Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 20, 2009

Open thread plus

It looks like I will not be able to post much today, and there is lots of leftover flotsam in the comments from yesterday's freak show, so feel free to discuss amongst yourselves the major issues of Life, the Universe and Everything.

And also check out Barry Rubin, who has been on an incredible tear lately.

Today's PalArab news 7-20-09

The Fatah infighting continues. A special session of the PLO Executive Committee met on Saturday to condemn Farouk Kaddoumi for his accusations that Mahmoud Abbas plotted to assassinate Arafat, but the session was clearly put together only by Kaddoumi's enemies. Meanwhile, four armed factions of Fatah, including the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and a group of Israeli Arabs, declared their support for Kaddoumi. Dov Weisglass, who attended all the Sharon/Abbas meetings, says the entire episode was made up by Kaddoumi, and Suha Arafat is also upset because blaming Abbas takes away the responsibility from Arafat's real killers - Israel.

Palestine Press Agency quotes a US magazine as giving out specific details on how Israel would strike Iran, along with operational windows for the strike and where the IDF is practicing. Hard to say whether the articles, in Global Politician, are legit or not.

Egypt seized a half ton of explosives and ten mortars on their way to Gaza.

Two Gazans, including a 17-year old, were killed in a smuggling tunnel collapse.

The PA shot and wounded two Hamas members in the West Bank. Their neighbors in the Al-Jalazoun camp tried to protect the Hamas members from arrest.

A group of Israeli Arabs demanded that the Israel compensate them for damage done by wild boars. They didn't seem to blame "settlers," apparently boars inside the Green Line have different masters than those on the outside.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 118.

What is the goal of foreign policy?

Today was an extraordinary day for the blog, as my posting about how Iranian prison guards rape women before their execution was featured on Yahoo news story pages for much of the day, and the headline apparently attracted some 20,000 people to view the article.

As one could expect from such an influx of people, I received a lot of comments, and the quality of most of them were about what one would expect. There were many people who refused to believe the story, calling it a Zionist or Jewish conspiracy against Islam (even though the story was not about Islam, but Iran.) Some believed that this was a perfect opportunity to bring in lies about the Talmud. Others got into flamewars.

One commenter, "marie," dropped by another thread and said something that encapsulates much that is wrong with how Westerners tend to think nowadays. In response to my musings on Obama's naivete in trying to force Israel to abandon historic Jerusalem, she wrote:

Keep building settlements retards...that will get the palestinians to love you!

Notwithstanding the humor that results when someone who fancies herself an "intellectual" calls others "retards" as a rhetorical point, this comment struck me as emblematic of today's Western liberal thinking.

Is the point of foreign policy to make your enemy love you?

It appears that the foreign policies of many Western nations in recent decades has been built around just that desire.

The Western nations, wracked with guilt over colonialism and hegemony, believe that they deserve to be hated, and as a result they must bend over backwards to be loved by those they have wronged. It never works, of course, but that is just proof that they need to try harder.

In the case of Israel, the West thinks of Israel as a proxy for all their sins, the intellectual Jew imposing his will on the unwashed Arabs. The fact that Zionism is not a colonialist movement but rather a national restoration movement is lost on those who feel that guilt. To them, the Jews symbolize what they hate about themselves and their past evils, and the Arabs are symbolic of the put-upon aboriginal peoples forever sullied by European colonialism.

So to them, only one side is guilty - the "white" side.

Asking both sides to compromise is not how peace can come, according to this thinking. The Jews are guilty of the original Western sin and must pay for it. Forcing the Jews to pay for the sins of the British and French and Portuguese and Spanish is a way to displace the feelings of guilt over their own past injustices.

To this way of thinking, only the enemy can decide when enough concessions are made. The enemy - the pure, innocent victims - have complete veto power over every peace plan because this is not a negotiation: it is a capitulation, and admission of guilt, a plea for forgiveness. If you are not forgiven then you have not done a good enough job of penance, and the proof is - because you have not yet been forgiven.

The enemy - such a loaded term, we should say the "negotiating partner" - cannot be expected to compromise, ever. Only one side has the onus of guilt, and the non-Westerners are presumed innocent. Any crimes they commit must be looked at through the prism of the much more obscene Western sins.

Marie has stumbled upon the exact problem - the fact that many on the West hate themselves and the only penance is to gain forgiveness from those we think we have wronged. We must do whatever is needed to make them love us, and only then can we love ourselves.

Israel must also be forced to adhere to this formula. Every terror act is justified because it is a reaction to Israel's original sin of existing. Every defensive move Israel chooses to do is a painful reminder of its hostile, "colonialist" origins.

This is the subtext behind today's liberal attitudes to foreign policy. It is rooted in this deep sense of self-hate drenched in guilt. And this hate is projected into Israel, the lightning rod for all of the West's sins.

BBC doesn't recognize Israel as being part of Mideast

The BBC has a show called the "Middle East Business Report" that airs weekly. ifindterror tweeted me, saying that s/he never noticed anything about Israel on that program.

Sure enough, the word "Israel" does not appear in any of the synopses of shows over the past couple of months. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan all pop up, along with the impacts of Arab trade with China and the UK, but nothing about Israel's economy.

I guess Israel's economy is not very noteworthy compared to the other nations in the area. Or maybe Israel just isn't where we all thought it was.

The startling tone-deafness of the White House on settlements

When looking at this latest debacle of the White House demanding that Jews stop building and moving into East Jerusalem, it is remarkable how deeply naive and uninformed the Obama administration is.

The White House apparently cannot distinguish between the American Left, that dominates Obama's political thinking, and the Israeli Left. The administration apparently thought that they could split the Israelis along ideological lines by insisting on a settlement freeze, believing that the J Street crowd has the same mindset as Labor and Kadima. Instead, the White House has unified Israelis as never before, as even the most dovish, secular mainstream Israeli understands the need to keep large settlement blocs close to the Green Line and the importance of Jerusalem.

Despite all of the rumors about White House pressure on Arab governments, all of that is being done behind the scenes and outside the public eye. Only this one issue, that the White House clearly didn't understand in the least, has become a symbol of power, a political game of chicken between Israel and the US. The US promised its Arab allies that it would gain what it felt was a symbolic concession from Israel and, darn it, it has to keep its word, even if it had no idea that these issues weren't merely symbolic to Israelis. Once the White House made the demand public, it cannot back down.

And Netanyahu is not going to yield.

So something that could have been handled easily has turned into a major fissure, because President Obama naively thought that the Israeli left would abandon Netanyahu over the settlements issue. And he couldn't be bothered to actually talk to Netanyahu, someone he disparaged during the campaign.

Obama's naivete on this topic was revealed some 18 months ago. One would have thought he would have learned something in the meanwhile.

Jordan's Interior Minister defends discrimination against PalArabs

A few weeks ago I mentioned an issue that has been percolating in Jordan that has received no attention in the Western media - the increasing discrimination that Jordanians of Palestinian origin have been receiving from Jordan, as the citizenship rights of many have been stripped away and their remaining rights whittled down.

The issue has been picked up by London-based Dar al-Hayat (in Arabic only, of course.) They published an interview with Jordan's Interior Minister Nayef. The minister tries at first to deflect the question, blaming everything on Israel:

Is it true that you are withdrawing of nationality from the Jordanians of Palestinian origin?

This is a campaign of lies by... external and internal forces meant to tarnish the image of Jordan.

But is it true?

- We need to emphasize the need for the Palestinian land and not to waste the chance to uphold the allowance of "family reunions" carried by the [Israeli] occupation authorities, and that we should be thanked for standing up against Israeli ambitions of unloading of the Palestinian land of its people.

Do you mean that the ones on the Israeli right that propose the idea of «Jordan is Palestine»?

Yes. There are the secret Israeli proposals with undeclared aims to impose a solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees at the expense of Jordan...

But the interviewer is not cowed into accepting this deflection. He goes on to ask specific questions about Jordanian law in disenfranchising Jordanian Palestinians, where the minister stonewalls and insists that there has been no change in policy. One example is about the cases where Jordanians Palestinians who have never been on the West Bank have had their travel documents reduced from 5-year to 2-year renewals:

Some of the [5 year] yellow cards were turned to [2-year] green cards from owners who insist that Jordan is the only home they have ever known.

- We insist on the necessity of renewal of permits for "reunions", as acting otherwise would mean the achievement of the objectives of Israel in the Palestinian territories, drained from their owners. I do not think that any Arab accepts that the Palestinians lose their right to their land voluntarily, because it is contrary to the holding of Palestinian and Arab right of return.

In other words, Palestinian Arabs who happily live in Jordan are not pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank, and therefore not doing their jobs. He's just helping them do what they are meant to do. Jordan's hatred of Palestinian Arabs is highlighted in this exchange:

Why does Jordan refuse to grant citizenship to children of Jordanian women [and West Bank Palestinian Arab men]?

- We cannot because the current law does not allow it. There is a security and political dimension to this issue, there are 37 Palestinians married to Jordanians, and this means the naturalization of more than 200 Palestinians, and we cannot do it because it serves the goals of the Israelis [as they would live in Jordan], especially at this time.

The minister makes it crystal clear that official Arab policy is to ensure Palestinian Arab statelessness and misery, always in the guise of doing what's best for Palestinian Arabs themselves. (He also says that the PA has no problem with any of this.)

Of course, any other Arab can become a citizen of Jordan and other Arab countries, by law. The laws only exclude Palestinian Arabs.

And they are keeping them stateless for their own good, of course.

Such philanthropy and selflessness exhibited by the generous Arab patrons of the Palestinian Arab cause, willing to spare no effort in ensuring that they remain miserable for decades to come!

Iranians rape virgin girls before executing them

Here is a sterling example of Iranian human rights, from The Jerusalem Post:

In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks. ...
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."
"I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said.
Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?"
"Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."

Apparently, this was known. From a book review in 2002:

It remains to be said that the fate of women in the prisons of the Iranian Islamic Revolution is worse than the fate of men. It is not necessarily because women are less resistant and less tolerant to torture, but because women are considered from the theological perspective of the Iranian regime to be an element of seduction, and their bodies a place of evil and impurity. The torture of a woman's body may take the form of rape. Despite the necessity of secrecy that imposes itself in these cases, some women political prisoners have dared to speak up in their memoirs about the torture and rape they were subjected to. However most of the women either were not given the chance to talk or have chosen not to talk. In fact, raped women were often executed. A woman's rape is frequently the last act that precedes her execution. This is explained by the rule in Iranian political prisons that the sentence of execution cannot be carried out if the woman is a virgin. Since there is a theological belief that if a woman dies a virgin she will go to heaven, the politically active virgin is forced to "marry" before her execution and thus to insure she will go to hell. She is forced to "marry" the hangman who will carry out her execution.. This marriage is conducted as a legitimate and official contract which includes, among other things, an estimated dowry. This "dowry" is subsequently paid to the family of the victim; it simultaneously becomes the equivalent of an official notification that she was executed.

Another source:

Iran and children’s rights
Iran is the only country in the world where its legislations function directly against children.

Article 1210 of the constitution: The civil law sets the age of consent for girls to be 9 years of age!

Section 84, paragraph 179 of labour legislation defines the minimum age of prohibition of labour to be 15! The amendment article to this section, briefly, overrules the minimum age limits, should the parents or guardians of the children either give their consent or be the proprietors of where their children are employed! By parents’ or Guardians’ consent, children could also be contracted out and would be exempted from the minimum age restrictions.

Articles 623 to 625 relating to religious practices, authorises child chastisement up to causing death. Even where punishment by the father leads to the death of his child, the penalty for causing death by chastisement is 10 days in prison plus the payment of compensation!

In the Islamic Republic, the state has a free hand to suppress and terrorise, execute by stoning to death, and carry out hanging in public, Article 1210 of its constitution legalises paedophilia!

By lowering the age of consent, the abuse of children is legalised.

The signing of any international convention by the Islamic Republic is meaningless and it is only done in order to mislead the international community about its own internal affairs.

According to Islamic law, should a female die as a virgin, she will be considered a martyr and will be destined for heaven. Hundreds of 14-17 year old girls supporting the “The Peoples’ Mujahedeen” were forced to temporarily marry members of the “Revolutionary Guards Corps” before their execution. Some were forced to marry their own torturer and executioner. This was done to deny them going to heaven!

How could anyone expect respect for international conventions from such a brutal and medieval regime?

Forget WMDs, forget the theocracy, forget Iran's plans to dominate the world. I think we have the best reasons to topple the Islamic Republic right here.

UPDATE: While these stories appear to have taken place a few years ago, the Huffington Post has details on the apparent prison rape of an Iranian woman protester in the past month, as well as of an 18-year old boy.

And for those commenters who think I'm saying that Islam condones these acts, try to read what I'm actually saying. I'm talking about the Islamic Republic of Iran, not Islam.

UPDATE 2: More evidence. And yet more. This has been going on for a long time.

Black magic in Saudi Arabia

From the Arab News:

While the Saudi Border Guard continues its search for the body of Fatima, the 18-year-old woman who reportedly drowned in the Red Sea off Jeddah’s Corniche on July 9, reports have come out about some more “magical” underwater discoveries.
Twenty-two small bottles have been found a few meters underwater; inside them contained paper with names scrawled on them, as well as an occasional piece of jewelry or lock of hair. According to yesterday’s Al-Madinah newspaper these are magical spells.
A little explanation: It is common (and firmly discouraged by the country’s religious police) for some locals to cast spells on people.
There are variations to this process, but the spell typically includes the person’s name written on piece of paper and a stolen personal item, anything from a bank statement to a stolen ring or hair. These items are often placed in vessels and tossed into the Red Sea.
The newspaper interviewed Sheikh Faisal bin Salman, an Islamic scholar who tracked down one of the persons targeted by one of the spells. “One of the papers was a bank receipt which included the number and the name of that man. I called him immediately and it turned out that he started to suffer from a massive headache and dizziness 20 days ago. Exactly the date of the spell,” said bin Salman.
The man, whose name was not revealed, was identified as a senior telecommunications industry executive.
The newspaper said he is being treated for the black magic.
As the sheikh works diligently to undo magic, the body of teenager has yet to be found.

Notice that the sheikhs aren't saying that the black magic is nonsense and irrelevant to Islam; they are saying that it is real, it works and it needs to be exorcised.

Sounds like a good "weapon."

IFJ likes some freedoms, not others

This past week the International Federation of Journalists was in the news, mostly because it decided to kick out the Israeli branch, the National Federation of Israeli Journalists. While the IFJ says that it was simply because the NFIJ wasn't paying its dues, the NFIJ thinks that there was a little bit more to it than that:

In January, the International Federation began issuing a series of letters condemning Israel for refusing to allow journalists to enter Gaza to cover Operation Cast Lead. The International Federation also published a report criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza and urging International Federation members and affiliated organizations to speak out against Israel's treatment of foreign journalists during the war.
According to Shibi, the International Federation report about Gaza was compiled without any Israeli input.
"No one called us to hear what we had to say," he said. Israeli journalists had things to say about the balance of rights of journalists to cover the war and the pressures coming from the army and the state, but the report was compiled without consulting a single Israeli source, he said.
"They are an organization fighting for ethics in journalism," he said. "Whoever may be the offended party, [everyone] has a right to say his piece; we were left out of the discussion completely."
"He [White] is kicking out the most free and fighting press corps in the region."
Shibi also mentioned that the International Federation had hosted a series of conferences in Europe about current media issues, but the Israeli unions were not invited.
The International Federation focused on the question of payments and how much the Israeli union should pay for membership.
Shibi said the Israeli union felt that it was not being accepted in the international framework. The National Federation of Israeli Journalists felt it should not pay "until we are full and equal members," he said. "No taxation without representation."

So a story that came out of Jordan yesterday is very interesting:

The Jordan Press Association (JPA) agreed to a request by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to hold its conference in the Kingdom in October, after the latter agreed to exclude Israel's participation, a JPA council member said on Thursday.
"We are against any form of normalisation with Israel, which still occupies Arab lands and violates Arab and Palestinian rights," JPA Vice President Hikmat Momani told The Jordan Times, adding that the JPA also agreed to the organisation of several training workshops for journalists from across the region by the IFJ, provided that Israel does not take part.

It is one thing for the IFJ to say that they are excluding Israel for non-payment of dues, but for them to agree to exclude Israel because the Jordanian Press Association demanded it for purely political reasons is a completely different affair.

If the IFJ had any integrity, it would inform the Jordanians that excluding an Israeli group is not acceptable, period, and should not be a prerequisite for the conference, irrespective of its dispute with the Israeli union.

Which means that it sure does appear that the IFJ is making decisions based on its antipathy towards Israel and not because of a dues dispute.

TGIF link dump

Meryl on Britain's hypocrisy in limiting arms sales to Israel.

Yaacov Lozowick on civilian casualties in Afghanistan and elsewhere and how they are off the radar.

Yisroel Medad on the latest Leftist tripe: that Israel's "occupation" is somehow "erotic."

I hadn't mentioned the Hizbollah blast this week that showed the ineffectiveness of UNIFIL.

Ha'aretz, burned by the last set of anonymous accusations by IDF soldiers of abuses in Gaza that turned out to have been unfounded, is being a bit more cautious this time, showing what some non-anonymous soldiers are willing to testify about on video.

Even Ehud Olmert is taking President Obama to task for focusing on settlements.

The transcript of the "plot to assassinate Arafat"

Earlier this week, Fatah Secretary General Farouk Qaddoumi publicly announced that Mahmoud Abbas had colluded with Ariel Sharon (and an American delegation) to assassinate Yasir Arafat in 2003. He claimed to have a transcript of the conversation, sent to him by Arafat himself.

The broadcast of his accusations from Amman caused the PA to shut down Al Jazeera's offices in the West Bank.

The "transcript" itself is not available in any Palestinian Arab newspaper but I found a translation in something called The Faster Times.

The entire thing is absurd - how would Arafat get the transcript and why would he send it to Kaddoumi, his rival from within Fatah? But it is still interesting. Here are some excerpts:

Sharon: I insisted on this meeting before the [Aqaba] Summit so we can finalize all security matters and put the final touches so as not to encounter any confusion or discrepancies in the future.

Dahlan: If you didn’t ask for this meeting, I would have.

Sharon: To begin with, work must begin on killing all the military and political leaders of Hamas, the [Islamic] Jihad, the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine - PFLP] so as to bring about chaos in their ranks, and to allow you to pounce on them easily.

Abu Mazen: In this way, we will inevitably fail. We won’t be able to get rid of them or confront them.

Sharon: So then, what’s your plan?

Dahlan: We told you our plan and informed you of it. And to the Americans [the plans were sent] in writing. We need firstly to have a period of quiet so we can wrest control over all the [Palestinian] security services and all the institutions [of the Palestinian Authority].

Sharon: As long as Arafat is around in the Moqata’ [the Palestinian Authority headquarters] in Ramallah, you will certainly fail. This fox [Arafat] will surprise you as he did in the past. Because he knows what you intend to do. And he will work towards your failure and put inevitable obstacles. He’ll proclaim, as the [Palestinian] street does, that you are being used to do the dirty work of the era.

Dahlan: We’ll see who uses the other.

Sharon: The first step needs to be to kill Arafat by poisoning. I don’t want him exiled, except if there are guarantees from the concerned states that he will be under house arrest. Otherwise Arafat will return to living on a plane [a reference to Arafat's frequent travels before his return to the OPT to drum up support for the Palestinian position internationally.]
...
Dahlan: Without a doubt, there is need for your support of us in the field. I support the killing of Rantisi and Abdalla al Shami because those, if killed, will create confusion and a large vacuum in the ranks of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Because they are the operational leadership.

Sharon: Now you have begun to get it Dahlan.

Dahlan: But not now. It’s necessary for you to withdraw for us from large parts of Gaza so we can have the large excuse, before the people. And when Hamas and the Islamic Jihad violates the ceasefire, you can kill them.
Sharon: And if they don’t violate the ceasefire? Are you going to leave them to organize and prepare operations against us so that we will be surprised that this ceasefire worked against us…?

Dahlan: They can’t be patient during a ceasefire while their organizations are fragmenting. There upon, they will break the ceasefire. After that will be the chance to go after them. Then it’s your grace, Sharon.

The American Delegation: This is a reasonable and logical solution.

I don't know how widely this transcript has been circulated among PalArabs (or even if the author of the article in TFT didn't write it himself!), but if it goes viral, it could widen the split within Fatah greatly. It is detailed enough to be believable to a gullible public, already conditioned to believe conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, a close aide to Arafat denies these accusations:

Former advisor of late President Yasser Arafat Bassam Abu Sharif, however, denied the accusation that Abbas had any part in an assassination attempt, and called Qaddoumi’s allegations “shocking.” He gave an interview with Al-Jazeera Friday and sent statements to several news outlets decrying the charges.

Speaking from Amman, Abu Sharif claimed to have a second report that proves former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Israeli Army Minister Shaul Mofaz were the ones who planned the demise of Arafat.

“Who assassinated Arafat is the same one who assassinated the former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin… he is [current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, who governs Israel and he did so by a political game of sabotage and assassinations,” Abu Sharif added without elaborating on the accusation.

The August Fatah summit will be interesting indeed.

Miracle anti-radiation meds bring up ethical challenges

From YNet:

Medication that can protect humans against nuclear radiation has been developed by Jewish-American scientists in cooperation with a researcher and investors from Israel. The full story behind the dramatic discovery will be published in Yedioth Ahronoth's weekend edition.

The ground-breaking medication, developed by Professor Andrei Gudkov – Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs - may have far-reaching implications on the balance of power in the world, as states capable of providing their citizens with protection against radiation will enjoy a significant strategic advantage vis-à-vis their rivals.

For Israel, the discovery marks a particularly dramatic development that could deeply affect the main issue on the defense establishment's agenda: Protection against a nuclear attack by Iran or against "dirty bomb" attacks by terror groups.

Gudkov's discovery may also have immense implications for cancer patients by enabling doctors to better protect patients against radiation. Should the new medication enable cancer patients to be treated with more powerful radiation, our ability to fight the disease could greatly improve.

Read the whole thing. This is big.

It also brings up a fascinating moral dilemma. Should this medicine be distributed to hostile or potentially hostile nuclear states?

If Iran gets the medicine, it may feel more empowered to attack Israel with nukes. Conversely, if Western nations have the medicine and Iran does not, it could dissuade Iran's nuclear ambitions.

On the other hand, denying any country access to lifesaving medicine would be considered, by most definitions, immoral.

One might argue that, since no Western state would initiate nuclear hostilities with Iran, that there is no moral dilemma to withholding that medicine, as the only way they would need to use it is if they strike first - which makes the morality of withholding it identical to the morality of a nuclear response as if that medicine never existed. Both ways there are going to be huge civilian casualties, which is considered the price to pay for starting a nuclear war and is the logic behind MAD.

Perhaps the medicine is analogous to having a defensive anti-missile capability. It is certainly not immoral to try to gain a military advantage by putting up defenses that the enemy does not have access to. One is not morally obligated to provide your enemy with a defense system on par with yours. In this situation, access to the medicine could possibly be considered a defensive weapon.

The only problem is...medicine is defensive but it is not generally considered an instrument of war, and there is something distasteful about withholding it. However, that idea is certainly not less moral than the increase of the chances of a nuclear war that would follow its widespread introduction. The only time Iran would need it is if it decided to send nukes first, and withholding a medicine that would never be needed is not immoral.

For these reasons, I would argue that it would be more moral to withhold the medicine from Iran or Pakistan than to give it to them.

(belated h/t Katie)

Palestinian children stand at a gate to the Rafah border crossing in the southern Gaza Strip during a protest against the Israeli blockade July 13, 2009.

They want to protest an Israeli blockade, and they want a good photo to symbolize them being in an "open-air prison."

What would be a better picture than putting them behind bars? And choosing children to perform the protest?

But which bars to choose? Well, obviously, the most photogenic ones. I know - the Egyptians have some nice blue ones! Let's go there, to the big gate that stops us from going to Egypt and stops Egyptian goods from being imported to Gaza - and tell the world that we are protesting the Israeli blockade!

Because the Reuters photographers and copy editors and caption writers have no idea that Rafah is an Egyptian crossing, not an Israeli crossing!

PalArabs tilting back against Hamas

Near East Consulting just came out with a poll of Palestinian Arabs. The results have not yet been published on their website and I only found them reported in Arabic, but they show that the trend of Palestinian Arabs away from supporting Hamas and towards Fatah are continuing.

As reported in Palestine Press, 37% supported Mahmoud Abbas versus only 12% for Ismail Haniyeh (51% had no confidence in either.) 46% saw the Fayyad government as being more legitimate vs. 20% for Hamas.

90% would like to hold new elections. If elections were held now, 46% would vote for Fatah and only 11% for Hamas.

If they were voting for president today, 34% would vote for Abbas, 24% for Marwan Barghouti and only 12% forHaniyeh and 2% for Khaled Meshaal.

70% wanted to take weapons away from the "factions," all non-governmental groups like Islamic Jihad.

70% are happy with the security measures done by the PA in the West bank and only 45% with those done by Hamas in Gaza.

Assuming that Gazans were included in this poll, these are stunning numbers away from Hamas. It means that the Israeli and Western policy of isolating Hamas has been a success, and that Operation Cast Lead has caused Hamas to lose popularity - as opposed to conventional wisdom that such actions only strengthen terrorists.

It means that Israeli policy of loosening up restrictions in the West Bank - in reaction to relative quiet there - is paying off in turning Palestinian Arabs against Hamas.

Meanwhile, Hamas may be fragmenting. The person whose body was found this morning in a Rafah smuggling tunnel was actually a Hamas leader who had actually been on the Hamas list during the last elections. There were signs of torture on his body. It seems unlikely that Fatah in Gaza has the resources to assassinate someone and transport them to the other end of the Strip to dump them in a tunnel that is probably controlled by Hamas anyway, so it looks far more likely that this was the result of Hamas infighting.

Israel's policy of isolating Gaza is paying dividends, and those who are trying to get those restrictions lifted are materially helping terrorists.

Hamas official expects to have a WMD within 20 years

Former US Embassy diplomat Norman Olsen, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, tries to show how the US policy of not talking to Hamas is counterproductive, because it means that Gazans cannot understand the US viewpoint:

Especially after years cut off from contact with Americans by US policy to isolate Hamas, they have little grasp of US culture – or of the realities facing an American president seeking to take up their cause.
Until this gap is bridged, miscommunication and distrust will thwart progress in the region.

This is almost too absurd for words. Other Arab countries have had full access to American culture and it hasn't helped them understand the Western mindset. Palestinian Arabs are intimately knowledgeable about the Israeli point of view but it hasn't helped them empathize with it, rather they are more likely to belittle it. For a diplomat to say such a naive statement is a scary thought indeed.

One part of his article, that he chalks up to such misunderstandings, is most instructive:

The Hamas official with American expertise, defending the concept of a long-term cease-fire, asserts that a hudna would allow a generation of new leaders to determine their own future and relations with Israel. I ask him why another two decades would generate any more moderation (on either side) than the past two decades. He quickly charges that time is on the side of the Palestinians, both demographically and, if no accord is reached, for acquiring a weapon of mass destruction to strike Israel.

So Hamas fully expects Iran to provide them with a nuclear bomb within the next 20 years to destroy Israel.

And all that Olsen can notice from this conversation is that Hamas doesn't understand Americans!

There indeed seems to be a miscommunication. Olsen, trying so hard to make Hamas understand what Americans think, refuses to believe what a Hamas official says to him explicitly.