Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 25, 2010

Saudi woman, 29, was in jail for disobeying her father

Samar Badawi, the 29-year-old Saudi woman who was incarcerated for not obeying her guardian (mahram) following a lawsuit by her father, was freed Monday.

Samar has been in prison for seven months after her father filed a case against her accusing her of disobedience.

Abdullah Al-Othaim, the head of the District Court in Jeddah, told Arab News that a warrant stating that Samar Badawi is free has been issued.

“Samar’s uncle (from her father's side) will now take care of her, being now adjudged her male guardian,” he said.

Samar was sent to Briman Prison in Jeddah on April 4 after her father lodged a complaint against her accusing her of disobedience. The father filed the counter-suit after Samar had lodged a legal complaint accusing her father of preventing her from marrying. Samar is a divorced woman with one son.

Samar accused her father of abuse and fled her family home in 2008 to live in a shelter. Samar's mother is deceased. Samar fled the shelter last year after learning that her father had instituted the case against her.

Under Saudi law a woman who has no guardian or who is in dispute against her guardian becomes a ward of the state who can face imprisonment for refusing to stay in authorized women's shelters.

There's more in the article, but there is only so much bizarre 8th century thinking that the human brain can absorb at one time.

Here's a Turkish peace activist!

From YNet:

The Viva Palestina 5 ship carrying "peace activists," which docked at the al-Arish port recently, brought along not only humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, but also enthusiastic Turks who took advantage of the opportunity to visit local Islamic Jihad members.

n pictures obtained by Ynet, the Turks are seen holding weapons and rocket launchers. While their prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to blast Israel and demand an apology for "state terrorism," two of the guests put on the uniform of the al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad's military wing.

The pictures from the Turkish delegation's visit were put on the al-Quds Brigades website as part of the coverage of their visit.

During their visit to Gaza, the Turkish delegation members visited several Islamic Jihad posts. One of the guests was quoted as telling the group's gunmen that they are "a source of pride for all decent people in the Arab and Muslim world." He defined them as "the forefront of the struggle against the Zionists."

Doesn't he look like a peace activist?

(h/t Jed and Joel)

The Palestinian Arab plan for de-legitimizing Israel, 1968

In 1968, Israel was still considered the small - but admirable - survivor of a war meant to destroy, waged by the combined forces of much of the Arab world. Israeli were, to the Western world, the "good guys."

It would be a gross understatement to say that this has changed in the intervening years. The entire framework of how Israel is viewed has been turned completely around, by a very successful campaign of de-legitimization that has cumulatively paid off in spades since then.

The blueprint for this sea change in how the world views Israel was written in 1968.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, by Yehuda Lukacs, reproduces a number of hard to find documents about the conflict. On page 295 one can find the Palestine National Assembly Political Resolutions, 17 July, 1968.

This is a most illuminating document.

While parts of it are obviously dated, these resolutions give an eerily exact plan on how the Palestinian Arabs plotted out the propaganda war against Israel.

Here are the entire section on Methods:

1. The Palestinian Arab people have chosen the course of armed struggle in the fight to recover their usurped territories and rights. The current phase in their armed struggle started before the defeat of June, 1967 and has endured and escalated ever since. Moreover, despite the fact that this struggle renders a service to the entire Arab nation at the present stage, insofar as it prevents the enemy from laying claim to a status quo based on surrender, and insofar as it keeps the flame of resistance alive and maintains a climate of war, preoccupies the enemy and is an object of concern to the entire world community, that struggle is nevertheless a true and distinct expression of the aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people and is inspired by their objectives. In addition, we feel bound to declare quite frankly that this struggle goes beyond the scope of what it has become customary to call “the elimination of the consequences of the aggression", and all other such slogans, for the objectives of this struggle are those of the Palestinian Arab people, as set out in the preceding paragraph. The fight will not cease; it will continue, escalate and expand until final victory is won, no matter how long it takes and regardless of the sacrifices involved.

2. The enemy has chosen Blitzkrieg as the form of combat most suitable to him, in view of the tactical mobility at his command which enabled him, at the moment of battle, to unleash forces superior to those deployed by the Arabs. The enemy chose this method in the belief that a lightning victory would lead to surrender, according to the pattern of I948, and not to Arab armed resistance. In dealing with it, we must adopt a method derived from elements of strength in ourselves and elements of weakness in the enemy.

3. The enemy consists of three interdependent forces:
a) Israel.
b) World Zionism.
c) World imperialism, under the direction of the United States of America.

Moreover, it is incontestable that world imperialism makes use of the forces of reaction linked with colonialism.

If we are to achieve victory and gain our objectives, we shall have to strike at the enemy wherever he may be, and at the nerve centres of his power. This is to be achieved through the use of military, political and economic weapons and information media, as part of a unified and comprehensive plan designed to sap his strength, scatter his forces, destroy the links between them and undermine their common objectives.

4. A long-drawn out battle has the advantage of allowing us to expose world Zionism, its activities, conspiracies, and its complicity with world imperialism and to point out the damage and complications it causes to the interests and the security of many countries, and the threat it constitutes to world peace. This will eventually unmask it, bringing to light the grotesque facts of its true nature, and will isolate it from the centres of power and establish safeguards against its ever reaching them...

5. An information campaign must be launched that will throw light on the following facts:

a) The true nature of the Palestinian war is that of a battle between a small people, which is the Palestinian people, and Israel, which has the backing of world Zionism and world imperialism.

b) This war will have its effect on the interests of any country that supports lsrael or world Zionism.

c) The hallmark of the Palestinian Arab people is resistance, struggle and liberation, that of the enemy, aggression, usurpation and the disavowal of all values governing decent human relations.

6. A comprehensive plan must be drawn up to fuse the Arab struggle and the Palestinian struggle into a single battle. This requires concentrated ideological, information and political effort that will make it clear to the Arab nation that it can never enjoy peace or security until the tide of Zionist invasion is stemmed, and that its territory will be occupied piecemeal unless it deploys its resources in the battle, not to mention the extent to which the Zionist presence constitutes a drain on its resources and an impediment to the development of its society.

Palestinian action regards the Arab nation as a reserve fund of political, financial and human resources on which it can draw, and whose support and participation will make it possible to fight the successive stages in the battle.

7. The peoples and governments of the Arab nation must be made to understand that they are under an obligation to protect the Palestinian struggle so that it may be able to confront the enemy on firm ground and direct all its forces and capabilities to this confrontation, fully assured of its own safety and security. This obligation is not only a national duty, it is a necessity deriving from the fact that the Palestinian struggle is the vanguard in the defence of all Arab countries, Arab territories and Arab aspirations.

8. Any objective study of the enemy will reveal that his potential for endurance, except where a brief engagement is concerned, is limited. The drain on this potential that can be brought about by a long-drawn out engagement will inevitably provide the opportunity for a decisive confrontation in which the entire Arab nation can take part and emerge victorious.

It is the duty of Palestinians everywhere to devote themselves to making the Arab nation aware of these facts, and to propagating the will to struggle. It is also their duty to endure, sacrifice and take part in the struggle.

While the PLO has not been as successful in rallying the Arab nations behind it in recent years, its propaganda plan has been executed flawlessly. Even though their plan describes how the Palestinian Arabs are part of, and depend on the help of, the much larger Arab nation, they present themselves as an isolated, tiny, besieged and victimized entity to the West, compared to the huge Israel/World Zionist/imperialist alliance.

Any glance at a map reveals the absurdity of the idea that Israel has territorial designs on the larger Arab world, or that it is an expansionist, imperialist state. Yet years of repetition of the points listed in this document - repeated in the media, repeated on college campuses, repeated by the useful idiots of the Left and the latent anti-semites of the world - have made them appear self-evident to nearly everybody.

Not only that, but this document foreshadows the terrorist spree of the 1970s. That string of high-profile attacks against Western targets was a successful implementation of section 5b, where the Palestinian Arabs let the West know that any support of Israel will result in their citizens getting killed. Over time, that idea became crystallized in many countries' collective psyches to turn their political viewpoints towards defending their nations from terror - and believing that by sacrificing Israel, they would achieve short-term security. They of course justified their abandoning Israel in terms of human rights and justice, and their excuses took liberally from the brand new Palestinian Arab narrative - a narrative that was created expressly for the purpose of isolating Israel from the West!

US resolution 242, this document bitterly notes, did not even mention Palestinian Arabs. In 1967, it was obvious that the conflict was between Israel and the much larger Arab nation, and that the refugees and their descendants were pawns of the Arab world. The policies that resulted from the PLO decisions to implement this plan effectively created the "Palestinian people" ex nihilo from the perspective of the Western nations. (This document is also explicitly against creating a Palestinian Arab state in the territories, calling it a Zionist plan and saying that such a state would serve Zionist objectives.)

While their military plans from 1968 only had limited success, the PLO's propaganda plan was executed brilliantly, and it continues to this day.

(h/t sshender)

Monday afternoon links

Israel's Chief Rabbi tells the Vatican not to interpret the Torah for Jews (story in French, in reaction to this story)

Eid al Adha is coming, and Gaza needs some 20,000 sheep and 8,000 cows to ritually slaughter in the streets (Arabic)

The Guardian, about a month late, notices that Hamas torched a Gaza water park. But they take pains to distringuish between mainstream Hamas and the extremists from Hamas who, in uniform, capriciously force Gazans to do what, um, Hamas wants. (h/t CiFWatch)

An op-ed that notices that, just maybe, UNRWA is part of the problem!

Egypt: Feeding its Coptic Christians to the Islamic lions

Also in Egypt, a pro-Israel conscientious objector, whose freedom to say unpopular opinions publicly is about to go away, possibly forever.

Oh, by the way, Cast Lead was as moral as war can be

Evelyn Gordon writes:

The New York Times tucked a remarkable statistic into the tail-end of an article on WikiLeaks’s latest document dump, one with ramifications for the ongoing delegitimization campaign against Israel: for most of the last century, the normal civilian-to-combatant wartime fatality ratio has been 10:1.

Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This elicits an obvious question: if civilians routinely account for 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare, why is the world up in arms about the civilian casualty rate in last year’s Israel-Hamas war in Gaza — which, by even the most anti-Israel account, was markedly lower?

Indeed, by the count that my team and I came up with of Gaza war casualties, nearly one half of the dead were either terrorists or members of the Hamas police which is effectively a paramilitary force, or (often) both. (The IDF claims closer to two-thirds killed were militants. The discrepancy is mostly in counting how many were killed in the war altogether.)

By way of contrast, the latest numbers from Iraq indicate a 2-1 civilian to militant casualty ratio - at least double Israel's rate.

So, yes, many civilians were killed - but compared to pretty much any modern war you can name, the ratio of civilian to fighter deaths was very, very low. Not only that, but a clear part of Hamas' strategy was to maximize their own civilian casualties, which makes Israel's achievement even more remarkable.

(h/t T34zakat)

Doesn't he look trustworthy?

Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Youssef has denied making the statements I reported that he said to Jordan's Addastour news.

In the interview, he had said "Martyrdom operations bring us problems with the international community, and are exploited by the Israeli media to distort our image, and accuse us of terrorism and incitement to violence....and this issue has been behind us since 2004, when we abandoned martyrdom operations." He also said that the Hebron massacre of four civilians was not timed to disrupt negotiations and that the Hamas ban on women smoking the hookah was a moral, and not a religious, issue.

Today, without specifying in which topic he was misquoted, he told Ma'an that he doesn't want to deny or even comment on the "yellow journalism and lies" that were in that article that could prejudice the resistance. That sounds like a denial to me.

Over a million Palestinian Arabs want to leave their homeland - and cannot

The latest PSR poll asks Palestinian Arabs:

Do current political, security, and economic conditions lead you to seek emigration abroad?

37% of Gazans, and 24% of West Bankers, say either that they "certainly seek to emigrate" or "seek to emigrate" from the territories.

That comes out to some 1.1 million Palestinian Arabs who do not want to stick around.

Now, imagine what would happen if they were free to emigrate to any Arab country they wanted. After all, the Arab League encourages its members to have liberal naturalization policies for Arabs from any Arab state - except Palestine.

The reason given by the Arab leaders for this explicitly discriminatory policy is that they are helping to preserve Palestinian Arab unity - by keeping them in a stateless limbo. But has anyone asked the Palestinian Arabs themselves what they want to do? As high as these numbers of West Bank and Gaza Arabs who want to emigrate are, the percentages of those who are already in other Arab countries and would love to become full citizens in their host or other Arab countries is almost certainly much higher - many millions who would happily become citizens elsewhere.

For some reason, their freedom of choice is not a concern for organizations like Human Rights Watch, which explicitly denies individual Palestinian Arabs the right to become citizens of their host Arab countries. And they are silent, of course, on Arab League discriminatory policies against Palestinians.

By sheer repetition of the mantra of "keeping Palestinian unity," the world has bought into one of the greatest human rights abuses occurring today, by Arabs against their fellow Arabs.

As I was writing this, I discovered a tiny loophole that some Palestinian Arabs have managed to use to become citizens of some Gulf countries. If they manage to move to the EU first, and become citizens there, then they or their children can move to Arab countries and become citizens as non-Palestinians!

Just another threat from Hamas

Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad accused Israel of planning to invade Gaza, and since imaginary threats are so thoroughly offensive, he decided to make a real one in response (a "cycle of threatened violence," if you will.)

Speaking at a university in Khan Younis, Hammad said that Hamas, accompanied with the armies of the world, will come to Haifa and Acre to liberate them from Zionist control.

He bragged that Israel is spending so much effort on missile defense, saying that the "occupation" is hiding behind walls and Israelis are unaware that they are trapped.

Moreover, he said that the siege of Gaza has made Gazans stronger and more steadfast.

Boycott Saleys Bags and Gifts

Saleys Bags and Gifts is a South African company that specializes in luggage, bags and keychains.

Recently, they decided that they don't want any business from people who support Israel:

'Sorry, we cannot supply you any of our goods as we don't want or need your blood money!"

This scathing comment, written on an invoice returned to the South African Zionist Federation, has angered some members of the local Jewish community, who are now seeking legal opinion against a Muslim-owned Johannesburg company.

The SAZF had placed an order with Saley's Travel Goods in Ormonde, Johannesburg, for 249 conference bags, which it wanted to hand out at its 47th conference in March next year.

But after placing the order and confirming it telephonically, the SAZF had their invoice returned with the strongly worded comments, purportedly signed by "management" of Saley's.

The unknown person who wrote on the invoice started off by writing "Dear", but then scratched it out and launched into a series of harsh words.

It continued: "Please do not contact us anymore and remove all our contact details from your records and we will do likewise. We don't want to aid and abet organisations that are responsible for crimes against humanity!"

Two lines were also crossed over the invoice, worth R8841.59, with the words: "Please don't pay! Don't contaminate our account with your blood money!"

The SAZF - which describes itself as an organisation acting on behalf of the South African Jewish community in matters relating to Israel, and which is the local representative of the World Zionist Organisation - reacted angrily to the snub, with office bearer Ben Swartz saying they are seeking legal opinion.

"We believe it amounts to hate speech," Swartz told the Sunday Times on Friday.

He said the SAZF had previously placed numerous orders with Saley's over the years and "never experienced a problem like this with them before".

Note that this awful Zionist organization never had a problem buying products from this Muslim-owned company in the past.

Their feedback form is here. You might want to (politely) drop them a line.

(h/t CiFWatch for image)

Poll: Gaza and WB Arabs cannot express themselves without fear

We've seen numerous times how easily Palestinian Arab "eyewitnesses" lie to the media to make Israel look as bad as possible. Not nearly as often, we've seen journalists actually go a little beyond the sound bites and find Arabs who will go against the conventional wisdom and tell the truth - but almost invariably, they demand to remain anonymous.

There is a very simple reason that this occurs: fear.

The latest poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research asks a very simple question:

In your view, can people in the Gaza Strip/West Bank today criticize the authority without fear?

The percentage of Gazans who answered "no" about their territory was 71.2%. This would not surprise most observers.

But the percentage of West Bank Arabs who answered "no" to the same question about their territory was nearly as high: 68.4% (or 71% of those who answered the question.)

More than two out of every three people who live in the West Bank feel fearful of simply criticizing their government. The same government that Western journalists and pundits are falling over themselves to praise as transparent and progressive has instilled a culture of fear that is nearly as pervasive as the one in Gaza! It might have improved in the past couple of years (as this poll seems to indicate) but it is nowhere near the paradise of progressiveness that the media has been breathlessly reporting.

Another question illustrates the fear that both Gazans and West Baners have of their governments:

To what extent are you worried or not worried that you or a member of your family could be hurt in your daily life by other Palestinians such as those affiliated with Fateh or Hamas?

The answers for West Bank and Gaza were again very similar - 48% of Gazans were worried or very worried about being hurt by other Palestinian Arabs, but 45% of West Bankers have that same fear.

There cannot be true freedom as long as people are afraid to publicly criticize their own leaders. Yet the world supports the establishment of yet another state without basic freedom of expression.

Isn't that a problem?

Reports: Israel behind blast at Iranian missile silo

Two weeks ago, an explosion at an Iranian military base killed some 18 people, including Revolutionary Guards.

Some details that emerged since then indicated that the base housed Iran's Shahab-3 missiles, which can reach Israel - and which can carry a nuclear payload. And those missiles are what exploded, not "ammunition," as Iran claimed.

Now, Le Figaro is reporting that this was a Mossad operation.

Who knows? Even if it wasn't, it can't hurt to make Iran think it was.

Illegal Arab buildings to be demolished. But this time, no one will protest.

When Israel demolishes Arab buildings in East Jerusalem that are illegally built - for example in al-Bustan, which was zoned to be a green open space and now has over a hundred illegal buildings - there is no shortage of self-proclaimed "human rights" workers willing to vigorously protest for the rights of the people to build these structures.

Somehow, I don't think they are going to be as concerned in this case:

The Gaza government announced Monday that it has given directives to its interior ministry to raze what it has termed illegal structures on public lands and enforce previous orders to arrest those trading the land.

Head of the ministry's land department Ibrahim Radwan said those in violation of the order had been given a deadline which has now expired and that officers would maintain permanent checkpoints, supported by police, on public lands to prevent "any violation."

Radwan said in the coming days, the ministry will begin enforcing a "wide-scale campaign" to remove structures erected or built on public lands without permission.