| Is a new intifada being planned? (Toameh) Posted: 12 Aug 2011 12:50 PM PDT From Khaled Abu Toameh in Hudson-NY: It is still not clear if the Palestinian Authority leadership will proceed with its plan to ask the UN in September to recognize a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines.
But what is clear is that the Palestinian Authority leaders have recently been talking about the need to escalate "popular protests" against Israel.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who says he is opposed to an armed struggle mainly because it would be counterproductive and inefficient, has repeatedly voiced his full support for a "popular intifada" in the West Bank.
Abbas would like to see more Palestinians joining weekly demonstrations against settlements and the security barrier. He and other Palestinians have expressed disappointment over the fact that the number of foreigners and Israeli Jews participating in the protests is higher than the number of Palestinians.
Palestinian Authority representatives would like to see the Palestinian masses march on Israeli military checkpoints and settlements after September, regardless of whether the statehood bid at the UN succeeds or not.
If the UN does vote in favor of the Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority is hoping that tens of thousands of Palestinians would take to the streets to "celebrate" independence and demand a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines in compliance with the new resolution.
And if the statehood bid fails for any reason, including a possible US veto, the Palestinian Authority still wants Palestinians to take to the streets to protest against the Americans and Israel.
Under both scenarios, clashes will erupt between Palestinians and the Israel Defense Force at checkpoints and entrances to settlements.
The "popular intifada" that the Palestinian Authority is seeking would then quickly deteriorate into an all-out confrontation similar to the one that erupted in September 2000.
A popular uprising means that Palestinians would also be throwing stones and firebombs at soldiers and settlers. It means that Palestinians could get killed if the lives of soldiers or settlers are in danger.
The road from there to the resumption of Palestinian terror attacks is very short. Fatah still has many militiamen who are ready to open fire "to defend Palestinians against Israeli aggression." The Palestinian security forces could also join the fight against Israel once things get out of control.
Then there is Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which is saying that only the armed struggle, and not the UN, will bring the Palestinians a state. Hamas has even mocked at the Palestinian Authority's talk about a peaceful and unarmed intifada against Israel.
In any case, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas will blame Israel and the US for the next cycle of violence, as they have always done in the past. Israel will be blamed for refusing to accept all Palestinian demands, especially the territorial ones. The US, on the other hand, will be blamed for siding with Israel and thwarting Palestinian efforts to achieve a state.
The only way to avoid such grim scenarios is by making clear to the Palestinian Authority that its statehood bid, which does not even seem to enjoy the support of many Palestinians for various reasons, could plunge the region into a new round of violence and bloodshed. The Palestinian Authority needs to understand that it is taking a big gamble by embarking on this adventure.
A new intifada will not only harm Israel, but also the Palestinian Authority and its leaders. The second intifada, which erupted in 2000, undermined the Palestinian Authority and resulted in the destruction of most of its institutions and security forces. The Palestinian Authority could now be digging its own grave by encouraging Palestinians to launch a new intifada. That is the key point - the unilateral declaration of a state is a recipe for bloodshed. Toameh's scenario is not fanciful in the least. The blindness of the Westerners who cannot grasp this is maddening. 
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| Arabic media discovers old Irgun posters showing Jordan in Eretz Yisroel Posted: 12 Aug 2011 11:44 AM PDT Firas Press has an expose of how pre-state right-wing Zionists were upset with the first partition of Palestine that carved out Transjordan, and considered the entire area to be Eretz Yisrael:  | | 1935 poster |  | The walls of the Old City are not the borders of Jerusalem
The Jordan is not the border of our land
The sea is not the border of our people
The Herut Party
(1948 poster) |
Then, the article shows some later posters where the expansionist Zionists are no longer demanding Jordan to be part of Israel - they want to give it to Palestinian Arabs:
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| Gas pipeline between Iran and Turkey blown up, for second time Posted: 12 Aug 2011 10:38 AM PDT From RTT July 29: The supply of natural gas from Iran to Turkey has been disrupted after an explosion damaged a section of the gas pipeline between the two countries, Iranian media said quoting officials on Friday. From Fox News, today: Turkey says an explosion at a pipeline has temporarily cut natural gas supplies from Iran.
The governor's office for Agri province, where the explosion occurred late Thursday, says Kurdish rebels are suspected of sabotaging the pipeline. The gas flow was immediately cut and no one was hurt in the explosion. Looks like this is the new soft target of choice. 
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| The Paris Muslims who saved Jews from the Nazis Posted: 12 Aug 2011 09:20 AM PDT From Missing Pages: Stories from World War II:  | | Si Kaddour Benghabrit | In Paris, a grand mosque built in honour of the 100,000 Muslim soldiers who died fighting for France in the First World War, became a sanctuary for Jews escaping persecution less than three decades later. Si Kaddour Benghabrit was a French Algerian who was deeply loyal to France. During World War I, he was appointed honourary consul-general and served the religious needs of Muslims in the French army. After the war came to an end, he worked in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1920, when the parliament decided to acknowledge his loyalty by asking him to establish a mosque in Paris. Six years later, the Great Mosque of Paris became a reality and Benghabrit was appointed its rector.
When war broke out in Europe again, and Jewish lives were in danger, Benghabrit used the mosque as a hiding place, issuing each person with a fake certificate of Muslim identity. One North African Jew named Albert Assouline who had escaped from a German prison camp, wrote of his experience hiding in the mosque, "No fewer than 1,732 resistance fighters found refuge in its underground caverns. These included Muslim escapees but also Christians and Jews. The latter were by far the most numerous." Accounts differ on the number of those saved, yet it remains a shining story of human solidarity.
In tracing the story down it seems that the main witness was Assouline. As described by the American Council for Judaism in a book review of Robert Satloff's Among the Righteous: According to Assouline, he and an Algerian named Yassa Rabah escaped together from the camp and stealthily traversed the countryside across the French-German border, heading for Paris. Once in Paris they made their way to the mosque, where, evidently thanks to Rabah's connections to the Algerian community, the two found refuge. Eventually Assouline continued his journey and joined up with Free French forces to continue the fight against the German occupation ... the most fantastic part of the story was his claim that the mosque provided sanctuary and sustenance to Jews hiding from the Vichy and German troops as well as to other fighters in the anti-Fascist resistance.
In a 1983 article for Almanach due Combattant, a French veterans' magazine, Assouline wrote [that] the senior imam of the mosque, Si Mohammed Benzouaou took "considerable risk" by hiding Jews and providing many (including many children) with certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could avoid deportation and certain death. Assouline recalled one "hot alert" when German soldiers smelled the odor of cigarettes and, convinced that Muslims were forbidden to smoke, searched the mosque looking for hidden Jews. According to Assouline, the Jews were able to escape via sewer tunnels that connected the mosque to nearby buildings.
In Satloff's view, "Assouline's stunning story described the mosque as a virtual Grand Central Station for the Underground Railroad of Jews in France...."
Derri Berkani, a French documentary film-maker, of Algerian berber origin, was so moved by the untold story of the mosque that he made the 1991 film "Une Resistance Oubliee: La Mosque de Paris" (The Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris). ...
Berkani adds many previously unknown details: that Benghabrit had a special button installed that he would push to trigger a warning alarm in the event of a police raid and that, in emergencies, Jews would huddle in the mosque's main sanctuary, which was known to be off-limits to non-Muslims, including German soldiers. In addition, Berkani provides the testimony of a physician in the municipal department of public hygiene, a man named Ahmed Somia, who tells the story of a young Jewish orphan, 7 or 8 years old, whom Benghabrit hid in the safety of his home. "Si Kaddour felt that we had to do something for this child," he said. The solution was to provide the boy with a false birth certificate from the mosque that certified him as a Muslim and allowed him to live openly.
Another case is that of Salim (Simon) Halali, a world-renowned singer, who died in Cannes, France in 2005. Born in 1920 to a poor Jewish family in Annaba, near the Algerian-Tunisian border, he made his way to France when he was just 14. It was not long before Halali became France's most celebrated "oriental" singer. For the next 40 years, he was a fixture of Andalusian music. It seems that he owed his success, and his life, to the mosque of Paris.
Virtually every obituary of Halali, on both sides of the Mediterranean, told the same story: Halali escaped certain deportation and death thanks to the generosity and ingenuity of Benghabrit. French writer Nidam Abdi explained in the Paris newspaper Liberation that the 20-year-old Halali found himself all alone in 1940 after his closest friend joined Radio Berlin, the Nazis' premier propaganda organ. When Vichy started its pursuit of Jews, Halali turned to the mosque for help. Benghabrit, who had been a fan of Halali's, evidently provided him with a certificate of Muslim identity. But because Halali was such a public figure, Benghabrit had to go one step further. To lend credibility to Halali's claim of Muslim roots, Benghabrit arranged to have the name of Halali's grandfather engraved on an abandoned tomb in the Muslim cemetery on Bobigny.
"For a certain number of Jews living in France — it is impossible to know how many — passing as Muslim was a clever ploy to avoid confiscation, arrest or deportation," writes Satloff. "This was a particularly useful ploy for Jewish men, since Muslims, like Jews, are circumcised, often the defining test of Jewishness under Vichy rule."
Satloff met in Paris with Dalil Boubakeur, the current rector of the Paris mosque and president of the governing body of all French Muslims, the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman (CFCM).
When asked about the mosque's role during World War II, he said that the reports of Jews being saved were true: "The mosque represented the sensibilities of the Muslims of North Africa toward their Jewish brothers. It was a natural phenomenon. ... What happened then (in the 1940s) was very symbolic but exemplary."
Boubakeur noted that, "It is true that the mosque provided certificates of Muslim identity to some Jews. This was possible because, especially for North African Jews, the names are very close." The motive, he said, was selfless, to enable Jews to avoid persecution by providing an acceptable rationale for their circumcision. The opportunity took advantage of a "double game" that, he said, characterized the complex relationship between the German occupation authorities and the Muslim community of Paris.
"The Germans were always pressing the mosque, trying to impose themselves on the mosque to use it for propaganda among Muslims," he said. "They always wanted to have visitors here; at one point, we feared that Hitler himself would make a visit. We tried to resist but it wasn't always possible." Asked by Satloff if it was not courageous for the mosque to risk its status by helping Jews, Boubakeur replied: "Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely, it was courageous. It was very courageous. Courageous and natural at the same time."
Boubakeur showed Satloff a copy of a document from the French Archives. Dated Sept. 24, 1940, the document was a note to the French minister of foreign affairs from the deputy director of the ministry's Political Department. In it the writer — a bureaucrat identified by the initials "P.H." — informed his superior about a certain peculiar action taken by the German authorities in Paris. The brief, typewritten note read as follows: "The occupation authorities suspect the personnel of the Mosque of Paris of fraudulently delivering to individuals of the Jewish race certificates attesting that the interested persons are of the Muslim confession. The imam was summoned, in a threatening manner, to put an end to all such practices. It seems, in effect, that a number of Jews resorted to all sorts of maneuvers of this kind to conceal their identity."
Far from downplaying the role played by the mosque of Paris in rescuing Jews, Satloff points out that its Web site not only includes praise for the "active role" the mosque played during the war "in saving Jews and resistance fighters," but there is also reference to "the late friend of the mosque, Abraham Assouline, (who) advanced the figure of 1,700 persons." This is a story of heroes that needs to be publicized. A children's book was written about this episode, and a short film dramatizing it can be seen here. (h/t Abdullah305 via Twitter) UPDATE: Bataween at Point of No Return has more details. 
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| Abu Sisi reveals Hamas uses mosques for military training Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:30 AM PDT Yesterday, Yediot Aharonot revealed that Abu Sisi, the Gaza engineer who was kidnapped in the Ukraine, has revealed to investigators a treasure trove of facts about Hamas. Some of the revelations: The engineer told interrogators that following Operation Cast Lead Gaza, top Hamas terrorist Mohammed Deif and the group's military wing commander Ahmed Jabari found Hamas' operations to be lacking and decided to make Abu Sisi in charge of establishing the organization's new military academy.
"An analysis of the war with Israel was undertaken. It found that a large number of Hamas activists ran away from their positions. A failure occurred in decision-making coupled with an inability to use arms during the battle – because of fear," he said. "A program of study had to be created, in order to improve the situation."
The new academy was tasked with imparting combat methods and tactics to Hamas terrorists, Abu Sisi said. Hamas men were undertaking their studies at mosques, while passing their final exams in known Gaza universities or in mosques.
"The books and academic materials did not bear the Hamas name or logo," he said. Instructors include university lecturers, education ministry officials, merchants and others.
"I assisted Hamas in developing their missile capabilities, by identifying and handing over mathematical equations that improve the metal pipe's ability to withstand pressure and heat," he said. "I was present when a missile was test-fired at the sea in Khan Younis." Someone should tell Goldstone that Hamas doesn't seem to distinguish between its military its "civilian" wings. While the information published is very valuable, the impression that the IDF gave initially was that Abu Sisi was much more important than what we are seeing here. It is unclear whether there is a lot more, far more important information that has not been released. Even so, the characterization of him as being only involved with Gaza's electrical plant has been shown to be false. 
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| State Department funds MEMRI to investigate Arab anti-semitism Posted: 12 Aug 2011 07:40 AM PDT From Israel HaYom: The U.S. State Department has awarded a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute to conduct a project that documents anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East. The grant was awarded by the Office of International Religious Freedom, part of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
"The grant will enable MEMRI to expand its efforts to monitor the media, translate materials into 10 languages, analyze trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and glorification, and increase distribution of materials through its website and other outlets," the State Department said in a statement released Thursday.
Through translations and research, MEMRI aims to inform and educate journalists, government leaders, academia and the general public about trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East and South Asia, generating awareness and response to these issues. MEMRI is a non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C. Its research is translated into 10 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew. I cannot wait to see the outraged reaction from the many MEMRI critics who get so upset that the organization shines a light on the hate that can be found in the Arabic and Persian media. 
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| Latest Latma Posted: 12 Aug 2011 06:50 AM PDT |
| Hundreds of millions of American aid - to Hamas Posted: 12 Aug 2011 05:50 AM PDT The New York Times reports: The State Department sent a message to Gaza's Hamas leaders on Thursday that it would withdraw some $100 million it is spending in Gaza on health care, agriculture and water infrastructure if they did not back off a demand to audit the books of American-financed charities operating there.
The threat, delivered via an intermediary, came after Hamas officials suspended the operation of the International Medical Corps on Sunday for its refusal to submit to a Hamas audit at the charity's site.
Tensions have been simmering for months over Hamas's relations with the nongovernmental organizations of a number of countries operating in Gaza as the authorities have sought to increase surveillance of the groups. Early this year, Hamas asked all such groups to register with the central government, pay a fee and submit financial reports.
Although those requests were resisted, most groups ultimately agreed to them, officials at charities based in Gaza said. But in June, when Hamas demanded that the groups permit its officials to audit their books, the objections grew. Though Hamas did not explain the reason for its demand, many governments are suspicious of foreign financing of charities, fearing that money can be diverted for political or intelligence-gathering uses.
For American organizations, United States policy forbids direct contact with Hamas, labeled a terrorist group by the State Department. As a result, on-site audits by Hamas officials would lead to suspension of aid, American officials said. The United States accounts for a large share of the money that foreign governments spend on humanitarian assistance in Gaza. No doubt the administration would argue that this money goes straight to needy Gazans and non-Hamas projects, and not to Hamas. Yet this is a fiction. Hamas, as the ruler of Gaza, has a budget - and the money that it doesn't have to pay to keep things running can be freed up to shore up its terror infrastructure. And everyone knows it: Aid provided by American and other foreign groups goes to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, where most of the 1.6 million residents are refugees. Like the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Hamas has had trouble meeting its payroll recently, and foreign officials hope that the threat of losing outside financing will persuade Hamas officials to drop their demand. If there were no relationship between Hamas' budget and Western-backed NGO aid, then why would anyone think that Hamas' financial issues have any relevance to this issue? The huge amount of money flowing into Gaza from the PA and the West might not officially go to Hamas, but it is clear that Hamas is the main beneficiary. (h/t David G) 
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| The frustration of the anti-Zionist left (updated) Posted: 12 Aug 2011 03:36 AM PDT Joseph Dana writes in the UAE's The National: Last weekend, more than 300,000 Israelis protested for economic reform throughout the country. In Tel Aviv, the epicentre of the housing protests, 250,000 Israelis marched to the defence ministry chanting the slogan "the people want social justice". The demonstrations were some of the largest in Israel's history and have pumped new life into the corpse of Israel's leftist political movement.
But the one issue glaringly missing from these demonstrations demanding "social justice" is the most urgent social justice issue in the region: the equality of everyone under Israeli rule, including Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Despite the connection between economic hardship and the settlements, Israeli protesters have been careful not to connect their struggle with Palestinian solidarity or an end to occupation.
This is partly tactical. In the climate of radical politics, Israeli public opinion meets any discussion of the occupation with a negative reaction. Protest organisers say economic reform would not receive the 87 per cent public approval rating that it enjoys if the early demonstrations had been overtly anti-occupation. However, after a month of increasing protests, questions about "social justice" can hardly ignore the occupation or unequal conditions for non-Jews.
Organisers are desperate to show that the demonstrations include all Israelis. As the protests have gained momentum, Arab-Israelis, among the most disenfranchised people in the country, have slowly joined. But displays of Zionist politics have been overwhelming.
How can a protest in Israel, borrowing the revolutionary energy of the Arab Spring, ignore Israel's military control of the Palestinians? Dana and his anti-Israel fellow travelers have been tweeting their frustration about this issue for weeks now. They see the tent protests as an opportunity wasted, as a tragically Zionist phenomenon when it should have been, they believe, an anti-Zionist movement. Of course, their complaints have been based more on their hatred of Zionism than on any logic. The protests touch upon a romantic memory of Israel's socialist past, when the entire country felt that it was like one big kibbutz and everyone was in it together. Whether this is true or not, and whether a massive social program would help more than it would ultimately hurt, is not the issue for now - the point is that the tent movement is a quintessentially Zionist response to perceived economic and economic inequity. In other words, it's the economy, stupid. Dana and his pals love to say that the "settlements" are the cause of the economy's woes, as they paint a picture of massive Israeli investment in helping crazed rightists on hilltops oppress their Palestinian Arab neighbors. This is false to begin with. Beyond that, if the anti-Zionist left would get their way and a half million Jews were ethnically cleansed from their homes, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars - money that every Israeli taxpayer would have to pay! It cost about $2 billion to remove a few thousand Jews from Gaza; the cost of Dana's idea of "social justice" would be a huge burden on the Israeli economy, making the chances of affordable housing in Israel much more remote. As much as Dana loves to pretend that the settlements are expensive, he never addresses the flip side. If you want a back of the envelope calculation, Ha'aretz reported that the total cost of building the Jewish communities across the Green Line was $17 billion - of which $13.5 billion were for the homes that the Jewish residents paid for themselves, Many of the other public buildings like synagogues were paid for by the residents as well, not the state. It would cost an order of magnitude more to evict them, and such a move would hugely exacerbate the housing crisis that prompted the tent protests to begin with. So Dana's agenda is exactly the opposite of that of the tent-protesters. He wants them to pay a massive personal price for a program of ethnic cleansing that they do not support. There is, of course, another angle that Dana and his fellow anti-Zionists always ignore as they push their half-baked arguments. Israelis - real Israelis of all types, right and left, not the coffee-shop Tel Avivians of Dana's world - have become extraordinarily cynical about Palestinian Arabs. The Israeli Left enthusiastically supported Oslo. Even though there were plenty of terror attacks during the process in the 1990s, before the intifada, they were downplayed by the government and the media because of the desire for peace which seemed at hand. Arafat's intransigence at Camp David, followed immediately with the pre-planned terror war that cost thousands of lives, left the Left with no one who really believed in the peace process. Sure, the Ha'aretz crowd would still push the concept, but real Israelis, including the Left, saw that the PLO's goals were far from peaceful. They felt let down and their idealism crumbled. From an economic perspective, the PLO-engineered intifada was hugely expensive. The additional security measures cost Israeli taxpayers - a cost that continues to this day. Dana and his friends will never mention the intifada except in how they believe it was justified by Israeli policies. To them, the intifada is another "social justice" movement, and they cannot figure out the difference between Arab suicide bombers and tent-dwellers on Rothschild Boulevard. Dana's world does not include the Zionist Left, the mainstream Left that built the state (and, incidentally, is part of the government.) His viewpoints are fringe within Israeli society. His stated objective would result in the exact opposite to what the protesters want. And his knowledge that his opinions are so far out of whack with those of the mainstream is frustrating him to no end. UPDATE: The paragraph I struck out was overly harsh towards Dana, and I apologize for that. I didn't know that he had lost family members in terror attacks. I don't want it to detract from my main points, though. Dana did not accept my apology. Instead, in reply he insulted me on Twitter, saying that I "care nothing for human life whether israeli, palestinian or otherwise" and that I am "disgusting" and I am a "pusher of vile hate." Of course, he refused to apologize for these far worse insults to me. And (as I pointed out to him) I never saw him use such words against the ISM, which explicitly supports the murderers under the name "resistance." He quotes Electronic Intifada liberally without any note of irony about the name of the site. But those purveyors of hate are not nearly as bad as I am, apparently. 
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