| Beirut river turns blood red Posted: 16 Feb 2012 08:15 PM PST Hey, it's the Middle East:  The Beirut River mysteriously turned blood red Wednesday after a stream of unidentified red liquid began pouring from the southern bank of the river in Furn al-Shubbak. The source of the liquid had yet to be determined Wednesday evening, as the river continued to empty the red-colored water into the Mediterranean Sea.
Government and local officials rushed to the scene at the Chevrolet crossing of Furn al-Shubbak Wednesday morning in an attempt to locate the sewage canal that was dumping the red-colored water but they were unable to locate the source. Accusations were traded among officials from the municipalities of Hadath, Hazmieh, Sin al-Fil, Furn al-Shubbak and Shiyah.
Eyewitnesses working in the area told The Daily Star this was not the first time the river had turned a different color. Several business owners around the Chevrolet crossing said that colored water pours into the river roughly every two months but no one pays attention to it.It was the quantity and brightness of the red liquid that grabbed the attention of many passersby and commuters on different bridges in the city Wednesday. Looking forward to the frogs ( or crocodiles,) locusts and hail. 
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| The lies of a "human rights" organization Posted: 16 Feb 2012 04:51 PM PST From the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights: On Tuesday 14 February 2012, the Gaza Strip's electric power plant announced that it was ceasing operation because it had run out of fuel supplies. This shortfall is a result of the Israeli Occupation Forces' (IOF) continued suspension of delivery of industrial fuel and the simultaneous halt in the supply of fuel from the smuggling tunnels.
The electricity cuts have exacerbated Gaza's already-deteriorated humanitarian conditions and human rights situation. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights condemns the Israeli siege on Gaza, which aims to keep the Strip on the edge of humanitarian catastrophe. The electricity cuts have an effect on the supply of food and medicine. Therefore, Al Mezan calls on the international community to ensure the necessary supply of industrial fuel. It also calls on the international community to work without delay for an end to the Israeli siege.
According to Al Mezan's field investigations, the interruption in the supply of industrial fuel has brought to a halt the operation of the only electrical power plant in Gaza, resulting in an electrical supply lasting only eight out of 24 hours. The plant needs between 350,000 and 400,000 liters of fuel daily. Due to the ongoing shortfall in the amount of fuel provided by the IOF and Israel's imposition of restrictions and impediments on the entry of fuel, the Gazan government resorts to importation of fuel from Egypt via smuggling tunnels. These supplies help keep the electricity running.  | | Slightly modified Al Mezan logo | As I have documented, the IDF is ready and willing to provide fuel for Gaza. It is Hamas that refuses to receive it, and it is Hamas that decided to switch from reliable Israeli supplies of diesel to getting fuel through smuggling tunnels. Al Mezan is lying. It has no ability to report about Israel at all in an unbiased manner. Even worse, it is apparently afraid to lay the blame on the crisis where it belongs - directly at Hamas. Yet, as a "human rights" NGO, Al Mezan data is cited in UN publications. It has partnered with Amnesty International, with Physicians for Human Rights -Israel as well as many other NGOs. They believe it uncritically - even though this is hardly the first time it has released a press release filled with lies. Who is demanding accountability from the all-powerful and respected "human rights" NGOs? (Besides NGO Monitor, which is heavily criticized for doing exactly what the media is supposed to be doing.) 
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| The media and the Assads, in the good old days Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:10 PM PST A fun video from Shraga Simmons, founder of Honest Reporting, whose excellent new book I plan to review soon: I also got the chance to interview Shraga (at a noisy airport) about this book, and plan to post that soon as well. 
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| Nasrallah reiterates his support for Assad's murderous regime Posted: 16 Feb 2012 01:01 PM PST Hamas might be getting nervous about publicly supporting a regime that murders thousands of its own Arabs, but Hezbollah has no such compunctions: 
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah defended Thursday President Bashar Assad and said Israel sought any system of government in Syria other than one headed by the embattled leader.
"The Zionist project poses a threat to the entire region," Nasrallah said.
"Some Arab states had been colluding with the United States, the West and Israel against nation's interests and assisted in keeping the Israeli entity," he said.
"Some of these governments had even betrayed Lebanon and Palestine," he added.
On Syria, he said Israel preferred any system of government to that of President Bashar Assad.
He said Damascus would resist and would never succumb to the will of the U.S. in the region.
"Israel bets and believes that given the regional strategic environment that is working against it that the Syrian regime should be overthrown," he said.
"An Arab peace plan with Israel has been on the table for years now … Arab leaders say the only solution concerning Israel is political but they refuse to offer a political solution in Syria," he added.
"There is an Arab, Western, American, and Israeli insistence that there be no solution in Syria and on toppling the regime in Syria. Why?" he asked. Those millions of dollars coming from Iran are paying off! 
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| How Iran's media publishes anti-semitism without being criticized Posted: 16 Feb 2012 11:44 AM PST Every week or so, you can find an absurd, anti-semitic, conspiracy-heavy article in Iran's PressTV. Here's this week's entry, by Peter Eyre: Many years ago after we had given independence to many of the former members of the British Empire one could have felt a certain amount of pride to be British but that has since long gone.
We now see another "Imperialistic Empire" taking its place know as the "New World Order" (NWO) with its headquarters firmly embedded in the City of London.
This evil satanic organisation, consisting mainly of Zionists and very senior members of the Freemasons have spread their evil tentacles over most of the UK and launched this country on a programme of continuous conflicts and war.
The NWO controls world finances, world politics, the UN, WHO, the ICJ, the judicial system, education, police and the military via its arm - NATO.
The heartland of the NWO are the Rothschild's, members of the EU Royal Families, the Pilgrim Society, the very senior members of the Freemason´s (including many MP´s and members of the House of Lords), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House London), Friends of Israel and The Bank of England etc.
There is a steady stream of politicians that pay regular visits to Chatham House to pledge their support for Israel with our current Prime Minister David Cameron, his deputy Nick Clegg and many others such as former PM Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, Ken Clarke, William Hague, George Osborne to name but a few. It is in the bowels of this building where they swear their allegiance to Zionists backed groups and Israel (their funders) instead of our own country.
Many people in this country do not realise that our dear BBC also forms part of this same satanic rot and is highly funded by the pro-Israeli groups that manipulate everything we hear and see. But these articles in PressTV are never written by Iranians. Instead, Iranian media taps from their ever-growing roster of Western nutcases and tin-foil-hat-wearers to write what they really want to hear. Since Iran claims that they would never be so crass as to attack Jews - after all, some 10,000-25,000 live in Iran, proof positive of how much Iran loves their dhimmmis - they are forced to use one of the oldest tricks in the journalism book. Find someone else who you agree with and broadcast whatever nonsense they are spouting. And at the end, in small type, print "The authors' views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Press TV News Network." This way, they pretend to inoculate themselves from any charges of anti-semitism, while doing everything they can to spread classic Jew-hating tropes. Enough Westerners buy the sham to make sure that it remains a prominent meme in Iran's English-language press. 
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| BBC Weather doesn't think Jerusalem is in Israel Posted: 16 Feb 2012 10:26 AM PST From the BBC Weather site, on a search for Israel: Hmmm. Anything missing? Nah, only Israel's capital. Let's click on Tel Aviv:
It shows three tabs, for the city, country and "pressure."
But if you type in Jerusalem you get:
No country.
According to the BBC Weather website, Jerusalem is not in Israel.
On the other hand, it does not recognize any Palestinian territories or cities, except for Gaza, which is also not in any country according to the site.
(h/t O)
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| Crude anti-semitism in Venezuela politics Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:09 AM PST From The Sun: It's hard to imagine how the apologists for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela are going to manage to put the gloss on the attacks being made by his regime on the new figure emerging in the opposition, Henrique Capriles Radonski. Mr. Capriles is a Catholic whose maternal grandparents were Jews from Poland. He is emerging as a challenger to succeed the cancer-ridden president. But now Mr. Capriles, governor of the state of Miranda, is being made the target of the kind of crude anti-Semitism that one normally associates with an earlier time.
A broadcast called "The Enemy Is Zionism" on the main and official government radio station in Caracas said that Mr. Capriles had worked for private sector firms "linked to the interests of the Zionist bourgeoisie." It calls him part of a "fascist and paramilitary sect" in which "religious rites were practiced" and plans were laid to attack "everything that did not represent the national Aryan race." It accused him of covertly representing Zionism, which, it said, "is hiding behind a religious and nationalist discourse" and "is the owner of most financial institutions in the world, controlling almost 80% of the global economy and communications industry almost entirely, while maintaining decision-making positions within the Department of State and European powers."
The government radio charges that Mr. Capriles recently met with the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, where, it says, they talked of, among other things, restoring diplomatic relations with Israel. It accuses the confederation of having "no shame" in its pro-Zionist views. Yet it it was only a year or so ago that Mr. Chavez and his mentor, Fidel Castro, were trying to convince the world that they had undergone a change of heart in respect of the Jews. "We respect and love the Jewish people," Mr. Chavez was quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic as saying at an international tourism fair at Caracas. Mr. Chavez professed his affection for the Jews shortly after Mr. Goldberg reported on his visit to Cuba, where he got the Cuban leader to chastise President Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust.
At the time — that was in the fall of 2010 — Mr. Goldberg reported that, according to people he'd been in touch with, Mr. Chavez's entente was "a direct result of Fidel's statement." No doubt he was right about that. But to what — or whom — is one going to attribute the latest government broadcast? "Using anti-Semitism as a political weapon to intimidate, discredit and disparage has been a constant modus operandi by sectors of the Chavista movement," an official of the American Jewish Committee in Washington, Dina Siegel Vann, is quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying. "We were just waiting for the barrage to start." The article goes on to note the link between Venezuela and Iran contributing to this worrying flashback to the 1930s. 
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| Assassination attempt on Barak? A basic sanity check Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:55 AM PST From YNet: Kuwait's Al-Jarida newspaper reported Thursday that Israel was able to prevent an assassination attempt on Defense Minister Ehud Barak, during his visit to Singapore this week.
According to the report, the Mossad – collaborating with local authorities – was able to stop the assassins, who planned on targeting Barak during his visit to the Singapore Air Show.
The newspaper based its report on information from "high ranking Israeli defense officials." The Jerusalem Post also wrote about this, as did Naharnet and other media. Now, if you were a high-ranking Israeli official, and you wanted to leak a spectacular news story, would you go to a Kuwaiti newspaper? Or would you call up Ha'aretz or the New York Times? There have been dozens of "scoops" in Kuwaiti newspapers over the years, often about Hezbollah or the PLO. None of them that I remember have ever panned out. (Al Jarida reported that a Shalit deal was imminent - in 2009; that Israel was ready to bomb Iran - also in 2009; Israel was planning a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas figures - in 2008. There are many more.) The idea that Kuwaiti reporters have better connections in Israel or Lebanon or the territories than local media strains credulity. I understand that news media want to sell papers, but they should do at least a basic sanity check on items like this. Whatever happened to getting two independent sources? Articles like these encourage unsavory reporters (and, of course, unethical bloggers) to make things up or to bypass even the most elementary fact checking when breathlessly reporting scoops from anonymous sources. While there will always be unethical bloggers and reporters, it is the responsibility of the more respected media to do a modicum of verification before reporting a story like this - or, at the very least, to inform readers that Al Jarida has a track record of being spectacularly wrong in its scoops. UPDATE: Israeli officials now deny the report in the update on YNet. 
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| Iran's Ahmadinejad honors Holocaust denier Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:40 AM PST From HuffPo (buried in an inappropriate news section): The Iranian government is zealous in its contempt for the Jewish state, and cheerily calls upon European antisemites as allies. Robert Faurisson is a long-time ally of the Iranian government, and has admired their policy on Holocaust denial since 2000. Faurisson appeared at the outrageous 2006 Iranian conference questioning the Holocaust, where he asked for "one document" of proof of the Holocaust. Robert Faurisson has argued since the 1970s that no genocide of Jews in the Second World War, nor any command from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. Faurisson was eventually convicted of Holocaust denial following France's introduction of the 1990 Gaysott Act. Since 2008, Faurisson has appeared in public alongside French "comic" Dieudonne. Dieudonne writes vile songs mocking the Holocaust, and includes a character dressed in striped clothing, in his sketches, called "Jackie". In this video shot in 2009, Dieudonne presents Faurisson with an award for "unfrequentability and insolence". And so to the events of this week. In a surreal and perverse way, life has imitated art, and President Ahmadinejad has awarded Robert Faurisson with 1st prize for "courage, strength and force" at the 30th International Film Festival in Tehran. Photos of Faurisson's appearance in Iran have appeared on the French website Street Press. According to Street Press, 2nd prize in this category went to French revisionist, the openly pro-Nazi Vincent Reynard. Also invited to the film festival, was the conspiracy theorist Webster Tarpley, Cuban Holocaust denier Maria Poumier, and of course, Dieudonne himself. These alliances are deliberate. Iran is sending an unambiguous message to Jews around the world, that even the Jewish affirmation of a tragic history, is a political statement. This occurred at the "Hollywoodism and Cinema" conference in Tehran at the beginning of this month. That conference, the second annual conference of its type, was meant to expose "Zionist" influence on Hollywood. One of the guests at that same conference was Sean Stone, son of conspiracy-theory director Oliver Stone. While in Iran, the younger Stone decided to convert to Shi'a Islam. (h/t Ian) 
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| Hamas blames "Zionist truck" for bus tragedy Posted: 16 Feb 2012 05:23 AM PST From JPost, in a horrific story all over the media: Eight people were killed - most of them children - and approximately 36 others were injured in a traffic accident between a bus and a truck in Jerusalem on Thursday. Three people were reported to be seriously injured, including an adult.
According to Magen David Adom, the bus overturned at the side of the road and caught fire.
"Firefighters began to take bodies out of the bus. We saw there was nothing more to be done," said Shalom Galil, a paramedic at the scene.
He told Israel Radio that it appeared the two vehicles had collided head-on in the rain on a "very steep and slippery road" near Jerusalem.
The injured were evacuated by Israeli and Palestinian paramedics to Hadassah University Medical Center on Jerusalem's Mount Scopus and to Palestinian hospitals. Magen David Adom paramedics remained in contact with Palestinian hospitals in the Ramallah area and the Palestinian Red Crescent in order to bring injured schoolchildren to Israeli hospitals.
Three children were being transferred from Hadassah University Medical Center on Jerusalem's Mount Scopus to the hospital's facilities in Ein Kerem, suffering from burns on 70% of their bodies. 36 injured children arrived at Palestinian hospitals in the Ramallah area.
The truck driver, an Israeli Arab, is being treated at hospital and is due to be questioned by police. And how does Hamas mouthpiece Palestine Times report it? Three times it identifies the truck as a "Zionist truck." 
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| AP coverage of Gaza blackout even worse that Reuters Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:05 AM PST Yesterday I critiqued a Reuters article about the Gaza power plant shutdown for having some serious errors and even more serious omissions, especially about Hamas' culpability. AP is even worse: Palestinian energy officials say fuel shortages have forced them to shutter the Gaza Strip's lone power plant, causing blackouts in the impoverished territory.
Gaza's energy authority has until recently relied on fuel smuggled from Egypt to circumvent an Israeli blockade. But shortages in Egypt have halted the smuggling. Israel never blockaded power plant fuel. As a matter of fact, about 90% of the power Gaza is getting today is coming from Israeli electrical lines. This reporting is either very lazy or consciously anti-Israel. Either way, there is no excuse for a major news service to get the facts this wrong. What is being left ( almost) unreported is that Hamas is the party solely responsible for the crisis because they refuse to take fuel that Israel is willing to ship. And people's lives are in danger because of Hamas' decision: Mr. Ashraf al-Qidra, Spokesman of the Ministry of Health, emphasized that more than 80% of patients in the Gaza Strip are threatened by a deterioration of their health conditions due to the power outages and the decreasing strategic stock of fuel required for the operation of electricity generators at hospitals and health care facilities. He further warned of a health disaster that may directly affect all patients in vital departments of hospitals whose treatment depend on the availability of electricity supplies, especially prematurely born infants in incubators, who are currently more than 100. Also at risk are more than 400 patients suffering from renal failure, including 15 children, who need dialyses twice or three times a week; and 66 patients who are currently placed in intensive care units. Al-Qidra indicated that 39 operation rooms, in addition to emergency and reception departments, gynecology departments, laboratories, and radiology departments in all hospitals of the Gaza Strip will become completely paralyzed if the crisis does not come to an end.
On its part, the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) warned in a statement published on its website on Tuesday, 14 February 2011, of its inability to supply water to people in appropriate amounts if the crisis of outages continues to persist. It pointed out that in spite of CMWU's ongoing efforts to operate wells and pumping plants during periods of outages, they cannot solve the problem because it is impossible to establish consistency between schedules of water distribution and schedules of electricity distribution in various areas in the Gaza Strip due to the long periods of outages, which causes disruption in the regular program of supplying areas with water, and thus impacts all aspects of life of people in the Gaza Strip. 
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