had exchanged expulsions and massacres, particularly before and during the Persian invasion of 614 AD. The hundreds of skulls at the Monastery of Mar Saba are said to be evidence of those massacres. One wonders then, under such circumstances, how the traces of any temple in Jerusalem could possibly have been preserved.

The Dome of the Rock is a focus of veneration for hundreds of millions of Muslim worshippers. It is also a visible and impressive work of architecture, around which much lore has developed. It was built in times of recorded history, on previously unoccupied ground, though the spot probably had ancient associations impossible to trace today.

This is only another small example of how Palestinian Arabs like to erase the eternal Jewish connection to the Land of Israel from history, often relying on outright lies as well as discredited "scholarship."

Of course, Al-Quds University is not only interested in erasing Jews from history; it is also supportive of terror attacks against them today. For example, it designated a week in honor of the Hamas innovator of suicide terrorism, Yahya Ayyash, "the engineer." Hamas and Fatah regularly schedule commemorations for terrorists there.

And an official university calendar included this graphic on every page, symbolizing the destruction of Israel by the Islamic sword.

Nevertheless, the US government seems to consider Al Quds University as a distinguished place. The US Consulate in Jerusalem often has programs in conjunction with Al-Quds, and is instrumental in fostering ties between US colleges and Al Quds. USAID has given Al-Quds millions of dollars.

But as far as I can find, only one US senator ever visited Al-Quds University:

Date: 15 / 01 / 2006 Time: 11:20

Ma'an Ramallah – US Democratic Senator Barak Obama, accompanied by US Consul Jacob Walles, visited the American Studies Center at Al Quds University in Abu Dis on Saturday.

The two officials were received by the head of the Center, Professor Mohammad Ad Dajiani, along with other University faculty and students.

Obama expressed his happiness at the visit and admired the academic services provided by the Center. He stressed the importance of such programs in order to create mutual understanding between the American and Palestinian people.

Professor Dajiani welcomed Obama and thanked him for accepting the University's invitation. He spoke about the importance of visits by US officials in order to develop the Masters program offered by the center.

Obama delivered a lecture on US policy and politics. Following the presentation, there was a brief debate and discussion.

Rafah cemetery collapses into smuggling tunnels

From Firas Press and Palestine Today (Arabic):

Heavy rain washed away the Azaaarbp cemetery on the Egyptian-Palestinian border town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip today, because of the existence of tunnels beneath the cemetery.
Witnesses said a large number of modern and ancient tombs were destroyed by torrential rains and plunged into a the tunnels beneath the cemetery.
A large number of houses were submerged in rainwater in all southern provinces.

Interestingly, a columnist at Palestine Press Agency quoted a poll saying that 65% of Gazans were against the smuggling tunnels, saying that the tunnels onlt served a small part of Gaza society.