יום שבת, 18 ביוני 2011

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

A grab-bag of links

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 01:03 PM PDT

I have too many windows open and I'm not sure who recommended all these pages, plus I don't have time to do a normal linkdump, so....

http://www.israellycool.com/2011/06/13/pro-israel-blog-off-final/ Vote!

http://www.melaniephillips.com/unscrupulous-optimists-and-the-harm-they-cause-us

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-truth-should-be-taught-about-the-1948-war-1.368167

http://www.giyus.org/2011/06/these-are-the-faces-of-the-new-anti-semitism-please-report.html

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/egyptian-judge-denies-plans-to-charge-american-israeli-accused-of-spying-1.368134

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/unrwa_protesting_too_much.html

Syrians getting shot today - last second shows two with legs blown off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVBfEohpRQ

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269836/israel-palestine-and-brthe-peace-pieties-barbara-lerner?page=3

http://freeisraelnow.blogspot.com/2011/06/genocidal-racist-arab-leader-ahmad.html

How come "peace activists" only pressure one side for peace?

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:46 AM PDT

There is a new advertising campaign in various US cities on public transit:

This organization, the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (which carefully does not disclose the names of the people behind it and launders its charitable contributions through the Illinois Justice Foundation) 

It claims that it is for "peace" and that the only way to get there is to stop US aid to Israel. This will, they say, force Israel to be more flexible in its approach to peace with Palestinian Arabs.

This is a recurring theme with so-called "peace" organizations. Their entire existence is only to pressure one side to make concessions. 

If they are so interested in peace, shouldn't they be demanding that both sides make compromises?

Has Americans for Peace Now ever called to pressure Congress to reduce aid to the PA when Abbas walked away from negotiations? 

But the problem is even worse than the bias that all these so-called "peace" organizations exhibit. The deeper problem is the absolute lack of pressure from any source demanding that Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies to make peace.

Where is the Palestinian Arab equivalent of Peace Now? Where are "Muslims for Peace" who are writing Arabic op-eds demanding "peace now"? Where's "A-Street" - the Arab equivalent of J-Street, an organization that claims that the US is coddling the PA with too much aid? Where are the leftist Arab newspapers slamming Saeb Erekat for yet more excuses to keep Palestinian Arabs in misery?  

Why do European states fund so many "pro-peace" organizations whose entire purpose is so one-sided? Why aren't they searching out and encouraging peace-minded Arabs to do equivalent pressure on the PA and Hamas that so many dozens of organizations are dedicated to doing for Israel?

The sad fact is that Arab intransigence has paid off. The very idea of pressuring the Palestinian Arab leadership to make necessary compromises for peace is  viewed as a non-starter. Years of sloganeering that "the settlements" are the "obstacle to peace" without acknowledging daily incitement, refusal to negotiate and all the other shortcomings of the PA position has resulted in a huge victory for the Arab side. Those who might try to call for pressuring the PA to negotiate with (as opposed to demand things from) Israel  in Arab countries and the PA would be putting their very lives in their hands by even bringing up the topic.

Jews, on the other hand, are endlessly willing to give, and give more, and then give even more. So it is easier to demand that they be the only side to make substantive and concrete concessions. 

This is not because Israel "holds all the cards," as the other side would claim. This exact same mindset of only pressuring one side was obvious before Israel was founded, as the British happily acceded to Arab demands about Jewish immigration and land purchasing, when the Jews held no cards whatsoever. The logic then was the same as it is now: Jews are reasonable and can compromise; Arabs are crazy and cannot be pressured without risking riots and bloodshed.

That is the real calculus of "peace." If we pressure Israel, maybe there will be peace. If we pressure Arabs, there might be bombs in our cities next month. 

It is no contest. 

So now anti-Israel organizations like this one can take advantage of this implicit Western mindset and cloak their hate in nice, liberal terms like "peace."

(The question of how reliable a local peace treaty might be when one party is widely but silently recognized as a threat to world peace is a question that no one dares to tackle.)

A new mosque in Gaza to replace the Jews

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 09:59 AM PDT

Palestinians attend Friday prayers at a new constructed mosque in the former Israeli settlement of Netzarim which was dismantled in 2005, close to Gaza city on Jun 17, 2011

Palestinian Prime Minister in Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniya delivers speech during Friday prayers at a new constructed mosque in the former Israeli settlement of Nate Sarim which was dismantled in 2005, close to Gaza city on Jun 17, 2011

There was once a beautiful synagogue in Netzarim:

Within minutes of Israel's evacuation, the Arabs burned it down and celebrated its destruction:




It looks like there is no problem finding building materials in Gaza, when the desire is there. And what greater purpose can be served in Gaza than building a brand new mosque in the place that hundreds of Jews lived a few years ago?

I haven't seen any new housing complexes built in the destroyed Jewish communities of Gaza. Mostly they have been used for terrorist training, some agriculture, and now this.

This new mosque was not built because of a pressing humanitarian need. It was built to insult Jews.

The "humanitarian aid" of "The Audacity of Hope": Letters!

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 09:07 AM PDT

Via a great article in The Telegraph, you can see a link to an interview with nutcase Alice Walker who will be on the US flotilla vessel called "The Audacity of Hope."

In the preface to that interview we find the exact contents of what the moonbat Americans and Canadians will be bringing with them to Gaza: letters from Americans to Gazans.

And from looking at the web page of US to Gaza, which is sponsoring the ship, we find out that the letters have already been emailed to Gaza for Gazans to make a public display out of them.

I'm sure that the starving Gazans will chew on the letters thoughtfully.

(h/t Israel Muse)

Palestinian Arabs celebrate even when Jews die in accidents

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 08:30 AM PDT

The horrific gas explosion in Netanya last night that claimed four lives is being covered by the Palestinian Arabic media - and the commenters are overjoyed.

From the pro-Fatah Palestine Press Agency we have "Allah is great" and "Prasie be to Allah."

At Firas Press Agency we see a person who wanted to repeat "Praise be to Allah" 9 times, plus someone who adds "Good news!" and another who called the victims "Jewish oppressors."

Egypt's Al Ahram obsessed with "spy" story

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 07:40 AM PDT

Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, which is the most popular Egyptian daily, has been obsessed with the story of Ilan Grapel.

Every day there are multiple stories with new and more bizarre accusations.

Today we have:

An analyst who tries to prove that Grapel's actions could only be explained by his being a spy, as tourists would never act the way he did. (Of course, Arabists and adventurers would act exactly the way he did.)

Another article claims that a US embassy staffer told Grapel "You are in big trouble" and that Al Ahram obtained documents that Grapel filled out requesting a renewal of residence saying he was a Muslim.

A third is a lengthy interview with a security officer giving details on how the brilliant Egyptian security team managed to track down this spy who was using his own name and freely talking to everyone without trying to hide anything.

Al Ahram confidently publishes a disclaimer of sorts at the end of one of the articles:
Pending completion of investigations

Al-Ahram will continue to publish all information and documents about the Israeli spy case, as it has been doing in recent days. The days after the conclusion of the investigation and the start of the trial will determine whether the Al-Ahram has been truthful and accurate or otherwise.
Other Egyptian papers are allowing at least a small degree of skepticism. But in poker terms, Al Ahram is "all in" and will now ensure that the most bizarre rumors will be plastered all over its pages to make sure that any possible "trial" will support its yellow journalism.

I don't know what the US is doing to get Grapel out of there, but this is a case of life and death, with Arab pride on the line. Every day that is wasted can literally be a death sentence for him. It is time to mobilize and write to the State Department to insist that this is the highest priority.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian woman in this photo with Grapel was interviewed on Egyptian TV. She revealed that Grapel told her he fought in the Lebanon war, that he studied in Tel Aviv and in the US, that his Arabic accent was Lebanese, he invited her to Israel but warned that "there was racism there."

He once told her that they will be allies one day. She asked, "Against whom?" He said "Iran." She replied, "forget it, that's impossible."

UN Watch again blasts the UN's hypocrisy

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 06:47 AM PDT

From UN Watch:



UN Watch's Hillel Neuer's speech after the usual "human rights" advocates - including Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Venezuela, and Iran - slammed Israel this week, as usual, at a UNHRC meeting in Geneva.

Mr. President,

History will record that the highest human rights body of the United Nations met today for no objective reason. Nothing in recent events, nothing in logic, nothing in human rights justifies today's debate.

Our meeting is automatic—the consequence of a decision adopted four years ago, shortly after this council was created, to keep a permanent agenda item on one country only: Israel.

History will record that at a time when citizens across the Middle East were being attacked by their own government—by rifles, tanks, and helicopters—the UN focused its scarce time and attention on a country in that region where this is not happening; the only country in the region which, despite its flaws, respects the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion; the only country in the region with free elections, an independent judiciary, and the equal treatment of women; the only country where gays are not persecuted, arrested or stoned to death, but, on the contrary, march in their own annual parade, as they did in Tel Aviv three days ago.

Mr. President, that is why the logic of this agenda item represents the opposite of human rights, and why it embodies the pathologies that so discredited this council's predecessor.

Indeed, this item is so unjust, so biased, so selective, so politicized, and so contradictory to this council's own principles of equality and universality, that it was condemned by the Secretary-General himself, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, on 20 June 2007, the day after its adoption.

And so we ask: In its recent 5-year review, despite everything happening in the Middle East, why did the Council decide to perpetuate this item, an act that will be finalized this week by the General Assembly?

Mr. President,

History will record that when citizens were being persecuted or massacred by their own governments—in Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere—the UN chose to turn a blind eye to the victims, and instead endorsed the cynicism, hypocrisy and scapegoating of the perpetrators.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Gazans protesting UNRWA, threaten to shut "Summer Games"

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 05:54 AM PDT

Protesters in Gaza are blocking people and vehicles from entering the UNRWA headquarters in Khan Younis.

They say that UNRWA has failed to rebuild their homes after Cast Lead.

Israel has been allowing building materials into Gaza for UNRWA and other approved projects since last year.

The protesters say that they might block UNRWA's "Summer Games," where hundreds of thousands of Gazan children attend free UNRWA-run summer camps.

As we mentioned before, it is a strange logic that Palestinian Arabs have - "if I don't get what I demand, then nobody gets anything."

That's a sure path to a successful state!

The Economics of Settlement (George Gilder)

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 04:50 AM PDT

A must read article at the American Spectator (thanks to all those who sent it in.) Excerpts:

The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broad consensus of the international media and the considered cerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israeli settlers in what are described as the "occupied territories" on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy put the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Remove the settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, and the problems of the region become remediable at last.

Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute adds to these political concerns a coming environmental catastrophe, also presumably aggravated by the Israeli settlers and their hydrophilic irrigation projects. He sees the Middle East as severely threatened by the growth of population and the exhaustion of water resources. The Institute explains: "Since one ton of grain represents 1,000 tons of water, [importing grain] becomes the most efficient way to import water. Last year, Iran imported 7 million tons of wheat, eclipsing Japan to become the world's leading wheat importer. This year, Egypt is also projected to move ahead of Japan. The water required to produce the grain and other foodstuffs imported into [the region] last year was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River."

Although these two concerns might seem unrelated, they converge in the history of Israel, created by several generations of settlers and constrained at every point by the dearth of water in a mostly desert land. In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of the first groups of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia, Arabs living in what became the mandate territory of Palestine -- now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza -- numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today's conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to these more earth-friendly, organic, and sustainable demographics, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.

...Many people imagine that the new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. What they did, in fact, was to continue the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted by Lowdermilk in 1939. With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and indeed faster in some, there could not possibly have been any significant displacement. The demographic numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction from the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim Rashid Khalidi, and the other divas of the naqba narrative.

By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, an increase of 60 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the creative, far-seeing cohort of pioneering Jews from Russia in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the entire history of Palestine. Only the 1948 invasion by five Arab armies -- and a desperate and courageous Israeli self-defense -- drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were evicted or urged to flee by Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor invited. But the creation of the State of Israel and its growing economy accelerated a renewed immigration into the area to today's level of some 5.5 million Arabs.

The only real Palestinian naqba came not in 1948 at the hands of Zionists, but rather in 1949, at the hands of foreign aid bureaucrats in the form of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In a desire to compensate the Palestinians for their alleged victimization by the creation of the State of Israel, the international bureaucracies perpetrated and created a genuine and permanent victimization among the 1.4 million refugees who live in UNRWA's 59 camps and the millions more who reside in the surrounding ghettoes.

...The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. No one reading the current literature could have any idea that throughout most of the three roughly 20-year economic eras following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region.

During the era of Israeli "occupation" that ran from after the war of 1967 to 1993, for example, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years. Meanwhile, the number of Israeli settlers in this area stripped of Jews by Jordan rose only to 250,000. Again, far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs.

IHH is out of the flotilla (updated)

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 03:51 AM PDT

From YNet:
The Turkey-based IHH group, considered the driving force behind the Gaza flotilla announced Friday its ship the Mavi Marmara will not be taking part in the Strip-bound sail.

IHH Chairman Bolant Yilderim called a press conference and told reporters that "due to technical problems, the Mavi Marmara will not sail this time and we are deeply sorry for that."

The international vessel convoy, which currently consists of 10 ships, will sail to Gaza nonetheless, he added, saying that the fact that the sail will be devoid of the Marmara would negate the notion that the flotilla was an "Islamist idea by Turkey."

The planned flotilla has been hit by setbacks as organizers have been finding it hard to meet their goal in regards to the number of ships participating in the sail; as well as calls from the UN and the Turkish government to cancel or postpone the planned sail.

The IHH, which organized the first Gaza flotilla, is heavily involved in the second sail, alongside the "Free Gaza" Movement" and the "European Campaign." These three are joined by several smaller groups, which are trying to stage a united international front.
No doubt, the flotilla organizers can make up for it because they claim to have 500,000 volunteers who applied to be on the ships.

UPDATE: The flotilla organizers insist that IHH is still in the flotilla, even if the Mavi Marmara is not. (h/t israelinfo)

Palestinian Arab prisoners using Facebook

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 02:48 AM PDT

From Ma'an:
Trying to show that Palestinian prisoners in Israel's custody enjoy VIP treatment, the Israeli daily Ma'ariv published Wednesday a report by Amit Cohen who monitored the Facebook accounts of some prisoners.

Ma'ariv says that a Hamas-affiliated prisoner, Haytham Battat, uploaded on his Facebook page three weeks ago a short YouTube film he entitled "Take me to Jihad." The film, according to Ma'ariv, included a song in Arabic dedicated to the Chechen rebels. A few minutes after the film was uploaded, his mother wrote a comment saying, "Oh my beloved son. This is a great song. I hope you and all prisoners will be released tomorrow morning."

The strange part of the story is that Battat updates his Facebook page from his prison cell. Battat is 27 and he is serving three consecutive life sentences after he was convicted of masterminding a bombing in Beersheba. He posted on his page photos shot inside the prison in one of which he is sitting with Sa'id Shalalda, who was convicted of abducting and killing an Israeli man, Sasson Nuriel, in 2005 near Ramallah.

Ma'ariv highlighted that Shalalda was on the list of Palestinian prisoners Israel approved to be released if a prisoner swap deal for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is to be agreed on.

Battat is not the only Palestinian prisoner who updates his Facebook page from his prison cell. Ma'ariv's report says many prisoners have state-of-the-art cell phones which help them access the Internet easily and even make video calls.

Another Palestinian prisoner, Saed Omar, posted on his Facebook page several photos of the lavish meals he and other prisoners are served, the paper reported. Omar is from the Nablus district, and he is affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He is serving a 19-year sentence. He was said to have posted photos of prisoners preparing stuffed chickens before they gathered around a luxurious table to eat their meal.

"I would rather die with my weapon in my hand than the stay alive with my weapon in my enemy's hand," Omar was quoted as saying on Facebook.

After Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was detained in Gaza, the issue of living conditions of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails surfaced as an issue, with hardliners advocating the abolition of prisoners rights. There were attempts to toughen prison conditions.
Ma'ariv's article also mentions the prisoners doing on-line shopping (picking out clothing and having their families deliver it).

This was originally written about in Al Arabiya a couple of weeks ago. I cannot find the article now but the price for smuggled cellphones was pretty high - if I recall, about 20,000 shekels. Ma'ariv reports that the prisoners say that prison administrators turn a blind eye to the cell phone use as long as the prisoners are behaving and not using the phones to violate security. The Israel Prisons Service denied that.

(h/t Joel)
פורסם על ידי zoom ב- 0:04

אין תגובות:

הוסף רשומת תגובה

הירשם ל- תגובות לפרסום (Atom)