| Some kinds of apartheid are OK Posted: 30 May 2012 02:02 PM PDT On Tuesday night, Arabs threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Jewish-owned house in Jerusalem and it ignited, torching the room and heavily damaging the house. This was the culmination of two weeks of incessant harassment of the Jewish residents - where they broke many windows of both houses and cars that belong to Jews in the neighborhood. But unlike the cases when Jews are accused of attacking Arabs - crimes that are universally condemned and referred to as "racist" - these incidents will be ignored. The reason? The Jewish homes are in Beit Hanina, a neighborhood that is predominantly Arab. Jews had lived there before 1948 and Jews purchased the property in 1977; finally the Israeli courts recognized the purchase and allowed Jews to move in a few weeks ago, in a move that received widespread condemnation worldwide. The EU and the UN condemned Israel for allowing Jews to live in land owned by Jews. You will not hear a single word of condemnation about the violent - and potentially deadly - attack on the families that live there today. Because some kinds of violence, and some kinds of apartheid, are acceptable to the world community. (h/t @JudgeDan48) 
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| Russian journalist attacked after insulting Mohammed Posted: 30 May 2012 12:45 PM PDT And so it goes.... A radio host has been hospitalized after being cut 15 times by an unidentified criminal. Two weeks ago the journalist ventured to criticize the founder of Islam, the Prophet Mohammed, on air.
Sergey Aslanyan, 46, was brought to Moscow's hospital with numerous non-penetrating knife wounds to the chest, neck and arm.
According to the police report, on late Monday evening an unknown man called to Aslanyan's flat over the building intercom and called him outside for a talk. When the journalist stepped out of the entranceway he was knocked over the head with a heavy object, after which the assailant brought the knife into play.
Aslanyan claimed that the attacker was shouting "you are Allah's enemy!" while slashing at the victim.
Police say the abuser was a slim man of about 30, while according to some witnesses there were several attackers.
As of now the journalist is conscious and his condition is stable. His relatives and friends are free to visit him in his flat, which is guarded by police. Investigators say they do not have a primary lead, but hope to identify the perpetrator using porch surveillance camera data.
Still, Izvestia newspaper made a guess that the attack could be linked to recent statements made by the journalist in a radio show. While discussing religion in general he made some "from zero to hero" remarks towards the Prophet Mohammed.
"The Prophet Mohammed, as we know, was not a religious figure. He was a businessman, but after getting considerable financial support built plans as to how to get to the top," Aslanyan disclosed. He also said that the Prophet "rewrote the Bible" so that "now everyone would know the Prophet Mohammed was not a market shopkeeper, but an outstanding political figure."
According to Aslanyan, the idea of Islam was a "business project from the very beginning," and turned out to be successful due to "handsome financing." Besides that, the journalist, who was an external expert at this radio show, speculated that the Prophet had some sort of sexual disorder.
Reportedly, the journalist later apologized on air for the harsh statements he had made, but that did not change public opinion much.
Such statements could not but stir the Muslim community. There was a widespread angry reaction on the Islamic internet forums.
Muslims from the Republic of Tatarstan, where Islam is the dominant religion, wrote a letter to the Prosecutor General's office saying Aslanyan's statements had insulted them.
"These insults wound our religious feelings and come into conflict with Russian legislature, because they unleash ethnic discord and interreligious hatred," insists Imam Seijarfar Lutfullin. 
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| Israelis saving the world, again Posted: 30 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT From Israel21C:  Be still your beating hearts: Making medical history, scientists from Israel have been able to transform human stem cells from older diseased patients into brand-new, healthy, beating heart tissue.
This could mean that heart disease might someday be repaired by using cells from a person's own body, eliminating the need for risky surgical implants and transplants.
Using stem-cell technology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers from Haifa showed that their lab-produced cardiac muscle cells are also capable of merging into existing heart muscles.
The news is causing a media sensation around the globe.
It will take five to 10 years before this basic science can get to the point of clinical trials, Gepstein emphasizes. People with advanced heart disease today might never benefit from the research, published in the current issue of the European Heart Journal. The advance is more likely to be applicable to people who are now 30 years old and younger.
Still, the breakthrough is monumental.
"What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young — the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born," says Prof. Lior Gepstein, head researcher.
Skin cells from patients aged 51 and 61 were transformed into healthy heart muscle cells by adding to the cell nucleus three genes and valpoic acid, a small molecule. Gepstein's team avoided a transcription factor typically used in creating stem cells because it's thought to cause cells to develop out of control and become tumors.
The new heart muscle cells, cardiomyocytes, grew in a lab dish with existing heart tissues, and within 24 to 48 hours both kinds of tissue were beating together as one.
"The tissue was behaving like a tiny microscopic cardiac tissue composed of approximately 1,000 cells in each beating area."
This culture was then implanted into the hearts of healthy rats, where it connected well to the existing cardiac muscle. 
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| "Bank of Palestine" promotional materials Posted: 30 May 2012 10:15 AM PDT EoZ fan Ruchie emailed me that she was at an Arab business conference in Nazareth, and one of the promotional items being given away was this mug from the "Bank of Palestine:" Of course, the map includes all of Israel, without any fear of controversy. Making it really hard to argue that the goal of Palestinian Arabs is not to wipe out Israel. No doubt if you ask them about it (in English) they would say that they were merely invoking a romantic map of "historic Palestine." Yet the only time any entity called Palestine looked like this was between 1922 and 1948, which means that "historic Palestine" was a bizarre anomaly of a territory, whose boundaries were drawn by the West, which was under British rule, and that lasted a mere 26 years. Isn't it weird that people who supposedly had been there for centuries define themselves this way? 
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| Lunchtime Trumptime open thread Posted: 30 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT I'm having problems blogging on the train as my mobile provider wants to charge for using my phone as a hot-spot (or even tethering,) so I'm a little behind on blogging. And since Donald Trump is in the news again, and I happened to pass by one of his buildings that I hadn't noticed had an interesting geometric pattern as well as a nice use of trees, I figured it is as good excuse as any for an open thread. 
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| Iran tries to play the fauxtography game with the BBC Posted: 30 May 2012 07:30 AM PDT From Iran's PressTV, by one of their reliable Western sycophants Peter Eyre: As we have seen so many times before the BBC has shown a distinct lean towards Israel or in this case a clear distortion of facts when it released a picture of the recent Houla massacre in Syria.
Take a close look at their front page photograph and then compare it with the photograph taken by Marco Di Lauro 9 years earlier on 27th May 2003 in Al Musayyib Iraq and you can clearly see the lack of professionalism by the BBC.
I find it so unbelievable that the general public simply accept whatever is placed before them and in doing so accept this as being justification for going to war. Just by simply studying this photograph which are all children, you can see that each row consists of around 25 – 30 bodies and so one can assume that in this photograph we are looking at four rows amounting to at least 125 and yet there were only 49 children killed in Houla, Syria.
Can one ever imagine that this once very professional media outlet earned so much respect from the people of Britain and now it has fallen to below a sub quality standard!! Indeed, the photo was taken in 2003, and the BBC erred. However, PressTV did not note the caption that the BBC used, and its photo is too fuzzy to read it. Here is a better screenshot: Apparently, anti-regime supporters in Syria circulated the photo and the BBC ran with it without confirming - something that happens a lot because of the difficulty of getting reporters into Syria. It was certainly sloppy on the BBC's part (there were far more bodies in this photo that the number of victims) but they made it very clear that they couldn't verify the photo. As soon as they found out the truth they took it down. (The original photographer is unhappy, though.) In case you think that the PressTV article has any credibility, though, here's a small bit from later on: I have reported before that when the Israelis attacked Lebanon in 2006 they also nuked themselves and again in 2008/9 when they hit Gaza………when will these maniacs understand that when they use the same weapons as were used in Libya the entire region becomes consumed in millions of radioactive nano particles that directly attack the human DNA. 
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| Two articles about Zionism, from different angles Posted: 30 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT From Melanie Phillips: Zionism is no more nor less than the self-determination of the Jewish people -- as a people, and not just as adherents of the Jewish religion. Jews are in fact the only people – as a people -- for whom Israel (ancient Judea and Samaria) was ever their national homeland. Those who deny Zionism thus deny Jewish peoplehood and the fundamental right of Jews to live as a people in their own ancestral homeland, Israel.
Unique in the world, Jews are both a people and adherents of a religion. Intrinsic to and inseparable from the religion of Judaism is the land of Israel; more specifically, the centrality of and longing for Jerusalem and its Temple. Deny that centrality and you rip the heart and soul out of Judaism. Those who deny the right of the Jews to Israel and Jerusalem deny the right of the Jews to their own religion.
Judaism is like a stool supported on three legs – the nation, the religion and the land. Saw off any of these legs and the stool collapses. Does this mean that all Jews are Zionists? Of course not, no more than it means that all Jews are religious. But just as the hatred of Jews on theological grounds has always threatened the lives and safety of all Jews including those who are not religious, so the anti-Zionist hatred of Jewish self-determination is a form of bigotry which threatens the lives and safety of all Jews, whether or not they are Zionists. And the fact that there are some anti-Zionist Jews who themselves hate the expression of Jewish self-determination in the form of the State of Israel is a manifestation of that same self-same bigotry no less for being such a tragically twisted example.
The anti-Zionist madness of our time is thus far more pernicious even than hatred of Israel, pathologically obsessive and malevolent as that is in itself. Bad enough that for so many people in Britain and the west, Israel has been successfully demonised as a pariah state on the basis of a unique systematic campaign of falsehoods, distortions and libels about its history and behaviour, untruths which have nevertheless become the unchallenged basis for public discussion.
But far worse even than this is the assumption underlying this lazy defamation, that Zionism is a creed that is itself a particularly aggressive kind of racism or colonialism. This vicious prejudice has turned truth, reason and decency inside out. The right of the Jews to their own historic national homeland has been recast, entirely falsely, as a usurpation of the 'right' to that land of 'Palestinians' – who never actually existed as a discrete people in the first place. Those Jews who are Zionists now find themselves as a result cast as racists and social pariahs – merely for asserting the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their own historic homeland.
Those who are driven by a vicious and bigoted hatred have thus been allowed to cast the victims of their hatred as themselves hateful people. Zionist Jews are thus defamed and victimised many times over – and by those who have the gall to claim the moral high ground in doing so, from luvvies Emma Thompson and Ken Loach to the boycotters and thugs who harass and bully Zionist Jews on campus. Read the whole thing. And from a completely different direction, from Michael Totten: "Are you Zionists?"
My colleague Armin Rosen and I were supposed to be conducting the interview. Instead, we were put on the defensive before we could even ask our first question.
"Of course not," I said.
"Nope," Armin said. "I don't have a Zionist bone in my body."
We were at the headquarters for the UGGT, Tunisia's biggest labor union, in the small city of Kasserine just down the road from Sidi Bouzid where the revolution—and the region-wide Arab Spring generally—began at the tail end of 2010 when fruit vendor Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest crooked and onerous government regulation.
Four men sat in the union office with us. Armin and I wanted to hear about what happened in the early days of the revolt against Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's autocratic regime, but they were in no mood to share such information with Zionists.
Our translator Ahmed Medien, a young and—shall we say—more cosmopolitan journalist based in the capital, Tunis, sat with us.
"What if we were Zionists?" I said, directing my question to Ahmed as much as to our interlocutors.
"They wouldn't talk to you," he said.
I was annoyed and tempted to say, never mind then, we're done here. How would they feel if I opened an interview by asking if they were terrorists? Part of me wanted to get thrown out of their office, not because I itch for fights on the job, but because I learn as much from one interview that goes off the rails as I do from six that are predictable. But I don't sabotage interviews. That's up to the folks on the other side of the table. And anyway, conversations like this one that merely go wobbly, rather than implode catastrophically, can also be more revealing than typical ones.
Did I lie when I said I wasn't a Zionist? What's a Zionist, anyway? A person who thinks Israel has a right to exist? If so, then, yes, I suppose I'm a Zionist, or perhaps just a Zionist sympathizer since I am not Jewish. But these working-class mustachios in Tunisia's back-of-beyond have another, more phantasmagorical, definition of the notorious Z-word. I'm certainly not a Zionist as they define one. Neither is Armin Rosen.
"We are not against Jews," said the man behind the desk in whose office we sat, "but Zionists didn't go to Palestine to coexist peacefully with Arab nations. They went there to take land from Palestinians and kill them. This is not a country that wants to peacefully coexist. This is a country that wants war between Arab nations."
This is nonsense on stilts, of course, and since he and his colleagues wanted to know if Armin and I support that, then, no, neither of us lied, not really, when we said we weren't Zionists.
(h/t Mohammed the Teddy Bear)
Tunisia is moderate and even liberal compared with other Arabic-speaking countries, but the place still suffers from a heady case of Israel Derangement Syndrome. More than half the people I interviewed complained about Israel at least once even when I didn't ask about it. Not a single one of these people—not a one—based their complaint in reality. They were jousting with a fantasy Israel that only exists in their minds. 
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| "Human rights orgs" double-down on Tamimi Posted: 30 May 2012 03:06 AM PDT I noted last week that the EU and Amnesty International regard Bassem Tamimi as a "prisoner of conscience" and a "human rights defender" even though he was convicted of encouraging kids to throw stones at Israeli soldiers. I mentioned that an Amnesty official visited the Tamimi family and reported, without a shred of verification, that the family's "curtains [are] burned from tear gas shot by the Israeli army into the house." I emailed the IDF, asking if IDF allows firing tear gas into houses. The answer I received was "IDF regulations do not allow for the firing of tear gas into a house. Tear gas is used only for riot dispersal." A reader sent my blog comments to both the EU and Amnesty's office in Amsterdam. Amnesty's reply is priceless, as it defends itself without any evidence besides its own sterling record: Dear Mr. XXXX.
Amnesty International regards mister Bassam Tamimi as a prisoner of conscience, who is imprisoned solely because of his role in organizing peaceful protests against the encroachement on Palestinian lands by Israeli colonists.
Therefore, in our view, he should be released immediately and unconditionally.
The underpinning of our work is solid and reliable information.
We attach much value to the checking and double-checking of all information we receive.
Hence, Amnesty reaches the above conclusions after extensive investigation of this case.
Amnesty's strenghth is reliability.
Amnesty only acts after very thorough investigation.
At Amnesty's headquarter in London, information on human rights abuses from around the world is collected and analyzed.
Amnesty also sends research teams to investigate the human rights situation on location. During such missions Amnesty talks to victims, lawyers, local human rights activists, the government and is present at court cases.
The research is done by a team of experts, supported by specialists in different areas like international justice, media and technology.
Only when our researchers are convinced about a case will Amnesty take action. This approach guarantees that our organisation is always capable of exposing human rights abuses without error.
Through this methodology our organisation is always capable of exposing human rights abuses in a reliable way.
With kind regards,
Wim Roelofsen,
Publieksvoorlichting Twelve paragraphs of "proof by assertion." The vignette on the Amnesty site proves every one of these assertions wrong, as Amnesty did not follow up about the "tear gas" claim and reports it as fact. As far as Tamimi goes, the EU did not respond to my reader's query. But HRW has now added itself to the gang of people who claim, falsely, that the conviction of Tamimi was based on the testimony of a child: An Israeli military court's conviction on May 20, 2012, of a Palestinian activist, Bassem Tamimi, of leading illegal demonstrations violates his right to freedom of assembly, while its conviction of him on a second charge of urging children to throw stones on the basis of a child's coercively-obtained statement raises serious concerns about the fairness of his trial, Human Rights Watch said today. The court sentenced Tamimi on May 29 to 13 months in prison, which he has already served, as well as a 17-month suspended sentence.
"The Israeli military authorities seem to have known it would be hard to justify convicting an activist for only leading peaceful protests, so they apparently used oppressive methods to produce evidence that he also encouraged children to throw stones," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
[Tamimi] was further convicted of soliciting children and youths to throw stones on the basis of evidence that, the court said, rested to a decisive degree on a statement obtained by police interrogators from a 15-year-old Palestinian boy whom soldiers had arrested at gunpoint late at night. They questioned the boy for more than four hours the following morning, after he had not slept, without letting him have a parent or lawyer present. In that statement, the boy said that Tamimi had encouraged youths to throw stones, but in court the boy retracted his statement and said the police had instructed him to incriminate Tamimi. As I noted last week, the judge specifically ignored most the testimony of a minor and a young adult because she did not believe their testimony and because of inconsistencies - yet HRW is saying that the conviction was based primarily on this evidence. Reading further, Amnesty admits that the judge noted that the 14-year old's testimony (of a relative of Tamimi's) was not coerced based on the fact that he was laughing during the interrogation and that police asked him if he wanted to sleep and he declined. Amnesty also admits that the judge noted there was corroborating evidence that Tamimi was directing children to throw stones, as he was gesturing from a roof towards soldiers while on a cell phone. So even though the court proceedings were completely transparent, including the videotaping of the interrogations and the reasoning behind the conviction, Amnesty and the EU are flatly stating that the judge is acting politically and not according to legal standards. HRW also admits that there is regularly stone throwing at these weekly demonstrations. Yet Tamimi is a "peace activist." 
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