יום שבת, 7 במאי 2011

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Weekend links

Posted: 06 May 2011 02:14 PM PDT

OK, time to post all the stuff that's been accumulating...

Melanie Philips' open letter to David Cameron

CiFWatch: Cowardly in Qatar (I had hoped to blog about this from the perspective of how the Guardian lied about the Palestine Papers, but didn't have time)

Ahmadinejad allies charged with - sorcery!

Just Journalism on media responses to praise for OBL

Mallorca condemns the killing of Marranos - in 1691.

Washington Institute on the Muslim Brotherhood

Did Mosab Youssef, the Hamas "defector" who converted to Christianity, dupe all of us?

Corrupting sports in Gaza

The Tony Kushner saga here and here.

Hypocrisy in Norway on Yassin and OBL

Intel Israel will manufacture the latest high-speed microprocessor that BDS opponents will not boycott

Daphne Anson on Norway's attempt to ban Brit Milah (if I translate it, all the anti-brit Googlers will descend here and take over the comment section.) Suffice it to say that they still aren't interested in banning child ear mutilation - because making a baby look cute with earrings is more important than a major religious obligation.

(h/t O., Joel, Silke, Zvi, and others I missed, sorry)

Kuwaiti woman fantasizes about being Mrs. Bin Laden

Posted: 06 May 2011 10:08 AM PDT

Islamist soft-core porn, translated by MEMRI.
In her May 4, 2011 column in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas, Khuloud 'Abdallah Al-Khamis described how she had always dreamed of being the wife of Osama bin Laden.

Following are excerpts from her column: 

"What would life be like at his side? How frequently I ask that question of [my reflection] in the mirror, as I imagine him and imagine that my smile is for him alone.

"When a woman claims that she beautifies herself for herself alone, she is lying, because behind every mirror is the shadow of the man to whom she dreams of giving all the beauty in the world when she appears in front of him. Osama [bin Laden] was that shadow behind my mirror; [in my mind] he would arrive at dawn, secretly, from Tora Bora, covering great distances to be with a woman who dreamed of him as her husband."

"So many times, my heart has tempted me to go towards his cave and to take the empty seat among the wives of the Caliph [i.e. bin Laden] – and when my night would arrive, I would get to wash his awe-inspiring beard, dirtied by the dust through which he crawled all night long. Is it conceivable that a jihad fighter's bed would be a bed of down and brocade velvet?

"I dreamed of being Osama's companion there, where the utmost danger lurks, so I could clasp his galabiya, stained with the blood of martyrdom, to my bosom, so I could be his companion as he [counted] the burdensome seconds, waiting to join the convoy of [his martyred] comrades and friends...

"Osama, the knight who dismounted from the horse of worldly pleasure, donned a [cleric's] turban, gripped a Kalashnikov, and entered the tunnel from which there is no return. From there I saw his stature reach to the heavens, as he recruited the knights in response to the voices of the women of Islam, whose honor has been violated and whose strength is gone, and who cry out [to him], 'Osama!'...

"How would life be with a husband who does not weaken at the sight of a woman's tears? What would a day be like in the life of an ordinary woman married to a man who never strays from the straight path and always receives God's grace, a man with no [fixed] schedule of coming and going, sitting and standing, eating lunch or dinner, when his wife never knows how long he will stay?

"What is morning like with a man who never sleeps? How could she threaten to leave him when he does not fear this? How could she seek pleasure in his arms him when pleasure is not in his vocabulary?

"How can a woman wish on herself a husband who never knows fear, never grows bored, never tires, and loves none but Allah? What weak spot would she [exploit], since he cannot be tempted? How could I be Osama's wife and pluck the strings of his desire for me.... when he desires only the virgins [of Paradise] – to whom mortal women can never measure up? Why does he stay with any woman when he has already divorced this world?

"Can we understand Osama like we understand [other] men? Or perhaps he has overturned the meaning of masculinity, so that after him, [all] men are but hollow bodies, and our definition of 'men' is changed so that it is no longer what it was before him?"

"[Here] in the dust of males who leave no impression, I had forgotten how a woman's soul yearns only for a man of steady loyalty [and] belief, a victor, a knight who dismounts only for something loftier. [I had forgotten] how a woman's soul, with all its guile and seductiveness, dreams of a man who will never be affected by her character, who will take her under the [shelter] of his rib, whence she was first created... of his mercies.

"Thank you [Osama], for making me dream of you as a husband. I tell you that we shall follow your will and testament, but seated as a strong base [Arabic pun on Al Qaeda] – because where we find the will to stand after you have gone?

"Oh, Osama... even if I did not have the honor of belonging to your family in this world, I promise I that will see you there [in the next world]...

"Farewell, dream husband for whom I wait."
Can the Arabic romance novels be far behind?
Apologies for the truly crappy Photoshop

Latest Latma (5/5/11)

Posted: 06 May 2011 09:44 AM PDT

UK "Palestine" Embassy website wipes Israel off the map

Posted: 06 May 2011 08:57 AM PDT

From the Palestine Embassy UK website:

This is an interactive map where you can zoom in on different districts in "Palestine" - which as in Israel.

But I thought that the PLO recognized Israel! I guess it was just another semantic game.

Hilariously, here is the link to get to this page:
The photo shown is from the city of Palestine, Illinois!

I suppose that one cannot blame the Palestinian Arabs for not knowing the history of their country. It is tough to keep track of the history of something that never existed.

(h/t JSS)

Outrageous: UK Methodist Church document to delegitimize Israel

Posted: 06 May 2011 08:03 AM PDT

A background document released by the Methodist Church of the UK is meant to instruct its readers on "Jewish and Muslim Perspectives on the Land of Israel-Palestine" - and, inter alia, to show how to argue with the Jewish claims for a homeland.

First, it looks at covenantal, Biblical claims:
In the Jewish tradition, robust debate is possible about texts and their meaning. In the rabbinical tradition, every word of a text can be challenged. Multiple meanings are sometimes accepted. In connection with attitudes to the 'land' of Israel, some Jews are also aware that holy texts can be abused. 'We have a battle for our holy texts' declared Rabbi David Rosen, of Rabbis for Human Rights in Jerusalem, at a session on theologies of the 'Land' at the Parliament of World's Religions in Barcelona in 2004.

For example, Jews who seek justice for all - Jews and Palestinians - will draw strength from the Covenant with Noah in Genesis (Genesis 9: 8 - 17). It is a Covenant which makes no distinction between nations or races. Other Jewish groups look to 'later' Covenants, which can be interpreted more exclusively. This intrareligious dialogue within Judaism must not be overlooked.
Anyone with a modicum of understanding about Judaism knows about rabbinic arguments on interpretation of verses.

They also know that such arguments have specific rules and boundaries, as would be the source texts of any legal system. To facilely declare that God's promise to all of mankind not to destroy the world with a flood is somehow more relevant to Israel than specific Biblical promises to the Patriarchs and the children of Israel is more than absurd - especially coming from an organization that should be somewhat familiar with the Bible.

But this is far from the most offensive part of the document.

Anti-Semitism in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, is another factor that cannot
be overlooked if Christians are to understand Jewish perspectives on the land of Israel. 'Israel is the only real answer to the Holocaust' is the message given at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Centre in west Jerusalem. Its location (on Mount Herzl, a hill which is home both to the tomb of the founding father of the Zionist Movement and the central military cemetery for members of the Israeli Defence Force) and its symbolic layout undergirds this message. A pilgrimage through the exhibition rooms of the Centre, which bring home both the horror of the Holocaust and the vigour of Jewish resistance, brings you out in the open air, overlooking the beauty of Jerusalem. This perspective is transmitted to young Israelis through visits to Yad Vashem organised by schools and other groups. When I visited the Centre with a group from Britain, I noticed that many visitors were not of European Jewish descent. As Michael Ipgrave, then Secretary of the Churches' Commission for Inter Faith Relations, wrote in his report of the visit: 'The Holocaust has come to serve as a national story embracing also Oriental Jews for whom this was not part of their family history.' Peace groups in Israel have to work against this backdrop.

...It is salutary and necessary for Europeans, and particularly Christians, to realise that they are implicated in this narrative.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center slammed this in the Huffington Post:

One of its authors chastises Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's Holocaust museum: "'Israel is the only real answer to the Holocaust' is the message ... This perspective is transmitted to young Israelis through visits to Yad Vashem organised by schools and other groups. When I visited the Centre ... I noticed that many visitors were not of European Jewish descent. As Michael Ipgrave, then Secretary of the Churches' Commission for Inter Faith Relations, wrote in his report of the visit: 'The Holocaust has come to serve as a national story embracing also Oriental Jews for whom this was not part of their family history.' Peace groups in Israel have to work against this backdrop."

Want peace? Decouple Israel from the Holocaust. Curiously, the Methodists' narrative goes beyond Palestinian chutzpah, whose historic revisionism ignores three millennia of continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land, and insists that the Allies manufactured the State of Israel to provide a home for survivors of the WWII Holocaust that these Methodists now want Jews to forget.

Want peace? Forget the collective memory of losing a third of your people, including 1.5 million children. For it's the "collective memory of the Holocaust [that] also feeds into an ethos of victimhood." Israelis should also turn the other cheek when rockets rain down on their children's school buses; turn a deaf ear when Palestinian imams promise the faithful a day when the rocks will call out to kill the Jews hiding behind them; turn a blind eye when the "moderate" Palestine Authority names streets for martyrs who murdered Israeli civilians; when one third of that same "moderate" population supports the savage butchering of a sleeping Israeli family in Itamar, including the all-but beheading of a 3-month-old baby.

Forget collective memory. For these religious leaders, only selective memory will set you free:

Take their reference to "Oriental" -- meaning Sephardic -- Jews. These experts must have forgotten the Sephardic Jews of Greece, 87 percent of whom were murdered by the Nazis. Never mind the Jews of the Maghreb were on Hitler's hit-list. These leaders also remembered to forget that it was Christian countries who slammed their gates shut before desperate European Jews, and that millions could have been saved had there been a State of Israel in the 1930s and 40s.
A couple of points beyond what Cooper said specifically about the Sephardim.

One is that there was a massacre of Jews in Iraq - the Farhud - during the Holocaust that was inspired by the infamous, Nazi sympathizing Mufti of Jerusalem. Here is a direct link between Arab anti-semitism and the Holocaust for Sephardic Jews.

But in a broader sense, the outrage that the Methodists feel about how Sephardic Jews are being taught about the Holocaust betrays their own anti-semitism. By mentioning it, the authors indicate that they do not believe that the Jewish people are a nation - the Sephardim, to them, have nothing in common with Jews who lived in some European countries. It is beyond their comprehension that Sephardim might actually care about their fellow Jews on their own, without being indoctrinated by the Zionists!

Even more so, they warn that Israel's Holocaust "narrative" is a direct challenge to them, as it implicates European Christians for standing by and letting millions of Jews get slaughtered. Which just happens to be true.

The point, of course, was to give the Methodists ammunition to argue against both Biblical and Holocaust arguments to justify a Jewish state.

Moreover, their recounting of Muslim narratives shows no skepticism. For example, it quotes the Koran as saying that Mohammed's night journey was to Jerusalem - even though the location of that journey is in a hadith, not the Koran.

This is a sickening document, and one that needs to be exposed.

UPDATE: The document was taken down...so you can find it here.

Why American Jews should not be embarrassed by Israel (Hazony)

Posted: 06 May 2011 07:14 AM PDT

From The Forward, by David Hazony:
Whenever I visit the United States, I spend a lot of time with people who strongly support Israel. But I'm always stunned by how poorly they understand the country. They talk about terrorism, Bibi and Tzipi, or the latest ex-general they met at a fundraising dinner. But when it comes to culture and daily life, they draw a blank. For all their cosmopolitanism, they know little or no Hebrew — cutting themselves off from the most vibrant Jewish experiences happening today.

Israel is not a football team that you can follow when you have time, ignore when you don't and always root for. It's a whole country, a whole world. It has its own literature, music, sports, films, reality shows and TV dramas and documentaries, many of which would make American Jews fill with pride, angst, laughter or criticism if they only knew about them. And yes, Israel has war and politics and existential threats. But to focus exclusively on these is never to understand what it's like to be Israeli.

Israel has been through hell, and this experience informs its wisdom. Like any other country, it has its successes and failures. But its imperfections should not be a "source of embarrassment" for American Jews, who, after all, have their own grievous failings, as well.
Read the whole thing.

"Moderate" Hamas leader: Muslims are human, Jews aren't

Posted: 06 May 2011 06:12 AM PDT

Ma'an reports that Khaled Meshal, the "political" leader of Hamas based in Damascus who many are now arguing must be embraced by Israel, has condemned how the US killed Osama Bin Laden:
Khalid Mash'al, head of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, on Thursday criticized the method used by US special forces to kill Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his "burial at sea."

Mash'al called on the West to "recognize the atrocity of the American raid and the burial of (bin Laden's body) at sea," in remarks to AFP in the Egyptian capital.

"Arabs and Muslims are human beings and the West should treat them as such, regardless of whether they are partisans or opponents of Osama bin Laden."
According to Meshal, Bin Laden - despite any faults he might have had - was, above all, a human being and must be treated as such.

Compare this with how he characterized a the terror ambush last September that murdered four Jewish civilians, including a pregnant woman:

On the first day these negotiations were announced, Hamas fighters killed four people in Hebron. Were you trying to send a message?

No. This was not based on giving a message against the negotiations. It was expressing a reality. There is an illegal occupation and there are illegal settlements. And the Israeli soldiers and the Israeli settlers who are armed are attacking Palestinians. [They are] attacking Palestinian people, the olive trees, the children, the women. Therefore the Palestinians have the right to defend themselves. Not every resistance action is connected to the negotiations. This is connected to reality. It's very clear, not every resistance is sending a message.
Apparently, Osama Bin Laden deserves to be treated with respect because he was a Muslim and Muslims are human beings. Killing him was an "atrocity."

Jews who want to live in the land of their ancestors, however, deserve to be brutally murdered. That's just reality.

I guess he doesn't consider them human beings.

Poor Madonna: Kabbalah Center under tax probe

Posted: 06 May 2011 05:25 AM PDT

From the LA Times:
The Kabbalah Centre, the Los Angeles-based spiritual organization that mingles ancient Jewish mysticism with the glamour of its celebrity devotees, is the focus of a federal tax evasion investigation probing, among other things, the finances of two charities connected to Madonna, the center's most famous adherent.

Sources familiar with the investigation said the criminal division of the IRS is looking into whether nonprofit funds were used for the personal enrichment of the Berg family, which has controlled the Kabbalah Centre for more than four decades, a period in which it expanded from one school of a little-known strain of Judaism to a global brand with A-list followers like Ashton Kutcher and Gwyneth Paltrow and assets that may top $260 million.

Among the items that investigators have reviewed, according to one source, is an August 2010 email in which a former chief financial officer of the center complained that he had been fired for pointing out financial improprieties and warned that the center was in danger of "committing suicide."

"I recently uncovered instances of income tax fraud at the Kabbalah Centre — instances which could bankrupt several of the directors involved … this is very serious business," the former CFO, Nicholas Vakkur, wrote in an email that circulated among high-level officials at the center. "I have little choice but to cooperate with the IRS and bring down the entire Kabbalah Centre," Vakkur wrote, adding a plea that "someone in authority" try to "reason" with center Chief Executive Karen Berg.
The EoZ archives has a 2005 article from the BBC about the Kabbalah Center that was even more damning.

A bit of nonsense in a NYT op-ed

Posted: 06 May 2011 04:00 AM PDT

The New York Times' jihad to mainstream Hamas continues today, with an op-ed by Nathan Thrall called "Hurting Moderates, Helping Militants." Guess who the "moderates" are?

In Gaza, the number of Salafi jihadis — austere militants willing to kill those they don't consider true Muslims — has grown significantly since 2006. Many of them are former Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters who see Hamas as caving to Israel while getting only blockades, closed border crossings and military incursions in return.

Five years of isolation have not dislodged Hamas, revived the peace process, strengthened Fatah or ensured Israel's security. Most of the Gaza Strip's imports now pass largely unimpeded through tunnels that are wide enough to carry cattle, cars, anti-tank missiles and foreign radicals.

Nor has isolating Hamas persuaded most Palestinians to embrace the alternative model in the West Bank, where undemocratic practices remain common, local leaders lack popular legitimacy, and tight security coordination with Israel is routinely denounced.

Instead, blockading Gaza and isolating Hamas have given rhetorical strength to militants who argue that the Islamist movement has erred by holding its fire against Israel and failing to impose Islamic law. As a result, Hamas is slowly losing members to more radical groups.

On Monday, Hamas self-defeatingly sought to bolster its flagging Islamist credentials by mourning the death of Osama bin Laden and praising him as an Arab holy warrior ...

Here's Thrall's bizarre train of thought: Hamas is losing members to more-extreme Salafist groups because it is viewed as not being radical enough by some.

So, according to Thrall, Israel must embrace Hamas, which would moderate its views to accommodate Israel's new friendship.

But according to his own words, this would make more radicals leave the group and strengthen the Salafists because they would look at Hamas as selling out!

On the one hand he is claiming that extreme radical Islamists are pushed there by the relative moderation of slightly less extreme radical Islamists. On the other hand he claims that by Israel embracing the slightly less extreme radical Islamists they will moderate and make peace with - which will again push their members towards extremism!

Thrall also fails to explain why (as he admits) even Islamic Jihad is losing members to the Salafist groups - when Islamic Jihad has not moderated one bit.

Not to mention his equally nonsensical assertion that the entire reason Hamas condemned Bin Laden's death was not because of its clear ideological affinity to Al Qaeda, but as a way to restore street cred among the Salafists.

This is, again, a willful blindness on the part of people who are so wed to the idea that peace with Hamas must be possible that logic and facts go out the window just to prove the unprovable. People to whom the "peace process" is a religion cannot lose their faith, so they must spin more and more crazy theories just to shore up their "flat Earth"-style beliefs.

Sorry. The earth is round, Obama was born in Hawaii, 9/11 wasn't an inside job and real peace between Israel and Islamic movements like Hamas is impossible. Hamas and other Islamist movements must be defeated, not embraced. While victory is difficult, as in any war, it is imperative.

Anyone who claims otherwise is simply ignoring reality and discarding facts for half-baked beliefs.

(h/t David G)
פורסם על ידי zoom ב- 0:05

אין תגובות:

הוסף רשומת תגובה

הירשם ל- תגובות לפרסום (Atom)