יום שני, 3 באוקטובר 2011

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Muslim mob torches another church in Egypt

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 02:14 PM PDT

From AINA:
After Friday prayers, a mob of several thousand Muslims from the village of Elmarinab in Edfu, Aswan province, demolished and torched St. George's church, which was being renovated. The mob demolished the dome, walls and columns, then went to the church depot where the lumber to be used for construction was stored and torched it. The fire lasted 2 hours but the attack continued until 7 PM.

In an interview on Coptic TV channel, Father Salib of St. George's Church said "the Imam of one of the village mosques called on the people to take matter in their own hands, he added. Other witnesses named the Imam as Sheikh Sabry.

According to eyewitnesses the Muslims also torched a large depot of electrical goods owned by a Copt, a supermarket and four Coptic homes. Muslims prevented the fire brigade from entering the village. Security forces, which were present, "stood there watching," said Mr.Michael Ramzy, a social worker at the church.

Dr. Naguib Gabriel, head of the Egyptian Union of Human rights Organizations send an urgent message to field Marchall Tantawi to save the Copts in Egypt. "The Copts, their lives and their churches are in danger," he said.

Attorney Mamdouh Nakhla, head of Al-Kalema human rights organization condemned Muslims taking the law in their own hands. He said "if the Egyptian Government is unable to protect its citizens, then the civilized international society should step in immediately to stop this human tragedy."
The only English-language Egyptian media to cover the incident was Bikya Masr:
Aswan's governor denied the burning of a church in Edfu, in southern Egypt, on Friday and said there was no attack on the church since there is no church "but a Christian guest house," adding that the situation has calmed and the clashes stopped.

Governor Mostafa el-Said told Channel One, Egypt's national TV channel, late on Friday that reports stating violence against a church in the city were "wrong."

Eyewitnesses, however, have reported that a number of Muslim men surrounded church and set fire to parts of it, then moved to Coptic houses in the area, where they set fire to buildings and vandalized a grocery store.

They added that violence continued into the night, with the men using gas containers to set a residential home on fire, while another reported that one of the Muslims said "we don't want Copts in our town."

Eyewitnesses have confirmed that some men tried to stop the fire trucks from reaching the burning buildings, which contributed to financial damages for the city.

El-Said said that the clashes erupted after construction was taking place at the guest house with "the intention of turning it into a church which provoked the Muslims."

He added that the Copts had permission to build on the guest house for 9 meters only, but they exceeded that and increased the building by 13 meters.

He said the Muslims "got angry" and the Copts admitted to the wrongdoing and promised to remove the extra floors, but there was a delay in the removal "which made a local Islamic clerk mobilize young men and head there to remove it themselves."
That burning smell in the air? That's the fragrance of Arab Spring!

(h/t Ya'akov S)

"Zionist-Free Middle East" conference in Tehran

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 11:30 AM PDT

Iranian monomania:
Students from Iran and other Muslim states on Sunday convened in an anti-Israel meeting in Tehran titled as 'A Zionist-Free Middle-East' to voice their support for the Palestinian schoolboys and children.

Iranian Education Minister Hamid Reza Haji Babaee addressed the opening ceremony of the conference on Sunday, and briefed the participants on the principles of Iran's policy on the Palestinian issue.

"Our policy on the Palestinian issue is neither political nor temporary; rather to us, the Palestinian issue is a divine belief in defending Islamic lands and Muslim people," Haji Babaee said.

He also reiterated the world arrogant powers' animosity towards the Palestinian nation is actually enmity and hostility towards Islam.

"They have not attacked just a part of Islamic territories; rather they have attacked Islam itself" by their aggressions against the oppressed Palestinian nation, the minister continued.

The 'Zionist-Free Middle-East' conference is being held in Tehran concurrently with the 5th International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada which started work in Tehran on Saturday.


Tunisia refuses to grant visas to Palestinian Arab bloggers

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 09:45 AM PDT

This week there is an Arab bloggers' conference in Tunisia.

But they are excluding the bloggers from one Arab "nation", as this tweet shows:


sami ben gharbia
Tunisian IM refused to give Palestinian bloggers visas to attend the 3 Arab bloggers meeting in Tunis for unknown reasons 
An Arabic tweeter confirmed, saying that Tunisia would not recognize bloggers using Palestinian Arab passports.

It seems that Jewish pro-Arab bloggers from Israel were denied as well, from this tweet from anti-Zionist Joseph Dana, which he has since deleted:

Isn't that interesting?

New Gilo housing plan is nowhere near any Arab communities

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 08:15 AM PDT

The world has been aghast at the very idea that the Jerusalem municipality approved expanding its Gilo neighborhood with 1100 new housing units.

But where exactly are the planned units going to be?

Here is Gilo as it looks today.



The green line is The Green Line. The blue line is roughly were the municipal boundary of Jerusalem is. Here is a larger view of Gilo within Jerusalem's boundaries. (The red line is the separation barrier.)

Gilo has had plans to expand for a while now.

This map from the Jerusalem Municipality website shows, in orange, the various potential areas in which Gilo could expand, mostly to the west and the north as well as filling in the area between the two western "peninsulas":



Notice that the boundaries of the Gilo neighborhood in the second map already includes all of the proposed expansions in the orange area above.

The total number of units in all the proposals is about 5000.

Here are four specific housing proposals from last year:



As far as I can tell, from emailing people who know the area as well as from news stories about the development, the proposed new housing units that is so upsetting the world are on the northwest part of Gilo, going into what is now the Gilo Forest - the one that is listed as 820 units in the map above.

Going back to the first map, we can see that the proposed housing does not go towards any Arab areas at all. The only space it take are a forest and park built by the Jerusalem municipality. It does not take up any land ever owned by Arabs. It is not "encroaching" on "Arab land." Instead, it is going towards the Jewish parts of "west" Jerusalem! 


There is nothing at all controversial about the idea of Gilo expanding to the northwest. There is no possible way that any of that land would ever be part of an Arab state.

The reflexive condemnation of every single expansion within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries of existing Jewish communities is not based on any logical or legal objection. It is simply a tacit acceptance by the world community of the reprehensible idea that the PLO has veto power over construction in much of Jerusalem.

And that is simply not acceptable.

Lots more weapons seized in Egypt

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 07:00 AM PDT

From AFP:

Egypt's security forces on Thursday seized a large weapons cache including anti-aircraft missiles and an aircraft bomb,, the official MENA news agency reported.
North Sinai security forces found 545 mortars, eight anti-aircraft missiles and a 70-kilogram (around 150-pound) aircraft bomb in a cave in the Sinai mountains, MENA said.

There were no immediate details on the origin or intended destination of the weapons.
Al Masry al Youm reports today on a huge shipment of 200,000 weapons components caught at an Egyptian port coming from China.

Between Libya, the Sudan, the Sinai terrorists and Gaza, Egypt is turning into a major weapons smuggling crossroads.

And you can be sure that they are not catching most of the weapons crossing the country.


Hamas and Fatah's on-again, off-again talks

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 06:00 AM PDT

Palestine Press Agency reports that the Secretary of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah announced that there would be a meeting between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo in mid-October to discuss reconciliation.

But immediately afterwards, Palestine Today quoted a different Fatah official as denying that here are any planned meetings this month.

This unity thing is really going well. After five months, the two sides still cannot agree on meeting each other.

So the wonderful choices are:


  • A dictatorship where the leader who has gone to years past his term unilaterally makes all the decisions, or
  • A state where the government includes unrepentant terrorists who are sworn to destroy another state.

And the world believes that either of these is preferable to the status quo.

Biden, Hillary Clinton's about-faces under Obama

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 04:09 AM PDT

From the New York Times:
In the middle of a meeting with 15 rabbis in Boca Raton, Fla., last week, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took a punch meant for his boss.

One of the rabbis asked why Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted in 1986, was still in prison. Mr. Biden, on a mission to shore up support for President Obama, replied forcefully, according to several people at the meeting.

"President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, 'Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time,' " Mr. Biden said. "If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life."

Yet in 2007, Biden said that he supports leniency for Pollard:



This is not the only recent public about-face done by an Obama 2008 presidential opponent turned employee.In Hillary Clinton's position paper on Israel in 2007 it says:
Hillary Clinton believes that Israel's right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.
This was a restatement of what she said during her 1999 Senate campaign: "I personally consider Jerusalem the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel."

But last week she was singing a decidedly different tune:
We believe that this morning's announcement by the government of Israel approving the construction of housing units in east Jerusalem is counter-productive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties. As you know, we have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side.
Which means that she no longer believes in an undivided, Jewish Jerusalem, and she thinks that Israel must let all new Jewish neighborhoods built over the past 44 years that "everyone knows" will end up in Israel under any peace agreement must remain stagnant indefinitely, lest a Jew adding a bathroom to his house be considered "provocative."

(h/t Avi Mayer tweet via JW)
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