Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 03, 2010

How's that outreach to Syria going, President Obama?

From AP:

The Obama administration is pressing Syria to resume long–stalled peace talks with Israel as part of its push for broad settlement between Arab countries and the Jewish state.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met on Monday in New York with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al–Moallem to make the case for negotiations. The State Department said Clinton was the first secretary of state to meet Syria's top diplomat in three years, although special Mideast envoy George Mitchell has made several visits to Syria in the past year.

Including two weeks ago.

So how well has this diplomatic push worked on Syria?

From the Tehran Times:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad held a meeting with Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Saturday.

During the meeting, Ayatollah Khamenei told Assad that the United States’ efforts to undermine the resistance movement in the Middle East region will not bear fruit.

The Leader praised Syria for its strength and forbearance in the face of external pressure and called for the expansion of ties between Tehran and Damascus.

There are no two other countries in the region with such strong bilateral relations, and efforts should be made to make the best use of this 30-year-old experience, he stated.

The Syrian president said that Iran-Syria relations serve as a model for other regional countries, adding that Damascus will continue to increase its cooperation with Tehran.

Earlier in the day, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad awarded Iran's highest national medal, the Grand National Order of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to the Syrian president for his support of the Palestinian and Lebanese nations.

This medal is a sign of Iran’s profound gratitude to the Syrian government and nation for their serious efforts to establish peace in the region, Ahmadinejad said during a ceremony held at the Foreign Ministry.

If it were not for Syria's resistance, no country in the region would have been unaffected by the Zionist regime’s aggression, the Iranian president added.

Following the ceremony, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem signed a memorandum of understanding for the establishment of an Iran-Syria free trade zone.

Iranian Industries and Mines Minister Ali-Akbar Mehrabian and the Syrian foreign minister also signed an MOU on increasing bilateral industrial relations.

The US begs Syria for a bone, Syria slaps America in the face about as publicly as humanly possible - and no one says a word.

"Buycott" movement notches another victory

From The Brooklyn Paper:

Controversy sells — and in Brooklyn Heights, it’s also good for the skin.

Local Jewish leaders and anti-Israel protesters faced off on Montague Street — again — on Tuesday, holding a raucous debate over whether West Bank-made lotions sold at Ricky’s cosmetics shop support Israel’s “illegal” occupation of the embattled region.

In the end, the boycott supporters ended up actually promoting the Ahava products, as Heights residents flocked to Ricky’s with their wallets open.

Ricky’s employees said that they sell out of Ahava products every time there is a protest — and there have been others in Manhattan, a neighboring city.

Besides the beauty of the boycotters ending up promoting business for Ahava, you gotta love that a Brooklyn paper refers to Manhattan as "a neighboring city."

(h/t Buycott Israel)

The tantalizing clue of Myrtus for Stuxnet

From the New York Times, in an article about the Stuxnet worm that is affecting Iranian factories, and possibly their nuclear plants:

Then there is the allusion to myrtus — which may be telling, or may be a red herring.

Several of the teams of computer security researchers who have been dissecting the software found a text string that suggests that the attackers named their project Myrtus. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.

It was Mr. Langner who first noted that Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively.

“If you read the Bible you can make a guess,” said Mr. Langner, in a telephone interview from Germany on Wednesday.

To be precise, Myrtus=Myrtle=Haddassah, which was the Hebrew name of Esther.

NYT further says:

There are many reasons to suspect Israel’s involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.

Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.

He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.

“They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought,” he said.

...something — perhaps the worm or some other form of sabotage, bad parts or a dearth of skilled technicians — is indeed slowing Iran’s advance.

The reports on Iran show a fairly steady drop in the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant. After reaching a peak of 4,920 machines in May 2009, the numbers declined to 3,772 centrifuges this past August, the most recent reporting period. That is a decline of 23 percent. (At the same time, production of low-enriched uranium has remained fairly constant, indicating the Iranians have learned how to make better use of fewer working machines.)

Computer experts say the first versions of the worm appeared as early as 2009 and that the sophisticated version contained an internal time stamp from January of this year.

Other researchers think that Myrtus might have a completely different meaning:

Personally I'd be surprised if a crack team of Israeli software engineers were so sloppy that they relied on outdated rootkit technology (e.g. hooking the Nt*() calls used by Kernel32.LoadLibrary() and using UPX to pack code). Most of the Israeli developers I've met are pretty sharp. Just ask Erez Metula.

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/METULA/BHUSA09-Metula-ManagedCodeRootkits-PAPER.pdf

It may be that the "myrtus" string from the recovered Stuxnet file path "b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb" stands for "My-RTUs"

as in Remote Terminal Unit. See the following white paper from Motorola, it examines RTUs and PICs in SCADA systems.

http://www.motorola.com/web/Business/Products/SCADA%20Products/_Documents/Static%20Files/SCADA_Sys_Wht_Ppr-2a_New.pdf

But, as the NYT article mentions, there is a psychological component to cyberwar, and a clue like Myrtus would play into already existing Iranian paranoia.

The good news is that something seems to have slowed down the Iranian nuclear program significantly, and if that hearkens back to Queen Esther's saving the Jews from immoral, genocidal Persian rulers, so much the better.

(h/t EBoZ)

חג שמח! - open thread

Now we are in the home stretch of that autumn Jewish holidays, and I will not be blogging until around Sunday.

Have a chag sameach!חג שמח

UNHRC ignores an important part of the flotilla report

Yesterday, the so-called UN Human Rights Council debated the report that slammed Israel for its conduct with the passengers who attacked IDF soldiers with iron bars, chains and knives as they boarded the ship.

As I mentioned, the report was incredibly biased and it trampled on international law. But the people debating the report did not bother to read it, because they characterized the flotilla as "humanitarian" - and the report, pointedly, did not.

The very headline of the debate on the UNHRC webpage called it "Israel's attack on the Humanitarian Flotilla." But the report is a lot more equivocal:

80. The Mission notes a certain tension between the political objectives of the flotilla and its humanitarian objectives. This comes to light the moment that the Government of Israel made offers to allow the humanitarian aid to be delivered via Israeli ports but under the supervision of a neutral organization. The Mission also notes that the Gaza Strip does not possess a deep sea port designed to receive the kind of cargo vessels included in the flotilla, raising practical logistical questions about the plan to deliver large quantities of aid by the route chosen. Whilst the Mission is satisfied that the flotilla constituted a serious attempt to bring essential humanitarian supplies into Gaza, it seems clear that the primary objective was political, as indeed demonstrated by the decision of those on board the Rachel Corrie to reject a Government of Ireland-sponsored proposal that the cargo in that ship to be allowed through Ashdod intact.

While the mission was wrong about how serious the flotilla was in bringing aid - the aid was not organized in any way that would have made it useful, and much of it was literally junk like expired medicines - the clear conclusion here is that the flotilla was not primarily a humanitarian mission.

Indeed, the mission even notes that

Many of the participants interviewed did not have specific skills or qualifications for humanitarian work. Some organizations said that they selected participants on the basis of their qualifications (for example, medical doctors), status as people of influence (parliamentarians, authors) as well as their ability to resist provocation.

In the conclusions and recommendations, the mission writes quite clearly:

277. A distinction must be made between activities taken to alleviate crises and action to address the causes creating the crisis. The latter action is characterized as political action and therefore inappropriate for groups that wish to be classified as humanitarian. This point is made because of the evidence that, while some of the passengers were solely interested in delivering supplies to the people in Gaza, for others the main purpose was raising awareness of the blockade with a view to its removal, as the only way to solve the crisis. An examination should be made to clearly define humanitarianism, as distinct from humanitarian action, so that there can be an agreed form of intervention and jurisdiction when humanitarian crises occur.

The mission here is acknowledging that not only was the flotilla primarily a political stunt that used humanitarian aid as a cover for a public relations ploy, but that by misrepresenting themselves as humanitarian they are putting real humanitarian aid activities in jeopardy. Or, in the words of the report, "Too often they are accused as being meddlesome and at worst as terrorists or enemy agents."

We see, however, that the UNHRC is ignoring this advice from its own committee. During the debate we see phrases like "the unwarranted and unprovoked military action by Israel against a humanitarian mission constituted a flagrant violation of international law" and "Israeli forces had boarded a humanitarian vessel" and "The organizers of the freedom flotilla were on a humanitarian mission."

Which just goes to show that the entire mission was a farce - even though the members made some attempts to appear fair and, in this case, made a very important and accurate observation and recommendation about the purpose of the flotilla, the UNHRC just barreled on and used the report as an excuse to vilify Israel, which was the mandate of the mission to begin with.

Benny Morris takes on Hitchens

A nice piece in Ha'aretz by Benny Morris. Morris describes how Christopher Hitchens notices the Muslim world is "riddled by corruption, violence and brutal autocracy, gradually falling into the grip of a nihilistic or medieval Islamism that is challenging the core values of the West - liberalism, democracy, tolerance and equal rights for women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities." - but he doesn't see the same problems with Palestinian Arabs.

In "Hitch-22" Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic: A man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him. To which Hitchens adds - and the falling man lands on the Palestinian again and again (the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the suppression of the intifadas, the construction of settlements in the territories, etc.).

But the metaphor is disingenuous, and it requires amplification to conform to the facts of history. In fact, as the leaping man nears the ground he offers the bystander a compromise - let's share the pavement, some for you, some for me. The bystander responds with a firm "no," and tries, again and again (1920, 1921, 1929, the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 and the 1947-48 War of Independence), to stab the falling man as he descends to the pavement. So the leaping man lands on the bystander, crushing him. Later, again and again, the leaping man, now firmly ensconced on the pavement, offers the crushed bystander a compromise ("autonomy" in 1978, a "two-state solution" in 2000 and in 2008), and again and again the bystander says "no."

The falling man may have somewhat wronged the bystander, but the bystander was never an innocent one; he was an active agent in and a party to his own demise.

In "Hitch-22" this is somehow omitted. ...

Moreover, throughout Hitchens seems to accept the Palestinians' definition of themselves as "natives" struggling against an "imperialist" foreign enemy.

But what of Jewish residence in the Land of Israel between the 12th century B.C.E. and the late Byzantine period (5th and 6th centuries C.E.)?

And what of Jewish residence and "nativeness" in Palestine since 1882, nearly 130 years ago? If residence grants rights, surely Jewish residence counterbalances Arab residence in Palestine since 636 C.E.

And if it is conquest that affords a claim to territory, then how is the Arab conquest in the 7th century, by blood and fire, any more morally cogent than the Jewish conquests of 1200 B.C.E. or 1948/1967?

Hitchens needs to take a long, hard look at Palestinian history and at the nature, behavior and aims of the Palestinian national movement.

Read the whole thing.

Hamas celebrating the past ten years of killing Jews

On the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the "second intifada" terror spree, Hamas has come out with its own statistics.

According to the terrorist organization, writing in the Qassam Brigades website, Hamas has launched some 4300 attacks since 2000, including rocket and mortar attacks, sniping, ambushes and 61 suicide bombings.

The one attack that they specify as being the most praiseworthy was the 2002 Passover massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, which killed 30 people (Hamas claims "36 Zionists.") In that attack, Hamas heroically murdered 21 people over the age of 70, ten of them elderly married couples (plus two other couples who were younger.)

Some 1800 Hamas members were "martyred" in these past ten years.

The pain of the Gazans paid NOT to work

Palestine Today has a weepy article about the psychological pain of Gaza men - who are forced to stay home and draw salaries from the Palestinian Authority.

Since the Hamas coup, tens of thousands of men employed by the PA have been forced by to not work in order to continue to get paid. If they take another job, or go back to their old jobs, they will lose their free paycheck.

Some of them have to suffer the indignity of watching their wives go off to work while they stay home with the children, an unspeakable horror!

The article goes on to talk to women who get beaten by their now-impotent husbands out of their frustration at having nothing to do. Many also beat their children.

One expert advises wives to go out of their way to treat their husbands as the kings of their home to avoid these beatings.

Yemen says that they will not bow to "Zionist pressure"

From the Yemen News Agency:

In an interview with Syrian newspaper al-Watan, [Yemen's Information Minister Hassan] al-Lawzi confirmed that the Yemeni government has strong ties with the United States.

‘’These ties protect Yemen from Zionist pressures’’, said Al-Lawzi, adding the relation between Yemen and the Unites states is developed to combat a joint threat, ‘’which is the crimes of al-Qaeda’’.

‘’Pressures were put on Yemen to compromise the Arab unanimously and to establish relations with Israel’’, al-Lawzi said.

‘’Yemen's relations with the United States are strong, but not on the expense of the Palestinian people and national interests. Yemen went through bitter experiences of which the most dangerous was the export of revolutions’’, he stressed. ‘’However, it overcame that’’, he added.

What is happening in Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia shows that there were conspiracies to stress the "Zionist entity" and others against Arab countries, including Yemen.

I don't quite understand the highlighted sentence; I think he is saying that since the US needs Yemen to help fight Al Qaeda, it no longer pressures the country to move to normalize relations with Israel.

More notable is that a minister of an Arab state, presumably an educated man, thinks that somehow events in Iraq, Somalia and the Sudan are really due to Zionist interests. This all-encompassing obsession with Israel is not merely a Palestinian Arab symptom but deeply embedded in the psyches of hundreds of millions of Arabs whose lives are not affected by events in Israel at all.

And this is yet another reason why real peace is simply not in the cards - as long as so many Arab leaders' visions are fatally skewed by irrational hate, nothing can be done to mollify them short of destroying Israel altogether. This minister's opinion might be brushed off as irrelevant, but it is not aberrant.

Is Stuxnet working? Bushehr plant delayed

From AFP:

Iran's atomic chief said on Wednesday that the country's first nuclear power plant will be ready to generate electricity by January -- two months later than announced.

Ali Akbar Salehi said that the process of placing fuel rods at the Bushehr facility, built by Russia, would be completed by the "middle of" the Iranian month of Aban, around November 7, the state television's website reported.

"Two or three months from then, the electricity generated by the plant will be connected to the grid," said Salehi, chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation.

Iran began loading the Russian-supplied fuel rods on August 21 and Ali Shirzadian, spokesman for the atomic body, had then said the plant would be connected to the national grid by end of October or early November.

But Salehi later had said that the loading would begin at the end of the Iranian month of Shahrivar (September 22) and by the end of the month of Mehr (October 22), the lid of the reactor would be shut.

Salehi, in an interview with Al-Alam television on August 31, blamed the delays on Bushehr's "severe hot weather" and safety concerns, adding that the loading was being done during the night.

Iran has not hinted at any other reasons for the delay, but officials have acknowledged that a computer worm is mutating and wreaking havoc on computerised industrial equipment in the country, where an official said on Monday that about 30,000 IP addresses had already been infected.

Analysts say that the Stuxnet worm may have been designed to target Iran's nuclear facilities.

Another Abbas poster

While I'm at it....

Syria also threatens Lebanese civil war

Right after Hezbollah threatened a Lebanese civil war if the UN-sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon makes its findings public, its Syrian sponsor seconded the threat. From the WSJ:

Lebanon remains an issue of tension between Washington and Damascus. The U.S. has strongly voiced its support for the U.N. completing its investigation into Mr. Hariri's murder, as well as trying those indicted for the crime at a U.N. court in The Hague.

Mr. Moallem [Walid Moallem, foreign minister of Syria] alleged Monday that the U.N.'s work in Lebanon has been irredeemably "politicized" and that Damascus has received word that members of Hezbollah were soon to be formally charged with the murder. He said that such developments risked plunging Lebanon into a new round of sectarian strife and that the U.N.'s investigation should be replaced by a purely Lebanese investigation to ensure fair treatment.

"We are convinced that a condemnation of the prosecutor of this court against Hezbollah will be a factor of disturbance in Lebanon," Mr. Moallem said.

Hezbollah publicly supported the STL before it was apparent that they were going to be found to be behind the murder.

Still, no outrage from the West over these threats. In fact, there has been little note of them altogether.

"Israelis desecrate Joseph's Tomb"

From Iran's PressTV:

Israelis desecrate Joseph Tomb

At least 100 settlers accompanied by the Israeli military have invaded Nablus city in the occupied West Bank, desecrating Prophet Joseph's Tomb.

The attack occurred at midnight, Press TV correspondent Sari al-Khalili reported from Ramallah on Tuesday.

They helpfully provide their readers with a photo of this "desecration":

Well, you can understand how something like this is utterly unacceptable. You just have to first accept the premise that Jews desecrate sacred Muslim land everywhere they go by their very presence, and the entire Middle East (as well as parts of Europe and Asia) are Muslim land.

Meanwhile, Ma'an quotes a PA official as saying there is no way that Jews would be allowed to restore the holy site. Ma'an describes the Arab terror attacks against Jews at the site in October 2000 as "violence precipitated by settler visits to the site."

(h/t Samson)

An Abbas poster

Yisrael Medad of My Right Word suggested a poster idea to me and others via email, and I am nothing if not accommodating.

Here's my implementation of his idea:

UPDATE: Some suggested a more direct, shorter version.

Feel free to use either one.

This year there was an architectural design competition for creating sukkot, the huts that traditional Jews eat and (some) sleep in during the current Sukkot holiday. The finalists were on display in New York.

Here is a video of the finalists, from The Forward:

Union Square's High-Concept Sukkahs from Jewish Forward on Vimeo.

When I first saw some of these designs, I thought that there was no way that they were kosher sukkot. However, it turns out that the designers used the services of a rabbinical student from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a (very) modern Orthodox institution, in order to ensure that each of the designs were halachically acceptable.

I wish I would have visited!

Here is an interview with the halachic consultant:

Designing a Kosher Sukkah from Jewish Forward on Vimeo.

The competition generated such interest that it will be expanded next year to some 15 cities in North America.