Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Report of large explosion near Hamas leader's home

More evidence of Hamas infighting....

Palestine Press Agency is reporting that a large explosion occurred Saturday night in the Shati refugee camp.

Witnesses said it targeted Abu Anas Hammoudeh, one of the top leaders of the Qassam Brigades in the Shati refugee camp west of Gaza.

Sources in Gaza said that the secrity forces of Hamas on Thursday arrested two members of the armed wing of Hamas against the backdrop of bombings that rocked a few days ago near the house of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh story beach camp west of Gaza.

Arab News insanity

Arab News published a ridiculous article,that stated in part:

Check this out. Here's a story of two countries from the Middle East. One is an ancient civilization with a rich history that goes back five thousand years. It's a functioning democracy with free elections held at regular intervals.

It's a huge country of 70 million people. It has remained within its borders and hasn't attacked any country in the last 100 years. It is pursuing a nuclear power program, which it insists is for peaceful purposes.
The second country also claims to be a democracy. In this democracy though you get citizenship and voting rights not on the basis of your origins even if you were born in this land but on your ancestry. This country was founded on the land stolen and forcibly taken from its original inhabitants. It has fought at least three wars and is locked in permanent conflict with its neighbors on all sides. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and other state-of-the-art killing machines. It pursues assassination as a state policy and regularly sends death squads around the world to take out people it doesn't like.
Which country do you think is a real threat to world peace? The first country that has no history of aggression or the second state that has killed tens of thousands of innocent people in wars of aggression against neighbors and in cold-blooded executions?
And no prizes, dear readers, for guessing that the two countries in question are Iran and Israel.
If anyone had any doubts about the evil and criminal nature of the State of Israel, they should have been cleared after what happened in Dubai.

I wrote as a comment:

Let's see..."Peaceful" Iran is a state sponsor of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups; it has used its Syrian proxy to try to turn Lebanon into a Shiite state, it develops "peaceful" missiles that can reach most of Europe, and it is working overtime to build nuclear weapons-something that even the IAEA is belatedly admitting, it was involved in a war only a couple of decades ago that killed more Arab civilians than Israel could dream of, and its "free elections" were proven to be a sham only a few months ago.

Oh, and it is headed by a group of messianic nutcases who are itching to do whatever it takes to bring the Mahdi back.

I guess the author forgot to mention those things. Instead he believes that the killing of a known terrorist leader is much worse than anything Iran has done.

The previous times I wrote comments on Arab News they didn't get published, but I can always hope...

Arab papers jumping on the passport bandwagon

Kuwait's Al Rai newspaper is reporting that the assassins of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, killed in Syria in 2008, used fake passports as well.

According to the paper, quoted by Palestine Today, Mughniyeh's killers had passports from Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

In my experience, Kuwaiti news scoops of this nature are rarely confirmed and are often fictional. The "analysis" that follows pretty much proves it.

Using peerless logic, the paper then asserts that this is proof that European governments work together with the Mossad and provide the Israelis with necessary paperwork.

The logic gets more bizarre as the claim is then made that the reason that Israel doesn't use US passports is because it doesn't want to embarrass its American ally when it gets caught, and it shows how much contempt Israel has for Europeans.

What's in a name?

The New York Times' Ethan Bronner reports, in an article about a dispute between Jerusalem's mayor and Jerusalem Arabs:

[N]o utterance escapes politics. All labels and names here are contested. The mayor calls the neighborhood not by its Arabic name of Al Bustan but by a Hebrew one — Gan Hamelech, or the King’s Garden, a reference to the spot some believe King David wrote psalms.

The implication is that the Arabic term for the neighborhood is the ancient, correct one, and that the Hebrew name has been retrofitted to erase Arab history.

But as the My Right Word blog notes, the truth is the exact opposite. Bustan is the Arabic word for garden or grove. The place name is Biblical. It was the Arabs who stole the name and Arabicized it, not the other way around.

10,000 tons of apples from Israel to Syria

Palestine Press Agency reports that the ICRC will be transferring 10,000 tons of apples from Israel's Golan Heights to Syria next week.

This has been an annual occurrence, as Israel has been selling their surplus apple crops to Syria since 2005, where the apples are often resold to Gulf states at a profit.

Druze communities in the Golan, which Syria considers occupied, grow most of these apples. And Syria supplies water to at least one of the Druze border towns for free.

MK Ayoub Kara, the deputy minister for the development of the Negev and Galilee, has suggested that these arrangements be increased. He suggests that if Syria would supply water to more Druze villages, more apples could be grown and the annual export could be increased tenfold.

"The two countries' economic interests will return the sides to the negotiating table, and from economic peace we will also reach true peace," said Kara.

Deputy Minister Kara is a member of that extremist, hawkish, racist political party known as the Likud.

He is also Druze.

New resources for college students

The annual hatefest known as "Israel Apartheid Week" is almost upon us. CAMERA has set up a very useful site that demolishes the claims of the Israel-haters and shows them to be anything but peaceful.

Also, check out this video about the "anti-Zionist" Jew-hatred on college campuses.

(h/t Jack)

Israel selling Iran booby-trapped material for nukes?

Palestine Today quotes French media as saying that Israel has set up dummy companies in Europe to sell components that could be used in the manufacture of nuclear bombs.

The purpose of these front companies is to take orders from Iran, ship them fake components, and when the Iranians open up the shipments ....boom.

According to this unconfirmed report, some Iranian experts were already killed in this manner.

I could not find the original source.

Islam's three tombs of Abraham

The New York Times, on November 9, 1902, had an interesting article, about two tombs of Abraham - and neither one was in Hebron:

Edward James Banks wrote a book in 1912 about his adventures in Babylon and he includes his attempts to excavate under the Tomb of Abraham in the village of Tel Ibrahim, and why he was stymied:

Tell Ibrahim, the Biblical Cutha, for which I had sought permission to excavate, is one of the ruins suggesting the crescent and star ; the temple is the star, but the crescent is very irregular. A canal bed, some three hundred feet wide, separates them. We rode up the steep slope of the temple mound and dismounted on the summit by the little tomb of Abraham. It was because of the sanctity of this tomb that permission to excavate here was denied me. Visible from the tomb are the date palms bordering the shores of the Euphrates, and over beyond them is Ibrahim Khalil, and there stands another sacred tomb of Abraham. The tomb is by no means impressive. The building, measuring about thirty by fifteen feet, is constructed of the square, Babylonian bricks from the ruins beneath it, and surmounted by a conical dome. The doorway, leading to the antechamber, has been partly walled up. The dust on the floor had long been undisturbed, for pilgrims seldom visit the place. The inner chamber, lighted by a small opening in the dome, contains only a plaster mound to mark the grave ; on it were lying a fragment of a marble slab, a broken earthen pot, and a faded green rag torn from the turban of some pious pilgrim. Rassam claims that while excavating at Tell Ibrahim, he rebuilt the tomb ; had he been less zealous, this one of the many sacred graves of Abraham would probably have been forgotten by now.

Ibrahim Kallil, the other site of a tomb of Abraham in present-day Iraq, was also mentioned in a much earlier travelogue by Claudius James Rich who visited there in 1811.

We arrived at the Birs about half-past eleven. There are vestiges of mounds all round it to a considerable extent, and the country is also traversed by canals in every direction. The soil round the Birs was sandy. To the north of it runs a canal called Hindia, dug for the use of Mesjid Ali, by order, and at the expense of, Shujah ud Doulah. Close to the Birs, or at about a hundred yards from it, and parallel to its southern front, is a high mound, almost equal in size to that of the Kasr. On the top of it are two koubbehs, or places of prayer. The one is called Ibrahim Khalil, where they show his burialplace, which is under ground, exactly in the style of Am ran Ibn Ali. The natives tell you that it was here that Abraham was thrown into the fire by Nimrod. This tomb has been lately repaired.

So it appears that the Arabs and Muslims have had a number of places they venerated as the burial places of Abraham, not only the one in Hebron.

It appears likely that the main reason they only talk about the Hebron tomb nowadays is because it also happens to be a place that Jews worship.

Mabhouh's use of passports and disguises

Firas Press reports:

A close friend of Hamas leader Mahmoud Mabhouh said Thursday that Mabhouh, who was assassinated in Dubai, resorted to the same method used by the killers as he used several false passports and means of deception during secret missions undertaken by him to bring arms to Hamas.

Mabhouh would take his personal security very seriously. "He used to wear contact lenses and dyed his hair while traveling to European countries," the source said, adding that he lived with Mabhouh for two years in exile.

The friend added: "He provided Hamas and other allied factions with money and weapons."

He said, "He had a lot of passports of different nationalities, all Arab", adding that Mabhouh had recent surgery to change the shape of his nose.

Dubai Police have not commented officially on the which passport Mabhouh used to enter the emirate.

The friend said, "He did not ever live a normal life. He never told anyone, even his wife, about his travel plans," adding that Mabhouh used Arab passports to enter the European countries because they are less suspicious.

Somehow, I don't think that any Arab countries are too worked up about the fact that Mabhouh used forged passports to get money and arms for a terrorist group.

Today's hypocrisy by Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook, the Nazareth-based writer who finds every excuse he can to lie about and bash the nation that allows him to write freely, has another perfect example of hypocrisy in his latest piece published by Ma'an.

You see, New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner recently revealed that his son was in the IDF.
Cook uses this as a springboard to accuse all Western journalists in Israel (outside of himself, of course) of having pro-Israel biases. He also manages to whine that they have better sources than he does.

There is another journalist who has written dozens of arrticles for Ma'an, as well as for many other Arab and far-left sites. His name is Ramzy Baroud, and his hatred of Israel is palpable. He doesn't even pretend to be objective any more.

He just wrote a book called "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter." Although he says this is a history book, his father was actually a member of the Palestine Liberation Army in the 1960s.

Will Jonathan Cook, or any other Ma'an writer, decry Ramzy Baroud for his obvious conflict of interest?

Given that Bronner clearly tries to be fair in his writing, and Baroud clearly does not, wouldn't it make more sense to go after Baroud?

Fat chance.

"Death of those who support mingling men and women"

From Al-Arabiya:

A prominent Saudi cleric has issued an edict calling for opponents of the kingdom's strict segregation of men and women to be put to death if they refuse to abandon their ideas.

Shaikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak said in a fatwa the mixing of genders at the workplace or in education "as advocated by modernisers" is prohibited because it allows "sight of what is forbidden, and forbidden talk between men and women."

"All of this leads to whatever ensues," he said in the text of the fatwa published on his website (albarrak.islamlight.net).

"Whoever allows this mixing ... allows forbidden things, and whoever allows them is an infidel and this means defection from Islam ... Either he retracts or he must be killed ... because he disavows and does not observe the Shariah," Barrak said.

"Anyone who accepts that his daughter, sister or wife works with men or attend mixed-gender schooling cares little about his honor and this is a type of pimping," Barrak said.

Part of this seems to have been prompted by the new Saudi KAUST university that allows men and women to attend classes together, and even allows women to go without the hijab.

Egyptian scholars denounced this fatwa.

Happy (almost) Purim!

Mabhouh circus update

The latest bizarre details in the Mabhouh assassination:

A third Palestinian Arab is being questioned by Dubai authorities for his involvement in the murder.

Two (or three) of the suspects left Dubai after a reconnaisance mission (or the hit) and went to Iran.

Iran is the only player in the region outside the Mossad that would have the means to do such an operation, and the ability to make it look like Israel did it.

However, I think it is more likely that we are seeing Dubai police incompetence, accusing anyone who was on Mabhouh's floor in the Rotana hotel, than a bizarre Iranian conspiracy to kill a business partner.

There is also this interesting tidbit from CBS:

The members of the hit team – at least a dozen men and two women – can be assumed to have been wearing disguises at every moment they were caught on camera. Antonio Mendez, former chief of disguises at the CIA, years ago revealed to CBS News that ultralight latex-type masks that fit completely over the face – and make you look like a completely different person – are real and not figments of the "Mission: Impossible" screenwriters' imaginations.

This would mean that the agents are not "burned" after being seen on camera in an operation like this.

PalArabs are protesting Jewish ties to ancient sites, not Israeli

If you think that the latest Palestinian Arabs are rioting over Netanyahu's including the Cave of Machpelah and Rachel's Tomb as Israeli heritage sites, read the Arab press.

They are upset that the sites are being called "Jewish heritage sites."

From Palestine Press Agency:

The city of Hebron in the West Bank called a strike this morning in response to the call by Fatah to protest the Israeli decision to annex the Ibrahimi Mosque and another mosque of the heritage sites of Judaism.

The strike affected all walks of life in the city of Hebron, including schools and universities, as the are protesting the decision of the Israeli Prime Minister to include the Ibrahimi Mosque and the Mosque of Bilal to the list of heritage sites of Judaism.

Palestine Today:

Clashes are continuing clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli occupation forces in the vicinity of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the West Bank, to condemned the Israeli government's decision to annex the Ibrahimi Mosque as a Jewish religious site.

Also Palestine Today:

Sheikh Kamal Khatib, deputy head of the northern wing of the Islamic Movement of Palestine occupied in 1948, warned that the declaration of Israel on Sunday night to include the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to the list of so-called Jewish heritage sites is only a "rehearsal" to see the reaction from Muslims as they plan to Judaize the Al Aqsa Mosque in the middle of next month.

The secular Al Quds:

The Israeli government had decided at the weekend, the restoration of its landmark of 150 historic Jewish sites, as "sites of special heritage status," and carry out development of the expanded and transformed into tourist sites. Among these sites the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb (near Bilal Ben Rabah mosque) in Bethlehem, outside the city walls of Jerusalem.

(It is interesting that Al Quds says that Rachel's Tomb is "near" the Bilal mosque, not in the same place, as Palestinian Arabs have been claiming for the past decade or so.)

These riots have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with Jews asserting their rights to their holiest sites.

Even while the "hawkish," "extremist," "right-wing" government of Binyomin Netanyahu takes pains to emphasize that in no way is he interested in diminishing Muslim rights to their holy places, the Palestinian Arabs - even the supposedly secular ones - are trying mightily to keep all Jews out of every one of their alleged holy places, which, not coincidentally, are all belatedly considered Muslim holy places as well.

Every conciliatory move that Israel has done towards accommodation is taken as proof that Jews aren't as attached to their holy places as Muslims are, and it emboldens the Arabs more and more.

The harsh reality is that if Israel would have annexed these sites in 1967 - including the Temple Mount - the Arabs would have grumbled but they would have understood and respected it. They project their own attitudes towards the Jews and expect them to act the way they would have. Only when the government of the Jewish state wavers as to how important these sites are do the problems arise.

And keep in mind that the Muslims claim the Western Wall as well, so if Israel caves on this, it won't help "peace" - it will just move the battle towards Jerusalem.