Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 11, 2010

Most West bank Arabs don't think they have freedom of expression

According to the latest Near East Consulting poll, 57% of West Bank Arabs feel that they do not have complete freedom of expression.

In Gaza, the number is not much higher, at 63%.

But if we throw a few billion more dollars a the "moderate" PA, I'm sure that there numbers will improve. Because Western money has such a good track record at moderating Arabs.

70% of poor, impoverished Gazans have Internet access

According to the latest Near East Consulting poll, over 70% of Gazans have Internet access - a higher percentage than people in the West Bank!

Only 8.4% of Gazans use Internet cafes, though. Which is probably a good idea, since those cafes have a habit of blowing up.

At any rate, I wonder how the Gazan rate of Internet access compares with those in the "poorest parts of Africa." You know, the places that Jimmy Carter says have better nutrition than Gazans.

30% of Arabs in the territories want to emigrate

The latest published Near East Consulting poll shows that some 30% of Palestinian Arabs would like to emigrate from their homes.

34% of Gazans, and 26% of West Bank Arabs would like to move away.

Of course, no Arab country wants them, and their leaders don't want them to leave.

So when the PLO says that "What is important is that individual refugees decide for themselves which option they prefer – a decision must not be imposed upon them," it really means that "you guys must continue to be used as pawns until we destroy Israel completely, just as we have used you for the past 61 years."

It's all in the interpretation.

Islamic Jihad laughs over cost of Iron Dome

The Islamic Jihad-aligned Palestine Today site has an article that contrasts the cost to Israel of deploying Iron Dome to protect its citizens from attack, against the cost of Qassam rockets.

As they note, a Gaza rocket costs only between $100 (for a mortar) and $1000 (for a Grad,) while each Iron Dome interceptor rocket costs between $30,000-$40,000.

They seem amazed that Israel would care so much to defend its citizens from wanton attacks of rockets.

I'm sure that "human rights" organizations will find something to criticize about Iron Dome as soon as it is deployed. Maybe they will argue that Israel should spend its money instead to provide more aid to Gazans. Or that since Gazans have the "human right" of "resistance" that Israel doesn't have the right to stop it.

HRW's Roth tries to weasel out of his libel

I wrote last week about HRW's Ken Roth's article vilifying Israel as a nation that uniquely hates human rights and that goes out of its way to trample the rights of its enemies.

One of the things he wrote was a purposeful misinterpretation of a statement by Tzipi Livni, which he used as justification for his sick thesis. He falsely wrote that she said that the IDF should not distinguish between Gaza civilians and terrorists, when in fact she said that Israel should not distinguish between Arab and Jewish victims of terror.

NGO Monitor traced the history of how Livni was misquoted and found that it originated in a similar accusation by Al Haq, a European-funded Palestinian Arab NGO. That libel then spread to other Palestinian NGOs, to Al Jazeera and finally to HRW which quoted it in its Rockets from Gaza report last August - in a transparent attempt to balance its rare criticism of Hamas with a calumny against Israel. The entire episode shows in a clear light how HRW's fact-finding methodology is flawed and biased, when they cannot even be bothered to read the original source of the quote and instead rely on biased and false interpretations from Palestinian Arab NGOs with a clear agenda against truth.

Now, Roth is backtracking. His article has been edited to take out Livni's quote, and to add a correction that, unbelievably, still doesn't admit the error:

On January 7, 2010, Human Rights Watch has updated this article following suggestions that the quote of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ("On my way here I heard that Hamas declared the man killed by a rocket in Ashkelon ‘one of the Zionists' despite being an Israeli Arab. They don't make a distinction, and neither should we.") is ambiguous on whether she meant that Israel will not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Other statements from Livni and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert support the argument, and one from Olmert has been added here.

The quote was not ambiguous at all, but as we have seen in the pasdt, HRW - that bastion of uncovering the truth - will do whatever is necessary to paper over its own mistakes.

And what was the quote that they added from Olmert that they say proves Israel's intentions to wantonly kill civilians? It is added in parentheses:

As Ehud Olmert, prime minister during the war, reportedly said in January 2008 about the Gaza blockade, Israel would not create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but "[t]here is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south."
Olmert repeated the notion after the war, reportedly telling his cabinet that, "The government's position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate."

The fact that Olmert said that the response will be disproportionate does not in the slightest way imply that Israel intended to target civilians.

So the only quote they are left with is Olmert's quote that the residents of Gaza will not "live normal lives" - during a blockade.

As with the Livni quote, HRW is falsely juxtaposing the quotes together to imply something that was not said. The first quote was about the blockade, the second one was about the war.

Is HRW now saying that Israel, under the Geneva Conventions, is obligated to provide Gaza residents with cement and pipes and potassium nitrate that can be used for rockets against Israeli civilians, so as not to inconvenience them? Because that sure seems to be HRW's standard by quoting Olmert the way they did.

Even if Olmert had said his statement about the war, is that the new standard for HRW's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions they pretend to uphold - that wars should not affect the lives of the people who live in a war zone?

As usual, HRW raises the bar in its misinterpretation of Geneva to create circumstances where it is literally impossible for a nation to defend itself, especially against an enemy that purposefully and deliberately hides amongst civilians.

This is the tragedy of Human Rights Watch. Their admirable intention to protect civilians has turned into a twisted parody of reality, where wars are by definition inherently evil and where the human rights of the citizens of democracies are less important than others', where democratic nations are held to standards that are literally impossible to uphold, where the parts of the Geneva Conventions that justify circumstances of attacking civilian areas are constricted by the willful misinterpretation of the zealous and biased as to become invisible.

And HRW's leaders are willing to lie to accomplish their agenda.

(h/t t34zakat)

Egypt bans all Gaza aid convoys

From Daily News Egypt:

Aid convoys bound for the Gaza Strip will now be banned from traveling across Egypt after activists this week clashed with police, the foreign minister said in remarks published on Saturday.
Ahmed Aboul Gheit told government newspaper Al-Ahram that members of one convoy led by British MP George Galloway committed “criminal” acts on Egyptian soil on their way to the blockaded Palestinian coastal enclave.
“Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory,” Aboul Gheit said.
“Members of the (Viva Palestina) convoy committed hostile acts, even criminal ones, on Egyptian territory,” the foreign minister added without elaborating.
On Tuesday night activists with the Viva Palestina convoy clashed with police in Egyptian the port town of El-Arish, 45 kilometers from the Gaza border.
Seven protesters were arrested during Tuesday’s clashes, but police swapped them for four policemen held by the activists.
A prosecutor in El-Arish later issued warrants for the arrest of seven activists, including two Britons and an American woman.

I have yet to see any comment from the Viva Palestina folks, the Free Gaza movement or Code Pink on this development.

When smuggling tunnels are a Jihad mission

Last September, Ma'an reported:

A Palestinian man was killed and four others were wounded by a powerful electric shock while they were working inside a smuggling tunnel under the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip overnight.

Medical officials at Abu Yousif An-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah told Ma’an the corpse of 19-year-old Amir Al-Ballishi arrived at the hospital with signs of an electric shock.

Some 200 smuggling tunnels are thought to exist under the Egypt-Gaza border. The tunnels are currently the only reliable means of importing goods into the Gaza Strip, and represent a lifeline for Palestinians there, who have lived under a strict Israeli-imposed siege for more than two years.

Just another case of poor Gazans being tragically killed while trying to bring in candies and soda from Egypt, right?

Well, Mr. Ballishi is now being lauded as a martyr by Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades, who describe the circumstances of his death as a "jihad mission."

Somehow, I don't think he was smuggling toys.

(h/t t34zakat via email)

Addameer keeps lying

Yaacov Lozowick notices that Addameer, the Palestinian Arab prisoners' right association, has recently started to claim that some 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967.

Sure enough, other websites are quoting Ala Jaradat from Addameer, saying that the number of Palestinians Arabs who have been imprisoned prisoners is at nearly 800,000.

Last summer, Addameer testified to the Goldstone Commission that the number of prisoners was at 750,000 since 1967 - a number that Goldstone quoted without any reservation.

In 2005, Addameer claimed there were 650,000 such prisoners.

Earlier in 2005, Addameer's number was 600,000, but they used the 650,000 number in 2004 as well.

As I showed a few months ago, these numbers are simply lies - and not just innocent lies, but lies on a massive scale. Addameer not only made up the initial numbers but they keep grossly inflating them, confident that their anti-Israel audience will lap them up without question. To think that an additional 50,000 Palestinian Arabs were imprisoned since the summer is to believe in Arabian Nights stories.

For Addameer's numbers to be accurate, Israel would be arresting some 10,000 people a month. Yet the PCHR says that the number of arrests was 23 last week, 26 the previous week, 23 the week before and 17 the week before that - for a total of less than 100 people a month.

Addameer is lying by a factor of a hundred!

And still no Western reporter has called them out on this transparent deception.

Addameer's website is not very forthcoming as to where it gets its money from. It does claim to work closely with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Do those organizations believe Addameer's fake numbers as well?

More on Scheuer and his opinions

I have been getting a lot of hits from my post about Michael Scheuer on C-SPAN (linked from Adam Holland's blog) and the video clip that I posted.

Some of the links are coming from places like David Duke's site, or like this comment from Canadian Spectator site that says

Note that elderofziyon.blogspot makes no effort to deny Israeli influence over American foreign policy, indicating that it is criticism of such control that must be deemed anti-Semitic.

This is a pretty good indication of the intelligence of the critics, as I did not call Scheuer an anti-semite, rather the caller that said that the US was "jewed" into Iraq and that Jews were spilling American blood for their interests.

However, it seems to be an appropriate time to talk a little about what Scheuer himself said, especially since some commenters are of the opinion that Scheuer's arguments have not been refuted. On C-SPAN, he had no problem with the caller's Jew-hatred, but the essence of his response was

Ultimately Israel is a country that is of no particular worth the United States....They have no resources we need. Their manpower is minimal. Their association with us is a negative for the United States. Now that's a fact.

Scheuer has stated similar opinions before. In other arguments, he often using the same terminology of proof by assertion, insisting that his opinions are facts. For example,

[O]ne of the reasons America is attacked by Islamists is because of Washington's unlimited and unqaulified [sic] support for Israel. This is a staemnt [sic] of fact, not opinion or analysis.

Scheuer's penchant for backing up his statements by simple assertion indicates that he knows himself that his arguments are tendentious.

As for his statement that it is a "fact" that Israel has no particular worth to the US, that is absurd. Israel has provided the US with peerless intelligence (most obviously during the Cold War, when Israeli analysis of downed MiG fighters and Soviet military capabilities helped the US tremendously.) Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor helped ensure that the US did not face a nuclear adversary during the Gulf War. Israeli inventions and innovations save US army lives, for example unmanned drones, active defense systems for military vehicles and medical inventions. Israeli use of US weapons in the field also help the US make their own weapons better.

Outside the military field, there is a good reason why Microsoft, Intel, Motorola, IBM and other high-tech superstars have R&D labs in Israel - because they see the value that Israel provides. The entire current generation of Intel microprocessors were designed in Israel. Doesn't that help the US?

To the other assertion of "fact" cited above, it is fantasy. Islamists don't hate America because of Israel - they hate Israel because it is a manifestation of America that is on their doorstep. The things they hate about Israel are exactly the same things they hate about America. If Israel didn't exist their hatred for the US would not decrease at all. There is a good reason why Israel is only considered the "little Satan."

Now, I didn't call Scheuer an anti-semite, because I had not researched other things he had said in the past. However, his hate of Israel and American Jews who support Israel indicates that this characterization would not be far off. At a debate with Alan Dershowitz, Scheuer said explicitly that American Jews led the US into war with Iraq (after Dershowitz said, accurately, that Jews on the whole opposed that war.)

Similarly, as Jeffrey Goldberg notes,

Scheuer is the man who once told an appropriately-shocked gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations that the Holocaust Museum is part of a clandestine Jewish operation to control American foreign policy: "Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity.

There are a lot more examples of how Scheuer chooses only Jews who support Israel as worthy of his hate, not to mention other interesting opinions he has.

In his defense, Scheuer did come up with this gem, that could prove his hatred for the Jewish State is more ecumenical:

I forthrightly damn, and pray that God damns, any American –– Jew, Catholic, Evangelical, Irish, German, Hindu, hermaphrodite, thespian, or otherwise – who flogs the insane idea that American and Israeli interests are one and the same.

Well, I'll be damned!

"Intransigent"

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority rejected US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for the resumption of peace talks without prerequisites, Agence France Presse and Israeli media reported on Saturday.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat stressed that peace talks can only be renewed on the condition that Israel realizes a settlement standstill across the West Bank and occupied east Jerusalem. "A resumption of peace talks requires the complete halt of settlements," Erekat told the AFP.

Negotiations, he added, could only be reinitiated from the point at which they were stopped in December 2008, when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. [when settlement activity was not a pre-condition - EoZ.]

It was announced on Friday that the US and Jordan would urge Palestinians and Israel to discuss Jerusalem and borders – issues that have been relegated to final status talks in previous negotiations. Meanwhile, President Mahmoud Abbas declared eight preconditions which must be met by Israel in order to bring the Palestinian side back to the negotiation table, including a total settlement freeze and Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders.

So Abbas is adding more and more pre-conditions before agreeing to peace talks.

Yet if you do a Google News search on the word "intransigent" in reference to the conflict, for some reason it is applied to Israel nearly exclusively. (Occasionally Hamas is thus described, but the PA is never labeled with that term in the mainstream media.) We've noticed similar words and phrases in the past that are exclusively associated with Israeli government - "hawkish," "right-wing," "hardliner," "extremist" - even though, objectively speaking, the Palestinian Arab positions and actions have been more extreme than the government of Israel's.

This is perhaps the most damaging part of the false narrative that the world swallows whole about the situation. When supposedly unbiased newspapers keep using these very biased terms in very biased ways, it is no surprise that an entire generation is growing up hating Israel and believing that the PA is being reasonable and "moderate" (a term that is never used for Menachem Begin or Ariel Sharon, both of whom made incredible concessions for peace.)

There is a cumulative effect of this use of language that, over the years, makes the conventional wisdom in the Middle East a sort of funhouse mirror reflection of the truth.

Israel has been losing the language war for way too long.

Terrorists trying to stop Gaza exports?

Yesterday, the Popular Resistance Committees took responsibility for some 12 mortars (Israel confirmed about 7 of them.) This is by far the biggest one-day total of projectiles fired from Gaza since the end of Cast Lead.

Why is there a sudden upsurge of mortar and rocket attacks on Israel?

The answer may be found in the choice of targets. For the first time since in many months, as far as I can recall, some of the mortars were shot at the Kerem Shalom crossing near the Egyptian border.

Before Cast Lead, the crossings were a regular target. Israel would always shut down crossings after these incidents for safety reasons.

Sure enough, in response to the attacks, the IDF did shut down Kerem Shalom.

Who did this hurt the most?

Israel has recently, without any fanfare, allowed semi-regular exports of strawberries and flowers from Gaza. Maybe it was because of the relatively small amount of rocket fire; maybe it was part of the Shalit negotiations, or maybe it was a deal that Israel made with Holland which has been supporting the Gaza farmers of those products.

Now that the crossings are closed again, piles of the crops that had been waiting at the crossing are going to waste.

Of course, Israel will be blamed for this, rather than the PRC. But it is hard to not conclude that the flower and strawberry exports were the real target of the terrorists.

It is also notable that the PRC is loosely aligned with Hamas, and has done a number of terror attacks with them. I have yet to see any word that Hamas has gone after the PRC for these attacks, as they have gone after some smaller groups in the past.

Israeli Arab town smashes hummus record

From AP:

Israel has taken the upper hand in a new kind of Mideast conflict, one fought with chickpeas instead of bullets.

A Guinness World Records adjudicator has confirmed that Israeli chefs in an Arab town outside Jerusalem now hold the world record for the biggest serving of hummus, the chickpea paste that is a staple and a near-religious obsession for many in the Middle East.

Jack Brockbank put the amount of hummus prepared by the chefs Friday at 9,017 pounds (4,090 kilograms).

The record doubles the previous one set in October by cooks in Lebanon.

Lebanon and Israel have officially been at war for decades. When the Lebanese chefs prepared their dish, they called it a move to reaffirm ownership of a food they say has been appropriated by Israelis.

According to Sky News, the record-breaking dish was created by a combination of Jewish and Arab Israelis, and the restaurant owner decided to go for this record to symbolize peace between Arabs and Jews. (The Sky News article says that Jews claim to have invented the dish, although I have never seen any such claims.)

The Israeli author of The Hummus Blog had responded to last year's Lebanese record by jokingly claiming to have created the world's smallest hummus dish, "since we Israelis were always pioneers in miniaturization."