Elder of Ziyon Daily News |  |
- Gazans blaming Hamas for fuel crisis; PA tries to come to the rescue
- A list of Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Jewish schools
- The UNHRC keeps its obsession with Israel going
- Shooting rockets and planning attacks. Welcome to the "cease fire."
- Hypocrisy (and some anti-semitism) on Toulouse in an Egyptian paper
- Fatah accusing Hamas of collaborating with Israel
- The PA has spent $7 billion in Gaza since Hamas took over
- "Islam is not to blame"
- Merah is dead
- Finally! A good article on the Gaza fuel crisis (updated)
| Gazans blaming Hamas for fuel crisis; PA tries to come to the rescue Posted: 22 Mar 2012 11:00 PM PDT From Ma'an: With shortages of electricity, water, fuel, cooking gas and medicine, a lack of economy and no infrastructure, patience with the Hamas-led government in Gaza is running low.Supposedly, fuel was scheduled go to Gaza Friday through Kerem Shalom: Nathmi Mhanna, a Palestinian Authority border official, said Thursday that 450,000 liters of Israeli diesel would be pumped through the Kerem Shalom crossing on Friday.But Nathmi Mhanna now says that Israeli fuel companies weren't ready to transfer the fuel so it will be delayed. 
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| A list of Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Jewish schools Posted: 22 Mar 2012 06:49 PM PDT It is very nice that Salam Fayyad and the PLO issued condemnations of the Toulouse massacre. But it would mean a lot more if they and other Arabs would show the least bit of regret for the many times Arab terrorists deliberately targeted Jewish schools themselves. 1970: The Avivim school bus massacre was a terrorist attack on an Israeli school bus on May 8, 1970 in which 12 Israeli civilians were killed, nine of them children, and 25 were wounded. Two bazooka shells were fired at the bus. Early in the morning, the bus departed from Avivim heading with its passengers to two local schools. This route had been scouted by the militants, believed to have infiltrated from Lebanon, and an ambush was set up. As the bus passed by, ten minutes after leaving Avivim, it was attacked by heavy gunfire from both sides of the road. The driver was amongst those hit in the initial barrage,[3] as were the two other adults on board. The three were killed as the bus crashed into an embankment as the attackers continued firing into the vehicle. 1974: The first target of the Kiryat Shmona massacre was a school, which was luckily closed for Passover. The terrorists went for plan B, killing 18 people at a nearby building. 1997: The Island of Peace massacre was a mass murder attack that occurred at the Island of Peace site in Naharayim on March 13, 1997 in which a Jordanian soldier opened fire at a large group of Israeli schoolgirls from the AMIT Fuerst School in Beit Shemesh who were on a class field trip, killing seven of them and injuring six others. (Jordan's King Hussein did apologize for this massacre, begging for forgiveness in person from the victims' families. This is in stark contrast with all the Palestinian Arab attacks listed here.) 2002: The Yeshivat Beit Yisrael massacre was a suicide bombing which occurred on 2 March 2002 at the entrance of the ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva "Beit Yisrael" located in downtown Jerusalem. Eleven Israeli civilians were killed in the attack, including two infants and three children. Fatah claimed responsibility. May 28: Three high school students were killed and two others wounded in a school in Itamar when a Palestinian gunman opened fire, before he was shot dead by a security guard. Fatah claimed responsibility. 5 students were killed and 23 people were injured, four seriously, when a Palestinian gunman penetrated a highschool that combines religious studies and military training in the Gush Katif settlement of Atzmona on March 7. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. 2008: The Mercaz HaRav massacre, also called the Mercaz HaRav shooting, was an attack that occurred on 6 March 2008, in which a lone Palestinian gunman shot multiple students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem, Israel, after which the gunman himself was shot dead. Eight students and the perpetrator were killed. Eleven more were wounded, five of them placed in serious to critical condition. The massacre was praised by Hamas and, according to a subsequent poll, was supported by 84 percent of the Palestinian population. Two terrorists entered the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva in Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, and stabbed two students. The terrorists were killed by two of the counselors in the room. The Izaddin al-Kassam's Martyrs Brigades, the Hamas military wing, claimed responsibility for the attack. 2011: The Hamas school bus attack was a 7 April 2011 incident in which Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a Kornet laser-guided anti-tank missile over the border at an Israeli school bus. Hamas militants claimed responsibility. The missile hit the bus after all but one of the children had been dropped off at the kibbutz where they lived, and the bus had traveled just 50 metres beyond its that last stop there.[6] The only remaining passenger, a 16-year-old boy named Daniel Viflic, was critically injured with shrapnel wounds to the head and died from his injuries on 17 April. And I am not even counting other attacks deliberately aimed at children (such as the Bat Mitzvah suicide bomb, or the attack on an ice cream shop in Petah Tikva) nor the many rockets that "happened" to hit schools (a 4 year old was killed in a 2004 Qassam attack that hit near a nursery.) So, to Fayyad and other Palestinian Arab leaders who condemned a man targeting children at a Jewish school - let's hear you apologize for these incidents. Only then can anyone believe that your condemnations now are anything more than window dressing. 
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| The UNHRC keeps its obsession with Israel going Posted: 22 Mar 2012 12:34 PM PDT From UN Watch: Yes, fully half of the resolutions passed were condemning only Israel. But hey - they finally did decide to pass a resolution condemning Syria, which has killed more Arabs in a year than Israel has in two decades through two wars and an intifada. 
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| Shooting rockets and planning attacks. Welcome to the "cease fire." Posted: 22 Mar 2012 11:05 AM PDT From YNet: Three rockets were fired at southern Israel from the Gaza Strip Wednesday night.But the "cease fire" is still holding. Rockets might make it "shaky," but only Israeli actions can end it. Meanwhile, even though it happened before the recent flare-up, this story is not getting enough publicity: The Shin Bet has thwarted an attempt to kidnap a soldier and carry out a terror attack in the Eilat area. After an indictment was filed against Muhammad abu-Adara, a Hamas operative from Rafah, it was released for publication that the Shin Bet arrested abu-Adara at the end of last month when he tried to carry out his plans in Sinai. 
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| Hypocrisy (and some anti-semitism) on Toulouse in an Egyptian paper Posted: 22 Mar 2012 09:45 AM PDT Joseph Mayton, an American journalist who is editor-in-chief of Egypt's Bikya Masr newspaper, writes: In India, it's "Porngate." In France, it's the live and non-stop coverage of man who shot students at a local Jewish school – imagine if the shooter had shot up a Muslim school – and in the United State, it's politicking chitter chatter. While in Syria, scores of civilians are being killed daily; in Sahel a humanitarian crisis is forming that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. But we care about the shooter in what is an incident that pales in comparison to what the Syrian government is doing to its people; what the military junta in Egypt does to protesters, and more importantly, the daily genocide carried out against an entire population in Palestine by the hands of the Israeli government.What is "Porngate?" From a different article in Bikya Masr: In the latest scandal involving India lawmakers, officials in Gujarat have been accused of watching pornography during assembly. The report publicized by officials in the Western Indian state, is the second such porn scandal this year to hit the Hindu nationalist BJP. And who wrote this article? Why, Joseph Mayton did, only the day before his self-righteous diatribe about how news organizations are ignoring big stories! Yet the major example of a story that he feels was over-reported is not about celebrities, or sports, or politics. No, he feels that as "disgusting" as the Toulouse massacre was, it should be relegated to the back pages while Syria - or, "more importantly," Palestine - remains the top story. Even though Syria is not the top story in his own newspaper! Mayton claims that if a similar massacre occurred at a Muslim school the world would have yawned. Actually, if a Jewish terrorist had grabbed a Muslim girl's hair in school and shot her in the head twice to "confirm the kill" while videotaping it, it would have been the top story for weeks not only in Bikya Masr but in the Jerusalem Post as well. Isn't it interesting that it is Toulouse that gets Mayton's ire for being over-reported? Mayton's disgusting hypocrisy and pure anti-semitism - not anti-Zionism, but anti-semitism - can be seen where he claims that "the daily genocide carried out against an entire population in Palestine by the hands of the Israeli government" is more important than the scores being murdered in Syria every day! Calling what Israel does "genocide" is simply Jew-hatred. In the entire year of 2011, fewer civilians were killed by Israel than in six hours yesterday by Syria. But to Mayton, Israel's actions are more important and more deserving of news. Mayton never called that "genocide." In other words, Mayton is guilty of the hypocrisy he is accusing other journalists of - in the very same article!
Bikya Masr has articles on its site from all over the world, articles about technology and sports and art the usual offbeat stories. Yet a search on the site for the words "France" or "Toulouse" or "Jewish" shows that it did not report the school murders in Toulouse at all. It didn't downplay it, it didn't bury it - it completely ignored it. Why would this newspaper purposefully ignore such a news story? Could it be precisely because the murder victims were Jews - which, Mayton helpfully tells us, are "ceremoniously Israeli"? This is not coincidence. This shows the attitude of the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper as well as his staff. Keep in mind that Bikya Masr is one of Egypt's most liberal and "Western" oriented newspapers. Yet even the editor of that paper is a sickening piece of filth whose visceral hatred of Jews shines through in this piece. This should give you a scale of reference to see how bad other Arab media is. 
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| Fatah accusing Hamas of collaborating with Israel Posted: 22 Mar 2012 08:35 AM PDT Palestine Press, as well as Arabic Kol Israel, quotes a Now Lebanon article as saying that Hamas has been holding "secret talks" with Israel. The source said that this would explain why Israel did not hit any Hamas sites during the fighting earlier this month. Of course, the IDF did target Hamas sites:  The article goes on to say that Fatah has been quietly accusing Hamas of giving Israel information about the PRC leader, Zuhair al Qaisi, so Israel could assassinate him before his planned terror attack, which would have been far more costly for Gaza. This explains, according to Fatah, why Hamas did not join in the fighting. Whenever Fatah insults Hamas, it is never because Hamas embraces terror. It is always because Hamas is supposedly too pro-Israel. Which tells you all you need to know about how "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas' party is. 
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| The PA has spent $7 billion in Gaza since Hamas took over Posted: 22 Mar 2012 07:25 AM PDT Yesterday there was a protest in Gaza against the Palestinian Authority: Protesters on Wednesday held a rally in Gaza City against Mahmoud Abbas, accusing the president of neglecting his responsibilities to the Gaza Strip. The PA, thin-skinned as ever, responded with all it supposedly does in Gaza - and unintentionally damning itself. The Palestinian Authority has spent over $7 billion in Gaza since 2007, Fatah spokesman Ahmad Assaf said Wednesday.All this is true. I have noted for years that over 60% of the PA's budget goes towards Gaza - on a per-capita basis, Gazans get more than twice what West Bank residents get from the PA. But what Fatah is not telling you is that those 80,000 workers (which used to be 77,000, by the way) are sitting at home doing nothing. They are literally being paid not to work. And it is also not saying directly that the PA's paying for Gaza infrastructure has left Hamas able to purchase weapons and build terrorist tunnels with all that cash it doesn't have to spend on running Gaza. All that cash from Iran is going straight to terror, being indirectly subsidized by the PA - and Western donor funds. Every Grad rocket is being partially paid for, indirectly, by the West. It is interesting that the PA could have used these billions of dollars as leverage to bring Hamas to its knees, and chose not to. Probably because they are more frightened of a backlash because of Hamas' influence in the mainstream Palestinian Arab population, something that gets downplayed in the West. 
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| Posted: 22 Mar 2012 06:04 AM PDT From an op-ed in The Telegraph by Ed West: Many people kill in the name of jihad but they do not represent Islam or Muslims, the vast majority of whom will be horrified by the Toulouse killings. It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant. Confused and angry young men easily attach themselves to something greater than themselves, especially a strong, confident inter-national identity historically opposed to the West from which they feel so rejected.West is trying to say the right things, and his point about 'universalism" being morphed into modern anti-semitism is on target, but he has a huge blind spot. I agree that the religion of Islam is not to blame for the murders. The religion itself, in the narrow Western sense of religion, is no more likely to create murderers than Christianity (or Judaism.) Yet there were the Crusades in the past, and there are jihadists today. For West's theory to be true, he must explain how those could exist; how people can kill "infidels" in the name of religion. His attempt to blame "the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant" is ridiculous and offensive, because practically everyone in the Western world is either such a second-generation immigrant or descended from one. And the idea that being a second-generation immigrant from a Muslim country in Europe is somehow more frustrating than the daily lives of a couple of billion people elsewhere who don't go around killing people is beyond absurd. West falls in the same trap of oversimplifying things that he is blaming others for. But today's jihadists have something in common with the Crusaders. To them, religion is not a personal belief system meant to improve themselves. It is an aggressive political framework whose philosophy includes the idea of gaining power at the expense of everyone else. Westerners like West are so protective of the idea of "religion" that they cannot see the basic fact that to hundreds of millions of people, Islam is not merely a religion but a political philosophy. And as a political movement, it is no less toxic than Communism or Nazism. Islam itself does not distinguish between its personal and political aspects. It is up to the Muslims themselves to modernize the religion to make such a separation. Modern Westerners do it instinctively, as no doubt most Muslims who grow up in the West do. But that distinction is a Western invention over the past couple hundred years, not something inherent in Islam. To the vast majority of Muslims living in the Middle East, such fine-honed distinctions do not exist. Not that most of them are jihadists - but a lot of them are potential jihadists, because there is no overriding moral code that discourages it. Islam is political; it wants to divide up the entire world into Dar al Islam (the Muslim house) and Dar al Harb (the "house of war.") And, sad to say, there are a large number of Muslims who glorify violence. A Gallup poll that was disgustingly whitewashed by the pollsters found that about one third of Muslims worldwide found the 9/11 attacks partially or completely justified. That is half a billion Muslims who support violent jihad against innocent civilians. It is true that most of them will not become violent, but it is equally true that the Muslim world has not done nearly enough to discourage and vilify such thinking. It is mainstream. That brings up another issue about Islam. It is not only a religion and a political movement, but it is also a culture. And too often, that culture is toxic. To give some examples, the "moderate" Palestinian Authority has officially honored the worst terrorists and child murderers like Dalal Mughrabi and Samir Kuntar. While Salam Fayyad condemned the fact that Jewish kids were murdered in a school in France, 84% of Palestinian Arabs approved of the murder of other Jewish kids in a school in Jerusalem in 2008. And the 9/11 attacks were celebrated in many Muslim communities worldwide, not just by Palestinian Arabs. It is not a problem that can be swept under the rug as merely disenchanted youths who need an excuse to murder people - it is a culture where large swaths of people openly celebrate murders. That is the problem that must be attacked, and it must be attacked from within the Muslim community. Unfortunately, the reactions we've seen from the French Muslim community has been more defensive than introspective. They are far more interested in distancing themselves from the murderer than in looking to see what in their culture might have created him. Islam, in a narrow sense, might not be to blame for Toulouse. But mainstream Islamic culture and Islamism as a political movement, today, supports the thinking that can lead to such outrages. Until that problem is dealt with, nothing will change. 
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| Posted: 22 Mar 2012 04:22 AM PDT From The Telegraph live-blog: 11.03 French Interior Minister Claude Gueant has just given a remarkable description of the gun battle which ended in Mohammed Merah's death less than half an hour ago. He said the police decided to storm the building after the gunman had threatened to kill police and refused to surrender late last night. Describing the raid itself, he said: We sent in special cameras to be able to see where he was but we could not locate him. It was when we were able to locate him in the bathroom that he came out shooting madly at everybody. The police had never seen anything like this kind of violence and the RAID police had to protect themselves. Merah jumped out of the window and continued to shoot. He was found dead on the ground. According to an interesting interview noted in Ha'aretz about a French woman who complained to police about Merah years ago, his brother is even worse than he was. The woman also stated that the "true mind" behind the suspect was his brother Abdelkader, who is currently in police custody. "It is he who brainwashed [Merah] and often flew out of France," she said. 
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| Finally! A good article on the Gaza fuel crisis (updated) Posted: 22 Mar 2012 02:59 AM PDT AP has an article that accurately describes the reasons for the Gaza fuel crisis. A dispute between Egypt and Gaza's Hamas government has produced the worst energy crisis here in years: Gazans are enduring 18-hour-a-day blackouts, fuel is running low for hospital backup generators, raw sewage pours into the Mediterranean Sea for lack of treatment pumps and gas stations have shut down.It only took six weeks for a major news service to tackle the issue. Given the huge number of reporters in the area, this shows how little journalists care about the lives of Palestinian Arabs if their problems cannot be blamed on Israel. The only major point that AP mentions that I haven't is the idea that Egypt doesn't want to be responsible for Gaza and wants it to still be Israel's responsibility. The funny part is that Israel has never expressed any problem with sending fuel through Kerem Shalom and has been ready and willing to do so for months. The only major point that AP misses is the fact that one main reason Hamas wants fuel through Egypt is to be able to charge higher taxes on it (and deprive the PA from getting taxes from fuel that goes through Kerem Shalom.) (h/t billposer) UPDATE: Now that AP felt it was worth reporting, Reuters rushed to pen a similar story. Funny, that. 
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