Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 28, 2011

Weekend open thread

Don't forget to put in your nominations for the 2011 Hasby Awards.

I was a little surprised not to see anyone nominate Bibi's speech at the UN - or, even more so, his speech to Obama.

So think about any other interesting hasbara events that may have happened this year, and nominate them!

Have a good weekend!

Meanwhile, in Syria...

From Al Arabiya today:

As many as 37 people have been killed when security forces opened fire at demonstrators on Friday, Al Arabiya reported citing Syrian activists as protesters called for nationwide rallies to demand the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria to protect civilians.

From CNN Thursday:

Three children were among 25 people reported killed Thursday in Syria, an opposition group reported, in the apparent latest round of violence to rattle the turbulent Middle Eastern nation.

From AP Monday:

Syrian security forces killed at least six people in the restive central city of Homs on Monday, while government troops clashed with gunmen believed to be defectors from the military in several parts of the country, killing five including a Syrian soldier, activists said.

I wonder when the Occupy Wall Street people will add this to their ever-growing, amorphous list of issues.

Does this mean Israel values Arabs twice as much as Jews?

From Al Masry Al Youm:

Alleged Israeli spy Ilan Grapel, who was released Thursday in a prisoner exchange deal between Egypt and Israel, thanked Egyptian authorities for treating him well during his four months of detention.

Grapel was returned to Israel on Thursday night in exchange for 25 Egyptians held in Israeli prisons. He crossed into Israel from the Egyptian border town of Taba.

Ouda Tarabin, an Israeli Bedouin who has been detained in Egypt for nearly a decade accused of spying for Israel, will be released sometime in the next few days in another swap deal, a representative of his family in Israel told the Voice of Israel radio station Thursday evening.

Yitzhak Molcho, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's chief negotiator for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Knesset (Israeli parliament) member Yoel Hasson informed the Tarabin family's representative that Ouda will be released in exchange for 60 Egyptians currently detained in Israel on charges related to Israeli national security.

By the brilliant logic of Deborah Orr and Alon Idan, subconscious racists who believe that only Israelis decide the terms of prisoner deals and that Arabs have no ability to influence the parameters, they have to admit that this is proof that Israel values the lives of its Arab citizens over twice as much as her Jewish citizens.

Hamas apologist thrilled with Islamist victory in Tunisia

From Ma'an:

Tunisia's main Islamist party Ennahda was officially declared winner of the national vote on Thursday, the first election of the Arab Spring.

Prominent Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh lauded the democratic vote, and said Ennahda's victory demonstrated the "resilience and tenacity of Islam" in the nation where the moderate Islamist group was banned before its January revolution.

Amayreh, writing for Hamas-affiliated news site Palestinian Information Center, said Tunisia can be "a model to be followed and emulated throughout the Arab world."

Ma'an fails to mention that Amayreh is a virulent anti-semite, liar and nutcase .

Nevertheless, it is useful to read exactly what Amayreh wrote that Ma'an ignored, and read between the lines of what he desires to see in Tunisia:

We Muslims are not against true democracy, a significant, accumulative human experience which can't be dismissed lightly. None the less, we are convinced a million per cent that Islam is inherently superior to democracy.

...With all due respect to the committed believers in western democracy, we Muslims don't believe in this way of thinking because peoples and nations ought to be answerable to values that are higher and more sublime than simple majorities.

Muslims in particular ought to seek Islamic democracy where human rights and civil liberties are guaranteed while general moral values of society are preserved and encouraged. Thus moral vices shouldn't be accorded the same freedoms as moral virtues.

Meaning, Islamic law is far more important than the "simple majority" will of the people.

Amayreh pointedly ignores the fact that while the Ennahda party won a plurality, it did not win the majority - nor can it put together a majority coalition with only Islamist groups. It will need to partner with some hated secularists. So his concept of "true democracy" seems to indicate that when Islamists win less than half the vote, they can impose their will on the "simple majority." I doubt that he would be as happy with coalition politics if somehow the secular parties of Tunisia could put together a larger coalition than the Islamists.

Amayreh's - and Hamas' - concept of "Islamic democracy" is one where democracy is only useful as long as it pushes an Islamic agenda. If not, then it is illegitimate.

Which means that "Islamic democracy" has nothing to do with democracy.

Ma'ariv reports of Abbas plan to dissolve PA

I reported Wednesday that there were rumors that Mahmoud Abbas might announce that he would dissolve the Palestinian Authority if he doesn't get his state, in the Palestinian Arab version of a temper tantrum.

Ma'ariv is quoting a senior Palestinian Arab official as saying that the PA has created detailed plans in case it decides to do just that.

According to the article, Abbas requested a contingency plan be drawn up on how to transfer various responsibilities from the PA to Israel, starting with health, education and tourism and ending with security.

There is an interesting subtext here. Many Israelis have said publicly that "occupation" is a disaster for Israel and that it would ultimately result in the destruction of the state. Abbas is not threatening Israel with war or terror; he is threatening it with the fear that Israeli liberals have instilled in some parts of Israeli society.

If an Israeli government would simply say that it is willing to accept the responsibilities of controlling the territories, then this entire plan would blow up.

Israel's leaders could go beyond that, mentioning that it would be nice for Israelis to be able to go shopping in Nablus and Ramallah again - as they did before the first intifada. It would help the economy of Arab communities in the territories. More Arabs could be employed in Jewish communities.

Whether or not this is true, calling Abbas' bluff publicly would be the fastest way to kill it. There is no way that Palestinian Arabs would accept their leader saying that he will do something Israel likes.

Arab lives really are cheaper - to Arabs

Ha'aretz publishes a ridiculously anti-Israel piece by Alon Idan that mirrors Deborah Orr's absurd, antisemitic Guardian article.

Idan writes:

The fact is, the release of one Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners is not normal; certainly it does not represent an inferior love felt by a Palestinian mother for her son compared to an Israeli mother.

As it turns out, such price lists and equations reflect the Israeli consciousness and what's inside. In the Israeli consciousness, the relation between the life of a Palestinian and the value of a Jewish Israeli is derived with mathematical certainty, 1:1,027, meaning that an Israeli life is as important as that of 1,027 Palestinians. This equation derives from the way we, not Hamas, view reality: 1,027 Palestinians are worth one Jewish life not because the Palestinians minimize the importance of their own lives, but because we diminish the value of their lives. This is a mirror image of the prejudice we Israelis harbor and which has enabled the immoral activities we have sponsored for dozens of years.

The equation inherent in Gilad Shalit's release is a trivial by-product of market economics that features the price of a Jew and the price of an Arab, according to how these values are rated by the wealthy buy-side, the Israelis. This is the capitalism seen in the cottage cheese controversy, only this time it features human beings. Its racist foundations are exploited by the oppressed side to gain bargaining power.

The Shalit deal is, in fact, a public display of Israel's racist price index. The ceremony occurs every few years, and the index is designed to update the market values of the region's various races. As of October 2011, in the Israeli market, the price of one Jew equals 1,027 Arabs. And the price increases every day.

In Idan's crazy mind, Israel is happy to exchange more and more terrorists in every such deal because it regards their lives as worthless anyway. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the value that Israel places on her own people; it is only about racism.

Beyond that truly insane logic, Idan is willfully overlooking the simple fact that, by any yardstick, Palestinian Arabs do not value their own lives as much as Israelis do. And this is not a racist statement - it is provable.

Why else would they demand to trade 1000 Arab prisoners for 1 Israeli to begin with?
Why else would they be killing their own civilians (as they were in Gaza in 2006) by the hundreds?
Why else would they produce TV shows encouraging their children to want to die?
Why else would they celebrate whenever they kill Jewish civilians in Israel, while no Jews celebrate the death of Arab civilians?
Why do they teach Palestinian Arab mothers to rejoice when their sons die while killing Jews?
Why does the Palestinian Arab culture even consider the idea of honor killings to somehow be less reprehensible than murder?

In fact, the one nation that seems to care the most about Arab lives is Israel. Israel spends enormous effort and money to minimize civilian deaths in its operations, and the ratio of civilians to militants killed in Cast Lead, about 1:1, is far lower than in any war ever waged by Arabs - and indeed lower than any war waged by Western nations as well. Israel literally spends millions on smart bombs that they can and do divert at the last second if they see a civilian, rather than just aiming and firing and hoping for the best. In Jenin, Israel recklessly risked its own soldiers lives to minimize Arab civilian deaths. Israel continued to provide medical services to Palestinian Arabs even after their terror leaders in Gaza took advantage of that fact by sending a female suicide bomber to blow up the hospital she was being treated at. Israel spends thousands of man-hours painstakingly investigating the deaths of Arab civilians killed during conflict, and punishes soldiers who are reckless with the lives of Arabs - something you simply will not see on the Arab side of the conflict.

So yes, Mr. Idan, I am afraid that Palestinian Arab lives really are cheaper to Arabs than they are to Israelis - by any measure.

(part of this was written in a 2006 post. See also this 2005 post on the same topic, as well as this Israellycool post today.)

(h/t Avram P)

The amazing time-traveling stone thrower

Ma'an reports:

Israeli authorities released on Tuesday Omar Jaradat, 11, from Saeer village north of Hebron after five months in the Israeli prison Ofer. He also paid a 5,000-shekel fine.

Israeli forces tried to forbid people who were waiting for the child near the checkpoint from welcoming him and tried to remove Palestinian flags that were on cars near the checkpoint.

The released prisoner spoke of harsh conditions inside the jails. He said that as winter approaches, there are few clothes for the prisoners and the authorities prevent families from providing them.

Naturally, the idea of an eleven year old kid being in jail for five months was too delicious for the anti-Israel crowd to resist. You can find tweets and articles about the poor kid.

So where were the headlines when he was put in jail to begin with?

From PCHR, last June:

At approximately 03:00, IOF moved into Sa’ir village, northeast of Hebron. They raided and searched a house belonging to the family of ‘Omar Mahmoud Jaradat, 17, and arrested him.

The Arabic version of the report also says he was 17, and was arrested for throwing stones.

A Ma'an Arabic article from last July quotes the Prisoners Society as saying that Jaradat was 17 at the time of his arrest as well.

I found a forum from his hometown congratulating him on his release, but it just calls him "young."

And this YouTube video slideshow of lots of photos of someone with his name was uploaded a few weeks after his arrest, so it may very well be a tribute to him as a prisoner.

This Omar Jaradat is not 11.

So how did a 17 year old turn into an 11 year old, in both the Arabic and English versions of Ma'an? Moreover, both versions imply that a reporter was there during the release - is it possible a reporter doesn't know the difference between an 11 year old and a 17 year old?

(Ma'an's editor tells me he will check this out and correct the article if he finds that the innocent 11 year old is in fact 17 or 18 now. As of seven hours later, there is no correction.)

UPDATE: Here's a different YouTube video made in September showing pictures of "the captive Omar Jaradat and his friends" with photos of a teenager along with Saddam Hussein, Arafat, guns and other interesting items.

Half a cheer - Ilan Grapel is in Israel

I'm glad he is out of Egypt, but I cannot find it in myself to be so happy that a stupid kid who was yelling anti-American slogans in Egypt is being treated with any honor.

He's an idiot whose misguided idealism and naivete cost Israel, the country he loves, a great deal.

I'm more worried about Egypt taking the next Grapel hostage than Hamas trying to find another Shalit.

UNRWA teachers' strikes in Gaza resume

The conflict between the Hamas-dominated teachers' union and UNRWA has resumed after a short period of time to celebrate the arrival of terrorists in the territory.

The union announced a teachers' strike next week from Sunday to Thursday, and there were more protests today.

As usual, UNRWA's website ignores the issue.

The major demand by the union is to be able to openly associate with terror groups. Their president was suspended from his job by UNRWA because of his open ties to Hamas, and the teachers are demanding he get his job back.

As I mentioned earlier this month, this is turning into a much larger issue, as Hamas is challenging UNRWA altogether because it is forced to adhere to a bare minimum of ethical behavior by its major Western donors. Hamas has challenged and defeated every potential rival in Gaza, and UNRWA - which is avowedly non-political although of course it has no problem insulting Israel at every opportunity - is the one major player that is still nominally independent of Hamas.

Iranian expelled from chess tournament for refusing to play an Israeli

From NYT:

One of Iran’s top grandmasters was expelled from an international chess tournament on Tuesday after he refused to play a match against an Israeli opponent, the director of the tournament said.

The Iranian, Ehsan Ghaem Maghami, was scheduled to play Ehud Shachar in the fourth round of the Corsica Masters, a pairing determined by computer. The director, Léo Battesti, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Maghami had asked him to change the pairing, but was told that doing so would violate tournament rules. Mr. Maghami then failed to appear at the scheduled time to play Mr. Shachar.

Mr. Battesti said Mr. Maghami should have told him beforehand that he would object to playing an Israeli. Given that five of the 186 players in the tournament were Israelis, the likelihood that he would face one during the tournament’s nine rounds was “99 percent,” Mr. Battesti said. “I told him, you cannot involve your rules in my tournament,” he said.

Jeffrey Goldberg links to Battesti's statement:

Iranian grandmaster Ehsan Gahem Maghami informed me of his refusal to play against his fourth round opponent, Israeli Fide Master Ehud Shachar. I told Mr. Gahem Maghami that as an organizer of a international sporting competition I could not accede to his request to change the pairings, so that he could play against another player. The presence of five Israeli players in this tournament was known to all participants since Saturday, October 22. It honors our competition, as does the presence of Iranian players and those from about thirty other nationalities. The motto of our Federation is gens una sumus, we are developing in Corsica an awareness of the positive aspects of the chess sport on our youth. Being complicit to any form of segregation would be unworthy, and in total contradiction with the foundations of our sporting activities. So regretfully I have to exclude the player who unfortunately has stuck to his choice, in spite of my entreaties. I regret it, but I could not shirk our responsabilities.

Since this is turning into a regular news story, and it is clear that no Iranian is going to participate in any match with an Israeli out of fear of retribution by his nation, perhaps it is time to ban Iran from sporting competitions altogether until it renounces this pretty-much official policy.

Free e-book: RAND analysis of Lebanon, Gaza wars

The RAND Corporation has released a 400 page e-book, Operations in Israel’s War Against Hezbollah: Learning from Lebanon and Getting it Right in Gaza, by Benjamin S. Lambeth.

I have only skimmed it but it appears to be a tremendous work of research. Lambeth has written other works, primarily about air campaigns.

He had access to many IDF and IAF officials in researching this.

Here are parts of a review by the Israel Defense website. Unfortunately, the website truncated the review.

Operations in Israel’s War Against Hezbollah: “Learning from Lebanon and Getting it Right in Gaza,” the new book from Dr. Benjamin Lambeth, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation, is a major contribution to the understanding of the Second Lebanon War of 2006 and the Gaza campaign of 2008-2009. ‏

It fulfills all the criteria for military-academic research and I believe it will undoubtedly serve as a springboard for further research in the field. ‏Dr. Lambeth presents his readers with a vast amount of information on the war, explains the key issues, and offers a balanced, tempered criticism. ‏The opening chapters describe the main combat operations, air power acheivements, central issues, and some sections of the Winograd Commission’s Final Report.

The material here is rather well known to most Israelis who are interested in the war and its concequences, but nevertheless, it is of great value to the target audience: foreign military persons, scholars, and politicians. ‏These chapters are certainly objective although one senses the author’s great sympathy toward Israel, the IDF, and the Israeli Air Force (IAF). ‏

A particular chapter deals with Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 through January 2009. The author carefully describes the preparations and particularly, the encouragement for cooperation between the air and ground forces. The campaign is also depicted accurately and in painstaking detail, beginning with the aerial attack that lasted six days, followed by the ineffective ground fighting, and later the ceasefire. ‏ I must admit that Lambeth’s conclusion that Operation Cast Lead was a success is puzzling. He completely identifies with the Israeli consensus that the lessons of the Second Lebanon

War had been learned and implemented; and that warfighting skills had vastly improved at the outcome of the campaign. Furthermore, the study goes to great lengths to exonerate Israel of any moral misconduct during the campaign. In my opinon both issues are open to debate. ‏The last chapter and the conclusions are the most important.

A basic approach toward the Second Lebanon War is the main factor for its radically different assessments—mainly between those who were responsible for the strategic decision-making, and those who meticoulusly study the war. ‏The first appraoch examined the war as an independent clash, and came to a balanced conclusion that, although far from a success story, Israel had made some important acheivements. ‏

The other approach compared it to previous successful wars, campaigns, and operations in Lebanon; beginning with Operation “Litani” (1978), through the First Lebanon War (1982), and finally, “Operation of Accountability” (1994). The Second Lebanon War is considered a resounding failure for its insignificant political and military achievements. Dr. Lambeth prefered the former approach.

‏The author bravely criticizes some of the military issues in the two wars. He denounces the critics who claim that Dan Halutz, then-chief of staff, was unsuited for his role, and outlines his experience, abilities, and suitability for the position. Dr. Lambeth argues that the decision for an aerial attack stemmed from the fact that, no one in the government wanted a ground operation that might incur many casualties. ‏He strongly condemns, and rightly so, the effects-based strategy (borrowed from the US by IAF and IDF ground forces), that caused considerable damage to the IAF’s aerial strategy. Commanders like Gal Hirsh (91st Division Commander) and Dan Halutz (Chief of Staff) always “pay the price,” whereas General Staff officers (who play a decisive role in modern wars) evade responsibility for their decisions and the consequences of their errors.