Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest |
| Hello Kitty says hello to Israel; BDSers unhappy Posted: 25 Jun 2011 11:36 PM PDT  Hello Kitty announced earlier this year that they will open a chain of new stores in Israel. As reported in YNet in February:While listening to what Hello Kitty officials have to say about the reasons for their decision to expand the brand's activity in Israel in the coming year, one might want to consider appointing them as economic attachés in one of Israel's embassies. The company managers insist that Israel is an overwhelming financial success story. This is making the usual crowd of Israel haters very upset as can be seen in this letter written to the company at "Palestine Campaign." Dear Shintaro Tsuji,(Of course, Resolution 242 does not say that; it implies that Israel would continue to hold onto parts of the area.) The campaign does not seem to have worked. From YNet on Saturday: The Hello Kitty brand is launching a chain of 18 stores in Israel at an initial investment of $2-3 million.Another BDS fail. (h/t Sophie, see also Blogwrath.) 
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| The human rights community shows its hypocrisy on Shalit Posted: 25 Jun 2011 07:50 PM PDT I mentioned Friday that there was a joint press release from eight human rights groups regarding Gilad Shalit. Noah Pollak at Commentary noted: If a better example of the utter moral collapse of the human rights community exists, it would be hard to find. The statement is one of passionless brevity — just a few sentences long — and expresses no opinion on the standing of Hamas, or on its 2006 raid into Israel, or on the legitimacy of its goals and methods. Remarkably, it doesn't even demand the release of Gilad Shalit. The most that this allegedly courageous and principled human rights community could bring itself to say to the terrorists of Hamas is that they should improve the conditions of Shalit's imprisonment.Pollak's criticism is slightly unfair, but only slightly. Let's first look at the actual press release: Human beings are not bargaining chips In a separate press release,B'Tselem explicitly calls for Shalit's release: Shalit is considered a hostage due to the circumstances of his abduction and the manner in which he is being held. International humanitarian law absolutely forbids the taking and holding of a person by force for the purpose of pressuring the adversary to comply with certain demands, while threatening to harm the person if the demands are not met. The taking of hostages is considered a war crime, for which all those involved bear personal criminal liability.But Amnesty does not: Amnesty International is asking activists around the world to sign our petition to Isma'il Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Hamas de facto administration in Gaza, urging him to alleviate the suffering of Gilad Shalit and his family by immediately complying with its obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that he is well treated, held in humane and dignified living conditions, and to allow him to communicate with his family, including through sending and receiving letters. Treating Gilad Shalit as a hostage is a flagrant violations of these obligations as Amnesty International stressed again today together with Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights NGOs.This means that Amnesty is considering Shalit a prisoner of war, not a hostage, even though he was captured on the Israeli side of the Gaza fence and the entire operation was meant to capture hostages. Amnesty, amazingly, ignores these facts and merely calls for Hamas to treat him humanely. HRW is equally bad. This year they merely reproduced the joint press release, but even last year they did not call for Shalit's release: Hamas authorities in Gaza should immediately end the cruel and inhuman treatment of Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit of Israel and allow him to communicate with his family and receive visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Human Rights Watch said today. June 25, 2010 is the fourth anniversary of his captivity. Interestingly, they did call for his unconditional release immediately after he was abducted. One can only wonder why they have dropped that demand in the years since. B'Tselem is not blameless either. In its press release about the joint declaration, takes pains to note that [L]eading Israeli, Palestinian and International Human Rights organizations issued a joint statement demanding that those holding him must immediately end his inhumane and illegal treatment.It is obvious that B'Tselem was the driving force behind this declaration. It is equally obvious that they tried really hard to get PCHR, the lone Palestinian Arab "human rights" group, to sign on, and they noted to AFP that the declaration was also issued in Arabic. However, the PCHR website is silent about this declaration! What good is the Arabic translation of the message when even its sole Arab participant refuses to admit of its participation in its own website? Thus we can see the incredible hypocrisy of the so-called "human rights" community. By refusing to demand Shalit's immediate and unconditional release, they are winking at Hamas' abduction of Israelis as hostages and encouraging more such raids. It is a travesty of everything they pretend to stand for. 
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