יום שני, 5 במרץ 2012

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Link to Elder of Ziyon

The giant blue UN chair in Ramallah bites the dust

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 06:35 PM PST

Remember that ridiculous  giant blue chair that was built in Ramallah to symbolize the PLO's bid to become a member state at the UN? The one that shows that Palestinian Arabs care far more about symbolism than substance, and more about stunts than real life?

From tweeter @JalalAK_jojo:

The original chair:

After some rain and wind:


And now...dismantled and discarded:



Since the PLO is so crazy about symbolism, what do you think this symbolizes?

Jerusalem declared "capital of Palestine, Arabs and Muslims"

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 03:56 PM PST

How delightfully original!

From Iran's ABNA:
Supporting the Resistance in Palestine Committee organized a forum on Al-Quds (Jerusalem) in Resalat Hall, Beirut on Sunday in the presence of political parties and national factions from Lebanon and Palestine.

Speeches at the forum, under the title "Declaration of Al-Quds as the capital of Palestine, the Arabs and Muslims," stressed the importance of Al-Quds as the inevitable capital of Palestine in the face of Zionist aggressions and schemes to Judaize it.

The Al-Quds forum began with the singing of the Lebanese and the Palestinian anthems followed by a speech delivered by Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in which he warned against the Israeli enemy's attempts to declare Al-Quds as the capital of the Jewish people, indicating that regional changes demonstrate the near achievement of Al-Quds liberation.

Head of the Orthodox Church Archbishop Atallah Hanna, in turn, hailed Sayyed Nasrallah's stances and told the participants in the forum that Palestinians are "strong with your solidarity with us because you are entrusted to the issue of Al-Quds as the cause of the Muslims, Christians and Arabs since it is the holy city which hosts the most important holy sites in Islam and Christianity."

"Our holy city is going through tragic circumstances since its occupation in 1984 through the weakening of the Palestinian and Arab presence and violation of Al Aqsa Mosque and other sanctities, however, these attempts are doomed to fail," Archbishop Hanna said in a live video link from Al-Quds stressing the importance of unity among Muslims and Christians for the sake of Al-Quds' liberation.
Liberation from whom, I wonder?

I'm surprised they didn't declare Jerusalem the capital of "every non-Jew on Earth." Because that is what they are trying to say, after all.

Screw Mecca and Medina and Rome! Jerusalem's importance increases directly in proportion to the amount of hate you have for Jews.

Israelis taking Gulf airlines via Jordan

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 11:05 AM PST

Firas Press quotes Mako (I couldn't find the original story) saying that many Israelis are saving money by taking Arab flights via Jordan, especially to Southeast Asia.

According to the story, Israelis travel to Queen Alia Airport in Amman, and from there take Arab flights to their destination. Gulf airlines will usually stop in their home countries, such as the UAE, Qatar or Bahrain, but while the Israelis must disembark to change planes, they don't need to go through security again.

An Israeli travel agency, "Fly East," specializes in arranging these trips, saying it can save hundreds of dollars per trip. According to Globes, some one third of Israeli backpackers going to the Far East - some 40,000 people this year - are using Arab airlines like Royal Jordanian Airlines or Qatar Airways, mostly to save money.

One reason for the uptick in Arab airline use is because Israelis don't want to use Turkish airlines anymore.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry is unhappy with this idea, stressing that the Gulf countries are just as much enemy states as Iran or Syria, and it is equally forbidden for Israelis to enter. Apparently, this advice is being roundly ignored.

Gaza fuel crisis continues; factories may shut down, Hamas refuses blame

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 09:35 AM PST

From Ma'an:
The leader of the business community in the Gaza Strip warned on Sunday that dozens of factories are at risk of closure due to Gaza's fuel crisis.

Ali al-Hayik, the head of Gaza's Federation of Industries and the Palestinian Businessmen Association, called on the Hamas-led government to provide fuel to factories to avert an impending catastrophe for local industry.

The government must take responsibility for the crisis and is tasked with supporting the private sector, al-Hayik said in a press statement.

Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Friday blamed Egypt for not resolving the fuel shortage. The Hamas authorities and Egypt cannot agree on an official channel for fuel deliveries, after Egypt sought to cut off the tunnel network.
As I've been reporting for weeks, this is all because Hamas refuses to accept fuel that goes through Israel.

There is a fuel siege of Gaza, but not from Israel. Hamas is actively promoting it in order to push a political agenda. And Hamas has no qualms about causing every Gazan under its control to suffer in order to "win." The head of Gaza's energy authority confirmed this by saying that Egypt wanted to transfer fuel via Kerem Shalom and he personally refused to allow it to go through the "Zionist entity" and insisting that Egypt transfer the fuel through Rafah, which is not equipped to handle the half-million liters needed a day.

Hamas, trying to deflect anger about the fuel crisis, organized some "youths" to protest - at the (closed) Egyptian consulate in Gaza.

Iran increasing support for Syrian massacres

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 08:20 AM PST

From the Washington Post:
U.S. officials say they see Iran's hand in the increasingly brutal crackdown on opposition strongholds in Syria, including evidence of Iranian military and intelligence support for government troops accused of mass executions and other atrocities in the past week.

Three U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports from the region described a spike in Iran­ian-supplied arms and other aid for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad at a time when the regime is mounting an unprecedented offensive to crush resistance in the key city of Homs

"The aid from Iran is increasing, and is increasingly focused on lethal assistance," said one of the officials, insisting on anonymity to discuss intelligence reports from the region.

The expanded Iranian role in the conflict has been underscored by reports — supported by U.S. intelligence findings — that an Iranian operative was recently wounded while working with Syrian security forces inside the country.
But Iran will act rationally when it builds a nuclear weapon, right?

Belgian bank decides not to give itself too Jewish a name

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 07:05 AM PST

The Dexia Bank of Belgium was bought out by the Belgian government last year in a bailout, and since it is no longer part of the Dexia group it needed a new name.

According to DeMorgan.be, one of the names on the shortlist was Symmon or a variant like Symon or Symona, to give the bank a more personalized flavor. A human name like Symmon would push the idea that the bank is simple to use, has good service and is reliable.

But there were two objections to that name.

One is that it was not particularly Belgian, which many desired.

The other was that the name Symmon was too - Jewish!
Although market analysis showed that the resistance of the Muslim community [to the name] is not insurmountable, the Dexia marketers saw the connotation as a major limitation.

In the end, they chose the name Belfius.

Jewish newspaper Joods Actueel tried to contact Belfius and the advertising agency that helped choose the name, but they refused to comment on that aspect of the story.

The paper noted that Simon is a common Flemish name, among the top twenty names given to babies in Belgium.

It is not clear whether the public relations firm pro-actively polled the name and found Muslim objections to it, or if it assumed that there would be objections from Muslims and that this was an obstacle that needed to be overcome.

The story shows that either the Muslim community in Belgium is inherently anti-semitic, or it is assumed to be so by the Belgian public. Or, more likely, both.

(h/t Rudi)

Competing videos on Obama's Israel record

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 05:40 AM PST

The Democratic National Committee released this commercial last week:



On Saturday, The Emergency Committee for Israel released an entire documentary about Obama's record on Israel:



While it is perhaps unfair to compare the two directly, they show what each side is emphasizing. The Obama team wants to highlight the amount of military cooperation that the US and Israel have shared, the anti-Obama team brings many examples of how this administration has seemed to have thrown Israel under the bus.

Both points of view are biased, of course.

The two major issues that Israel faces are the Iranian nuclear threat and the Palestinian Arab threat - both terrorist and diplomatic.

On the Iranian front, while some may argue that the US should have done more sooner, Obama's initial outreach to Iran has now been forgotten and his current sanctions are indeed far reaching. It is a shame that some time was lost while he seemed to need to convince himself of what the Bush administration already knew about Iran. On the one hand, the US has not done a bad job in corralling international support for sanctions considering the huge opposition from Russia and China; but on the other hand I don't think that Iran perceives a US military threat as credible, which would be the single most important deterrent possible. Meanwhile, Iran is wholeheartedly supporting Syria's massacres and Hezbollah's terrorist army in Lebanon, and the US has failed to publicly push those aspects of the regime.

Most of all, the Obama administration's actions vis a vis Iran have not been to support Israel; they are to defend Western interests. Not that there is anything wrong with this, of course; this is what nations are supposed to do. Nevertheless, in that sense the narrative in the Democratic video is a little deceptive. US actions on Iran have been meant to try to stop Israel from attacking on its own at least as much as they have been to try to stop Iran from getting closer to building a bomb. Sending Patriot missiles to Israel is nice, but in a sense it shows that the US is starting to consider a nuclear Iran a fait accompli.

As far as the Palestinian issue is concerned, the Obama administration has continued previous US policies of vetoing one-sided Security Council resolutions against Israel. But it has been the most consistently pro-Palestinian Arab administration ever, completely adopting the Arab narrative on settlements and the 1967 lines, ignoring (at least in public) previous commitments given by the Bush and Clinton administrations on Israel's security, publicly pressuring only the Israeli side and providing Palestinian Arabs with political cover for their intransigence. Perhaps the peace process was moribund before he entered office, but it completely fell apart under Obama - and this is after Israel implemented a settlement freeze that, according to conventional wisdom, should have brought Abbas to the table.

Abbas himself explained it best when he said that he is simply waiting for Washington to pressure Israel to do everything he wants.

Obama's record on Israel is not as anti-Israel as the ECI video implies. As I wrote at the time, Obama's "1967 lines" speech also included many very good points, and it seems that Obama's original public position that was exactly congruent with J-Street has shifted a little towards realism.

I don't know how much of that is from his learning anew what previous presidents had already learned about Palestinian Arab duplicity, and how much is simply his desire to get re-elected.

UPDATE: Obama's speech at AIPAC.

Edited interview of Asma Assad shows hypocrisy of Arab world

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 02:58 AM PST

From NYT:

A video blogger has remixed footage of an interview Asma al-Assad gave to CNN in 2009, in which Syria's British-born first lady decried the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, to make it seem as if she was speaking out against the violent crackdown on dissent currently under way in Syria.

The remix posted on YouTube cuts together outraged comments from Mrs. Assad in 2009 (including, "the barbaric assault on innocent civilians has been horrific," and, "this is the 21st century, where in the world could this happen?") and video shot last week of the Syrian government's bombardment of Homs, the city her family is originally from. (Readers should be aware that the clip includes some extremely graphic video of a dead child with a gaping head wound.)
In a similar vein, the editor-in-chief of Asharq al-Awsat wrote last week:
Let us pause here in front of this state of mad dictatorship, and compare it with what Israel has committed against us in recent times, and I say recent times as we are talking about the last 5 years, particularly the Lebanon and Gaza wars. The entire world rushes to stop Israel's aggressions against Lebanon in 2006, and this war ended after approximately two months, claiming the lives of 1,200 Lebanese. The same thing applies to the Gaza war, which had approximately the same death toll. In both wars, the public opinion in the Arab world rushed to take action, whilst counterfeit "friends of Israel" lists were issued, masterminded by the al-Assad regime; indeed a number of Arab politicians attempted to exploit this tragedy, most prominently the al-Assad regime. However we did not hear anybody ask – even now – why did these wars happen? Whose interests did these wars, and more, serve? Who was responsible for this?

Today, in the case of al-Assad, we have seen the Syrian forces brutally killing their own people on our television screens over the past year – not two months – whilst the death toll stands at more than 8,000 and the tyrant of Damascus's troops have destroyed mosques, tortured and assassinated children, as well as women and the elderly, simply in order to allow al-Assad to cling to power. Despite all this, we find some countries, politicians, media organizations and figures, who are procrastinating; it is as if we – as Arabs – are saying that if the killer is also an Arab, then this is something that we can accept, however if he is an Israeli, then we must all move as one to put an end to this! This is a saddening and shameful state of affairs, particularly when somebody like Hassan Nasrallah shamelessly comes out to defend al-Assad!

(h/t Michael G)
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