Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, January 01, 2015

Haaretz' Gideon Levy says he loves Israel - with a catch

Here comes the new Israeli, a man’s man; with a tiny skullcap, service in an elite army unit, high-tech, English and a swimming pool, with the coolest and most up-to-date message: “Stop apologizing, we love Israel” (rhymes in Hebrew); the poster is already in evidence on several balconies.

On Monday night, at a meeting convened by Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), the most successful politician in Israel at present explained: “This election is between those who apologize and those who are proud ... those who are objective and those who are in favor of the State of Israel.” Drum roll.

Well, [Habayit Hayehudi chairman] Naftali Bennett, I apologize and I love Israel (of course not your Israel and not the present Israel); I’m objective and I’m in favor of (a just) State of Israel; I apologize and I’m proud.

Levy has an interesting definition of "love."

Let's see how he might apply it to his Swedish girlfriend whom he starred with in a reality TV show a couple of years ago:

Clueless Roger Cohen in Gaza unwittingly interviews a Hamas terrorist's brother

Roger Cohen once again shows that he is way out of his depth in his latest clueless New York Times op-ed.

This paragraph is intended to be a showcase for his astuteness yet it reveals the opposite:

Nobody wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human beings.

Nobody wants to talk about Gaza?

The New York Times search engine estimates that Gaza was mentioned in its pages 9,500 times in 2014, ten times the number of, say, the Central African Republic which is in the middle of a devastating civil war - and a place that Roger Cohen would never consider visiting, when going into Gaza for a day is so much easier.

The failure of the Israeli withdrawal? But Cohen wants Israel to do a similar withdrawal from the West Bank!

But most ignorant is his characterization of negotiations with Hamas. Israel didn't directly negotiate with Hamas over Shalit just as Israel did not directly negotiate with Hamas over the many cease fire agreements over the summer that Hamas broke. But beyond that, Hamas' leadership, quite explicitly and nearly daily, calls to utterly destroy Israel. Cohen even admits this in his next paragraph.

Just what exactly is Israel supposed to directly negotiate with Hamas over - the timeframe of its destruction?

He goes on:

My Gaza road ended at the Shuhadaa al Shejaeya Secondary School for boys. ...Hasan al-Zeyada, a psychologist, showed me around. He lost six close relatives, including his mother and three brothers, in an Israeli airstrike on July 20. Of the students at the school, he said that they had no need to be taught history: “They have lived it. They can teach it to me.”

Hasan al-Zeyada's house was almost certainly a terrorist base and his brother Omar was a Hamas terrorist.

Here is screenshot from Omar Ziyada's martyr video:

Here's a Hamas "martyr" poster of Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma who was killed in the same airstrike:

Two unrelated Hamas terrorists being killed in the same house indicates that they weren't exactly having tea there. The Zeyada house was being used as a control center or weapons depot.

And as we've documented, two of Zeyada's other siblings enthusiastically posted his "martyr video" on their Facebook pages, showing that they knew quite well that he was a Hamas terrorist. which means that Hasan knew this as well.

But this same Hasan lied and told the same New York Times that none of his relatives were militants!

This is the third time the NYT is uncritically quoting Hasan Zeyada. Not once did they check out any of this publicly available information about his Hamas brother, which casts considerable doubt over Hasan's own believability.

If Roger Cohen were a journalist, he would have done a little research, perhaps asked Hasan about why he lied to Cohen's own newspaper. Maybe probe him as to what else he knows about Hamas activities in Gaza during the war.

But Cohen is no journalist. He doesn't travel to Gaza in order to investigate anything; He goes to Gaza to confirm the myths that have been in his head beforehand and ignore everything else. He wants to be duped by the people he interviews, because that way he pretends to have more evidence to support his ignorant theories about Israel and Gaza.

(h/t Ronald, EBoZ)

Red Klotz died this year at 93

Last night I went to a Harlem Globetrotters game. It was enjoyable, although they did not seem to be quite as skilled as the Globetrotters I had seen on TV decades ago when they had Curly Neal and Meadowlark Lemon. There was some excellent passing and alley-oops, but not too much of the trick shots or dazzling dribbling that I recall seeing as a kid.

But I also watched their opponents, the team that always loses, the Washington Generals.

During this year's tour, the shtick is that the Generals have regrouped and are thirsting for revenge, wanting to recapture the glory of their last win, in 1971. It is called the "Washington Generals Revenge Tour."

Of course, the Generals lost. That's what they are meant to do. They are booed when they are introduced, and in this particular show, they openly "cheated" and lost (of course) anyway.

But I was interested in their history, and the history of the Generals has an interesting tie to US Jewish sports history.

The original owner of the Washington Generals was Louis Herman "Red" Klotz, Klotz was an early basketball star in Philadelphia high schools and colleges, winning player of the year in 1939 and 1940. He was part of the Baltimore Bullets championship team in 1948, making him - at 5'7" - the shortest player ever to win an NBA championship.

Afterwards, Klotz bought one of the original basketball teams, the Philadelphia Sphas. of the now defunct American Basketball Association.

"SPHA" was an acronym for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. Their original uniforms even had those initials in Hebrew!

In the late 1920s and 1930s, the Sphas were the best basketball team in the world.

The original owner and coach, Eddie Gottlieb, sold the Sphas so he could buy the Philadelphia Warriors in the new NBA, and the ABL became a minor league.

In the early 1950s, the Sphas played the Globetrotters a couple of times:

[Klotz] won many games with the Sphas, and one day on the ballroom at the old Broadwood Hotel in Philadelphia they beat the Harlem Globetrotters in a straight up game. The great Goose Tatum, the first clown prince of basketball, the man who invented the skyhook, met Klotz at half-court and said in a threatening voice: “That will never happen again.” And the next time they played, the Sphas won again. And that is about the time when Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein approached Klotz and asked him to put together a team that would play the Globetrotters night after night all over the country, all over the world. Of course, there would be an understanding. People were coming, after all, to see the World Famous Harlem Globetrotters. It was one of those moments in a man’s life. Red Klotz loved to play basketball. He loved to coach basketball. And he loved to win. The Globetrotters would give him a chance to do the first two.

“We’ll give you a run for your money,” Red Klotz said to Saperstein.

“I’m counting on it,” Saperstein said in return.

Klotz then borrowed some cash to buy a Green De Soto — the Green Hornet, they would all call it — and he began his life as a player, owner, coach, driver, psychiatrist, motivator and inspirational leader for a team he decided to name after Dwight D. Eisenhower: The Washington Generals.

Besides owning and coaching the Generals, Red Klotz was also a player. He would willingly allow the Globetrotters to make a fool out of him. But he always took his role seriously.

There are rules for being a Washington General (to use their most general name).

1. The Generals are allowed — expected, even — to play completely legit on offense. There are no limitations. If they can beat the Globetrotters defense, they can score every single time down the court.

2. The Generals are allowed to play defense as hard as they want when the Globetrotters are not in one of their reams. For about 40% of every Globetrotters game, the basketball is straight up.

3. When the Globetrotters DO go into one of their reams, it is the Generals’ responsibility to play the stooge and make the Globetrotters look as good as possible. They are expected to play their roles with gusto and verve. Red Klotz had his pants pulled down thousands of times — he would always take pants duty first few games of every tour to give the other players time to settle in. He always tried to look as shocked and embarrassed as possible. In his mind, Red often said, his job was to play Ginger Rogers to the Globetrotters’ Fred Astaire, that is to do everything the Globetrotters did with the same joy and expertise but to do it going backward.

Then there was that now legendary game in January, 1971, in Martin, Tennessee - the last game the Generals ever won (possibly under the name the New Jersey Reds; they had a number of different team names even as they never had a home game).

Klotz’s place was not in the paint. He was a shooter, still is a shooter, and on that day in Tennessee he started to make a few long jumpers. Eddie Mahar, a shooting guard from Brooklyn, made a few shots. Sam Sawyer, a forward from Atlantic City and someone who would become one of Klotz’s closest friends, worked hard inside. The Globetrotters seemed weary or uninterested. And nobody noticed the scoreboard.

Nobody noticed, that is, except for Red Klotz.

The game stayed close. The Globetrotters did not do as much show as usual that day in Martin, Tenn. The great dribbler Curly Neal wasn’t playing — he apparently had an injury of some sort — and the showman Meadowlark Lemon seemed to Klotz and others to be in a bit of of a fog. So they played basketball. In the fourth quarter, the New Jersey Reds got hot. Every one of their shots seemed to drop. The Globetrotters kept missing. This much everyone agrees upon. The score tightened.

The Globetrotters could have gone into their show at any point, scored every time down the floor, and put an end to the drama. The Reds would not have been able to do a thing to stop it. But for reasons that were never revealed, and perhaps never quite understood, the Globetrotters played the final minutes straight up. There were 3,600 people in the stands that day, and not one of them was quite sure what was happening. The players themselves were not quite sure what they were doing. Maybe the monotony had simply crumbled their resolve. Maybe they all just wanted something different, something that was unlike the day before and the day before that and the day before that. Whatever, the game grew close.

And then … well, nobody would ever seem to remember the details. In one version of the story, the Reds built a startling 12 point lead in the final minutes and the Globetrotters had to stage a furious comeback. In another, the game was tied at the end of regulation and went into overtime. Fairy tales, you know, have different endings in different parts of the world. The only thing anyone seems certain about is that the Globetrotters led 99-98 with scant seconds left when Red Klotz got the ball about 25 feet away from the basket and fired one of those two-handed set shots that had made him the best in the city and won him the girl and carried him through a war and landed him the childhood dream of traveling around the world. It went in of course, like it went in when he was 12 years old. The Reds led 100-99.

There were, according to the newspapers, three seconds on the clock. The timekeepers stalled the clock long enough for Meadowlark Lemon to take the game-winning shot, a hook shot, the sort he had made about as many times as Red Klotz’s set shot. The buzzer sounded. The ball bounced away. The New Jersey Reds or Washington Generals or International All-Stars or whatever you would like to call them had won the game. It was, mathematically, the greatest upset in the history of sport. Red Klotz and his team ran off the court in triumph. The crowd’s reaction was some mix of shock and uncertainty. In time, Red Klotz would remember them booing (“It was like killing Santa Claus,” he would say many, many times), and certainly most did boo. But in the days afterward, when he talked to the small-town reporters who asked, he would remember that some people cheered too.

Klotz was 50 years old when he made that game-winning shot.

He died this past July, at the age of 93, and I hadn't seen his name in any of the lists of notable people we lost this year. But while he holds the record for the most basketball games lost, he knew exactly what he was doing.

12/31 Links Pt2: CAMERA's Top Ten Media Mangles for 2014; Lydda '48: The Dog That Didn’t Bark

From Ian:

CAMERA's Top Ten MidEast Media Mangles for 2014

1. Hate-Indoctrination and Incitement Ignored
No issue was more glaringly and indefensibly neglected by most of the media than theoften grotesque demonizing of Israel and the Jewish peopleby the Palestinians and the wider Muslim/Arab world. Instead of reporting the hate-indoctrination prominently and continuously for what it is -- a central driving force for violence and fundamental threat to peace -- media outlets such as The New York Times typically ignored the phenomenon orcharacterized it as merely an accusation by Israelis rather than an objective reality.
Few instances of such media malpractice were as blatant as The Times' censoring of Secretary of State John Kerry's strong denunciation of incitement as the cause of the massacre of Jews at prayer in Jerusalem's Har Nof synagogue. Kerry's emphatic statement was first included in an online version of the New York Times story but later entirely excised by the time the printedaccount reached readers.

Lydda 1948: The Dog That Didn’t Bark

In his July 2014 Mosaic essay, Martin Kramer dismantled Ari Shavit’s assertion that “Zionism carrie[d] out a massacre” at Lydda in 1948 – a claim Shavit has spread not only in his book, My Promised Land, but in his New Yorker article, “Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre, and the Middle East Today.” Kramer recently presented his findings to an Israeli audience that included Lydda veterans and others intimately familiar with the 1948 war – who expressed surprise and anger at Shavit’s allegation. This post provides still another reason to doubt Shavit’s claim: in 1948, The New York Times covered the April “massacre” at Deir Yassin and the later operation at Lydda – but reported no “massacre” at Lydda. And for the reasons set forth below, it is virtually certain that the Times would have reported it if it had occurred at Lydda.
Currivan and his editors would have considered a Lydda “massacre” the following day “news fit to print” – to put it mildly. But Currivan’s next report on Lydda, datelined July 12 (published on July 13) reported the capture of Lydda and Ramleh “on this all-important front” and noted that Lydda “had offered considerable resistance at first and suffered heavy casualties as a result.” Currivan’s succeeding report, datelined July 13 (published July 14) reported “the complete capture of Lydda,” with the exception of a holdout of Arab fighters at the police station, and noted that Arab civilians had suddenly departed Lydda after its capture. In none of his reports did Currivan report anything remotely approaching a “massacre.”
This is the journalistic equivalent of the non-barking dog: (1) the Lydda operation occurred three months after Deir Yassin, which the Times had covered; (2) Lydda was a significant strategic site; (3) the Times had an experienced war correspondent covering the Lydda operation; and yet (4) the Times reported no “massacre” there. A massacre at Lydda would have been a major development and important news. But there was no bark from the Times.

Lies and Falestine

A while ago I came across a paper written by Jeremy R. Hammond entitled “The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel.” In his diatribe he begins his bitter prolonged discourse based on the assumption, purveyed by those ever so sad losers of Nachba fame, that there was an entity, a “country” if you may, called “Palestine”. So allow me to debunk the false claim of a existence of a country whose sole inhabitants were “unjustly” usurped of “their” land known as “Falestine”.
Here are true historical facts.
The word ‘Palestinian’ is never found in Scripture. The term ‘Palestine’ is used four times in the King James Version (Exodus 15:14) Philistia (פְּלָשֶׁת); Isaiah 14:29, 31 (O Philistia) but never as synonymous with either the land of Canaan or the land of Israel. The Hebrew word is פְּלִשְׁתִּים, Plištim and referred to a small region also known as Philistia (Psalms 60:10, 87:4, 108:10), the land of the Pelishtee, or Philistines. It occurs 286 times in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible (of which 152 times in Samuel 1), whereas in the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, the equivalent term phylistiim occurs only 12 times, with the remaining 269 references instead using the term “allophylos” (“of another tribe”).
“In the New Testament, the term Palestine is never used. The term Israel is primarily used to refer to the people of Israel, rather than the Land. However, in at least two passages, Israel is used to refer to the Land: (Matt. 2:20-21)

Look how peacefully Abbas' Fatah party views Israel

This was on Fatah's Facebook page today:

The text is "We remain on your skulls." I am told that the first word, "baqiya," is often associated with ISIS.

This reminds me of a political cartoon published in Syria during the Six Day War, entitled "The Barricades of Tel Aviv:"

I've seen some people argue that the Fateh Facebook page isn't "official." I have no way of knowing who posts to the page, but I can tell you one thing: not a single fan of that Facebook page, out of 130,000 "Likes," objected to this image, nor to the many other equally militaristic images on the site.

There was another interesting picture posted there, as a bit of nostalgia. Since tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Fatah's first terror attack, someone dug up a poster celebrating the fifth anniversary:

Then, everyone knew that "occupation" wasn't the issue - Jews having their own country was the issue. And that is just as obvious looking at this latest poster, even if the entire West chooses to be blind on that topic.

Finding offensive pictures like these are not proof that the entire society approves of violence. You can find equally offensive graphics that are racist and anti-Muslim.

The difference is that that there is immediate revulsion and condemnation when it happens in the West. And there is net to none when it happens in Palestinian territories of Arab countries.

But the complete lack of pushback for these images - the almost total lack of Arabs complaining that these are offensive and disgusting - does reveal a lot about Arab society in general and Palestinian Arab society in particular.

(h/t David G, Grant Rumley)

EU To Fund New Echo Chamber For Anti-Israel Academics, Activists (PreOccupied territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page. And congratulate them on making the big time!

Brussels, December 31 - Officials at the European Commission have approved a grant to underwrite the design and manufacture of a better-insulated echo chamber for politicians, activists, and academics who oppose Israel. EC spokesman Wyrol Yessmen told representatives of several anti-Israel organizations today that the Commission had approved their application, and that work on the design and production could begin within weeks.

Critics of Israel have for years complained that they have been unable to insulate themselves completely from information or opinions that do not dovetail with their preconceived negative view of Israel, despite surrounding themselves with like-minded colleagues, blocking social media contact by opponents, and similar strategies to maintain a monolithic, self-congratulatory circle of anti-Zionists. The existing echo chamber was effective in stroking the egos of the personalities inside it, according to the organizations, but its ability to remove all dissenting viewpoints and facts contradictory to their position was less than satisfactory.

To eliminate the penetration of poisonous notions that Israel and its policies might represent positive phenomena, a group of activists, academics, and politicians formed an organization called Progressive Rights and Education Activists Combating Hard Teachings Opposing True, Honest Ethnic Cleansing of Hebrew Occupation in Indigenous Regions (PREACHTOTHECHOIR). PREACHTOTHECHOIR applied for European Commission funding earlier this year as the fighting in and around the Gaza Strip raged and organization members came to realize how difficult it was with their current resources to completely drown out or shout down people or groups who insist on justifying Israeli self-defense and legitimacy.

A more effective echo chamber, argued the proposal, would further European values by allowing critics and enemies of Israel to proceed unimpeded in their quest to pursue the removal of Jews as a significant presence from the map, a quintessentially European endeavor. "The danger posed by dissenting voices can be eliminated by preventing those voices from reaching our ears," wrote linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, in his letter of recommendation supporting the proposal.

PREACHTOTHECHOIR intends to contract with an engineer to develop the chamber. As the appropriate engineering field is acoustics, the proposal naturally mentions as its preferred candidate Professor Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, whose expertise is electrical engineering, completely unrelated to acoustics, but who has used his laurels as an "engineer" to lend credence to his 1976 book denying the Holocaust, in which expertise in electrical engineering is similarly irrelevant.

12/31 Links Pt1: Israel calls Palestinian actions at UN ‘embarrassing’; Honor Killings in Gaza

From Ian:

UN Security Council rejects unilateral Palestinian statehood bid

The resolution needed nine votes in favor (out of 15) to pass. It fell one vote short, obtaining eight votes in favor (Russia, China, France, Jordan, Chad, Luxembourg, Argentina and Chile), two against (the United States and Australia), and five abstentions (Britain, Rwanda, Nigeria, Lithuania and South Korea). However, even if the resolution had passed, the U.S. would have vetoed it.
Before the vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with the leaders of three of the nations that ended up abstaining, including Rwanda and Nigeria, and asked them to not vote in favor of the Palestinian resolution.
On Wednesday morning, Netanyahu said, "I want to express appreciation and thanks to the U.S. and Australia, and also special appreciation to the president of Rwanda, my friend Paul Kagame, and the president of Nigeria, my friend Goodluck Jonathan. I spoke with both of them. They personally promised me they would not support this resolution. They stood by their word, and that is what decided this battle. This was very important for the State of Israel."
After Tuesday's vote, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power said, "In recent years, no government has invested more in the effort to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace than the United States. Peace, however difficult it may be to forge, is too important to give up on.
"Regrettably, instead of giving voice to the aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis, this text [the Palestinian resolution] addresses the concerns of only one side. It is deeply imbalanced and contains many elements that are not conducive to negotiations between the parties, including unconstructive deadlines that take no account of Israel's legitimate security concerns.
"We must proceed responsibly, not take actions that would risk a downward spiral. We voted against this resolution not because we are comfortable with the status quo. We voted against it because we know what everyone here knows as well -- peace will come from hard choices and compromises that must be made at the negotiating table. Today's staged confrontation in the U.N. Security Council will not bring the parties closer to achieving a two-state solution."

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Palestinians Opposed Abbas's Statehood Bid

The widespread opposition among Palestinians to Abbas's statehood bid at the Security Council is a clear sign that many Palestinians remain opposed to any form of concessions to Israel. It is also an indication of fierce opposition among Palestinians to the resumption of peace talks with Israel.
Those who opposed the Palestinian resolution also argue that Abbas should have gone instead to the International Criminal Court to file "war crimes" charges against Israel. For many Palestinians, punishing Israel should take priority over any peaceful establishment of a Palestinian state.
But the opposition to the resolution, which envisaged a two-state solution, also shows that many Palestinians continue to believe that violence, and not diplomacy, will bring them closer to achieving their goals.
As Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar put it, "This Palestinian resolution is catastrophic and has no future on the land of Palestine. The future belongs to the resistance. We will continue to work to liberate all the land and achieve the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Hamas will not accept anything less than all the lands that were occupied in 1948."

Israel calls Palestinian actions at UN ‘embarrassing’

The Security Council on Tuesday rejected a resolution on Palestinian statehood, with the Palestinians failing to get the minimum nine “yes” votes (required for either adoption by the 15-member council or to prompt a possible veto by one of the five permanent members): Eight voted for the resolution and two voted against, with five abstentions.
“The Palestinians seek — and find — every opportunity to avoid direct negotiations and to walk circumventing paths,” Israel Nitzan of the Israeli mission to the UN said in a short statement. “We’ve become accustomed to their political maneuvers. But today they surpassed themselves by going all the way to the Security Council to make a mockery of it with embarrassing resolutions.
“We have news for the Palestinians – the way to achieve statehood is not paved with provocations,” he said.

Israel's Statement Following the Defeat of the Palestinian Draft Resolution

We're reported on Sheik Yassin Al-'Ajlouni, the Jordanian preacher who ruled that Jews should have a place of prayer on the Temple Mount - and then retracted the ruling when he was heavily criticized.

Silly Yassin, thinking that he could get out of trouble by merely repenting for his horrible idea that Jews have a right to worship on their holiest spot.

Sheikh Al-'Ajlouni has been arrested for issuing his original fatwa, on the orders of the Administrative Governor of the Irbid Governorate.

I'm not sure what law he violated.

At the same time, the "General Mufti Department" Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Sheikh Ajlouni demanding that the Ministry of Education take "appropriate administrative action" against him "for issuing random fatwas that hurt the feelings of Muslims, and affected the Jordanian efforts to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque from Zionist attacks."

Ajlouni is a physics teacher,

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Egyptian courts may have decided this week that they don't want Jews to visit the gravesite of Yaakov Abuhatzeira, making up ludicrous excuses to bar Jews from the country, but not all Arab countries are following suit.

There are a series of pilgrimages to the gravesites of famous rabbis in Morocco throughout the year. One of them is happening around now, as Jews of Moroccan origin from around the world are visiting the grave of Rabbi David Ben Baruch Hakohen Azogh.

These pilgrimages are known as hiloulot and they take place on the anniversaries of the rabbi's deaths. Many are also celebrated at Lag B'Omer in the spring.

Moroccan news media are quite supportive of the influx of Jewish pilgrims, even the ones from Israel. There were a number of sympathetic articles about this most recent pilgrimage to the town of Taroudant where Rabbi Azogh's grave is. The articles note how these pilgrimages are opportunities for members of Moroccan Jewish families now spread throughout the world to have reunions.

There is even a ten minute news video about the visits that seems to be very supportive of the influx of Jews to Morocco. Note one interviewee is clearly from Israel.

From The Telegraph:

HarperCollins, one of the world's largest publishing houses, sells English-language atlases to schools in the Middle East that omit Israel.

Collins Middle East Atlases show Jordan and Syria extending to the Mediterranean but do mark the position of the West Bank.

“The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world. It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence,” said Bishop Declan Lang, the chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs, to The Tablet.

“Maps can be a very powerful tool in terms of de-legitimising 'the other' and can lead to confusion rather than clarity. We would be keen to see relevant bodies ensure that all atlases anywhere reflect the official United Nations position on nations, boundaries and all political features," added Dr Jane Clements, director of the Council of Christians and Jews.

However, Collins Bartholomew, the subsidiary of HarperCollins that specialises in maps, said that including Israel would have been “unacceptable” to their customers in the Gulf and the amendment incorporated “local preferences”.

The Tablet said it had discovered the customs officers in one unnamed Gulf country only permitting the import of school atlases once Israel had been deleted by hand.

The description of the book at their resellers emphasizes that it is meant only for schools in "Middle East" countries. well, all of them except one:

An ideal school atlas for young primary school geographers. Content is specifically designed for schools in Middle East countries. It enables students to learn about the world today by exploring clear and engaging maps, study satellite imagery, understand key facts and statistics, and learn how maps and atlases work.

The atlas has been developed specifically for schools in the Middle East. It has been designed to stimulate and inspire students with its syllabus specific content.

The maps give in-depth coverage of the region and its issues. Topics included in the atlas help pupils to understand the relationship between the social and physical environment, the regions’s challenges, its socio-economic development and inter-relationships with neighbouring regions and the wider world.

But their main webpage for the book doesn't mention the caveat of its intended audience.

HarperCollins describes itself this way:

We love maps! We have done for almost 200 years, and we've been a leading publisher of maps and atlases all that time. Our focus is to produce clear, up-to-date, and informative map products to enable you to find the information you need quickly and easily.

"Informative" being a relative term.

People who produce schoolbooks, as well as people who create maps, have an obligation to their profession to ensure accuracy. To hear HarperCollins defend itself because the intended audience doesn't like reality is as poor an excuse as one can imagine. Should science textbooks include creationism for that reason?

Here's another map from the book.

(h/t Adam Levick)

UPDATE: HarperCollins responds:

HarperCollins regrets the omission of the name Israel from their Collins Middle East Atlas. This product has now been removed from sale in all territories and all remaining stock will be pulped. HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for any offence caused.

12/30 Links Pt2: Fatah: Synagogue killers glorified as Islamic Martyrs; Europe's Year of the Jihadist

From Ian:

PA official news and Fatah: Synagogue killers glorified as Islamic Martyrs

Posting a picture of the graves of the two terrorists who murdered 5 Israelis in a synagogue in West Jerusalem last month, Abbas’ Fatah movement glorified them with the supreme Islamic status of Shahids - “Martyrs... who ascended [to heaven]”:
“This is the place of eternal rest of Martyrs (Shahids) Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal of Jabel Mukaber [neighborhood] in occupied Jerusalem, who ascended [to heaven] a month and a half ago during an operation (i.e., terror attack) at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem. Early morning today, they were escorted to their graves at Al-Sawahreh Al- Sharqiyeh.”
[Fatah’s Facebook page, “Fatah - The Main Page”, Dec. 25, 2014]
Fatah called the terror attack “an operation at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem.” On Nov. 18, 2014, the two Arab terrorists from East Jerusalem entered a synagogue in Jerusalem and attacked worshippers with guns, knives and axes, killing 4 worshippers and a police officer. 7 people were injured, 3 of them seriously. The terrorists were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli police that arrived on the scene.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency WAFA likewise honored the murderers with the supreme Islamic status of “Shahids” who were “escorted... to the place of their final rest”:
“Yesterday [Dec. 25, 2014], the citizens of Jerusalem escorted the bodies of Martyrs (Shahids) Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal, from the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood of south-east Jerusalem, to the place of their final rest in the Al-Sawahreh Al-Sharqiyeh cemetery, after they were held by the occupation for 37 days, and transferred to their relatives after midnight.” [From WAFA, official PA news agency, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 26, 2014]

Is Israel an apartheid state? Answers from someone who’d know

Today living in Jerusalem, [Benjamin] Pogrund, 81, is arguably the most vocal — and perhaps best placed — critic of equating Israel with apartheid South Africa. “The apartheid accusation is a deadly one,” he said. “It’s something that people can relate to. It sounds so straightforward and direct and easy. The fact that it’s built on a foundation of simple untruths and exaggeration and distortion is another matter.”
Pogrund knows apartheid up close, the original kind. One of the most prominent Jewish opponents of the South African apartheid regime, he was a close confidant and personal friend of Nelson Mandela. In 1961, as his paper’s African affairs reporter, Pogrund helped the future president organize an illegal strike.
“Mandela and I met secretly and regularly,” Pogrund recalled in David Saks’s 2011 book “Jewish Memories of Mandela.” “We had a system of sending messages to arrange to meet, which would either be at a friend’s house in Fordsburg, or when I would drive to a street corner at night, pick up Mandela — his worker’s overalls disguise did little to hide his tall, imposing figure — and we would sit in my car in a dark street and talk about the strike campaign.”
In “Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel,” which came out in July, Pogrund ardently argues against comparing South Africa with the Jewish state. At the same time, he makes plain his utter disapproval of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Western leftists stand up for their comrades in Islam

Islamic State’s totalitarian ideology is clarified in Dabiq magazine and Flames of War, a documentary that justifies its genocidal barbarity using propaganda concocted by the 1960s communist Left. In socialist and Islamist propaganda, the West is portrayed as an imperialist colonial leviathan that stands between eternally oppressed minorities and the second coming of international socialism. The utopian socialists and Islamists both promise world peace — after their bloody revolutions, of course.
Reality is an enduring irritant in the smooth passage of totalitarian propaganda from its political elite to the masses. The internet has revealed the intimate violence of life in socialist and Islamist states, whose totalitarian ethos descends on the wings of a promise of peace and equality.
North Korea uses the UN to market itself as a champion of peace. Islamists claim to represent a religion of peace. Socialism is sold as the politics of peace. On December 16, as Australians mourned our first victims of Islamic State terror on home soil, the jihadist who terrorised our nation, Monis, could be found on Wikipedia’s list of peace activists, cited as an “Australian Muslim cleric, anti-war activist”. The list includes socialist Noam Chomsky, pedophilia advocate Allen Ginsberg and anarchist Emma Goldman.
In November, members of Britain’s socialist-communist party Left Unity proclaimed that the Islamic State caliphate had “progressive potential” because it opposed “Western-imposed nation-states” in the Middle East. Repeating the ignoble lie that “Western domination” gave rise to Islamic State, Left Unity socialists John Tummon and Mark Anthony France issued a diktat: “The European Left has to acknowledge and accept the widespread call for a caliphate among Muslims” as “an authentic expression of their emancipatory, anti-imperialist aspirations”. They praised the caliphate for its “strong internationalism” while heaping criticism on the West for its dedication to secularism. (h/t Alexi)

Palestine Today reports that while some 350 truckfuls of goods were scheduled to be imported into Gaza from Israel today, there is no fuel being pumped for the Gaza power plant, for the third day in a row.

This is not because of any Israeli limitations on fuel. Gasoline and cooking gas are being pumped today. It is all a question of whether there are any buyers in Gaza who are paying for it.

Hamas and the PA have been arguing for weeks over the price of fuel for the power plant. It appears that sometimes, some other nations have been paying for the fuel for Gaza.

Right now, it seems, no one is paying.

COGAT tells me that so far this year, 62,888,584 liters of fuel have been transferred from Israel to Gaza for the power plant, including 7,276,227 liters in December alone.

When the Gaza power plant does not have fuel, electricity outages reach 12 hours a day in Gaza. Israel provides 125 MW a day and Egypt another 32 MW a day.