יום שני, 8 באוקטובר 2012

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

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Chag sameach! (again)

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 01:58 PM PDT

The festival season is winding down, and once again I will not be blogging for the next two days.

In commemoration of Simchat Torah, here is a 2009 article from the New York Times:
THE weathered brown parchment with its frayed edges and inked Hebrew letters seemed beautiful but unremarkable.
Itzhak Winer, a 34-year-old Torah scribe turned Judaica seller, considered the item a nice find, but just one of the 30 or more Torahs he buys and sells in a year. From his Jerusalem dealer, he learned that the Torah had been owned by a family in Morocco and was in excellent condition.

"He knew that it's old, but he didn't really know — and neither did I — how special it was," said Mr. Winer, who works out of his home in Willowbrook, Staten Island.

Curious about the item's origins, Mr. Winer took it to a Lower East Side rabbi named Yitzchok Reisman, an expert in identifying antique Torahs, the scrolls containing the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Rabbi Reisman, born in 1938 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, found himself drawn as a teenager to the scribes who congregated on the Lower East Side. They shared their craft with him, passing down stories and lore of ancient scrolls.

Rabbi Reisman also became attracted to the buying and selling of Torahs.

"There were 400 congregations that were declining, closing up and selling off the Torahs and the assets," he said. As Torahs from the Lower East Side migrated to the suburbs and across the continent, the sellers, he saw, "helped transfer the Torah scrolls on to the rest of America."

Today, Rabbi Reisman restores Torahs using handmade ink and carved turkey feathers at his workshop on Grand Street. Heaps of wooden rollers and antique furniture obscure treasures like the gleaming copper case of a 300-year-old Yemenite Torah and an elaborately woven Torah cover from Iraq.

Rabbi Reisman quickly realized that Mr. Winer's Torah was unique. The materials and calligraphic style identified it as Spanish, which meant that it was written before 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. In addition, the strong swirls on the top of certain letters matched the style favored in kabbalah, the Jewish mystical movement.

"There are very, very few manuscripts and pieces of manuscripts that are older than the 1400s," Rabbi Reisman said on a recent day in his ramshackle office as Mr. Winer looked on. And the kabbalistic flourishes, the rabbi added, make it "the only Spanish Torah known done in that way."

These special markings are "like thorns that appear in certain letters that only show up in a small window of time," Rabbi Reisman said.

"No!" Mr. Winer interrupted. "A few hundred years."

"That's a small window," Rabbi Reisman retorted.

As they bickered gently over nearly every detail, the two men also said that their research suggested that the Torah was created between 1272 and 1302, and that it could be connected to a famous Spanish scribe, Shem-Tob ben Abraham ibn Gaon.

But they did seem to agree on who should get the Torah. "We're hoping to get somebody or some community or some organization that wants to preserve the Spanish kabbalistic tradition," Mr. Winer said, "and it's important to them to give it the respect it deserves."
I wish all my Jewish readers a Chag Sameach!

New reports of Syrian refugee women being sold as brides

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 12:00 PM PDT

A followup to this story, from Now Lebanon:
Following the growing influx of Syrian refugees into Arab countries, women are being treated as spoils of war. Widows and daughters are being in essence sold to Arab men who are looking for cheap brides. Families of refugee women sell them into marriage to ensure they are taken care of and that they aren't deflowered or cause problems in their new homes.

As soon as a group of Syrian activists learned of cases in which Jordanian men were marrying young Syrian girls from the Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan under the pretext of protecting them, they launched an online campaign called "Refugees, not Spoils of War."

"It was a reaction to a call made by Arab clerics encouraging such marriages as a way of protecting the Syrian refugees by using a religious context," said Moayad Skaif, organizer of the campaign. "These calls are an abuse to Syrian women; they are demeaning and belittle their value and worth. They are also an exploitation of the Syrian refugees' ordeal."

The campaign aims to protect the rights of Syrian women seeking refuge, said the activist, by denouncing such acts and preventing them. It also aims to create awareness among Syrian families of the dangers of these marriages and to send a message to young Arabs that aiding Syrian refugees can take different forms than proposing marriage and handing over a dowry. Because of the campaign's lack of money, it urges non-governmental humanitarian organizations and different donors to establish a fund that support the refugees and their need to marry if they wish to.

"We are not a human right organization and we do not have the resources. We are just concerned activists," said Skaif.

According to an activist within the campaign who preferred to remain anonymous because of the sensitive nature of his work, some of the cases that were documented involved men marrying women and then forcing them into prostitution. After one such woman fled her husband and went to the police, Jordanian authorities banned Jordanian men marrying Syrian women from the Zaatari refugee camp.

As news of the ban made headlines, many other Syrian refugees living in countries such as Libya and Morocco came forward with their stories. In a report on BBC Arabic, Syrian refugees spoke of how men in Benghazi go door to door asking Syrian families if they have any young girls available for marriage and mentioned offices that handle the details of marrying off young Syrian girls in return for money. Libyan men, according to report, fancy marrying Syrian girls as opposed to Libyan because they are prettier and have lower dowries.

Sunday links

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 10:00 AM PDT

From Ian:
Palestine – Cutting Abbas Down To Size by David Singer
"PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President – Mahmoud Abbas – continues to promote the deceptive and misleading claim that the areas lost by Jordan and Egypt to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War constituted 22% – not 5% – of historic Palestine"

The Professor's Shoddy History
Berlin's Jewish Museum gave Judith Butler and Germans permission to indulge dangerous political impulses
"Why would the Jewish Museum give Butler a podium and allow her to advocate for BDS, a campaign that even the unyielding Israel critic Norman Finkelstein has labeled a "cult" that seeks to "eliminate" Israel by hiding behind nonviolent rhetoric? To understand the answer to that question, one must put Butler's visit in the context of slowly shifting German attitudes toward Israel and Jews—as well as within Germany's ongoing attempts to deal with its past. "I have also wondered whether the use of my abridged remarks about Hamas and Hezbollah itself was a kind of anti-Semitic attack," Butler told the left-wing German newspaper Jungle World in 2010 in response to those Germans who had criticized her for her views on Israel. "I feel, in fact, again my vulnerability as a Jew in Germany, when I am discredited in this way in the media." With such rhetorical feats, Butler transforms herself from an American intellectual into a latter-day victim of anti-Semitism, and in so doing gives Germans who might feel uneasy expressing support for the boycott of the Jewish state license to feel like victims as well."

Americans in Pakistan to protest drone strikes
"The American activists — around three dozen representatives of the U.S.-based activist group CODEPINK — along with Clive Stafford Smith, founder of the London-based legal advocacy organization Reprieve, want to march with Khan and publicize the plight of communities affected by the U.S. drones.
Ahead of the march, local media carried reports Friday of alleged suicide bombings planned against the demonstration and a pamphlet distributed in a town along the march route warned participants they would face danger. The main Pakistani Taliban faction issued a statement criticizing the event."

UK think tank takes EU to task on Hezbollah stance
Whereas the United States, Canada and Holland recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist group, the EU does not.
"The Henry Jackson Society wants the EU and the UK to formally outlaw Hezbollah in its entirety – in line with the US, Canada and the Netherlands – and recognize it as "a terrorist organization that consistently uses violent terrorist tactics."

French synagogue terrorized by blank shots as police raid jihadi cell
"A Jewish community leader told the Le Parisien newspaper that the shots were fired at the synagogue to scare the local community. "This was an act that was more against the Jewish community, it's very worrying," Val d'Oise Jewish community head Moshe Cohen Sabban told the paper."

Sixteen Arrested for Role in Iran's Currency Crisis
On Thursday, Tehran's attorney general said 16 people had been arrested for their alleged "disruption of the currency market." The 16 were said to have worked with "external and internal forces" in creating a panic that benefited them personally and helped to disrupt the economy.

Vatican says talks to reconcile with anti-Semitic group 'dead'
Chief of church doctrine says he is unable to bring Society of St. Pius X into the fold
"The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Saturday welcomed the suggestion that talks with the society had broken down and said it hoped the society's members "will eventually give up their theology of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial."

Overheard in a coffee shop: A better way to do brain surgery, based on Israeli simulation technology
Two Israel Air Force officers and one American doctor have developed a novel way to allow surgeons to prepare for operations
"The idea for the Surgery Rehearsal Platform, known as an SRP, emerged, said Selman, when he overheard a discussion on flight simulation between former Israel Air Force officers Moty Avisar and Alon Geri. Knowing a good thing when he heard it, Selman, who is Neurosurgeon-in-Chief of University Hospitals in Ohio and Chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, got involved in the conversation. The result was the establishment of a new company with the Israeli experts (who were in Ohio working with Lockheed Martin's office in Akron), called Surgical Theater LLC."

Making fracking a greener proposition
Israel's Flow Industries makes an 'air gun' for clearing industrial blockages, and it may also provide a better way to extract shale oil.

Australian naval contract for Israeli firm
Elbit Systems, the Israeli company that develops military technology, has won the contract to supply the Australian Navy with battle management systems in Australian ships.

UNICEF uses Israel-made water purification tablets in Syria
Israel Chemicals given special authorization to sell water purification tables to UN to rehabilitate Syria's water sources

Jewish Virtual Library: October is Israel Innovation Month

Palestinian Arab sheikh reveals Israel's latest plan to destroy Al Aqsa mosque

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Sheikh Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has told Quds Media how exactly the Israelis plan to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

You see, the tunnels they have been excavating nearby (he claims, underneath) aren't meant to destroy the mosque directly. Rather, those wily Israelis are setting up a situation where an earthquake of only 5.0 on the Richter scale will cause the structures on the Temple Mount to collapse on their won, and then the Jews can blame the earthquake!

Sabri has, in the past, has stated:
"If the Jews want peace, they will stay away from Al Aksa. This is a decree from God. The Haram al-Sharif belongs to the Muslim. But we know the Jew is planning on destroying the Haram. The Jew will get the Christian to do his work for him. This is the way of the Jews. This is the way Satan manifests himself. The majority of the Jews want to destroy the mosque. They are preparing this as we speak."

"Six million Jews dead? No way, they were much fewer. Let's stop with this fairytale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity. It is not my fault if Hitler hated Jews, indeed they were hated a little everywhere. Instead, it is necessary to denounce the unjust occupation endured by my people."

"Anyone who studies The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and specifically the Talmud will discover that one of the goals of these Protocols is to cause confusion in the world and to undermine security throughout the world."
Which means that according to analysts as smart as Karl Vick, Sabri is a moderate.

Time magazine's infomercial for Mahmoud Abbas - and Hamas

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 06:00 AM PDT

You know how the Palestinian Arab leaders are frustrated about how Western media attention has been on Egypt, Libya and Syria instead of them?

Apparently, this malaise extends to frustrated mainstream media reporters like Time's Karl Vick who spend their lives covering the Palestinian Arab leaders. Their reliable front-page stories are being pushed back, and they want the spotlight no less than their Palestinian Arab idols.

So the newly marginalized Vick managed to get an exclusive interview with the equally irrelevant Mahmoud Abbas, and Time allowed Vick to write a 3000 word paean to Abbas's "leadership" which sweeps everything negative under the rug and to try to restore the corrupt, intransigent PA back to prominence.

The article is filled with deceptions like this:
Missiles still fly out of Hamas-controlled Gaza from time to time, but according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tallies every reported incident on occupied territory, most violence in the West Bank is now committed by Israeli settlers against their Palestinian neighbors rather than the other way around. There have been spectacular exceptions, including the March 2011 slaughter of five Jewish settlers in their West Bank home. But month by month, the Palestinians tend to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators.
OCHA does not track all violent incidents - they only track incidents that result in injuries. So the vast majority of Palestinian Arab firebombs and stone throwings, which are really daily events in the territories, are simply not counted because Israelis have armored cars and buses and fenced communities in Judea and Samaria.

Another knowing deception:
Abbas' 2011 U.N. bid so irked Israel and Washington that each held back vital funding to Abbas' Palestinian National Authority (PA), the Palestinian transitional government. The revenue shortfalls wreaked havoc on the Palestinian economy. By September, people were burning tires in the streets to protest not Israel's 45-year military occupation but the PA itself.
The PA economy's woes have nothing to do with temporary withholding of some aid a year ago; it is from paying tens of thousands of people to not work in Gaza, paying families of suicide bombers, and other questionable economic policies of the PA.

If you read between the lines and know anything about the conflict, you can see Vick contradicting himself:
Abu Mazen himself spends more and more time abroad, flying on a chartered jet provided by the United Arab Emirates, a statesman without a state, relentlessly grooming an image of a peaceful people denied a homeland in foreign capitals.
Without me even having to point out the polls proving that they are still anything but a peaceful people and how they really want to destroy Israel in stages, Vick goes on:
If Abbas retires, as he frequently says he wants to, he will leave with no clear successor. Polls show Palestinians would elect Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic Fatah militant not currently available; he's serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. In recent months, Palestinian business leaders have talked up Khaled Meshaal, a notion that speaks volumes about the changes roiling Palestinian politics. Since 1996, Meshaal had held the most senior position in Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, long the face of Palestinian terror.
So the "peaceful people" would overwhelmingly choose terrorists as their leaders!

But Vick needs to soften Hamas' image, so he adds this amazing fact:

Earlier this year, however, Meshaal endorsed the Abu Mazen approach. While reserving the right to violent resistance and not renouncing the Hamas Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, Meshaal said the time has come for negotiations with Israel and nonviolent protest in the spirit of the Arab Spring. "Now we have a common ground that we can work on--the popular resistance, which represents the power of the people," Meshaal said.
So after seeing Arab governments fall from nonviolent resistance, Meshal now adds that to his arsenal of weapons to destroy Israel - and Vick reads this as Hamas moderation and a victory for Abbas' ("peaceful") approach!

Once you know that the goal of both Fatah and Hamas is the destruction of Israel - whether by using violence, politics, demographics, legal tactics, public relations or clueless magazine writers - then the switch from one tactic to another is not nearly as important as understanding the end goal. Vick purposefully ignores the goal and praises the means, which is frankly insane. But that insanity gets described this way:
To have a leader like Meshaal, whose organization dispatched numerous suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians, adopt the Abu Mazen approach was still a remarkable philosophical victory for Abbas.
Vick ignores the fact that last week Islamic Jihad held a massive rally in Gaza celebrating terror, and Hamss didn't only condone it - they sent one of their leaders to participate. But thst's not the face of Hamas that Time readers are seeing.

He ends off with:
Whatever new governments emerge from the Arab Spring, they are unlikely to be more understanding toward Israel than the bookish moderate who, when asked last October why he was going to the U.N., replied with one word: "Hope. All the time we give them hope."
Meaning that Vick completely misunderstands the Arab Spring. Abbas' current relative moderation, as far as it goes, is not reflective of his people. and if a Palestinian Arab spring emerges - and the anti-Abbas protests have already started - he will be replaced by someone more in line with the people's will, meaning someone more violent. Which means that any "peace" is illusory if the people prefer terror. Israel's peace with Egypt is holding for now, but it has weakened considerably after their revolution; a Palestinian Arab revolution will in all likelihood bring in something worse. That is not a reason to make a fake peace agreement now - it is reason to be wary of making agreements with leaders who don't represent their people.

This is basic, but it is beyond Karl Vick.


Latest ship of Israel-hating liars heading to Gaza

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 03:36 AM PDT

From AFP:
A Swedish ship with rights activists from several countries aboard sailed from Naples on Saturday in the latest bid to break Israel's blockade against Gaza.

A crowd of well-wishers saw off the sailing vessel Estelle as it left the Italian port as part of the "Freedom Flotilla" movement.

"We think it will take around two weeks to get to Gaza, but it will obviously also depend on the weather conditions," spokeswoman Ann Ighe told the AFP news agency.

The Estelle, whose voyage was organized by an international pro-Palestinian coalition, is carrying humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip.

The 17 activists from around the world on board include passengers and crew from Sweden, Norway, Canada, the United States and Israel.

Israel says the blockade against Gaza is necessary to prevent weapons from entering the coastal territory, which is run by the Islamist movement Hamas.

The Free Gaza movement landed in hot water last month after its founder, Greta Berlin, tweeted that "Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews."

The tweet linked to a video of Eustace Mullins, a conspiracy theorist, claiming that the word "Nazi" combines the words "National Socialist" and "Zionist."

The organization Ship to Gaza Sweden quickly issued a statement:

"This movie link and its content have since been connected to Ship to Gaza Sweden and this year's Freedom Flotilla mission. Let's make it clear that our action is not anti-Semitic, and furthermore is not organised in co-operation with the Free Gaza Movement," the organization said.

At just 53 metres (173 feet) long, the Estelle is much smaller than the Marmara ferry, and has sails as well as an engine.
Here are some of their lies:

Following our initial attempt to break the blockade there have only been minor easings of the blockade--commodities such as spices which Israel had previously classified as "luxury goods" are now allowed into Gaza.There is still an acute shortage of medicine, medical supplies and building materials.
Actually, since the Mavi Marmara, Israel now allows all the food and fuel into Gaza that Gazans pay for, without limit. (Don't believe me? Ask Gaza Gateway!)

Israel never limited medical supplies into Gaza. Again, that is an issue of what the PA pays for and what Hamas allows to be distributed to hospitals, rather than confiscating it and reselling it to make money.

And here is Ship to Gaza's biggest lie:
Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris said Friday on visiting the Estelle:

"This is not an initiative in favour of Hamas but in favour of Palestine, of the Palestinians who live in Gaza, and in favour of two states living as neighbours in peace and security."
But look what one of the leaders of the Ship to Gaza, Henning Mankell, said about the two-state solution:
In 1948, the year of my birth, the state of Israel proclaimed its independence on occupied land. There are no reasons whatsoever to call that a legitimate intervention according to international law. What happened was that Israel simply occupied Palestinian land. And the amount of land under possession is constantly growing, with in the war in 1967, and with the increasing number of settlements today. ... A two-state solution will not be the end of the historical occupation.

...When change is coming, each Israeli has to decide for him- or herself if he or she is prepared to give up their privileges and live in a Palestinian state.
This is the "peaceful" solution they seek - the utter destruction of the Jewish state. And to these idiots, "occupation" did not start in 1967 but in 1948.

Mankell also provides this justification for suicide bombers:
Is it strange that some of them in pure desperation, when they cannot see any other way out, decide to become suicide bombers? Not really? Maybe it is strange that there are not more of them.

More hypocrisy from Mankell is that he is against nationalism altogether - but for some reason he wants the "Palestine" borders to include only British Mandate Palestine, not to include Jordan, which indeed is part of "historic Palestine." Why should he accept colonialist borders to destroy Israel and not Jordan?  If Mankell was consistent, he would - but he isn't.

Needless to say, nothing on their website is critical of Egypt, which fully controls a border with Gaza and which severely restricts goods and people from crossing. No, 100% of the efforts of these haters pretending to be "pro-Palestinian activists" is against only one state. Which just so happens to be Jewish.

So what "humanitarian aid" is being shipped? 41 tons of cement - less than the amount needed for a single house. The organizers, as with the previous boats towards Gaza, throw a symbolic amount of material on board so they can fool journalists into thinking that they are an aid organization, even though their purpose is purely political.

And the journalists are never smart enough to call them on it.
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