Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 31, 2009

UNRWA chief slanders Israel

The UN’s director of relief operations in Gaza told Palestinians in Gaza that they had not been defeated by the Israeli military on Sunday.

“The Palestinians were not defeated by Israeli army in its latest offensive against the Gaza Strip, and they proved to be capable of resuming their life anew despite all their hardships,” said John Ging, the director of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which serves hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Gaza.

This means that the official UNRWA position is that Israel's goal in Gaza was to defeat the "Palestinians," not to stop rockets or deter Hamas.

The only way to interpret Ging's statement is to say that he believes that this was a war whose goal was genocide, and the Israelis failed in their attempts to eradicate all Arabs from Gaza.

This is a slanderous and sickening statement. But it is not a surprising one.

Every Israeli town is a "settlement"

This cartoon from Palestine Today shows what Palestinian Arabs really consider to be "settlements."

And it is hardly limited to the West Bank.

And here is how "moderate" Firas Press looks at "settlements:"

The clear implication is that the idea of Jews living in supposedly Arab territories is inherently aggressive. The logical conclusion of that mindset is that to kill all Jews in the territories is considered "self defense."

Put the two cartoons together and you have the Arab justification for genocide against all Israelis.

Another sighting of Zionist Pigs

This Zionist Pig article from Palestine Today is notable because it doesn't merely accuse "settlers" of unleashing these wild boars on Palestinian Arab crops, but now the IDF and the Israel Nature and Natural Parks Protection Authority are part of the conspiracy!

And they have "witnesses!"

Wild pigs spread in the territory of the town of Arraba, south of Jenin in the northern West Bank, and caused serious damage to agricultural crops.

...Witnesses in the town of Arraba affirmed to the news agency that the Israeli occupation forces and the so-called Israeli Nature Protection Service brought a tanker full of pigs inside the town, under the protection and guard of military patrols of the army of occupation, and placed them on Arraba-Ya'bad street in a garbage dump near the town of Arraba.

Ya gotta love Arab witnesses.

Click to read previous Zionist Attack Zoo postings.

Hamas, PA forces battle; 6 dead

From Ma'an:

Six Palestinians were killed on Sunday morning in clashes between Palestinian Authority security services and gunmen affiliated to Hamas in the northern West Bank city of Qalqiliya.

According to the medics, three security officers and two Hamas fighters were killed, in addition to the owner of the building where the Hamas men had stationed themselves.

A couple of observations:

The PA police are incredibly incompetent, even after months of US-backed training, to lose three policemen in a gun battle with only a handful of Hamas terrorists.

While the PA has all but given up on controlling Gaza again, Hamas has clearly not given up on controlling the West Bank. One must look at the "unity talks" in that context.

When Ma'an talks about PA officers killing Hamas terrorists, they are "killed." When the IDF kills a single Hamas member while trying to arrest him, it is an "assassination."

In other Hamas/Fatah news, Hamas arrested a Fatah-leaning reporter in Khan Younis. These arrests have been increasing on both sides, with each side accusing the other of torture.

Together with a four-year old boy who was killed by "his father's weapon," the 2009 PalArab self-death count rises to 92.

Arab deja vu

Here is a report from AP, showing Arab displeasure at US arms supplies to Israel as well as Israel's declaration of Jerusalem as its capital.

Guess when this happened?

The report is dated September 12, 1966. Yes, the Arabs were complaining then that the US was not being fair in its policy of maintaining a balance of power between Israel and the Arabs. To them, the US should have allowed them to obliterate Israel.

Even more interesting is their statement on Jerusalem. Israel declared western Jerusalem to be its capital - and even though there are no Muslim or Christian sites of any import in the western part of Jerusalem, the Arabs still said that this was a threat to the holy sites - that they still controlled! (And that they banned all Jews from visiting!)

Chag Sameach!

Tonight starts the holiday of Shavuot, so I will not be blogging until, probably, Sunday.

And my blogging will be lighter than usual for the next few weeks as I have major projects both at work and at home that need to get finished.

I wish all my Jewish readers a Chag Sameach!

The 500-character challenge

I just saw yet another article in the Saudi Gazette about how important it is for other Arabs to feel sympathy for Palestinian Arabs and to boycott Israel.

The feedbacks for the article are limited to 500 characters, so as a personal challenge I wanted to craft a response that fit within those limits.

Here's my reply (not yet posted):

It is interesting that Arabs don't seem to notice the institutionalized bigotry that they have against Palestinians - namely that they do not, by law, allow Palestinians to become citizens of their countries.

It is much easier to blame Israel for all the Palestinians' problems rather than notice that Arab policies have left them stateless and miserable for 61 years.

And this bigotry is justified in the name of "unity."

Why not give the Palestinians the option to become citizens if they want?

Maybe I'll work on a 140-character tweet, next....

Terrorists getting money

Creeping Sharia noticed that Congress has just allocated billions of dollars to, shall we say, questionable "allies."

Anne Lieberman emailed many bloggers and journalists about these stealth appropriations:

I would wager that few among you know - I certainly didn't - that Congress appropriated almost a billion dollars to the Palestinians last week. And what's worse is that they specified about a third of it to go to Gaza (Gaza = HAMAS).

I thought it was illegal to fund terrorists.

These expenditures were in that Supplemental Appropriations bill where Congress didn't give Obama the money he wanted for closing Gitmo since he didn't have a specific plan (big news for a day or two). So I guess they did read this bill, some of it anyway.

It was passed in the House May 14, and the Senate passed it a week later... a week ago today, May 21 (my fellow West Virginians will note that Senators Byrd and Rockefeller didn't vote).

So when you see Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) coming to the White House today, just know that he's picking up a big fat check. Know also that he is a terrorist, Arafat's right-hand man for decades and the financier of the Munich massacre (when Palestinians murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics in 1972). He's also a Holocaust denier and his term in office at the so-called "Palestinian Authority" ran out in January. So he has no real position and leads a country that doesn't even exist. But now I'm nit-picking. What's a billion dollars, one way or the other?

The money, much of which is above and beyond what Obama requested, includes:

•West Bank and Gaza: $665 million in bilateral economic, humanitarian, and security assistance for the West Bank and Gaza.

•Jordan: $250 million, $250 million above the request, including $100 million for economic and $150 million for security assistance.

•Egypt: $360 million, $310 million above the request, including $50 million for economic assistance, $50 million for border security, and $260 million for security assistance.

USAID goes into detail of where the money for the PA is allocated. Here's a small part:

Peace and Security ($109 million)

This supplemental request fulfills existing security assistance requirements and responds to new
opportunities in the Palestinian Territories, supporting efforts by the Deputy Envoy for Security,
LTG Dayton. The bulk of the request is to sustain and accelerate the critically important and
effective effort to train, equip, and garrison the Presidential Guard and Special Battalions of the National Security Forces to crackdown on terrorism and bolster and backstop the efforts of the Palestinian Civilian Police to maintain law and order. In addition, the request contains funds to begin developing new programs that the European Union and other donors are not supporting, but have been identified by the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, Senator Mitchell, as critical to the overall effort to create a competent and professional Palestinian Authority Security Force. Accordingly, the principal areas of focus for supplemental security assistance will be to fully develop two more National Security Force Special Battalions; train a second Presidential Guard battalion; train, equip, and support civil defense first responders; sustain and expand security and law enforcement-related specialized training; develop a border integrity capability; and augment program development and support funding to address expanded logistical, administrative, and related requirements of the program.

This supplemental request also provides law enforcement-related training and equipment to enhance border integrity along the Gaza border. This assistance is intended to help further stabilize and control this border following the Gaza conflict. Funding would be used for training in a full range of border integrity disciplines and will provide non-lethal equipment to these trained forces.

I don't understand the last paragraph at all - who exactly from the PA is controlling the Gaza border? Or is this for Egypt?

I wish I had known about this when I went to Washington last week....

Moving the red lines

Binyomin Netanyahu has, apparently accidentally, stumbled upon one of the best political weapons Israel has. And even he doesn't realize it.

When he took office, the Western press started obsessing over his non-use of the words "two state solution." The world made the assumption - despite "Ultra-Rightist Avigdor Lieberman's"' acceptance of the Roadmap - that Netanyahu was a super-hawk whose proposals for peace were smokescreens for his real desire to annex the entire Arab world and perform a genocide on all Palestinian Arabs. The pressure started to build and Netanyahu, like all recent Israeli leaders, buckled a few days ago when he tacitly seemed to accept "linkage" despite explicitly renouncing it:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to tear down settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank in return for US backing on its stance on arch-foe Iran, local media reported on Tuesday.
Netanyahu told his right-wing Likud faction on Monday that Israel would have to dismantle what it considers illegal outposts, as demanded by Washington, since the issue of Iran was more important, newspaper reports said.
"I identify the danger and that's why I am willing to take unpopular steps such as evacuating outposts. The Iranian threat is above everything," the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot quoted Netanyahu as saying.
"There are things on which you have to compromise."

Despite the seeming waves of pressure on Israel in reaction to Bibi's "intransigence," however, there has been an undertow in the opposite direction from his perceived lack of support for a two-state solution.

His reticence to say the magic words "Palestinian state" are causing people to openly wonder whether a such a state is desirable or feasible.

Canada's National Post has always been on the right wing in the Middle East conflict, but the following article (republished in the Vancouver Sun) would have been inconceivable a few months ago:

The two-state solution illusion

...A two-state solution sounds pleasant to Western ears. It seems the proper thing for Canadian politicians to say. Certainly the media would pillory Harper and Ignatieff were they to refuse to play along. But were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to endorse the plan tomorrow—as Barack Obama wants as precondition to helping Israel resist Iranian nuclear agression—it would be utterly meaningless. “There is no partner on the Palestinian side,” [Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled] Toameh says. Israel's West Bank settlements are no obstacle, he adds; they are a red herring: a minor issue that Jerusalem will easily handle—based on its readiness to dismantle its settlements in the past—when the moment is right. That time is not now, and is not coming soon. Because, in today's environment, whatever proposed peace agreement is backed by Abbas would only be instantly rejected by Hamas, and any deal with Hamas—were any possible—reflexively rejected by Fatah. And neither group has much validity in citizens' eyes, he reports. In fact, Toameh mischievously suggests Netanyahu might be clever to try what Obama wants and publicly back a two-state plan immediately, if only to put the Palestinians and international peace-plan backers “in a corner” by revealing to all how truly impossible implementing anything of the sort would be under the current circumstances.

The international community’s error, says Toameh, is that it seems to think statehood is something to be handed to Palestinians, like a gift. It is, he believes, an undeserved one. “I believe a state is not something we should be given, it is something we should earn,” says the West Bank-born journalist. Far from demonstrating a capability to create a functioning, responsible civil society, he says, Palestinians have only proven their willingness to tolerate chaos, mob-rule and terror. They watched as, instead of building hospitals and schools and infrastructure with the billions sent to Ramallah and Gaza, Arafat lined his own pockets, Fatah fattened its cronies, and Hamas purchased weapons. On the one hand, Palestinians have fallen again and again for rotten leadership, which in turn, do their best to suppress the emergence of more responsible alternatives. On the other, Toameh seems to suggest that the Palestinians are getting the government they deserve. “Everything is going in the wrong direction, largely because of the failure of Palestinians to hold [their] government accountable,” he says.

Bibi has moved the very parameters of the debate, and that points to incredible political power.

The Arab/Israeli conflict is, ultimately, binary. There might be 22 Arab nations, 57 Islamic nations and an entire building of diplomats in New York's East Side who love to dump on Israel, but in the end Israel does not have to go along with anything that compromises its own red lines. Unfortunately, those lines have become fuzzy, to put it mildly, and each time Israel's leaders retreat from one of them the vacuum is instantly filled with more pressure to bring the lines in ever closer.

What Bibi has inadvertently proven is that the opposite is still true. If Israel's leaders stake out an uncompromising position that pushes the lines outward, even at this late date, there will be a perceptible shift in the world's reaction, even amongst the predictable criticism.

While previous Israeli governments have effectively ceded parts of Jerusalem, Bibi is at least publicly moving that line back outward. If he doesn't yield, the net effect would be to change the very discourse from "how much of Jerusalem should Israel give away" to "should Israel give any away." Similarly, his public statements on natural growth in the settlements would also change the very terms of the debate from "Israel should return all of the West Bank" to "How much should Israel return?"

When all is said and done, the resolution to the problem is not to be found in legal or historic or religious arguments - it will be the result of negotiations. Netanyahu has the potential to strengthen Israel's negotiating position immensely, if he chooses to, by simply being strong in his convictions.

As one of the sides in this lopsided conflict against her, Israel holds some impressive cards that cost little to show. And if Israel is to learn anything from its Palestinian Arab neighbors, it is that the consequences of saying "no" often end up being rewards.

CAMERA picks up on EoZ PCHR research

From CAMERA's blog:

Elder of Ziyon blog's investigation of a list of Palestinian dead during the Israeli military operation in December and January reveals that hundreds who were reported to be civilians were in fact militants. The list of 1417 Palestinian victims was published in March by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a Gaza-based organization. By cross-checking the names on the list with other Palestinian sources, including Hamas-affiliated web sites, Elder of Ziyon was able to compile the names of 286 militants who PCHR misidentified as civilians.
Media coverage of the Israeli operation in Gaza prominently featured the accusation that Israeli forces engaged in indiscriminate and excessive violence, in some cases intentionally targeting civilians. PCHR's reports of civilian fatalities were frequently cited to substantiate this accusation. As CAMERA pointed out as early as January 21, scrutiny of PCHR's own data cast serious doubts about its accuracy. The CAMERA analysis pointed out over 20 cases of mislabeling militants as civilians and noted that 75 percent of the fatalities were young males of combat age.

The recent analysis by Elder of Ziyon delves further into PCHR's data and debunks PCHR's assertion that most members of Hamas internal security forces (policemen) were civilians. It also reveals that a number of children (aged 17 or under) were Hamas combatants - a point initially suggested in the CAMERA analysis.

While these revelations come too late to impact coverage of the fighting, it can only be hoped that responsible journalists will be less inclined to accept without scrutiny the casualty statistics and claims made by PCHR and other groups that most of the casualties caused by Israeli military action are civilians.

The research has slowed down but it is not finished yet.

New PA minister urges boycott of Israeli goods

From Ma'an:

Newly-appointed Palestinian Minister of Social Affairs Majida Al-Masri has ordered a ministry-wide boycott of Israeli products as her first decision in her new role.

The decision says Palestinian products must have the priority, but if a certain product is unavailable, priority goes to Arab countries, then foreign equivalent. Israeli products are to be boycotted altogether.

I hope she expands her plan to the entire PA.

I don't have recent statistics but in 2000, over 92% of the PA exports went to Israel, and 73% of Palestinian Arab imports came from Israel.

If we implement her plan, what little economy the PA has would disappear altogether.

But as their citizens go through garbage to get scraps of food, at least they'll have their honor!

Thoughts on Cardozo

There are a number of articles today asking whether Benjamin Cardozo would be properly considered the first Hispanic US Supreme Court Justice.

His ancestors likely came from Portugal, although his family lived in the US for generations. And some people question whether Portuguese people are properly considered Hispanic, with some contradictory evidence whether the US legally considers them as such.

I think that there is a subconscious reason why people did not historically consider Cardozo to be Hispanic or even Portuguese: because he was Jewish. And throughout history, with rare exceptions, Jews were not popularly considered to be full members of their adopted countries.

Some of the reason is from the Jews themselves, especially the more religious ones, who would tend to be more insular and separate. But much of the reason is simply because the Jews were never accepted as equal members of most of the societies they became a part of, even after hundreds of years.

The bottom line is that, throughout history, both Jews and non-Jews considered the Jewish people to be a nation of their own. Cardozo was first and foremost a (Sephardic) Jew, by his self-definition as well as by others, and this definition of Jew had little to do with religion and a lot to do with ancestry.

Which goes to show that, not too long ago, pretty much everyone agreed that the Jews were part of their own nation. It is interesting that only recently have people, for political purposes, started to question that fact.

PalArab news roundup 5/27/09

Work accident - A Hamas member was killed on a special "jihad mission" in the the northern Gaza Strip, and apparently he managed to kill someone else along with him. Interestingly, he seems to have been killed in a tunnel that is nowhere near Egypt, meaning that it is likely that Hamas is working on more tunnels to Israel to stage terror attacks.

Tunnel collapse - Another Gaza man was killed, and another injured, when a smuggling tunnel collapsed on them in Rafah.

Hamas, Fatah tensions escalate - For the past couple of weeks, the numbers of tit-for-tat arrests of Hamas members in the West Bank and Fatah members in Gaza have accelerated.

Love doesn't conquer all - An Israeli court is hearing an appeal of a gay Palestinian Arab man to become a permanent resident of Israel, as he has an Israeli lover and believes that his life is in danger under PA control.

Syrian snakes strike back - A Syrian girl was bitten four times by a viper in a single week. Perhaps the snakes are organizing their own resistance movement against Syrian girls for the Snake Nakba.

The 2009 PalArab self death count is now at 85.

Notable links

Nakba Day letter - the story of how a Jewish family was massacred in 1929 a day after the sheikh of a neighboring town promised their safety.

Solomonia on the Jewish Nakba.

Yaakov Lozowick on a small irony of "linkage."

Arabs worry about eating donkeys and pigs

Although I cannot find the source now, Gazans earlier this month feared that the meat being served in restaurants was actually donkey meat.

And now, Egyptians are worried that the hundreds of thousands of pigs slaughtered in Egypt because of swine flu fears have made their way into Egyptian markets as well.

Both pig and donkey are not allowed to be eaten by Muslims.

So, the Arab media has been publishing handy guides on how to tell the difference between pork and beef.

In other Islamic news, some $80,000 that had been donated by Yemen to Gazans via the "Islamic Society" charity has disappeared.