יום שלישי, 3 באפריל 2012

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

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Haniyeh lies, blames Israel for "withholding fuel" from Gaza (updated)

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 07:58 PM PDT

Palestine Times reports that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister, holds the "Zionist occupation" to be "fully responsible" for the deaths of 3 Gaza children who died in a tragic fire when fuel their parents were storing in their house exploded, probably from a candle. Haniyeh said that Israel was at fault for its "siege of Gaza and preventing fuel for electricity," which is of course a complete lie: Israel is willing to provide all the fuel necessary, but Hamas is refusing to accept fuel from Israel.

Gulf News adds:
Speaking to Gulf News, Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas spokesman, said that the failure to deliver fuel to Gaza and the power shortage has paralysed life there.

"The death of the three children is a crime and Israel is responsible for it."

"The victims' family and Gaza will not forgive Israel for this crime," he said.

Barhoum said that Israel and some groups in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) were also responsible for causing a delay in delivering fuel to Gaza Strip.

"Egypt is required to act and come to the rescue," he said.

He called on Arab countries to immediately intervene to save the Gaza Strip from an environmental and humanitarian disaster that Hamas has deliberately caused.

Hamas is cynically promoting Gazan suffering in order to extort money and aid from Arab states. And still none of the leaders of those states are willing to publicly respond that they'll only help when Hamas acts like they care about their own people. The fear of Islamists taking Hamas' side seems to be enough to cause them to keep any of their reservations about Hamas' manipulations to themselves.

Meanwhile, Gazans are waiting in lines from morning to night to get a gallon of petrol.


(h/t Jeff T)

How to misuse statistics: Israel accused of jailing too many journalists (updated)

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 03:22 PM PDT

From Justin Martin at Columbia Journalism Review:

At the end of each year, the Committee to Protect Journalists counts the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide and lists the countries in which they're locked up.

These data are very helpful, but I think we can consider them under a new lamp by taking into account each country's size. China and Eritrea, for example, have about the same number of journalists rotting in prison, 27 and 28 respectively. But the population of China is over 250 times that of the small dictatorship.

Any country that unjustly arrests or imprisons a single journalist is democratically suspect, of course, and that includes you, America. Ratings of press freedom in the United States tanked after 2011, as counts of arrested journalists in this country soared. Still, though police in the United States tend to arrest journalists filming or otherwise documenting unrest, their bosses usually get embarrassed at the media blowback and drop the charges. Imprisoning journalists for months or years at a time is another matter and, other than the outright murder of journalists in places like Russia and Syria, the long-term jailing of reporters is the offense with which the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is most concerned.

For a new take on this scourge, I quickly calculated the highest twelve ratios of jailed journalists to a country's population size.

So we see that according to this criterion, Israel jails more journalists per capita than any other nation except for Eritea.

Sounds damning, right?

Except that it is a meaningless statistic. The size of the country's population has nothing to do with how many journalists are in the country. Israel has far more journalists than most countries that are much larger, because there is such intense interest in Israel. Moreover, Israel is liberal in allowing journalists to have access to the nation, as opposed to, say, practically every other nation in the Middle East.

If you want to see which nations jail the most reporters per-something, you must compare it to the total number of reporters - not the total population of the nation. To restate the question - if you are a reporter in Country X, what are the odds that you will be arrested? Comparing the number of jailed journalists to the total population of the nation doesn't tell you anything meaningful.

This is not to blame Justin Martin at CJR - at first blush his metric sounds like it might be meaningful - but his initial assumption is completely wrong.

Unfortunately, I cannot find immediately how many journalists are in Israel. Here's a list of journalists per million in North America and here's one with newspaper journalists per million for many other countries, but not Israel. I would be willing to bet that if you find out those numbers, and look at number of jailed reporters per thousand reporters, you will see Israel going way, way down that list.

This is all besides the fact of the circumstances of the imprisonment, which is a whole other topic. Given that Arab media openly says that their journalists are part of the war against Israel, it is but a small step for some of them to step over that line. But even without going into that, this is a perfect example of a statistic that sounds like it is illuminating some truth - and in fact it is obscuring it.

UPDATE: I was too charitable. Martin really dislikes Israel and chances are pretty good that he gleefully published this metric just to castigate the Jewish state. Of course, even in this article he smarmily says "Israel wants to be called a modern democracy and gets cranky when critics point out that it is not."



Blood libel alive and well in Arab world

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 02:00 PM PDT

A new book was published in Arabic that is getting some publicity in the Jordanian media, called "Jewish Hostility Towards Christ and Christians," by Assad Azzouni.

According to these articles, the book includes risible charges such as saying that Jews are trying to destroy Christianity and convert all Christians to Judaism. It also devotes much space to how the Talmud is dedicated to starting wars, and of course has complete faith in the autheticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as Jews being behind all Masonic activities.

None of the articles about this book show the slightest bit of skepticism about Azzouni's claims.

Beyond that, Azzouni wrote his own article in Al Watan Voice about the same theme. In that article, almost as an aside, he writes:
Do not forget the need to kill Christian children and use to knead their blood in a dough on their festival.

Then he goes beyond the standard blood libel to add a specifically Islamic twist:
According to Rabbi Moses Abu Alhafiyah, the Talmud analyzes two types of blood for the pure blood of the Passover. If Christian blood is not available, Muslim blood is acceptable, because they believe that many Christians converted to Islam.

No comments on the article, no one protesting this throwback to the anti-semitism of the Middle Ages in Europe. It is simply accepted as a fact in the Arab world. In English, they will stress how much they love Jews but in mainstream Arabic media opinions like these are accepted wholeheartedly.

And this is just from a quick search for the word "Jew" in Arabic newspapers published today.

Toulouse killer's neighbors say "he was one of us"

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 12:30 PM PDT

From Reuters:
In the neighborhood where Mohamed Merah grew up, and was last seen joking with friends days after he had killed three French soldiers in a pair of shootings, the message to outsiders is clear: he was one of our own, no matter what he did.

The self-styled Islamist militant tore a wound in France's fragile sense of community when he gunned down the soldiers, sons of North African immigrant families like his own, and then a rabbi and three Jewish children - all in the name of al Qaeda.

in Les Izards, the 1960s housing project where Merah, 23, felt most at home, the reaction to his rampage has been one of anxious defiance of outsiders trying to peer into what seems like a closed world, cut off from elegant downtown Toulouse by its poverty, by crime and, locals say, by racial discrimination.

"I'm going to tell you one thing: he was a kid from this neighborhood and we support his family no matter what people say on TV," said one middle-aged mother of Algerian origin who said she had known Merah when he was a child in Les Izards.

Typical of others in the area of low-rise blocks and tidy squares a 15-minute metro ride north of the city centre, she did not want to be named when speaking up for the man who was, briefly, public enemy No. 1: "He was one of ours," she said. "And we will never be sure of what really happened."

By one local account of a confrontation between youths and the authorities in the neighborhood, after Merah was killed trying to escape a siege of his apartment, one young man was arrested after yelling at the police ranks: "My friend Mohamed is a real man - too bad he wasn't able to finish the job!"

Hatem Ben Ismail, who runs several community centers in the area and describes himself as the "go-to guy on Les Izards", says he simply hesitates to discuss in public the mood among the youngsters he tries to help: "The situation with the young people," he concluded, "is just too explosive."

By the bakery where Les Izards residents said they last saw Merah hanging out, two days before his last attack, on a Jewish primary school on March 19, a group of surly young men in tracksuits and dark glasses glowered at oncoming cars.

When, on a reporting assignment this week, a Reuters photographer approached the youths, all in their late teens and early 20s, she was warned, with a stream of expletives, to leave - or have her car smashed up.
True to Reuters' philosophy, the article goes heavy on "understanding" Merah and the seething neighborhood he is a part of, emphasizing poverty and alienation and downplaying Islamic fundamentalism.

But even that is too much for news editors worldwide. Any article that might show Muslim youths as being supportive of a murderer is anathema. it doesn't fit the meme and must be suppressed. While typically Reuters articles can get posted at hundreds of newspapers and other media sites, this two-day old story was only picked up by two newspapers according to Google News search: The Chicago Tribune and the Jerusalem Post.

(h/t Jeffer)

Egyptians have learned the wrong lessons from the revolution

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 11:15 AM PDT

After months of insisting that they will not field a presidential candidate, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood nominated their deputy supreme guide Khairat al-Shater to be Egypt's president.

Liberals who were trounced in the parliamentary elections are upset. So what are they doing?

Facebook.
The number fans of a Facebook page against the Muslim Brotherhood's nomination of its former deputy supreme guide, Khairat al-Shater, surpassed that of Shater's official fan page on Monday.

Shater's official campaign page has attracted 62,300 fans, while the page against him, "I will not vote for Shater," has gained 76,500.

The official page supporting Shater for president was first created on Saturday after the Brotherhood announced his nomination. Hours later, an opposing Facebook campaign also emerged.

"The number of our fans surpassed that of Khairat al-Shater's official page in less than 24 hours," the opposing campaign said in one of its posts on Monday. The response is considered a strong message of disapproval for the Brotherhood.

An even stronger message, the page's organizers said, would be if the number of fans doubles that of Shater's official page.
Hey, Egypt: Facebook isn't what brought down Mubarak. It was merely a tool to help organize rallies, and once the ball got rolling the newspapers and other media took over. Putting up a Facebook page against Shater is literally meaningless if you don't have an alternate candidate.

And you don't. There are hundreds of potential candidates for president. If all the MB supporters vote for Shater, and liberal votes get split among the remainder, then Shater wins. The only credible non-Islamist candidate seems to be Amr Moussa, and even if there was a runoff, the Islamists win anyway. (Before Shater entered the race, the Salafist candidate had a very good chance of at least making it to a runoff vote.)

Egyptian liberals seem to think that if they don't like the new leader, they just need another couple of big rallies in Tahrir Square and they can get another chance. They are not organized nearly as well as the Islamists.

Egypt is doomed to become an Islamist state. The liberals have learned nothing from their huge loss in the parliamentary elections. In the end, the liberals will flee to the West rather than fight for Egypt, where they can congratulate themselves on their ability to create Twitter trending topics and do absolutely nothing real.

Gaza fuel crisis update

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 10:15 AM PDT

Last week, Hamas, in reaction to its artificially created  crisis where it refuses to accept fuel from Israel, started offering carpools for people to use Hamas state vehicles to get to work.

Now, Gazans are wondering - how do these Hamas vehicles have fuel themselves? Diesel is completely unavailable in Gaza, ambulances can no longer be used, but Hamas government officials still have fuel for their own cars! They are saying that Hamas confiscated the fuel it needed from petrol stations and are using it exclusively for their own purposes, and trying to pretend to be the "good guys" as they exploit the fake crisis.

Meanwhile, the three children who were killed yesterday in a Gaza house fire caused by candles igniting stored fuel  were declared "martyrs" by Mahmoud Abbas, with the implication that they died as part of a war. It is unclear if he considers it as if they were killed by Hamas or Israel. Either way, he is using that status to pay the families martyr money, which of course comes from Western aid.

The PFLP called on both Hamas and Fatah to put aside their differences and find a solution to the crisis.

There are also shortages of cooking gas. Israel does transfer these through Kerem Shalom but it only ships what Gaza accepts, and Hamas has been limiting that amount as well. But that's not the only problem - now there are problems with transporting the gas that is being shipped inside Gaza because of the shortage of diesel for the distribution trucks.

Israel is shipping some 150,000 liters of diesel through Kerem Shalom today. The Red Cross is bringing it in and paying for it for Gaza hospitals to be able to use their generators.

Al Dameer, a pseudo-human rights body, called for both the PA and Hamas to work together to find a solution to the problem, but hinted that Hamas' refusal to accept fuel from Israel might be legitimate. It said "Al Dameer calls upon the Gaza Government to work immediately with all in order to develop plans that contribute in finding temporary solutions for this continual crisis until achieving the final solution. It should be taken into consideration, the economical and social conditions of Gaza Population before developing these plans." As if Gazans would riot if fuel came from Israel, so their sky-high black market prices are reduced to merely the going market rate after PA taxes. (As usual, they find a way to blame Israel as well, calling it the "occupying power" of Gaza.)

It has now been nearly two months since Egypt cracked down on illegal fuel smuggling to Gaza, the only method of obtaining power plant fuel that the far-thinking Gaza government allowed for over a year.

"Moses led Muslims out of Egypt to liberate Palestine"

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 09:15 AM PDT

Lying as natural as breathing.


Interview with Dr. Omar Ja'ara, lecturer at Al-Najah University in Nablus, and specialist in Israeli affairs on PA TV:

"We must make clear to the world that David in the Hebrew Bible is not connected to David in the Quran, Solomon in the Hebrew Bible is not connected to Solomon in the Quran, and neither is Saul or Joshua son of Nun [of the Bible]. We have a great leader, Saul, [in the Quran] who defeated the nation of giants and killed Goliath. This is a great Muslim victory. The Muslims of the Children of Israel went out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and unfortunately, many researchers deny the Exodus of those oppressed people who were liberated by a great leader, like Moses the Muslim, the believing leader, the great Muslim, who was succeeded by Saul, the leader of these Muslims in liberating Palestine. This was the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine from the nation of giants led by Goliath. This is our logic and this is our culture."
[PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 15, 2012]

As of this writing, this video is not yet on the Palestinian Media Watch site.

(h/t Mike)

Hamas leader: "Half of Palestinians are Egyptian, the other half Saudi"

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 08:15 AM PDT

Oh, this is too good. From MEMRI:


Following are excerpts from an address by Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad, aired by Al-Hekma TV on March 23, 2012.

Fathi Hammad : Is Egypt incapable of supplying fuel for 1.5 to 2 million people in the Gaza Strip?
[...]
If you do not point your compass toward Palestine, Al-Aqsa, and Jerusalem, in order to uproot the Zionist enemy, the US will trample you underfoot. It will besiege you with its conspiracies and will finish you off. Therefore, you must hoist the banner of Jihad, the banner of "there is no god but Allah."
[...]
Brothers, there are 1.8 million of us in Gaza. In Egypt, there are about 90 million people. We equal merely two percent of the Egyptian population. [Supplying us with fuel] would not burden you at all.
[...]
At Al-Aqsa and on the land of Palestine, all the conspiracies, throughout history, have been shattered - the conspiracies of the Crusaders, and the conspiracies of the Tatars. At Al-Aqsa and on the land of Palestine, the Battle of Hattin was waged. The [West] does not want this noble history to repeat itself, because the Jews and their allies would be annihilated - the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists.

Thus, the conspiracy is very clear. Al-Aqsa and the land of Palestine represent the spearhead for Islam and for the Muslims. Therefore, when we seek the help of our Arab brothers, we are not seeking their help in order to eat, to live, to drink, to dress, or to live a life of luxury. No. When we seek their help, it is in order to continue to wage Jihad.
[...]
Allah be praised, we all have Arab roots, and every Palestinian, in Gaza and throughout Palestine, can prove his Arab roots - whether from Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, or anywhere. We have blood ties. So where is your affection and mercy?
[...]
Personally, half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri ["Egyptian"]. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.

Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are a part of you.

Allah Akbar. All praise to Allah. Allah Akbar. How can you keep silent, oh Muslims, when the people of Gaza are dying? You watch from the sidelines without providing them with the simplest thing, which you give to the West for the most meager price.
[...]
Ah, but when it comes to becoming citizens of those Arab countries that they came from, then they are all "Palestinian" and must be treated like lepers - in order to protect their own nation, of course.

Palestinian Arab nationalism does not reflect any inherent peoplehood but rather it is a political fiction created only in the twentieth century, and only to destroy Zionism. And Fathi Hammad knows the truth, as do many other Arabs. They just won't be caught dead saying it to Westerners.

The logical conclusion from Hammad's statements is that Palestinian Arabs should be allowed, if they want to, to become citizens of any Arab country they desire - just as other Arabs can. Human rights groups should be in the forefront of that movement. The Arab nations who refuse to do so are engaging in worse discrimination against Palestinian Arabs than anyone else.

Yet Human Rights Watch is against this simple human right, and for that reason alone it deserves to be exposed as a hypocritical sham. Not to mention the Arab states who self-righteously pretend to support Palestinian Arab while they are in the forefront of keeping them stateless and miserable.

Freedom of the press, PA-style: Insult Fatah and get arrested

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT

If you are a member of Fatah, and someone says something that offends you, you can make a quick call to PA security and demand that person be arrested. They'll be happy to do it for you. After all, what are friends for?

From Ma'an:
The recent detention of three Palestinian journalists in the West Bank are not based on security complaints but legal charges filed by individuals, the spokesman on the West Bank security services said Sunday.

Reporter Yousef al-Shayeb was detained a week ago, and on Wednesday a Palestinian court extended his remand for 15 days. He is being held while under investigation for "libel" and "defamation" over Jordanian newspaper article in January.

Ismat Abdul Khaliq was also detained this week after posting a number of comments on Facebook, and Tareq Khamis of Zaman press was briefly held on Sunday.

"The Palestinian Authority's security services have no security-related problem with any journalist," Adnan Dmeiri told Ma'an.

Abdul Khaliq and al-Shayeb were detained "upon orders by the Attorney General and judiciary over legal charges filed by other people," Dmeiri said. He said three charges have been filed against Abdul Khaliq, without elaborating on the petitioners.

Earlier on Sunday, Palestinian Attorney General Ahmad al-Maghni said the preventive security had filed a complaint against Ismat Abdul Khaliq.

She posted a number of insulting comments which accused President Mahmoud Abbas of betrayal and called for disbanding the Palestinian Authority. The exact charges were not clear.

Meanwhile Tariq Khamis was interrogated over "something related to Ismat Abdul-Khaliq," Dmeiri said, also without providing details. Khamis was detained Sunday from offices of Arab Cultural Forum in Al-Bireh near Ramallah, and later released.

Al-Shayeb was jailed after a complaint filed by Foreign Minister Riyad Malki and Hael al-Fahoum, the envoy in Paris. His report in Al-Ghad newspaper documented corruption allegations against the Palestinian diplomatic delegation in France, the Palestinian National Fund and the foreign minister.

Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki on Thursday defended his role in the reporter's arrest, after the Palestinian journalists union held protests and called for members to boycott a press freedom prize announced by the PA days earlier.

"I'm surprised some journalists reacted emotionally on behalf of their colleague without hearing the other side's case, or considering for a moment if Yousef al-Shayeb is the oppressor or the oppressed," Al-Malki told Ma'an.
PA politicians are notoriously thin-skinned.

In the end, this shows that despite all the talk of democracy and liberalism and reform in the PA, it remains a Fatah terror gang who use the government to do what they please.

Hijacking Holocaust Remembrance at Northeastern University (video)

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 05:35 AM PDT

Must see:

Poster: Homocrites

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 03:10 AM PDT


Background here.

Some commenters urged me to make a poster after that article, but I was reluctant because I thought it might accidentally offend gays. But when I sent it to a prominent gay Zionist activist for comment the response was "I f***ing love it."
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