Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, August 15, 2014

08/15 Links Pt1: Supporting Hamas is Anti-Semitic; Groundhog Day in Gaza; Better Off Without UNWRA

From Ian:

Alan M. Dershowitz: Supporting Hamas is Anti-Semitic

Some of those who support Hamas, such as Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson, claim that they support its political goals, but not its anti-Semitic policies. (We must recognize "its legitimacy as a political actor".) Others, such as the Turkish Foreign Minister and the leaders of Qatar, support its military goals. (We support the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas "because it embraces the Palestinian cause and struggles for its people.") These distinctions hold no water, since Hamas' anti-Jewish policies are central to its political and military actions. Some supporters of Hitler made the same argument, claiming that the Nazi Party and its leaders espoused good economic, educational and political policies. No reasonable person today accepts that excuse, and no reasonable person should accept the excuses offered by supporters of Hamas who claim to be able to slice the bologna so thin.
The same is true for those who argue that Hamas is preferable to ISIS or other Jihadist groups that might replace it. A similar argument was made by fascists who claimed that their parties were preferable to the Communists. The reality is that Hamas is an anti-Semitic organization, based on a Jew-hating philosophy, with the goal of destroying the nation state of the Jewish people and killing its Jewish inhabitants. It is evil personified. There is no excuse or justification for supporting Hamas, and anyone who does is supporting anti-Semitism.
Some Hamas supporters — such as those who chant "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas" — proudly acknowledge this reality. Others, such as Cornell West, who according to the American Spectator "headlined a high profile pro-Hamas demonstration," deny it. But all are complicit, even if they are themselves Jewish or have Jewish friends. Supporting an organization that at its core is anti-Jewish and whose charter calls for the killing of all Jews is anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent. And those politicians, academics, entertainers and others who support Hamas — and there are many — must be called out and condemned, as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd has been. So must those, like Navi Pillay, the head of the United Nation's Human Right Council, who see a moral equivalence between this anti-Semitic terrorist group and the democratic nation state of the Jewish people. She demanded that Israel share its Iron Dome system with Hamas, without condemning Hamas for using Palestinian civilians as its own Iron Dome.

Caroline Glick: Anti-Semitism and its limitations

A survey of Britons taken at the end of last month by YouGov showed that 62 percent believed that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza. This includes 72% of Labor supporters and 57% of Conservatives.
In other words, nearly two-thirds of Britons believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. And since Israel is surrounded by forces that seek its destruction, we can extrapolate that nearly two-thirds of Britons would, at a minimum, have no problem with Israel being wiped off the map.
This rising political force of anti-Semitism is already impacting previously supportive governments’ policies toward the Jewish state. Bowing to the anti-Israel positions of his Liberal-Democrat coalition partners, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided that arms exports to Israel will be suspended if Hamas continues its current round of war with Israel.
The primary engine propelling Western nation after Western nation to abandon their support for Israel and deny the protection of law to Jewish communities is the rising power of Muslim minority communities in these countries. As Douglas Murray explained in an essay published by the Gatestone Institute this week, when it comes to Israel and Jews, otherwise integrated, moderate Muslims in Europe are quick to join jihadists in denouncing Israel and rallying behind anti-Semitic curses and threats.
The unanimity of anti-Semitic prejudice among Muslim communities in the West, and its impact on the politics of Western nations, indicates that in the future, Western nations’ polities toward Israel may have more in common with the positions of Sunni Arab states than with those of the US.

Sarah Honig: Groundhog Day in Gaza

It took Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, countless rocket barrages of ever-increasing ranges (all the way to Zichron Ya’acov), ambushes, abductions and mega-scale weapons arsenals to impress average Israelis with the truth.
Yet some political Phils still want to drag us back to their Punxsutawney in the sand, and force us to wake to another Groundhog Day with Abbas once more in charge of Gaza, quite regardless of his proven perfidy, quite regardless of what has already happened under his watch in Gaza, quite regardless of the fundamental fact that he couldn’t hold on to Gaza in the first place, that he was the incompetent who lost it Hamas.
What Livni, Herzog, Gal-On and their hangers-on prefer we forget is that this isn’t a classroom exercise in conjuring outlandish screenplay outlines. It’s doubtful that they believe their own folly-mongering. There’s something beyond the cynical in trying to cause others to blunder through the identical ghastly experience time and time and time again.
It’s nothing less than unconscionable to deceptively inspire false optimism in others and urge them to stake their lives serially on what has miserably failed for 20 years, assuring all and sundry that it would this time end up really well.
Weatherman Phil was a fictional fellow. Yes, he became desperate, even suicidal, but his exploits were side-splitting and destined for a Hollywood happy-end. Our interminable ordeal, however, is anything but a funny flick. Our infatuation with the homegrown version of Groundhog Day firmly belongs in the horror genre.
Our nightmarish ordeals are for real and we can’t awaken to another reality. We, alas, aren’t in pastoral Punxstawney. There’s nothing humorous about Hamas and nothing amusing about its enabler, Abbas.

StandWithUs: Col. Richard Kemp on the IDF & Hamas in Gaza (47 Min)

The idiotic "Gaza war was for natural gas" meme (updated)

I am amazed at how many articles have been written in the past month with the same stupid theme, that the Gaza war is really about Israel's desire for natural gas off the Gaza coast.

Counterpunch. Daily Sabah. Middle East Monitor. The Guardian.

The meme goes like this: Israel has always hungered after the gas that BP is said to have found off of Gaza's coast in 2000. But it doesn't want Hamas to get hold of it because it will be used to fund terror, and also because Israel needs the gas badly. So Israel has been trying to negotiate with the PA to get the rights to the gas, and it tries to destroy Hamas every few years to take it out of the game.

A couple of these articles are savvy enough to note that since 2000, Israel has made some major gas discoveries as well. But, we are told, those will not be commercially available until 2017 or 2020 (depending on the article) and Israel wants the Gaza gas now.

OK, how stupid is this?

First of all, the Gaza gas is much further away from being commercially available than the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields that are within Israeli territorial waters according to everyone (except the people writing these articles who claim they are disputed, which is wrong.)

Secondly,the Tamar field is already pumping gas today.

Thirdly, while these articles breathlessly tell us that the Gaza fields hold 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas, they don't mention the size of the Israeli fields:

Tamar - proven reserves of 7.9 trillion cubic feet, and 3 trillion more in probable reserves.
Leviathan - 16 trillion cubic feet.
Sarah and Myra - a 54% probability of 6.5 trillion cubic feet

The Gaza gas field is small potatoes compared to existing Israeli fields, very far from ever being commercialized, and subject to attack by terrorist rockets. Why would Israel wage a war under those circumstances?

Ah, but if you think of the stereotype of the greedy Jew, then it all starts to make sense...

UPDATE: The estimated value of the Gaza gas field is about $4 billion. Protective Edge has cost the Israeli economy about $3.6 billion; this is not counting Pillar of Defense and Cast Lead.

Those greedy Jews aren't very good at math, are they?

(h/t Bacon Eater)

Hamas admits intimidating, deporting journalists whose coverage they didn't like

From MEMRI:

Isra Al-Mudallal, head of foreign relations in the Hamas Information Ministry, admitted, in a phone interview with Mayadeen TV on August 14, that journalists who filmed the places from where missiles were launched were deported from the Gaza Strip. "The security agencies would go and have a chat with these people," she said.

Following are excerpts:

Interviewer: How did you manage to maintain contact with the foreign journalists, and how did you convey your point of view to them?

Isra Al-Mudallal: Since the beginning of the aggression against the Gaza Strip, a state of emergency was declared at the border crossings, especially at the Beit Hanoun Crossing, also known as the Erez Crossing, and journalists were allowed in without any bureaucratic procedures, except for registration to guarantee their safety.

Our problem was that [we didn't know] who was entering the Gaza Strip. Who were they? Most of them were freelancers, and the others were from news agencies.

Fewer journalists entered the Gaza Strip during this war than in the previous rounds, in 2008 and 2012. Therefore, the coverage by foreign journalists in the Gaza Strip was insignificant compared to their coverage within the Israeli occupation [i.e., Israel]. Moreover, the journalists who entered Gaza were fixated on the notion of peace and on the Israeli narrative.

So when they were conducting interviewers, or when they went on location to report, they would focus on filming the places from where missiles were launched. Thus, they were collaborating with the occupation.

These journalists were deported from the Gaza Strip. The security agencies would go and have a chat with these people. They would give them some time to change their message, one way or another.

The Israeli missiles do not distinguish between fighters, civilians, or children.

We suffered from this problem very much. Some of the journalists who entered the Gaza Strip were under security surveillance. Even under these difficult circumstances, we managed to reach them, and tell them that what they were doing was anything but professional journalism and that it was immoral.

Hamas merely had friendly "chats" with the reporters they felt were "collaborators." Nah, no threats there.

But some people seem to know better:

Nearly four weeks ago, I called the one-sided dispatches from Gaza that adhered to Hamas' published guidelines of how and what to report a scandal. Journalists tried to hide their being intimidated, and the consequences of how it affected their reporting from Gaza, for as long as they could.

Journalistic ethics has been trampled upon in Gaza, and now those lapses are being covered up. Too bad there seem to be no journalists who are willing to do an investigative report on fellow journalists.

(h/t Yoel)

The New York Times doesn't want to make any assumptions:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York was sweating, his shoes caked in dust. He had just climbed out of a tunnel near the Gaza border that Israel says was covertly built by Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza.

...Israeli officials seemed eager to use the occasion, and their sympathetic audience, to highlight what they presented as evidence of Hamas’s malevolence.

...Mr. Cuomo climbed into an armored truck, which took him to a field that had been excavated to reveal a tunnel that Israeli officials said Hamas had dug.

See how careful the NYT is? After all, you cannot be 100% certain Hamas dug these tunnels, even when they brag about it. It might have been an Israeli false flag operation. Or a series of natural cave formations that happened to all run in parallel between Gaza and Israel and are just now being discovered.

The New York Time has an obligation to verify everything before it reports things as facts. Just like it did on July 18:

Around noon, an airstrike killed three children in their bedroom. Three more strikes in the afternoon killed an additional four children. And after 9 p.m., an artillery shell killed eight people in their home, including four children.

No doubt the reporters checked each incident and determined that they were airstrikes or artillery, and not Qassam rockets or Hamas mortars. They didn't rely on third parties, but on their own military forensics skills, to make this flat determination. No need to qualify those facts.

(h/t POT)

EoZ Q&A at MJE (Video)

Due to popular demand, I made a video of the question and answer session after my lecture at the Manhattan Jewish Experience on Tuesday. There is a lot of material I cover here, and the questions were quite good.

08/14 Links Pt2: Rebuilding a Demilitarized Gaza Is the Road to Peace; Reagan & Israel the Real Story

From Ian:

Alan Johnson: Rebuilding a Demilitarized Gaza Is the Road to Peace

Britain, France, and Germany have now proposed a plan. Gazans would not just get emergency humanitarian assistance, but long-term and large-scale economic development, as well as much greater freedom to trade and travel. Hamas, on the other hand, would get disarmed. The Israeli government and opposition are in favor of the idea, so too the United States, and the policy would likely attract support from regional Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Crucially, it also offers a framework to re-establish the authority of those Palestinians who oppose terror, recognize Israel, and want to negotiate a two-state solution—the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas.
I interviewed six Israeli and American policy experts this week—Matthew Levitt, Michael Herzog, Gershon Baskin, Jonathan Spyer, Jonathan Rynhold, and Asher Susser—about the viability of “reconstruction for demilitarization.” Could it be a political solution to the Gazan tragedy? As I sat and edited the transcripts, I identified these ten rules for success.
1. Only this policy paradigm can avoid the next round of violence. “If you want to stabilize Gaza over the long run and prevent the repetition of violent rounds of conflict, you have to support this,” said Michael Herzog, a former adviser to several Israeli defense ministers. The periodic restoration of deterrence over Hamas by airstrikes and ground invasions is simply “not a tenable plan anymore,” Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute told me. Jonathan Rynhold, head of the Argov Center for the Study of Israel and the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University, argued that it is vital to show that “Israel’s war is against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people.” The policy “puts the onus on Hamas to explain why they are unprepared to give up their rockets in exchange for reconstruction.“

Spoerl Captures Insanity of Hamas Coverage in New Hampshire Union Leader

Joseph Spoerl, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at St. Anselm’s College in New Hampshire, highlights a huge problem in the coverage enjoyed by Hamas during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. In a piece published today in the New Hampshire Union Leader, Spoerl puts forth the following scenario:
"Imagine that [during World War II American and British reporters had sent back a steady stream of news stories and photos highlighting the plight of German civilians: photos of ruined homes and apartment blocks, wailing women and children, overwhelmed hospitals and so forth. Suppose, further, that these reporters never mentioned anything about the ugly ideology of Hitler and the Nazis, their genocidal hatred for Jews, their plans for world conquest, their persecution of political opponents, etc.
We would all agree that reporters acting in this way would be guilty of a serious breach of journalistic ethics. They would be actively misleading their audience by telling only a small portion of the truth."
Spoerl observes that such a scenario is taking place today as reporters highlight the suffering of the residents of the Gaza Strip without addressing the agenda of the fascist organization that controls the territory. “As absurd as it sounds, the imaginary scenario sketched out here has been unfolding before our very eyes in the Gaza strip over the past month.”
He concludes his piece as follows:
Hamas is an imperialistic, totalitarian political movement driven by genocidal hatred for Jews — in short, an Islamic Nazi Party. It exists beside the world’s only Jewish state, a liberal democracy.
No aspect of the conflict is more important, or more ignored by the mainstream media, than this one.

Mark Steyn: Young Turks

A Tweet from Yasmina Haifi:
"ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It's a preconceived plan by Zionists who want to deliberately blacken Islam's name."
Who is Yasmina Haifi? She's an official at the Dutch Ministry of Justice who serves as project leader at the Netherlands' National Cyber Security Center. And she thinks Isis is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad.
She could be right. On the other hand, maybe Yasmina Haifi is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad - or at any rate deranged. Presumably the many Dutch Muslims out on the streets holding pro-Isis demonstrations would disagree with her - because they surely wouldn't be demonstrating in favor of a Zionist front group, would they? Unless, of course, they're also in on the Zionist plot...
Look at Yasmina Haifi in the photograph at right - she's not a burqa-wreathed crone, but a modern western career woman in a foxy red jacket with just a hint of cleavage. And yet she cannot bear the truth about her religion and what is done in its name. So she takes refuge in the laziest conspiracy of all. In the Netherlands, an "extremist" Muslim supports Isis because it's chopping the heads off infidels, but a "moderate" Muslim opposes Isis because it's a Zionist front group.
This is the human capital with which the Netherlands has chosen to build its future.

Dutch Official Suspended for Saying ISIS is 'Zionist Plot'Elad Benari Thursday, August 14, 2014

The Ministry of Security and Justice and the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV) responded by saying they were opposed to Haifi’s tweet.
“Security and Justice and the NCTV distance themselves from her remarks,” the government said in a statement quoted by NL Times. “And since [the comment] relates to the work of the NCTV and the National Cyber Security Center, cause is shown to terminate her assignment NCSC/NCTV and outsource her work with immediate effect.”
In an interview with the local Radio 1 on Wednesday, Haifi said she will not take back her statements, saying she has the right to speak her mind.
“Freedom of expression is apparently only for certain groups,” she was quoted as having said.
“I have taken the liberty to express myself and obviously I have to pay for it. I do not know why I should take it down; this is what I think,” Haifi declared.

Let's riot and ransack French embassies worldwide!

This story came out a couple of days ago:

A Jewish group has petitioned to change the name of La-mort-aux-Juifs.

A Jewish organization is petitioning French officials that a small hamlet outside of Paris change its name from what translates in English as “Death to Jews.”

“[The fact that the name] was unnoticed during seventy years since the liberation of France from the Nazis and Vichy is most shocking,” Shimon Samuels, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s international relations, wrote to France’s Interior Minister.

But the deputy mayor of Courtemaux, the village of 289 people that oversees the contested hamlet, is resistant to a name change, arguing that the tradition should be respected.

“It’s ridiculous. This name has always existed,” Marie-Elizabeth Secretand told AFP. “No one has anything against the Jews, of course. It doesn’t surprise me that this is coming up again. Why change a name that goes back to the Middle Ages or even further? We should respect these old names.”

Secretand also noted that the municipal council was petitioned to change the name of the town, which consists of two houses and a farm, 20 years ago, but that request was denied.

Oh, those wacky Jews, thinking that writing a letter would get the town to take them seriously.

I mean, it would be hard to find a bigger insult than a call to genocide. Jews are insulted. And being insulted is a perfectly valid reason for acts of violence in today's world.

If only Jews would just take their cue from those who know how to get things done. They would riot, ransack French embassies worldwide, to send letter bombs to the leaders of the town. They would boycott everything remotely French, and to threaten anyone who disagrees.

I mean, that is the proper reaction to insults, isn't it? Not only are reactions like that expected, but they also get results. The fear that is placed in people's hearts at the prospect of being on the receiving end of a bullet or a bomb causes many of them to decide that their lives are more important than their principles - and to change their principles to align with the new reality. And that is fine, as long as they do what we want.

If nations are against your reign of terror, the response is obvious: target them. They'll come into line.

If other nations try to say you are violating international law, threaten them too. In a decade or two international law will magically change towards your viewpoint as long as you keep the pressure up.

It helps if you have a billion people who support you, but it is not a necessary condition to get results. The major components of success are terror, threats and targets who value their lives.

Face it. Terrorism and incitement work. Diplomacy and polite letters don't. Airplane terrorism combined with energy extortion was enough to turn modern Europeans into supporters of the terrorists and extortionists.

Jews are so 21st century. They really need to learn that the only way to get results is to go back to the 7th century way of doing things.

Playing by the 21st century rules is clearly a game for suckers.

(If anyone reading this thinks my advice is serious, please go away. Modern societies need to recognize the real threat and to stick to their principles, not run away from them. The goal is to punish terror in a way that turns it counterproductive, not to cave in.)

South Africa Jews threatened with boycott - and violence - by COSATU officials

COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, issued this statement on July 30 threatening to boycott Jewish stores and companies unless the Jewish community stops supporting Israel:

The Jewish Board of Deputies is allowed to spread their Zionist-supporting lies with impunity in South Africa. ... If the Jewish Board of Deputies wants to advance a Zionist agenda, they should leave South Africa and go advance their agenda elsewhere. To let these funders of a war against a defenceless people act with impunity in South Africa, is against South Africa’s commitment to the people of Palestine. The Jewish Board of Deputies must be advised in no uncertain terms that if they are not part of the solution then they are part of the problem.

The Jewish Board of Deputies are given until the 07 August 2014 to stop their Zionist propaganda in Cape Town, failing which we will boycott and call strikes at all of their member - and supporting companies and organisations. The Jewish Board of Deputies should know that just because Premier Zille supports them, it does not mean that they can act with impunity against the will of the majority of South Africans.

With questions, please call COSATU Western Cape Provincial Secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, 0827733194

There is no fundamental difference between this threat to blacklist and boycott Jews and the similar call by neo-Nazis to boycott and target Jewish stores in Rome last weekend.

But then Tony Ehrenreich went even further - to actually physically threaten Jews. He wrote on his Facebook page:

The time has come to say very clearly that if a woman or child is killed in Gaza, then the Jewish board of deputies, who are complicit, will feel the wrath of the People of SA with the age old biblical teaching of an eye for an eye. The time has come for the conflict to be waged everywhere the Zionist supporters fund and condone the war killing machine of Israel.

The SA Board of Jewish Deputies is responding:

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) is in the process of instituting both criminal and civil charges against Tony Ehrenreich, Provincial Secretary of COSATU (Western Cape branch), for hate speech and incitement to violence against the elected, representative leadership of the SA Jewish community. This will include laying charges of incitement with the police and lodging a formal complaint with the SA Human Rights Commission.

Ehrenreich denies that his statements were inflammatory:

I am not anti simetic or calling for violence against jews. I do say stop being polite in responding to Isreali war crimes. +JBoD endorsment
— Tony Ehrenreich (@TonyEhrenreich) August 14, 2014

There is one way Ehrenreich can successfully defend himself in court. Both his tweet and his Facebook post are filled with spelling, stylistic and grammatical errors. He can claim that he is functionally illiterate and therefore has no idea what words actually mean. Because there is no way to interpret his actual words as anything but a call, twice, to physically attack Jews who support Israel.

08/14 Links Pt1: US livid with Israel? Hamas can’t believe its luck; WSJ Hypes False Story About Israel

From Ian:

The New Romantics: "Being Fair" to Terrorist Groups

It is now fashionable to be anti-Semitic again, so long as you disguise it as anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. Here, the Romantics can join hands, not only with the Islamists but with the anti-Semitic new Nazis in Europe, where, over the last several years, hatred of Jews has re-emerged as a major political force.
What sort of pink-tinted spectacles do you need to march while chanting, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas"? Or to march alongside the black flags of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that terrorize millions and threaten to slaughter thousands as those who hold them dream of glory and triumph? Throughout Europe, it is not just the new Romantics that bow down to the myth of Islam as the path to peace. Governments, church leaders, do-gooders of every stripe accommodate every demand made by Muslim minorities. "Shari'a Law? No problem." "Islamic banking? Why not?" "Muslim prayer groups obstructing our roads and pavements? They have every right."
This all illustrates a different sort of acquiescence: infatuation probably born out of fear rather than out of revolutionary zeal and hatred of the abominable West. Both are dangerous, but there is still time for democratic publics everywhere to turn back the tide of submission to Islam. Given its history and predilections, the Romantics will cling to the coat-tails of Hamas, Hizbullah, the Islamic State, and the Muslim Brotherhood until they triumph. When that happens, the Gays for Palestine, B'tselem, the Marxists, the Presbyterians, the Socialist Workers Party, EAPPI, the Quakers and everyone else will smile as they are led to the gallows, knowing they have wrought a great change in the world but destroyed democracy, love and liberty, and personal freedom in their tragic journey to romantic fulfilment.

David Horovitz: US livid with Israel? Hamas can’t believe its luck

After the abandonment of Israel by the UK, with its promise to limit arms sales to Israel if Hamas restarts its attacks on our civilians, we now learn that the US is already restricting arms sales to Israel, having halted a planned supply of the Hellfire precision missiles that enable Israel to strike at the rocket launchers set up by Hamas in the heart of Gaza’s residential areas.
While we seek to ascertain just how grave the crisis now is between Israel and its most important ally — is the case of the non-delivered Hellfires a procedural delay or the beginning of an embargo? is the relationship between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations ruptured or just very heavily strained? — nobody is going to believe the prime minister the next time he claims, as he did two weeks ago, that US support throughout this campaign has been “terrific.”
It becomes ever harder to understand what the US administration thinks it is doing in the Middle East. Its influence is waning across the region. It appears insufficiently robust — to put it mildly — when dealing with the region’s most dangerous regimes, notably Iran. Its ill-judged lack of enthusiasm for Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi — apparently blamed by Washington for ending an elected Muslim Brotherhood presidency, even though president Mohammed Morsi would likely have ensured no further elections — is pushing Egypt ever closer to Russia. And now ties with the region’s only democracy are fraying.

Israeli official confirms US nixed arms shipment; pols argue over who’s to blame

A senior Israeli official confirmed to Israeli media that the US had suspended a shipment of Hellfire missiles to Israel amid worsening ties over fighting in Gaza.
The decision to hold off on the transfer was most likely on grounds of increased diplomatic tension, the official said, corroborating a Wall Street Journal report earlier in the day that claimed the White House and State Department had been angered by a transfer of arms to Israel and had ordered greater oversight into future sales.
The report claimed that US-Israeli tensions are at a record high, with US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to hold a “particularly combative phone call on Wednesday” and officials on both sides resorting to name-calling.
The accounts sparked an internal debate between Israeli politicians.

WSJ Hypes False Story About Israeli End-Around The White House To Grab Munitions

Dominating the front page of Thursday's Wall Street Journal is a story called "Israel Outflanks White House in Pressing Gaza Strategy" which contends among other things that Israel has been doing an end-around the White House by securing munitions directly from the Pentagon. Buried in the twenty-first paragraph of the piece as an end run around is actually standard operating procedure.
On Thursday's Morning Joe, NBC's Pentagon Reporter Jim Miklaszewski agreed that the end around story was not true:
When this issue arose people at the Pentagon were discussing it openly because at the time it was considered a pro forma exchange. These weapons, primarily munitions actually are forward located in a stockpile in Israel that are under the control of the U.S. government so that in an emergency, if the Israeli government needs munitions in a hurry, it's there.
(…) I don't know that it happened that way but officials here [the Pentagon] at the time, described it as a prearranged pro forma exchange between the U.S. and Israel in terms of providing them ammunition. And I can tell you when we asked questions about it here at the time, there was nobody that was attempting to side step the issue, doing the tap dance. They said, oh, yeah, we did it, blah, blah, and here it is. So I can't tell you if, in fact, there was anybody here at the Pentagon that was trying to undercut the State Department or the White House. And quite frankly, with the iron hand in which the White House rules this building, they don't sneeze here without waiting for the White House to say gezuntheit. That is not far from the truth. For a minute I can't believe personally that people here at the Pentagon were trying to purposely hide this transfer of munitions or undercut the White House.

Fatah says it kidnapped a soldier. Soldier disagrees.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades came out with a video where they claim to have abducted an Israeli soldier named Yaron Snitman:

For proof, they show this nameplate:

Meanwhile, Snitman is on Facebook telling people he is OK.

Apparently, according to one of the YouTube commenters who is a friend, Snitman's shoe plate was lost in battle in Gaza.

(h/t Bob Knot)

Donald Macintyre (Independent, New Statesman) corrects a Gaza lie with another lie

From The New Statesman, in a long report by Donald Macintyre:

[T]en-year-old Mohammed Badran... was blinded in an Israeli air strike but at the hospital he seemed unaware that his entire family had been killed when a missile destroyed their home at the Nuseirat refugee camp. Not understanding the nature of his injury, he repeatedly asked staff, “Why have you switched the lights off?”

But there is a correction:

Update, 12 August: Mohammed Badran’s family turned out not to have been killed in the strike on his home, as had been reported here. In the confusion of a packed Shifa Hospital, the doctors treating him in the burns unit thought he had lost his parents and all his siblings. In fact, although seven of the Badrans’ nine children were also injured in the attack, including their 17-year-old daughter Eman, who is now also in Shifa with serious leg injuries, Mohammed’s parents Tagorid and Nidal Badran both survived to take care of him. That is until Nidal, 44, a policeman, was killed in another air strike, this time on the Qassam mosque in Nusseirat refugee camp, in the early hours of Saturday, 9 August, as he prepared to attend dawn prayers.

So the bloodthirsty Israelis, not satisfied with only injuring members of this upstanding family, ruthlessly murdered the patriarch as he was innocently preparing for dawn prayers.

However, Nidal was not at the mosque for dawn prayers. He was there at 3:30 AM meeting together with two other senior Hamas members, as my story earlier today showed. It is clear that the destroyed mosque held some other secrets that Hamas was trying to keep reporters away from.

The three terrorists killed in the mosque were Nidal Badran (نضال بدران), Maaz Zayed (معاذ زايد) and
Tariq Jadallah (وطارق جاد الله).

Suddenly, the targeting of the Badran house seems a little less random, doesn't it?

By the way, the Arabic media never refers to the three Hamas members killed at the mosque as being anything other than civilians. PCHR and AP mentions that they were militants but doesn't mention their names.

Macintyre mentioned Nidal Badran's death in an earlier story for the Independent, describing the strike this way:

Israeli bombing this morning destroyed one of the largest mosques in central Gaza, killing at least three Palestinians preparing for dawn prayers, including the father of a severely injured ten year old boy blinded in an earlier strike on their home a week ago.

Two bulldozers are searching through the mountain of rubble left by the F16 air strike on the Al Qassam mosque in the heart of the crowded Nusseirat refugee camp for the last of four men who had been in a room set aside for customary washing before prayers when the bomb struck shortly after 3am.

Among the three bodies recovered was that of Nidal Badran, 44, who had been desperately hoping that his son Mohammed, who is currently in Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital suffering from serious cranio-facial injuries, including the loss of his sight, would be transferred for urgently needed surgery to Europe.

The PCHR article describing the men killed as being "members of an armed group" was already published at that time, so Macintyre did not bother to do even the least amount of fact checking about the terrorist Nidal Badran before describing him sympathetically - twice.

Macintyre did report that Israel issued a warning before destroying the mosque, but that it did not reach the Hamas members in time.

And it wasn't as if Macintyre didn't have a clue. He knew Badran was a policeman, and every decent reporter in Gaza should know that the vast majority of policemen have traditionally also been members of the Al Qassam Brigades.

Just another media whitewash of Hamas.

Oh, and check this out:

{T]he dead man’s brother Kemal Badran, 45, who works for the information office of the UN refugee agency UNRWA, said that his brother had had 20 years’ service as a policeman in Gaza... “He was a religious man,” he added, saying that he frequently went early to the mosque before dawn prayers to wash and read the Koran. “Maybe [the Israelis] did not know that there would be anyone at the mosque at this time,” he said.

PCHR clearly knew that Nidal was a terrorist...and so did his UNRWA brother.

You cannot trust anything Gazans tell a reporter. Too bad reporters are so eager to believe the lies.

(h/t Honest Reporting, Bob K)

"The Qualities of Jews in the Quran"

Muslims never tire of saying to the Western media that they have no problem with Jews, they have wonderful Jewish friends and supporters, and all they are against are Zionists.

In Arabic, the story is a little different.

Dubai-based pan-Arab news site Moheet interviews a professor who discusses how Jews are portrayed in Islam's foundational text, the Quran.

Among the attributes of Jews that Muslims memorize every day:

Jews steal money
Jews use usury to enrich themselves and impoverish non-Jews
Jews don't care about human life
Jews are cowards, hiding behind fortified walls
Jews betray all agreements and covenants
Jews distort words of holy books
Jews are killers of prophets and other fine people
Jews want to extinguish the light of Allah
Jews bring corruption to the lands they are in

Just in case you think that the article is really talking about Zionists and this was all a big mistake, here is their illustration:

As usual, this article did not cause a ripple of disagreement ot an ounce of discomfort in the Arab world. No condemnations, no distancing, no quibbles.

And, in the West...no coverage.

Because it would be really awkward to notice that Arabs are far more antisemitic than anyone else, and that the antisemitism has nothing to do with Israel. If that was true, peace would be impossible, and to say that is sacrilegious - since holding on to the unfounded belief of this being a purely political conflict than can be solved with diplomacy is as irrational, and as irrationally defended, as any religion is.