Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Hamas celebrates two female "martyrs"

The Al Qassam Brigades website has added two female "martyrs" to its ever-growing list.

Here's a picture of the first one :

And here's what the second one looks like:

The resemblance is striking!

Both women were allegedly killed on October 27, 2007, by a "Zionist shell" as they were doing some "charity" work for Hamas.

The only problem is, the PCHR lists no women killed by Israel that week, nor the week before and not the week after, in Gaza.

It looks like it is time for martyr inflation!

Pig blood in cigarette filters?

Al Arabiya reports:

A new study reveals cigarettes may contain traces of pig's blood which could be “very offensive” to Muslims and other religious groups, Australia’s The Australian reported on Tuesday.

University of Sydney Professor Simon Chapman referred to a “recent Dutch research which identified 185 different industrial uses of a pig - including the use of its haemoglobin in cigarette filters,” The Australian said.

"I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive," Chapman.

The discovery places more than 100 million Muslim Arabs in an extremely awkward situation, especially considering that several fatwas have already been issued prohibiting smoking altogether. This new information would make the previous prohibition all the more valid for Muslims.

Report that Hamas robbed Gaza bank (updated)

Palestine Today reports:

Armed elements from Hamas today took control of a branch of the Bank of Palestine in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, and confiscated a million shekels.

Local sources reported that, in the wake of this incident, the management of the bank decided to close all its branches in the Gaza Strip.

In a completely different news story, the PA announced a $3.9 billion budget for 2010, of which some $1.5 billion will go towards the Gaza Strip.

All the money that the PA gives Gaza is money that Hamas can free up to buy weapons and to avoid any responsibility for the people under its direct control.

And, as we see, Hamas has some rather novel ways to raise money itself.

UPDATE: More details from Al Arabiya:

Hamas security forces took $400,000 from a bank in the Gaza Strip on Monday, in a direct challenge to Palestinian authorities in the West Bank who had frozen the money to comply with money laundering regulations.

Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, said the men were executing a court order to seize the assets of a medical organization, the Patient's Friend Association.
Seeking to apply global regulations against money laundering, the Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA) froze the association's account after its board fell under Hamas control, banking sources said.

The PMA described Monday's seizure, the first time Hamas had challenged the authority, as a "sinful attack".

Ehab al-Ghsain, spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said Monday's move was "the implementation of a judicial decision." The association had "resorted to court after the Fatah government froze its account in the bank," he said.

One employee of the Bank of Palestine, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the Hamas policemen had forced the staff to open the bank's vault and acted "aggressively".
"They took 1.5 million shekels ($400,000) and signed a paper showing the amount of money they had taken," the employee said.

It was the first time Hamas had challenged the PMA, which functions as regulator of the Palestinian banking system in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

"This is a serious development. We are investigating the matter and then we will take the appropriate action," Jihad al-Wazir, the governor of the PMA, told Reuters. He declined to give details about the raid.

In a statement, the PMA called on Hamas to "abide by the rule of law to safeguard the soundness of the banks so that they can keep providing services to the people."

Banks in the Gaza Strip would stage a strike on Tuesday to protest at the raid, Wazir said. Around a dozen banks, Palestinian- and Arab-owned, still function in the Gaza Strip, though their headquarters are in the West Bank.

Well, bank robbing is pretty easy for Hamas. They already have the masks.

Must read: "The Future of an Illusion"

By Elliott Abrams:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular “peace process” has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
1. Israel’s flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.
3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.
4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.
5. The ‘peace process’ retards peace.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Yaacov Lozowick in a great essay of his own)

Another picture of Jews "storming" the Temple Mount

In a story about alleged Jewish plans to storm the Temple Mount on Passover, Palestine Today illustrates the article with another image of Jewish desecration of the Temple Mount:

Shocking!

Wishing a happy Passover to all my readers, and trying to get my wishes in to those about to start the holiday in Israel.

I will not be posting from this afternoon until at least Wednesday night and posting might be light the rest of the week anyway.

You still have time to download the free EoZ Haggadah! Over 1200 people have grabbed it already!

Meanwhile, here is an open thread for others who want to share their holiday wishes...

Arabs nervous over Murdoch purchase

Last month, media mogul Rupert Murdoch purchased a 9% stake in Arab entertainment giant Rotana.

This has caused some consternation in Egypt that Murdoch, widely assumed in the Arab world to be Jewish, is trying to plant a "Trojan horse" in Arabic culture to normalize relations with Israel.

As Middle East Online says:

The tie-up between Arab entertainment giant Rotana and pro-Israel media mogul Rupert Murdoch is viewed in Egypt not only with suspicion but as signalling the decline of Arab film and art heritage.

In a country where film and television attract some of the largest audiences across the Arab world, the tycoon's foray into the Middle East is widely seen in cultural circles as a ruse to benefit Israel.

Murdoch's News Corp last month acquired a 9.09-percent holding in the Rotana Group of Saudi royal and business tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with an 18-month option to double the stake.

Rotana is one of the largest film producers in Egypt and also owns the rights to hundreds of Egyptian motion pictures.

In Egypt, which signed a 1979 peace treaty with Israel but has resisted a warming of cultural ties, there has been wide suspicion that the tie-up with Rotana is part of a Murdoch scheme to thaw frosty Arab views of Israel.

"Murdoch will enter every Arab home to impose normalisation" of ties with Israel, said Egyptian film critic Ola al-Shafei.

The partnership amounts to "a defeat for the Arab film and art heritage," she added.

Scriptwriter Osama Anwar Okasha wrote that Murdoch's stake in Rotana was a "Trojan horse" designed to stealthily penetrate Arab culture.

"The important thing is not the share sold by Alwaleed, but a person who hands over nine percent can also sell off the rest of the company," said novelist Ezzat Qamhawi.

"We are now facing the reality of the sale of Arab films and music to an investor whose media empire is one of the causes of the erroneous image of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the West," he added.

Egypt's state-owned film company has already threatened to stop working with Rotana, whose bouquet of free-to-air satellite channels target an Arab audience across the Middle East that is equally opposed to Murdoch's politics.

Ironically, there is one rich person in this story who is explicitly hoping to affect news coverage with business deals - and it is not Murdoch:

[Prince Alwaweed] said last month that he hoped the partnership could help moderate the widely-perceived anti-Arab bias of some of News Corp's most strident outlets, such as Fox News.

"It's not only Fox that in general is against the Arab world. It's an American syndrome," he said at a news conference in Riyadh when the deal was announced.

"We will always do our best to lower that tone," he said.

When in 2005 Alwaleed was reported as saying he had influenced how Fox News depicted rioting in heavily Muslim suburbs in France, the conservative Accuracy in Media group called for an investigation.

After Alwaleed, who owns a seven-percent stake in News Corp, gave an interview to Fox News this January conservatives blasted the network for its alleged kid-glove treatment.

UNHRC Resolution Score: Israel 5, World 3

From UN Watch, last Wednesday:

The UN Human Rights Council slammed Israel in 4 resolutions today, with another scheduled tomorrow. The Council’s five against Israel surpass the total combined amount of resolutions it will dedicate to all other countries in the world — one each on Burma, North Korea and Guinea.

The nation that has the best record on human rights in the Middle East is considered to be worse than every other nation combined by the esteemed UNHRC. And no one even considers this unusual anymore.

I mentioned an Arabic news story last week that Gaza authorities rejected Israel sending clothing and shoes to Gaza because the number of daily truckloads were too low.

Today, Ma'an mentions that an agreement has apparently been struck, and Israel will be sending 10 trucks full of clothing a day. Of course, Ma'an doesn't mention Hamas' previous rejection of the shipments as being too insulting to accept. (The Arabic Ma'an story says that Hamas' managed to negotiate the amount of daily shipments from 5 to 10,, short of the 30-50 they had been demanding.)

Ma'an also illustrates the story with another heartbreaking picture of a Gaza storekeeper with nothing to sell.

Now Gazans can smuggle entire cars

Sshender sends me this link to an Israeli Channel 2 news story that seems to show a car being pulled, whole, through a Rafah smuggling tunnel.

(h/t Hasbara Master for the video link)

UNHRC passes resolution limiting freedom of expression

From Al Arabiya:

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.