Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, November 27, 2009

Have a good Shabbos/Shabbat Shalom

Enjoy the rest of the Thanksgiving. and 'Eid, holiday weekend!

Christian girl, 16, gets 50 lashes for knee-length skirt

A 16-year-old south Sudanese girl was lashed 50 times after a judge ruled her knee-length skirt was indecent, her lawyer and family said in the latest case to push Sudan's Islamic law into the spotlight.

The mother of teenager Silva Kashif said on Friday she was planning to sue the police who made the arrest and the judge who imposed the sentence, as her daughter was underage and a Christian.

Kashif, whose family comes from the south Sudanese town of Yambio, was arrested while walking to the market near her home in the Khartoum suburb of Kalatla last week, her mother Jenty Doro said.

"She is just a young girl but the policeman pulled her along in the market like she was a criminal. It was wrong," said Doro.

Doro said Khashif was taken to Kalatla court where she was convicted and punished by a female police officer in front of the judge.

"I only heard about it after she was lashed. Later we all sat and cried ... People have different religions and that should be taken into account," she said.

Drive-by shooting attempts in Gaza and the West Bank

Unidentified gunmen opened fire early Thursday on the car of the deputy governor of Nablus, Mrs. Annan Alatyrh Amartij, in the west of Nablus. She was not injured.

Also on Thursday, unidentified gunmen in a car opened fire on one of the main leaders of the armed wing of Hamas in the Bureij camp, Ayad Fadhel, and escaped. He also escaped injury.

Happy Eid!

Egyptian medical association refuses Israel ties

PalToday reports that the Egyptian Medical Syndicate refuses to have any relationship with Israeli doctors.

The issue came up last month when Egyptian authorities barred Israeli doctors from attending a breast cancer conference.

Dr. Hamdi Al-Sayyed, head of the Syndicate, said that the general assembly of Egyptian doctors refused to establish relations with Israeli doctors because "they have contributed to the implementation of serious violations against the Palestinian people."

He called to "criminalize all forms of normalization with the Israeli occupation."

The reasons he gave were because Israeli doctors participate in torture against Palestinian Arabs, and also because they help steal the organs of Palestinian Arab prisoners.

The syndicate has shown similarly progressive thinking before. Last year, it supported a proposed Egyptian law that would make ban organ donations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Egypt.

Their website also reproduces a fatwa against normalization with Israel. That page has been up since 2005.

"Israel is a murderous arm of the Yankee empire"

From Ma'an:

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez branded Israel a murderous extension of US power on Wednesday during a visit by Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We know what the state of Israel stands for - a murderous arm of the Yankee empire," Chavez told joint a news conference, according to Reuters. "What the president of Israel said, we take as a threat."

Venezuela is of course a baseball-mad country. Yet out of 205 Venezuelan baseball players in major league history, only 3 have belonged to the Yankees, a clear statistical imbalance that indicates a deep hatred of Venezuela by the Yankees organization.

The seething hatred between the genocidal dictatorship and the depraved empire may be dated back to 1996, when the Yankees beat out other teams to sign a 16-year old phenomenon from Venezuela named Jackson Melian. Melian never lived up to his potential, and is still banging around the minor leagues, representing a typical failure of the Yankee organization to build up talent from within and instead forcing them to spend gigabucks to buy players developed by other organizations.

The Yankee/Israel conspiracy is less well known. The Israel baseball League collapsed after only one season, but it was known to have a couple of Dominican players, and the Dominican Republic is a major rival to Venezuela in the Caribbean Series.

I hope that others can take this story and dig up more detailed information about this under-reported conspiracy.

More pictures of Starving Gazans ®

Pictures taken this week, from Palestine Today:

Lebanon gives Hezbollah the right to attack Israel

From Al-Arabiya:

Lebanon's new cabinet has agreed on a policy statement that acknowledges Hezbollah's right to use its weapons against Israel, despite disagreement by some members of the ruling majority.

Information Minister Tarek Mitri said late Wednesday after a cabinet committee set up to draft the statement met for the ninth time that an agreement had been reached.
He said the new statement will retain the same clause approved by the previous cabinet as concerns the arsenal of Hezbollah, which fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006 and is considered a terrorist organization by Washington.

The clause states the right of "Lebanon, its government, its people, its army and its resistance" to liberate all Lebanese territory.

Hezbollah is commonly referred to as the resistance in Lebanon.

Mitri said that reservations concerning the clause by members of the Western-backed majority would be noted in the government program.

Christian members of the majority, including the Phalange Party and Lebanese Forces, argue that Hezbollah's arsenal undermines state authority and runs counter to U.N. resolutions.

Not only does this give official Lebanese status to an independent army that doesn't answer to the government, it also is clearly against UN resolution 1701, which called for "no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon; and it also implicltly contradicts the paragraph that calls for "strong support for full respect for the Blue Line."

It is effectively the continuing surrender of Lebanon to Hezbollah.

EoZ Thanksgiving

I would like to thank you for reading my blog, and making this a very successful year.

So far in 2009 this blog has had over 625,000 page views, and I am as always humbled and gratified that so many people come here to read what I have to say.

And since this is Thanksgiving, here is an exhaustive review of the kosher status of turkey, which is not a simple matter at all.

Arab entertainment company Rotana canceled the production of a comeback music video by a famous Algerian singer, known as Warda (who is 70 years old,) over fears of disturbances because of the still-heated feelings over the football matches between the two countries in recent weeks.

Abbas ensures he'll be president for life

Remember all those panicky headlines that said that Mahmoud Abbas would resign over his displeasure with the "peace process" that he personally stopped? Remember how the world freaked out, begging him to stay?

Well, it turns out that people misunderstood him. When he said he was considering resigning, he really meant that he was staying on in his multiple jobs (chairman and president of the PLO, leader of Fatah, president of the PA) until he drops dead:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday he plans to stay on his post until the next election is held, but repeated he will not run for reelection.
"At any time we have the election I will go away and will not run," Abbas told reporters in the Chilean capital Santiago.

Palestinian authorities have said the election, which has been scheduled for Jan. 24, had been postponed.

Elections cannot be held unless Hamas approves. Hamas won't approve until it is certain it would win or if it changes PA policy to support Hamas' positions. Therefore, no new elections - and Abbas stays on forever.

Very few people publicly mentioned this scenario, although some did, during his dramatic theater designed to gain sympathy, take pressure off himself and boost his incredibly tiny ego.

The Great Zionist Bible Conspiracy

Middle East Online has an amazingly paranoid article, written by a Maidhc Ó Cathail, that has to be seen to be believed:

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions for Palestine campaign should widen its scope to target non-Israeli companies who contribute significantly to the oppression of Palestinians. As part of this broader strategy, priority should be given to one of the most egregious offenders, the prestigious British publisher, Oxford University Press. As unlikely as it may seem, the world's largest university press is responsible for one of the greatest obstacles to justice for Palestinians – The Scofield Bible.

Since it was first published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible has made uncompromising Zionists out of tens of millions of Americans. When John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, said that "50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel," it was the Scofield Bible that he was talking about.

Although the Scofield Reference Bible contains the text of the King James Authorized Version, it is not the traditional Protestant bible but Cyrus I. Scofield's annotated commentary that is the problem. More than any other factor, it is Scofield's notes that induced generations of American evangelicals to believe that God demands their uncritical support for the modern State of Israel.

So here is his thesis: that Scofield's annotations to the Bible, published in 1909, somehow twists the Bible into making it into a more Zionist book than it already is.

How so? Here's an example.

Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield's commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield's notes have been italicized in the following passage:

"'I will bless them that bless thee.' In fulfillment closely related to the next clause, 'And curse him that curseth thee.' Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew – well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle."

Drawing on Scofield's speculative interpretation, John Hagee claims, "The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God."

However, as Stephen Sizer points out, in his definitive critique, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? "The promise, when referring to Abraham's descendants speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations 'blessing' the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel."

Apparently unaware of this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, enhanced Scofield's interpretation, by adding, "For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment." Reading such tendentious comments, a bible-believing Christian could easily assume, for example, that God will punish the 114 countries which endorsed the Goldstone Report.

At least Cathail implicitly admits that anti-Zionism is usually a manifestation of anti-semitism!

Scofield's interpretation of the passage, which actually can be found at Genesis 15:18, is pretty straightforward, and the idea that God cannot be referring to groups of people or nations is a bit tendentious itself.

Anyway, once Cathail has established that Scofield was a horrible Zionist, he needs to explain not only that he was a scoundrel, but also that he was really manipulated by a Jewish Zionist, the real Jew force behind this Zio-Bible:

Being a "born again" preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men's club in 1901. In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield comments, "The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield."

That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club's committee members, the Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield intimates, Scofield's theology was "most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer's pet projects – the Zionist Movement."

Others, however, have been more explicit about the nature of Scofield's service to the Zionist agenda. In "Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem," Prof. David W. Lutz claims, "Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter's career, including travel in Europe."

Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine "this peer among scalawags" ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why OUP chose to endorse such a sectarian work.

See? Those nefarious Jews didn't only give the Bible to the world...they kept manipulating it by controlling unsuspecting Christians and forcing them to write Zionist commentaries decades before the State of Israel was reborn!

How could Oxford University Press be so blind to have bought into this century-old Jewish conspiracy?

Sarah Obama in Mecca for Hajj

From Al Arabiya:

Sarah Obama, the wife of the American President Barack Obama's grandfather, arrived in Saudi Arabia where she is set to perform the annual Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, press reports said Wednesday.

Sarah was accompanied by her grandson and Obama's cousins who will all be hosted as guests of the Custodian of the two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.
Sarah's trip to Saudi, along with 10 villagers from Kogelo Kenya, where she will head to Mecca and Medina as part of her pilgrimage refutes published reports that she had converted to Christianity.