Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, May 15, 2009

Egypt to check Obama delegation for swine flu

I couldn't find the original story, but Palestine Today quotes an Egyptian newspaper saying that President Obama and his delegation will be "checked" for swine flu upon entering Egypt.

The report by «Egypt Today» Wednesday quoted an anonymous Egyptian official saying that Obama, and the accompanying delegation, which is estimated about one thousand people, would be subject to the procedures established by the Presidency of the Republic. The newspaper did not mention the nature of the checks, but it quoted an Egyptian expert that they will pose questions regarding the extent of the seriousness of the visit and the entry of the virus causing «swine flu» to Egypt as the United States as the top of the list of countries hit by the virus.

UPDATE: Here's the story (h/t A.L.)

Hamas prevents "Nakba" rallies

In a little-reported story even among the Palestinian Arabic press, Hamas has prevented groups from holding rallies to mark "Nakba day" in Gaza.

The Popular Struggle Front put out a statement saying

Such practices by the security forces of the Hamas movement of preventing the national marches to commemorate the Nakba show the state of division in the Palestinian street, which has overshadowed the work on national unity.

The decision is blow to all efforts to end the division and reconciliation and the restoration of unity.

Leftists across the world denounced Hamas' anti-democratic and anti-freedom actions.

And if you believe that one...

Jay Leno joke

Saudi Arabia held its first beauty pageant over the weekend and already they're embroiled in their own scandal.

Topless photos of Miss Saudi Arabia have surfaced ... you can see her entire forehead.

(from Giglish)

Go for it.

The heinous criminals have been arrested

From Iran's PressTV:

Iran has arrested individuals behind a scheme to 'smear the government' through importing alleged Israeli oranges into the country.

"We are absolutely certain that the oranges were not imported from Israel and that the stickers were fabricated," Iran's Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei told reporters after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

"It is obvious that the move was aimed to smear the government and overshadow its anti-racism activities," he explained.

"[In addition to those detained,] some people have been summoned or invited for further study of the case, the result of which will be announced accordingly," the minister went on to say.

The oranges which were allegedly imported from Israel sparked controversy in Iran, as Tehran bans any sort of dealings with Tel Aviv.

The oranges had stickers with a sign that read Jaffa Sweetie Israel PO. However, they were distributed in boxes bearing 'made in China' imprints.

I like the "anti-racism" line.

(Actually, the Jaffa Sweetie is not an orange, but a pomelit.)

Small victories in publicizing PCHR lies

NGO Monitor has linked to our results along with other researchers.

The Backspin blog of Honest Reporting had also linked to our research.

Someone had posted many of my articles about the PCHR at Cleveland Indymedia.

Richard Landes at The Augean Stables republished my Casualties of Truth article.

Now I have to find the time to learn a content management system so I can create a nice looking website to show our research....and while I am computer literate, even the simple ones take hours to learn and configure.

Hamas terrorist killed "on special Jihad mission"

Ma'an Arabic reports:

The Al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas, on Thursday morning, announced the death of 20-year-old Khaled Ghalban of Khan Younis during his "mission of jihad in particular."

The announcement said Qassam Ghalbanwas killed in the performance of his duty of jihad, particularly in the task, without giving any details.

That means either he blew himself up or another Hamas member killed him. There have been recent reports of Hamas infighting.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 76.

Hamas leader: "I hate all weapons"

Hamas' PR machine chugs along, with credulous Westerners believing any old lie as long as it gives them hope. Here's a particularly laughable example:

GAZA CITY, May 14 (IPS) - A founding member of Hamas says he hates all weapons and insists that his organisation is not anti-Jewish.

In an interview with IPS, Sayed Abu Musameh described frequent claims in the European and U.S. press that Hamas's charter is based on enmity towards Jews as a "big lie".

"In our culture, we respect every foreigner, especially Jews and Christians," he said. "But we are against Zionists, not as nationalists but as fascists and racists."

Musameh also contended that Hamas has long been ready to agree a truce - known in Arabic as a hudna - with Israel but that Israel had refused all offers and imposed a crippling economic blockade on Gaza. The firing of Qassam rockets on the Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Sderot was designed "not to destroy Israel or to destroy Israeli people" but to "make them notice our siege."

"I hate all kinds of weapons," said Musameh. "I dream of seeing every weapon from the atomic bomb to small guns banned everywhere."

The Hamas Charter includes such loving statements towards Jews as:

...our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave...

The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: "The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim)."

The Nazism of the Jews does not skip women and children, it scares everyone.

The other Arab and Islamic states are required, at the very least, to facilitate the movement of the Jihad fighters from and to them. We cannot fail to remind every Muslim that when the Jews occupied Holy Jerusalem in 1967 and stood at the doorstep of the Blessed Aqsa Mosque, they shouted with joy: "Muhammad is dead, he left daughters behind." Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.

...more steps need to be taken by the Arab and Islamic peoples and Islamic associations throughout the Arab and Islamic world in order to make possible the next round with the Jews, the merchants of war.

As far as that "hudna" that Hamas has offered, it had a few small preconditions - like Israel surrendering Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria first.

Hamas' respect for Christians is so all-embracing that the few remaining Christians in Gaza live in fear of attacks and often choose to prostrate themselves to Hamas in the vain hopes of being left alone. And Hamas members are not shy about their naked hate of Jews and Christians.

As far as Hamas' aversion to all weapons, well...

Iowahawk: "I Guess You Had To Be There"

Iowahawk brings us the celebrity roast to end all celebrity roasts.

This brilliant piece is the most biting, trenchant and witty criticism of the current administration imaginable.

PLO: Two state solution will lead to Israel's collapse

MEMRI does it again:

Following are excerpts from an interview with PLO Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki, which aired on ANB TV on May 7, 2009:
Abbas Zaki: What is needed is a settlement, not a hudna [truce]. After 45 years of struggle, we have the right to reach a conclusion to this conflict, rather than extending the hudna, enabling Israel to expand on a daily basis.

My advice is: we should not give Israel a hudna, because whenever Israel is given a hudna, it consolidates its position and becomes more deeply rooted. What hudna? If they do not withdraw from the 1967 lands – what hudna? Israel will become a fact on the ground, and we will end up as small enclaves, and should be driven out with time.

Therefore, it is high time that we found a final, comprehensive solution. The Arabs talk about a comprehensive solution and present initiatives, and the world talks about a solution, yet we say: Let's stick to the hudna. No, my friend. I personally joined Fatah somewhat belatedly, in 1962. Work out how many years that is. Should I keep on extending the hudnas? Impossible. We want a solution now.

They talk about a two state solution, and when that is achieved...even Ahmadinejad, the leader of the rejectionists throughout the region, said he supports a two-state solution. Nobody fools anybody.

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? what will become of all the sacrifices they made--just to be told to leave?

They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

And he is exactly right.

This is the real reason that Arabs insist on Jerusalem - not because of their love of the city that they ignored for a thousand years, but because they know that the Jewish connection to the city is so strong and so powerful.

As a result, the Arabs aren't scared of secular Israelis, socialist kibbutzim, Israeli robotic jeeps, drones or even the IDF altogether. They believe that all of those can be defeated by appealing to liberal sensibilities of the West and slowly chipping away at the resolve of the Zionists who desperately want peace more than anything else.

What they are scared of are Jews who are unapologetically proud of their Judaism and of their deep, emotional ties to the Land of Israel.

While they consider everyone else a pushover - they are patient, and will wait decades to wear them down - the Jews who have a pure, emotional, and especially religious connection to the Land are the ones that they know they cannot defeat. Because deep down they know that their own connection to the land is derivative, a mere shadow of the Jews' deep love of Israel.

They know that the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque were close to being ruins before the Jews started returning to the Land of Israel in large numbers. They know that they showed almost no interest in Palestine before the 20th century.

They know that if the Jews had not started moving back to Palestine, their own mythology would never have started.

This is why their goal is Jerusalem. This is why they raise a stink at every new building built or purchased by Jews, at every synagogue, at the slightest hint of Jewish permanence in the city that Jews have been praying towards and crying over for millenia.

And this is why Jews - even the ones who, for whatever tragic reason, don't feel the same connection that their ancestors did - cannot compromise on Jerusalem.

(h/t Vicious Babushka)

"Hamas is the foreign-policy wing of Iran"

An interesting section of an op-ed by Cal Thomas:

Last week in London I spoke with Liam Fox, a conservative Member of Parliament and "shadow defense secretary." Fox told me, "There is a belief in some quarters that if only you can resolve the problems between Israel and Palestine, all the other problems in the Middle East, in a domino-like fashion, will fall into place. That is absolute nonsense."

Indeed, it is.

Fox said on a recent visit to Iran that Iranian politicians told him they realize they lack an air force to fight back if they are attacked by Israel, so they would use Hezbollah and Hamas. "They are part of our defense policy against Israel," Fox quoted them as saying, "Hamas is not part of the Palestinian problem. Hamas is the foreign-policy wing of Iran in Israel."

This simple fact is what Westerners fail to grasp: Hezbollah and Hamas are proxies for Iran - and they intend to surround Israel.

And if Iran is allowed by the West to develop a nuclear bomb, which it appears is already being treated as a fait accompli, it will not need to work that hard on its missile delivery system - because there are tens of thousands of human beings who would be more than willing to bring it themselves to Israel's borders.

Here are the reasons that the free world is letting this happen:

1. Israel is the obvious target, not Europe, Westerners don't feel personally invested or threatened.

2. Even though they work overtime to limit Israel's ability to defend itself, they figure that Israel will ignore them and defend itself anyway, so they don't feel they have to get involved.

3. The unwillingless to face the horrible - yet obvious - truth causes otherwise smart people to close their eyes and grab onto whatever justifications they can find, like the discredited NIE report.

4. Doing something means making hard decisions, something that democratic leaders are loathe to do when they have an eye on getting re-elected.

5. Everyone hates war and no one wants to start one without the other side doing something overtly aggressive. The only justification would be the existence of a huge crater where Tel Aviv was.

Turkmenistan!

From Eurasianet:

Israel has announced it will open an embassy in Turkmenistan’s capital of Ashgabat, located just 32 kilometers from the Iranian border.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman held a series of "secret talks" with officials in Ashgabat and a team of Israeli diplomats and security personnel will visit the Turkmen capital later in May to select a "suitable building" to house the Israeli diplomatic mission, Israel National News reported May 13.
Turkmenistan and Israel established formal diplomatic relations 17 years ago, but to date no Israeli ambassador has resided in the Central Asian state.
Ashgabat is situated in the foothills of the Kopet-Dag mountain range and is just a short drive from the Bajgiran border point. Turkmenistan and Iran share a 994-kilometer long border.

Even if Israel/Turkmenistan cooperation never reaches the point where this is strategically important, just knowing how much it ticks off Iran - that a neighboring Muslim state would open an embassy of the hated Zionists - makes it all worth it.

Benny Morris on a "secular, democratic Palestine"

The leading "new historian" tells it like it is :

The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine — a one-state “solution” — and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, and as a corollary, al-Husseini, the Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and 1940s; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the national movement from the 1960s to Yasser Arafat’s death in November, 2004; and Hamas today — all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in another version, to limit it to those 50,000-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.
The Palestinian vision was never — as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to Western journalists — of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (though it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouﬂage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power.
Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi has written that “in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, replacing Israel.” And Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: “The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance.”
This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council (PNC) never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was “a secular democratic state in Palestine.” The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a “secular, democratic Palestine.”
The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” — that is, 1917.
True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, “freedom of worship and of visit” to holy sites to all, “without discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.” And, no doubt, this was music to liberal Western ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently?
Western liberals like, or pretend, to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances.

That last sentence could be the slogan of this blog.

Read the whole article.

Selectively hearing the Pope's words

One of the interesting things that occur when the Pope speaks is not only that his words are examined exhanstively, but that the people who interpret his words show their own biases.

This occurs on all sides - there are plenty of Israelis as well as Arabs who are quick to criticize the Pope's choice of words. To give one example, some Israelis were not happy with the Pope talking about Jews "killed" instead of "murdered" in reference to the Holocaust, although as Batya points out, Yad Vashem uses the even more indirect word "perished."

The news media, however, pretend to have no biases. So when they start interpreting the words of the pontiff, we can see exactly where they are coming from.

From the Times of London:

Pope criticises 'tragic' West Bank barrier
Pope Benedict XVI today lamented the "tragic" building by Israel of the West Bank separation barrier in a speech to Palestinians at a refugee camp in Bethlehem in the shadow of the 25ft structure.

In sentiments that are sure to anger Jerusalem – who had blocked the building of a stage for the Pope next to the concrete and steel wall – the pontiff said the barrier was a symbol of the stalemate in relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Towering over us... is a stark reminder of the stalemate that relations between Israelis and Palestinians seem to have reached – the wall," he told a crowd at the Aida refugee camp.

“In a world where more and more borders are being opened up – to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges – it is tragic to see walls still being erected,” he said.
“How earnestly we pray for an end to the hostilities that have caused this wall to be built."

It doesn't sound to me like the Pope is criticizing the security barrier - it sounds more like he is lamenting the terrorism that forced Israel to build the security barrier.

Somehow, the Times of London chose to interpret Benedict's words differently.

Perhaps because they are more bothered by the wall than by the terrorism that spawned it?

What could be worse than the "Nakba"?

For Palestinian Arabs, the "nakba" has little to do with the creation of hundreds of thousand of refugees and everything to do with the establishment of a Jewish state. Hence their Nakba celebrations are timed to coincide with Israel Independence Day (and the anniverary of the UN Partition of Palestine) and not with, for example, the events at Deir Yassin.

The leader of the Islamic Jihad just confirmed this:

Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Abdullah Ramadan Shallah said Palestinian recognition of Israel would be "more dangerous than the Nakba of 1948", the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi reported on Wednesday.
In a speech delivered by telephone for an event in Gaza on Tuesday, Shallah said: "What is more dangerous than the Palestinian people's Nakba is that the ones with the rights recognize their enemies and deny their own rights. Everything that is happening in Jerusalem is the result of the deals, agreements and negotiations with the Zionist enemy."

To the West, they will whine about Israeli massacres and atrocities and the "refugee" problem and use them as reasons to vilify Israel. In the minds of Arabs, however, the existence of a Jewish state in an all-but-ignored backwater of what they had lazily considered to be Arab land is the real crime, and everything else is a smokescreen to try to eliminate that aberration. Sometimes the methods sound peaceful, and sometimes aggressive, but the end goal has been consistent. The pain that the Arabs feel from Israel is not physical but rather its very existence is an affront to their manhood and their pride.

No amount of concessions will ever mollify that.

How not to clean a gun

From Ma'an:

A young Palestinian woman from the southern West Bank town of Beit Ummar was shot and died Wednesday when her fiancé misfired his gun while cleaning the weapon.

The 20-year-old woman and her 22-year-old fiancé have not been identified.

Neighbors say the man is a security officer in one of the Palestinian Authority’s security services. Several shots were heard as the man was reportedly cleaning his handgun. One of the shots hit his fiancé, who was killed instantly

.The Zionists make the Palestinian Arabs sound like they are dirty, but this one is so concerned with cleanliness that he kept cleaning his gun even while it was firing bullets at his fiancee!

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 75.

Iran TV: "Swine flu an American/Zionist plot"

Insanity from the Land of the Mullahs: (via MEMRI)

Reporter: Every so often, diseases develop in different corners of the world, and disappear after wreaking damage to the tune of billions of dollars. After avian flu, the time has come for pigs. It is a disease that afflicts pigs, but because of the physiological similarity between humans and pigs, this disease afflicts humans as well. Now, the main actors in this great movie must go into action. The director has fulfilled his role very well, and gathered the boldest and most famous actors for this blockbuster.

The international news networks air the trailers of this movie for free. With the outbreak of this disease, the American president went into action, and said in a sensational speech: "My government has consulted health officials, and they have not advised the closing of the U.S. borders."

In his speech, Barak Obama mentioned a medicine called Tamiflu – but what exactly is Tamiflu? Who are the compassionate manufacturers of this medicine? This great pharmacist is none other than Rumsfeld, the former American secretary of defense. He is one of the shareholders, and an active and influential member on the board of directors of Gilead Science, which is the main provider of medicine for this disease.

It should be noted that the Gilead Sciences is a Jewish company. Its name, in Hebrew means "holy place," and all its shareholders are Zionists.

Dr. Ali-Reza Mehrabi, Shaid Beheshti University: The United States is one of the few countries with an arsenal of viruses. It is one of the countries with the largest arsenals of smallpox.

[...]

It is interesting that last year, [Rumsfeld] bought, if I'm not mistaken, 18 billion dollars worth of new Gilead stocks.

[...]

If we accept the assumption that work was conducted in a laboratory in Mexico – whether in a pig farm or some other place – the mere fact that this substance found its way out, even if by mistake, shows that the U.S. is conducting experiments in a peripheral country, rather than on its own soil. In this case, the U.S. might have lost control.

(h/t Suzanne)

Men's fashions under attack in Saudi Arabia

From Arab News:

An official at the Saudi Arabian Airlines once prevented a young man dressed in Bermuda [shorts] to board his Riyadh-bound plane on the grounds he was not properly dressed.
Some youths dressed in Bermudas were prevented from entering hospitals even during times of emergency.
As a reaction to this fast spreading fashion among young men, calls have been made to draft a new law specifying the least minimum specifications for male clothes which could be socially acceptable. The calls were meant to restore the sense of decorum to the outfits men wear in public places.
Sheikh Saleh Al-Shamrani, a teacher at the Scholarly Institute for Islamic Studies in Jeddah, described the tight trousers and sleeveless open shirts as “contrary to men’s ethics”.
“It seems that every age has its fashion. Very often we are confused between men and women because of the dress they wear,” he said. Al-Shamrani stressed that the thobe (Arab garment) and Shumag (head dress) are for men while the Abaya and the skirt and blouse are for women. “If men give up this dress to dress like women they will be damned,” he said recalling the Prophet’s (pbuh) Hadith warning against men acting like women and vise versa.
He called for punishing such kind of men because they drifted away from the natural instinct and recalled another Hadith which says “kick them out of your homes”.
Asked how to treat men dressed like women in public places, Al-Shamrani said they should be taken away from these places to be taught the right behavior and the proper dressing sense.
“The alternative punishment like asking them to memorize the Qur’an or attend congregational prayers for a month will be a suitable punishment for them,” Al-Shamrani added.

So according to Saudis, studying the Quran is a punishment?

Conspiracy theory of the day: The artificial earthquake

A (presumably Arab) "expert in Israeli affairs" warned that Israel planned to create an artificial earthquake to demolish the Al Aqsa Mosque.

The evil Zionists are apparently using a rock-melting chemical to destabilize the Temple Mount and to ultimately cause its collapse.

It seems that the Jews have tested their localized artificial earthquake technology in the Western Negev and near Eilat.

I don't know about this one. It seems to me that if Israel could cause earthquakes at will, they would be wiser to direct it towards Natanz. Not that I would be terribly upset if the Muslim desecrations on the Temple Mount would happen to collapse due to an act of God.

Casualties of Truth

(This is the article that I wrote as an op-ed, that was inexplicably not published as planned. Much of it was beautifully rewritten by a prominent writer and author.)

For three weeks in December 2008-January 2009, Israel and Hamas fought a war in the Gaza Strip after Hamas announced it was abandoning the ceasefire and began escalated rocket and mortar attacks on Israel.

There is one fact about that war which people around the world think they know: there were about 1400 Palestinians killed in the war and most or almost all of them were civilians, mainly women an children.

This claim, however, is false and demonstrably so on the basis of careful research using publicly available and reliable materials. Indeed, a group of bloggers, including the author, have shown already that more than 30 percent of the claimed "civilian" casualties were in fact, to use the polite word, armed militants or members of Hamas-led security forces. And the number of such combatants we are discovering is rising every day.

While Hamas and other Palestinian political groups were using alleged civilian casualties to bolster their case with international public opinion, they demonstrably knew otherwise. In fact, they publicly bragged about the military activities of those they labeled innocent civilian bystanders.

The basis for many claims about the distribution of casualties was in a March report <http://pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2008/list.pdf> by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). Widely covered‹and credulously accepted‹in the Western media, the report was a seemingly comprehensive, detailed list of every death. The bottom line: : the name, gender, age, location, and job of each person is detailed. Most importantly, the PCHR claimed 1180 of the alleged 1414 victims were civilians.

Our team cross-checked the names listed by PCHR with lists of "resisters" compiled by the Al- Mezan Center for Human Rights <http://www.mezan.org/en/index.php> , lists of "martyrs" published by Hamas, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), and other militant groups in Gaza, as well as from the Ma'an News Agency, and other Palestinian sources.

The IDF released its own report on casualties from Operation Cast Lead, saying that there were 1166 killed in Gaza, of whom 709 were known Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants. The IDF did not release their list of casualties, so we could not check specifics against the PCHR claims.

Our results so far show that at least, if all armed police are counted, 391 of the 1180 people who PCHR classifies as "civilians," were, in fact, militants.

PCHR's criteria to determine exactly who is a "militant" are unclear. Sometimes they speak of "active combatants" but at other times they state, accurately, that any members of armed groups, such as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, would be considered legitimate targets under international law.

The team has identified members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP and the DFLP considered "civilians" by the PCHR. Examples include Adib Harb (brigade commander for the PRC), 'Eid 'Oda al-Shandi (field commander in the al-Qassam Brigades) and even senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan.

The IDF has categorized most or all of the Hamas police force as "Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives" and therefore as legal targets. The PCHR takes strong exception <http://pchrgaza.ps/files/PressR/English/2008/44-2009.html> to this categorization, saying that Hamas policemen are civilians.

Even by the PCHR's own criteria, our research <http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-of-those-civilians-killed-in-gaza.html> has detailed proof identifying over 64% of the police killed in Operation Cast Lead some 180 of them out of 283, were also members of militant groups, predominantly the al-Qassam Brigades acting as combatants against Israel.

Certainly, the PCHR is aware of the affiliations of many of not all of the victims in Gaza . For example, the PRC al-Nasser Salah Addin Brigades‹the most extremist group in Gaza which has been reportedly linked to al-Qaida--published a list <http://www.moqawmh.com/ara/index.php?act=News&id=2583> of its 18 of its "martyrs" on January 22. Yet nine of them, including two commanders, were classified as "civilian" by the PCHR months later. Similarly, an al-Qassam Brigades' leader famous for developing the Qassam rocket, Amir Yousef Al-Mansy, was also called a "civilian." It strains credulity to think that the PCHR was unaware that they were militants engaged in fighting Israel.

Why, then, did they classify so many known militants as civilians? One can only conclude that the reason is to deceive the media.

Such a high number of Al Qassam members among the police killed indicates that Hamas itself does not distinguish between its so-called civilian and military wings. Effectively, Hamas considers its police to be the same as its military force. If Hamas does not make such a distinction, why shouldn't everyone else conclude that its entire police force is a legitimate target?

In addition to the police, we have identified 117 other militants that the PCHR classified as "civilian." None of our findings are inconsistent with the IDF report on Gaza casualties.

While the PCHR misrepresents the facts about Palestinian casualties it makes other statements which reveal the highly politicized nature of the group that show it is not a human rights organization. For example, it consistently uses the phrase "IOF" ("Israel Occupation Forces") instead of Israel Defense Forces, the proper name of Israel's military, in trying to make Israel look as bad as possible.

The PCHR's influence cannot be overstated. UN groups routinely quote PCHR figures and reports. News media around the world rely on organizations like the PCHR to give them accurate information about what happens in Gaza. The PCHR presents itself as an unbiased party and is taken as such in media reports. The truth, however, is quite different.

Israel's war in Gaza was not aimed at causing civilian losses, nor was it a war of "occupation," as the PCHR would have it, but of defense. The fact that the casualty figures are being misrepresented is a demonstration of the fact that charges made against Israel are false. We are confident that as our research continues we will find many more soldiers of Hamas and other groups waging war against Israel disguised as civilians.

(updated numbers 6/12/09)