Arab media roundup

I'm not going into all the details of today's massive air attack against Gaza - you can read all about that in the usual media - but here are some interesting tidbits from some Arabic sites.

Ma'an has a bulletin that Israel still plans to open up Kerem Shalom on Sunday to bring in medical supplies.

A cartoon from AlJazeera.net that indicates that Arab nations gave Israel the "green light" to attack Gaza.
Egypt promised to open the Rafah crossing for injured Gazans, but according to Ma'an changed its mind and decided to send medical supplies to Gaza instead. Palestine Press, however, reports that Hamas was stopping Egyptian aid from reaching Gaza - including 18 ambulances and much blood.

The terrorist who died on Friday, that Ma'an had reported was shooting rockets at Israel, is now referred to as a "journalist" in reporting his funeral.

A Gazan was killed and four injured when a smuggling tunnel collapsed.

Hamas' website refers to Israel's attacks as a "massive holocaust" even as it brags about shooting rockets and killing a civilian. Rockets made it as far as Kiryat Gat.

Islamic Jihad's leaders are comparing this to "Deir Yassin."

The "Free Galilee Brigades" that have claimed recent terror attacks in Israel say that they will start a new wave of terror. Hamas' Khaled Meshaal also threatens "martyrdom operations."

While Palestinian Arabs are claiming that one third of the dead are civilians, and the Free Gaza movement is putting out press releases claiming that Israel bombed playgrounds, so far the pictures of the dead make them all look to be young men in their 20s.

Apparently a "VIP" tunnel has been constructed for senior Hamas members to go to Egypt in style.

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A Palestinian Arab "journalist" dies

Palestine News Network writes:

Gaza / PNN – The latest victim of the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip is a journalist. Palestinian medical sources report that Hamza Shahin died on Friday from wounds sustained two weeks ago.

The local news photographer was hit during an Israeli air attack on the northern Gaza Strip in mid-December, medical sources said today.

Shahin had been seriously injured in an Israeli attack ostensibly targeting a group of armed resistance members. He died today in a Gaza hospital.

What a tragedy! An innocent journalist murdered by the evil Zionists!

Of course, even the other Palestinian Arab press adds other details. From Ma'an:

A Palestinian fighter affiliated with the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, was pronounced dead on Friday after sustaining wounds in an Israeli artillery strike in the northern Gaza Strip earlier in December.

Shaheen was reportedly injured in an Israeli airstrike, in which two missiles targeted a group of fighters in the Tal Az-Za’ater area of Jabaliyah Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip.

He was apparently firing a homemade projectile toward Sderot, his southern Israeli target, when the Apache helicopter fired toward him and others.

Hamas' own obituary doesn't mention his sterling journalistic credentials, only that he was a "mujahid."

Israel's record of only killing card-carrying terrorists in Gaza since the beginning of November is still intact.

Will Reporters Sans Frontieres condemn Israel for this?

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Empty threats lose effectiveness

Israel has been talking a lot about a major Gaza operation over the past few days. [This tough talk may have helped Kadima in the most recent polls.] Yet as we have seen, the Israeli leaders have a history of freely talking about doing something about Gaza and being very reluctant to actually do anything.

This all-talk, no action posturing has had its effects on the Palestinian Arab public as well. An on-line poll at Ma'an Arabic asks whether the current Israeli threats to invade Gaza next week are a bluff ("psychological war" or real. At the moment, 53% say it is bluff while only 43% are taking it seriously.

A couple of years of empty threats does make it hard to take them seriously.

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Qassam kills two girls - in Gaza

Yes, those rockets that were dismissed as "Christmas firecrackers" by PLO UN representative Mohammad Abu-Koash have killed again. Just this time, the victims were two Palestinian Arab girls:

A rocket apparently fired by Palestinians on Friday struck a house in the Gaza Strip, killing two Palestinian sisters aged five and 13, Palestinian medics said.

Hamas police said they were investigating the cause of the blast in Beit Lahiya village in northern Gaza, which medics said seemed to be due to a rocket aimed at Israel that had misfired.

Earlier in the day, a seriously wounded 35-year-old Palestinian man, hurt by a misfired rocket on Tuesday, was taken to an Israeli hospital for treatment.

Apparently, Christmas came a little late to Gaza this year.

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now 226, with 28 of them being children.

And the number of Arabs seriously injured and killed by Qassams since the latest escalation is far higher than the number of Israelis, even though the number of rockets that fall short seem to be perhaps in the 5% range.

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Funhouse mirror news

JERUSALEM, December 26 (FMN) - The UN today stepped up its pressure on the Arab world to send humanitarian aid to the besieged residents of Sderot, suffering under years of constant rocket bombardment from Iranian-backed Arabs.

"The brave people of the Negev are being forced out of their homes, in what can only be called ethnic cleansing," stated UN General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann. "This slow genocide is being ignored by the world at large, and the Arab world is responsible."

The Arab world have been enforcing a siege on Israel for over sixty years. Basic humanitarian items are not allowed into Israel from most Arab countries, and Israel is likewise banned from selling its own goods to its neighboring states, hurting the economy of the tiny nation.

"Legally, Israel is suffering under occupation, as the Arab states control all of Israel's land borders," stated Brockmann. "In addition, there are hundreds of Arab settlements in Israel itself, which have been the major obstacle to peace for decades."

"The Arab treatment of Jews and Israelis can only be described as a form of apartheid," said former US president Jimmy Carter as he visited Ashkelon in a solidarity visit. "Israel, one of the most crowded nations in the world, has been forced to give more and more land to the expansionist Arabs over the past decades, and it gets nothing in return. Peace requires full normalization, and I am disappointed that even Egypt and Jordan continue to incite against Jewish national self-determination."

"Israel has turned into an open-air concentration camp," asserted peace activist Lauren Booth last month. "The Israeli economy is being constrained by the Arab boycott of Israel, which is still largely in force. The occasional 'peace' treaties and tiny trickle of trade is just a facade by the Arab world meant to cover up their humanitarian crimes against the peaceful people of Israel and their aims to shrink Israel's land area into nothingness."

While all of Israel suffers from the Arab blockade, it is the residents of Sderot who are suffering the most lately from indiscriminate rocket attacks by the Iranian-funded Arabs of Gaza.

UN Human Rights investigator Richard Falk called the rocket attacks "a crime against humanity" and demanded that "the Arab states, flush with oil money, must provide Sderot residents with basic needs, like rocket shelters, psychologists and medical professionals."

"For sixty years, the Arab nations have conspired to block Jews from being able to return to their land. They have started overt and covert wars against the only Jewish state. The few Jews who remain in Arab countries suffer from official and unofficial discrimination.

"Hundreds of resolutions against the systematic Arab attempts to destroy Israel have been ignored by these expansionist states, and Israel remains besieged even after so many years. How long will the world remain silent?"

Academics such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have also noted that world opinion tends to support the so-called "Arab Lobby" even as the genocidal intent of the Arab world is explicitly stated in their media and mosques. "The Arab influence on world governments is directly proportional to power of the Arab economy, which influences businesses and politicians in ways that can only be described as insidious. As a direct result, simple moral values become muddled as the Arab world works hard to influence the agendas of Western nations, to remarkable success," stated Walt in a lecture in Munich last Sunday.

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Pakistan Taliban threatens to kill schoolgirls

From the al-Arabiya:

Taliban leaders in Pakistan's troubled northwest Swat valley have banned girls from attending school, threatening to kill any female student, officials said Thursday.

The threat was delivered this week by local Taliban commander Shah Durran in an address carried on an illegally-run radio station in the area, local officials told AFP.

"You have until Jan. 15 to stop sending your girls to schools. If you do not pay any heed to this warning, we will kill such girls," one official quoted the commander as saying.

An official at the Pakistani education ministry said there are about 1,580 schools registered in Swat -- once known for its top-flight schools.

"Already Taliban militants have destroyed 252 schools, mainly those where girls and boys were studying together," official Naeem Khan said.

The Pakistan Daily Times adds:

Locals say they are helpless and have no other option but to accede to the Taliban’s pressure as the government has failed to provide them with securuty.

“This is terrible,” the principal of a private school in Mingora told Daily Times, requesting that the name of his school should not be mentioned as that would risk his life and property.

He said the Taliban decision had proved that the government had lost its writ in the valley. “This is the question of the future of our children. The Taliban decision will throw more than 40,000 girls out of schools,” he said.

Although AFP reported this a day ago, only a handful of Western media outlets have picked up on this - and, as far as I can tell, none in the United States.

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Hamas continues to claim it only targets military

Hamas' absurd claims that it only targets military targets get even more ridiculous in its latest broken-English press release:

Al Qassam Brigades announeced in statement issued About the expected agression on Gaza by the zionist forces sad "Thousands of the Zionists who lived in the military bases will be in the range of Qassam firing".

The palestinian Resistance resumed firing Qassam Rockets after relatively quiet night, the Zionist sources claimed that on Thursday morning a Qassam rocket fired at what so-called the military base "Sha'ar Hanegev".

As always, the Zionist sources clamied that there were no reports of injuries in the base, also the resistance managed to target the base in previouse tome, several mortar shells landed in the area without causing injuries as the Zionist sources claimed..

About two hours later, two additional blasts were heard in the Sa'ar Hanegev Regional Council, but the rockets' landing site was not located. The Salah al-Din Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committee's military wing, claimed responsibility for the rockets.

Yesterday, Al Qassam Brigades announced its responsibility on some operations, part of the operations were a the folowing:

Operation	Target
(3) mortars	Military base "Kfar Azza"
(3) mortars	Military base "Natif Etzra"
(3) mortars	Military base "Zikeem"
(5) mortars	Military base "Third Eye"
(7) mortars	Military base "Al-Ersal" [Erez crossing - EoZ]
(6) mortars	Military base "Nir Oz"
(19) mortars	"Karm Abu-Salim" [Kerem Shalom - EoZ]
(2) mortars	Military base "Malaka"

But if they happen to kill some kids, well, that's reason to celebrate as well!

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Free speech, PalArab-supporter style

I just saw another typical Israel-bashing website that masquerades as a Google News source called "Palestine Think Tank - Free Minds for a Free Palestine."

As can be expected, it celebrates previous terror attacks against Israel (calling it "resistance") but publicly claims that current "resistance" be non-violent - not because terrorism is immoral, but because at this point in time it looks really bad to the stupid Western nations who still abhor murdering Jews for no good reason.

For a site that uses the word "free" so freely, it has an interesting caveat in its comment policy:

Comments containing Zionist propaganda...will not be approved.

Apparently, the ediors of this "news" source are so afraid that some truth might leak out in the comments that they'd rather censor it ahead of time.

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Open thread!

Today's thread is red and green.

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"Nittel-nacht"

It was not that long ago that Jews who lived in Europe dreaded Christmas Eve.

That night was known as "nittel nacht," and traditionally local Christians would attack Jews during that night. As a result, the Chassidic communities of Europe came up with a set of customs for that night, mostly for self-protection.

Here is a very comprehensive article about it.

In 1905, a Cleveland writer named Martha Wolfenstein published a set of short stories, written for the general public, about various Jewish topics, and one of her stories seems to be a fairly accurate description of how nittel nacht was experienced in Bohemia in the mid-1800s. Although nothing tragic occurs in this story, some of its matter-of-fact depictions of daily anti-semitism that European Jews had to endure are jarring - as well as their dreams to return to Jerusalem, where they would no longer have to worry about such things.

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Today's unreported Palestinian Arab news

But will they call it "homemade?": An apparent Qassam rocket fell short in Gaza, hitting the house of a journalist and seriously injuring his brother, a 37-year old lawyer.

Target rich environment: Islamic Jihad will hold a rally tomorrow to celebrate its part in terrorizing Jews. It will be held at Nuseirat, on Salah al Din Street, at 3 PM.

Paper threats: Israel is said to have dropped thousands of leaflets to Rafah, warning tunnel owners that Israel will start bombing them in 48 hours.

Cairo worries: The Governor of Northern Sinai warns that any Israeli actions in Gaza could trigger the flight of thousands of Gazans into Egypt. Nothing could be worse for a country than having to accept Palestinian Arabs in their midst, right?

Holy Shiites: As relations between Cairo and Tehran grow more strained, more Egyptians are criticizing the Muslim Brotherhood for their ties to Iranian Shiites.

Gleeful jihadist mathematics: Hamas claims to have shot 54 mortars, 24 Qassams and 2 Grad missiles in 24 hours, in what it is calling Operation Oil Stain. This does not include rockets and mortars from Islamic Jihad, the PRC and the other terror groups. Interestingly, I have not yet seen any Fatah faction claim responsibility for any rockets.

Strike back at capitalism: Hamas has set up a hotline number for Gazans to inform on their fellow residents if they charge "monopolist" prices on any smuggled goods. If there are any Gazans you want to see harassed by Hamas, just call the local number 282-5247.

We'll see if any media picks these stories up, as Arutz-7 apparently did yesterday an hour after I posted. They really should pay me.

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The Jewish Kabbalistic Festivus Santa Conspiracy

I just saw a long article, indexed in Google News, from some crackpot place called Gather.com, which attempts to ascribe magic Kabbalistic and Masonic rites to many famous people, as a precursor to (what else?) total world domination.

While the article itself is filled with the usual unintelligible anti-semitism and gibberish, I will point out only its Seinfeld sections.

Among the most notorious of cabalists are the TV comedy stars of the once #1rated "The Jerry Seinfeld Show." The producer of the Seinfeld show was Larry David, a Jew, all four of the cast were Jews, and cabalistic hand signs, occult language, and magic rituals were covertly planted in many episodes.

Michael Richards, who portrayed the klutzy "Kramer" in Seinfeld, also seems to relish giving cabalistic and Masonic hand signs and gestures. Richards was pictured on the front cover of the Scottish Rite Journal, and inside the publication, he told of how pleased he is to be a Freemason.

Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld strikes a decidedly cabalistic pose. It is well-known in entertainment circles that Jerry Seinfeld—indeed, all of the performers on TV's popular Seinfeld sitcom-practice cabala magic and ritual.

According to Forbes magazine in 1998, Jerry Seinfeld made a whopping total of $225 million on the comedy circuit. And that's no joke! (Photo and article: Austin American-Statesman, September 9, 1998, p. A14)

Again we discover the comedy team from Seinfeld teaming up to present cabalistic messages. [click on picture to see all the messages explained - EoZ]

Observe the V in Michael Richards' ("Kramer") leg and in Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' ("Elaine") arm; the circle that Richards makes with the fingers of his left hand, the "X" made by the intersecting hands and wrists of Richard and Louis-Dreyfuss; the descendant triangle sign of Jason Alexander's ("George") hands, and so on.

The entire article is unintentionally hilarious; in it we see that Yasir Arafat, Malcolm X, David Rockefeller and Ben Stiller, among many others, were all practitioners of Kabbalah because they were found photographed with their arms clasping each other, or one finger in the air, or pretty much any pose you can think of.

Which makes me think that Festivus is really a Masonic/Jewish conspiracy to co-opt Christmas, and Santa Claus himself is a Jewish Kabbalist Mason!

The evidence is clear if you carefully examine Santa's magic hand gestures:

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