Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, August 24, 2012

Journalistic "ethics" from Ha'aretz and The Guardian (update)

A few days ago I noted that the Mostly Kosher blog proved that Ha'aretz was wrong in its assertion that the US State Department initiated a new policy of referring to Jewish terror attacks.

The lie was repeated by Harriet Sherwood at The Guardian, even though any modicum of research would have proven that it was false.

I contacted the Guardian to see if they would issue a correction. So far, they haven't.

The author of the Mostly Kosher blog revisited the Ha'aretz article today, though, and it has magically and silently been corrected- both in Hebrew and English!

No correction that can be found (certainly not on the page that matters), no admission of a major error - just a silent correction on a story that practically no one is going to read anymore.

Even though the original mistake was copied, not only in the Guardian but in many other media.

So this is how the media admits mistakes - not by admitting them, but by rewriting history as if they got it right the first time.

UPDATE: Apparently, Ha'aretz published a correction on Friday in page 5 of their print edition. Still nothing from The Guardian.

Erekat the liar strikes again

Saeb Erekat, the PA's official liar-in-chief, continues on his proud tradition in his comments on the letter written by Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman:

PLO official Saeb Erekat said Thursday that he had written to the US and Israel asking for clarification of a missive by the Israeli foreign minister slamming the president and calling for a new Palestinian leadership.

Erekat told Lebanese satellite channel Mayadeen that he intends to send more letters to international bodies to warn that President Mahmoud Abbas is in danger.

Israeli FM Avigdor Lieberman's letter to US, EU, Russian and UN leaders called for Palestinian elections to usher in new leaders.

"Due to Abbas' weak standing and his policy of not renewing the (peace) negotiations, which is an obstacle to peace, the time has come to consider a creative solution, to think 'outside the box,' in order to strengthen the Palestinian leadership," the controversial minister wrote.

Erekat said the letter entails incitement to kill Abbas.

The letter calls for new elections. In no way, shape or form does it call for his death. Luckily, I reproduced the entire letter a few days ago, so we can see yet again that Erekat lies as easily as he breathes.

Time to bring up my 2010 Erekat the Liar video:

Other posts proving his lies since then: Fisking an op-ed, his lie about Israel's being accepted to the UN, his bizarre charge that Qatar invests in Jewish settlements, his lies about the video I spoofed above, and his admitting that he lies all over the world.

And not once - literally never - does the media call him out on his lies. He is still a featured guest on CNN and elsewhere, where his constant lies are not questioned in the least.

Isn't that supposed to be the media's job? Well, yes - unless they agree with the agenda of the liar.

More on the absurd claims that science proves the Koran

My article on the Muslim claim about a Jewish embryologist who supposedly converted to Islam based on his scientific research is receiving a lot of attention - from Muslim countries.

Many of my hits today are from people Googling "Robert Gilham Islam", "Robert Gilham embryologist", "Robert Gillham Einstein" and similar queries indicating that people who read the many articles in Arabic about this supposed story are researching it themselves to corroborate it.

And these queries are coming from Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Jordan, Pakistan and other Muslim countries.

What I hadn't noticed before is that the source of the story, Dr. Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Sayed, is the same person who recently claimed that NASA was hiding proof of the Koran discovered by their scientists - another of whom supposedly converted to Islam!

In this article from August 11th, we see al-Sayed making both of these claims as well as some others that supposedly show scientists around the world proving the Koran.

For example, al-Sayed claims that a "Professor Keith Moore" proved that a fetus' gender gets determined at exactly 42 days of gestation - not 41 and a half, but exactly 42 - every single time, "proving" a Koranic verse.

Apparently, that one interview spawned both of these uncorroborated and unprovable stories.

The good news is that Arabic talkbacks in some of the articles about "Robert Gilham" are also showing skepticism. The many Google searches indicate also that many Muslims are trying to verify the story on their own. While most comments swallow the story whole, a distinct minority indicates that they do not believe it.

And at least one forum has much skepticism about the story, quoting my article.

But at the same time that some Muslims are questioning the story -Arabic Russia Today republished it!

UPDATE: Followup post here on the background of Islamic misuse of science. It is a well-organized and well-funded bit of propaganda.

Now, THIS is an "honor killing!"

From Ma'an:

Unidentified gunmen killed a 43-year-old man in Gaza days after his release from jail, local sources said Thursday.

The man was jailed after confessing to raping his 16-year-old daughter. Police had launched an investigation after the man's daughter gave birth to a daughter.

He was in jail awaiting a trial, but was released on Aug. 16 along with 98 other prisoners as a gesture by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to celebrate the Muslim festival Eid al-Fitr.

Days later, a group of gunmen dragged him from his home in the Nuseirat refugee camp and killed him on the outskirts of the camp, local sources told Ma'an.

The assailants then called the police who took the body for burial, the sources said.

Arabic media says that the father took advantage of his naive daughter and repeatedly raped her whenever his wife was away from the house. When she became pregnant, he did not let her go to a doctor; only when she was in labor did her mother take her to the hospital and find out the truth.

While this is hardly indicative of a functioning justice system in Gaza, at least in this "honor killing" it is the rapist who was killed, not the victim.

Friday morning snippets (Zvi)

From Zvi:

This year, Israel issued 200,000 entry permits to Palestinians for Eid al-Fitr and Ramadan

"Israeli authorities issued 130,000 entry permits to Palestinians to observe the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. Even young men, whom Israelis normally regard with suspicion as potential militants, were permitted entry....Tallied with entry permits issued during Ramadan, the number of permits reached 200,000."

This figure is interesting. 200,000 entry permits constitutes roughly 10% of the entire Arab population of the West Bank.

[AP says that "Israel has allowed the entry of over 1 million Palestinians from the occupied West Bank since the beginning of Ramadan due to improved security." It sounds like Palestinian Arabs used their permits multiple times. - EoZ]

Add this to your list of Israeli goodwill gestures that the PA will throw back in Israel's face, and which will be completely ignored by most of the world's media.

Apparently, a lot of the visiting Arabs made straight for the beach. I hope that they had fun.

The move was initiated by Israel's Defense Ministry, which Israel-haters and various western news media consistently paint in terms that recall the Nazis.

The world is a very different place from the world as portrayed by the BBC or Human Rights Watch... .

Israel saving the world again... .

"Taking the idea of solar thermal hot water heaters to the next level is Tigi Solar, a new Israeli company that was inspired by the busy bee.The inside of Tigi's solar energy collector looks like a honeycomb. This unique shape helps collect more sun power more efficiently than regular solar collectors -- so efficiently that boiling hot water made from the sun can even be piped in to heat homes."

Israel and Germany team up to help Kenya

"Israelis, Germans and Kenyans have teamed up to increase the tilapia (St. Peter’s fish) population and improve wastewater treatment in Lake Victoria.Last week, high-level representatives from the three parties signed a trilateral agreement in Kenya for a project that has been in the works for roughly a year, to upgrade commercial fishery and wastewater purification systems in Africa’s largest lake, officials from the Foreign Ministry told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday... .If successful, the team may carry out similar projects in Uganda and Tanzania, both of which also rely on the lake, and representatives have already started talks with Ugandans about the idea."

Israel and the US are Natural Allies

Just what it says!

"An honest American broker would no longer ignore blatant Palestinian myopia. Just this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared Jerusalem a Muslim and Christian city, insisting that there will be no peace until the Jewish occupiers depart. The Jews, he said, wish to “destroy the Al Aqsa mosque and build the alleged Jewish temple.”"

Eyesight for Israel's Blind

In this column, a person who has internalized a bogus caricature of Israel is surprised to find that the scene in an Israeli hospital demolishes that caricature - but then fails to draw the obvious conclusion and crawls back inside his shuttered world-view. What a shame... .

Warning - the column demonstrates in many places that the author simply doesn't "get" Israel or the local Arabs.

"This distrustful ignorance of the other can be found everywhere in Israel. Or almost everywhere, for there is a place that escapes this reality: the hospital. Because of an urgent eye problem upon my arrival in Israel in late June, I had to spend seven hours in the ophthalmology department of the Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, which is the main centre of treatment, teaching, and research in Jerusalem.What I saw during those hours were, despite my personal condition, the most comforting and hopeful signs that I have encountered in the entire region in many years. Arab citizens of Israel – that is, Palestinian doctors and nurses – were treating Jewish and Arab patients. Israeli doctors and nurses attended to Arabs' needs. I even saw some inter-action among patients themselves. Old Israelis who had clearly come from eastern Europe before the Second World War were playing with very young Palestinian children. There was an atmosphere of reassuring tolerance of the other....What I encountered that day in Ein Kerem was the best of Israel – and a direct rebuttal to the frequent accusation that Israel is an ‘apartheid state'. "

The author is wrong to think that this scene is unique; there are scenes in many places in Israel - and not only in medical settings - where cooperation and tolerance are the rule. But he is right that Israel's doctors represent [some of] the best of Israel and that the scene at the hospital blows out of the water the ludicrous claims about "apartheid." The story also reminds me a bit of Yaakov Lozowick's blog post about a hospital emergency room.

Egyptian general blames Mossad for Sinai attack

Al Ahram has an interview with General Ahmed Rajal Attiya, one of the leaders and founders of Special Operations team in Egypt.

In the interview, he "reveals" that the Mossad has a team of people, called Unit 242, who infiltrate extremist groups in the Sinai and makes them do things they normally wouldn't. The spies form sleeper cells, pretending to be normal Arabs for years. Then, when the time is ripe, they pop up and start telling the innocent extremists to attack targets they wouldn't possibly have thought of themselves, all in order to foment hate and rancor between Arabs.

Israel has similar groups in all Arab countries. Attiyah even names them: "Janin" in Lebanon, "Hazov" in Syria, "Shaked" in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and "Kidon" in the Nile basin.

In this case, Attiya claims that Israel had special reasons for the attack on Egyptian soldiers - they wanted to extend Israel's control over northern Sinai.

Well, of course.

Al Ahram shows no skepticism over Attiyah's claims.

Yes, even Egyptian generals push bizarre conspiracy theories.

James de Rothschild's pleas for fair Jewish immigration to Palestine, 1935

Another amazing find from the archives of British Parliament debates, where James Armand de Rothschild is describing how there are many illegal Arab immigrants to Palestine at the time that there were increasing restrictions on Jewish immigration, on the eve of the destruction of European Jewry. Note how he says that there are no restrictions on Arabs traveling from Transjordan to Palestine.

James Armand de Rothschild

...Here I want to touch on the subject of immigration. No one in this House can have anything but praise for the High Commissioner. ... Although it can be alleged that the present administration has been more liberal than its predecessors, there is a vast scope for increased immigration at the present time. Indeed, there is to-day a very great dearth of labour in Palestine. This question has been raised over and over again in different quarters of the House at Question Time, and there can be no doubt that the dearth of labour has led to a severe rise in wages, in prices and in the cost of living.

...This labour shortage, about which there is so much complaint, cannot be made good by Jewish workers owing to the restrictions on immigration, and I suggest that it is impossible to make it good by local Arab labour, as all local Arab labour is already fully employed at the present time. Therefore, over the last two years or so, it has been very inadequately met by an influx of Arabs from the neighbouring countries. This policy, if continued, will gradually deprive Jewish employers of Jewish labour in their colonies, and they will shortly find themselves in the same position as planters in the Far East or in South America—landlords employing cheap, inferior labour. Such a divorce between the settlers and the soil is an entire reversal of the principles on which Jewish colonisation was first begun in Palestine, and I sincerely hope that the High Commissioner will see that it is not allowed to continue.

I do not in any way criticise the Government for their policy in giving more employment to the Arabs who are natives of Palestine. This is a natural result of Jewish immigration; it has been so for the last 40 or 50 years. Jewish immigration has always proved manna to the native Arab. It has meant more work and more money for him. I wish to criticise the Palestine administration for permitting immigration from neighbouring Asiatic countries while restricting Jewish immigration. The case of Transjordan is, perhaps, the most flagrant. I should like to know what has happened to the petition which has been circulated on this subject, and which was presented to the Mandates Commission at its recent meeting. I should like to know whether on that occasion it was pointed out to the British representative that the Ordinance of 1933, which regulates immigration into Palestine, is in direct contradiction to Article 6, since not only does it not give 2088 facilities for Jewish immigration, but allows Transjordan Arabs to enter Palestine without passports, whereas no Jew is allowed to enter Transjordan whether he has a passport or not. The Ordinance of 1933 appears to be directed solely against Jews and to discriminate against them, as they alone are excluded from Transjordan, and the Transjordan Arabs are allowed into Palestine. The Government make the point, I know, that these Transjordanians are only allowed to seek work in Palestine for a short time. Everyone who has gone into the matter knows that they spend most of the year in Palestine. They go back to Transjordan for a few weeks to see their families and visit their own homes, but they return very shortly to Palestine, undercutting both Jews and Arabs.

The immigration from Transjordania is only one side of the question. There is also a great and growing number of immigrants from Hauran, which is the southernmost part of Syria, and also from Arabia and Egypt. In 1934 the Government themselves imported concrete workers from Egypt for work on Government buildings in Palestine, as if there were not enough plasterers and workers in concrete to be found in Palestine; and if there were not, why should not the Government allow entry into Palestine of the number of Jewish concrete workers and plasterers for whom the agency had asked? As regards Hauran, let me remind the House of an interview with the Governor of Hauran which appeared last August in a French paper published in Damascus called "La Syrie." The Governor in this interview said that immigration from Hauran into Palestine had taken place to the extent of between 30,000 and 40,000 Hauranis. Forty thousand had been able to settle in Palestine, he said, within the few preceding months, and he added that they had sent back considerable sums of money to their families in Hauran. These figures have never been officially and definitely contradicted. It has been alleged that they were exaggerated. That is an easy answer. Why have they not been contradicted? Everybody who goes to Palestine can see Hauranis everywhere. They are settled all over the country, in every colony and every town. Only last year the Government used 400 of these Hauranis on some of its public works in Haifa, paying them only 100 mils a 2089 day, which is a wage that no native of Palestine, whether Jew or Arab, would accept. The policy of the Government appeared on that occasion to be to grind down both the native Arabs as well as the Jews in favour of immigration from another mandated territory, and from Egypt. Both Egypt and Syria, I submit, are able to take care of their own people.

One of the causes of this Haurani immigration, we are told, is pressure from the Assyrian tax collector. The main reason is that these gentlemen can fold their tents in the night and cross the frontier without being in any way molested by the police, and with no hindrance from those who should have stopped this movement from the other side of the frontier. I know there have been a few cases of repatriation of these Arabs, but the punishment of Arab illicit immigration has only been very slight compared with that which has been meted out to the Jews. Jewish labour immigration has been curtailed to such an extent that Jews are forced to employ Arab labour which would other-wise be employed by Arabs themselves. We may consider this unjustifiable. How much more unjustifiable is a policy which compels Jews and Arabs in Palestine to employ non-Palestinian labour?

Only a few days ago we read in, the newspapers of the new wave of persecution of Jews in Germany. This is a subject upon which I have never touched in this House, and it is one that I do not want to dramatise. The tragedy, we know, is one that does not want dramatising. The moral, physical, economic persecution carried to its extreme limits is what we know of to-day. The High Commissioner appointed by the League of Nations to deal with the problem of refugees, Jewish and other, from Germany, has often said that Palestine is the only country to which these men and women can turn, owing to the economic difficulties which beset the rest of the world. To-day large numbers of young men between the ages of 17 and 25, formerly trained in the liberal professions, deprived now of their livelihood, forced to flee because of persecution, have been retrained in artisan schools in Belgium, France and Holland. For these young people there is a great demand in Palestine, but they cannot go to Palestine unless they provide £250, or unless they succeed in getting on to that very limited schedule which the Administration allows the Jewish Agency for immigration into Palestine. Similar retraining of the younger people is going on in Germany, in every town and almost every village. Is it to be wasted because these poor wretches cannot afford £250 to take them to Palestine? Are they to remain in Germany, or are they to flee to other countries? Are they to be persecuted, are they to be starved, because they have not £250 to settle in Palestine, whereas in Palestine the industries and the industrialists are clamouring for their services and their work?

There is no hope to-day for the younger generation in Germany. May I plead most earnestly that both the Minister and the High Commissioner should not be so hard-faced to these people and so indulgent to their many guests from Syria, Arabia and also from Egypt? May I plead with them for a measure of real generosity and more liberality in their policy, in view of the daily dangers which beset these men and women, and in view of their desperate situation? I said at the beginning of my remarks that we were indebted to the High Commissioner for a more liberal scale of immigration. I said that this scale of immigration was made possible only by the efforts of Jews all over the world, and especially those in Palestine. They had freely given and invested money. These efforts had been made with one object, and one object alone, and that is the further establishment of more Jews in Palestine and the furtherance of the Jewish National Home. To-day the coffers of Palestine are full of Jewish shekels. Its ports, its harbours, its orange groves, its industries are still barred to thousands of unhappy, capable, industrious Jews. I plead with the Government and the Palestine Administration that these Jews should be allowed to bring their measure of activity to the building up of a country which at present they can only cherish from afar.

Rothschild's pleas were ignored, and a few years later the British White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. The White Paper doomed hundreds of thousands of Jews, who might have otherwise been saved, to be murdered by the Nazis.

Thursday links

From Ian:

PMW Abbas and the PA used term "alleged Temple" at least 97 times in 2011 and 2012

”The use of the term "alleged Temple" to deny Jewish history has been Palestinian Authority policy under Abbas for many years. Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the entire Palestinian Authority leadership and the structures under its control actively and repeatedly use the term "alleged Temple."

CAMERA: Where's the Coverage? Palestinian Authority Incitement against Jews and Israelis

UNWatch U.N. chief sending ‘wrong signal’ going to Tehran’s NAM summit

“Iran practices international terrorism, subjugates women, persecutes minorities, rapes dissidents, rigs elections, denies the Holocaust, and disregards UN resolutions to halt its illegal nuclear weapons program. Mr. Ban’s visit wrongy hands legitimacy and propaganda points to the forces of repression in Tehran, and their chief ally in Damascus.”

Iran's supreme leader orders fresh terror attacks on West

"Iran's Supreme Leader has ordered the country's Revolutionary Guards to intensify its campaign of terror attacks against the West and its allies in retaliation for supporting the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria."

Ayalon: South Africa is still an Apartheid state
After South Africa mandates labels on products from the West Bank, deputy FM argues that S. Africa needs to look in the mirror.
"At the moment, South African Apartheid is directed at Israel and against miners in South Africa itself. Instead of making decisions about labeling Israeli products, it would be advisable for the South African government to take brave decisions about the 34 miners,"

The Attacks on Israelis You Won’t Read About Anywhere Else, August 19-21

Lyon’s chief rabbi receives threatening letter, Holocaust photos

A letter threatening to “punish Jews,” accompanied by photos of Jewish children being led to death camps during the Holocaust, was sent to Lyon’s chief rabbi Richard Wertenschlag.

Turkish Islamic Scholar Attacked for Meeting with Jews

"Turkish Islamic scholar Adnan Oktar is being targeted by Muslims in a campaign to discredit him as a Muslim, because he meets with Jews."

Mosul Iraq's 'Most Dangerous City' For Christians

Egypt’s Christians organizing first protest against Muslim Brotherhood leadership

‘We are oppressed and humiliated,’ Copts say, warning country’s civil character is under threat

Hungary condemns anti-Semitic calls during match with Israel

Prosecution not likely against fans who chanted ‘dirty Jews’ during a friendly game

Radical Islam Joins the DNC

"... Jibril Hough and Imam Siraj Wahhaj have said and done radical things in their past. Which means either the Democrats failed to utilize due diligence or they simply didn’t care. In addition to the Muslims being misrepresented, Democrats and Charlotteans also have a right to know how the DNC has failed them before they even arrive in Charlotte."

Boteach Calls on Pascrell to Denounce “Jew-Hatred” of Arab Fundraiser

MEMRI Ibrahim Al-Amin: Lebanese Opponents of Hizbullah Are Israeli Collaborators until Proven Otherwise

John Cleese ‘orders strike on Iran’
Commercial for Sababa Egozim features the famed British comedian speaking Hebrew

Also:

JCPA: Sinai, the New Egypt, and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty

Israeli doctors save a Russian man after no one in Russia could

JPost: Top German politician calls for EU to ban Hezbollah

Iran's supreme leader orders fresh terror attacks on West

MEMRI: Saudi Shura Council Member Ibrahim Al-Buleihi: Progress for Arab and Islamic World Can Only Come from Western Civilization

This week's Low-Intensity Conflict Report.

(h/t Norman, Yoel, O.)

Cycle of violence, 1947

From the New York Times, April 12, 1947:

April 13:

See? It's a cycle!

Five million pageviews

Today, I reached five million page views since the I started keeping statistics in the early days of the blog.

If I am calculating correctly, the five millionth pageview came from Mecca/Jeddah, Saudi Arabia! The reader did a Google search for "center for prevention against vice black magic jeddah" and this posting came up at #2.

So thanks to my Saudi reader, and everyone else!

Muslims claim Jewish doctor proves Koran correct; converts

This story has been all over Arabic language media over the past week.

According to the story, a Jewish embryologist at the "Albert Einstein Institute" named Robert Gillham converted to Islam after discovering that a man's "imprint" remains with a woman he's slept with for three months afterwards.

The story says that Gillham tested women for the existence of these "imprints" and discovered that many American women had imprints from multiple men, showing that they were promiscuous. He tested his wife and found out that she also had sex with other men, and in fact one of his three children was not his.

But Muslim women that he tested were all faithful, according to the story.

Since Islam decrees a three-month waiting period after divorce in order to ensure that any subsequent child has clear parentage, his purported discovery of this three-month "imprint" proves that the Koran contains all of modern science - and therefore he converted to Islam.

I could find no record of any embryologist named Robert Gillham nor any doctor with that name who worked at any institution named Einstein.

The story was first told by Dr. Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Sayed, an Egyptian professor, and has been published in numerous Arabic media since then.

The irony is that the 90 day waiting period after divorce in Islam, which supposedly shows how well the Koran knows science, comes from...Judaism!

See also my update here.

Fatah opens Facebook page, praises terrorists

Fatah just started their official Facebook page.

In one posting they slam Avigdor Lieberman for saying that Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas supports terrorism.

A couple of hours earlier, they posted about Mahmoud Siam, who they say killed four Israelis in Gaza in 2002, using this photo:

There are plenty of other photos glorifying terror:

But don't call them supporters of terror. That's incitement.

PA discrimination against "refugees" behind electricity crisis

A follow-up to last week's story:

Israeli and Palestinian officials will meet this week to discuss the Palestinian electric company's debts and set a payment schedule to postpone blackouts in the occupied West Bank.

Palestinian energy authority director Omar Kittaneh and the director of an Israeli company will attend the meeting, said Hisham al-Omari, the director of the Jerusalem Electric Company.

Al-Omari said the Israeli electric company is demanding back payments and is serious about cutting off electricity to Ramallah, Bethlehem Jericho and parts of Jerusalem if payments are not received.

The Jerusalem Electric Company owes about 415 million shekels, he said.

Al-Omari blamed the Palestinian Authority for failing to seek payments from refugee camps and said the company could not take responsibility for the camps, which are exempted from paying for electricity.

"The PA should take financial responsibility for the refugee camps. The camps are part of us, and they have to take responsibility and pay their bills," he said.

But the PA has never taken responsibility for the so-called "refugee" camps in their midst. Even the the people living in camps in Area A under full PA control, or those in Gaza before the Hamas takeover, were never treated equally.

On the contrary - the PA (and Hamas), which has the ability to dismantle those camps and mainstream tens of thousands of their residents into Palestinian Arab society, have steadfastly refused to do anything of the sort.

Not only that, but a PA official has even stated that the residents of the camps would not even become citizens of "Palestine" should the state ever be declared!

The electricity issue is actually emblematic of the cynical use of the "refugees" by the PA, who prove again that instead of trying to help their own citizens, they are instead hell-bent on prolonging their suffering.

Israel releases Golan terrorist; he praises Assad

From UPI:

Israel has released a Syrian prisoner who served 27 years for resistance activities, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported.

"After 27 years of captivity and unjust detention on charges of resisting the Israeli occupation ... the Arab prisoner hero Sedki embraced freedom and returned to the occupied Golan," SANA said.

Sedki al-Maket was arrested in August 1985 and released to his hometown of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, the news agency said.

Al-Maket, now in his mid-40s, and five others formed a group called The Secret Resistance Movement. He stole grenades and mines from an Israeli military base, compiled information on Israeli military bases and troop movements, and was a member of a group that detonated explosives on an Israeli military base, the International Middle East Media Center said Wednesday.

There was no official comment in Israel on the release.

He served his full term.

It looks like al-Maket is still a strong supporter of Bashir Assad. From Hezbollah's Al Manar:

Speaking to Al-Manar TV, Maqet recalled the May 2000 and July 2006 victories of the Lebanese Resistance against the Zionist killing machine, saying that he was following on all those developments during his prison period.

He further saluted Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, stressing that "we are the soldiers of this great leader and standing under his leadership.”

The released prisoner also saluted the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian people and the Syrian national army “who is facing conspiracies and fighting the same as in 1973,” Maqet said.

Al-Maket might want to think twice before going on any international speaking tours, based on recent experiences from Samir Kuntar.

(Updated headline based on this.)

Israeli archaeologist discovers secrets of Sobibor death camp

From AP:

When Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi decided to investigate his family's unknown Holocaust history, he turned to the skill he knew best: He began to dig.

After learning that two of his uncles were murdered in the infamous Sobibor death camp, he embarked on a landmark excavation project that is shining new light on the workings of one of the most notorious Nazi killing machines, including pinpointing the location of the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were killed.

Sobibor, in eastern Poland, marks perhaps the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plot to wipe out European Jewry. Unlike other camps that had at least a facade of being prison or labor camps, Sobibor and the neighboring camps Belzec and Treblinka were designed specifically for exterminating Jews. Victims were transported there in cattle cars and gassed to death almost immediately.

But researching Sobibor has been difficult. After an October 1943 uprising at the camp, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it to the ground, replanting over it to cover their tracks.

Today, tall trees cover most of the former camp grounds. Because there were so few survivors -- only 64 were known -- there has never been an authentic layout of the camp, where the Nazis are believed to have murdered some 250,000 Jews over an 18-month period. From those few survivors' memories and partial German documentation, researchers had only limited understanding of how the camp operated.

"I feel like I am an investigator in a criminal forensic laboratory," Haimi, 51, said near his home in southern Israel this week, a day before departing for another dig in Poland. "After all, it is a murder scene."

Over five years of excavations, Haimi has been able to remap the camp and has unearthed thousands of items. He hasn't found anything about his family, but amid the teeth, bone shards and ashes through which he has sifted, he has recovered jewelry, keys and coins that have helped identify some of Sobibor's formerly nameless victims.

The heavy concentration of ashes led him to estimate that far more than 250,000 Jews were actually killed at Sobibor.

"Because of the lack of information about Sobibor, every little piece of information is significant," said Haimi. "No one knew where the gas chambers were. The Germans didn't want anyone to find out what was there. But thanks to what we have done, they didn't succeed."

The most touching find thus far, he said, has been an engraved metal identification tag bearing the name of Lea Judith de la Penha, a 6-year-old Jewish girl from Holland who Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial confirmed was murdered at the camp.

Haimi calls her the "symbol of Sobibor."

"The Germans didn't discriminate. They killed little girls too," he said. "This thing (the tag) has been waiting for 70 years for someone to find it."