יום שני, 11 במרץ 2013

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Link to Elder of Ziyon

Israeli Arab requests political asylum in Egypt!

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 07:12 PM PDT

From Egypt Independent:
Security forces had arrested an Israeli citizen named Ahmed Gamal Daief, an Arab citizen of Israel who tried to enter the Egyptian border from Taba and requested political asylum to Egypt, explaining that he is Muslim and faces persecution and repression by Israeli authorities because of religious practices.
Now, that's weird.

UNRWA teaches hate (Video)

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 03:11 PM PDT

An important video from David Bedein:



As I noted when I discovered UNRWA school websites extolling jihad and martyrdom last year, UNRWA's educational vision is:
An UNRWA education system which develops the full potential of Palestine Refugees to enable them to be confident, innovative, questioning, thoughtful, tolerant and open minded, upholding human values and religious tolerance, proud of their Palestine identity and contributing positively to the development of their society and the global community.
Obviously, UNWRA falls short of those lofty goals as it is teaching anything but peaceful co-existence.

(h/t Josh K.)

Long range rocket fired in Sinai - Egyptians say it is from 1973?

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 01:00 PM PDT

Bizarre:
Jihadist groups operating in Egypt's Sinai peninsula on Sunday fired a long range missile during a military drill, Egyptian security sources said.

The missile, believed to have a range of 45 kilometers, was fired from Nekhel in central Sinai towards the direction of Suez, Egyptian military sources told Ma'an.

The missile landed in a desert area and left a crater three meters deep and two meters wide.

Egyptian military experts said it is likely that the missile was an unexploded Israeli ordnance left behind from wars in the Sinai peninsula.
A forty year old Israeli rocket that is finally being fired - during a military drill?

Given that hundreds of Grad and other rockets with that range have traversed the Sinai in recent years on their way to Gaza, this claim seems ludicrous.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

A conference to address the absurd UNRWA definition of refugees

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 11:00 AM PDT

From JPost:
At a small conference at the Harvard Club in Manhattan on Thursday, a host of dignitaries and experts, including Israel's envoy to the UN Ron Prosor, addressed the UN's classification of Palestinian refugees as the principal stumbling block to a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO.

The conference was the opening salvo in the direction of drafting of US legislation meant to end the automatic transmission of refugee status to the descendents of Palestinians that has been taking place since 1948, just as Filippo Grandi, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), prepared to hold a press conference on Monday on Palestinian refugees becoming a "forgotten population" in an increasingly turbulent region.

Dr. Daniel Pipes, a leading international expert on the Middle East, opened the conference, declaring that the Palestinian refugee situation is broken, sick, and detrimental to all involved. The current approach by UNRWA "creates a narrative of victimhood and leads to extremism," said Pipes.

The Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank where Pipes serves as president, organized the conference, titled Changing US Policy on UNRWA and the "Palestine Refugees."

"No one will admit it... the real obstacle [to a two-state solution] is the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees," Prosor said. The "refugees problem is the main obstacle to peace, not settlements."
There need to be many more such conferences. The problems with UNRWA are endemic and nothing can be solved unless Palestinian Arabs are treated like every other refugee or former refugee population in the world.

This means pressuring host countries to naturalize them, to automatically give citizenship to those born in their countries, and to stop calling people who either live in their homeland or have citizenship elsewhere "refugees."

Sunday Links Part 2

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 09:30 AM PDT

From Ian:
When liberal Protestants were Zionists
Jewish Ideas Daily: Given the way intellectual fashions have turned against the Jewish state, it is now very difficult to imagine a prominent liberal Christian theologian defending Zionism.
In his recent book Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, Daniel F. Rice includes a chapter on the eminent Protestant theologian's relationship with Felix Frankfurter, one of the most prominent American Jews of the 20th century.
One of the foundations of their friendship was their shared belief in the Zionist project. Indeed, Niebuhr not only helped found the Christian Council on Palestine, an association of pro-Zionist Christian clergy, but wrote impassioned defenses of the Jewish state for important periodicals like The Nation and The New Republic. Frankfurter so esteemed Niebuhr's writings on Zionism that he was at a loss to find any written work that, in his words, "faces the Jewish problem more trenchantly and more candidly."
Israel feared Soviets sunk sub in 1968, papers reveals
Documents released by state archives on 45th anniversary of disaster detail confusion at highest levels following loss of Dakar
Sixteen documents cleared for publication last week by the state archives document the confusion in the minutes and days after the sub was lost, as officials attempted to grapple with the tragedy while carrying out search and rescue missions. The papers do not shed further light on the exact cause of the loss of the Dakar, which remains undetermined.
Muslims accuse Jerusalem cop of defiling Quran, threaten his life
The event which sparked the controversy took place this past Sunday. A group of female Muslim worshippers at the entrance to the Temple Mount were disrupting visitors from entering through the Jewish entrance. Police on site attempted to move the group of women and during the ensuing commotion a Quran fell out of one of the women's bags.
A police officer standing next to the woman in question became the subject of an intense smear campaign; he was accused of throwing the Quran to the ground, kicking it and even stomping on it. As a result of the ensuing death threats against the policeman, Jerusalem police have had to take measures to ensure his safety.
BBC Watch: BBC blames torture of African migrants in Sinai on Egypt-Israel peace treaty
Rather than blindly repeating the inaccurate information he was "told" by an either uninformed or interested party, Thomson should have checked the accuracy of that claim before including it in his report. His obvious failure to do so means that his assertion that the failure to deal with the kidnapping and torture of African migrants in Sinai is related to the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty becomes nothing more than a gratuitous and misleading inaccuracy which prevents audiences from understanding the real factors at play.
2 in 5 Austrians say life under Hitler 'not all bad'
Survey finds that majority of country feel they've sufficiently dealt with their Nazi past, would prefer strongman leader
The Simon Wiesenthal Center regularly grades Austria among its lowest-scoring countries for prosecuting Nazi war criminals.
The poll found that 61% of Austrians feel the country has dealt with its Nazi past sufficiently and 57% feel the Nazi's victims have been compensated in full.
The survey also found that 61% of respondents, mostly the same people who said life under Hitler had some good aspects, would be happy with a strong-armed leader that did not have to contend with rival lawmakers or elections. A similar poll in 2008 found only one in five Austrians in favor of a strongman.
Paris police probing use of Nazi symbols against Jews
Swastika painted on door of Jewish student union; man performs Nazi salute in front of the city's rabbinate
The swastikas on the offices of the UEJF at Paris' Université Panthéon-Assas "prove that universities are also affected by the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in France," the union's president, Jonathan Hayoun, said in a statement.
Israeli Company Hopes to be First to Put 3D Printed Cars on the Road (VIDEO)
Israeli company Stratasys, already a major player in the 3D printing field and its subsidiary, RedEye On Demand, plan on putting the first 3D printed car–named the URBEE 2– on the road within two years, in partnership with KOR EcoLogic.
Operation Pillar of Defense: Israel Battles Hamas for Information Control
The IDF's primary goal in the operation was to eliminate the threat of rockets being launched from the Gaza Strip against Israel. Using old and new media platforms, the IDF's information operations (IO) sought to disrupt Hamas' IO, to warn and / or intimidate, and influence public opinion. The first three elements focused on Hamas and the residents of Gaza. The final goal included not only them but public opinion world-wide. (h/t Teddy)

Another pseudo-scholarly attempt to delegitimize Israel in NYT

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 08:00 AM PDT

The New York Times Opinionator column yesterdayis from Joseph Levine, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

He argues that Jews, as a people, have no right to a state.

The core of his argument:

So, when we consider whether or not a people has a right to a state of their own, are we speaking of a people in the ethnic sense or the civic one? I contend that insofar as the principle that all peoples have the right to self-determination entails the right to a state of their own, it can apply to peoples only in the civic sense.

After all, what is it for a people to have a state "of their own"? Here's a rough characterization: the formal institutions and legal framework of the state serves to express, encourage and favor that people's identity. The distinctive position of that people would be manifested in a number of ways, from the largely symbolic to the more substantive: for example, it would be reflected in the name of the state, the nature of its flag and other symbols, its national holidays, its education system, its immigration rules, the extent to which membership in the people in question is a factor in official planning, how resources are distributed, etc. If the people being favored in this way are just the state's citizens, it is not a problem.

But if the people who "own" the state in question are an ethnic sub-group of the citizenry, even if the vast majority, it constitutes a serious problem indeed, and this is precisely the situation of Israel as the Jewish state. Far from being a natural expression of the Jewish people's right to self-determination, it is in fact a violation of the right to self-determination of its non-Jewish (mainly Palestinian) citizens. It is a violation of a people's right to self-determination to exclude them — whether by virtue of their ethnic membership, or for any other reason — from full political participation in the state under whose sovereignty they fall. Of course Jews have a right to self-determination in this sense as well — this is what emancipation was all about. But so do non-Jewish peoples living in the same state.

Any state that "belongs" to one ethnic group within it violates the core democratic principle of equality, and the self-determination rights of the non-members of that group.

I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic. But the harm doesn't stop with the inherently undemocratic character of the state. For if an ethnic national state is established in a territory that contains a significant number of non-members of that ethnic group, it will inevitably face resistance from the land's other inhabitants.
If we accept that Levine's arguments are correct, every single state in the Western Hemisphere, as well as Australia and others, have no right to exist - because there is a minority (no matter how small, in Levine's characterization) who are indigenous residents whose own self-determination is fatally wounded by the existence of these states.

Apparently, Levine he feels that only Jews are violating the rights of other peoples.

By Levine's definition, Kurds and Armenians and Tibetans and anyone else who wants to exercise self-determination would also be acting illegitimately if there is even a small group of people not belonging to those groups on the lands they claim.

In fact, if you follow his bizarre logic, while "of course Jews have a right to self-determination," in no practical way can that right be exercised. What kind of a right is it when it is hamstrung by definition?

Levine's logical fallacy is that one's right to self-determination is illegitimate if it happens to compete with anyone else's similar right. This is something he simply made up. A people's right to self-determination is independent of others' rights. Unless there is a new continent that is discovered, by definition everyone's rights to self-determination is going to interfere with others'.

Given this reality, what can a people who aspire to self-determination do? They grant the maximum rights possible to the minority population, without giving up on their own rights. The minority population can make a decision to live with these rights - and fight to increase them within a society that hopefully is democratic and tolerant - or, if appropriate, they can choose to move to an area where they are the majority and can practice their own rights to self-determination freely, similarly granting maximal rights to their own minority groups.

Levine is essentially engaging in a sophisticated form of anti-semitism, where by his definition only the Jewish people's rights must be subsumed to the rights of others; the others are not limited by any means that he sees fit to mention.

Also unmentioned by Levine is the small fact that every Arab country defines itself as either "Arab" or "Muslim" or both in their constitutions, thus being just as guilty as Israel of infringing on minority rights - and therefore being just as non-deserving of statehood.

Levine lets the veil fall from his own pretense of objectivity when he states
[I]f an ethnic national state is established in a territory that contains a significant number of non-members of that ethnic group, it will inevitably face resistance from the land's other inhabitants. This will force the ethnic nation controlling the state to resort to further undemocratic means to maintain their hegemony. Three strategies to deal with resistance are common: expulsion, occupation and institutional marginalization. Interestingly, all three strategies have been employed by the Zionist movement: expulsion in 1948 (and, to a lesser extent, in 1967), occupation of the territories conquered in 1967 and institution of a complex web of laws that prevent Israel's Palestinian citizens from mounting an internal challenge to the Jewish character of the state.
This statement is so a-historic, and so wedded to the anti-Israel narrative, that Levine's anti-Israel bias is revealed in all its ugliness.

Only the most rabid anti-Zionist claims that Israel forcefully expelled Arabs in 1948 in order to maintain a Jewish majority - in fact, the vast majority of Arabs fled on their own.

There were essentially no expulsions in 1967 to outside the territories.

Moreover, Levine absurdly characterizes the attacks on Israel from Jordan and Syria in 1967 as "resistance," which would be laughable if he weren't a professor at a prestigious institution.

Finally, Israeli efforts to maintain itself as a Jewish state - practicing that very same self-determination that Levine pretends that Jews have - is described negatively, a "complex set of laws" meant only to make Arabs into second-class citizens.

As the Arabs so, Levine is looking at everything Israel does through an anti-Israel lens, not even considering the idea that Jews indeed do have national rights on their historic homeland. Even worse, he does not admit that Israel bends over backwards to give rights to its Arab minority beyond those given in states where they are the majority. No, to Levine, Jewish nationhood (and apparently only Jewish nationhood) is inherently racist.

Sorry, but this is not a serious essay that advocates for equal rights. This is a hate-filled screed that is dressed up in academic garb. the NYT's decision to run this shows that they are easily seduced by quasi-academic arguments that are simply disguises for anti-Israel hate.

Peaceful worshipers at Al Aqsa on Friday (photos)

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 06:30 AM PDT

On Friday, there were riots on the Temple Mount, as Arab "worshipers" threw stones and Molotov cocktails towards Israeli police, injuring several.







(h/t Yisrael Medad)

Hamas: "Egyptian newspapers accept bribes from Israel to criticize us"

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 04:12 AM PDT

For several months, there have been articles in the Egyptian media critical of Hamas. Most recently Egyptian security sources have told Egyptian media that Hamas members were definitely involved in the fatal attack on the Egyptian army last year, that Hamas stole a printing press that could print Egyptian identity cards, and a number of articles about Hamas undermining the security of the Sinai.

Now, Hamas spokesman Salah Bardawil, on his Facebook page, blames these articles on - Israel bribing Egyptian media!

Again the Egyptian media has reverted to an onslaught on Hamas and the resistance and to Gaza and to the Palestinian people without evidence and no basis, not even thinking and without conscience or fear of God - instead they accept enormous bribes from Israel and enemies of the Palestinian people and enemies of the Brotherhood and the resistance. They are exploiting the chaos in Egypt by malicious hands and do not want what is best for the people of our beloved Egypt. We are confident that Egypt will remain safe and that Hamas will be victorious despite the yellow bribed media.
Yup - Egyptian media is pro-Israel and against the Egyptian people because of those Israeli bribes.

Sunday Links Part 1

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 03:27 AM PDT

From Ian:
Envoys work to end UN's Palestinian refugee status
Prosor: Real obstacle to peace is right of return for Palestinian refugees, not settlements; adds transfer of status "misguided."
At a small conference at the Harvard Club in Manhattan on Thursday, a host of dignitaries and experts, including Israel's envoy to the UN Ron Prosor, addressed the UN's classification of Palestinian refugees as the principal stumbling block to a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO.
The conference was the opening salvo in the direction of drafting of US legislation meant to end the automatic transmission of refugee status to the descendents of Palestinians that has been taking place since 1948, just as Filippo Grandi, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), prepared to hold a press conference on Monday on Palestinian refugees becoming a "forgotten population" in an increasingly turbulent region.
Israeli envoys promote anti-incitement accord at UN
Dore Gold tells 'Post:' There is a global interest in addressing problem of terrorism; Prosor presents draft accord.
Speaking to the Post, Gold recalled that two of the biggest failures of the international community during the 1990s were the genocide in Rwanda and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. In both conflicts, "incitement was cited as a trigger for the wars that broke out," he asserted.
'Abbas, Fayyad dispute could cause fall of gov't' By Khaled Abu Toameh
Sources say conflict between PA president, PM arose over resignation of Qassis, who is said to have quit over unions.
Qassis recently decided to quit the PA government – a move that was rejected by Abbas. Qassis was Abbas's choice for finance minister – a job that Fayyad held for the past four years.
A few days later, however, Fayyad, in a surprise move, announced that he had accepted Qassis's resignation.
Fayyad's announcement was seen by Palestinians as a direct challenge to Abbas.
Freed UN peacekeepers cross from Syria to Jordan
After four days being held by Syrian rebels in village near Israeli border, all 21 Filipino captives reach safety
The abduction and the tortured negotiations that ended it highlight the disorganization of the rebel movement, which has hindered its ability to fight Assad and complicates vows by the US and others to provide assistance.
It also has raised concerns about the future of UN operations in the area. The Filipino peacekeepers were abducted on Wednesday by one of the rebel groups operating in southern Syria near the Jordanian border and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, where a UN force has patrolled a ceasefire line between Israel and Syria for nearly four decades.
UN peacekeepers on Syrian border halt night patrols
International teams fear more kidnappings, violence; Israel beefs up border security
In Jordan, desperate Syrian refugees turn to prostitution
'Given the vulnerability of women, the camp's growing population and the lack of resources, I'm not surprised,' says UN official
Egypt protesters torch buildings, target Suez Canal
Two people die in Cairo from tear, gas and rubber bullets as court ruling on deadly soccer riot sparks rage.
Syria
The ruling enraged residents of Port Said, at the northern entrance of the Suez Canal, by confirming death sentences imposed on 21 local soccer fans for their role in the riot last year when more than 70 people were killed.
But the court also angered rival fans in Cairo by acquitting a further 28 defendants that they wanted punished, including seven members of the police force which is reviled across society for its brutality under deposed autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt wants to lure Israelis back to the Sinai
Once a prime vacation destination, revolution, terrorism and general lawlessness have kept tourists away from the Peninsula's pristine beaches
Channel 2 news accompanied a group of Israeli travel agents who were invited by Egyptian tourism operators to tour the restive peninsula, in hopes of reversing the trend and bringing Israelis and their shekels back to the luxury resort towns of Taba and Sharm el Sheikh.
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