Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, April 25, 2009

April 2009 rocket calendar

Q=Qassam (may include Katyusha-style rockets)
QS=Qassam landing short in Gaza
M=Mortar
F=Fatality (F=Gazan, F=Israeli)
(G)=Grad (included in Qassam count, not consistent yet)

MS=Mortar landing short
P - unnamed "projectiles"
(Paren) indicates unconfirmed Palestinian claims

* - Fatal non-rocket attack

K=Katyushas from Lebanon

April 2009

Proof of the Hamas/Zionist Conspiracy!

One of the funnier parts of watching the Arab world is seeing how the worst insult possible is to call someone a Zionist.

You can understand how Hamas accuses Fatah of being "Zionist," after all, they actually negotiate with those hated Israelis. But can Fatah actually believe that Hamas is Zionist as well?

Apparently so.

Palestine Press Agency published a photo last August showing an Israeli flag flying serenely over a Hamas compound in Gaza City:

This caused a bit of a stir in the Fatah message boards, as poster after poster used this as proof that Hamas was cooperating with Israel and were really secret Zionists and that the Americans and Israelis were working together with Iranian Shi'ites and Hamas. Others expressed extreme sorrow that Hamas could have become such a lost cause.

Finally, one member wrote a message explaining that Hamas was creating a video about the life of one of its "martyrs" and that the Israeli flag was just a part of the scenery.

Even after that explanation, the posters kept on going, saying things like "Hamas = Iran = Israel = America" and "They are the grandsons of monkeys and pigs, they are terrorists and they belong to Israel" and "Hhahahahahahahaha we knew this for a long time. Hamas is the second incarnation of the Jewish state."

Not the brightest bunch.

(h/t Suzanne)

Good backgrounder on Gaza casualties

Besides the research we have been doing comes this analysis by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Herzliya. I wish it had more specifics but it points to some new avenues of research.

Excerpts:

4. During Operation Cast Lead Hamas adopted the policy of concealing its own casualties to prevent morale from flagging and to reinforce the (false) impression that Israel was deliberately directing its military operations against Gazan civilians. Surfers on PALDF, Hamas's main Internet forum, were informed that it was strictly forbidden to post the names, pictures or any identifying details about “resistance” [i.e., terrorist] operatives killed or wounded until the end of the “Israeli aggression” in the Gaza Strip 3 (see the Appendix for the text of the instructions). In some instances reports were received of unofficial (and sometimes secret) and improvised burials during the fighting.

5. The policy of hiding the real number of terrorist operative casualties and issuing false reports about the number of civilians killed has continued after Operation Cast Lead . That was manifested by the creation of a false propaganda presentation of the mass killing of civilians in the Gaza Strip (the “holocaust” claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda) and the reduction or hiding of the blow dealt to Hamas's military infrastructure and its terrorist operatives. All of the above were aimed at serving the “victory narrative” which Hamas has been carefully constructing since the end of Operation Cast Lead.

6. Hamas, which controls all information originating in the Gaza Strip, issued exaggerated numbers of the number of “civilians” killed during Operation Cast Lead, while feeding the media false data and selective, biased reports about the number of armed operatives killed. That was done by lending a civilian character to security forces' operatives despite the fact that such operatives also serve in the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades in unequivocally operational capacities. 4

7. The numbers of armed terrorists involved in the fighting are therefore swallowed by the general statistics, where their identity as terrorists is blurred and they are represented as civilians or innocent, harmless policemen deliberately killed by the IDF . As a result a gap has been created between the biased data provided by Hamas (which the human rights organizations base their reports on) and the aforementioned findings of the examination undertaken by IDF Military Intelligence .

8. After Operation Cast Lead the Palestinians media reported an exaggerated 1,330 deaths. 5 By the end of February the total had been inflated to 1,414 (according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights) and then to 1,452 (by a media report which originated with the Hamas de-facto administration 6). The continual increase in the numbers of the dead was not supported by reports of scores of newly-found bodies or deaths of the wounded.

9. The discrepancy between the initial and later numbers can be explained by the inclusion of those who were not actually killed during Operation Cast Lead or the addition of those who died of natural causes.

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.