Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 16, 2009

Bill Clinton storms the Temple Mount

Former US President Bill Clinton visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock on Sunday, sources said.

The visit surprised officials, however, as neither media nor the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Endowments were informed in advance.

"It seems it was a special visit," said Jerusalem endowments director Azzam Al-Khatib.

Israeli forces suddenly imposed a number of strict security measures, and then half an hour later, Clinton entered from the Moroccan Gate, Al-Khatib added.

The US Consulate opted not to inform officials of the visit ahead of time as they usually do, he said.

A spokeswoman for the consulate told Ma'an that Clinton's visit to Jerusalem was personal and thus not coordinated with the Americans.

When Jews visit the Temple Mount, the Palestinian Arab media routinely regard it as "storming" or "raiding" or even "raping." And the Jews are usually called "extremist settlers."

Anti-semitic hate crimes soar in California

From AP:

The California Attorney General's office says that more gay and Jewish people were the victims of hate crimes last year even though the overall number of bias-related crimes declined slightly.

A report released Friday showed that in 2008 there were 1,397 crimes motivated by racial, religious and other forms of bias, a 2% drop from a year earlier.

More than half were based on a victim's race or ethnicity and of these, the vast majority were directed against black people.

Hate crimes based on religious bias were the second most common.

In 2008, there were 184 assaults, threats, and other crimes directed at Jews, a 37% increase from the year before.

Here is a breakdown of the reported anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate crimes in California over the past four years based on the annual reports from California's Attorney General:

	Total anti-Religious	Anti-Jewish	Anti-Muslim
2005	205	141	12
2006	205	129	14
2007	203	134	13
2008	294	184	11

And graphically:

The ratio of anti-Jewish to anti-Muslim hate crimes increased from 10:1 to nearly 17:1 over the past year. While anti-Muslim hate crimes decreased by 15%, anti-semitic hate crime increased 37%.

And if you think that the reason that there are so few anti-Muslim hate crimes is because there are so many fewer Muslims, think again. There are about a million Muslims in California, and about 1.2 million Jews.

In other words, anti-semitism is increasing at alarming rates in what is regarded as the nation's most liberal state, and "Islamophobia" is virtually non-existent. Just like it is in New York.

A post I wish I'd written

From the Treppenwitz blog:

Let's look at a recent statement Bill Clinton made in an interview regarding the middle east peace process to see if we can spot anything that fits the definition of fallacy:

"...[not] a single week's gone by [since Yitzhak Rabin's assassination] in which I have not reaffirmed my conviction that had he not lost his life on that terrible November night, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement for peace in the Middle East."

In his last speech to the Knesset before his assassination (presumably his last verifiable policy statement), Rabin categorically rejected the idea of a full fledged Palestinian State... rejected the idea of dividing Jerusalem... and rejected the idea of Israel returning to the pre-Six Day War borders.

But don't take my word for it... here is the quote directly from the Israeli Government's web site (with my emphasis in bold):

"We view the permanent solution in the framework of [the] State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority. The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.

And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:

A. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev -- as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.

B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.

C. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the "Green Line," prior to the Six Day War.

D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif."

[emphasis mine]

If I had read that speech without knowing who spoke the words, I would have to guess Benjamin Netanyahu or Maybe Ariel Sharon (pre-disengagement). But this was Yitzhak Rabin at the height of his push for peace!

Rabin is often being remembered as a dove like Peres or Livni, and it simply was not true.

Read the whole thing.

Notable

Barry Rubin:

How do we know that the attack at Fort Hood was an act of Islamist terrorism? Simple, Major Nidal Hassan told us so. You’ve seen reports of a long list of things he did and said along these lines. But what’s most amazing of all is this: Hassan is the first terrorist in history to give an academic lecture explaining why he was about to attack.

Media Backspin 15Nov09:

Tomorrow night, UK viewers will be treated to what Channel 4's "Dispatches" program bills as Inside Britain's Israel Lobby.
Here are three reasons why HonestReporting's expecting the worst.

Israellycool:

Rutgers University has voted to sponsor the University Chapter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) for its semi-annual Meal Sign-Away program. While the PCRF now makes a point of stating it’s adherence to the US Treasury Anti Terrorist Financing Guidelines, terrorism seems to be a recurring theme with the PCRF and it’s personnel. According to this site (but provided with supporting links from other sites I found), there are many troubling links between PCRF personnel and terrorism...

Speaking of Rutgers, Professor Richard Landes of The Augean Stables blog will be speaking there this week.

Daily Goldstone 11/15

From the Washington Post:

IN ORDER to eliminate the Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, the United States launched at least 15 missile strikes in Pakistan this year and killed, besides Mr. Mehsud, somewhere between 200 and 300 people, according to a study by the New America Foundation. At least a quarter of those who died were civilians.

Was that toll "disproportionate" to the threat posed by a single terrorist and therefore a war crime? How about the recent NATO bombing of hijacked fuel tankers in northern Afghanistan, in which a mix of 80 to 120 Taliban militants and civilians died? Justified strike, accident or war crime?

This is the sort of fraught question that the United Nations and its Human Rights Council, in theory, ought to be focused on. Asymmetrical wars, in which terrorists and insurgents deliberately mix among civilians, are the story of the 21st century so far -- and there are no clear norms for managing the moral dilemmas they pose. Can a drone's targeter knowingly expose civilians to injury if a terrorist leader is in range? How should a civilized army respond when its soldiers are mortared, or its own civilians exposed to rocket fire, from a position inside a schoolyard?

A commission appointed by the Human Rights Council to investigate Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza last winter could have set an example of serious treatment of such issues. Headed by the respected South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the panel altered the one-sided mandate it received, so as to examine abuses by both Israel and Hamas during the three-week conflict.

But Israel refused to cooperate -- and the Goldstone commission proceeded to make a mockery of impartiality with its judgment of facts. It concluded, on scant evidence, that "disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy" by Israel. At the same time it pronounced itself unable to confirm that Hamas hid its fighters among civilians, used human shields, fired mortars and rockets from outside schools, stored weapons in mosques, and used a hospital for its headquarters, despite abundant available evidence.

By pretending it did not know whether Hamas employed such tactics and by claiming that Israel's actions were driven by a motivation to kill civilians on purpose, rather than to defeat Hamas, the panel dodged the hard issues it should have tackled. It did not seriously attempt to balance civilian deaths against the threats Israel was targeting or to understand the real motivations for the destruction in areas from which rockets were launched at Israeli cities.

As it happens, Israel is ahead of most other nations in managing these issues. In Gaza its forces used thousands of e-mails, phone calls and even non-lethal explosives to warn civilians away from airstrike targets. Its army's criminal division is investigating 45 complaints of abuses.

A broader, government-sanctioned independent investigation is called for: a number of specific allegations in the Goldstone report, one-sided though they are, deserve a full answer. Not just Israel but the United States and many other nations ought to face more pressure to justify the means they use to fight insurgents and terrorists. Sadly, the only thing proved by the Goldstone commission is that the United Nations is incapable of performing that service.

Followup: NTNU votes against boycott

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) decided against supporting a boycott of Israei academic institutions, as it was considering.

As CAMERA reports:

The board of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) unanimously voted to reject a proposal by staff members to boycott Israel. The Board stressed the need to maintain open communication between scientists at NTNU and those at academic institutions in Israel. This comes after a counterpetition of professors at the same university (which drew three times as many signatories as did the original boycott proposal ) and an international counter-boycott petition (which drew over 3,500 signatories — i.e. more than 1.000 times as many as the original proposal) became public.

One win for the good guys.

Of course, this always puts advocates for Israel in a defensive mode. And it wouldn't do to push for academic boycotts of other countries because the entire idea of an academic boycott is bad. So the only real offense would be to strengthen ties between world universities and Israeli universities, as NTNU already has ties to Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem.

I'm part of the anti-NGO conspiracy!

The Guardian reports on HRW's whining about being criticized by people like me:

America's leading human rights organisation has accused Israel and its supporters of an "organised campaign" of false allegations and misinformation, including "extremely personal attacks" on its staff, in an attempt to discredit the group over its reports of war crimes in Gaza. Iain Levine, HRW's programme director, said that while the organisation had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it. "I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organised campaign, and we're seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks ... from some of the language and arguments used it would seem as if there has been discussion," he said."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation."

Isn't it a shame that HRW has to spend time defending its positions rather than being believed uncritically? All together now....Awwww! Although I was tragically not mentioned by name, I am an integral part of the nefarious anti-NGO conspiracy. After all, I was the one who noticed Marc Garlasco's interesting hobby of collecting Nazi memorabilia, information that I shared with other bloggers in an illegal secret Zionist underground information channel known as "email." I didn't have the time to exhaustively research it all, and Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric took the story and ran with it (with my full support.) My later contributions to the story included the sock-puppets that HRW sent out to defend themselves and the picture of Garlasco wearing the Iron Cross sweatshirt (which I believe someone else found first and alerted me to.) [And now Omri has a radio show, where such information can be shared with even more people! See how deep our Zio-connections are?] Notably, even then the Guardian quoted HRW implying some sort of blog conspiracy when the story broke. One has to wonder if, say, HRW and Amnesty and the UNHRC and the PCHR and Al Mezan and Al Addameer share information with each other - and whether this is a terrible conspiracy as well? (The answer to the first question is, of course, "yes.") The difference is that the NGOs have multi-million dollar budgets, and will often repeat the claims of other NGOs - even clearly biased ones - without any of their own fact checking. For example, Al Addameer's absurd claim of 750,000 Palestinian Arab prisoners since 1967 has been accepted as fact. Would HRW say that this story is above criticism as well? In interests of full disclosure, a Zio Blog conspiracy member list has been published. You can see us in the About Us page on the Understanding the Goldstone Report site. It includes NGO Monitor, CAMERA and Honest Reporting as well as some well-known writers and bloggers. We share information and build on other posts and articles. We do this precisely because it is more effective and focused. In fact, I'm going to now link to another, far more detailed critique of the Guardian article, from Richard Landes and Augean Stables. See how we all conspire together? Booga booga!

Today's PalArab news 11/14/09

Sheikh Salah continues his daily warnings about Jewish ambitions on Al Aqsa, this time saying that a series of "Talmudic" parks will be built around the Temple Mount. Will there be a Rabbi Akiva ride?

Sunday is "Palestine Independence Day!" Yes, the ancient state was declared in 1988, and no one really noticed. Mahmoud Abbas made a speech to mark the occasion, and Hamas relented from its earlier threat to ignore the day and keep schools open.

Meanwhile, Saeb Erekat is threatening to declare independence again, by bringing it to a UN vote. UPI seems to mistranslate the Al Ayyam interview with him, changing his words from "a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital" to "a state that would include all Palestinian areas held prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and that had East Jerusalem as its capital," which is certainly not true. (h/t My Right Word)

The Arab love for Guinness (world records, not the ale) continues, with the world's largest embroidered dress being created in Hebron.

Der Speigel is saying that a Shalit deal is coming Real Soon Now.

Looks like another UNRWA workers' strike is coming this Tuesday in Gaza and the West Bank.

Firas Press has an unusual article about Israeli Muslims in the IDF and how they are proud to serve their country. The author is astonished, especially since all Muslim IDF soldiers are volunteers. The commenters aren't happy.

Early sundown open thread

Fridays sure get hectic after the clocks change.

Here's a spot to relax this Sabbath!

Those "Gaza authorities"

As I have mentioned previously, the Goldstone Report doesn't condemn Hamas, and instead often refers to the "Gaza authorities" as if they were a legitimate government that is separate from "Palestinian armed groups" who shoot the rockets to Israel.

Since the "Gaza authorities" cannot control the "armed groups," in Goldstone's imagination, they cannot be held responsible for the actions of the "armed groups."

Both the "Gaza authorities" and the "armed groups" answer to the name Hamas, but that little detail just doesn't seem to be on Goldstone's radar.

Anyway, today the respected "Gaza authorities" decided that they needed some construction materials, no doubt to rebuild their "civilian infrastructure" and not to work on bunkers.

So they went to the local dealer, along with their police, and beat up the owners of the company that sells these materials. They also shot some bullets in the air, no doubt to ensure that the salespeople would treat them politely. They then proceeded to take what they wanted.

These are the people who Goldstone is asking politely to perform a proper, transparent investigation into possible war crimes.

Top ten reasons to dress as a woman in Saudi Arabia

From Arab News:

Police in this northern city arrested an academic of Arab nationality working in an engineering college for hiding under an abaya, making people think he was really a “she.” According to a recent report in Asharq Al-Awsat, the cross-dressing professor was caught because despite being covered from head to toe he didn’t manage to replicate a woman’s “demeanor,” according to a Saudi shopper who informed the authorities of this clandestine man. Police are unsure of the motive for the professor’s disguise.

Top ten reasons a man might want to dress as a woman in Saudi Arabia:

10. Sheer jealousy at how well Saudi women are treated
9. Wants to hang out at the mall
8. Wanting to catch a glimpse of some serious ankle in the rest room
7. Hoping to get picked up by a handsome man
6. Those abayas are just so cute!
5. Hates driving
4. Embarrassed while practicing ululating
3. Undercover Muttawa agent
2. Wants to sweet talk professors into getting a higher grade
1. Really bad case of acne

Dumb as a wall

Another moonbat article comparing Israel's separation barrier to the Berlin Wall appeared in the Herald Scotland.

The author, who appears to be anonymous, starts this one off by assuming that since it is an anti-Israel article he will be accused of anti-semitism - before he even makes his point:

In writing this, I’m bracing myself for being called an anti-Semite, an appeaser of terrorists and propagandist for the Palestinian cause.

I’m none of those things. I say this simply because these days, it seems, anyone who dares criticise the policies of the Israeli government leaves themselves open to such accusations.

The compulsion to write something that would leave me prone to such an attack was instigated earlier this week by watching Berlin’s champagne and fireworks celebrations commemorating the fall of the Wall.

How strange it must be, I thought, for any Palestinian in the village of Abu Dis, sitting before a TV screen looking on as the world indulges in rapturous back-slapping over the restoration of freedom and human rights that came with the passing of the wall.

He goes on to describe the evils of the "wall", using the usual poor arguments. Noteworthy is how he dismisses the idea that Israel has gained any security from building it:

For Israelis such as these, there is simply no debate to be had. As far as they are concerned, the crushing effects of the wall on the lives of millions of Palestinians is a small price to pay for the relative – if somewhat imaginary – guarantee of their own personal security.

Imaginary? The number of victims of suicide attacks on Israel decreased from 289 in 2002 to virtually none now. But don't take my word for it - ask the terrorists:

PIJ leader Ramadan Abdallah Shalah told Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV that the terrorist organizations had no intention of abandoning suicide bombing attacks but that their timing and the possibility of carrying them out from the West Bank depended on other factors. “For example,” he said, “there is the separation fence which is an obstacle to the resistance [i.e., the terrorist organizations], and if it were not there, the situation would be entirely different” 1 (Al-Manar TV, November 11, 2006 ).

Mousa Abu Marzouq , deputy chairman of Hamas's political bureau in Damascus , was asked by a group of Egyptian intellectuals and politicians why the suicide bombing activity had decreased during since the Hamas government came to power. He said that “ [carrying out] such attacks is made difficult by the security fence and the gates surrounding West Bank residents ” 2 (Abd al-Muaz Muhammad, Ikhwan Online, the Muslim Brotherhood Website, June 2, 2007 ).

The calculus is simple: the author feels that the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Israeli lives saved by building the barrier are worthless.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if this opinion is anti-semitic or not.

UPDATE: For the terminally stupid, Meryl Yourish has a handy-dandy comparison between the Berlin Wall and Israel's security fence.

Swedish blood libeler: "My bad!"

Oops!

The Swedish journalist who wrote a controversial article claiming Israel Defense Forces soldiers kill Palestinians in order to harvest their organs is reportedly reconsidering his views after a recent visit to Israel, Army Radio reported on Thursday.

Donald Bostrom, according to the report, recently withdrew from participating in an anti-Israel conference to be held in Beirut, citing his recent, and highly contentious, participation in a media-affairs conference in southern Israel as the cause.

"The visit to Israel and the fact that I was part of a fair dialogue made me rethink the whole issue," the Aftonbladet journalist reportedly told close aides.

No, it wasn't the lack of evidence that made him rethink the issue. It wasn't the fact that it echoed anti-semitic accusations from centuries past. It wasn't because even the Palestinian Arabs he quoted said that they didn't believe that Israel killed their son for his organs.

No, it was because he found out, gosh darn it, that some Israelis are nice people who might not do such a thing.

Sorry, Donald. When you return the $5000 award you got from Algeria because of your lies, then we might think a little more highly of you. When you publicly apologize for your sick article, then maybe you can start on the road back to being a responsible human being. When you loudly tell the Arab world - which wholeheartedly embraced your blood libel - that you and they are completely wrong, then you can stand up with a tiny amount of pride as having tried to rectify your calumny.

Privately admitting to some friends that you might have been mistaken? That is a worthless gesture.

Daily Goldstone 11/12

Jonathan Dahoah Halevi looks at an episode detailed in Goldstone that I had looked at as well:

The Goldstone Report about Operation Cast Lead accuses Israel of an air strike on the mosque on January 3, 2009, which caused the deaths of “at least 15 Palestinians” who were in it at the time. During the confrontation with Dr. Gold, Goldstone claimed that 21 Palestinians had been killed, and he presented the attack as a salient example of Israel’s policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians. However, Israel issued official documents stating that its Air Force did not attack the mosque and that the dead had been killed in fighting the IDF.

What really happened at the Ibrahim al-Maqadmah mosque, named for one of the heads of Hamas’ military-terrorist wing? The Goldstone Committee version is problematic because of its many essential failures and weak spots. The committee members relied exclusively on reports from “eyewitnesses” who did not see what was happening outside, especially at the entrance where the missile hit. Moreover, the committee was aware that all the Palestinian witnesses deliberately did not give any information about the activities of the terrorist organizations, because they were afraid of Hamas.

Therefore it is logically impossible to determine unequivocally that the Palestinian statements were “credible and reliable.” Another source of wonder is the dubious methodology used by the Committee in examining the circumstances of the event. The recorded statements of the Palestinian “eyewitnesses” posted on the UN website reveal that Committee members did not ask the Palestinians even one question about armed men or weapons in the mosque, or about what was happening in the open space in front of it.

The fundamental position of the Goldstone Committee was based on fallacious hypotheses. The Committee claimed that it found no evidence that the mosque was used for military purposes, and claimed that Israel presented a “false position” when it issued a Foreign Ministry report denying an attack on the mosque. However, in the same report read by the Committee members, there is unequivocal information supported by photographs of IDF forces seizing weapons in the Salah a-Din mosque in Gaza City during Operation Cast Lead.

The photos appended to the Foreign Ministry report clearly show various types of weapons and ammunition, including EFPs for attacking armored vehicles and a machinegun used to attack Israeli aircraft. The Committee did not explain why it chose to disregard the information completely, and its version becomes more entangled and incomprehensible in light of its admission elsewhere in the Report that it only visited two mosques in the Gaza Strip, because they were the two places the de facto Hamas administration permitted the committee to visit, since it wanted to exhibit the damage caused by the Israeli attacks.

The Goldstone Committee also failed by thoroughly examining the data. If Committee members had examined the names of the Palestinians killed at the Maqadmah mosque, they would have discovered that their identities and the membership of many of them in terrorist organizations contradicted the “eyewitness” claims that there were no terrorist operatives in the area, and contradicted as well the conclusions of the Report in that respect.

Seven of the 15 Palestinians killed at the mosque were members of terrorist organizations who had participated in fighting the IDF, most of them members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military-terrorist wing, and a few of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Regarding one of them (Ahmed Abu Ita of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades), it was reported that he had gone to the Maqadmah mosque to meet “friends,” i.e., other armed terrorist operatives.

In light of the foregoing information, there is another scenario which can explain the circumstances of the attack on the mosque and bridge the gap between the positions of the IDF and the Goldstone Committee: Israeli intelligence discovered the intention of Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades operative Ahmed Abu Ita to go to the Maqadmah mosque to meet other terrorist operatives there or nearby. The Israeli Air Force drone located him as he and the others arrived, but did not spot the civilians because they were inside the mosque praying.

During the narrow window of time the decision was made to attack the groups of armed terrorists near the mosque entrance. The missile launched hit them, killing some outright and damaging the mosque wall, killing Palestinians inside.

The Goldstone Committee, which did not accuse Hamas of war crimes (rather, it mentioned “Palestinian armed groups”) and rocket attacks, also did not examine the aforementioned scenario , which can easily be found in open sources, and did not even try to ask Palestinians witnesses if such a possibility could exist. Based on partial, biased information and without making an attempt to reach the truth, the Committee accused Israel of the deliberate murder of Palestinian civilians.

Israel made the mistake of not presenting the facts and sources to the public, within the limits of security, to dispel the accusation of war crimes raised by the Goldstone Report.

Halevi also looks at the many times mosques were used for storing bombs and weapons, for recruiting terrorists, and for breeding suicide bombers.

(h/t t34zakat)

Israeli Arabs trying to take tabbouleh record from Lebanon

Last month, Lebanon made a big deal over the fact that it had broken the world records for the largest tabbouleh dish and the largest hummus plate. It particularly wanted to break these records because the previous hummus record was done in Israel, and Lebanon considers these to be particularly Lebanese dishes.

The Lebanese tabbouleh record might be short-lived.

Firas Press reports that starting this Friday, the northern Israeli Arab town of Shefa Amr, will have dozens of volunteers working to create a tabbouleh dish five meters in circumference and weighing over 4000 kg.

I've never seen the Lebanese complain about Jordanian or Syrian or Egyptian hummus, only Israeli. So it will be interesting to see if Lebanon will be as upset when the record for one of its claimed dishes is broken by Israeli Arabs as it was when the hummus record was broken by Israeli Jews.