Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, March 28, 2010

UNHRC passes resolution limiting freedom of expression

The U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday narrowly passed a resolution condemning Islamaphobic behavior, including Switzerland's minaret building ban, despite some states' major reservations.

The resolution, which was criticized by the United States as "an instrument of division," "strongly condemns... the ban on the construction of minarets of mosques and other recent discriminatory measures."

Some 20 countries voted in favor of the resolution entitled "combating defamation of religions," 17 voted against and eight abstained.

The resolution also "expresses deep concern ... that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism."

It "regrets the laws or administrative measures specifically designed to control and monitor Muslim minorities, thereby stigmatizing them and legitimizing the discrimination they experience."
However, the European Union pointed out that the concept of defamation should not fall under the remit of human rights because it conflicted with the right to freedom of expression, while the United States said free speech could be hindered by the resolution.

"The European Union believes that reconciling the notion of defamation with discrimination is a problematic endeavor," French ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattei said on behalf of the bloc.

Eileen Donahoe, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. also slammed the resolution as an "ineffective way to address" concerns about discrimination.

"We cannot agree that prohibiting speech is the way to promote tolerance, and because we continue to see the 'defamation of religions' concept used to justify censorship, criminalization, and in some cases violent assaults and deaths of political, racial, and religious minorities around the world," she said.

"Contrary to the intentions of most member states, governments are likely to abuse the rights of individuals in the name of this resolution, and in the name of the Human Rights Council," added the U.S. envoy.

Islamic Jihad upset with Hamas for claiming responsibility for attack

Islamic Jihad is very upset with Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades for taking credit for the operation that killed two Israeli soldiers (which Islamic Jihad named "Operation Luring Idiots.")

Hamas had written a detailed account of the operation, including an interview with the purported members of the team that engaged with the IDF.

Islamic Jihad derided the Hamas account as a "fiction," especially a part where Hamas claimed to have shot at the soldiers from afar and that they refrained from firing on an Israeli ambulance because of respect both for international law and Islamic principles of morality. PIJ's response was to sarcastically ask why they were respecting international law when Israel targets hospitals and mosques.

Trying to walk the line between respect and derision, Islamic Jihad came out with a statement saying "Our brothers in Al-Qassam Brigades - whom we hold in high esteem as one of the other arms of the resistance - should more often check for accuracy before making statements to the media."

They agreed that the Al Qassam Brigades were in the area as backup, but denied that they were an integral part of the operation. And as a final measure of proof, PIJ referred to a Ha'aretz account of the fighting that more closely corresponded with Islamic Jihad's account than with Hamas'.

The implication is that he hated Zionist media won't lie the way Hamas does.

Arab Journalists Union to blacklist those who meet Israelis

Palestine Today reports that the Arab Journalists Union and other PalArab press organizations strongly criticized the Palestinian Arab journalists who met with their Israeli counterparts.

They said that this meeting was a kind of "normalization," and a serious crime. The unions called on the journalists to apologize or risk facing the consequences.

These consequences include being placed on a journalist "blacklist" and other punitive measures such as boycotting them.

The statement said it was with that deep regret and disgust that they learned that the meeting took place, seeing it as a disavowal of the blood of the martyrs of the Palestinian movement.

In other words, the Journalists Union made it crystal clear that, for them, objectivity is secondary to propaganda.

Of course, the correspondents for major news services in Gaza are members of this union that denies the adherence to even the most basic journalistic standards.

Hamas storms hospital to arrest Fatah member

Palestinian Press Agency reports on an incident yesterday, where Hamas members attempted to kidnap a Fatah member, Sheikh Abdul Khalil. His parents tried to stop the arrest and Khalil was beaten.

After the parents took him to the hospital, Hamas broke in and arrested Khalil and five of his Fatah friends (it was unclear if they were visiting him at the hospital or if they were arrested in their homes.)

Sunday Times slams Human Rights Watch

The Times (UK) has a beautiful article that nicely exposes the problems at Human Rights Watch, starting with the Garlasco affair that I helped expose, but showing that Garlasco was just a symptom of a much deeper problem.

Excerpts:

When the story broke that one of the organisation’s most prominent and vocal members of staff might be a collector of Nazi-era military memorabilia it felt like some sort of sexual scandal had erupted in the Victorian church. For a lobbying group accustomed to adulatory coverage in the media, it was a public-relations catastrophe.

Human Rights Watch is one of two global superpowers among the world’s myriad humanitarian pressure groups. It is relatively young — established in its current form in 1988 — but it has grown so quickly in size, wealth and influence that it has all but eclipsed its older, London-based rival, Amnesty International.

Unlike Amnesty, HRW, as it is known, gets its money from charitable foundations and wealthy individuals — such as the financier George Soros — rather than a mass membership. And, also unlike Amnesty, it seeks to make an impact, not through extensive letter-writing campaigns, but by talking to governments and the media, urging openness and candour and backing up its advocacy with research reports. It is an association that is all about influence — an influence that depends on a carefully honed image of objectivity, expertise and high moral tone. So it was perhaps a little awkward that a key member of staff was found to have such a treasure trove of Nazi regalia.
Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700 press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for The Independent.

Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.

I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named because “we operate in a very small world and it’s not done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”

Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in 2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing 30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never produced a report.
Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down that shook HRW in October. It came from the organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open and democratic societies rather than closed ones.

He said: “It broke my heart to write that article… Of course open societies should be watched very carefully, but HRW is one of the very few organisations that is supposed to go into closed societies. Why should HRW be covering Guantanamo? It’s already covered by a lot of other organisations.”

Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line. Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments even when they turned out to be incorrect.
In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.
Since the Garlasco affair blew up, critics of Human Rights Watch have raised questions about other appointments. An Israeli newspaper revealed that Joe Stork, the deputy head of HRW’s Middle East department, was a radical leftist who put out a magazine in the 1970s that praised the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In 1976 he attended an anti-Zionist conference in Baghdad hosted by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Stork’s boss, Sarah Leah Whitson, and most of his colleagues in the Middle East department of Human Rights Watch, also have activist backgrounds — it was typical that one newly hired researcher came to HRW from the extremist anti-Israel publication Electronic Intifada — unlikely to reassure anyone who thinks that human-rights organisations should be non-partisan. While it may be hard to find people who are genuinely neutral about Middle East politics, theoretically an organisation like HRW would not select as its researchers people who are so evidently on one side.
While HRW was dealing with the fallout from the Garlasco affair, it was already on the defensive as a result of criticism of a fundraising effort in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s worst human-rights violators. This involved two dinners for members of the Saudi elite in Riyadh, at which Sarah Leah Whitson curried favour with her hosts by boasting about HRW’s “battles” with pro-Israel pressure groups, such as NGO Monitor.

I asked the HRW executive director Kenneth Roth about the controversy that surrounded the Saudi dinners. He said: “Because somebody is the victim of a repressive government, should they have no right to contribute to a human-rights organisation?” Even if they had been invited, few victims would have been able to make the dinners — most Saudi dissidents are either in prison or live abroad in exile.

This is exactly the hubris and doubletalk that we have seen time and time again from HRW over Garlasco. There is zero evidence that the Saudi fundraising dinner had a single Saudi dissident or critic in attendance, yet HRW defends itself as if that was the focus of the dinner - not to line its pockets with money from people who share its loathing for Israel.

Many of those on the left of the human-rights “community” may feel conflicting emotions when it comes to dealing with radical Islam, as if the former is somehow a dangerous distraction from the real struggle. In 2006 Scott Long, the director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights programme at Human Rights Watch, attacked the British campaigner Peter Tatchell, accusing him of racism, Islamophobia and colonialism for having the temerity to lead a campaign against Iran’s executions of homosexuals — a campaign that Long believed was unconstructive and based on “a Western social-constructionist trope”.

Human Rights Watch does perform a useful task, but its critics raise troubling questions that go beyond Garlasco’s hobby or raising money from Saudis. Why put such effort into publicising alleged human-rights violations in some countries but not others? Why does HRW seem so credulous of civilian witnesses in places like Gaza and Afghanistan but so sceptical of anyone in a uniform?

It may be that organisations like HRW that depend on the media for their profile — and therefore their donations — concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about.
HRW’s reaction to the scandals has perhaps cost it more credibility than the scandals themselves. It has revealed an organisation that does not always practice the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others.

The only thing that this article didn't mention was HRW's crude use of sockpuppets to defend itself during the Garlsaco affair.

Read the whole thing.

Gaza journalists admit Hamas censorship - including BBC

From JPost:

A delegation of Palestinian journalists from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank toured Tel Aviv on Thursday, as part of an initiative to build bridges between the Arab media and their peers in Israel.

Among those present were three reporters from the Gaza Strip and two from the West Bank. The reporters work for a variety of news outlets, both in the Arabic and English-speaking worlds....

One of the journalists, Palestinian TV broadcaster Lana Shaheen, said she appreciated the opportunity to meet fellow reporters in Israel and described the difficulties of being a reporter in the Gaza Strip.

...Shaheen says she has to contend with significant censorship from Hamas on what journalists can report from the Gaza Strip. Such limits make it very difficult to present a completely objective picture of the situation on the ground.

Shaheen said “to some extent” Hamas controls what they can report. She used the example of a friend who works for the BBC who produced a report on the rather widespread making of homemade wine in Gaza, “and the next day we receive a statement from a Hamas spokesman saying they are supporting the enemy and this is immoral.”

The question is, did the BBC end up running the story anyway?

I couldn't find any such BBC story, although AFP covered it last year. Apparently, the BBC caves to Islamist demands on how "objective" its news coverage can be.

"Operation Luring Idiots"

The fatal exchange of gunfire in Gaza on Friday between IDF troops and Islamic Jihad/Hamas terrorists was a named operation, according to a number of Arabic sources.

While IDF sources deny that there was an ambush, Hamas claims that it was an ambush operation.

The Arabic media is calling it "Operation Luring Idiots." Which makes it appear that the goal was indeed to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

Zahi Hawass: "I will not allow any Jew to pray in restored synagogue"

Zahi Hawass, the Jew-hating general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and Egypt's top archaeologist, has announced that he will not allow any Jew to pray in the restored Maimonides synagogue in Cairo.

He told a Muslim scientific forum that "his decision to close the temple was a reaction to Israeli attacks on Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem."

He stressed that he would treat the Maimonides synagogue the same as any other Egyptian antiquities, and that the decision to cancel the opening rededication ceremony of the synagogue was to keep history and politic separated.

But he would not allow any Jew or Israeli to pray there and he would not allow the Egyptian Jewish community to administer the site. He also said that this was a reaction to "provocative practices that carried out by the Jews in their celebration which was held in the temple." He was referring to the dancing and drinking of wine, which he felt offended a billion Muslims.

He said that Egypt still intended to restore ancient synagogues, and the next one to be worked on was the Temple of the Prophet Daniel in Alexandria.

Earlier today, Palestine Today (link not available) quoted Hawass as saying that the very opening of the synagogue was a "slap in the face" of Israel, showing that Egypt is a tolerant country.

To him, Egyptian synagogues are museums that are meant to promote the idea that Egyptians are open-minded towards Judaism, even as he shows that he is not tolerant at all towards Jews.

Obama ensures that terror has no consequences

From YNet:

The Obama Administration is demanding that Israel hand over more West Bank land to exclusive PA control, including the Abu-Dis area adjacent to Jerusalem, Palestinian sources told Ynet Thursday.
According to the US vision, the move will take place as part of reverting to the state that prevailed in the West Bank before the outbreak of the last Intifada.
"The most significant demand is to restore the situation to what it was on the eve of the Intifada," one source said.

Because what could possibly be wrong with turning back the clock to the day before a war began that killed a thousand Israeli civilians?

Starting and losing a war has consequences in every part of the world except for one. Since 1967, the world - and "international law" as interpreted by most - is fixated on the idea that the Arabs can start all the wars they want against Israel. If they lose, international pressure will ensure that the previous status quo can be returned to, so there are no consequences for losing.

We have seen Egypt, Syria, the PLO, the PLO again, Hezbollah and Hamas start wars with Israel, secure in the knowledge that they will not lose anything of consequence if they lose the war. Just expendable people who are less important than "The Struggle" and perhaps a few years of negotiations and pressure.

It wasn't that many years ago that Israelis were putting their lives on the line in order to take a bus or go to a restaurant. Their government finally went on the offensive to fix this intolerable situation - it built a fence, it took actions against terrorists, it added checkpoints both in the territories and all over Israel itself that every citizen had to go through many times daily, and it took actions to stop giving Hamas materials to build rockets and tunnels with.

All those defensive actions, meant to save lives, appear to be now "unacceptable," in the term that the Obama administration uses with serious conviction against Israel and with fake conviction against Iran.

Now, the surviving Palestinian Arab leaders who wholeheartedly supported the intifada are being given an opportunity to turn back the clock, so they can come up with a new way to destroy Israel without losing any leverage.

The strategy is simple. When the Arabs win, militarily or politically, they win. When Israel wins, it is a draw at best. So all the Arabs have to do is keep trying.

While the White House thinks in terms of four-year chunks of time, the Arabs think in terms of centuries. To them, the Crusades were a mere blip in time.

And so is Israel.

So, backed by Westerners who cling to the false hope that a temporary peace treaty will somehow stop worldwide Islamic terror, the Arabs can keep trying to shave parts of Israel off until there is nothing left. After a Palestinian Arab state will come demands for the Arab parts of Israel, then demands for the 1947 partition lines, then demands for Arabs to "return" to lands that they never owned to begin with. There will be demands for "Palestine" to have full control over its airspace, to have the full ability to invite Iran or Syria to place an army on its territory, all in the name of fairness and independence.

The demands,and the supporting wars, will not stop because there is no incentive to stop them. They know that the West will always want to turn the clock back if they lose, so why fear losing?

There is a basic fact that should be self-evident, but years of double-talk and wishful thinking has rendered it invisible in the Middle East:

The only way towards real peace is if both sides have something to lose by its absence.

Another bomb in Gaza

Yet another bomb exploded in Gaza near a security compound, the latest in a series of such bombings aimed at police in recent months.

Earlier this week, Hamas' interior minister blamed the bombs on "teenagers."

The secret Jewish plan (guest post by Zvi)

In response to my posting on Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass' obsession with the Jews, where he declares his love for them but then informs us helpfully that the Jews have no history, culture or redeeming value, regular guestblogger Zvi reveals The Plan:

WARNING LABEL: THIS COMMENT CONTAINS SARCASM. JEWISH SARCASM HAS BEEN PROVED BY RESEARCHERS AT BIR ZEIT UNIVERSITY TO HAVE PRODUCED BIRTH DEFECTS IN GAZA. THE PAPER, PUBLISHED IN THE PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL "LET THE JEWISH PIGS AND MONKEYS DIE", SAYS THAT THE RESEARCHERS WERE UNABLE TO RULE OUT THE POSSIBILITY OF RETROACTIVE BIRTH DEFECTS. IF YOU WANT TO AVOID RETROACTIVELY RECEIVING BIRTH DEFECTS, DO NOT READ THIS COMMENT. AT ALL COSTS, AVOID READING EVEN THIS SENTENCE! OH, WAIT. YOU ALREADY DID. SORRY.

You might as well read the rest, then.

We're trying to humiliate Arabs, you know. Especially Egyptians. That's our obsession, the reason why we Jews live. It's the reason why we wake up in the morning.

And of COURSE we control the world. It makes SUCH perfect sense. Using this world control - which the Nazis used to rant about, so very unlike the wise and philo-Semitic leaders of Iran and Syria and Israel's great friend, Egypt - we ensured that 6 million of our loved ones would be murdered across the European continent. Yes! This was because our parents and grandparents knew that they would not miss their families anyway, and knew - clever Jews! - that survivors would be able to come to the Middle East and be locked up in British internment camps in Cyprus for several years.

Of course, we knew in advance, because it was part of the Plan, that the detainees would eventually be able to come to Israel and have the unusual opportunity to be attacked from all sides by 3 armies and their local allies, without an air force or tanks or even sufficient small arms to use in the defense. We knew, because it was in the Plan, that a few million Jews would somehow survive this kind of onslaught and would then be able to live on a fingernail clipping of land, half of which is desert, the 151st largest country in this Jew-controlled world. [And one of the few areas in the region without any oil - EoZ]. Yes indeed, we knew from the start that Jews would manage to live under bombardment in this snippet of a country, to which of course we have no real connection, because it's really "Muslim land", but which we "occupy" simply in order to humiliate the Arabs! We could really live anywhere in the world and continue to rule the planet - Tehran, for example, or Oslo, or Barcelona, or Baghdad. But Jews live in Israel for a Great and Wonderful Purpose - to drive Mahmoud al-Zahar nuts.

We set it all up in advance, because it was our plan all along to get massacred and expelled five or 6 times! Or was it 20 or 100 or 1000 times? Elder, when did we cook up this brilliant scheme, again? The year 1900? Or was it 1500? Or 100? Part of the Plan is that I don't know what the Plan is! Our diabolical cleverness astounds me whenever I think about it!

[Zvi - everyone knows that it is in the Talmud, but in the censored parts.]

Our incredible, magical control of the world allowed us to ensure that 1 million of us would be driven from homes in Arab and Muslim countries *cough Egypt cough* by Nazi-inspired repression, pogroms and threats of genocide, and allowed us to ensure that these refugees ended up in tent cities near present-day Sderot, where nobody but the Jews shouldered the burden of helping them and integrating them into Israel's population.

Our control further ensures that the Palestinians' childrens' childrens' children are not allowed to return to the countries from which many of their fathers and grandfathers came, and are living in squalid camps, supported by the taxes of people whom they hate. This is a big part of the Plan - to make sure that these people are kept on the dole, all the while being brainwashed to kill us.

Our control ensures that Israel gets rocketed and nobody worries about it, and that Israel is continually and uniquely attacked by one United Nations resolution after another, while most of Europe and Asia watch the spectacle. We are very clever, we who ensure that no other national state on earth receives such "special handling!"

Our absolute control of the world enables us to ensure that otherwise "caring" governments don't raise a finger to help Jews who are physically attacked or threatened in places like Oslo and Malmo, and it's why, when a Jew displays an Israeli flag in his window in Germany, we ensure that the German authorities make him take it down - while allowing a crowd of vicious anti-Semites to issue threats of violence against us without challenge.

Our pernicious control allows us to arrange for The Guardian and Aftonbladet to spread blood libels about our people and our lone national state; and because we control the world SO completely, we are able to make sure that our national state is singled out in this manner, that no other state on earth receives such a constant barrage of manufactured hatred. We ensure that when other states slaughter thousands of civilians in cold blood (e.g. Sri Lanka and Sudan) over the course of a few weeks, this is virtually ignored! Of course we do! We want the media to focus exclusively on insane, trumped-up political attacks on OUR lone national state. Because we are so diabolically clever and have such magical control over the planet. All part of the Plan.

And we control all of the money and all of the business! This is because we control the world's oil resources! Haha! Just seeing if you were on your toes! Okay, so we don't control the oil. But "everybody knows" that we control the banks - never mind the fact that the boards of directors of most of the world's biggest banks include either no Jews at all, or very few. We do it with Joo Rays (we're good with this high-tech stuff)! What else do we control? The making of Kosher l'Pesach food - very important. Oh, right, I forgot that we control the media; we use it to ensure that our lone national state is constantly bashed for behavior that is ignored when anyone else does it. All part of our clever plan! (It is a VERY CLEVER plan! ; - ) )

And we control elected governments, and NGOs! Never mind that there are only 11 million of us in the world. Pay no attention to the fact that governments blatantly don't give a fig what we think about Jerusalem, about Iran, or about most other major topics. But have no fear. We control with our JOO RAYS! We're mind-controlling politicians with our wily ways. Except when we're not. Do not be distracted by the relentless way in which major NGOs bash Israel in order to raise money from oil dictators. We control them!

And oh, boy! Our cabal is such a secret cabal! Every Jew participates in this network! Except for Norman Finkelstein. And Jeremy Ben-Ami. And just about all of the left-wing Jews. And the Neturei Karta. And the Israeli supreme court. And the settlers. And the millions of other Jewish people who can't be bothered to show up at the synagogue. No, wait! Sorry! I forgot! We're ALL conspirators; we just don't realize it! I don't realize it either. It's such a clever plan that nobody in the world knows what the plan is! We have endless, friendly debates about it in public forums, using such friendly pet names as "heartless neocon", "self-hating dhimmi", "naive liberal" and (whispers) "Zionist". Yes, Zahi is right. We Jews are so powerful because we are completely and totally united! Bibi is in league with Noam Chomsky! And Tzipi Livni! And Amira Hass! Danny Ayalon is consorting with Rahm Emanuel! And we have kept all of this a secret for thousands of years!

Oh, it's a fiendishly clever Plan.

Sssshh.

And it's all about humiliating Egypt. By signing a peace treaty with it and giving back the Sinai. Oops, wait. I think the idea is to humiliate the Arab world by continuing to breathe. Elder, help! I've lost the threads of our super-secret conspiracy!

[It is all very complicated, as you can imagine. A lot of it is centered around lawn darts, SETI, women's pro wrestling and shaitel machers. When you reach the rank of Elder Daled Zayin you will gain more knowledge.]

And only wise Zahi can detect our secret control! Wallah! It's a miracle!

UNHRC says Israel must compensate Hamastan

From Arab News:

Israel should pay Palestinians reparations for loss and damages suffered during last year’s war in the Gaza Strip, the UN Human Rights Council said Thursday.
The 47-nation body didn’t call for similar payments by Palestinians to Israelis. The resolution was opposed by the United States and five European countries.
The council, which has been criticized for excessively focusing on Israel in the past, approved four other resolutions condemning the Jewish state on Wednesday.

Here are some expenses that the UN did not feel worthy of compensation:

* The cost of fortifying homes and schools in Sderot and other Negev communities (over $75million spent so far, an additional $150 million needed)

* The cost of 32 public bomb shelters ($1.5 million) and additional ones in Ashkelon ($2 million)

* Building new rocket-resistant schools in the Negev ($18 million)

* Paying for treatments of thousands of residents with post traumatic stress

* Compensating for those killed and injured

* Compensation for the lost property values in Sderot and surrounding communities

* Compensation for lost productivity of Negev residents

* Compensation for the cost of developing the Iron Dome system and any new systems to defend against rockets and mortars

* Compensation for the entire cost of Operation Cast Lead, a war that Israel would not have had to wage if the rockets weren't being fired. This includes the huge amount that Israel was forced to spend to minimize civilian casualties, dropping leaflets, calling residents to warn them to leave, the intelligence behind accurately targeting terrorists.

In the end, no one has yet come up with an alternative to Operation Cast Lead that would have stopped the rocket fire. In the absence of any real alternative, it appears that it is Hamas that owes the residents of Gaza compensation for starting the war.

Egypt's top archaeologist really hates Jews

Zahi Hawass is the general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. As Barry Rubin recently pointed out, he was quoted in the New York Times as saying "I love the Jews, they are our cousins!"

Which would be great, except that MEMRI translated an a TV interview he gave last year:

Zahi Hawass: "For 18 centuries, [the Jews] were dispersed throughout the world. They went to America and took control of its economy. They have a plan. Although they are few in number, they control the entire world."

Interviewer: "Dr. Hawass, you are a great historian and archaeologist. I would like to figure out the mystery of how 15 million people, 5 or 6 million of whom do not share this vile Jewish logic... With regard to Israel and Zionism – we are talking about 7 or 8 million. How is it possible that these 7 or 8 million have taken control of the entire world, and have convinced the world of their cause, while we, over one billion Muslims, cannot convince the world of our cause? How would you explain this from a historical perspective?"

Zahi Hawass: "The reason is that they are always united over a single view. They always move together, even if in the wrong direction. We, on the other hand, are divided. If even two Arab countries could be in agreement, our voice would be stronger. Look at the control they have over America and the media."

Interviewer: "So in your opinion, the secret lies in unity?"

Zahi Hawass: "Yes. It was unity that gave them this power..."

Interviewer: "You mean from a historical perspective?"

Zahi Hawass: "Of course."

In an earlier article in Asharq Al Awsat, he said " "The concept of killing women, children and elderly people... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine" and that "the only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment - so much so that they have become artists in this field."

Well, this distinguished historian, who pretends to be a type of Indiana Jones on his website, now has another article in the pages of Al Awsat al Asharq, saying something really amazing:

What Israel is doing now is a violation of the rules and values, and the Ibrahimi Mosque and the Mosque of Bilal Ibn Rabah [The Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb] has no connection whatsoever with Jewish history, it is a product of and part of the culture and heritage of Palestine.

He must also think that the Talmud Yerushalmi is also "part of the culture and heritage of Palestine." After all, it is sometimes referred to as the "Palestinian Talmud."

I just wonder what kinds of mental gymnastics Hawass has to go through to claim that the burial places of the founders of Judaism - a fact admitted by Muslims - have "no connection whatsoever with Jewish history." It must hurt.

"Arabs should use Holocaust as a political weapon"

In an ironic op-ed at Asharq Al Awsat called "The Crocodile Tears of the Holocaust Industry," Hamad Al-Majid writes:

A young Jewish American woman approached the prominent Jewish professor; she had been attending the lecture he was conducting [at the University of Waterloo] when she asked a question before breaking down in tears. In a trembling voice, the student asked "During your speech, you made reference to Jewish people – some of whom are in this audience – describing them as Nazis, how can you do this? I find that extremely offensive."
This young woman was talking to Jewish American professor, academic, and writer, Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein. Finkelstein's mother survived the Majdanek concentration camp, while his father survived the Auschwitz concentration camp; every single member of his family on both sides was killed by the Nazis. Dr. Finkelstein is one of the bitter opponents of Israel, and he has harshly criticized the Israeli criminal actions and brutality against the Palestinian people. The young woman's tears did not move the professor, and instead he fiercely criticized her with the vigour of a wounded Palestinian whose home, wife, and children had all been taken away from him by the Zionists. Frowning at the young student, Dr. Finkelstein reacted angrily saying, "I don't respect that…I don't like and I don't respect your crocodile tears. I don't like to play the Holocaust card before an audience, but my late father was in Auschwitz and my late mother was in Majdanek, every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated, and it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons that my parents taught me that I will not be silent while Israel commits crimes against the Palestinians. There is nothing more despicable than to use their suffering and martyrdom to try to justify the torture and brutalization and the demolition of homes committed by Israel against the Palestinians. If you had a heart, you would be crying for the Palestinians."

The lesson that Majid learns from this sickening episode?

This is a positive way of dealing with the Holocaust, and this is something that wise Jews and Westerners should promote in order to prevent such injustice occurring again. In my opinion, this is better than entering bitter controversy over the veracity of the Holocaust, and casting doubts and denying it. If we compare the French Muslim intellectual Roger Garaudy's denial of the Holocaust with Dr. Norman G Finkelstein's condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, as well as the Israeli Holocaust against the Palestinians, and how – in his view – the former is being used to justify the latter, we find that Finkelstein's controversial view is far more influential in the West than Garaudy's.

This writer is saying that he prefers using the Holocaust as a political weapon against Israel than denying the Holocaust altogether, because the former is more effective.

Holocaust denial isn't wrong - it is just not effective.

The corollary to this argument is that if, at some time, Holocaust denial becomes a more effective argument, then that would be the preferred weapon.

The only thing missing from his argument is any reference to the truth. Truth, he believes, is completely irrelevant - absurd Holocaust analogies must be used as a club to beat Jews with, because that hurts them more than denying the Holocaust does, and the goal, of course, is to hurt the Jews.

The ironic part is that the same people who accuse Jews of politicizing the Holocaust to justify Zionism are now politicizing the Holocaust to denounce Zionism. Somehow, to them, this is not a problem.

And the reason is, as mentioned, that the truth is not a factor in this battle.

Arab analyst notices Abbas' tactic of passivity

From an op-ed in Asharq al-Awsat by its editor, Osman Mirghani:

The Palestinian situation is now at its worst stage with division and conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Even if reconciliation efforts are successful, mutual confidence between the two parties is something that may remain absent for a long time. This would mean continuation of a state of weakness and the absence of true bargaining power. To be clear, the Palestinians should not expect an Arab miracle that will result in all their dreams and aspirations being fulfilled. The current Arab situation is extremely frail, and even if there is a desire to take serious steps to support the Palestinian negotiator, this is something that would require the Arab position to derive its strength from the cohesion and strength of the Palestinian position.
It is not logical for the government of President Mahmoud Abbas to pin all of its negotiation hopes on the US effort, just as it is not acceptable for Hamas to stall reconciliation and subject the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza to the calculations of Tehran. While Fatah and Hamas fight over power, Palestinian suffering is increasing; their lands are being confiscated, and the dream of a Palestinian state is diminishing day by day. What is currently required of the Palestinian leadership is for it to rise to the level of responsibility and stop jeopardizing the rights of its people. Without complete reconciliation, neither the Arab states nor Washington will be able to do anything for the Palestinians.

While I obviously disagree with Mirghani's politics, it is refreshing to see an Arab call out the Palestinian Arabs for their lack of leadership and their waiting game. Abbas pretends that the US will create a state for him with no effort on his part, and while the direction of the US has changed, in the end he will need to make decisions that he has been assiduously avoiding - because of his fear of criticism.

Chances are, he will continue to avoid these decisions until he dies, because Abbas has never shown the slightest ability to lead.