Elder of Ziyon Daily News

I couldn't make it to the parade, but...
"The people of Jordan do not accept Jews entering their homeland"
"American settlers desecrating Al Aqsa"
Rockets, firebombs - another peaceful day
Some "love" from Egypt
Anti-semitic acts in France have increased since Toulouse
Work accident!
A vignette about racism
An Israeli artist calls for 3.3 million Israelis to move to Poland
Egypt's imminent fuel crisis

I couldn't make it to the parade, but...

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 08:00 PM PDT

I couldn't make it to the Salute to Israel parade on Sunday in New York, but I found one decoration along Fifth Avenue that the city forgot to take down.

Since the Empire State Building photo got the anti-Israel crowd so riled up, I figured this scene might cause them a collective aneurysm as they sputter about "kosher taxes" and other idiocies.

"The people of Jordan do not accept Jews entering their homeland"

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 02:30 PM PDT

On Sunday afternoon, a group of Jews visited the Jordanian tourist site of Kerak in Jordan, where there is a Crusader castle and other sites.

So the Jordanian residents stoned them.

Al Jazeera (Arabic) reports:

Salem Jeradat - who owns a grocery in the town - was surprised Sunday afternoon by a delegation of Jewish men and women who wear wearing the clothing of religious Jews, which led him to throw his shoes at them.

"Then the people of the town immediately came to the group and they threw shoes and stones, and they kicked them out of town immediately." Jeradat continued, "The people of Jordan do not accept the Jews entering their homeland, and the Wadi Araba treaty between Jordan and the Zionist entity does not represent us."

The idea is that those who occupy Palestine and desecrate holy places should not be allowed to roam freely in Jordan. Citizens of the town gathered in the evening in a grocery and committed themselves to prevent Jews from returning to their town.

A Jordanian website helpfully added that the Jewish tourists were wearing "provocative hats."

None of the articles mention "Zionists." Just Jews.

But don't call them anti-semitic. They get angry.

"American settlers desecrating Al Aqsa"

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 01:15 PM PDT

You don't have to live in Israel to be a "settler!"

From Anamnalquds.com:

25 settlers in a group from the American Zionist Movement on Monday desecrated the courtyards of the holy Al Aqsa Mosque near the Moroccan Gate as the Israeli occupation police protected them.

According to eyewitnesses, "the settlers had to take off their shoes and wandered around the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque while a guide spoke of the establishment of the Zionist temple in is place."

Here is one of the horrible photos of the desecration:

Hmmm...why would they need protection from the "occupation police"?

Rockets, firebombs - another peaceful day

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 11:45 AM PDT

From Arutz-7:

A firebomb was thrown, Sunday evening, at a home on the Mount of Olives, east of the Old City of Jerusalem.

According to PalArab media, it was two bombs thrown, and they claimed there was damage.

Meanwhile,

A Qassam rocket fired from northern Gaza exploded on the outskirts of Sderot at noon on Monday.

And on Friday:

A mortar shell fired from northern Gaza exploded in an open area in southern Israel.

There's an entire "low intensity conflict report" coming out detailing carjackings, rock attacks and more.

Some "love" from Egypt

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 10:30 AM PDT

From MEMRI, a new music video in Egypt called "I Love Israel":

My name is Amr El Masry, I love Israel.
I love Israel.
I love Israel.
I love Israel.

May it be destroyed.
May it be colonized.

May it be destroyed.
May it be colonized.

May it be wiped off the map.
May a wall fall on it.

I love Israel.
I love Israel.

May it disappear from the universe.
God, please have it banished.

May it disappear from the universe.
God, please have it banished.

I love Israel.
I love Israel.

May it dangle from the noose.
May I get to see it burning, Amen. I will pour petrol on it.
I love Israel.
I love Israel.

I am an Egyptian man.
I am not a coward.

Everywhere I go, my name is Amr El Masry.
I love Israel.
I love Israel.

I love Israel.
I love Israel.
I love Israel.
I love Israel.

May it be targeted. May it go up in flames that will never subside.
May it be targeted. May it go up in flames that will never subside.
From the bottom of my heart – may a wall fall on it.

I love Israel.
I love Israel.

May it destroy itself.
May we never hear of it again.

May it destroy itself.
May we never hear of it again.

I love Israel.
I love Israel.

May it cease to exist, not even on the border.
May they say on the news that there is no more destruction.

I love Israel.
I love Israel.

My heart is broken under my smoking jacket.
I see that you are occupied, so I'm off. Goodbye.

I love Israel.

(h/t Yoel)

Anti-semitic acts in France have increased since Toulouse

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 09:03 AM PDT

The vicious attack over the weekend by mob of apparent Arabs against three Jews in Lyon is not anomalous:

Jewish communal leaders in France say an attack on three Jewish men Saturday night was just the latest in a line of anti-Semitic incidents against the country's Jews.

"There has been a series of acts like the one in in Villeurbanne," said Richard Prasquier, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), according to Le Figaro.

Police are still searching for the culprits behind the incident Saturday night near the southern city of Lyon, in which 10 attackers assaulted three 18-year-old Jewish men outside a Jewish center in Villeurbanne. Two of the victims were taken to the hospital after being beaten with a hammer and metal rod.

Police believe the attackers are of North African extraction.

Joël Mergui, president of the Central Consistory, an umbrella organization working to coordinate local Jewish communities, said the country's Jews were under constant attack. "Not a week passes without anti-Semitic assaults in France. I refuse to believe Jews will be forced to choose between security and their Jewish identity."

The chief rabbi of the Grand Synagogue in Lyon, Richard Wertenschlag, called the atmosphere "unbearable."

"These incidents are becoming more and more frequent, so much so, alas, as to make one take them for granted," he said.

In March, a rabbi, his two children, and an 8-year-old girl were killed outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, by Algerian-French terrorist Mohamed Merah. Following the attack, French authorities vowed to crack down on Muslim extremism and anti-Semitic incidents.

But CRIF Vice President Ariel Goldman told Le Figaro that incidents had in fact ramped up.

"In the month following the Merah terror attack we counted 140 such acts," said Goldman. "This amounts to a third of the violent incidents we had in 2011."

Work accident!

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 07:34 AM PDT

From the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades English website:

Ezzedeen Al Qassam Brigades (E.Q.B) the military wing of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, mourned on Monday morning, June 4th, 2012, the death of the Qassam member Ahmed Mohammad Qalajah ,25, from Al Yarmouk district in Gaza city.

The brigades confirmed in a press statement released on Monday morning, that the martyr Ahmed has died while in a special Jihadist mission in the Strip, adding that he was martyred after a long bright path of Jihad, hard work, struggle and sacrifice

Al Qassam Brigades mourn the death of the Mujahed, reaffirms the commitment and determination to continue the resistance against the belligerent occupation forces.

The Arabic version includes the desire that he enters Paradise, because they are afraid that perhaps that is not the fate of the "martyrs" who never managed to kill any Jews.

A vignette about racism

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 06:05 AM PDT

Recently there have been some isolated attacks by Israelis against African would-be immigrants into Israel.

While the problem of these illegal immigrants is a serious one, nothing justifies racism, and nothing justifies physical attacks against these people.

The irony is that the Arab media is essentially celebrating these attacks as "proof" of Israeli racism. An op-ed in Al Quds today even says:

Palestinian people who have been the brunt of these racist practices for sixty-odd years have an affinity with these Africans and solidarity with their plight, just as they had sympathy with the Jewish immigrants who fled the persecution of Europe early last century, and, they were rewarded with expulsion and deportation and mass killings, ethnic cleansing; here are innocent African migrants who are tasting some of this Israeli racism...

The idea that Palestinian Arabs feel an affinity for Africans of any type is almost as laughable as the idea that they felt sympathy for Jewish Holocaust victims (they did everything they could to keep millions of Jews in Europe to be slaughtered.)

I noted an Economist article last week that detailed systematic racism against blacks and Asians in the Arab world (an article that was completely ignored by the Left that claims to care so much about this very issue.) There were few anguished op-eds in Arab newspapers about this clear, institutionalized racism. (Here is one exception.) No articles by such luminous moderates like Hussein Ibish calling for an end to Arab racism. Nothing.

To his credit, Robert Fisk was even more outspoken about the problem.

Arab societies are dependent on servants. Twenty-five per cent of Lebanese families have a live-in migrant worker, according to Professor Ray Jureidini of the Lebanese American University in Beirut. They are essential not only for the social lives of their employers (housework and caring for children) but for the broader Lebanese economy.

Yet in the Arab Gulf, the treatment of migrant labour – male as well as female – has long been a scandal. Men from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in the billionaires' paradise of Kuwait – and are consistently harassed, treated as third-class citizens, and arrested on the meanest of charges.

But sometimes the truth about Arab racism against blacks can be seen in a much more personal way.

In an advice column for the (Hamas-oriented) Palestine Times, an 18 year old Palestinian Arab girl writes:

I am an 18-year old girl, and my skin is brown. I believe I am beautiful to some extent, but people close to me don't, because they see me as "black." I often wish my mother would bleach my skin in order to whiten my skin, therefore, I am sparing no effort to buy creams to lighten my skin color. Unfortunately, members of my family like my younger sister, as her skin is white and beautiful. What's worse, the mother said this to my sister but not to me, which makes me jealous of my sister. My parents favor her even to the point that my father and my mother always argue as to which of them my sister resembles. I even thought about suicide. Please Help me I am broken and too pre-occupied...

The racism is so deep that even within a family there is preference for the daughter with whiter skin!

Arabs of course were instrumental in the slave trade, kidnapping tens of millions of Africans throughout the centuries, something that still exists (especially in Gulf countries) with African domestic workers who are effectively indentured servants.

Their glee at seeing some isolated and condemned acts of Israeli racism is more than a bit hypocritical.

An Israeli artist calls for 3.3 million Israelis to move to Poland

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 03:01 AM PDT

And Arabs are overjoyed.

From the JRMiP homepage:

'3.3 million Jews can change the life of 40 million Poles'

The founding wish of the JRMiP is to write new pages into a history that never quite took the course we wanted. We call for the return of 3.300.000 Jews to Poland to symbolize the possibility of our collective imagination – to right the wrongs history has imposed and to reclaim the promise of a utopian future that all citizens deserve. Our destiny is not tied to the fate of Jews – or Poles – we welcome into our ranks all those who believe in the strength of dreams and political will to achieve more. Members of the movement are migrants, intellectuals, workers, artists, out-casts and thinkers: People who recognize that the Europe of today needs to be re-thought, that Israel must change to be part of the Middle East and that as citizens we have the ability and responsibility to imagine the world differently. Now, the movement needs you. Together, we can be strong in our weakness.

In the words of the JRMiP manifesto: 'This is the response we propose for these times of crisis, when faith has been exhausted and old utopias have failed. Optimism is dying out. The promised paradise has been privatized. The Kibbutz apples and water melons are no longer as ripe. We direct our appeal not only to Jews. We accept into our ranks all those for whom there is no place in their homelands – the expelled and the persecuted. There will be no discrimination in our movement. We shall not ask about your life stories, check your residence cards or question your refugee status.'

Join us and Europe will be stunned.

The JRMiP was initiated by Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana in 2007 and since then has garnered international recognition and support. In May 2012 the JRMiP will meet for the first time in Berlin to formulate their future agenda.

The desire seems to be that if Jews of Polish ancestry would return to a country that always treated them as second-class citizens, then the remaining (mostly Sephardic) Jews in Israel could melt into a Middle East and return to becoming second-class citizens as well.

This is considered "utopian."

The heralded JRMiP Congress was apparently held three weekends ago - yes, on Shabbat - and perhaps three dozen "delegates" were scheduled to attend.

I can find no news stories about it.

In fact, the entire idea may have been a publicity stunt for the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, who created a trilogy of films about a fictional JRMiP in faux documentary style.

However tenuous the idea's relationship is with reality, Israeli Arab newspaper Elaph loves the idea. What's not for Arabs to love? It pushes their idea that Jews properly belong elsewhere.

The script could have been written by Helen Thomas!

Egypt's imminent fuel crisis

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 12:45 AM PDT

From Egypt Independent:

Egypt has struggled to obtain bank payments for its fuel purchases, trade sources said, delaying diesel supplies for transport, industry and agriculture ahead of the second round of an election vote.

The payment problems have caused shipping delays and prompted some suppliers to think again before offering oil into a forthcoming US$1 billion import tender, half a dozen trade sources, including current suppliers, told Reuters.

They said delays of up to two weeks in deliveries were a regular occurrence ahead of peak summer demand for diesel, blaming Egypt's difficulties in obtaining letters of credit from banks.

An official at the Egyptian General Petroleum Corp (EGPC) denied this.

A trader involved in the transactions said banks were increasingly nervous with loans and required additional assurances as Egypt's stretched finances made it harder to pay for its heavy fuel subsidies bill.

"There has been a queue of (oil) product vessels in Egypt that are waiting for letters of credit," said a second trader working for a Swiss-based trading house.

Fuel shortages have already caused anger this year and have delayed the harvest. Long lines at fuel stations in central Cairo were forming on Thursday, causing large traffic jams in some main thoroughfares.

Shipping delays can cut or eliminate oil traders' profit margins through additional waiting fees — "demurrage" costs.

Traders said these amounted to between $15,000-$25,000 a day depending on the size of the vessel.

The recent delays could further shrink Egypt's pool of suppliers participating in tenders, which has already fallen since the revolution, the traders said.

"Taking into consideration extra demurrage for sure there are some companies not offering anymore," said a trade source. Another source said that those able to continue supplying Egypt are likely to ask for premiums on fuel sales.