יום חמישי, 12 ביולי 2012

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Link to Elder of Ziyon

Summer re-runs: EoZ's most offensive video, from 2008

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 06:00 PM PDT

From August 2008, here is "Rachel Corrie", the EoZ song spoof video, that was banned on YouTube:



Here's the background behind the song as well as the lyrics, based on the Simon and Garfunkel classic "Richard Cory."

For those who don't get it, it is written from the perspective of a jihadist who uses clueless Westerners like Corrie to achieve his violent aims.

And, yes, that is me singing, badly, with a lot of purposeful audio distortion. I was trying to make it sound like I had two voices without singing it twice. But I could not hit those high notes.

UPDATE: If you follow my link above a couple of generations, you can see that I was inspired to do this from a "peace activist" named Anis Hamadeh who threatened to sue me for mocking one of his songs. 

I wondered what ever happened to Anis, and came upon this unintentionally hilarious video he made for a 90-minute cabaret show he created for "Palestine." It is so bad, it is brilliant.

Good old Anis, always good for a laugh!

Central Park open thread

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 02:00 PM PDT

Taken with my Google Nexus Galaxy phone this morning; three images stitched with Hugin:

Midweek links

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 12:30 PM PDT

From Ian:

The horrific legacy of Munich '72: I was there the day Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes
"The Munich Games in 1972 were overshadowed when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage and later killed by Palestinian terrorists. Gerald Seymour, ITN reporter turned novelist, recalls the horror and its legacy for the 2012 Games"

Missouri Politician Claims No Jews Died on 9-11
"MD Alam is running for Secretary of State in Missouri and heads the National Democratic Party Asian American Caucus, a group sponsored by the Democratic National Committee. Alam also believes no Jews died during the attacks of 9/11 and has made statements that infer Jews were involved in the attack itself."
He has since apologized, essentially saying - I believed everything I saw on a YouTube video:


IDFBLOG - IDF Elite Counter Terrorism Unit Practices Rescuing Hostages

It's clearer than ever: Israel is not the problem
"Roots of tension in the Arab world are far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"
"Yet, incredibly, 18 months into the Arab Spring, we're still being fed the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of all instability in the Middle East. Its resolution, we are told, would alleviate all tensions and solve the most pressing problems in the region."

Israel's Plight Ignored
Counterterrorism forum excludes Israel despite state's record of suffering terrorist attacks

'Chavez selling Assad diesel fuel for tanks'
"Wall Street Journal claims Venezuelan president, state-owned oil company helping Syrian regime buck US and EU sanctions"

Russian Navy Vessels and Marines Head to Syria

Iran seeks to legalise marriage for girls under 10 [unfamiliar source - EoZ]

Calls to Destroy Egypt's Great Pyramids Begin by Raymond Ibrahim

In bid to expand port trade, Haifa finds an unlikely partner Iraq
"Seaside city quietly facilitating Iraqi imports and exports via overland link through Jordan"

The dishonesty of the anti-settlement crowd

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 11:00 AM PDT

From Think Progress, about the Levy Report that said that the Judea and Samaria are not legally considered occupied:

The difference here, said Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, who has brought dozens of cases against settlements in Israeli courts, "is that this is a supposedly committee of jurists, and this is a legal position that they are taking," not just a political position. "It's one thing to be a politician and to hold certain views about what ought to be. That's fine and legitimate. It's a completely different matter to make legal assertions." Many countries have territorial demands and disputes with other countries, Sfard said, "but they don't simply ignore the legal consensus about the status of these territories. They conduct their disputes diplomatically in international affairs."

According to Sfard, while Israel may have legitimate territorial aspirations in the West Bank — "I don't agree, but it's legitimate" — it tries to materialize those aspirations though negotiations with Palestinians and other countries. "Holding negotiations is legitimate, and it's legitimate for a government to say 'here's what we want,'" Sfard said. "It's a different matter to simply deny the legal framework that applies."

"International law is based on consensus," Sfard continued, "and if most of the jurists of international law, all U.N. organs, the International Court of Justice, multiple U.N. Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, the International Committee of the Red Cross, all agree that [the West Bank] is occupied territory, it is highly immodest for this committee to say otherwise, and for the government of Israel to even reflect on adopting this, sorry, but bizarre position."
Upon first glance, this seems reasonable. Isn't international law based on consensus?

Well, yes it is. But Sfard is being deceptive both on the definition of "international law" and on the definition of "consensus."

The Geneva Conventions are "international law." The reason that they are international law is because all the countries at the time got together and hammered them out, sentence by sentence, sharpening or watering down articles and paragraphs until they all agreed. That was the "consensus."

The statement "Israeli settlements are illegal" is not a statement of international law; it is an opinion on applying international law to a specific circumstance.

By definition, "consensus" means that everyone agrees. (There are some specific exceptions, but the statement is generally accurate.)

So Sfard is purposefully misrepresenting international law in order to achieve his own political goal.

As a legal scholar told me:
The "international consensus" about Israeli settlements cannot possibly be a rule of customary international law. Customary international law is the result of common international practice combined with "opinio juris" (the belief that the practice is required by international law). By the nature of things, there cannot be a common international "practice" concerning Israeli settlements. That is something that only Israel can have a "practice" concerning. There can be a customary law about allowing one's citizens to settle in territory one has captured, not one about the specific case at hand.

As to whether there is an international customary law concerning practices of this type, more generally (i.e., allowing one's citizens to settle in territory captured in international conflict), there is not. Many states have allowed citizens to settle in such territory, and even encouraged them to do so. In some cases (e.g., Morocco and Western Sahara), the practices have been considered illegal, and in others (e.g., India and Goa), the practices have been considered obviously legal. There is no principled line on which to draw the bounds of a rule. In any event, in no case has the world reacted the way it does to Israel. For instance, the EU does not discriminate against products from Western Sahara "settlements" in its free trade agreement with Morocco. The international anti-Israel consensus certainly exists, but it is just as clearly not an expression of customary international law. It is not even a principled application of a rule of law. It is very clearly a singular standard applied to the Jewish state.

Another known expert in international law mentioned this:
I would add, the Bush Letter is in tension with the "everyone agrees it is an illegal position."
Indeed, other US statements over the years also confirm that the US position has been that Israel would never be forced to return to the 1949 armistice lines.

Not only that, but the entire Oslo framework is based on the idea that at least some of the land is disputed - if not, what is there to negotiate?

Beyond that, UNSC resolution 242 specifies "secure and recognized boundaries" which means that the Green Line is not what the final borders of Israel should be - the phrase is meaningless otherwise.

Here is one small but representative example about how anti-Zionists will twist facts to fit their agenda. The irony here of course is that it is Sfard who is politicizing the legal process, not the Levy Commission.

I am still trying to get the specific legal arguments advanced by Levy translated into English, but so far I have not seen any substantive arguments against them, just a lot of hand-waving masquerading as real analysis going on the presumption that they must be wrong, even though very few have read them.

Academics pooh-pooh idea that Islamists seek world domination

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 09:30 AM PDT

From CNN Security Blog:

Muslim extremists are more concerned with defending against foreign intrusion than foisting Islam on the world, according to a new study of extremist texts. The study suggests that a Western approach of claiming extremists are seeking world domination is misdirected, and instead should seek to counteract claims of victimhood.

"Continued claims to the contrary, by both official and unofficial sources, only play into a 'clash of civilizations' narrative that benefits the extremist cause. These claims also undermine the credibility of Western voices, because the audience knows that extremist arguments are really about victimage and deliverance," write the researchers, Jeffry Halverson, R. Bennett Furlow and Steven Corman.

The analysis by Arizona State University's Center for Strategic Communication looked at how the Quran was used in 2,000 propoganda items from 1998 to 2011, though the majority were from post-2007, that emanated mostly from the Middle East and North Africa. Among the groups analyzed were al Qaeda and al Shabaab, as well as anonymous postings online.

One result that surprised the researchers, the "near absence" of citations from one of the most extreme passages, the "Verse of Swords," that encourages "all-out war against world domination."

"Widely regarded as the most militant or violent passage of the Quran, it is treated as a divine call for offensive warfare on a global scale," the researchers wrote. "It is also regarded as a verse which supersedes over 100 other verses of the Quran that counsel patience, tolerance and forgiveness."

The study concludes that extremists, at least based on how they quote from the Quran, do not reflect "an aggressive offensive foe seeking domination and conquest of unbelievers, as is commonly assumed. Instead they deal with themes of victimization, dishonor and retribution."
Um, not too many people were claiming that they sought to take over the world militarily, at least not so soon. They aren't idiots who think that homemade bombs will topple the West.

To see how they plan to take over the world, just read what they say. The Muslim Brotherhood is not shy about sharing its blueprint, and it has kept the same plan for many decades:
In a recent sermon, the General Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi', set out his vision for his movement and for Egypt in the post-revolutionary era. Citing Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Bana, he stated that the movement has two goals. The immediate goal is to prepare the hearts and minds of its members, which involves "purifying the soul, amending behavior, and preparing the spirit, the mind and the body for a long struggle." The second, long-term, goal is to affect "a total reform of all domains of life," which will eventually result in establishment of an Islamic state governed according to Koranic law – first in Egypt and eventually in the entire world.

Badi' stressed that this long-term goal can only be achieved by gradual stages: by "reforming the individual, then restructuring the family, then building society and the government, then [establishing] the rightly guided Caliphate, and [finally achieving] mastership of the world." He also emphasized that this must be achieved through cooperation among all the forces and sectors in Egypt, and without any coercion: "All these purposes and goals... must be realized... through unity of ranks [not division], by persuasion, not coercion, and by love, not by force." Badi' warned against the "attempts to split up the united ranks [of the nation] and drive a wedge between young and old, men and women, Muslims and Christians, and [different religious] schools and groups," saying that the Egyptian nation will need all of its human resources in order to meet the challenges that lie ahead. Finally, he advised his followers not to follow their emotions but to manipulate the circumstances rationally and realistically: "Do not fight the ways of the world because they are overpowering. [Instead], try to overcome them, use them, change their course, and pit some of them against others."

Academics should know that when you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers.

(h/t JS, Yoel)

Hamas summer camp includes "The Prisoner Experience"

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Last week I reported on how Islamic Jihad is training the next generation of terrorists in their Gaza summer camps.

Now we can see what Hamas has been up to in theirs:

Narrow hallways, interrogation rooms painted black, isolation cells and handcuffed mannequins – this is all part of the setting of a new summer camp operated by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Islamic group has been operating summer camps for children in all cities and refugee camps throughout the Strip. This year, the organizers came up with an original theme – "the suffering of the Palestinian prisoners" – allowing children to experience first hand the daily lives of prisoners held in Israel.

Hytham al- Madhun, one of the camp guides, explained that the mock prison set up for the camp is divided into six rooms, each simulating the incarceration conditions of Palestinian prisoners. The first room is an interrogation cell, which is where prisoners are first led once entering the prison. In this room, Madhun describes to the kids "the prisoners' firm resilience in the face of Israeli interrogators' threats and their refusal to admit the charges ascribed to them."

One of the main heroes of the camp is Ibrahim Hamed, who was the head of Hamas' military wing in Ramallah and is responsible for murdering dozens of Israelis. The guides boastfully tell the children how Hamed, who was recently sentenced to 54 life sentences, has continually refused to give his interrogators any information, including his given name.

In the next room, the children get to see what a prisoner's cell looks like, and the guides warn them of Israeli agents who pose as prisoners, trying to get the Palestinian prisoners to talk and admit to their acts. Other rooms include a solitary confinement chamber, a torture den, a room that simulates a prison hospital, and even a small prison courtyard.

Ahmad Rantisi, one of the organizers of the summer camp, said that its goal is to allow children to get a tangible experience of the suffering of Palestinian prisoners, and strengthen their belief in the protection of Palestinian land and the high price that must be paid.

In addition to the mock prison, the children participate in different activities, including military training, religious studies and walking on boards with rusty nails and knife blades.
Photos from CRI
Interestingly, Hamas has not been keen on photographing their military training in camps as much as they did in previous years, perhaps in an effort to soften their image.

PA loves foreign protesters - until they protest the PA

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT

From JPost:
Anti-Israel foreign nationals living in the West Bank participated in recent protests against the Palestinian Authority, a senior PA official in Ramallah charged Tuesday.

The official told The Jerusalem Post that at least 10 Western activists who came to the West Bank to take part in demonstrations against Israel participated in two anti-PA protests in Ramallah.

"The involvement of Western nationals in protests against the Palestinian Authority is completely unacceptable," the official said. "We will be forced to cut off all ties with non-Palestinians who incite against the Palestinian leadership."

The Western activists who took part in anti-PA protests are affiliated with a number of anti-Israel NGOs, the official revealed.

In the past two weeks, Palestinians staged a number of demonstrations in Ramallah in which anti-Israel Western activists were involved.

A PA security source in Ramallah said that a number of Western nationals took part in all three protests.

According to the source, a special commission of inquiry set up by Abbas to investigate the assault on protesters and journalists in Ramallah has discovered that "non-Palestinians" played a role in organizing and leading the demonstrations.

Hundreds of Western activists live in Ramallah and surrounding villages and take part in weekly protests against settlements and the West Bank security barrier.
An entire subculture of Westerners dedicated to destroying Israel live happily in the PA, paid by NGOs that often receive money from the EU and other governments. And the economy of the Palestinian Arab territories is, to a large extent, dependent on these foreign anti-Israel NGOs.

When Israel turns away these inciters at the border or the airport, they scream bloody murder, claim "free speech," and write lots of nasty articles at Electronic Intifada about how Israel hates freedom.

Will we be hearing anything from them if the PA cracks down on them?

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

Book Review/Interview: "David & Goliath: The explosive inside story of media bias in the Mideast conflict "

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 04:00 AM PDT

David & Goliath: The explosive inside story of media bias in the Mideast conflict describes in great detail the daily media bias we see every day against Israel.

Shraga Simmons, a former head of Honest Reporting, writes the book as part memoir and part research project, as he goes through the past decade of how newspapers, TV and wire services have been skewing the facts against Israel. We see through his eyes how he discovers the patterns of bias, documents them and holds reporters' feet to the fire when he exposes them.

While any reader of this blog is aware of media bias against Israel, reading about it all at once is a mind-blowing - and often infuriating - experience. We tend to get numbed after a while because we are so used to the daily bias, but that is a mistake - every single example must be called out and the reporter or news service held responsible.

The good news is that complaining to the media actually works. Honest Reporting has been very effective in making reporters and writers more sensitive to the issue and to write things more carefully, and it is heartening to read about how Shraga, leading his mailing list in the early 2000s, managed to prove exactly how CNN was biased against Israel.

It is that personal touch that makes this book so readable. But make no mistake - Simmons goes through the incidents in detail and the cumulative effect is astonishing.

All the major events since 2000 are analyzed - the Jenin "massacre" lie, Hezbollah's bullying of reporters in Lebanon, the "fauxtography" scandals, the Gaza war coverage, and countless smaller incidents, always written in an engaging, first person manner.

My only quibble was that all of the photos and illustrations were in the back of the book, not together with the appropriate text, which would have made it even better.

You can read a sample chapter here. The book webpage is here.

I highly recommend it. It is available in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Disclaimer: I am thanked in the acknowledgements of the book, and my blog is quoted in the footnotes about a dozen times.
I got a chance to interview Simmons last December and feel very bad that I never found the chance to review the book earlier. It is a good interview as Simmons discusses how he started Honest Reporting (plus some stuff about me!)

Here is the interview, done off the cuff in Newark airport last December:

What a surprise: Abbas proven a liar again.

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 01:00 AM PDT

We all knew that Mahmoud Abbas was a liar. We proved it in 2007, we proved it in his speech to the UN, we proved it again and again and again, even quite recently.

And here are two more:
Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday confirmed the accuracy of her account of a 2008 meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which he had told her why he couldn't accept then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's terms for a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. In an interview at the weekend, Abbas had denied that the conversation Rice described and quoted in her memoir had taken place at all.
"Dr. Rice stands by her account of the conversation and what she wrote in her book," Rice's chief of staff, Georgia Godfrey, told The Times of Israel.
During an interview with Israel's Channel 2 news that aired Saturday night, Abbas denied a crucial passage in Rice's memoirs about his failure to accept Olmert's peace offer.
In "No Higher Honor," Rice records making a visit to Ramallah in May 2008, immediately after Olmert had detailed the offer to her, during which she "sketched out the details" of the Israeli proposal, which included an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank with one-for-one territorial swaps, the division of Jerusalem between Israel and a new Palestinian state, and an international trusteeship to control the Old City. Olmert suggested symbolic and practical solutions to the Palestinian refugee issue, and offered to allow a limited number of Palestinian refugees to live in Israel, being the first Israeli prime minister to do so.
Regarding the refugee question, Abbas said according to Rice's account: "I can't tell four million Palestinians that only five thousand of them can go home."
During Saturday's interview, however, Abbas denied making this statement, adding that no such conversation between him and Rice ever took place. When the interviewer, Danny Kushmaro, asked Abbas specifically about the quote in Rice's book, he responded: "I absolutely did not say that."
Was Rice lying, Kushmaro, then asked. "I'm not calling her a liar," the Palestinian president replied. "I am saying that we never had that conversation."
In the same interview, Abbas also denied making a statement attributed to him by a senior US journalist. In 2009, the deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Jackson Diehl, wrote that he met Abbas and discussed with him Olmert's 2008 peace proposal and why the Palestinian side turned it down. "The gaps were wide," Abbas said, according to Diehl's account at the time.
"I didn't say that," Abbas said in Saturday's interview when Kushmaro asked him about that quote.
But Diehl, like Rice, insists the quotes in his piece were accurate. "I stand behind the 2009 column I wrote about the meeting that my colleague Fred Hiatt and I had with Mahmoud Abbas, and all of the quotations it contains," Diehl told The Times of Israel.
He may be in inveterate liar, but he's a moderate inveterate liar, so Israel really should give in to his ever-growing list of demands and make an agreement with him. It wouldn't be worth the paper it is written on, but the goodwill of the world towards Israel should last a good three or four days.

(h/t/ Sasha)
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