Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 24, 2009

To my Cleveland Indymedia re-poster

Someone has been posting many of my articles to Cleveland Indymedia. I don't know who it is, and I appreciate it very much, but could you please include a link to my original posting when you re-post? The formatting, links and quotes sometimes get messed up and I would like interested people to be able to find the original.

Thanks!

I haven't been covering the war of words between Egypt and Hezbollah in the wake of the arrest of a Hezbollah terror cell in Egypt, but this Al Khan cartoon describes liberal Egyptian fears of Islamic fundamentalism quite nicely.

An "anti-racist" racist

This Guardian "Commentary is Free" column by Seumas Milne shows how racist some leftists are - even when they pretend to be against racism:

What do the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week's UN conference against racism in Geneva – even before Monday's incendiary speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23 European states.

In international forums, it's almost unprecedented to have such an undiluted racial divide of whites-versus-the-rest. And for that to happen in a global meeting called to combat racial hatred doesn't exactly augur well for future international understanding at a time when the worst economic crisis since the war is ramping up racism and xenophobia across the world.

Milne predictably goes on to describe and justify how much of the (non-white) world views Israel as racist.

What is more interesting is how he himself views things. He looks at US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel as being primarily "white" nations. This is the type of statement one would expect from David Duke. He implies that it is the "white" nations who are guilty of ignoring an anti-racism conference, and not the "rest." The implication, of course, is that the "white" nations are racists - and that the Arab and African nations who agree with Ahmadinejad are the ones who are more concerned with the existence of racism!

This amazingly twisted viewpoint is a perfect example of how political correctness turns the truth on its head and ends up being racist itself. Milne somehow ignores that the "racist" US elected a black president (and his hated white predecessor chose two black Secretaries of State.) He somehow doesn't notice that every state that boycotted Durban is a democracy and is committed to equal rights for its citizens. He also ignores the small fact that it is entirely possible that a majority of Israelis today have at least one grandparent who came from a non-European country.

Boycotting Durban 2 doesn't imply that "European or European-settler states" are racist. Describing those nations as "white," however, comes close.

Gazans who died naturally called "martyrs"?

The New York Times writes, in an article about the internal IDF report on Gaza:

Gaza health officials said more than 1,300 Palestinians died during the war, but Israel disputes Palestinian claims that most of them were noncombatants. By the Israeli military’s count, 1,166 people were killed, of whom 295 were noncombatants, 709 were what it called Hamas terrorist operatives and 162 were men whose affiliations remain unidentified.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza put the number of dead at 1,417: 926 civilians, 236 combatants and 255 police officers. Israel says that about 400 Gazans die of natural causes every month, possibly accounting for the discrepancy in numbers.

This is an interesting possibility.

One indication that it may be true could come from the Palestinian Ministry of Health website. They routinely list "martyrs" of Gazans who have supposedly died as a result of not getting adequate medical attention because of the "siege." This list started last July and now has 325 "shahids," many of whom had cancer and other incurable diseases.

A quick look at the numbers of these martyrs by month is interesting:

November - 10
December - 14
January - 3
February - 13
March - 23

That's right - during the war, when one would expect that ill patients would be dying in much higher numbers, the sick of Gaza suddenly gained a reprieve! - Only three of them died, a much lower rate than before and after the war!

So how many of the "shahids" listed by the PCHR were really people who died of natural causes?

Joseph's Tomb desecrated again

From YNet:

Hundreds of Jewish worshipers who arrived at Joseph's Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus overnight were stunned to find the compound severely vandalized – yet again.

Israel pulled its forces out of the compound in October 2000. The IDF disallowed Jewish worshippers from entering it for a long period of time due to security concerns; and deserted, it has been burnt down and defaced many times.

December of 2008 saw Joseph Tomb's restored and the military began allowing worshippers to visit it once more, but always at night and under heavy military guard, for their own safety.

Wednesday night's visit was approved by the proper military authorities and the IDF provided the worshippers with an escort.

The group which entered the compound was made up of some 500 people. Upon entering the tomb they found it had been defaced – the headstone smashed and swastikas sprayed on the walls, as well as graffiti of a blood-dripping sward over a Star of David, and another "trampled" by a boot.

Some reported seeing visible boot prints all over the compounds, which they claim are consistent with the Palestinian police standard issue boots.

This is how we can expect Jewish shrines to be treated when they are under Palestinian Arab control. Anyone who relies on "agreements" with the PalArabs to preserve Jewish holy places is, quite simply, a fool.

And by extension, so is anyone who relies on "agreements" with the PA altogether.

A related post from last week.

Update on PCHR fake-civilian publicity

I want to thank everyone who made suggestions to my draft press release as well as other ideas on how to get this information out there.

At the moment, I am talking indirectly to one major media outlet.

I am also in contact with one organization that is "definitely interested" in discussing how we could coordinate our efforts further. I would be much more comfortable finding a partner like that who would be able to verify and expand on what we have found and who already has experience in doing this sort of work. I can't speak for Suzanne or PTWatch but I would prefer that the news gets out widely by any means even if my name is not attached to it.

For now, a press release seems to be a little premature.

Side notes - I did manage to download all of the Al Qassam "martyrs" pages along with pictures. If anyone wants to go through the discussions in the messages as well as the links on the list and save the pages before they go stale or disappear, it would be appreciated.

"I want my daughter to vacation in Egypt"

An bizarre column by Jonathan Power published in the Arab News:

My 18-year-old-daughter asked me on Saturday where she can safely travel to when she finishes school in June and has three months holiday before going to university in September. “The Muslim countries or Japan”, I replied.
She was quite taken aback. At school they talk about the US, Australia, Thailand and South America. “No”, I said very empahtically, “I don’t want you to go there”, and then set about explaining to her and her mother why I felt so strongly.
I pulled out the figures from the new 2009 UN World Development Report. After a lot of research into different types of measurement, the UN decided that the only accurate one was the homicide rate. If you try to compare rape, theft, break-ins etc. there is confusion — every country, apart from those in European Union, measure these in different ways. Some figures are accurate, some seem like they’ve been drawn out of a hat.
But most countries report their murder rate pretty accurately.
To cut a long story short, I would gladly let her go to Egypt, which has the world’s lowest murder rate — at 0.4 per 100,000 population. Although it is closely followed by Japan at 0.5, other Muslim, mainly Arab, countries follow next, all with less than one murder per 100,000 of population. The United Arab Emirates, including that hot bed, Dubai, is at 0.6; Oman at 0.6; Saudi Arabia at 0.9; Bahrain at 1; and Jordan at 0.9. Even Indonesia, with all its political troubles, comes out at 1.1. Outside the Arab countries, the Scandinavian countries are the safest. Norway is at 0.8, Denmark at 0.8 and Iceland at 1. But Sweden breaks the Scandinavian success rate with a poor 2.4. Holland and Ireland do well too.
So daughter, there is your list that I approve and your mother has been persuaded to approve. None of the others you mention or think about are safe, so forget about them. Ironically for us, they are countries with a Christian heritage— the US at 5.6; Mexico at 13; Russia at 19.9; South Africa at 47.5; and Columbia at 62.7.

Jonathan Power must really love his daughter. After all, he is very worried about the 0.0056% chance that she would be murdered if she visited the United States for an entire year.

It is curious that he is not concerned at all about the greater than 30% chance that she would be sexually harassed in Egypt on any particular day:

...Sexual harassment is not only a persistent threat to some women, but that it is a widespread issue for all of Egyptian society. Survey results attest that harassment is not limited by age or social class, but hinders the progress of women across demographics. Service workers, housewives and professionals alike all report experiencing sexual harassment. The most common form is inappropriate touching (40% of all respondents), followed by verbal harassment (38%). 30% of respondents reported being harassed on a daily basis and another 12% are harassed almost daily. Only 12% of respondents approached police when harassed, expressing a complete lack of confidence in Egypt's police and legal system to protect them from harassers.

And more recently from the Christian Science Monitor:

As May Zayed gets ready to leave for her downtown office, she tries to prepare for the harassment she'll face on the street. The 20-something member of Egypt's large working class says she has learned to tune out most lewd comments. But it's impossible to ignore everything. "There is no way to get ready for it," she says. "It just becomes part of your normal life."
According to a study released by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights (ECWR) in July, 62 percent of Egyptian men admit to sexually harassing women, and 83 percent of Egyptian women reported being harassed. Half say it happens every day.

So, the probability that Powers' daughter will be sexually harassed as a single woman walking alone in Egyptian streets during a week-long vacation is pretty much 100%. But chances are pretty low that she would be murdered, so definitely Egypt is a better vacation destination for his daughter than London or New York.

If your priorities (and math skills) are really, really poor.

A 16-year old terrorist

As I find more Gaza "civilians," I came across PCHR #405, Tareq Yaser Mohammed ‘Afana, a 16-year old youth.

According to the Hamas website:

Did not stop young age Shahid Tariq - God's mercy - which at the age of 17 [sic, he was almost 17] years old an overwhelming sincere desire to join the convoy of jihad, and join a convoy of mujahideen, so he contacted the leadership of Hamas and asked to join the ranks of the mujahideen, in the face of strong determination and desire true that waiting more than one year is too much. The leadership of Hamas agreed to his request, and Tariq - God's mercy - in the month of August 2008 became one of the Mujahedeen of the Qassam Brigades. He was within the ranks of the Mujahideen only 4 months until he became a martyr covered in blood.

During the very short Jihad of this Shahid, which did not exceed 4 months, he struggled a great holy war and left his mark on the forehead deep in the pages of history. He was first stationed in the camp of Jabalya to protect his people from the treacherous Zionist cowards, and also participated in the digging of tunnels, which were hell to burn the Zionists invaders, as well as participated in the preparation and processing and packaging in which the targeting mechanisms and the Zionist tanks.

But according to "human rights" groups, this is an innocent child victim of Israeli aggression.

So far we have identified over 145 "civilians."

Adventures in autotranslation

Looking for more Hamas members that the PCHR called "civilians" on Arabic websites is interesting, because sometimes Google decides to translate instead of transliterate.

I found this "martyr" on the Hamas site:
Facilitate Abdullah scarf

Luckily, I have a font I once commissioned that transliterates from Arabic to Hebrew so I can read the name and then transliterate it to English. This guy's name turned into

תיסיר עבד אללה ושאח

which I was then able to find was

#303 Taysir Abdullah Mohammed Weshah

on the PCHR list, another "civilian" according to PCHR.

We now have identified 137 "civilian" terrorists so far that Israel killed.

Hamas opens a bank

Let the terrorist money laundering begin!

GAZA CITY: The first bank affiliated with the Hamas movement opened yesterday in Gaza.
“We are opening the bank today and are beginning to offer our services to the public,” Alaa Al-Rafati, head of the National Islamic Bank, told AFP.
The National Islamic Bank has $20 million in start-up capital and will operate under Islamic finance rules, he said.
With offices on four floors of a building in central Gaza City, the bank will hold the accounts of 6,000 Hamas employees whose salaries are to be deposited in the bank.
Rafati did not say how the movement acquired the start-up capital in a territory under Israeli embargo since Hamas, which is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state, violently seized power in 2007.
Because of the blockade, which has prevented all but essential humanitarian goods from entering the territory, Gaza’s banks have faced a virtually constant liquidity crisis. Rafati said no such problems would plague the new bank.
“We have absolutely no crisis of liquidity, be it shekels or dollars. This will allow us to win the confidence of customers.”
Although the vast majority of the board of directors are members of Hamas, including Rafati, he said the bank was “a private enterprise aimed at making profit and is not associated to Hamas or to the government in Gaza.” The Palestinian Authority has refused to issue the bank a license and called for it to be boycotted.

Does anyone smell the stench of Tehran?

Egyptians uniformly against "normalization"

Thirty years after Camp David, a small episode in Egypt this week illuminates the hatred that Egyptians have towards Israel.

Rabidly anti-Israel pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim led the Cairo Symphony Orchestra at the Cairo Opera House. Barenboim, who may be the only Jew to hold an honorary Palestinian citizenship, emphasized that he was not there as a representative of Israel, and he mentioned (to great applause) "I am sick to my stomach every morning when I wake up and I see the Palestinian territories still being occupied." He told a press conference, "I am not here to represent the Israeli government. I am here as an individual who has been very critical of the Israeli government."

Even so, Egyptians were divided as to whether hosting an Israeli in any capacity was part of a slippery slope towards the heinous crime of "normalization" with its peace partner.

Al Ahram notes:

Barenboim's Egyptian opponents question his decision to hold onto Israeli citizenship, pointing out that his visit to Egypt, the first such, may be intended to furtively normalise relations with Israel -- a step Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, along with the vast majority of intellectuals, formally rejects. Hosni's critics ask whether inviting Barenboim to Egypt is a nod on his part to the pro-Israel-dominated US political sphere, with a view to gaining favour regarding his nomination to the post of UNESCO director-general. "I will not accept such a visit or such a performance," the well-known writer Youssef El-Qaeed declaimed. "And don't tell me that Barenboim has a Palestinian passport or that he was a close friend of Edward Said's. I still will not accept it.

But those who were more ambivalent towards Barenboim's performance are equally against normalization:

The better known novelist, Gamal El-Ghitani -- also the editor of the cultural weekly Akhbar Al-Adab -- takes the opposite stand: "Had it been 10 years ago, it would have been perfectly fine. As it is this visit looks like an electoral manoeuvre in Hosni's candidacy for UNESCO director- general, which it is not. This is not normalisation and it's a dangerous wager to say that it is. This conductor is a hugely important figure who has always supported peace and spoken out against Israeli aggression in the Middle East."
The well-known journalist Assem Hanafi goes even further, explaining that refusing to let an anti-Zionist figure perform in Egypt is to realise Israel's wishes. "All I can say," he says, "is that this is an excellent opportunity and I have already booked my seat." The head censor, critic Ali Abu Shadi, feels that "what we have to go on" is Barenboim's stated position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. "If it is in support of the Arab cause and Palestinian rights, I am all for the person. If it is not I am against him -- even if he is the most outstanding artist on earth."

To the claim that it is an electoral manoeuvre on the part of Hosni, Abu Shadi exclaims, "normalisation of what? And to what end?"

People who claim they are for "peace" in the Middle East never talk about what exactly that means in terms of Israel becoming treated like a legitimate state by its Arab neighbors. All they care about is pressuring Israel to make more and more concessions. You will be hard pressed to find a "peace activist" lobbying Egypt to increase cultural and economic ties with Israel.

In other words, the only people who really want a true peace are Israelis, and not its critics, and Israeli-Egyptian relations prove it.

One must wonder why those who claim to want peace rarely try to improve the illusory "peace" that already exists.

The Egyptian peace treaty with Israel is often held up as a shining example of what is possible. This is true. However, it is also a shining example of exactly the kind of "peace" that Israel could ever gain from its neighbors - one where they will continue to project implacable hate towards the very idea of a Jewish state in their midst.

Draft press release about fake Gaza civilians

A number of people have mentioned that the research that I, PTWatch and Suzanne are doing needs to be publicized. I am not very good at self-promotion nor at project management, but here's what I think needs to be done:

* Complete, as much as possible, the research we are doing
* Hopefully, create a comprehensive report of the findings and analysis, including pictures of the "civilian" terrorists
* Publicize it to media outlets

If anyone out there is better than I am at this stuff, especially at organizing and double-checking the data, please volunteer to help out.

Here's a draft press release I wrote, all critiques are appreciated:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In the wake of worldwide accusations of widespread Israeli atrocities towards civilians in Gaza, an ad-hoc team of researchers has discovered that many of the so-called "civilian" casualties in Gaza were, in fact, Arab terrorists.

In March, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights released a seemingly comprehensive list of people killed in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. This list described the victims as either "militant" or "civilian," and determined that out of 1417 dead, 926 were civilians. These numbers were publicized widely throughout the world as the definitive list of casualties, and were used as proof that the Israel Defense Forces were using indiscriminate and disproportionate force.

A team of independent researchers from the United States, Germany and the Netherlands has been finding many problems with the PCHR methodology. Using newspaper articles, descriptions of the victims on Hamas websites and other sources, this team has so far identified that over 125 of the so-called "civilians" were, in fact, active members of terror groups.

"The PCHR seems to have used a deliberately narrow definition of 'civilian,'" says the pseudonymous Elder of Ziyon, leader of the team, who has been publishing their findings on his website. "Hamas military commanders and leaders who were clearly legitimate targets are not being counted as "militants" by the PCHR, even as Hamas lauds them as long-time members of the Qassam Brigades terror group."

Further analysis from the team reveals that the initial claims by the UN, PCHR, Palestinian Health Ministry and others that there were 30-50 victims of Israeli shelling outside the Jabalya UNRWA school in January were untrue. The PCHR's list agrees with the IDF's claims of only 12 victims. Even so, the claim of dozens of phantom victims is still on the PCHR website.

The team is compiling the results of their research in real time, fully transparently, on the Elder of Ziyon website at http://elderofziyon.com. The centerpiece of the research is a living document that is listing all of the terrorists that the PCHR considers "civilian" along with links to the webpages that prove their affiliation to known terror groups, often with biographies and photos. The final results will be published and available for review.

For more information, contact Elder at coolboardpresident @ yahoo.com.

New blog to check out by Barry Rubin

Professor Barry Rubin, prolific author and Middle East expert, has a new blog where he is writing a large number of interesting posts.

I have no idea how he writes so fast.

Check it out!

Another Hamas victim succumbs

A Gaza man who was injured by Hamas during Cast Lead has succumbed to his wounds, increasing the self-death count for the year to 67.

Human Rights Watch just came out with a report accusing Hamas of murdering some 32 political opponents during Cast Lead.

Another "martyr" data point

When the Gaza operation ended, Hamas claimed to have lost 48 members in total.

At the moment, their Arabic website lists 138 Hamas members who were "martyred."

Their English website? Only 9.