Jerusalem Journal

Israeli Group Suing European Union

2010-01-25T11:47:00.001+02:00

Jan. 25, 2010

By Nicole Jansezian

European taxpayers are pouring millions of Euros into anti-Israel organizations through the European Union, an Israeli watchdog group charged at a news conference.

NGO Monitor is suing the European Union for failing to produce details of its funding of non governmental organizations, wary that most of the Palestinian institutions receiving money are using it to “demonize and delegitimize” Israel. The suit was filed last week.

Many of the organizations that have or are receiving EU funding have signed documents expressing anti-normalization with Israel, Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, said on Wednesday that his organization has petitioned for the information since 2008.

“We have made every effort to obtain the documents necessary for analysis for over a year, without any substantive response,” he added. "”We therefore have no other option than to take this issue to the courts and sincerely hope this will lead the European Union to act in a responsible, law-abiding manner on such critical funding issues.”

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday against the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union.

Based on information gathered from the EU’s website and scant information the EU provided to the group, NGO Monitor identified some $50 million given to about 90 Israeli and Palestinian NGOs.

“A lot of these organizations are at the core at the center of the campaign to demonize Israel and delegitimize Israel,” Steinberg charged. “They call Israel an ‘apartheid state.’ They are using terms like war crimes. This demonization process was recently characterized by Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu as parallel to the Iranian nuclear threat. We take this seriously.”

The EU denied many requests made by NGO Monitor citing issues such as “security,” “privacy,” and “commercial interests.”

NGO Monitor legal counsel, Trevor Asserson of Asserson Law Offices, said the withholding of information is “absurd when you are talking about an NGO who is carrying out peace within a region.”

Asserson pointed out that in the documents that the EU did send, information was erased and eligibility criteria was blanked out.

Using information available on the EU website, Steinberg estimated that up to 70 Israeli NGOs receive funding but that three quarters of them are groups that “are involved with demonization” of Israel. Some 70 to 80 Palestinian organizations receive funding, and very few of them supply humanitarian aid. Most are consider “peace partnership” groups.

But Steinberg charged that many of these organizations are involved in strategizing how to bring legal action against Israel in other nations and promoting economic boycotts of the Jewish state.

“We’re not saying that they only fund groups that delegitimize Israel, but we’re saying they fund a lot of groups that delegitimize Israel,” Steinberg said. We’re talking about a well-funded, highly structured campaign to delegitimize Israel.”

David Kriss, EU press and information manager, said that the European Commission has provided NGO Monitor “with comprehensive information on the funding of projects in Israel and in the region.”

He added that EU policy is not required to be reflected by the funding recipients “in all their statements, seminars or publications.... Moreover, the EU fully supports diversity of opinion and the right of expression as long as this is in line with its fundamental democratic principles.”

Beer Festival Highlights Accomplishments of Palestinian Town

2009-10-06T16:42:00.002+02:00

Oct. 6, 2009

TAYBEH - Not everything that shimmers in this West Bank town is golden. In fact, at Oktoberfest one of the brews is amber and another is as dark as Guinness, providing a spectrum of choice for consumers of the only micro-brew beer in the Middle East.

The Taybeh Brewing Company proudly hosted its fifth annual Oktoberfest last weekend. In addition to Taybeh beer on draught, Middle Eastern food, dancing and specialty goods were displayed in a fest

ive celebration of Palestinian culture.

Taybeh, the only 100-percent Christian town in Palestinian territory located about 5 miles from Ramallah, is surrounded by 16 Muslim villages. The population was 12,000 just a decade ago, but has dropped to 2,000. Mayor David Khoury blames Israel’s military presence for the town’s economic hardships, but his town has become an example of producing a good thing in a difficult situation. Khoury and his brother Nadim, the brewery’s founder, after living in Boston for 30 years, returned to their hometown of Taybeh to invest in the economy, create jobs and forge a reputation that Palestine as a nation can create excellent products. Nadim founded the brewery in 1995 after the Oslo Accords were signed.

“Nadim thought, ‘If we have a country, we’d make excellent products,’” explained Maria Khoury, David’s wife. “After the first uprising (in the 1990s), the image was very bad. We came here to change the image.”

Taybeh has been successful despite a second intifada beginning in 2000 that severely curtailed i

ts export ability. The company sold more than 150,000 gallons last year and in 1998 the beer became the first Palestinian product to be produced in Germany under the Taybeh license. It is made from the German formula that uses no preservatives or additives, rendering the beer 100 percent natural with malts from Belgium, hops from Bavaria and yeast from the United Kingdom. Taybeh produces four brews: golden, light and dark and just last year unveiled a nonalcoholic version, a beverage more marketable to the town’s Muslim neighbors.

But because of its natural ingredients and lack of preservatives the beer spoils quickly and long delays at Israeli checkpoints threaten to ruin kegs-full of beer as Taybeh trucks wait to pass into Israel. This challenge to get the beer from Taybeh to Jerusalem--a mere 20 miles away--prompted a new strategy: If the beer can’t get out, the town will bring the outsiders to them. Thus Oktoberfest was born.

“We are trying to find creative ways to boost the economy,” Maria, who has voluntarily taken on promotion for the beer and the town itself, said. “We can’t afford to go three hours to (the) checkpoint and other businesses cannot afford that. So we entice people to come here. The whole theme behind Oktobebrfest is to promote local products. Its a nonviolent way to resist harsh conditions.”

Each year the festival attracts thousands of people, including Palestinians, foreigners and a few Israeli citizens who defy the official warning posted outside the town prohibiting their entrance under Israeli law. The festival also features homegrown products such as honey, olive oil and embroidery. Maria Khoury said some local merchants sell more in these two days than they do the entire year.

Oktoberfest has remained largely unopposed by surrounding Islamic villages and a rising fanaticism in the region, Maria said. But this year the mayor’s car was firebombed during a meeting at the municipality. Maria Khoury said authorities have no idea who did it and whether it was a personal attack against the mayor or related to the beer festival. David Khoury was lightly injured. Relations have been more tense since three years ago when 14 Christian houses were burned down and a Muslim woman was killed in an “honor killing” after residents of the neighboring Muslim town accused a Christian in Taybeh of having an affair with the woman.

Called Ofra in the Old Testament and later Ephraim in John 11:54, the town has been occupied by Christian Arabs for hundreds of years, Khoury said. His own family claims about 12 generations there. The village has kept its unique identity as Christian for 2,000 years. Khoury wants to keep it that way and to improve life for its citizens.

Palestinian Leader Renews Vow to Destroy Israel

2009-08-18T18:12:00.001+03:00

By Nicole Jansezian

Article originally published here.

The Palestinian party that the West considers moderate reaffirmed its commitment to a violent struggle against Israel and called for the removal of all Jews from Jerusalem.

It also refused to renew the peace process until all Palestinian prisoners are released form Israeli jails - language that paves the path for another round of violence in the region.

Reiterating its theme of armed struggle, the Fatah platform states: “We believe that all forms of resistance are a legitimate right of the peoples of territories in the face of occupation.”

“The struggle stems from the Palestinian people’s right to oppose the occupation and the settlements, the expulsion and the racist discrimination – and this right is a right guaranteed by international law,” the official wording reads.

In a one-man race, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was re-elected as head of Fatah for another five-year term.

“Although we have chosen peace we reserve the right to return to armed resistance,” Abbas said, setting the tone of the assembly in his keynote address.

The Fatah General Assembly's approval of the radical language could lead to another violent Palestinian uprising against Israel, said Avi Dichter, Israel’s former internal security chief. “Fatah’s statements clear the way to what may eventually be the third intifada,” he said. “Once you say that the fight will go on by all means necessary, anyone in their right mind understands that spells an armed conflict.”

The Palestinian party, which the Obama administration and other Western nations cited as a peace partner for Israel, held its first general assembly in more than 20 years with about 2,260 delegates in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Israel allowed participants from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the United States to travel to the West Bank while Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, prevented Fatah members there from leaving the strip.

The assembly, which was scantly reported in mainstream media outlets, ended late last week with militant statements and even a call from one member for the party to forge a strategic alliance with Iran. Fatah ratified a political platform that includes the Palestinians’ right “to resist occupation in all forms;” the continuation of the armed struggle until all Palestinian refugees are repatriated inside Israel; refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; and a call for Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem, according to the Arabic language Al Quds newspaper.

“Fatah will continue to sacrifice victims until Jerusalem will be returned [to the Palestinians], clean of settlements and settlers,” language used to refer to Israelis, the platform states. “Fatah is still a liberation movement, and since we have not yet achieved our goals, we have popular resistance,” said Fatah Central Committee member At-Tayyib Abdul-Rahim.

In another step backward for peace, the party endorsed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as Fatah’s official armed wing despite previous agreements with Israel and the U.S. to dismantle the faction.

“The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are the jewel in Fatah's crown,” said Fahmi Al-Za'arir, a Fatah spokesman. “We must strengthen their status . . . [and] maintain them in a state of alert.”

Tom Gross, an expert on Middle East affairs, said that, instead of proving itself the “responsible Palestinian party that could form an independent Palestinian state that would live in peace with Israel, the extremely hard-line pronouncements and resolutions Fatah adopted during the past week show that it still has not made the transition from a guerrilla movement in exile bent on destroying Israel to a political party charged with establishing Palestinian self-rule.”

The Bethlehem rhetoric ostensibly buries the chance for peace in the near future. Israeli leaders were frustrated with Fatah’s resolutions to support an armed struggle.

“If its program is to be believed, Fatah is just as extremist as Hamas, and that’s worrying because it damages the prospects of reaching a compromise with the leadership of the Palestinian Authority,” said Israel’s Information Minister Yuli Edelstein. “We must not act as if we haven’t heard. We must emerge from the circle of illusions that these are moderates who want peace.”

Caroline Glick, a right-wing columnist for The Jerusalem Post, had harsh language for the West, particularly the White House.

“A central pillar of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy paradigm was shattered at the Fatah conference in Bethlehem — but don't expect the White House to notice,” she writes in her column Friday. “Fatah was supposed to be the poster child for moderate terrorists . . . It was supposed to be the group that proved the central contention of the Obama White House's strategy for dealing with terror, namely, that all terrorists want is to be appeased.”

“But over the past week in Bethlehem, Fatah's leaders said they will not be appeased,” Glick writes. “They remain an implacable terror group devoted to the physical annihilation of Israel."

Rep. Hoyer: Obama Israel Stance Misperceived

2009-08-15T15:34:00.000+03:00

By Nicole Jansezian

Aug. 14, 2009

Article originally printed here.

JERUSALEM - House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said President Barack Obama’s forceful stance on stopping construction in Israeli neighborhoods and settlements has been “blown out of proportion” and misperceived both by Israelis and American supporters of the Jewish state.

“The Obama administration shares ... strong, unwavering support of Israel as a Jewish state,” Hoyer told Newsmax. “The settlements has become such a focus, but there are more important issues. The settlement issue has been blown out of proportion and is not what he is articulating.”

While a GOP delegation to Israel last week criticized the president’s policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iranian nuclear weapons, a group of 29 Democrats this week sought to reaffirm “that the relationship between the U.S. and Israel remains as strong as ever,” Hoyer said during a news conference in Jerusalem on Thursday. Obama has been pressuring Israel to freeze all settlement construction, including “natural growth” in existing settlements.

But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said while he will not approve the building of new settlements, he will allow construction in existing ones. Hoyer defended the White House, saying that U.S policy hasn’t actually changed since the implementation of the Roadmap. But Hoyer’s own position that Jewish building in East Jerusalem is acceptable is at odds with the State Department.

The State Department last month summoned Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren to press Israel to stop construction by an American Jewish millionaire in East Jerusalem, according to Israeli media reports. In the midst of dubious directives coming from the White House that have set relations between Jerusalem and Washington on edge, this summer saw the largest delegation of U.S. congressmen ever to visit the Holy Land.

Last week, 25 Republicans, led by Minority Whip Eric Cantor, took the same tour and met with the same leaders as their Democratic peers. Both trips were sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israel lobbyist in Washington. Earlier in the week, the Democrats met with Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who said the chance for peace in the near future had been obliterated by the political situation in Palestinian territories.

“The current situation in which no one authority represents all of the Palestinians, in which there is ‘Hamastan’ in Gaza and ‘Fatahland’ in Judea and Samaria ... buries any possibility to reach a comprehensive settlement with the Palestinians in the next few years,” he said. “The uncompromising, extremist positions of the Palestinians concerning Jerusalem, the right of return (of refugees) and the Jewish settlements create an unbridgeable gap between us.” Hoyer on Thursday blamed the Palestinians for stalled peace talks with Israel.

“The largest thing impeding negotiations at this time is the unwillingness of (Palestinian President Mahmoud) Abbas to sit down now,” Hoyer said. “He had no preconditions with (former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert.” The delegation met with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced terrorism and said Israel has a right to exist, but did not specify whether he supported Israel as a Jewish state, a requirement laid out by Netanyahu.

Fayyad has been touted by the West as a moderate Palestinian official untainted by corruption, however, he is unpopular among Palestinians. At the news conference, Hoyer was presented with a report on Palestinian school books, some of which teach jihad and martyrdom, and was handed a map issued this week by the Palestinian Authority Tourism Ministry that labels the land stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea as Palestine with no mention of Israel.

“If we teach our children hate we cannot be surprised that they grow up to hate,” he said. “The teaching of hate and prejudice is unacceptable any place in the world and particularly here.” In response to reporters’ questions concerning reports that the United Nations in the Gaza Strip is subject to the whims of Hamas, Gene Green, D-Texas, said he was going to make sure the UN does not “continue to prop up a terrorist organization like Hamas.”

In Israel, GOP's Cantor Slams Obama's Iran Policy

2009-08-15T15:31:00.002+03:00

By Nicole Jansezian

Aug. 6, 2009

Article originally printed here.

JERUSALEM - Republican congressmen visiting Israel criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a disproportionate emphasis on stopping construction in Israeli settlements and its lack of vigilance in preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.

“We’re concerned with what the White House is signaling of late,” Eric Cantor, R-Va, told reporters on the fifth day of the visit. The minority whip in the House of Representatives emphasized the “existential threat that Iran poses” to the region and to the United States. Cantor said he was troubled by an unbalanced emphasis of the American administration on freezing Jewish settlement construction rather than attempting to extract meaningful commitments from the Palestinians and Arab states.

Cantor led a delegation of 25 Republican congressmen and women on the weeklong trip, sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an organization affiliated with the influential pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Next week, some 30 Democrats from Congress will make a similar visit to the region.

The delegation stressed their own unmitigated support for Israel and the danger of any acquisition by Iran of nuclear weapons, an issue strongly echoed by Israeli leaders.

“I don’t believe the president of the United States fully comprehends this threat of Iran (acquiring) nuclear weapons and the threat to the stability of this region,” said Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado. Coffman, who has stated in the past that radical Islamic elements are the cause for destabilizing the Middle East, said President Barack Obama’s approach to Middle East peace “is in error in a very big way.” “Many outside the State of Israel see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a centerpiece to the Muslim conflict of the West - that is absolutely wrong,” he said after the news conference. “The broader conflict has nothing to do with Israel.”

The congressional delegation met with Israeli leaders as well as with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who they said wavered when pressed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, one of Israel’s stipulations for a peace agreement. The delegation also expressed outrage that Palestinians named streets in the West Bank and Gaza after terrorists. “If there is an unwillingness on the part of so-called moderate Palestinians ... it makes it very difficult” to reach a peace agreement, Cantor said. Cantor also referred to a 2004 letter by former President George W. Bush to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which the U.S. condones growth and permanence in major settlement blocs. The Obama camp has said it is not bound to “understandings,” including this letter, between the Israeli governments and prior administrations.

“The Bush letter indicates we could never see Israel turn back to 1967 lines,” said Cantor, who supports the letter. “Those communities (the settlements) will never be separated from Israel.” Meanwhile, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported today that American Middle East envoy George Mitchell has asked Israel for a one-year freeze on West Bank settlement construction in order to elicit concessions from Arab countries. Israel has already agreed to suspend building in settlements for six months. The congressmen’s tour has involved meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials, briefings and visits to settlements and Sderot, the city on the Gaza border bombarded in the last eight years by Palestinians rocket attacks.

Netanyahu Corrects Obama in his own Speech

2009-06-17T09:32:00.004+03:00

It was sort of a "Elder-statesman-schools-'man-child'-in-history" speech

June 17, 2009

First published here on ForcedExile.com

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on Sunday night was directed at the Obama administration and addressed historical errors and key omissions in President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, including the history of the Jewish state and the reasons a Palestinian state has yet to be established, analysts say.

“Netanyahu responded to his main aversary and it is not the president of Iran. (Obama) made mistakes that were historically incorrect; Netanyahu corrected him,” Gil Hoffman, a political analyst from The Jerusalem Post, said in an interview with reporters.

Netanyahu stressed several times in his foreign policy address that he was speaking on behalf of a “consensus of Israelis,” which Hoffman says was an implication that Obama’s policies are not merely coming down against the Likud leader and right wing, but against the majority of the nation.

“He said (to Obama) ‘you’re wrong about certain things and these things have major implications,’” said Jonathan Rynhold, senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

One of the issues Netanyahu clarified was the establishment of a Jewish state. Obama said in Cairo that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Netanyahu instead went back 3,500 years and pointed to Abraham and continuous Jewish history in the region as the reason Jews claimed this land as home.

“The right of the Jewish people to a state in the land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish people over 2,000 years - persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, murders, which reached its climax in the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy in the history of nations,” Netanyahu said. “The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) is the birthplace of the Jewish people.”

Netanyahu also focused on oversight in Obama’s Cairo speech of why a Palestinian state has not been established despite overtures, peace talks and international agreements. Obama asserted that Palestinian suffering stems from dislocation, lack of a homeland and “the daily humiliations, large and small, that come with occupation.”

Countering that, Netanyahu said the Palestinians had a chance to create a state first in 1947 when the United Nations proposed the Partition Plan for a Jewish state and an Arab state. The plan was rejected by Arab states.

“Whoever thinks that the continued hostility to Israel is a result of our forces in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is confusing cause and effect,” he said. The prime minister outlined attacks in the 1920s, a war in 1948, continued attacks in the 1950s and another war in 1967 on the eve of the Six-Day War that occurred “nearly 50 years before a single Israeli soldier went into Judea and Samaria.”

“A great many people are telling us that withdrawal is the key to peace with the Palestinians. But the fact is that all our withdrawals were met by huge waves of suicide bombers,” Netanyahu said.

As Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, noted, “What has brought Palestinian suffering is the priority on total victory and Israel’s destruction rather than merely getting a homeland.”

Even Palestinians, while overwhelmingly disappointed with the speech, said it was critical of Obama’s Cairo address. Mustafa Barghouti said Netanyahu’s address was an indirect swipe at Obama, particularly for clarifying his mention of the Holocaust.

“We were hoping that after Obama’s speech to have some flexibility,” he said. Instead, “this speech was a plan for war and not for peace. He negated all possibilities of negotiations.”

Mark Regev, spokesman for Netanyahu, said that while the address may have seemed like a response to Obama’s Cairo University speech, it was in fact a reiteration of positions the prime minister has taken before, except for calling for a Palestinian state. “You could have said the same things last month,” he said.

Nevertheless, Rhynhold said Netanyahu particularly emphasized Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state because of the historic connection to the land.

“He took Obama to task for not recognizing Jewish ‘peoplehood,’ the link of the people to the land,” he said.

The prime minister recognized the need for the Palestinian population to have a state, but his recognition, as opposed to opposition leader Tzipi Livni’s call for a “two states for two nations,” is based on the pragmatic issue of a displaced population, not on their claims to the land.

“He accepted Palestinian statehood, but not as a nation,” Rhynhold said. “He was saying ‘I recognize there’s a practical problem here, but I still think the Jewish people’s claim to the land is more significant.’”

Why Running is Fun in Israel

2009-06-01T10:46:00.002+03:00

Jogger finds roadside bomb in the Galilee

June 1, 2009

A jogger discovered a roadside bomb, possibly intended to detonate as a car or school bus drove by, at the entrance of the Avtalion neighborhood in the Galilee, police said.

Police released this news two months after the discovery. They believe the device, packed with fireworks in addition to other explosive materials, was planted by an organization of Israeli Arabs.

Ynet reports:

"It is clear to us that the planting of the bomb was nationalistically-motivated," a source in the police's Northern District told Ynet on Sunday.

He said the bomb was laid there in an attempt at carrying out a terror attack, and that there was no doubt the attempted attack "could have caused casualties."

...The official added that the explosive device was "amateur, but no different from others that were previously used to cause casualties".

"It included gunpowder among other things, and if it had gone off the damage would have been extensive. Ninety percent of these amateur bombs can maim and kill," he said.

PA official to Lebanon TV: Two-State solution will cause Israel's collapse

2009-05-26T10:01:00.002+03:00

Yet another reason Israel doesn't want a two-state solution. Can you blame them?
May 26, 2009

In an interview with Lebanese TV, PLO Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki aired the Palestinian strategy: Give us two states so we can wear down the Zionist mindset. Once that happens, the Palestinians can take over all of the land, so Zaki told ANB TV on May 7, 2009. He actually lays out the strategy in two separate interviews and, besides rocks and rockets, it includes ideological warfare: "When the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine."

"With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."

(To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2109.htm)

Zaki, who is part of the 'moderate' Fatah party, has made other enlightening statements in the past:

"In light of the blood that is being shed in Gaza, and the crying of the men - not only of the women... The hardest thing is to watch the men crying in Gaza. I now support any operation that will make the women and men in Israel cry. When the Al-Qassam Brigades and all the other forces were told to strike everywhere, I expected things to be carried out quickly. All those who always flex their muscles, and say they want to slaughter Israel - this is their opportunity. Soon, the world will view us as those responsible for the crime. Currently, in light of what is happening to the children of Gaza, any martyrdom operation is permissible, I swear by Allah."

..."Don't forget we're Arabs - we believe in blood vengeance. No one can treat our blood like water. We should have afflicted them with three or four operations, and then their women would have said to those sons of bitches: 'Come home, we are getting killed here.' When Israel focuses on one front, other fronts should be activated.

New TV, January 6, 2009(to view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1980.htm ).

And then he tags the U.S. too, for good measure.

Abbas Zaki: "We consider the U.S. to be an enemy because its only strategic alliance is with Israel."

Interviewer: "How can you consider Israel to be your enemy, if you signed a peace treaty with it?"

Abbas Zaki: "Allow me... This enemy... If I had the capabilities of the U.S. - would I be fighting it or negotiating with it?"

Interviewer: "Israel ceased being an enemy once you signed a peace treaty with it. I don’t know how it could be your enemy. Do you talk to the Israelis as if they were your enemies? Do you talk to Israel as a friendly or enemy country?"

Abbas Zaki: "An enemy country, which owes us certain things. The heroic Vietnamese used to negotiate with the French, while they were slaughtering them."

Interviewer: "I can assure you that in his speeches, Abu Mazen says the U.S. is a friendly country."

Abbas Zaki: "Well, this isn’t true. Perhaps Abu Mazen, in his position, needs to use diplomatic language, but he is the greatest critic of the U.S."

OTV, November 7, 2008 (to view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1933.htm ).

And lastly, some more thoughts:

"The use of weapons alone will not bring results, and the use of politics without weapons will not bring results. We act on the basis of our extensive experience. We analyze our situation carefully. We know what climate leads to victory and what climate leads to suicide. We talk politics, but our principles are clear. It was our pioneering leader, Yasser Arafat, who persevered with this revolution, when empires collapsed. Our armed struggle has been going on for 43 years, and the political struggle, on all levels, has been going on for 50 years. We harvest U.N. resolutions, and we shame the world so that it doesn't gang up on us, because the world is led by people who have given their brains a vacation - the American administration and the neocons."[...]

..."The P.L.O. is the sole legitimate representative [of the Palestinian people], and it has not changed its platform even one iota. In light of the weakness of the Arab nation and the lack of values, and in light of the American control over the world, the P.L.O. proceeds through phases, without changing its strategy. Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine."

NBN TV, April 9, 2008(to view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1738.htm)

Israeli Newspaper: Two states based on false assumptions

2009-05-26T09:51:00.003+03:00

May 26, 2009

Most Israeli newspapers are liberal, more left wing than the American media, if you can believe it. So when a newspaper publishes an editorial saying the two-state solution is based on erroneous assumptions, its time to take note.

Here is Monday's editorial from Yediot Ahronot, which outlines these false assumptions which has become the basis for the "two states for two peoples" principle and American faith in it:

1. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders is the substance of the Palestinians' national aspirations. A small, truncated state, the establishment of which would require them to agree to the end of the conflict and its claims is the Palestinians' nightmare, not their national dream. Three times they could have had such a state (1937, 1947 and 2000), and three times they rejected it.

2. The gap between the Israeli and Palestinian position is bridgeable. The reality is otherwise. The maximum that the Israeli Government – any government – will be able to offer the Palestinians and still survive politically is far from the minimum that the Palestinian administration – any administration – will be able to agree to and survive politically.

3. Egypt and Jordan want to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and will, therefore, render assistance. The reality is opposite: Both Egypt and Jordan prefer the continuation of the existing situation in which the conflict continues and they can continue blaming Israel. As long as the conflict goes on, the Egyptians have the ultimate excuse to all of their troubles in the region. For the Jordanians, a Palestinian state on their border, under (it is reasonable to assume) a Hamas administration, would be the end of the Hashemite monarchy.

4. A permanent settlement would bring stability and security to the region. The exact opposite. There is no chance that a small, truncated Palestinian state would be viable. The frustration that would be created in such a situation, certainly in Gaza, with Israel lacking defensible borders is a clear foundation for instability.

5. There is a chance now that we cannot miss. If we compare the current situation to that which prevailed in 2000, the clear conclusion is that the chance to reach an agreement then was far greater than it is now – and it did not happen. Is it possible today to reach an agreement in Judea and Samaria, to say nothing of Gaza, when Hamas is the dominant Palestinian movement?

6. Progress on the Palestinian issue is essential in order to aid the Arab countries against Iran. What does one have to do with the other? The Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt) have a supreme interest in blocking Iran, with or without the Palestinian issue.

7. There is only one solution to the conflict. Says who? When, either here or in the US, was a deep study ever done on all the possibilities? One can easily point to alternative solutions that would also free the Palestinians from Israeli control." The author believes that the chances to conclude a permanent agreement, now, based on the "two state" solution are no greater than they were at Oslo, Camp David or Annapolis and declares, "One hopes that the almost assured failure will not have negative repercussions in other areas, such as stopping Iran or US-Israeli relations."

Christian gravestones vandalized by Muslims in West Bank

2009-05-25T11:40:00.003+03:00

May 25, 2009

Reuters reports:

Vandals desecrated some 70 graves in two Palestinian Christian cemeteries on Sunday in what a Palestinian Authority official said was a rare attack on the Christian minority in the occupied West Bank.

Watch how everyone interviewed goes out of their way to stress that this was a rare or isolated incident.

A church official in the village of Jiffna near Ramallah where the attack took place called in Palestinian security officials to investigate, but neither he nor the investigators said they had any initial clues who was responsible.

"This unfortunate incident has brought Muslims and Christians closer and many from the Muslim community have shown solidarity with us and have condemned this action," said Greek Orthodox Church official George Abdo.

Abdo said it was the first time such an incident had occurred in the village.

Issa Kassissieh, a Palestinian Authority official and adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas on Christian affairs, said he believed it was "an isolated act against Christian symbols".

"Palestinian Christians and Muslims have always lived in harmony in the Holy Land," Kassissieh said.

Jiffna, northeast of Ramallah, is home to some 1,600 inhabitants, about two thirds of whom are Christians from the Greek Orthodox and Catholic communities. The Palestinian Authority says 50,000 of the West Bank's 2.5 million Arab population are Christians.

Christians have emigrated from Palestinian territories en masse in the past three decades. The official line is that the Israeli occupation is causing dire economic conditions is forcing them to leave. No mention of Muslim persecution of Christians. They've always lived in harmony. Right.

But the decline of Christian numbers in Bethlehem long pre-dated the building of the security barrier. Scholars note that it even pre-dated Israel’s capture of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War.

Greater Bethlehem, which includes the linked towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, was part of the British mandate of Palestine until 1948, then fell under Jordanian control until June 1967. Israel administered the area until it handed authority to Yasser Arafat’s P.A. in 1995 as a result of the Oslo peace accords.

Israeli political analyst Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli government liaison to the U.S. Congress, revealed several years ago that in the run-up to the handover to Arafat, former Bethlehem mayor Elias Freij, an Orthodox Christian, lobbied the Israeli government not to transfer Bethlehem, saying it would become a town with churches but empty of Christians. Freij later became a P.A. minister, and died in 1998.

Read more here (http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=48189) and here (http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/pope-in-bethlehem-a-missed-opportunity-aaron-klein-argues-benedict-ignored-murder-persecution-of-christians/).

Israeli Defense Minister: Talk unlikely to halt Iranian nukes

2009-05-25T11:22:00.005+03:00

May 25, 2009

Talking to Iran would most likely fail to halt the Islamic regime's nuclear program, Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on Monday.

"I believe that the chance the dialogue has of stopping Iran's nuclear efforts is very low," Barak told Israel Radio. "I also believe the Americans understand this. They only think that there is logic to this, even if the chance is low... in order to contend with what needs to, or is likely to happen in the future."

President Barack Obama's early diplomatic overtures to Iran have been rebuffed so far. Iran posed one of the most "serious potential threats" to Israel, Barak said, stressing that Israel would not take any options off the table to defend itself.

Bibi to U.S.: Whatever on the settlements

2009-05-25T11:07:00.002+03:00

I wonder if he'll take that tack on Iran as well

May 25, 2009

At least one person is willing to stand up to President Boy Wonder Obama. The two-time prime minister of Israel Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu isn't taking orders from the White House despite behaving himself during meetings in D.C. last week.

Netanyahu on Sunday rebuffed U.S. calls for a full settlement freeze in the occupied West Bank and vowed not to accept limits on building of Jewish enclaves within Jerusalem.

The note of defiance set the stage for a possible showdown with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, which, in talks with Netanyahu in Washington last week, pressed for a halt to all settlement activity, including natural growth, as called for under a long-stalled peace “road map.”

“The demand for a total stop to building is not something that can be justified and I don’t think that anyone here at this table accepts it,” Netanyahu told his cabinet, referring to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to an official.

Netanyahu said Israel had no plans to set up any new West Bank settlements. But he told Obama, according to the official, that his government “does not accept limitations on building” within what Israel defines as its capital, the Jerusalem municipality, an area that includes Arab East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank captured in a 1967 Middle East war.

Commentary from Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:

One can cheer this in at least one aspect. It sends notice to Obama that Israel will not allow itself to become a doormat to Obama’s ambitions in the Middle East. Israel has no reason to have any confidence in the road map, and Obama’s insistence on unilateral compliance is laughable just a few weeks after Hamas provoked a war in Gaza. The Palestinians have done nothing to comply with the road map requirements, and Israel rightly objects to being held accountable alone for its responsibilities.

National Health Care, America? Don't Do It!

2009-05-24T10:53:00.002+03:00

May 24, 2009

If you need any more reason to not nationalize health care in the U.S., let this be a shining example of why not (from the Jerusalem Post):

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert will undergo prostate cancer surgery at a New York hospital next month. Spokesman Amir Dan said Olmert would leave for New York on June 4. He would not name the hospital, to protect the former premier's privacy. Last month Olmert's office said tests showed that his prostate tumor had grown and immediate treatment was required. Dan said Israeli doctors recommended Olmert be treated by experts in the US. Olmert,63, made his condition public in October 2007. A year later he announced his resignation over multiple corruption allegations.

Israel has national health care. The U.S. still has private health care, at least until the Dems can get their hands on it. But where does Israel's highest elected official go for his surgery? Answer: Not his own country. No, he goes to a place where health care is still private and perhaps still good. His own doctors recommend it.

40% of Israeli Arabs don't believe Holocaust happened

2009-05-21T19:08:00.001+03:00

Startling numbers are not just in Iran

May 24, 2009

A new poll shows that 40 percent of Israeli Arabs, those who live in Israel with Israeli passports next door to Jewish neighbors, don't believe the Holocaust ever happened. The disturbing poll results mark a significant increase in Holocaust deniers and those who refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist as Jewish democratic state.

Professor Sami Samocha, who conducted the survey, said the poll results are usually related to current affairs. Ynet reports:

"The most moderate year was 1995 – the golden era of the Rabin government, the Oslo Accord, and the attitude to the Palestinian people," he said. "Four years later, the great disappointment with the Netanyahu government and the October events worsened the situation."

In 1995, only 7 percent of Arab-Israelis said the State had no right to exist. Meanwhile, the figure rose to 22 percent last year. Samocha said the Gaza blockade, the Second Lebanon War, and the aftermath of the October 2000 Riots are exacerbating factors in this poll.

The Associated Press jumped on that statement, qualifying in the first paragraph the news service's article that "the results were likely more statements of protest than belief." Using Samocha's own words, the AP downplays the startling rise in Holocaust denial among Israeli Arabs, blaming a rising frustration among the minority group. Recognizing the Holocaust justifies Israeli policies, Samochoa says.

"When they say 'there was no Holocaust,' they are protesting. They are saying 'I am not giving legitimacy to the Jewish state,'" he said. "It's an index of despair, frustration and protest."

Palestinians and Arabs in Middle Eastern countries deny the Holocaust occurred, usually blaming Jews for making it up to gain sympathy. The Holocaust is not taught to all Arabs in Israel. One student I met here said he didn't believe the Holocaust occurred until a German was able to convince him otherwise. Education is a major factor in this issue - whether it is taught at all that a genocide of 6 million Jews occurred, or whether it is taught that this is a lie. This young man only believed what he was taught until someone explained to him the truth.

A Two-State Inconvenience for the US and Arab Nations

2009-05-21T18:03:00.004+03:00

May 21, 2009

Some analysts writing after the Obama-Netanyahu meet and greet in DC claim that despite their pleas for a Palestinian state, subsequently reported by a breathless drive-by media, American officials and Arab nations are quite happy with the status quo. And one even calls it a "fiction."

STRATFOR explains why many don't expect two states to emerge any time soon:

First, at present there are two Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, which are hostile to each other. Second, the geography and economy of any Palestinian state would be so reliant on Israel that independence would be meaningless; geography simply makes the two-state proposal almost impossible to implement. Third, no Palestinian government would have the power to guarantee that rogue elements would not launch rockets at Israel, potentially striking at the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, Israel’s heartland. And fourth, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have the domestic political coherence to allow any negotiator to operate from a position of confidence. Whatever the two sides negotiated would be revised and destroyed by their political opponents, and even their friends.

For this reason, the entire peace process — including the two-state solution — is a chimera. Neither side can live with what the other can offer. But if it is a fiction, it is a fiction that serves U.S. purposes. The United States has interests that go well beyond Israeli interests and sometimes go in a different direction altogether. Like Israel, the United States understands that one of the major obstacles to any serious evolution toward a two-state solution is Arab hostility to such an outcome.

Click to read the full article. He concludes

Netanyahu has promised that the endless stalemate with the Palestinians will not be allowed to continue. He also knows that whatever happens, Israel cannot threaten the stability of Arab states that are by and large uninterested in the Palestinians. He also understands that in the long run, Israel’s freedom of action is defined by the United States, not by Israel. His electoral platform and his strategic realities have never aligned. Arguably, it might be in the Israeli interest that the status quo be disrupted, but it is not in the American interest.

Another major topic discussed in DC was Iran as a nuclear power. Israel's general view is to strike offensively. But Obama wants to talk for the rest of the year before he has to take any harsher action beyond mean words.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Yet as Thérèse Delpech, a leading nonproliferation expert at France's Atomic Energy Commission, warned last October at a Brookings Institution lecture, "We [the Europeans] have negotiated during five years with the Iranians . . . and we came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but . . . [only] in buying time for their military program." In those five years, she also noted, Tehran never implied that if only the Americans were at the table the clerical regime would be amenable to compromise.

...Americans and Europeans don't like to dwell on the problem of anti-Semitism in the region, preferring to see it as tangential to geopolitics and economics and treatable by the creation of a Palestinian state. But Israelis are acutely conscious that unrelenting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are important factors in the Shiite Islamic Republic's increasing popularity among Arab Sunni fundamentalists -- especially in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood would probably triumph in a free election. In Iran, the anti-Jewish passion among the revolutionary elite appears to have actually increased as ordinary Iranians have soured on theocracy and state-sanctioned ideology.

For the full article, click here.

Pope Ends Rancorous Israel Trip With Visit to Other Christian Communities

2009-05-15T18:51:00.002+03:00

May 15, 2009

Article originally printed here.

Pope Benedict XVI ended his five-day visit to Israel on a positive note visiting Christian churches of other denominations and solidifying his stance on anti-Semitism after a rancorous week laden with comparisons to his predecessor and disappointment among Israelis.

In his farewell address, the Pontiff emphasized the “solemn” occasion of visiting the Holocaust Memorial and hoped to shed some of the aspersion cast on his statements, which appeared to be rote and lacked enough remorse for the majority of the Israeli public. Local media was awash with criticism for the Pope’s statements since his first day in the country.

“I wish to put on record that I came to visit this country as a friend of the Israelis, just as I am a friend of the Palestinian people,” he said at the airport.

Addressing his speech on the Holocaust directly, Benedict said meeting Jewish survivors was a deeply moving encounter that brought back memories of those “brutally exterminated” he said, choosing the word “exterminated” rather than “killed,” a word many Jews felt wasn’t strong enough in his previous speech.

Compared to Pope John Paul II on virtually every leg of his journey, Benedict was accused of failing to follow the lead of his predecessor in expressing remorse for the Catholic church’s historic persecution of Jews. He also omitted his own experience in the German army.

But Rabbi David Rosen, a spokesman for interfaith dialogue in Israel, has said all along that this Pope is an academic, not a diplomat.

“Benedict is shier than his predecessor and not comfortable in public relations, dealing with image,” he said. “There is a big difference in style the way they communicate and the nature of their communication.”

During this papal visit, Palestinians scored a major political boost from the Pope as he called for a Palestinian state in several speeches and sermons and expressed empathy with the suffering of the people. And as he left the country, he again noted the separation wall, something he called “one of the saddest sights for me during my visit to these lands.”

“Let it be universally recognized that the State of Israel has the right to exist, and to enjoy peace and security within internationally agreed borders,” he said. “Let it be likewise acknowledged that the Palestinian people have a right to a sovereign independent homeland, to live with dignity and to travel freely.”

Israeli President Shimon Peres absolved Benedict of his statements on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, saying they carried “substantive weight.”

In a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pope Benedict condemned anti-Semitism and hate against the State of Israel, the prime minister’s office said. Netanyahu asked the Pontiff to sound his moral voice against Iran.

On his last day, Pope Benedict visited the Greek Patriarchate, the Holy Sepulchre Church, the tradition site of Jesus’ death and burial, and St. James Armenian Convent, where he praised progress in relations between Catholics and Orthodox faiths.

Archbishop Nourhan Manougian reminded the Pope that many nations have yet to recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in Turkey. The Pontiff did not address the sticky political situation in his speech, but the 200 Armenians gathered were nevertheless pleased for the recognition of their community as the last stop on the Pope’s tour in the Holy Land.

“The significance is that we are one of the Christian communities in the Old City and for us it is a great honor to be visited by the Pope,” said Michael Zakarian. “It is good for Armenians to be recognized especially being such a small minority”

More than 40,000 Attend Nazareth Mass

2009-05-14T19:55:00.001+03:00

May 14, 2009

From an amphitheater built specifically for this mass, Pope Benedict XVI exhorted Christians and Muslims in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth to repair damaged relations between them and to “find the way to a peaceful coexistence.”

The Galilean city, with a 30 percent Christian population, has been marred by tensions in recent years between Christians and the Muslim majority. Muslims tried to build an unauthorized mosque that would have towered over the Basilica of the Annunciation, but the Israeli government put a stop to the construction in 2002 and offered alternative sites for the Islamic house of prayer.

Tensions persist, however. Prior to the visit, the Northern Islamic Movement called on Muslim leaders to boycott interfaith meetings with the Pope. Benedict offended Muslims worldwide when he quoted in September 2006 a medieval description of the religion as “evil and inhuman” and ”spread by sword.” Benedict made it clear that the text did not reflect his own views, but Muslims violently protested in cities around the world and even attacked churches in Palestinian areas.

Earlier this month, an imam strung up a banner across Nazareth’s main square warning the Pope: “Those who harm Allah and His Messenger – Allah has cursed them in this world and in the hereafter, and has prepared for them a humiliating punishment.”

Despite these threats though, Muslims, Druze, Jews and Christians participated in the interfaith dialogue in Nazareth and during a song about peace sung in three languages, the Pope and the representatives of different religions on the platform clasped hands and stood together - a far cry from the interfaith meeting in Jerusalem on Monday that ended abruptly after an Islamic judge used the platform to criticize Israel in unscheduled speech.

The Pontiff also met privately with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon to discuss the peace process and agreements on land and taxes between the Vatican and Israeli government.

Some 40,000 worshippers attended the mass on the hill surrounding the 7,000-seat amphitheater, the biggest in Israel. The theater was built on Mount Precipice, where a mob tried to throw Jesus off a cliff according to the New Testament.

“This is first-class exposure and will encourage tourism in the future. We are expecting a wave of tourism following this,” said Mayor Ramiz Jaraisy told reporters prior to the mass. “We hope for a specific call from the Pope for people to come and make prilrimage to the Holy Land.”

At the mass, Archbishop of Galilee for the Greek Melkite Church Elias Chacour welcomed the pope and pled for his”moral and spiritual support” to stem the exodus of Christians from the Holy Land. The flight of Christians “fills me with pain” and that the future is not encouraging.

But while exhorting local Christians to stay in the Holy Land and calling on several occasions for a Palestinian state, the Pontiff failed to address Muslim persecution of Christians. He blamed the economy, limited movement and Israeli policies as the reasons Christians are leaving the Holy Land.

Tomorrow, the Pontiff will visit the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus is believed to have been crucified and buried, and Saint James Armenian Church before he returns to the Vatican.

Palestinians Boosted by Pope’s Call for Statehood

2009-05-14T12:58:00.002+03:00

May 13, 2009

BETHLEHEM - Palestinians scored a major political boost from Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the Holy Land as he called for a Palestinian state in several speeches and sermons and expressed empathy with the suffering of Palestinians on Wednesday.

“It is understandable that you often feel frustrated,” the Pontiff told residents living in the Aida refugee camp. “Your legitimate aspirations for permanent homes, for an independent Palestinian State, remain unfulfilled. Instead you find yourselves trapped, as so many in this region and throughout the world are trapped, in a spiral of violence, of attack and counter-attack, retaliation, and continual destruction.”

Earlier addressing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the Pope said: “the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders.”

Speaking in the shadow of the concrete barrier erected by Israel in response to terror attacks, the Pope appealed for an easing of Israeli security restrictions on Palestinians.

“Towering over us, as we gather here this afternoon, is a stark reminder of the stalemate that relations between Israelis and Palestinians seem to have reached – the wall. In a world where more and more borders are being opened up – to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges – it is tragic to see walls still being erected.”

He also called on Palestinian youths to “have the courage to resist any temptation you may feel to resort to acts of violence or terrorism.”

The Palestinian Authority deployed 4,000 police throughout the city and closed several roads. The city was decorated with Vatican and Palestinian flags side by side and posters declaring, “Our Pope is our hope.”

If any group needed his support, it was the Palestinian Christians, a minority of just 2 percent whose numbers remain under threat by a flagging Palestinian economy, Israeli military control of the borders and Muslim persecution. The Pope personally encouraged Gaza Christians as well, 100 of whom were able to attend the mass in Bethlehem with special permission from the Israeli army.

“My heart goes out to the pilgrims from war-torn Gaza: I ask you to bring back to your families and your communities my warm embrace, and my sorrow for the loss, the hardship and the suffering you have had to endure,” the Pope said in his sermon at Manger Square. “Please be assured of my solidarity with you in the immense work of rebuilding which now lies ahead, and my prayers that the embargo will soon be lifted.”

Of Gaza’s 1.6 million population, about 3,000 Christians remain. The Pontiff bolstered Christian communities in the West Bank as well asking them to persevere and exhorting them to build up their churches, consolidate their presence and “offer new possibilities to those tempted to leave.”

The Christian population of Bethlehem, once at 80 percent, has gone down to 20 percent now. Many have left for safety, comfort and better opportunities in other countries. Rami El-Araj, a Bethlehem resident, said he attended Pope John Paul II’s mass in 2000 with a group of his friends.

“Now I’m alone - everyone left since then,” he said.

Mass in Jerusalem Gets off to Political Start

2009-05-13T22:04:00.000+03:00

May 12, 2009

JERUSALEM - The Pope’s first mass in Israel became a political platform when Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal blamed Israel for the problems facing Christians in the Holy Land.

“Holy Father, you stand before a small flock that is shrinking, that suffers from emigration, largely due to the effects of the unjust occupation and all its humiliation, violence and hatred,” he said referring to Israeli authority in some Palestinian areas and at checkpoints. “Jesus wept in vain over Jerusalem and continues to do so.”

Most Christians in Israel and the Palestinian Authority are Arab, and many relate nationalistically as Palestinians, not Israelis. Palestinian flags flew in the crowd and the traditional mass songs were sung in Arabic by local congregants at the mass site, an outdoor area in the Kidron Valley built specifically for the mass.

“Around us, we have the agony of the Palestinian people, who dream of living in a free and independent Palestinian State, but have not found its realization; and the agony of the Israeli people, who dream of a normal life in peace and security and, despite all their military and mass media might, have not found its realization,” Twal continued.

An Israeli official rejected the accusation and said Israel views her Christian residents as allies.

“Don’t blame us for the decreasing numbers of Christians in the Holy Land. It has to do directly with Palestinians themselves,” Raphael Ben-Hur, senior deputy director-general of the Tourism Ministry told Newsmax. “There is a diminishing number of Christians in Bethlehem and it has nothing to with Israel and nothing to do with occupied territories. It has to do with the Muslims.

Without addressing the politics of the situation, Pope Benedict XVI empathized with the local Christians and called on local authorities to take care of the minority group.

“I wish to acknowledge the difficulties, the frustration, and the pain and suffering which so many of you have endured as a result of the conflicts which have afflicted these lands, and the bitter experiences of displacement which so many of your families have known and – God forbid – may yet know,” he said in his homily at the foot of the Mount of Olives. “I hope my presence here is a sign that you are not forgotten, that your persevering presence and witness are indeed precious in God’s eyes and integral to the future of these lands.”

The head of the Catholic Church also addressed the “tragic reality” of Christian emigration from the Holy Land that leaves a “great cultural and spiritual impoverishment to the city.”

“As I urge the authorities to respect, to support and to value the Christian presence here, I also wish to assure you of the solidarity, love and support of the whole Church and of the Holy See,” he exhorted.

Following the Pope’s statements, Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat told Newsmax he accepts the challenge to care for the Christian flock in his city.

“I accept the urging. I think we should make the Christians that live in Jerusalem feel more comfortable as residents of the city and I’m committed to serve them as much as I am any other resident of the city,” he said. “I accept the challenge and I hope Christians around the world also accept the challenge that I am giving them to see all the Christians in the world come here at least once in a lifetime.”

Barkat, who was elected in November, has a goal to attract 10 million tourists, of all religions, each year to Jerusalem.

To shouts of “Viva il Pappa” (long live the Pope), strains of bagpipes, organ choruses and cries from emotional worshipers, the Pope rode in on the “Popemobile,” his trademark vehicle, which Israeli security deemed unsafe for most locations on this visit.

Meanwhile the Vatican sought to clarify issues its spokesman said were misreported.

“The pope was never in the Hitler Youth, never, never, never,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters in Jerusalem.

He said that the Pope, like all other youths in Germany, was forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht for a short time till his capture by the Allied forces. However, in “Salt of the Earth,” then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said that he was automatically enrolled into the Hitler Youth: “At first we weren’t, but when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later, as a seminarian, I was registered in the HY. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back.”

Lombardi did not explain the discrepancy.

“It was not his choice,” Lombardi said. “If you know the Pope you now he is absolutely not a militaristic person. He was compelled to be in this group.”

Controversial Headlines Greet Day Two of Pope Visit to Israel

2009-05-13T21:54:00.001+03:00

May 12, 2 009

JERUSALEM - Israeli papers were awash with disappointment in the Pope’s speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, while several Muslims were arrested Tuesday morning for distributing fliers condemning the Pontiff’s visit.

Day two of the Pope’s visit to Israel, before the Holy Father even presided over his first mass, and controversy is coming from all sides. Several Jewish officials were expecting specific condemnations and an apology from the Pope for the Holocaust. But the Pope addressed these issues in his first speech at the airport, according to Vatican Spokesman Federico Lombardi.

“He already named at the airport the Shoah (Holocaust) and the 6 million Jews murdered and ... anti-Semitism,” Lombardi said at a news conference. “His meditation was centered on ... the engagement of the Catholic church to engage themselves forever against the crimes against humanity and the right of the peoples.”

After his closely watched speech on Monday, many Israelis expressed disappointment. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau called the speech “a missed opportunity” without personal remorse and mention of 6 million Jews killed. Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said the Pope was detached.

“He came and told us as if he were a historian, someone looking in from the sidelines, about things that should not have happened,” Rivlin told Israel Radio. “He was a part of them.”

On Tuesday, the Pope headed out on a tour of holy sites in Jerusalem. Removing his red shoes, the Pope entered the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine and part of the compound that comprises Islam's third-holiest site, the Al Aksa Mosque. A rock in the shrine is believed to be the place Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.

“Here the paths of the world's three great monotheistic religions meet, reminding us what they share in common,” Benedict XVI said while visiting with Muslim leaders.

“Fidelity to the One God, the Creator, the Most High, leads to the recognition that human beings are fundamentally interrelated, since all owe their very existence to a single source and are pointed towards a common goal,” he said.

The quick tour was followed by a prayer at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, directly adjacent to the mosque area. The Pontiff placed a note in the wall, as is tradition.

“God of all the ages, on my visit to Jerusalem, the ‘City of Peace,’ spiritual home to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, I bring before you the joys, the hopes and the aspirations, the trials, the suffering and the pain of all your people throughout the world,” the note read. “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, hear the cry of the afflicted, the fearful, the bereft; send your peace upon this Holy Land, upon the Middle East, upon the entire human family; stir the hearts of all who call upon your name, to walk humbly in the path of justice and compassion.”

At the Heichal Shlomo synagogue, Benedict reaffirmed Christian-Jewish cooperation and “lasting reconciliation” between the two faiths as he met with the two chief rabbis of Israel, Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar.

“Jews and Christians alike are concerned to ensure respect for the sacredness of human life, the centrality of the family, a sound education for the young, and the freedom of religion and conscience for a healthy society,” he said. “An indication of the potential of this series of meetings is readily seen in our shared concern in the face of moral relativism and the offences it spawns against the dignity of the human person."

The Pope noted the Christian population in Israel which also values “opportunities for dialogue with their Jewish neighbors.”

Metzger, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi, thanked the Pope for his visit to “the eternal capital of the Jewish people,” Jerusalem.

Metzger thanked Benedict for preventing the return to the Catholic Church of the Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson to his position as an example to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Had you not done so a message may have been understood by another Holocaust denier, the president of Iran, granting legitimacy to his sinful declarations of his will and intention to destroy our country,” he said.

Despite Talk of Compassion, Pope Speech Failed to Please Some

2009-05-13T21:52:00.000+03:00

May 12, 2009

By Nicole Jansezian

JERUSALEM - Two heads of state, symbols of their religion and nation respectively - Pope Benedict XVI, 82, and Israeli President Shimon Peres, 85 - met this afternoon both appearing slightly frail and walking tentatively, a cautious pace that seemed to characterize their mission of peace.

The pair of octogenarians planted an olive tree at the official residence of the president and attended a somber ceremony at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, where the Pope met six Holocaust survivors.

“The Catholic Church feels deep compassion for the victims remembered here,” Benedict said at the memorial service. “As we stand here in silence, their cry still echoes in our hearts. It is a cry raised against every act of injustice and violence. It is a perpetual reproach against the spilling of innocent blood.”

Peres, meanwhile, sought to anoint the Pope as the spiritual leader who would provide the impetus for peace in a conflicted region.

“In you we see a promoter of peace; a great spiritual leader; a potent bearer of the message of peace to this land and to all others,” he said at the official welcoming ceremony in his garden. “This year, the year of your visit here, may reveal an opportunity for us and our neighbors, to attain peace.”

Significantly, Peres noted “ties of reconciliation and understanding” emerging between the Holy See and the Jewish people.

While the Israeli public is generally amiable toward the Pope’s visit, some groups were expecting specific statements. Ha’aretz newspaper noted that the Pope has a dangerous balancing act, especially at Yad Vashem where he will “make do with the adjacent memorial hall.”

“Many Jews will feel that this is not enough, and will expect the German Pope, with his own Hitler Youth past, to make a further gesture, perhaps an apology for the Holy See's conduct during the war years,” the newspaper continued. “Whatever he says, there are too many people to run afoul of.”

Indeed, the offense began with one of the attendees at the ceremony. Buchenwald survivor and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau called the speech “a missed opportunity” without personal remorse and mention of 6 million Jews killed.

“A few points were missing in the pope's address,” Lau told Israel’s channel 1. “There was no mention of the Germans, or Nazis, who conducted the massacre. ... Instead of the word ‘murdered’ as the previous pope John Paul II used, Benedict XVI used the word ‘killed.’ There is a very clear difference between the two verbs.”

At the President’s House, Pope Benedict said his pilgrimage to the holy places “is one of prayer” for peace for the Middle East. The Pope empathized with “ordinary” Israelis as in his speech.

“What parents would ever want violence, insecurity, or disunity for their son or daughter? What humane political end can ever be served through conflict and violence?” he asked. “I hear the cry of those who live in this land for justice, for peace, for respect for their dignity, for lasting security, a daily life free from the fear of outside threats and senseless violence.”

The Ministry of Tourism is expecting between 10,000 to 15,000 additional tourists in conjunction with the Holy See’s tour of the Holy Land. At the Nazareth mass, an outdoor arena will hold 40,000 people, while the Jerusalem mass will accommodate 5,000 to 6,000. The State of Israel has alloted about $10 million for this visit.

This is Benedict’s first visit to Israel as Pope, but not his first visit. The Pope was friends with the late Teddy Kolleck, Jerusalem’s legendary mayor. As Pope he is literally following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, according to Rabbi David Rosen, an Israeli expert in Jewish-Christian relations.

Rosen warned that while political leaders, religious officials and journalists would be analyzing all of the Pope’s words, the truth is “Benedict is shyer than his predecessor and not comfortable in public relations.”

With a placid demeanor, the Pope appeared drained from days of travel and showed little reaction at the events he attended on Monday.

“John Paul II had to work on relations before he came,” he said. “Now Benedict is walking in his footsteps, literally, the same agenda.”

Rosen said the order of Benedict’s agenda is symbolic. He first visited the President’s house showing the importance of office, then headed to Yad Vashem empathizing with the Holocaust and lastly to Notre Dame for an inter-faith dialogue to stress the importance of building bridges between the faiths.

Pope Benedict Welcomed in Jerusalem

2009-05-13T21:51:00.001+03:00

May 11, 2009

JERUSALEM - With church bells ringing, sirens of a police motorcade wailing and helicopters whirring overhead, Israel’s capital welcomed Pope Benedict XVI.

The city’s mayor, Nir Barkat, greeted the Pope and other dignitaries at helipad near Hebrew University and told His Holiness to feel at home during his stay.

“In Jerusalem, the capital of Israel and the Jewish people, we promote pluralism, dialogue and freedom of religion,” said Barkat.

In his five-day visit, the Pope will tackle divisive religious issues in a city that three religions claim as holy. This evening, he will meet the parents of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit at President Shimon Peres’ official reception, he visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, then immediately following that, he will attends an inter-faith dialogue with Jewish and Muslim leaders.

As he did in Jordan during the past three days of his journey, Benedict XVI will also encourage the Christian community in Israel and the Palestinian territories, a minority living among Jews and Muslims here.

The Pope took the opportunity at Ben Gurion Airport to address anti-Semetism upon his arrival in Israel.

“Sadly, anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head in many parts of the world. This is totally unacceptable,” said the pontiff. “Every effort must be made to combat anti-Semitism wherever it is found, and to promote respect and esteem for the members of every people, tribe, language and nation across the globe.”

The German pope has been criticized for lifting an excommunication order on a bishop who said the Jewish death toll during the Holocaust was exaggerated. The bishop has not been reinstated to his position.

“Tragically, the Jewish people have experienced the terrible consequences of ideologies that deny the fundamental dignity of every human person,” the Pope said. “It is right and fitting that during my stay in Israel I will have the opportunity to honor the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Sho’ah (Holocaust), and to pray that humanity will never again witness a crime of such magnitude.”

Tomorrow the Pope will tour Old City sites, including the Dome of the Rock. He will end the day with a mass in Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley at the foot of the Mount of Olives. His visit follows months of preparation regarding security, infrastructure and tourism.

“I take my place in a long line of Christian pilgrims to these shores, a line that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Church's history and which, I am sure, will keep and continue long into the future,” the pope said during his address on the tarmac. “I come, like so many others before me, to pray at the holy places, to pray especially for peace - peace in the Holy Land and peace throughout the world.”

Pope Walks Out of Meeting After Palestinian Outburst

2009-05-12T00:28:00.001+03:00

Welcome to Jerusalem

May 11, 1009

Article originally published here.

JERUSALEM – An meeting of 300 religious leaders hosted by the Pope came to an abrupt end Monday night when a Palestinian sheikh, who was not on the program, forced his way to the pulpit to criticize Israel.

The head of Sharia courts in the Palestinian Authority, Taysir Tamimi, made an animated plea to the Pope to fight for “a just peace for a Palestinian state and for Israel to stop killing women and children and destroying mosques as she did in Gaza.”

“Israel destroys Palestinian cities and establishes settlements on Palestinian land,” he cried in a rising voice, adding that Jerusalem “will remain the capital of a Palestinian state.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the outburst a “provocation” and said that instead of “fostering peace and co-exstistence chose to plant seeds of division and confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians and also between Jews, Muslims and Christians.”

“It is a shame that the extremists are those who represent the Palestinians and the Muslims in his important event in the presence of the Holy See,” said Aviv Shiron of the Foreign MInistry.

The speech was given in Arabic with no translation, but most local Christians and Muslims present understood what was said. Others simply understood the intent.

“If the Pope wasn’t there, I could stand up and leave the room, but I didn’t want to insult the Pope,” Oded Wiener, director general of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, told Newsmax after the incident.

Wiener and his Palestinian friend from the Islamic land trust were supposed to present a gift to the Pope after the scheduled speeches, but the Pope left the stage after Tamimi finished his speech, which wasn’t stopped by officials at the dialogue.

During the speech, some in the audience got up to leave, but most attendees stayed put, some laughed while others even applauded enthusiastically when Tamimi finally brought his statement to a close.

The Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said that the interruption was “a direct negation of what a dialogue should be. We hope that such an incident will not damage the mission of the Pope” and inter-religious dialogue.

“We hope also that inter-religious dialogue in the Holy Land will not be compromised by this incident,” Lombardi added, in his statement.

Outbursts like these are not uncommon for Tamimi, who was specifically banned from speaking tonight because he has chosen to speak off-topic at other gatherings.

“All religious people in the world of all other religions need to guard the Palestinians from Israel and protect their lands,” he implored.

Wiener accused Tamimi of “time and again” spoiling the dialogue.

“We want to speak about peace and he speaks hatred,” he said. “He embarrassed the Pope and wasn’t supposed to speak tonight. The fact that a person like him ... used an internal stage instead of seeking peace, promoting peace instead of using the opportunity with the Pope to promote peace, he spoke about hatred and terrorism.”

Imam: Mosque is a jihad factory

2009-05-08T04:26:00.002+03:00

May 8, 2009

You know how American troops are very careful not to target mosques in military operations? Respect for religious sites and all. Perhaps time to rethink that strategy. From Israel National News:

A Muslim cleric in the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization has redefined the purpose of the mosque, generally known around the world as the Islamic house of worship.

In a video clip of a televised sermon broadcast on Al Aqsa (Hamas) TV on April 24, the unidentified cleric declared, “True foundation and education start in the mosques… “ A transcript of the sermon, in subtitles, was provided by the Washington-based media watchdog organization, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

The point made by the cleric underscores the importance of security measures carried out by Israel Police on Fridays at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, especially during periods of tension, prior to Israeli national and Jewish holidays, or immediately following terror attacks.

“Do you realize what the mosque is? It is a prime factory educating men to fear and please Allah; [it is] the prime factory for educating Jihad fighters,” the cleric continued in the video clip. “The mosque is the life of Muslims, and the symbol of their courage and honor.”

During his sermon, the cleric also explained that even a Muslim fetus is not free of the obligation to make war.

“The Palestinian fetus in its mother’s womb, the Muslim fetus throughout the world in its mother’s womb, call [on Muslims] to unite through fear of Allah, through pleasing him, and through choosing Jihad and Resistance [terror],” he proclaimed.

Obama to confront a Middle Eastern nation over its nuclear program...

2009-05-07T15:55:00.002+03:00

...But it's not Iran! How’s this for change?

May 7, 2009

Iran gets a hug. Israel gets a warning. The Bamster’s latest foray foreign policy has left many heads spinning. The West has come to accept his tactful strategy of “talking” to Iran. Even Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres said Israel accepts, even cheers the U.S. in chatting with Ahmadinejad.

So it came as a shock when this news was reported in the Washington Times:

President Obama's efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons threaten to expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel's nuclear weapons from international scrutiny, former and current U.S. and Israeli officials and nuclear specialists say.

The issue will likely come to a head when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Mr. Obama on May 18 in Washington. Mr. Netanyahu is expected to seek assurances from Mr. Obama that he will uphold the U.S. commitment and will not trade Israeli nuclear concessions for Iranian ones.

Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, speaking Tuesday at a U.N. meeting on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), said Israel should join the tUniversal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, ... remains a fundamental objective of the United States," Ms. Gottemoeller told the meeting, according to Reuters.

She declined to say, however, whether the Obama administration would press Israel to join the treaty.

A senior White House official said the administration considered the nuclear programs of Israel and Iran to be unrelated "apples and oranges."

It’s no wonder Israelis are nervous about Obama. A recent poll of Israelis showed that while 60 percent said they had either a "somewhat favorable" or "very favorable" opinion of Obama, and 14% said their attitude toward him was unfavorable, only 32% of the respondents said they approved of Obama's policies toward Israel, and 21% said they disapproved.

The Hebrew-language newspaper Yisrael Hayom (Israel Today) noted in an editorial today that the American demand that Israel sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is nothing new, but questions the timing. "The [American] government is currently showing a terminological openness toward policy initiatives that are not to Israel's liking. This willingness must not be applied to the policy of ambiguity that has characterized Israel's nuclear policy for decades."

More numbers in the poll: 66% of Israelis said they would support military action if diplomatic and economic efforts failed to stop Iranian nuclear armament and 75% of them would support this action even if Obama was opposed.

Pilgrim of Peace?

2009-05-07T13:31:00.003+03:00

Christians are ambivalent; Jews are apathetic; some Muslims are angry, some are attending mass

May 7, 2009

Pope Benedict XVI announced that he is coming as a "pilgrim of peace" to the Holy Land, and indeed, many positive expectations can be attributed to his visit. But lurking among all religious groups in the country is a quiet murmuring about the Pontiff's time here.

Muslims: Benedict offended Muslims worldwide when he quoted in September 2006 a medieval description of the religion as "evil and inhuman" and "spread by sword." In Nazareth, Imam Nazem Abu Salim and his followers strung up a banner across the city's main square warning the Pope: "Those who harm Allah and His Messenger – Allah has cursed them in this world and in the hereafter, and has prepared for them a humiliating punishment." Benedict did not endorse the text, and made it clear that it did not reflect his own views, but Muslims violently protested in cities around the world and even attacked churches in Palestinian areas. The Northern Islamic Movement called on Muslim leaders to boycott interfaith meetings that are to be held during the Pope's visit.

Nevertheless, many Muslim students who attend Christian schools in Nazareth and Bethlehem will be attending mass with their classmates.

Jews: Benedict offended Jews when he reinstated Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson a couple months ago. Another lingering issue is the proposed beatification (one step below sainthood) of Pius XII, accused of ignoring the Holocaust. Because of that, Benedict will visit Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial but will not go inside the main room which has a plaque critical of the former World War II era pope.

During Operation Cast Lead in January, the Pope appeared unsympathetic to Israel when he sympathized with Gazans. He mentioned during a mass the deaths of Palestinians killed in Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which Israelis found unfair since he never mentioned the daily rocket attacks on southern Israel, ongoing for nine years.

Christians: You would think that the Christian community would be most thrilled about this visit, but a general skepticism has pervaded the rankled minority. A Jerusalem resident, who once lived in Bethlehem, said he has no expectations from the Pope. He ticked off on his fingers the reasons: 1. the last time a Pope was here, the economy proceeded to head south after his visit (that could, technically, be attributed to the intifada, not the pope); 2. the Pope is visiting, like his predecessor, a Palestinian refugee camp and will probably make a monetary donation there, like his predecessor did in 2000. There are no Christians in a refugee camp - why give them the money and not the Christians who are also struggling economically? So asked this unhappy Christian who has long since left the West Bank with no plans of returning.

Christians in Gaza are also offended that the Pope is visiting Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, but not going to Gaza. Admittedly going to Gaza would be a security nightmare. But they are upset nonetheless.

Israel activates 'Operation White Cloak'

2009-05-07T12:52:00.004+03:00

May 7, 2009

Operation White Cloak is underway. Really, I could stop writing right there: I love the name 'White Cloak.'

Yes, this is the Israeli security detail for protecting the Pope, replete in his white robes, but without his Popemobile, deemed "not safe enough" by Israel's ultra-vigilant security. Israel is deploying 60,000 police officers and 20,000 secret service agents and soldiers during the week of the tour, most of them in Jerusalem.

Protecting the Pope is the most intense security detail for Israel, according to Raphael Ben-Hur, senior deputy general of the tourism ministry, even greater than that of visiting American presidents.

“The Pope is one of the most important people all over the world and we have to secure him,” he said.

I was here for U.S. Pres. George W. Bush's visit nearly a year ago to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary. He was only here three days but the city was shut down. Certain streets were forced to evacuate and if any cars remained, they were towed. The entire neighborhood of the Central Bus Station, a major transportation hub, was desolate during Bush's speech at the convention center. I walked about a mile after the event until I could even find a taxi to catch. The neighborhood was vacated.

The Ministry of Tourism is expecting between 10,000 to 15,000 additional tourists in conjunction with Il Pappa's tour of the Holy Land. At the Nazareth mass, an outdoor arena will hold 40,000 people, while the Jerusalem mass will accommodate 5,000 to 6,000.

The State of Israel has alloted 43 million shekels (a little more than $10 million) for the trip. The Pontiff's official tour has been a good excuse for the three cities on his tour to get a much-needed facelift, just like the last papal tour in 2000 when John Paul II visited. Olive trees have been planted in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. The walkway down to the mass site - in the valley between the Eastern Gate of the Old City and the Mount of Olives - is getting repaved so as to accommodate the Popemobile. The area was once a haven for drug addicts and dealers. Now it is a massive construction site which must be done for Tuesday's mass.

Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, has a vested interest in the trip too because it shines the spotlight on his city. Bringing 1 million tourist s a year to Israel’s capital was a stated goal of Barkat’s campaign. This international exposure should be a boon to the city.

Already, an extra 10,000 to 15,000 tourists are expected in conjunction with the pope’s visit.

In Nazareth, an amphitheater for the mass has been built along with a helicopter pad, according to a reporter who visited there. New roads, sidewalks, and other general construction needed since the founding of the state, she said. I can't wait to see it myself. Nazareth, the city where Jesus was raised, now has a Muslim instead of Christian majority, a switch in the last few decades.

As I've reported before, Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories are leaving for various reasons. Here is some info from the website Palestine Facts:

After World War II, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, was 80% Christian and Nazareth 60%. Now those percentages are 20% and 30% respectively, and are shrinking. Jerusalem Christians were a plurality in the 1920s; today, they number under 2 percent of the city's population.
Serious violations of religious freedom are reported from within the Palestinian Authority, especially the persecution of Muslims who have converted to Christianity. In the Christian town of Bet Jella, a human rights lawyer reported brutal interrogation methods and arbitrary arrests based on fabricated criminal charges against Muslims who have converted to Christianity and their families. His report includes testimony about torture from victims who were terrified to criticize the Palestinian Authority and their secret police.
In Nazareth, the Christian population has decreased dramatically due to the rise and spread of militant Islam. The Islamic Movement (a radical Muslim group) has demanded the construction of a mosque near the Church of the Annunciation, a mosque even some moderate Muslims oppose. On Easter, 1999, the Muslim group burned Christian stores and targeted Christians over the issue; attempts to intervene were frustrated because Christians are terrified to speak out.
Hundreds of Christian families have left Palestinian towns like Bet Jella and Bethlehem during the al-Aqsa intifada, caught literally in the crossfire between Palestinians and Israelis. On the West Bank, a nearly-permanent Muslim boycott of Christian businesses is achieving its objective: driving the Christians to emigrate.
In October 2000, Christians were attacked in Gaza after a Palestinian Muslim leader called for a "jihad" against both Jews and Christians.
In February 2002 a Muslim mob, including Palestinian Authority Special Forces, burned Christian businesses and attempted to destroy the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in Ramallah. The attack occurred after a Christian man killed a Muslim while being pursued by a Muslim gang because he refused to pay protection money for safe passage to his home.

Christians in the Palestinian territories will also get to see the Pope - about 200 Gazans have received passes to attend the mass in Bethlehem. I had thought there were only 2,000 Christians of the 1.6 million residents there, but latest statistics claim there are 3,800. I'm not sure that these passes were actually issued either.

Obama Avoids Calling Armenian Killings 'Genocide'

2009-04-25T10:23:00.002+03:00

Why were people really expecting him to be different?
April 25, 2009

Article first published here.

JERUSALEM -- As Armenians around the world gathered Friday to remember their tragic shared heritage, President Barack Obama called the 1915 massacres of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks a “great atrocity,” but failed to label it genocide as he’d promised during his campaign.

The president’s position disappointed many Armenians, who feel the U.S. is once again downplaying the mass murders.

“At least when someone promises, as a presidential candidate, something of this significance, we expect him to be true to his promises,” said Sarkis Mesrobian, an Armenian pilgrim to Jerusalem from Los Angeles.

In a speech on Friday, Obama called the killings “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century,” but fell short of campaign promises, as have many of his predecessors, to label it a genocide.

In many ceremonies and protests around the world, the mood of the day revolved around expectations over Obama’s promises and strong record on the genocide. Armenian groups were confident that Obama and the U.S. Congress would officially recognize the genocide despite jeopardizing relations with Turkey.

On his website, Obama even writes that, “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides.”

In a written statement today, Obama said his “view of history has not changed.”

Nevertheless, in a ceremony in Jerusalem on Thursday, a priest in the Armenian monastery, Father Pakrad, called Obama’s previous statement a “pledge gone with the wind.”

“We are fully aware that the Armenian Genocide issues has become a political stand for the U.S. government instead of its becoming a pure moral issue,” he said in a speech. “Obama believes that each country must work through its past and hold out the promise of a new day. One thing he is not aware of is that ever since the Armenian Genocide our history has been halted because the genocide issue is unresolved.”

The United States and Israel, both with significant Armenian populations, are among the countries who have yet to officially recognize the genocide. Ankara denies that a genocide occurred and says the death toll has been inflated and was a result of civil war.

Even if Obama was on course to recognize the genocide, his intentions could have been derailed with an announcement this week by Turkish and Armenian officials that they are negotiating to ease a 16-year economic blockade Turkey has placed on Armenia since its war with Azerbaijan.

Obama praised the two countries’ efforts to overcome their differences and said he was “not interested in the U.S. tilting these negotiations one way or another while they are having a useful discussion.”

As they did in cities around the world, Jerusalem Armenians held a mournful memorial mass today then staged a protest at the Turkish consulate. Congregants packed into Saint James Armenian church for a two-hour long service in memory of relatives killed in death marches, massacres, starvation and disease. Outside the Armenian monastery in the Old City, posters in three languages called for genocide recognition.

Just days after the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, Armenians in Jerusalem pled with Israeli passersby in Jerusalem’s Old City to recognize their own plight. A scattered few Israelis who did join the memorial in Jerusalem said they felt shame that their government wouldn’t officially recognize the genocide.

Lehi Shachar, a student from Haifa, came to Jerusalem to stand in solidarity with Israel’s Armenian community.

“I wanted to come, especially on this day, to identify with the people because of our history,” she said referring to the Holocaust against the Jews in Nazi Germany. “It is absurd that the Israeli government doesn’t recognize this day.”

A Turkish reporter covering the Jerusalem protest said he admits there were killings, but he “cannot call it an ethnic cleansing.”

“The diaspora Armenians want first that they recognize it as a genocide, but the Armenians in Armenia want dialogue,” said Osman Sert, Jerusalem bureau chief of TRT. “This (genocide recognition) is blocking everything. “In Armenia, they have economic problems and they want normalization.”

Armenian Genocide Day - For Justice

2009-04-23T23:46:00.004+03:00

Reminder: Tomorrow is the little thought-about genocide commemoration of 1.5 million Armenian people

April 23, 2009

I'm going to be marching with and writing about the Armenian Genocide memorial day tomorrow in Jerusalem. For those not familiar with this Holocaust, I have compiled some information. The Turks have rewritten history, have raised a generation believing a lie and, some countries, like the US and Israel, have let them get away with it in the name of strategic relations. The Armenian people cannot begin to heal unless their pain has been acknowledged.

Info from this site.

One and a half million Armenians were killed in the Armenian Genocide, carried out by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916. Armenians commemorate this on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. On that same day, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.

The genocide was systematic: Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed. Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were killed. Finally, Armenians were told they were being relocated so they embarked upon what became known as "death marches." Many died in this way - either starving to death or succumbing to the brutal conditions of the desert. On the Black Sea coast, Turks loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea.

The Turkish government denies that there was an Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were only removed from the eastern "war zone."

The Armenian Genocide, however, occurred all over Anatolia [present-day Turkey], and not just in the so-called "war zone." Deportations and killings occurred in the west, in and around Ismid (Izmit) and Broussa (Bursa); in the center, in and around Angora (Ankara); in the south-west, in and around Konia (Konya) and Adana (which is near the Mediterranean Sea); in the central portion of Anatolia, in and around Diyarbekir (Diyarbakir), Harpout (Harput), Marash, Sivas (Sepastia), Shabin Kara-Hissar (þebin Karahisar), and Ourfa (Urfa); and on the Black Sea coast, in and around Trebizond (Trabzon), all of which are not part of a war zone. Only Erzeroum, Bitlis, and Van in the east were in the war zone.

The American people, via local Protestant missionaries, did the most to save the wretched remnants of the death marches, the orphaned children. The New York Times published some 150 articles on the slaughters in 1915. (from a documentary on the Genocide by Two Cats Productions.)

Despite Turkish denial, there is no doubt about the Armenian Genocide. For example, German ambassador Count von Wolff-Metternich, Turkey's ally in World War I, wrote his government in 1916 saying: "The Committee [of Union and Progress] demands the annihilation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the [Ottoman] government must bow to its demands."

Much documentation exists from foreign consuls and businessmen, not to mention genocide survivors. Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent a cable to the U.S. State Department in 1915: "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses [sic] it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion."

Morgenthau's successor as Ambassador to Turkey, Abram Elkus, cabled the U.S. State Department in 1916 that the Young Turks were continuing an ". . . unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history."

One Turkish government, that of Damad Ferit Pasha, has recognized the Armenian genocide. In fact, that government held war crimes trials and condemned to death the major leaders responsible.

The Earth Day farce

2009-04-23T23:24:00.002+03:00

April 23, 2009

I decided to skip the Earth Day event at the Old City walls this evening, for what I believe is good reason. By not watching the farce, I spared myself copious amounts of eye rolling and a lethal dose of sarcasm.

Jerusalem decided to copy the US and turn out the lights on the Old City walls for a nice energy-saving hour. But on my way to the Old City today, I saw increased cop patrols (completely necessary considering the president and mayor would both be there) creating a lot more pollution. I saw trucks carting in electrically powered decorative orb-like objects. Friends told me that they saw a children's model project of a windmill powered by wind, was powered by the wind of a fan, electric naturally.

Sound systems were carted in and speeches were made. More energy and hot air. Then the lights went out. I wonder what the net gain would be for that hour, especially after the previous 12 in setting up the event.

It isn't a bad idea to conserve energy, but to expend more to make your conservation more dramatic? Don't make me sneer. I want to be happy. Really.

"Preparing the way" for the Pope

2009-04-23T18:39:00.000+03:00

And yes, I ran too :)

April 23, 2009

BETHLEHEM - From Manger Square, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, about a dozen Palestinians from Beit Sahour, Beit Jalla and Bethlehem geared up to run to Jerusalem in the sixth annual peace marathon. But the runners weren’t sure whether they could complete the race.

“We’ll see if they let me (into Jerusalem). I have a pass, but I don’t know if they’ll let me,” said Imad, 23. Imad’s temporary pass, organized by an Italian organization that sponsored the run, didn’t guarantee entry, but would help.

The logistics of the run reflect the situation. Palestinian runners started from behind the concrete barrier that keeps them from Israel and had to obtain permits to cross the checkpoint, logistics that must be worked out in advance. The Israeli runners, many of whom visited Bethlehem before the first Intifada (uprising), are no longer able to enter according to Israeli law, which prevents its citizens from entering Palestinian territories.

Instead, the Israeli delegation met the runners at the checkpoint where the Palestinian contingent’s entry into Israel would be decided.

These locals and Italian pilgrims “prepared the way” for Pope Benedict XVI, just three weeks before his arrival in Israel, with the sixth annual Pope John Paul II Pilgrimage Peace Marathon on Thursday morning. Some 50 Italians and about a dozen Palestinians and Israelis took part in the “marathon,” actually just six miles, but replete with a border crossing from Palestinian territory to Israel’s capital, an attempt to promote peace in the Holy Land.

Centro Sportivo Italiano, the Italian Sports Association, brings pilgrims from Italy and “aims to continue the legacy of Pope John Paul II for peace, brotherhood and inter-religious cooperation” through sports, the organization said in a statement.

Retired AC Milan soccer star Demetrio Albertini, now Deputy President of the Italian Football Association, provided star power for the run. Italian volleyball world champion Andrea Zorzi also joined the marathon. The first stop for the Italian delegation was Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on Wednesday.

Albertini said the race, because of its mission, was an emotional event for him.

“It’s the sixth, but it’s a new day for a very long run in the future for peace,” he said. “In sports you don’t see that wall between the Palestinians and Israelis. This is the strength of sports, you don’t see your differences. That is why we run, why we are here, to bring this message to the young people to live without these differences.”

The race itself took place in true Italian fashion, relaxed and entertaining. It took two hours for the group to span the route, stopping for photo opportunities and extravagant greetings along the way. The Italian delegates passed out olive branches to Palestinians on one side of the wall and to Israelis on the other.

In the end, all the Palestinian runners crossed the border without a hitch and finished the race at Notre Dame church across from the Old City.

Would the race bring peace? Maybe not, but Murad Manoureh, a Palestinian from Beit Sahour, believes it can help.

“Sports is the language for everybody in the world,” he said. “It is a good language and we play by the rules. We run for peace and we run for some sport.”

“We want peace with Israel and we want to visit Jerusalem. We haven’t been here for a long time and it is nice to see it after a long time,” he said.

Yaron Rohin, a Jerusalem runner, has participated in this run for five years.

“It is beautiful to see that the Palestinians crossed the border with relative ease,” he said. “They met us together with the Italians. Now we just need to see some results. If the politicians will also understand this, then we will see peace.”

Sirens sound for Holocaust Memorial Day

2009-04-21T11:17:00.003+03:00

Somber memorial coincides with Hilter's birthday and anti-Israel racism conference

April 21, 2009

Originally published here.

In a chilling coincidence, this year’s solemn Holocaust commemoration in Israel landed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday as well as on the first day of a United Nations racism conference the Jewish state says is taking a marked anti-Israel stance.

Several Israeli organizations have sent delegates to Geneva to protest the conference. One organization, Israel Empowerment Fund, rallied Christian Zionists from around Europe to take part in the pro-Israel protests.

“The conference is only an excuse to blame Israel for all the problems in the world and be anti-Semitic, which is ironic because the whole theme of the event is supposed to be against racism,” Michael Decker of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice tells Newsmax.

The organization created a coalition of Jews and Christians called “The Israel Empowerment Fund” and called upon European Christians to join them in Geneva for a week of protest events. Demonstrations for and against Israel are set to take place every day of the conference.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Israel of being the "most cruel and racist regime," sparking a walkout Monday by angry Western diplomats at a U.N. racism conference.

Several nations including the United States have boycotted the United Nations’ conference in Geneva due to its statement’s harsh wording against Israel. On Monday, Israel recalled its ambassador to Switzerland, Ilan Elgar, in protest against the Geneva conference and a meeting between Ahmadinejad and Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz.

“I feel deeply hurt and ashamed that on such a day, there is the opening of a racist conference in Geneva, and the main speaker is who? (Iranian President) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” Israel’s President Simon Peres said in a statement. “A man that calls to wipe Israel off of the map. A man who denies the Holocaust.”

Around the nation, Jewish-owned businesses shut down at dusk on Monday and ceremonies took place at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial to remember the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the nations who boycotted the conference, but condemned it and “its guest-of-honor” who he called “a racist Holocaust-denier who does not hide his intentions to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.“

“The unfortunate fact is that while we are marking the events of the Holocaust here at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there are those who chose to participate in a spectacle of hatred of Israel, conducted at this very hour in the heart of Europe,” Netanyahu said at a memorial service Monday night. “From here I turn to you, President of Switzerland, and I ask you: how can you, as a head of an enlightened state, meet with those who deny the Holocaust and strive for another one?“

Indeed, several delegates walked out of Ahmadinejad’s vitriolic speech on Monday when he called Israel a "paragon of racism.

The United Nation’s Durban Review Conference is a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

Thousands Celebrate 'Holy Fire' in Jerusalem

2009-04-20T09:19:00.003+03:00

Easter in Jerusalem

April 20, 2009

Originally published here.

JERUSALEM - The quiet of the Sabbath was pierced Saturday morning by the drums and bagpipes of marching bands that led the patriarchs of various churches in the Old City toward the Holy Sepulchre for the Holy Fire ceremony the day before the Orthodox Easter.

In a nation where headlines regarding Israelis and Palestinians dominate the news, the few Christians here cling to Easter as the one day a year when they parade their identity despite being a 2 percent minority among Jews and Muslims.

The indigenous Christian community is bolstered at this time each year by thousands of international pilgrims who pack into the Old City for a chance to attend the Holy Fire ceremony at the Holy Sepulchre, traditionally believed to be the tomb of Jesus by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Some pilgrims sleep outside the church the night before in order to be first inside the church. Greek Orthodox, Armenians and other Eastern rite Christians follow a different calendar than Catholics and Protestants, celebrating Easter on Sunday, April 19.

About 10,000 worshippers were allowed into the church on Saturday, including Steve Toumayan, 32, a Jerusalem native who now lives in Toronto. Toumayan said he took his vacation during Easter so he could return to Jerusalem and attend the Holy Fire service again after 10 years.

“This is the place to be. Everything happened here,” he said referring to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The ritual of the holy fire dates back at least 1,200 years and the origin of the flame, which is said to leap from the tomb, is considered a miracle by the faithful.

But the Holy Fire, or Sabbath of Light ceremony, has been marred in the past by fights between Christians vying for coveted turf in the historic church. One year the Greek Patriarch and an Armenian priest came to blows in the tomb of Jesus, leading to a fight that spilled out between followers of the denominations.

Since then, young Christian men don a priest robe for the day ready for a fight; hundreds of Jewish Israeli police, border guard units and riot police block sections of the Old City to control entry to the church; and Muslim families, who hold the church keys, seal the tomb of Jesus with wax when the priests go inside to pray.

This year no inter-Christian fights were reported although many scuffles erupted at police checkpoints when pilgrims pushed to get through police barricades. Otherwise, the ceremony was peaceful and touching to the faithful who awaited the flame. Congregants from the Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Greece and Armenian, among others, held bundles of candles as they waited for the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in the Holy Land, Theofilos III to enter the tomb. After the flame appeared it was passed from the tomb and relayed to all the candles in the church. One is even flown to Greece.

Before the flame was passed from within the tomb, Nectar Derian, 65, from New York, on her first visit to Israel, thanked God for the opportunity to be at the ceremony.

“This light comes from heaven and I’m anxious to light my candle,” she said.

Since the Orthodox Palm Sunday last week, the Christian and Armenian quarters of the Old City have been packed with visitors, revelers and proud bearers of jewelry or tattoos of crosses. Naro Kalaydian, owner of Bulgourji Armenian Restaurant, said the business had seen an endless run of tourists from around the world and local Christians on holiday the entire week, a significant boost from last year.

The Holy Sepulchre was dedicated by Constantine in the 4th century. The present church was built in 1810. Today about 14 denominations claim some degree of rights in the church, with six that have rights to hold daily services in the church including Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Ethiopian, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Syrian Orthodox. All denominations abide by a decision that allows a Muslim family in the Old City to hold the keys to the church.

Israeli parliamentarian says nuclear Iran balances Israel

2009-03-31T11:28:00.003+03:00

Yes, she is in the Israeli government
March 31, 2009

On one of her first days in the Knesset, Hanin Zoabi said she welcomed increased Iranian influence in Gazaalso called Israel an "aggressor state." Zoabi is the first woman elected in the Balad party which is Arab. As reported by The Bulletin:

“If this influence is supporting me, so I will not mind this influence. Even, I would ask for this influence ... The question is not whether there is an influence or not, the question whether this influence is supporting you, can support your demands or can go against your demands.”

Queried regarding Iran’s quest to manufacture nuclear weapons, she stated was that “It would [sic] be more supporting me to have a counter-power to Israel” and “I need something to balance its [Israel’s] power.”

She also spoke of Egypt and Jordan as being a threat to the Arabs of the Gaza Strip, intimating that they are scared of a free and democratic Palestinian state.

Ms. Zoabi was then asked if she felt worried due to the fact that Iran is getting close to acquiring a nuclear weapon and because she lives in close proximity to Jews. She replied, “No, I am not, I’m afraid from the nuclear Iran, I am more afraid from the Israeli nuclear [weapons].”

Israel is a democracy that allows free speech. Zoabi's case isn't unique. Many of the Arab party Knesset members speak out against Israel and advise the Palestinian Authority. In many other nations, this would be considered treason, but Israel allows it.

More from Zoabi:

Ms. Zoabi said that Israel was an aggressor state, and that only a situation similar to that which existed between the Soviet Union and United States in the form of the doctrine of “Mutually Ensured Destruction” would restrain Israel.

“It’s the balance of power. This is the only idea. Our only idea that it is more dangerous to the world, more dangerous to everyone, more dangerous to the Palestinians, to Israelis to have Israel as the only powerful state. I need something to balance its power because this balance of power will restrict the Israeli using of power. The Israeli violence of the army is an outcome of the Israel’s convenient feeling that no one will restrict her, that no Arab country will really declare a war against [Israel].”

She continued by saying “and another thing … I need a power which can make contrast to the Israeli power and it’s not for myself. It is not supporting me the fact that Israel would be the only state with a nuclear weapon. It’s more supporting me to have counter power to Israel.”

“I believe that [Israel] would respect its use of power if she’s afraid from others. The fact that she is not afraid from Arab countries, the fact that she is not afraid from a potential declaration of our Arab world to declare war against Israel, makes Israel more violent. You understand me. Sometimes I need power not in order to implement this power but in order to respect the other’s power. “

She was then asked if an Iranian bomb would lead to a nervous America and thus more U.S. pressure on Israel and if that would be good for her she replied “Exactly.”

Checkpoint violence

2009-03-31T11:19:00.003+03:00

March 31, 2009

Two Palestinian students said Israeli border patrol guards beat them at a checkpoint on Saturday as they were making their way from Jericho to Jerusalem.

According to Alla and Iad Mazlum, relatives of the two, said the two were detained at the checkpoint along with other Palestinians.

Alla's father told Ynet that after identifying themselves, his son and Iad were taken into a room, where the officers ordered them to strip and "beat them for no reason."

... Border Guard said the officers offered a different version of the events, but added that the incident would be investigated.

If true, a travesty indeed.

Two-state solution older than Israel

2009-03-31T11:09:00.002+03:00

March 31, 2009

The two-state solution isn't a new and sudden idea. In this American Thinker piece, Victor Sharpe traces the history of two states to pre-Israel. And it was a lot larger than anything in question now. In fact, present-day Jordan would've been included in Mandatory Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration issued by Lord Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, never envisaged that the Jordan River would be the eastern boundary of the reconstituted Jewish homeland.

The squabbling by the French and British colonial powers over the final frontiers of the Palestine Mandate had earlier led the London Times to urge Paris to accept sensible and rational frontiers in both the north and east of Jewish Palestine. As early as September 19th, 1919 it had thundered in an editorial:

"The Jordan will not do as the eastern frontier of Palestine ... Palestine must have a good military frontier east of Jordan ... Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling state but one that is capable of vigorous and independent life ... "

Great read. Article here.

Thanks, Islam. No really.

2009-03-31T11:02:00.002+03:00

March 31, 2009

If anyone can believe this, the Anglican church's Archbishop Rowan Williams thanked Muslims for bringing religion back to Great Britain. Muslim.net reported:

In an unprecedented move by a Western Christian leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has praised British Muslims for bringing back religion and ethics into public life.

"I think Islam has made a very significant contribution to getting a debate about religion into public life," Williams, the leader of the Anglican Church, told the Muslim News. "And I think it's very right that we should have these debates and discussions between Muslims and Christians and others in public."

Britain is home to more than 2 million Muslims.

This is the first time a Western Christian leader thanks Muslims for bringing back religion to a secular Western society.

Domestic violence against women in Gaza rises

2009-03-27T17:28:00.003+03:00

But the war made them do it
March 27, 2009

More human rights violations from Hamas, this time against the usual target: Women. Ok, its men in Gaza not necessarily Hamas. However, there aren't many others left in Gaza besides Hamas after the civil war in 2007. Anyway, I digress:

The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in Gaza, local Palestinian NGOs and mental health professionals are reporting increased incidents of domestic violence and sexual assault against women in Gaza since the beginning of 2009.

An unpublished UNIFEM survey of male and female heads of 1,100 Gaza households conducted between 28 February and 3 March indicates there was an increase in violence against women during and after the 23-day war which ended on 18 January.

“According to our staff, and through clinical observation, there was increased violence against women and children during and after the war,” said public relations coordinator for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), Husam al-Nounou. “We can attribute this to the fact that most people were exposed to traumatic incidents during the war, and one way people react to stress is to become violent.”

So it was the war that caused men to beat or kill their wives? I guess we could find similar numbers in southern Israel where post traumatic stress from daily rockets attacks affects more than 50 percent of the population.

But don't blame the men. Although, if you read about how many women are treated in Islamic nations (and in America) you will find violence against women is rarely limited to war.

But al-Nounou insists.

“This war was extremely harsh, people felt insecure, vulnerable and unable to protect themselves, their children and their families; when people were trapped at home this increased the stress and anxiety,” said al-Nounou.

The center says child visits for divorced parents has doubled since the war (from 30 to 60). Bakr Turkmani, an attorney at the PCDCR, said "the number of divorce and separation cases has increased significantly since the war, and domestic violence played a role in the increase."

However, Turkmani must accompany the victims to the police station, otherwise their reports of abuse are not "accepted.” Why? Because compaints from women are not taken seriously. Therefore, most rapes and abuse are not reported in Islamic societies, according to organizations who work undercover with Muslim women.

But its the war:

Director of the women’s unit at the leading Palestinian human rights organisation, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Muna As-Shawa, said the centre had received reports of increased domestic violence and sexual assault during and after the hostilities. The unit had counselled over 600 women.

“During and after the war women struggled to fulfil their roles as mothers, and care for their children without electricity and water, while under attack,” said As-Shawa, “and if the husband died, sometimes the father-in-law took the inheritance and tried to take custody of the children.”

Presumably because the father in law was stressed too.

The full article is here.

Arab reporter shocked by anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses

2009-03-27T17:16:00.002+03:00

March 27, 2009

Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist for The Jerusalem Post, thought he was talking to "a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber" when speaking to some students and professors at American universities.

In an article titles, On Campus: The Pro-Palestinians' Real Agenda, Toameh writes that he "discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah."

I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s “apartheid system” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda” and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals and universities.

...When the self-designated “pro-Palestinian” lobbyists are unable to challenge the facts presented by a speaker, they resort to verbal abuse.

On one campus, for example, I was condemned as an “idiot” because I said that a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas in the January 2006 election because they were fed up with financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

On another campus, I was dubbed as a “mouthpiece for the Zionists” because I said that Israel has a free media. There was another campus where someone told me that I was a ‘liar” because I said that Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms because of his role in terrorism.

And then there was the campus (in Chicago) where I was “greeted” with swastikas that were painted over posters promoting my talk. The perpetrators, of course, never showed up at my event because they would not be able to challenge someone who has been working in the field for nearly 30 years.

What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to “resist the occupation” even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much more understanding and even welcomed my “even-handed analysis” of the Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.

Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years.

What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.

Frightened? Read the whole thing here.

The danger of verbiage

2009-03-27T15:33:00.004+03:00

March 27, 2009

Reporters, myself included, tend to fall into use of hastily created phrases that become part of our verbiage. Israeli analyst Barry Rubin points out some of the offending phrases in the following column:

It's Worse Than a Crime, It's Blundering Analysis
By Barry Rubin
March 21, 2009

The problem, as we see repeatedly, with much media coverage of issues involving Israel is the way the story is defined. There need not be any sense of bias by a reporter. Merely copying what other journalists do or from a specific ideological framework—not because reporters have preconceptions but because they make far less effort than in the past to balance them—leads to a conception of the story that is skewed.

This appears subtly in news stories but very openly in analysis pieces. Consider Steven Gutkin, “Analysis: Mideast peace up to interlocking deals,” March 16, 2009. The lead is innovative but a bit clunky: “The fate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a collection of moving parts that somehow need to come together in a single package: an Israel-Hamas prisoner swap, a truce for Gaza, and new governments on both sides of the firing line that could pursue peace.”

There is an attempt to present the issue as involving a number of aspects. Yet the article mixes two very different things: the situation between Israel and Hamas regarding Gaza, and prospects for a comprehensive peace. In a very real sense, these are not related or, to put it another way, they are inversely related.

The undercover assumption here is that the more peace there is between Israel and Hamas, the more likely a comprehensive peace becomes. In fact, the first would damage the second. The reason why should be obvious: Hamas is against any compromise peace but favors long-term, bloody struggle using terrorism. If Hamas survives as ruler in Gaza, and even more damaging if the Palestinian Authority and Hamas make a coalition, the chances for a comprehensive peace—low enough already—decline to zero. All-out war is guaranteed.

The article next discusses the ups-and-downs of Israel-Hamas negotiations over a prisoner exchange and continues: “Such a swap could have helped pave the way for a long-term Israel-Hamas truce deal that in turn might have opened the Gaza Strip's blockaded borders to allow for reconstruction after Israel's punishing offensive there.”

This can be summarized as: truce brings open borders brings reconstruction to repair damage caused by Israel.

The words “rockets” or the phrase cross-border attacks do not appear in the article. There is no hint that Hamas aggression is the cause of conflict, nor that the fighting started because Hamas unilaterally rejected the existing truce (which it wasn’t enforcing any way). Equally, there is no mention that the issue is not just opening the borders but what is allowed to go across them, nor that there is some problem with rebuilding things in order to benefit a radical and repressive Islamist regime to keep it in power.

Thus the story is this: Israel attacked and destroyed Gaza, let’s have a truce so it can be rebuilt.

And who do you think that places the blame on?

Then we turn to an equally important—and misexplained—subject: “Rebuilding Gaza will almost surely also depend on the success of current reconciliation talks in Egypt between Hamas militants and the Western-backed Fatah movement in efforts to reverse the results of a brief 2007 civil war that left rival Palestinian governments in Gaza and the West Bank.”

At least the reporter wrote “Western-backed” rather than moderate, though no hint is given that the civil war was started by Hamas. It was a rather one-sided civil war.

Yet next comes a truly terrible and profoundly misleading sentence: “Getting Hamas and Fatah to reconcile is also key to the success of U.S.-backed Mideast peace talks, as it's unlikely Israel would sign on to a deal if moderates are in control of just the West Bank while militants rule Gaza. The latest news from Egypt is that the Hamas-Fatah talks are not going well.”

Well, where to begin? While it is true that Israel understandably wants to sign a peace deal only with a united Palestinian side which can deliver on its pledges, putting Hamas and Fatah together will ensure no such deal can ever be signed.

There is no hint in this article of why the word “militants” is used to describe Hamas. A lot of people critique the media for not using the word “terrorists” I don’t agree. Terrorism is a tactic and Hamas uses terrorism yet that does not encompass the organization’s views or goals. I’d prefer to see such phrases as: radical Islamist or determined to wipe Israel off the map or repressive, or even genocidal.

But the implication is not that Hamas would block peace—much less that the Palestinian Authority would—for we are next told: “The biggest question now is whether Israel would sign a deal under any circumstances. Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, a political hawk, early Monday initialed a coalition agreement with the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu Party, increasing the likelihood that Israel's next government will spurn peace talks.”

“The bottom line is that the obstacles to Palestinian unity, open borders for Gaza and a peace deal that would usher in Palestinian statehood seem as formidable as ever.”
Note that there has not been one phrase or sentence to suggest that Hamas or Fatah or the PA are obstacles, only Israel. The Palestinians problem is just that they cannot unite, not that they oppose peace.

By the way, from a purely analytical point of view it should be pointed out that the reason PA-Hamas talks don’t go well is that both want to be in command, while Hamas is not going to give up control of Gaza. There isn’t going to be any Palestinian unity at all. You can bet on it.

And of course both Netanyahu and the Yisrael Beitenu party support a two-state solution.

But that one sentence is so important let me repeat it: “The bottom line is that the obstacles to Palestinian unity, open borders for Gaza and a peace deal that would usher in Palestinian statehood seem as formidable as ever.”

So this is what is allegedly needed for peace:
---Palestinian unity (in which Hamas would veto any peace);
--Open borders for Gaza (which would not only make Hamas rule permanent but would allow in items used for military purposes so Hamas could build up its army).
--“A peace deal that would usher in Palestinian statehood”

As always, there is no mention of a peace deal that would: end the conflict forever, bring full recognition of Israel, or provide Israel with security structures and guarantees.

This is the standard practice of AP and a lot of the media. What Israel wants in a peace deal is never ever mentioned.

The rest of the article discusses the prisoner exchange using such phrases as “Israel's crushing economic blockade of Gaza” and “bloody Israeli military offensive in Gaza.” No criticism of Hamas; no mention of rockets; no mention of repression and executions of oppositionists in Gaza.

And we are told: “Hamas is desperate to reopen the area's borders to allow in reconstruction supplies.” This makes Hamas seem humanitarian. But usually those who are desperate are ready to make concessions to get what they need. This is not true in Hamas’s case.

And finally, the ending: “If Hamas sticks by its refusal to recognize the Jewish state, as seems likely, a new right-wing Israeli government could use that as an excuse to shun a future Palestinian unity government, and perhaps even intensify the blockade of Gaza.”

Let us consider the full implications of this sentence: If Hamas says that it will never recognize Israel, will continue to attack Israel, does continue to attack Israel, teaches children to be terrorists, and has the goal of wiping Israel off the map, this merely gives Israelis of the “right-wing” an “excuse” to be mean to them.

Can people really be writing this kind of drivel, the slightest examination of which shows its absurdity? Can the AP and other news organs sneeringly reject any criticisms and assert that this is fair and balanced and good and accurate coverage?

Yes.

But is this fair, balanced, accurate, and accurate coverage?

No.

Shalit deal doesn't go through

2009-03-18T07:20:00.002+02:00

Captive to remain in Hamas' hands for now
March 18, 2009

In the last week support has swelled for releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Shalit's parents and hundreds of supporters swarm around the tent erected by the prime minister's house in a show of support every day. It's been an emotional week for the nation.

Negotiations failed, however, and it looks like it will fall to the next administration to do anything about it. Here's a glimpse of what might in my article that first appeared here:

The next Israeli government is expected to resume targeted assassinations of Hamas terrorist leaders and cut off family visits to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in an effort to pressure Hamas to allow visits to kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and ease up on its demands for an exchange, sources close to the prime minister designate say.

These hardline tactics are likely elements of future attempts to free Shalit since negotiations will now most likely fall to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, officials said.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the nation in a televised news conference to explain why Israel and Hamas failed to reach an agreement in Cairo.

“The government of Israel, so long as I stand at its head, will not agree to the dictates [of Hamas] as they were presented,” Olmert said. “Israel agreed to generous and far-reaching compromises. I approved these compromises, which meant releasing dozens of prisoners, some of them murderers.”

But in the end, the deal fell through over 100 prisoners in what could be Olmert’s last chance to leave office with a positive legacy after a stormy three years in office wracked with corruption scandals and two wars. Olmert’s special envoy Ofer Dekel and Israel Security Agency Chief Yuval Diskin blamed Hamas for its “unwillingness” to be flexible and for toughening its stance in recent days. The Israeli cabinet today voted to release to the public Hamas’ prisoner list.

Hamas official Osama Hamdan told Reuters on Tuesday he hoped Israel would resume talks soon.

“If the Israeli government sticks to its negative position, it will not be possible to clinch a deal, at least at the present time,” he said. “If Israel wants to reach a deal, it should come with a serious offer.”

Yoni Ben-Menachem, chief editor of Israel Radio, said the gap between what Hamas was asking and what Israel was willing to cede was too large to overcome, including 100 disputed prisoners accused of direct involvement in deadly terror attacks against Israelis.

“Hamas did not change its initial demand to release the hard-core terrorists, 450 prisoners,” he said at a media briefing in Jerusalem. “They have been very persistent about this demand for three years now.”

Ben-Menachem said that military aides close to Netanyahu believe the next prime minister will renew targeted killings of Hamas, update Israel’s security policy and “make new rules.”

“It’s a new government, it’s a different ball game. If you apply the right pressure ... they will change their position,” he said referring to Hamas. “With the right pressure and incentive ... you can do it.”

Another bargaining chip Israel has, Ben-Menachem pointed out, is the $5 billion in foreign aid promised to rebuild Gaza: “Hamas will want to start rebuilding Gaza. But to get equipment there, the passages must be opened. The passages cannot be opened without Shalit.”

Joshua Teitelbaum, a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center, agreed that Israel would likely adopt a tougher stance against Hamas under Netanyahu’s administration.

“Definitely there will be a bit of a harder line,” he told Newsmax. “They will resume targeted killings and generally turn up the pressure.”

Shalit was abducted on June 25, 2006 in cross-border raid near the Gaza border. Volunteers at a tent erected outside the prime minister’s residence have marked the 996 days since the kidnapping.

Shalit’s father, Noam, told reporters after Olmert’s speech that the government failed and begged leaders to do everything in its power to return his son.

“We’ve been dealing with these hopes, expectations and disappointments for 1,000 days,” he said. “What's important now is actions, and not hopes and expectations.”

In the last week, a groundswell of public support in favor of exchanging prisoners for Shalit peaked in Israel with 69 percent supporting handing over hundreds of prisoner for a single soldier’s life, according to a poll by the Dahaf Institute.

Hamas has prevented Israeli and international officials from visiting Shalit, but intelligence reports indicate that the soldier, now 22 years old, is still alive, in Gaza and is reportedly being held with explosives strapped to him.

Several Palestinians families in Gaza and the West Bank were disappointed when Israel and Hamas failed to agree on a swap. A few Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails were so confident they would be released, they had started to pack on Monday. Ben-Menachem expects Palestinians to apply some pressure to the Hamas government to get their family members in Israel prisons back, but not as forcefully as in Israel.

”We’re talking about a dictatorship in Gaza,” he said.

Report: British support of Palestinians funds hate textbooks

2009-03-17T13:54:00.002+02:00

March 17, 2009

Here is how British taxpayer money is being spent: According to a study due out tomorrow, 100 million pounds of British taxpayer money has been spent promoting terrorism and encouraging young Palestinians to hate the West and to become suicide bombers.

The report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance alleges that British money given to the Palestinian Authority has been used to print textbooks that teach children “death is not bitter in the mouth of the believers" and that the Iraqi insurgency is a "brave resistance" against Britain and the U.S.

Palestinian TV shows and newspapers also call for terrorism and urge Palestinians to pick up weapons. For example, one TV presenter on the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation called Ayat al-Akhras, 18, the youngest Palestinian female suicide bomber, is a hero.

The Daily Mail quotes Timothy Kirkhope, leader of the Conservative delegation in the European Parliament, who said that no more aid money should be sent to the Palestinian territories unless monitored: "Money has been misspent in the area before and used to buy weapons. This time they may not be using it on bullets and guns, but they are using it to turn the minds of young people towards militancy.”

The report mocks claims that textbooks encouraging terrorism stopped being used in classrooms after the Annapolis conference of November 2007, in which both Palestinians and Israelis pledged to reach a peaceful two-state solution.

The following are examples from media or textbooks:

"Palestine is our dream. Brothers, Oh Fatah's loyal masses the land is thirsty [for martyr blood] […] Jaffa, Haifa and Acre are calling. Ramallah.. Nablus and Gaza: "When will we meet and break the chains? To Jerusalem march millions of Martyrs" - Ahmed Dughmus, 8 January 2008

“It doesn't mean that we don't want the 1948 borders [all of Israel], but in our current political program, we [PA] say we want a state on the 1967 borders […] We [Palestinians] were created on this land in order to liberate it, to live on it, to continue as people of Ribat [Religious war]. We are on the land of Ribat and must remain [on it] until Resurrection.” - Najat Abu Bakr, Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, 26 February 2008

“There are diseases like smallpox, that can be eradicated, but the disease that was inflicted on the Palestinian people and the Arab nation in general, that's the Jewish disease, the Zionist disease, which is a cancerous disease, that started with occupying and taking over lands in 1904 […] Those (Jews), from 1904 to 1947, reached 605,000. That’s the cancer that spreads over the lands.” - Adnan Ayash, History Professor, 5 June 2008

Saudi gang-rape victim gets punished for committing 'adultery'

2009-03-16T12:22:00.002+02:00

March 16, 2009

Another dispatch from the religion of peace: A Saudi judge sentenced a pregnant gang-rape victim to 100 lashes for committing adultery even though she isn't married, the Daily Mail reported.

The judge ordered that the woman be jailed for a year and receive 100 lashes, but the lashes could wait until after she delivered the baby, he ruled.

Where's all the women's rights groups to speak up for this woman whose testimony in Islamic court counts as one-fourth that of a man?

The woman, 23, became pregnant from the rape. She was reportedly assaulted after accepting a ride from a man. It is illegal in Saudi Arabia for a woman to be with a man unless he is a relative.

The man took her to a house where she was attacked by him and four of his friends throughout the night. The judge ruled that she she had committed adultery despite not being married.
She later discovered she was pregnant and tried to get an abortion.

The Saudi Gazette reported that she eventually 'confessed' to having 'forced intercourse' with her attackers.

Women have very few rights in Saudi Arabia. They are not allowed to drive and are banned from going out in public in the company of men other than male relatives.

Terror attack in Jordan Valley leaves two cops dead

2009-03-16T12:03:00.002+02:00

March 16, 2009

In the last two weeks, two terror attacks have created an eerie reflection in Israel. After each attack, every Israeli wonders if this will be the one to set off the next intifada (uprising). Two weeks ago, a bulldozer driver went after a police car in Jerusalem. he was shot dead before he did any damage.

The story ended differently Sunday night. Last night two Israeli policemen were shot and killed in the West Bank, the first Israeli deaths in that area in nearly a year, on a road that both Israelis and Palestinians frequent Highway 90 is used by Israelis as well as Palestinians to cut through to the Sea of Galilee in the North and the Dead Sea in the South.

The police officers were shot a close range in the valley between Jericho and Jordan.

Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said that the two officers were on patrol near the Jewish town of Massua. The small Jewish community is in an agricultural area of the Jordan Valley, north of Jericho and near the Jordanian border.

Police are searching for the killers. The last Israeli deaths in the West Bank occurred on April 25 last year, when two security guards at an industrial park near the city of Tulkarm were shot dead.

More dismal thoughts on the new admin’s Israel tack

2009-03-16T10:40:00.001+02:00

Obama has, in essence, turned on Israel
March 16 2009

In a New York Post editorial, John Bolton, the former U.N. Ambassador, notes how the Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to find a solution to the Israeli-Arab dispute is another sign of America’s slow abandonment of the Jewish state.

Bolton explains why:

Almost invariably, Israel is the loser -- because Israel is the party most dependent on the United States, most subject to U.S. pressure and most susceptible to the inevitable chorus of received wisdom from Western diplomats, media and the intelligentsia demanding concessions. When pressure must be applied to make compromises, it's always easier to pressure the more reasonable side.

How will diplomatic pressure work to change Hamas or Hezbollah, where even military force has so far failed? If anything, one can predict coming pressure on Israel to acknowledge the legitimacy of these two terrorist groups, and to negotiate with them as equals. ...

Why would America subject a close ally to this dynamic, playing with the security of an unvarying supporter in world affairs? For America, Israel's intelligence-sharing, military cooperation and significant bilateral economic ties, among many others, are important national-security assets that should not lightly be put at risk.

The only understandable answer is that the Obama administration believes that Israel is as much or more of a problem as it is an ally, at least until Israel's disagreements with its neighbors are resolved. Instead of seeing Israel as a national-security asset, the administration likely sees a relationship complicating its broader policy of diplomatic 'outreach.'

Defining 'moderate' in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

2009-03-15T12:51:00.002+02:00

March 15, 2009

Mustafa Barghouthi, secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, is considered a moderate in the Palestinian world by the West. His column in Friday's Atlanta Journal and Constitution defines 'moderate' for us as he asks for America's help:

The administration can help level the playing field by taking three steps. First, insist Israel immediately stop all settlement activity. Second, reject Israel’s embrace of apartheid. One set of laws for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians is unacceptable. Third, accept our democratic choice.

The democratic choice mentioned here is the election of Hamas:

Despite the Obama administration’s reluctance to deal with the government Palestinians elected, a breath of fresh air is clearly blowing through Washington. And just in time....

Barghouthi also argues that American principles and interests should make them pro-Palestinian. He doesn't mention any requirements from the Palestinians, for example recognizing Israel's right to exist and cessation of terror.

I am convinced that an evenhanded mediator such as former Sen. George Mitchell will soon find that we are not the recalcitrant party. He will uphold American principles and serve American interests if he has the courage to say so. And let us hope that more American officials go see for themselves the harm Israel is causing Palestinians — and long-term Israeli interests — with American tax dollars.

Chas Freeman controversy sheds light on DC Israel climate

2009-03-15T12:22:00.003+02:00

March 15, 2009

By now most everyone knows the former Ambassador Charles "Chas" Freeman has withdrawn his appointment to be the Obama admin's top intelligence analyst. If you heard anything about his controversial nomination and favorable views toward Saudi Arabia and the Tianemen Square massacre, it was no thanks to the mainstream media. Instead conservative and Jewish bloggers are credited with -- or blamed for -- his bowing out. Freeman himself lashed out at the "pro-Israel lobby" in DC for wrecking his nomination.

Mainstream media reported on Freeman's angry withdrawal, but very little of the controversy itself. Caroline Glick, a conservative columnist for The Jerusalem Post, writes about why the entire episode, from his apointment to withdrawal, is disturbing to American intelligence and to Israel.

Glick notes that the main controversy "revolved around his financial and political ties to potential and actual US adversaries" and not his views on Israel, which were prediminantly negative.

Whatever the reason for his resignation, it is a good thing that Freeman was forced to resign. It is a very good thing that the man writing the US's National Intelligence Estimates and briefing the president on intelligence matters is not a hired gun for the Saudi and Chinese governments who believes that Jewish Americans have no right to participate in public debate about US foreign policy. But while his appointment was foiled, the fact that a man like Freeman was even considered for the post tells us two deeply disturbing things about the climate in Washington these days.

First and foremost, Freeman's appointment gives us disconcerting information about how the Obama administration intends to relate to intelligence. Freeman was appointed by Adm. Dennis Blair, President Barack Obama's director of national intelligence. Blair stood by Freeman's appointment even after information became known about his financial ties to foreign governments and his extreme views on Israel and American Jews were exposed. Blair repeatedly extolled Freeman for his willingness to stake out unpopular positions.

Blair ... defended Freeman ...(and) the Islamic Republic. He claimed that just because Iran is enriching uranium, there is no reason to believe that the mullahs are interested in building a bomb. That is, America's top intelligence officer is willing to take Iran's word on everything.

On the other hand, he isn't willing to take Israel's word on anything. Although he acknowledged that his nonchalant assessment of Iran was based on the same information as Israel's dire assessment of Iran, Blair scoffed at Israel's views, claiming that they are colored by the Jewish state's fears. In his words, "The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view." ...

THE SECOND disturbing development exposed by Freeman's appointment is the emergence of a very committed and powerful anti-Israel lobby in Washington. In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy-makers and opinion-shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as a qualifying credential for high position. Freeman's appointment shows that this is no longer the case. ...

From September 11, to Russia's invasion of Georgia, from Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that claimed Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, it is clear that in recent years, the US intelligence community has regularly substituted wishful thinking for true analysis. Freeman's appointment and the emergence of the anti-Israel lobby as a major force in Washington policy circles show that turning the US away from Israel has become a key component of that wishful thinking.

But, as they say in the world of intelligence, forewarned is forearmed.

Read it all here.

The treachery of driving in Israel

2009-03-11T12:34:00.000+02:00

March 15, 2009

Okay, so it isn't just me who experiences new depths of road rage and utter shock on Israeli roads. I've often wondered if there is a correlation between erratic driving and Israel's constant fight for existence. Emma Shevah, writing in the Independent Minds, describes perfectly the situation on the roads and even a link to terrorism in a column. Here are some highlights or read the entire article here. I've always wanted to write about Israeli drivers, but Emma captures the roadway experience/nightmare to a tee. I'll highlight some of the lines that elicited verbal responses:

Israelis are notorious drivers. There's something to be said about the collective character of a nation and the way those attributes are transferred into driving habits. If you think Israelis are rude, impatient, arrogant, tetchy and care only about their own progress in life (and I guarantee you won't be the only one), you should witness the way they drive. ...

The art of queuing has yet to grace these shores: in public toilets or to get on buses, it's a question of push right on in regardless of who may have been before you or how old and weak they are. On the roads it's no different: imagine a junction with a slip road to the right, a stream of cars lining up for two hundred yards to take it, driving slowly, in lane. Then imagine a car sailing past the entire line and ramming in between two cars at the front. Cheeky bastard, right? Now imagine lots of cars doing it, one after the other in a constant effrontery to the done thing. You feel foolish, a sucker, nudging forward politely like that, driving pettily close to the car in front so they can't ram in front of you as you get closer to the turning, but they do, and they'd go into you unless you braked.

There are no grid boxes at junctions so even when there is no forward access, drivers care about nothing other than their own progress through the lights, so they block the entire junction and haughtily ignore the furious beeps of the drivers who can't get past.

The way to get someone out of the fast lane on a motorway is to drive right up to their bumper at 120km an hour and flash your lights, and if they don't move, overtake on the inside and zigzag in and out of the other lanes, in between cars that are too close to each other already, missing them by millimeters. Last week I crossed a set of lights in town only to see a car in front of me, in my (single) lane, reversing. He reversed all the way down the hill backwards, on the wrong side of the road, with me following him open-mouthed. One house near the kids' school has an unfortunate driveway: in order to get out they have to reverse onto a busy roundabout, and I've seen them do it without the slightest hint of caution. I've seen a policeman driving whilst speaking on his mobile phone when a civilian would be fined 1000 shekels for the same crime. I had a police van (not in emergency mode) drive right up behind me, flashing me to move over, but I couldn't change lanes as a car was parallel to me, so the only thing I could do was drive above the speed limit , overtake the other car, and let the police van pass. Forced over the speed limit by the police! I could go on and on and on. Sometimes it's laughable but in reality, driving here is not a pleasant experience - it's fraught with tension and aggression, and worst of all, it makes you drive like a cheeky bastard too.

A recent study by PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA) showed that terror attacks influenced driving behaviour in Israel: following a terror attack there was a 'temporary lull in light accidents followed by a 35% spike in fatal accidents on Israeli roads 3 days after the attack'. The results were based on analyses of road accidents and terror attacks between January 2001 and June 2002, when the intifada was taking place, and whereas previous studies had focused on subjective reports of post-traumatic stress, the report concluded that there was a "population level behavioural response to violent terror attacks".

I have no doubt that the stress of living in this country - not only in relation to terror attacks but the general stresses of not earning enough money for a decent day's work (The Jerusalem Post recently reported that 49% of Israelis don't earn enough to cover the basic monthly expenses); of the persistent threat of survival as a nation state and as individuals on the dangerous streets; of living in a boiling pot of political, religious and economic tensions, and other factors, like the heat of the summer and diabolical road surfaces, all contribute to the atrocious driving habits and exceptionally high accident rates. But also, to a significant extent, the problems on the roads have to do with a basic lack of consideration for other drivers, an absence of civility and manners (I sound like my mother) and driving recklessly and illegally because you bloody well feel like it and who the hell are you anyway? Unlike some of the factors involved, those minor details are things that every single driver on Israeli roads could do something to improve on a daily basis.

Ugh. I'm frustrated just reading about it!

The Score is no Longer ‘Love’

2009-03-11T09:06:00.000+02:00

Sweden’s reception of Israeli tennis team full of violence and hate
March 11, 2009

Tennis isn’t what it used to be. And neither is anti-Semitism. Both have undergone a revolution in the Scandinavian country of Sweden where Israel’s tennis team was greeted with protests fit for an evil tyrant or aggressor.

Once upon a time politics stayed out of sports. But for Israel, that ended in a fury in Munich when Palestinian terrorists executed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in 1972. Perhaps it is that memory which, for Israelis, makes the Swedish riots last weekend even more poignant when the Israeli Davis Cup team played its match.

The riots come just a few weeks after Israeli tennis player Shahar Pe’er was barred from the Dubai Open by the United Arab Emirates. And just before that, Sweden recommended that an Israeli tae kwondo delegation -- 45 athletes and five coaches on the way to the Swedish championship -- stay home due to Muslim threats against them. They did.

The tennis team didn’t. In the supposed bucolic, neutral country of Sweden, up to 10,000 protestors and masked rioters gave tennis a new face. The protest was dangerous enough that the city banned spectators from the game in Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city with a large Musilm population, saying it could not guarantee the Israeli players‘ safety. The game was played to about 400 media representatives, sponsors and guests in attendance, according to reports. But no fans.

The masked rioters threw paint bottles, stones and firecrackers at police in riot squad vans and on horseback. One of the demonstrators climbed onto a police van and stomped on its flashing lights, smashing them to bits.

“We are ... anarchists who want to protest against the fact that there are this many police officers to protect the representatives of a repressive occupying force that massacred so many innocent people in Gaza,“ a demonstrator named Jan told AFP.

The demonstration was to protest against Israel's recent offensive in Gaza.

For Israel athletes who played the Swedish team, it was all a bit surreal playing to an empty stadium. Israel player Andy Ram described the intense security surrounding the team from the Jewish state, where it is more higher than it was in Dubai.

“At any given moment, we are surrounded by police vehicles, undercover police officers, and anti-terror forces,” Ram wrote in a Ynet editorial. “Every morning, they take us from the hotel to the stadium via another route, through an underground parking lot, with part of the ride being undertaken in armored vehicles. Since we landed here, almost a week ago, we left the hotel only three times.”

He continues: “The feelings within the Israel team are very grim. All the innocence that prompted us to play tennis has disappeared, and this match, which was supposed to be a beautiful moment of sports, has become completely worthless. Nothing here is reminiscent of the Davis Cup; what we have is a war atmosphere, tension, and the feeling that something very bad may happen at any moment.”

Yes, I know sports these days is rarely for the love of the game any more. Fat contracts and glamorous lifestyles add to the allure. But being whisked around by security and playing to empty stands surely curtails the glamor.

If the vitriol and protests continue, its safe to assume that other cities with large Muslim populations will follow suit. This could lead to a ban on Israeli athletes and teams in the name of national security in other countries.

The protests, isolated as they may seem now, could lead to the isolation of Israel, first through its sports.

Fatah party asking West for more money

2009-03-06T10:35:00.002+02:00

The $600 million from the US apparently wasn't enough
March 6, 2009

The Palestinian Authority is asking US and European taxpayers to fund a new television station, run by Fatah, in order to counter its rival party Hamas. This is in addition to the millions of dollars promised to the PA and the rebuild Gaza at a donor conference in Sharm el-Sheikh earlier this week. The US promised $900 million: $300 million to go to Gaza rebuilding and $600 million to the PA.

Israeli Arab reporter Khaled Abu Tomeh questions this new move in this article. Here are some excerpts where he makes some astonishing points:

Abbas and his Fatah companions want to tell the Palestinians through the new TV station how bad Hamas is. They want to tell the Palestinians that Hamas is a “dark and bloody militia that seized power over the Gaza Strip through violence.” They want to send out the message that Hamas is acting as an agent of the Iranians, whose primary goal is to undermine all “moderate” Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East.

Moreover, Fatah wants to tell the Palestinians (and whoever wants to listen) that Hamas is largely responsible for their miseries and for the fact that the Gaza Strip has been turned into an Islamic “emirate” and a center for jihadists and suicide bombers.

In which case, the question that pops up is: So why are Abbas and his Fatah lieutenants chasing Hamas and literally begging the Islamist movement to agree to the formation of a “unity government” with them? If the purpose of the new TV station is to discredit Hamas and portray it as a bloodthirsty terrorist movement, so why are Fatah representatives sitting with their Hamas counterparts in Cairo, where they are talking about joining forces and distributing ministerial portfolios?

For the past three years, Fatah’s media outlets have done almost everything to try and discredit Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian public, but so far with little success. Hamas members and leaders have been accused by Fatah of rape, embezzlement, murder, kidnappings and various other crimes.

Yet there is another problem with the Fatah-controlled media and it’s related this time to Israel.

While targeting Hamas, the Fatah newspapers, radio and TV stations and Web sites have also been inciting against their peace partner, Israel, and against the US and Europe - the same parties that are financing Fatah and supplying it with weapons. Ironically, it is this type of incitement that drives more Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas.

Why? Because if you are telling your people day and night how bad and evil Israel is, your people will then say that this means that Hamas is right - you can’t make peace with Israel or any Jew. And if you are telling your people (through your media) that the Israelis are war criminals and colonialists and land thieves and cowards and vampires and children killers and are basically responsible for all the miseries of the Palestinians, what will the people think of Mahmoud Abbas when they see him meeting with any Israeli? They will certainly spit in his face and ask him, “Why are you talking to these Jews? You yourself have told us how bad and evil they are.”

The last thing the international community needs to do is to fund yet another Palestinian media outlet that promotes hatred, violence and anti-Western sentiments. The new Fatah TV station is not going to be much different than the other Fatah-run media organizations. If anything, it will help raise another regeneration of Palestinians on hatred and glorification of suicide bombers.

First Terror Attack of 2009 Rattles Nerves in Jerusalem

2009-03-05T21:31:00.001+02:00

March 5, 2009

Article first published here.

In the first incident of its kind this year, a bulldozer driver sped down a busy Jerusalem street on Thursday afternoon near the city’s largest mall and rammed a police car, sending it sailing into the air and flipping over twice with two officers inside.

The incident comes the day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the country speaking with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders about preconditions for a peace agreement.

The bulldozer driver, who had an open Koran in the vehicle according to police, was shot by police officer who had just arrived at the scene. He later died in the hospital. The two officers were slightly wounded, according to a police spokesman.

“We’re 100 percent sure it was an intended terror attack carried out by an Arab or a Palestinian from East Jerusalem based on what we found at the scene and the life-threatening situation it was,” Israel Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld tells Newsmax.

The driver had no identification on him so police weren’t certain if he was a Jerusalem resident or a resident of the Palestinian territories with a work permit for Jerusalem. No one claimed responsibility for the attack. Rosenfeld said police were investigating which nearby construction site he was working at the time.

The attack, the first this year in Jerusalem, underscored the fragile relations in the mixed Israeli capital where Arabs and Jews mingle on the job and socially. This was the fourth bulldozer attack in the last year.

Rosenfeld said police had no specific warning or information about an impending terror attack, but since the country’s security forces have gone on high alert now especially ahead of next week’s Purim holiday.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat arrived on the scene shortly after the attack. This is the first attack in the city since he was elected.

“The attack targeted us for no reason other than the fact that we live in Jerusalem. This was an attack carried out exclusively for the purpose of harming civilians,” he said.

Improved rockets launched at Israel

2009-03-01T08:58:00.003+02:00

March 1, 2009

Palestinians have managed to use during the cease-fire to improve their rockets. One of two improved Kassam rockets were launched and smashed into an Ashkelon school, luckily on Saturday, in an attack that tore through the school and destroyed classrooms.

In all, seven rockets were launched over the weekend, most hitting open fields. Police said terrorists in Gaza assembled the rockets that struck Ashkelon using an improvised technique to make them more powerful.

The two rockets had a 170-mm. diameter, which allowed for a greater amount of explosives to be packed inside.

"These are improved Kassams, more powerful than standard Kassams. They have a longer range and pack a bigger punch," a police source told The Jerusalem Post.

Amnesty Int’l Calls for U.S. Arms Embargo Against Israel

2009-02-27T14:47:00.001+02:00

Feb. 27, 2009

Article originally printed here.

Amnesty International has called on the Obama administration to immediately suspend weapons sales to Israel after the human rights organization said it found that most of the weapons Israel used in the Gaza Strip were manufactured in the United States.

“To a large extent, Israel's military offensive in Gaza was carried out with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with U.S. taxpayers’ money,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's director for the Middle East. “The Obama administration should immediately suspend U.S. military aid to Israel.”

Israeli officials say the report robs Israel of its right to self defense.

Amnesty’s report, “Fueling Conflict: Foreign Arms Supplies to Israel/Gaza,” also calls on the United Nations Security Council to “impose immediately a comprehensive ... arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.”

The group accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes in its 38-page report, but focused heavily on Israeli actions and American weapons used in the Gaza Strip. Amnesty researchers found that weapons fragments in school playgrounds, hospitals and in homes were mostly made in America, the report said.

In a statement, Israel's Foreign Ministry slammed the report calling it a biased version of events during and leading up to Operation Cast Lead, which left 1,300 Palestinians dead. The report neglected to mention Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields, the statement said.

“Hamas openly and in an organized fashion uses women and children to protect military targets, and booby-trap homes and public buildings,” the foreign ministry said. “The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) never intentionally targeted civilians.”

The report also called for halting arms sales to Hamas, but admitted that “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have smuggled small arms, light weapons, rockets and rocket components into Gaza, using tunnels from Egypt into Gaza; this weaponry has been acquired from clandestine sources.”

Hamas’ weapons, funded by Tehran and other Arab regimes, are illegally supplied through tunnels connecting the Strip to Egypt.

NGO Monitor, a watchdog group of non-governmental organization, said, “Amnesty’s attempt to equate the transfer weapons to Israel for legitimate defense, with clandestinely smuggled arms to a terrorist organization, is defamatory, immoral and absurd.”

NGO Monitor Director Gerald Steinberg said the report was “clearly part of a campaign to deprive Israel of the means to defend itself.”

But the report could gain traction in the U.S. After a visit to the region last week, Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., said he planned to recommend the U.S. reassess its military support for the Jewish state. Baird, who visited Gaza with Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., said he was troubled by the American origin of Israeli weaponry.

“We need to use every pressure available to make these needed changes happen,” he said. “If our colleagues had seen what we have seen, I think their understanding of the situation would be significantly impacted. They would care about what happened to the Palestinians.”

Danny Reisner, a legal advisor to the Israel Defense Forces, countered accusations that Israel committed war crimes and noted that Israel suspended the war every day to allow humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza.

“People are complaining that war crimes are being committed - and I agree,” he said. “War crimes are being committed by Hamas.

“They are waging war. Therefore we can respond within the realm of war. The other side does two things fundamental to the problem: they don’t abide by the rules and they don’t identify themselves as combatants.”

Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

The Amnesty report questioned a 10-year agreement ending in 2017 in which the U.S. would provide $30 billion in military aid to Israel. Israeli defense officials said they were concerned, especially ahead of U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell’s arrival in Israel today, that President Barack Obama will cut military aid to Israel.

“Mitchell is a known opponent of the outposts and the settlements,” a senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post. “The Americans may try to use the military aid as a way of pressuring the new government into dismantling outposts and freezing construction in settlements.”

Meanwhile, the British government is being sued by pro-Palestinian groups for selling weapons to Israel. The suit, filed this week, accuses the government of flagrantly breaching international law by continuing British export of arms to Israel. The Foreign Office said that the British government “monitors the situation in Israel with care in considering applications for arms export licenses.”

This case calls for suspension of arms to Israel and for the European Union to suspend a preferential trading agreement with the Jewish state. It also calls for the arrest, on the basis of war crimes, of Israeli agents visiting England. Lawyers for Al Haq, a Palestinian charity representing 30 families in the case, said more legal action is planned against Israel.

And now more reconcilation: a PLO-Hamas Coalition

2009-02-26T14:47:00.002+02:00

Feb. 26, 2009

Who will come up with a coalition government first: the Palestinians or Israelis? After nearly two years of civil war and targeted assassinations against each other, Fatah and Hamas suddenly announced they are seeking a unity government and have even released prisoners on each side to that tune.

What does this pose for the Obama administration and other governments which have cast Hamas as a terrorist organization? Could they negotiate with a government that included Hamas when so many states have already declared their refusal to do so?

Yes they can. Many foreign governments are promoting a “coalition government” between the PLO and Hamas, they leave out the fact that Hamas still hasn’t and probably won’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. Oh, and Hamas does not even recognize the authority of the PLO.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was in Oslo the day before negotiations were set to begin in Cairo:

“We want to see the formation of a Palestinian national unity government or a government of national consensus — it doesn’t matter, as long as we agree upon a government,” Abbas said. “This government must fully honor the commitments that we agreed to in the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization),” he said, adding: “When governments come, they respect and honor and accept obligations of previous governments.”

Congressmen to recommend cutting back military support to Israel

2009-02-25T14:05:00.001+02:00

Feb. 25, 2009

Last week saw a parade of American congressmen to Gaza on separate fact-finding missions to the Holy Land. In keeping with the undertone of anti-Israel sentiment seeping out from the new administration, Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington state, planned to report back to DC that the U.S. should reassess its military support for the Jewish state.

Baird said he was troubled by the American origin of much IDF weaponry used in Gaza and suggested that America reconsider military aid and weapons sold to Israel.

"We need to use every pressure available to make these needed changes happen," he said. "If our colleagues had seen what we have seen, I think their understanding of the situation would be significantly impacted. They would care about what happened to the Palestinians."

The congressman alleged that Israel had "apparently willfully destroyed any capacity of the Palestinians to rebuild their own infrastructure" and said he was struck, he said, by "the level of destruction, the scope of it, specifically the civilian targets - schools, hospitals, industry."

Baird managed to balance his message with some photos he took of damage from rocket fire on Sderot, which he did condemn. He he said he plans to bring in aid and medical workers from Gaza to share their stories.

Displaying his lack of knowledge of the situation, such as security and humanitarian aid being held hostage by Hamas, the congressman called for more humanitarian aid and goods to Gaza, accompanied by open border crossings that would allow Palestinians to travel for trade and medical care-- and presumably terror attacks.

He visited Gaza with Rep. Keith Ellison (D Minnesota)

Pro-Israel organizations, while upset at Baird’s conclusions, weren't concerned that many minds would be changed.

"By and large, we continue to see support for Israel and understand why it was necessary for Israel's leaders to do what they did," one official said about Congress, speaking anonymously. "I'm not afraid of these members coming back and giving a briefing."

Stimuli for Everyone

2009-02-25T13:45:00.001+02:00

Even Hamas, er, Gaza gets some
Feb. 25, 2009

While the U.S. continues to create more stimuli, the administration is considering a $900 million package to stimulate the Gaza economy and its former skyline. The package, which needs congressional approval, purports to strengthen the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which is nowhere near Gaza.

In fact, anyone representing the political party of the PA, Fatah, has already been shot in the knee caps or thrown off a building by Hamas. So how it will strengthen PA President Mahmoud Abbas remains a mystery.

“This money is for Gaza and to help strengthen the Palestinian Authority. It is not going to go to Hamas,” said the official, who asked not to be named as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to announce the funding at a donors’ conference in Egypt next week.

Even better! The UN, whose facilities were used as Hamas firing positions and whose supplies were hijacked by Hamas, will get to distribute the money.

Reuters: The United States wants Abbas’s PA to play a central role in the reconstruction effort in Gaza, hoping this will increase its influence in the Hamas stronghold. Washington is also putting pressure on other donors to bolster Abbas.

“We call on donor countries to focus their pledges to meet the Palestinian Authority’s priorities, including budget support, and on projects that can be funded through the Palestinian Authority and other existing, trusted mechanisms,” said a State Department official.

From blogger Jules Crittenden: Well, if that’s what they wanted, Obama should have got on the phone with Olmert last month and said, “Don’t stop.”

Not just anti-Israel but pro-bin Laden

2009-02-25T13:29:00.003+02:00

Feb. 25, 2009

A few days ago I reported on former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, who is Obama's choice to head the National Intelligence Council. He’s expressed his anti-Israel sentiment before. But now we come to find out he also had business with the Bin Laden family--even after 9/11.

Ashley Rindsberg in the Daily Beast reports:

Charles “Chas” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had business connections with the bin Laden family and their Saudi Binladin Group, a multi-billion dollar construction conglomerate founded by the father of Osama bin Laden. As chairman of Projects International, Inc., a company that develops international business deals, Mr. Freeman asserted in an interview with The Associated Press less than a month after September 11 that he was still “discussing proposals with the Bin Laden Group—and that won't change.”

In the same interview, Freeman also contested the notion that international companies who had business with the bin Laden family should be “running for public relations cover”, noting that bin Laden was still “a very honored name in the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia]”, despite its family tie to the Al-Qaeda leader. (Freeman wasn’t immediately available for comment.)

Mr. Freeman frequently maintained that the larger bin Laden family was closely aligned with American interests. Contrary to the notion that the family was still supporting and even funding Osama bin Laden, the bin Laden family and its business conglomerate were part of the “establishment that Osama's trying to overthrow,” as Mr. Freeman told The Wall Street Journal in a separate interview less than two weeks after September 11.

However, The Journal also noted that Freeman's connections with the bin Laden family went beyond business: Freeman's Middle East Policy Council, a think tank dedicated to Mideast issues, was receiving “tens of thousand of dollars a year from the bin Laden family” at that time. Since the rumors of his appointment broke, Freeman has been criticized because the pro-Saudi MEPC also accepted donations in the millions of dollars from the Saudi royal family.

Subsequent investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies and journalists of bin Laden family ties to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden raised questions about the authenticity of the family's claim of financial and emotional distance from the world's most wanted terror leader.

Al-Qaeda No. 2 encourages more fighting from Hamas

2009-02-24T13:50:00.001+02:00

Feb. 24, 2009

Al Qaeda’s no. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri called on Palestinians to reject a cease-fire and instead be steadfast while Jewish targets are attacked around the world.

"The jihad to liberate Palestine and all the homelands of Islam mustn't cease, and if the field tightens in one place, it widens in other places, and Crusader and Jewish targets are spread all over the world," he said according to speech transcription provided by the US-based SITE Intelligence Group.

Zawahri promised that Islamic terrorists would help the Palestinians by mounting attacks everywhere, "for the entire world is our field against the targets of the Zionist Crusade."

Osama bin Laden also issued an audio message on Gaza in January urging Muslims to launch a jihad against Israel.

The authenticity of the 25-minute recording could not be independently confirmed, but it was posted on an Islamist Web site known as a clearing house for al Qaeda messages.

Rockets still breaking the "quiet" in the South

2009-02-24T13:41:00.002+02:00

Feb. 24, 2009

While the international community is still under the illusion that a cease-fire is in effect between Israel and Hamas, rockets are still flying overhead. They just aren't hitting anyone.

The Israeli army reported also foiling a large-scale attack against troops or a southern Israeli community, security officials said. Soldiers spotted two Palestinians laying explosive devices near the border crossing on Monday.

Islamic Jihad claimed the would-be attack was an effort to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

Two rockets were also fired at southern Israeli cities on Monday. One hit an open area and another landed in a field near Sderot. No one was wounded and no damage was reported. Hence, nothing reported.

Israeli soldier barraged with new weapon of choice: shoes

2009-02-24T13:39:00.000+02:00

Feb. 24, 2009

An Israeli soldier was speaking to a gathering of Dutch Jews in Amsterdam on Sunday when four shoes were hurled at him, two of which hit him.

Ron Edelheit, who holds both Israeli and Dutch citizenship, travels to Holland about once a year to visit his mother. He was asked by the Women's International Zionist Organization to speak at a gathering. But pro-Palestinian activists in Holland have been threatening the speech from the moment it was announced with calls and letters. The event original location was canceled.

"The police were at the 50-man demonstration outside," said Edelheit, referring to a rally organized by the Dutch Palestine Committee. "But these three young people, who you could tell did not belong [at the event], came right in."

Shoe-throwing is a sign of disrespect in the Islamic world and was popularized by an Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former US president George Bush during a press briefing last December.

On Feb. 4, Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Benny Dagan was hit by a shoe at Stockholm University while defending the Israeli army’s Operation Cast Lead offensive against Gaza.

“Today it's a shoe, tomorrow a knife,” Edelheit said.

Report: Obama to tap anti-Israel appointee to intel council

2009-02-23T15:32:00.002+02:00

Feb. 23, 2009

Prez. Obama is about to appoint a fierce critic of Israel to his National Intelligence Council, according to Foreign Policy magazine's website column "The Cable."

Chas W. Freeman, Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will become chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Why fear though?

Freeman has blamed Israel for the strife in the region. In a 2007 speech he said:

"American identification with Israeli policy has also become total. Those in the region and beyond it who detest Israeli behavior, which is to say almost everyone, now naturally extend their loathing to Americans. This has had the effect of universalizing anti-Americanism, legitimizing radical Islamism, and gaining Iran a foothold among Sunni as well as Shiite Arabs. For its part, Israel no longer even pretends to seek peace with the Palestinians; it strives instead to pacify them. Palestinian retaliation against this policy is as likely to be directed against Israel’s American backers as against Israel itself. Under the circumstances, such retaliation – whatever form it takes – will have the support or at least the sympathy of most people in the region and many outside it. This makes the long-term escalation of terrorism against the United States a certainty, not a matter of conjecture."

Freeman also advocates Hamas, and called the terror organization "the only democratically-elected government in the Arab world."

Here's some more from another 2007 speech:

"We abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel’s efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations. We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists. This has convinced most Palestinians that Israel cannot be appeased and is persuading increasing numbers of them that a two-state solution is infeasible. It threatens Israelis with an unwelcome choice between a democratic society and a Jewish identity for their state. Now the United States has brought the Palestinian experience – of humiliation, dislocation, and death – to millions more in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Amid threats, Jewish family flees Yemen in secret operation

2009-02-22T13:03:00.000+02:00

Anti-Semitism on the rise in this Arab nation
Feb. 22, 2009

It wasn’t the repeated death threats that caused Sa'adia Ben Yisrael to decide it was for him and his family to move to Israel. A grenade thrown at his home was the final straw.

Ben Israel, a leader in the tiny Jewish community, and his family of nine left the Muslim nation for Israel in a secret airlift planned by the Jewish Agency and Israeli officials. Another man joined the entourage.

Jewish Agency Spokesman Michael Jankelowitz refused to say how the 10 were rescued, citing security concerns, but said they had been threatened by al-Qaida and that the grenade attack on the family's home could have been carried out by al Qaida-affiliated extremists. No one was injured in the attack.

There are only 280 Jews left in Yemen, most of them in the newly constructed Jewish Quarter in Raida, where anti-Semitism is on the rise. About 50 live in Sanaa, the capital. Yemenite Jews have the special protection of the President of Yemen Ali Abdallah Salah. However, anti-Semitic attacks have escalated in recent years culminating in the murder of Moshe Yaish Nahari, father of 9, by a Muslim extremist, in December.

Following Israel's recent three-week offensive in Gaza, threats against Yemeni Jews rose significantly.

"They're actually in great danger,” said Rabbi Moshe Tenamil. “They're in real danger, we know who we're dealing with.”

Ezra Tzubari, Ben-Yisrael's cousin, said he hoped the family's decision would encourage others to do the same.

"To the people still there in Yemen who are even a little in danger – just come here and see this completely different world," he said.

Random Katyusha lands in the north, wounds three

2009-02-22T12:55:00.001+02:00

Feb. 22, 2009

A Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon on Saturday nearly hit home in Israel’s western Galilee region, injured three family members in that home and damaged the building.

A second Katyusha was said to have landed in Lebanon. Israel fired into southern Lebanon. No warning sirens went off and no group claimed responsibility for firing the rockets.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said Lebanon was committed to implementing UN Security Council resolution 1701, which ended a month-long war between Israel and Hizballah in 2006, but blamed Israel’s counter attack for threatening the area's.

"Prime Minister Siniora (said) the rockets launched from the south threaten security and stability in this region and are a violation of resolution 1701, and these issues are rejected, condemned and denounced ... Israeli artillery (fire is an) inexcusable violation of Lebanese sovereignty," the statement said.

Hizballah denied involvement in the attack.

Why I Am a Bad Jew

2009-02-18T13:55:00.002+02:00

An enlightening look at modern anti-Semitism
Feb. 18, 2009

This editorial was written by Rami Kaminski

For centuries, we lived in Berdichev. In the brutal Ukrainian winter of 1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family - babies, young adults, octogenarians - stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies
fell silently into a mass grave.

Like most Jews in Europe, my family "cooperated" with the Final Solution. They did not resist or fight back. Six million Jews were slaughtered in a period of four years. They received little sympathy while they were still alive and hunted down like animals. There was no public outcry because the Holocaust fit the world's narrative for Jews during the past 2000 years: a people destined to be persecuted and slaughtered.

During their two millennia in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to resist. There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against their host nations or retaliated against their murderers. Instead, the survivors - if there were any - were expelled or left for another place.
The murdered were regarded as "good" Jews. They accepted their fate helplessly, without resistance. This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel about it. After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this particularly ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the Jews.

Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective. Today, the only good Jew is a powerless Jew willing to become a dead one. The Zionist Revolution is to blame. It changed everything. Jews re-created their own country. The Arabs attacked the new Jewish state the day after independence and
promised to complete Hitler's genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again and again. Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations, adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back.

With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the world has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.

The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain. In 2005, Israel eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it "Judenrein," and handed it over to the Palestinians. Left behind were synagogues and thriving green houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day
after Israel's withdrawal was complete. Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians built military bases and installed rocket launchers to shell Israeli civilians. To date, some 7,000 missiles have fallen on Israeli cities and towns, killing and maiming dozens, and sowing widespread terror. Medical studies reveal nearly all Jewish children in the communities bordering Gaza suffer from serious, trauma-induced illness.

The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews, take over the land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by Islamic law.

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being
Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel's defensive military action insist Hamas uses only "crude" rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Be'er Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminant killing in the name of "holy war" which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have
not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists' professed intentions for the "infidels."

The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it are the Israelis. They've not had time for detached philosophical ponderings. They've been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic fundamentalism.

Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be "good" Jews willing to be slaughtered without resistance, or be "bad" Jews who defend themselves at the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world. Good
Jews would wait for another six million to be murdered, and pick up to leave for another country to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse to go calmly into the ditch.

I confess: I'm a bad Jew.

Rami Kaminski, MD, is Director and Founder of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York, a not-for-profit organization aimed at evaluating current psychiatric services and how they integrate with medicine, such as the mutual effects between medical and psychiatric conditions. Prior to that, Dr. Kaminkski was the Commissioner's Liaison to Families and Community and Medical Director of Operations at the New York State Office of Mental Health. Dr. Kaminski also holds an academic position as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He
earned recognition in 1990 from Mt. Sinai Hospital as Physician of the Year, and received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Awards from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Dr. Kaminski's research explores neuropsychiatric aspects of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer and
Parkinson's disease and movement disorders, as well as psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. He was for many years Director of The Schizophrenia research Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. Dr. Kaminiski also served as the Medical Director
of the PMHP and consultant to the committee in charge of developing the Special Needs Program.

Ayalon: Christians are Some of our Best Friends

2009-02-17T16:17:00.001+02:00

Feb. 17, 2009

Danny Ayalon, former Israeli ambassador to the US and a member of the Israeli parliament on the “Israel our Home” ticket, said he did not agree with the harsh policies against Christian volunteers living in the Holy Land.

“We should be ore open to our Christian brothers,” Ayalon told me in an interview. “Yisrael Beitenu (Israel our Home) will push for making relations between Christians and Jews and ISraelis much closer, much stronger.”

Many Christian volunteers are now subject to tighter visa rules which have required many to leave the country with just two-weeks notice. The sudden enforcement of an old rule on the books has slashed the staffs at Christian outreaches in Israel by one quarter to one half at various institutions in the past six months.

Ayalon said Israel should recognize Christian Zionists as some of the best friends of the Jewish state.

The right-wing party picked up momentum during the campaign with the addition of well known politicians like Ayalon and conservative Uzi Landau who defected from Likud.

“I want to zero in on what distinguishes us from the other parties and why we are becoming so popular,” Ayalon said at a debate with members of the four top parties prior to the election. “We believe Israel should be a normal country. (We want to) resume normalcy... and become a country like every other country.”

“Normalcy” would require a loyalty test to the State of Israel as a Jewish State. Ever since party leader Avigdor Lieberman proposed a “loyalty test” to determine the identity of citizens, presuming many Israeli Arabs and Arabs who don’t have citizenship in Israel would not side with the Jewish state, the party was labeled racist. Ayalon, however, compared the situation in Israel to Spain when the high court there ruled that parties opposed to Spain itself could not run in national elections

“We want the same yardstick here,” Ayalon said referring to the Arab parties who are represented in the Knesset yet oppose Israel and work with the Palestinian government.

Israel's Protest Vote: Kidnapped Soldier Shalit for PM

2009-02-17T16:13:00.001+02:00

Feb. 16, 2009

Article originally published here.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers and citizens chose to cast a ballot on election day for their kidnapped colleague Gilad Shalit, now nearing 1,000 days in Hamas captivity. Some said it was their way of protesting a dismal selection of politicians, while others wanted to send a message.

“In the upcoming elections ... let us show the government that we care more about Gilad Shalit than the prime minister does,” one of the petitioners wrote on an internet group that began the Shalit campaign. Supporters taped a white paper that read “Israel wants Gilad Shalit” over their ballot.

Suddenly though, the issue is leading Israel’s cabinet agenda. Shalit's fate could be resolved this week as outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seeks to leave office with a positive legacy rather than the cloud of corruption allegations that forced him to call for new elections in the first place.

“The security of residents of the South and the release of Gilad Shalit are currently at the top Israel’s priorities,” Olmert said, speaking at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Sunday. “There are those who might say it is a point of weakness, others will call it a point of great strength that the life of one is so important to us.”

Olmert has a “strong need (for) some kind of an achievement, such as the release of the Israeli soldier,” said Ismail Radwan, a Hamas official in Gaza.

Hamas has presented Egyptian negotiators with its demands: the return of about 1,000 prisoners - perpetrators of some of the worst attacks in the second intifada - and the opening of border crossings. The last time Israel exchanged prisoners, in July, two soldiers’ bodies were returned to the Jewish state in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners including Samir Kuntar, who killed a four year old, her father and a policeman in cold blood in 1979.

Volunteers, who have been holding vigil for Shalit outside the prime minister’s official residence for months now, say Israel must show it cares about its soldier’s lives.

“(The Palestinians) don’t care about their people like we do. They send them to die like it’s nothing,” said Varda Schmerler. “We care about each kid.”

Hamas, meanwhile, is rebuilding its arms smuggling tunnels destroyed in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter told the cabinet Sunday.

“When Hamas speaks about the reconstruction of Gaza, they are talking about reconstruction of their supply of rockets, which will be fired into Israel,” he said.

Israeli Right's Rise Means Borders Could Shift Again

2009-02-13T16:36:00.002+02:00

As theories abound as to what type of govt will be best for Israel, here's one thought
Feb. 13, 2009

(Article originally posted here.)

While Palestinian, American and European leaders worry how Israel’s shift to the right will negatively impact the peace process, perhaps the only ones who need to fear an Israeli right-wing government is the Israeli right wing, which is generally opposed to giving away land for peace.

History shows that the major land-for-peace giveaways in Israel have been undertaken by right-wing Israeli governments and politicians who have campaigned against dividing the land. The left has traditionally advocated “land-for-peace” policies, but has hesitated to follow through.

The election of 65 right-wing parliamentarians to the Israeli parliament on Tuesday versus 55 centrists and left-wingers should enable Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu to build a coalition government, presumably of hawkish parties. This drew predictable reactions from Palestinians and foreign peace-process negotiators.

But they need not worry -- yet. Israeli voters have a mercifully short memory that politicians appreciate.

“There’s a famous phrase of Israeli politicians, ‘I never promised to keep my promise,’” said Jonathan Rynhold, senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Netanyahu ran a hard-line campaign against dividing Jerusalem and giving away land and is an outspoken critic of the 2005 Gaza withdrawal. But it was Netanyahu who, during his previous tenure as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, ceded Hebron, one of Judaism’s holiest cities, to the Palestinians as part of the Oslo Accords.

“The decision to honor the terms of the Oslo agreement and withdraw from Hebron marks an important turning point for the right wing in Israel,” Joel Peters wrote for Middle East Review of International Affairs in 1997. “Netanyahu and the Likud have traveled a long way over the past year.”

Despite initial opposition to Oslo, Likud and Netanyahu began the process that locked Israel into negotiations with the PLO and further territorial concessions in the West Bank.

“Perhaps Netanyahu has matured as a leader but, the old adage, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,’ implies Likud might have recruited a fresh face,” Daniel Pipes, author and director of the Middle East Forum, writes on his website. Pipes reported in 1999 that Netanyahu was in secret talks to give away the strategic Golan Heights, another sticking point of the Right.

“The prime minister, in contrast to both his hardline image and his promises to supporters, was ready to make big concessions to (Syrian President Hafez al-) Assad for a peace agreement from which Israel would get diplomatic recognition, trade, and other attributes of peace,” Pipes reported in The New Republic that same year.

Menachem Begin, one of the nation’s most highly regarded leaders and founder of the Likud party, made the first sweeping Jewish withdrawal as a result of the Camp David Accords.

In the spring of 1982, despite widespread protest in Israel, Begin withdrew from the Sinai and evacuated the Jewish settlements there. Most of the 5,000 settlers had voluntarily moved, but some resisted. Ironically, it was then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon who was sent to forcibly remove them.

Sharon is the most recent example of right-wing territorial compromise. A fierce military general, who claims in his autobiography to have promoted Israel’s settlement movement, Sharon ran against Amram Mitzna who called for Israel’s withdrawal from Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Likud pounded Mitzna’s Labor party - winning 38 seats to Labor’s 19 - in the 2003 elections precisely because of its opposition to the disengagement. But within two years, Sharon spearheaded the Gaza withdrawal, causing, among other things, a split within the Likud. Sharon went on to form the Kadima (Forward) party and paved the way for Netanyahu’s return to head of Likud.

But this hasn’t stopped the world from worrying. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on the international community to impose upon a right-wing government headed by Netanyahu the same diplomatic conditions it imposes on Hamas, a terrorist organization.

European leaders expressed fear over the rise of a Netanyahu-led, right-wing Knesset.

“That seems the most realistic outcome, sadly, although I would like to see a progressive government committed to the peace process,” said Andrew Gwynne, a Labor Party legislator in Britain.

A right-wing coalition also seems to worry the United States: “There would be great unease,” a Capitol Hill source told The Jerusalem Post.

Article originally posted here.

U.S. professors call for boycott of Israel

2009-02-12T16:52:00.000+02:00

Feb. 12, 2009

A group of American university professors is calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, marking the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of the United States.

Anti-Israel groups in Great Britain have attempted academic boycotts against Israel several times, but the American movement took Israeli professors by surprise. The campaign was founded by 15 academics, mostly from California.

David Lloyd, a professor at the University of Southern California, told Israel’s Ha’aretz that the initiative was “impelled by Israel’s latest brutal assault on Gaza and by our determination to say enough is enough.”

Lloyd also said pro-Israel lobbying groups exert too much control over US politics and the media and have instigated a “campaign of intimidation” against academics who criticize Israel’s policies. Officially called the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, the group released a statement saying that it opposed the “censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in US universities, as well as US society at large” and called for “non-violent punitive measures” against Israel.

Lloyd also stated, albeit incorrectly, that “Hamas has sought direct negotiations with Israel, a pursuit that constitutes de facto recognition of Israel, and has openly discussed abandoning its call for the destruction of the State of Israel conditional on reciprocal guarantees from Israel.”

Israeli academics downplayed the boycott, but Jonathan Rynhold, a professor at Bar Ilan, said the ultimate goal of the boycott is to blur “the distinction between criticism of Israeli policies and criticism of Israel’s existence. Their game is to move the liberals, who accept Israel’s right to exist ... and turn them into radical left-wing critics [who believe] Israel is racist in its core and everything it does is wrong.”

Anti-Semitic Incidents Up Worldwide during Israel’s War with Gaza

2009-02-12T16:51:00.000+02:00

Feb. 12, 2009

The number and severity of anti-Semitic acts skyrocketed during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza this year. The Jewish Agency for Israel’s Annual Report on Anti-Semitism said 250 incidents were reported in December to January compared with 80 during the same period in the previous year.

While many European governments uncharacteristically sided with Israel this time, most of the recent attacks took place in Western Europe and were perpetrated by local Moslems, the report said. There were approximately 100 incidents in both France and in Great Britain, including violent assault on Jews and Israelis.

“We shall continue our endeavors to curb this unpleasant phenomenon by addressing our observations and proposals to leaders of the world and demanding that they implement effective measures to counter anti-Semitism, as well as promoting our own educational programs through our emissaries worldwide,” said Hagai Meirom, Jewish Agency Treasurer.

Isaac Herzog, Israel Minister for Welfare and Social Services, expressed his concern at the rise in extremist Moslem groups.

“We are witnessing the growth of Islamic and extreme left-wing groups who are taking center stage in the arena of anti-Semitism in general, and anti-Semitic acts against Jews, in particular,” he said.

The overall number of anti-Semitic incidents fell by 15 to 20 percent in 2008 compared to 2007.

Israeli Economy Slowing Down, but Banks Not in Crisis

2009-02-12T16:50:00.000+02:00

Long-term prospects more positive in Israel than other western nations
Feb. 12, 2009

The global financial crisis took awhile to cross the continents, but its tentacles have at last reached the Israeli economy forcing the Bank of Israel to revise its 2009 forecast to reflect a .2-percent decline rather than 1.5-percent increase.

The Israeli economy has more easily adapted to hostility than to these external factors. In 2006, the 40-day war with Hizbollah only briefly interrupted an economic boom. But this growth spurt came to a halt in the third quarter of 2008 as the global recession entered the scene.

“The effects of the global financial crisis on real economic activity in Israel are evident,” the Bank of Israel said in a report. “World trade, which exerts a major influence on domestic activity, has dropped, and is expected to fall further.”

The Bank of Israel is forecasting a 6.9 percent drop in exports and a 6.4 percent fall in imports in 2009. Foreign exports make up 45 percent of Israel’s GDP.

According to government figures, the Israeli economy expanded by 4.1 percent in 2008 to a record $190 billion capping off four years of higher than 5 percent annual growth. The slowdown hit Israel when demand for exports plummeted. Foreign companies downscaled their investment projects and consumers reduced spending.

“Israel’s economy is oriented toward export markets and other international activity,” the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange said in its annual report. “It is expected that the global crisis will adversely affect exporting firms as well as Israeli entrepreneurs abroad.”

Even so, Israel’s economy is expected to weather the situation better than many other developed nations.

“It’s going to be pretty gloomy, but it’s not like the United States or Germany,” said economist Jonathan Katz at HSBC. “It will be more of a slowdown than a recession.”

Also working in Israel’s favor is a conservative and stable banking system that is not in crisis.

“Happily for us, Israel’s economy hasn’t caught the three American diseases--consumer and private credit greater than 50 percent of GDP, a bursting real estate bubble, and a bankrupt financial system because of the first two diseases (and other causes)” wrote Ha’aretz financial reporter Guy Ronik. “Americans spent the last decade living well beyond their means. Israelis saved.”

Another factor in slowing the crisis’ arrival in Israel has been the Bank of Israel’s steady hacking of interest rates, down to 1 percent in January from 2.5 percent in November. In fact, investment bank UBS analyst Reinhard Cluse maintains his long-term forecast for 2010 of 2.7 percent growth. UBS said it expects a moderate recovery as early as the second half of the year.

“Following years of prudent fiscal policy, Israel is one of the few countries in (Europe Middle East Asia) where the government now has substantial scope for fiscal stimulus,” Cluse wrote. “After a balanced budget in 2007 and a deficit of 2.1 percent of GDP in 2008, we expect the deficit to rise to 4 percent of GDP or even higher in 2009, thus helping to prevent a more serious decline in growth.”

Livni surprises with lead, but results remain inconclusive

2009-02-11T03:40:00.002+02:00

Right-wing bloc could propel Netanyahu to PM
Feb. 11, 2009

(Article originally posted here.)

TEL AVIV - Tzipi Livni's Kadima party took a surprise lead in Israel’s parliamentary elections on Tuesday, but even if she edges out her rival Benjamin Netanyahu in a final vote count the foreign minister could fail to rally enough seats to build a coalition government.

Despite a one- or two-seat margin for the centrist Kadima party predicted in early exit polls, the left-wing bloc is outnumbered by a strong showing of right-wing, nationalistic and religious parties that casts doubt on Livni’s ability to establish a coalition and become prime minister.

“With all due respect to Tzipi Livni, she won’t be able to build a government. And that is very clear,” said Gilad Erdan, a parliament member on the Likud ticket. “Those in Israel who opposed the disengagement (withdrawal from Gaza in 2005), those who oppose giving up territories for nothing now have the clear majority.”

At Likud headquarters a victorious mood quickly deflated when initial exit polls announced Kadima as the front runner. But party members were quick to spin the results in party leader Netanyahu’s favor.

“Tzipi Livni only has 43 votes in order to create a government and we have 63 members of Knesset who support the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu will be the next prime minister of Israel,” said Likud Knesset Member Reuven Rivlin.

Both Livni and Netanyahu declared victory Wednesday morning and Livni left the door open for her rival to join her government.

“I proposed to you before the elections were set to join a unity government under my leadership. You refused,” she said. “Now all that is left is to do the right thing, to honor the decision of the citizens of Israel, to do what is right for Israel at this time…and to join a unity government led by us.”

Netanyahu hinted at the possibility of working with Livni, but with him as head of the government.

“From this day on, the right wing bloc rises to an absolute majority in the Knesset,” he said. “There is no doubt regarding our own movement’s meteoric rise. In the last Knesset we had only 12 seats, 10 percent of the Knesset. We have more than doubled our power and grown more than any other party.”

After all the votes are counted, President Shimon Peres has one week to decide which party leader will be first to attempt to build a government and the prime minister-designate then has six weeks to form a coalition. Peres may decide that even with fewer mandates Netanyahu has a better chance at establishing a stable government.

Israel Beiteinu (Israel our Home) became the third largest party, surpassing Labor, traditionally one of the top two parties. A polarizing figure who has been called a racist by the media and opponents, Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman appears to have galvanized the secular Zionist vote.

Lieberman’s campaign theme, “No loyalty, no citizenship” refers to his proposed loyalty test aimed at Israeli Arab members of parliament who speak out against the Jewish state and, in some cases, advise the Palestinian government. Lieberman’s views struck a cord among voters who are disillusioned with faltering peace talks and unabated terror attacks.

Leading up to the elections many factors indicated a shift to the right, including a desire to balance Barack Obama’s democratic administration with a more hawkish Israeli government in U.S.-led negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Likud jumped from 12 seats in the previous government to an estimated 27 or 28, while Israel Beiteinu surged to a likely 16 seats from 11. The right-wing bloc is bolstered by religious parties Shas, Jewish Home and United Torah Judaism.

“The conservative side of the political spectrum has gotten stronger,” observed Dore Gold, author and director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The left-wing vote was split just three ways. Kadima led with 29 possible seats. Rounding out the leftist parties was Labor, which saw a dismal drop from 19 seats to an estimated 13, and Meretz, expected to earn four or five seats. In that context, Prof. Barry Rubin of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herziliya said Kadima’s apparent edge is not surprising despite Likud’s strong lead in the polls in recent weeks.

Rubin also disagrees with the assumption that Israelis voted more hawkishly this year and that the Likud party is right wing.

“The real move has been toward the center, which is represented not only by Kadima and Likud but also by Labor,” he wrote in Tuesday’s The Jerusalem Post. “A greater majority is about to vote for parties close to centrist positions than at any time in history.”

The final voter turnout was 65.2 percent compared to 63.2 in 2006.

Election Day Reading

2009-02-10T11:42:00.002+02:00

Feb. 10, 2009

The polls are open and all the major party leaders have already cast their votes. I will be at Likud headquarters this evening covering the results. Tomorrow I will post articles and reaction to the elections.

In the meantime, here's some good reading for the day:

High-ranking Foreign Office diplomat arrested over anti-Semitic gym tirade London Daily Mail
Sounding a lot like Iran's A'jad: Stunned staff and gym members allegedly heard him shout: 'F**king Israelis, f**king Jews'. It is alleged he also said Israeli soldiers should be 'wiped off the face of the earth'. Sometimes anti-Israel IS anti-Semitism, just couched in political terms making it appear on the surface less ugly.

Dispatch from the Gaza border by Michael Totten
Fewer than twenty Israelis have been killed by rocket fire from Gaza since Hamas and Islamic Jihad adopted the tactic. ... It’s not just about casualties, though. Thousands of rockets have fallen on Sderot. And every rocket launched at the city triggers an air raid alert. Everyone within ear shot has fifteen seconds to run into a shelter. Imagine sprinting for cover 5,000 times.

Ending the West's Proxy War Against Israel Wall Street Journal online
As long as the West continues to subsidize Gaza's extreme demographic armament, young Palestinians will likely continue killing their brothers or neighbors. And yet, despite claiming that it wants to bring peace to the region, the West continues to make the population explosion in Gaza worse every year. By generously supporting UNRWA's budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in their own countries.

Hamas' Secret Service: the Ghost unit

2009-02-09T12:28:00.001+02:00

Feb. 9, 2009

A slightly chilling article from The Jamestown Foundation by Abdul Hameed Bakier describes a Hamas unit called “Ghost” Suicide Bombers:

Recently, Islamic and jihadi internet forums circulated an article entitled “The Ghost suicide bombers. Who are they? And how do they spend their day?” (hanein.info, January13). The posting, written by the Gaza correspondent for the influential Doha-based Islamonline website, included a short interview with the trainers of Hamas’ suicide bombers (Islamonline.net, January 12).

Islamonline’s correspondent, Muhammad al-Sawaf, said the suicide bombers, known as “Ghosts” to other Gaza militants, are the first line of defense in Gaza. They spend up to 48 hours at a time in ditches, reciting verses from the Quran while waiting for Israeli forces to pass by in order to blow them up. The bombers belong to the military wing of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam battalions of Hamas. Abu Moath, an al-Qassam leader supervising the suicide bombers, said the bombers are very determined individuals chosen carefully by Hamas: “They live like any other pious Palestinian youth. Some of them are university students that go about their lives without raising unwanted attention or bragging about their end mission. They go through a special faith program.”

Since the start of the conflict in Gaza, the “ghost” suicide bombers have isolated themselves from families and friends. They spend their time hidden close to areas where Israeli forces deploy. On the selection criteria for suicide bombers, Abu Moath briefly explained that only young people are chosen from the ranks of al-Qassam’s battalions, which number up to ten thousand fighters. Abu Moath disclosed females are also recruited to the ranks of the suicide bombers. The candidate bombers are secretly scrutinized by al-Qassam lieutenants to make sure they are religiously committed and responsible. The next phase is to notify the bomber of their acceptance and put them through psychological and military training on weapons and tactics, especially those used by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Abu Moath asserts that all through the selection and training phases the suicide bombers are tutored by religious clerics and Islamic preachers. Upon completion of training, the bombers are sent behind enemy lines. Each group of suicide bombers is compartmentalized and does not know the location or composition of other groups to avoid compromising their comrades if one of them is captured by the Israelis. Abu Moath admits such captures happen very often because the suicide bombers operate behind enemy lines. Each suicide bomber is issued special weapons and a custom-tailored explosive belt.

Other Hamas units of suicide bombers include the “Booby-Trapped Martyrs.” These martyr units are designed to deploy on the streets and alleys of Gaza’s cities, armed with heavier explosive belts than those used by the “ghosts.” These units are as secret and compartmentalized as the “ghost” suicide bombers and deploy with Hamas commando units tasked with kidnapping Israeli soldiers.

Many forum chatters hailed and prayed for the “ghost “ and “martyr” suicide bombers, posting comments such as: “It is only my lack of luck that I am not with them. I wish them all the best in this life and hereafter. May God give them steadfastness and determination, amen.”

In another interview by Islamonline correspondent al-Sawaf, al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said Hamas fighters have surprised the Israeli forces with offensives attacks rather than the expected defensive operations. He said the suicide-bomber Mahmoud al-Rifi, whom he claimed stayed for days in a ditch on the al-Raes mountain west of Gaza city and blew up an Israeli commando unit, was one example of Hamas’ successful new guerilla warfare tactics. However, other sources said al-Rifi did not carry out a suicide attack; rather, he waited for Israeli forces in a ditch on the al-Raes mountain and attacked a detachment of Israeli commandos with a machine gun, killing two Israeli soldiers before being killed while trying to take a third injured soldier prisoner (muslm.net January 9).

According to earlier threats by Hamas leaders, Hamas is expected to resume suicide bombing attacks in Israeli cities in retaliation for the war on Gaza. Regardless of the Israeli wall built to prevent suicide bombers from entering Israel, Hamas leaders allege they have managed to infiltrate tens of their suicide bombers who are already in place in Israel and the West Bank awaiting orders (alrainews.com, December 22, 2008). Even though Hamas has enough experience and possible accomplices among Palestinians living in Israel to resume suicide attacks in Israeli cities, Israeli forces demonstrated their ability to prevent suicide attacks in the assault on Gaza. The absence of successful suicide attacks on Israeli forces in the conflict is likely an indication of Hamas’ inability to recruit enough volunteers to perpetrate suicide bombings, regardless of whatever claims are made by the Hamas leadership.

UN-neutral Getting Bitten by the Dog it Feeds

2009-02-09T12:19:00.001+02:00

Summarizing recent weeks of the Hamas-UN battle
Feb. 9, 2009

If nothing else positive, and there was little positive, the Gaza war has brought to light several inconsistencies, or shall I say ‘UN-consistencies,’ when it comes to the United Nations and its dealings with Hamas, Israel and the Palestinians.

First, here are some incidents that have occurred in recent weeks:

1. When Israelis saved Arab students trapped in a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) school in East Jerusalem, they encountered pictures depicting the IDF as murderers. Several students fell into a six-foot deep hole when a floor in the school collapsed on Feb. 1. Israeli responders found drawings depicting Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border shooting Palestinians at them at point blank range while they tried to get food. Another picture, drawn by a student, showed an Arab shot to death by an Israeli soldier.

2. The United Nations agency in charged of a school in Gaza where dozens of civilians were killed by Israeli mortar fire in Operation Cast Lead has admitted to employing terrorists to work at its Palestinian schools in the past, has no system in place to keep members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad off its payroll and provides textbooks to children that contain hate speech and other incendiary material against Israel and Jews.

3. UNRWA brought the media to watch while it tried to pass unapproved goods through the Gaza border Tuesday, Feb. 3. The Israeli army, as expected, turned away the unappoved trucks then slammed UNRWA for trying to pass through the unkosher good and bringing the media to film Israel’s rejection of the trucks. Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Spokesman Maj. Peter Lerner said the incident was a “regretful provocation. ... UNRWA receives preferential treatment at the crossings, and today alone 50 of its trucks were allowed in.”

Just two days later, however, Hamas put on its own show albeit not for the cameras. Hamas turned against its complicit ally, the UN, and twice in one week (Feb. 3 and 5) commandeered hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid from UNRWA. The UN actually ceased shipping aid over the border until Hamas returns the goods.

Perhaps the UN is beginning to see the light. Or at least one ray. In another first, it announced this week it will probe Hamas’ use of children as human shields during the war, according to The Jerusalem Post.

“It is still very difficult for us to say that it was actually happening and we still need to conduct a full investigation into what exactly took place... but we are not denying that it happened; it is absolutely possible that Hamas was using its civilians as human shields,” said UN special representative for children and armed conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy.

A small leap for morality, but a huge step in the right direction for the UN nonetheless.

Also, in a report released last week, a former legal official with UNRWA accused the organization of politicizing the Palestinian refugee issue. James Lindsay, UNRWA’s legal advisor from 2002 until 2007, said the agency should conduct background checks so as not to hire terrorist organization members anymore; help those who wish to move out of refugee camps by expanding loans; and shift from a “status-based” system of aid designated for refugees to a “needs-based” system.

Andrew Whitley, director of the UNRWA representative office at UN headquarters, slammed the report and immediately did what the report lambasted the UN for: politicizing the situation.

“Someone reading this paper with no background would assume that the Israeli government was a benign actor.,” he said. “No mention is made of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

But NGOs are notoriously biased against Israel. A Jerusalem-based watchdog, NGO Monitor, documented more than 500 statements by some 50 NGOs just in one month during the recent fighting in Gaza.

“These statements are characterized by overwhelming condemnation of Israel, devoting minimal attention to Israeli human rights and casualties,” the organization reported. “These same groups were markedly hesitant to condemn the widespread and illegal use of human shields by Hamas. ”

A Palestinian from Gaza blamed Hamas for the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Nuaf Atar, a Fatah operative captured during the operation, accused Hamas government officials of controlling humanitarian aid Israel allowed in and selling it instead of distributing it for free, as was intended. But Israel continues to get blamed by the NGOs and the international community, which clamors for it to open the borders for a more free flow of goods. Goods that never make it to the people who need them.

NGO Monitor Executive Director Gerald Steinberg summed it up best: “The consistent attempt to demonize Israel in the media and in the courts while turning a blind eye to the illegal activities of Hamas demonstrates that many human rights groups have lost their moral compass.”

Carter strikes again

2009-02-09T11:05:00.002+02:00

Former president exhibit his usual anti-Israel gusto
Feb. 9, 2009

I have a hard time choosing. Is former Pres. Jimmy Carter blindly optimistic or blatantly anti-Israel? He can’t be an optimist, he was a US president, but that leaves us with the latter.

If you are going to solve the Israel-Palestinian issue you cannot be against wither side, but in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Carter clearly outlines which side he believes must pay up in order to achieve peace. Perhaps its the reporter’s fault for not asking tough questions, but he never puts the onus on Hamas or the Palestinian Authority for stopping acts of terrorism.

Carter, 84, talks about his new book, the assertive and cheerily titled “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land.” I have yet to read the book, but in the interview with reporter Mike Tolson, Carter, 84, notes that he is optimistic for “peace” because “the vast majority of Israeli citizens also are committed to withdrawing from the West Bank.” No recognition of the State of Israel by Hamas or cessation of terror is a prerequisite for peace apparently.

He goes on to say that the war in Gaza has engendered “more intense hatred and resentment against Israelis for doing this.” No mention of the Hamas rockets that were unanswered for nine years and which terrorized innocent civilians occasionally killing a few, but only a few because they are miraculously inaccurate..

Feeling at one with The One is he?

“Most presidents have been very cautious and have waited until the last part of their administration before they would expend that capital, and it’s too late. (Obama) has taken a different position, as I did 30 years ago. I started the first day, even before I became president, to do that.”

Carter insults the “Israeli lobby” in the United States: “You have to remember that the major Israeli lobbies, they’re not in favor of peace. They never have professed to be. What they are in favor of is protecting the policies of whatever government is in charge in Israel. If you look at their Web sites, they make that quite clear. So they’re for Israel, they’re not for peace between Israel and its neighbors.”

How interesting. He is basically calling Israel supporters war mongers. This is an incomprehensible insult to intelligence and to the people who support Israel. No mention of Hamas supporters and pro-Palestinian lobbyists. They are for peace.

In conclusion, if you don’t agree with Carter’s approach to peace, then you are not for peace. Diplomatic, hey?

Troubles with Turkey cause Jews to rethink Armenian genocide

2009-02-05T15:13:00.002+02:00

Feb. 5, 2009

And now for an issue dear to my heart: Jews check Armenian genocide stance. Only fitting that one genocide survivor support another. However, the article is thin on proof of an actual movement. From the Jerusalem Post:

An official with a leading American Jewish organization told the The Jerusalem Post on Monday that a deterioration in Israel-Turkey relations might prompt his group and others to reconsider Armenian efforts to win recognition of the century-old Turkish massacres as genocide.

A bill that would ensure such recognition by the US, which was backed by Rep. Adam Schiff - a Jewish Democrat who represents a heavily Armenian area of Los Angeles - failed to make it to a Congressional vote in 2007. However, it sparked a row in the American Jewish community between those who sided with Turkey in an effort to protect Israel's political interests, and those who argued that Jews were particularly responsible for helping other groups block the public denial of genocide.

"No Jew or Israeli in his right mind will insult Turkey," the official told the Post. "But next time... they might not come to Turkey's aid or equivocate quite so much on the issue."

The Bush administration opposed the bill out of concern for what it would do to US-Turkey relations.

I’d like to add that even several Israeli politicians oppose recognition for the same reason.

The current blowup between Israel and Turkey comes amid expectations that the Obama administration will name academic and writer Samantha Power, an expert on genocide, to a key National Security Council post dealing with multilateral institutions. Power has been outspoken in labeling the Turkish massacre of Armenians genocide, albeit from outside the government.

Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman - whose opposition to the Armenian genocide legislation in 2007 provoked widespread criticism - told the Post that as long as Israel maintained its diplomatic ties with Turkey, he saw no immediate reason to change his position on any future genocide resolutions.

"This is not a punishment or a reward issue - we don't change our position on what's right or wrong based on what people say," Foxman said. "The interests between Israel and Turkey continue."

Foxman also noted that he knew of Jewish friends who had cancelled trips to Turkey over Erdogan's comments, but described the Erdogan flap as a disagreement between "friends."

The Armenian community of some 20,000 in Israel has long lobbied the Israeli government to recognize the genocide. Several Israel scholars have taken up the cause arguing that of all people groups, Jews should express sympathy with genocide victims. But the issue hasn't taken hold in the political world. Three years ago, Knesset Member Yuri Shtern told me (noticing that my married name is Armenian) that he and Israel's chief Rabbi Yona Metzger traveled to Armenia and were fighting for recognition. Shtern--a fair and compassionate politician--has since died of cancer, however, and no one has taken his place on this issue.

On the other hand, it is rare for Israel to have strong ties with a Muslim nation and recognizing the genocide would risk their friendship with Turkey. But after the outburst of Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan at the Davos conference, Israelis are starting to see just how far their friendship with Turkey stretches, or not. Erdogan stalked off the stage there on Jan. 29, calling Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres a murdered.

Since then relations ahve been strained with both sides trying to patch things. But trust has been damaged.

Turkey: “It’s not a business-as-usual relationship anymore,” said Cengiz Candar, a columnist for Radikal, a Turkish daily. “It’s a very uneasy sort of cohabitation in this region now.”

Israel: "He has burned all the bridges with Jerusalem,” said one senior Israeli official, who spoke anonymously to the NY Times. “He won’t be seen as an honest broker anymore.”

Turkey denies slaughtering 1.5 million Armenians beginning in 1914. Recognition of the genocide would mean denying Turkey's claims, thus ruining relations with the vast Islamic country.

To learn more about the Armenian genocide, of which my husband's grandparents were survivors, check this out: Armenian Genocide (http://www.armenian-genocide.org)

UN-neutral accuses Hamas seized Gaza aid

2009-02-04T16:20:00.003+02:00

Feb. 4, 2009

The UN, after blaming Israel for not letting aid through, albeit unapproved aid, is now accusing Hamas police of raiding a UN aid warehouse in Gaza City on Tuesday and snatched 3,500 blankets and hundreds of food parcels.

According to a UN statement: "This took place after UNRWA staff had earlier refused to hand over the aid supplies to the Hamas-run Ministry of Social Affairs. The police subsequently broke into the warehouse and seized the aid by force. The aid was due to be distributed to five hundred families in the area. UNRWA condemns in the strongest terms the confiscation of its aid supplies and has demanded that it is returned immediately."

Obviously Gazans are in need of aid after Israel's three-week military offensive against Hamas. Gunness also said Wednesday this is the first time Hamas has seized UN aid. Er hmm. Not according to the Jordanians, but whatever.

Israeli officials have charged that the militant group routinely confiscates supplies meant for needy Gazans. But Israelis are biased, of course.

Isaac Herzog, responsible for the humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip, called the robbing of UN warehouses by Hamas “further proof that Hamas is continuing to make life miserable for the population of Gaza and will use any means to intensify its suffering.”

Israel insists that humanitarian assistance transferred to the Gaza Strip go to the civilian population only, without allowing Hamas to benefit from it. Herzog noted that Israel allowed aid trucks through even while under fire.

Hamas had no comment.

Mahmoud “Wipe out the Jews” Ahmadinejad a Jew?

2009-02-04T16:10:00.002+02:00

Feb. 4, 2009

Could it be? The son of a leading Iranian authority alleges that the Iranian president, who has called for the destruction of the Jewish state, is himself Jewish.

Mahdi Khazali apparently wrote in a blog that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has Jewish roots. The story was picked up by the Hebrew-language Omedia website and Radio Free Europe. He said Ahmadinejad changed his name, attacks Israel and the Jews and expresses strong Muslim religious beliefs in order to hide his Jewish roots.

The name under scrutiny is Saburjian and A’jad hails from the Aradan region of Iran. The accusations appear in an article Khazali wrote entitled, “The Jews in Iran” where he says the time has come to “reveal the truth” about the Jews’ role in Iran. Not sure what that means.

A'jad's relatives once told the The Guardian that the family had changed its name for "a mixture of religious and economic reasons."

Of course this could be a political strategy: A'jad is up for re-election five months from now. Perhaps his opponents think they can defeat him by using his own rhetoric against the Jews.

Hope and Change, also for Hamas

2009-02-04T16:05:00.000+02:00

Feb, 4, 2009

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal told the Iranian Parliament yesterday that Hamas has even more legitimacy after winning the war against Israel. Fars News reports:

Hamas government's legitimacy has grown stronger after the Israeli regime failed to attain its goals through the invasion of Gaza, Hamas Political Leader Khaled Meshaal said on Tuesday.

"The enemy announced ceasefire without any preconditions for Hamas and it's a great success," Meshaal said.

He viewed Hamas's victory a result of faith and jihad (holy war).

"Today when Iran and Turkey stand by the Palestinian cause, they strengthen our cause and it's a real conflict with the US administration and Israel's supporters."

"Israel's power is in destruction and killing and this power is not useful for them anymore," the senior Hamas official said, adding, "There will be no security even through occupation and Israel's downfall has began already."

Addressing European countries, he reiterated, "We are still waiting for them to play a different role based on their long past history with the Islamic and Arab world and based on their experiences which are deeper than those of the Americans."

"The US president's change may be an opportunity for Europe and the western world to change their policies and press the new US administration not to repeat the past mistakes," Meshaal added.

UN-neutral?

2009-02-04T14:56:00.003+02:00

Feb. 4, 2009

Is the UN declaring its own war on Israel? Consider some previous incidents:

When Israelis saved Arab students trapped in a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) school, they encountered pictures depicting the IDF as murderers. A floor in the school collapsed on Feb. 1 and several students fell into a six-foot deep hole. Israeli responders found drawings depicting Arabs handing out food at the Gaza border while Israeli soldiers shot at them at point blank range. One of the pictures, drawn by a student, showed an Arab shot to death.
The United Nations agency that administers a school in Gaza where dozens of civilians were killed by Israeli mortar fire in Operation Cast Lead has admitted to employing terrorists to work at its Palestinian schools in the past, has no system in place to keep members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad off its payroll, and provides textbooks to children that contain hate speech and other incendiary information.
UNRWA brought the media to watch while it tried to pass unapproved goods through the Gaza border Tuesday, Feb. 3. The Israeli army, as expected, turned away the unappoved trucks then slammed UNRWA for trying to pass through the unkosher good and bringing the media to film Israel's rejection of the trucks. Coordinator of Government Activities in the Spokesman Maj. Peter Lerner said the incident was a “regretful provocation. ... UNRWA receives preferential treatment at the crossings, and today alone 50 of its trucks were allowed in.”

Pres. Hussein addresses Arab world

2009-01-29T17:29:00.002+02:00

Suddenly its okay to mention Obama’s Muslim roots
Jan. 29, 2009

Where’s John McCain to the rescue? During the campaign, McCain chided anyone who used the current president’s middle name. Mention of the H word became taboo and labeled “fear mongering.” But where is that sentiment now?

Obama referred to himself by his full name when being interviewed by Al Arabiye, a Saudi-owned TV network, during an interview -- his first sit-down interview of his presidency. Apparently telling a pan-Arab television network about his Muslim ties is okay, just not the American press.

“I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries,” Obama told Hisham Melhem.

Obama’s father, Barack Sr., was born into a Muslim family – though he became an atheist before arriving in Hawaii, where Obama Jr. was later born. Obama spent four years as a boy in Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Hamas tried to hijack ambulances during Gaza war

2009-01-29T13:41:00.001+02:00

Aussie reporter talks to civilians in the Strip
Jan. 29, 2009

Ambulance drivers in Gaza told The Sydney Morning Herald that Hamas was more of a threat than Israeli bullets. Drivers coordinated patient pick up with Israeli troops so they wouldn’t get shot at, but Hamas staged emergencies in order to get whisked out of harm's way.

Mohammed Shriteh, 30, an ambulance driver for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, said Hamas members would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.

"After the first week, at night time, there was a call for a house in Jabaliya. I got to the house and there was lots of shooting and explosions all around," he said.

Because of the urgency of the call, Mr Shriteh said there was no time to arrange his movements with the IDF.

"I knew the Israelis were watching me because I could see the red laser beam in the ambulance and on me, on my body," he said.

Getting out of the ambulance and entering the house, he saw there were three Hamas fighters taking cover inside. One half of the building had already been destroyed.

"They were very scared, and very nervous … They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to put them in the ambulance and take them away. I refused, because if the IDF sees me doing this I am finished, I cannot pick up any more wounded people.

"And then one of the fighters picked up a gun and held it to my head, to force me. I still refused, and then they allowed me to leave."

Mr Shriteh says Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds Hospital's fleet of ambulances during the war.

"You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you. So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone."

Students at UN schools in Gaza learn war tactics

2009-01-29T13:20:00.001+02:00

Instead of sticks and stones, rockets and stones
Jan. 29, 2009

The Associated Press reports from a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school where a teacher was filmed asking children about their trauma during the war. The teacher told the children that Palestinians have to “wage war against them (Israelis) until they leave their land,” and asked her students, aged about 8, how they should react.

Two children in the class suggested hurling stones or rockets back at Israel. “Okay,” the teacher said, apparently summing up her class’ position. “We throw rockets at them, we throw stones at them,” she said.

The UN said such behavior is “completely unacceptable,” and that the teacher would likely be removed once identified. However, this points to UN’s repeated lack of neutrality in the conflict.

Sheikh Hussein on Al-Arabiye

2009-01-29T12:43:00.002+02:00

Jan. 29, 2009

Let's start with something lighthearted, yes enlightening. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did. Jules Crittenden is my new favorite writer:

Al-Hopiyah, Al-Changiyah!

In the rubble of the United Nations compound, Gaza City, partially blown-up Mortar Pit No. 6:

Farouk: Look, Achmed! Ali, come quick. The new Emir of Amerikiyah, Sheikh Hussein Obama, is being interviewed by al-Arabiyah! Even before he speaks to his own people upon the TV, he speaks to us! He speaks of our righteous Jihad against the filthy Zionists! It is true what they say … is he not charming?

I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan. These things are interrelated. And what I’ve said, and I think Hillary Clinton has expressed this in her confirmation, is that if we are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest, then I think that we can make significant progress.

Achmed: This is very interesting, Farouk. You see, he clearly agrees that the Zionist entity, as the root of all evil and discord within the lands of the Caliphate, must be swept into the sea. “Looking at the region as a whole.” What else can this mean, but that the Crusaders are prepared to submit to the brothers in Iraq and also to the wild ones of the Hindu Kush and Waziristan?

Ali: Be quiet, I am trying to listen, you donkey.

Now, Israel is a strong ally of the United States. They will not stop being a strong ally of the United States. And I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.

And so what we want to do is to listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then there’s a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs.

Ali: “Strong ally.” It is the same from the House Negro as from his white masters, just as Sheikh al-Zawahiri has said.

Achmed: No, no, Ali, he said “breakthrough.” What can this mean but uniting Gaza with al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, and sweeping the Jews into the sea at Haifa? Along with their stove-lighting Fatah Shabbat monkeys.

Ali: Stop prattling, this part is important.

AL ARABIYA: … Let me take a broader look at the whole region. You are planning to address the Muslim world in your first 100 days from a Muslim capital. And everybody is speculating about the capital. (Laughter.) If you have anything further, that would be great.

Ali: Ha ha, yes. Which cell of brothers do we activate!?!

How concerned are you – because, let me tell you, honestly, when I see certain things about America – in some parts, I don’t want to exaggerate – there is a demonization of America.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Absolutely.

AL ARABIYA: It’s become like a new religion, and like a new religion it has new converts - like a new religion has its own high priests.

Ali: What is this piece of dried camel dung saying about new religions? This is haram.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

AL ARABIYA:It’s only a religious text.

Achmed: No, Ali. Listen closely, I believe he is cleverly trying to entrap Barack Hussein, who has strayed from the religion of his fathers, in a tangled web of his own words.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

AL ARABIYA: And in the last – since 9/11 and because of Iraq, that alienation is wider between the Americans and - and in generations past, the United States was held high. It was the only Western power with no colonial legacy.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

AL ARABIYA: How concerned are you and – because people sense that you have a different political discourse. And I think, judging by (inaudible) and Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and all these, you know – a chorus.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes, I noticed this. They seem nervous.

AL ARABIYA: They seem very nervous, exactly. Now, tell me why they should be more nervous?

Ali: Yes, good question. Opportunities for dividing the infidels and conquering have never been brighter!

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I think that when you look at the rhetoric that they’ve been using against me before I even took office .

AL ARABIYA: I know, I know.

Farouk: Ha ha, they should call this network “Al-Suckupiyah.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA: …What that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt. There’s no actions that they’ve taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.

In my inauguration speech, I spoke about: You will be judged on what you’ve built, not what you’ve destroyed. And what they’ve been doing is destroying things. And over time, I think the Muslim world has recognized that that path is leading no place, except more death and destruction.

Achmed: He speaks of blessed martyrdom!

Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.

AL ARABIYA:The largest one.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I’ve come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

Farouk: It is true what he says! From al-Britainiyah to al-Indonesiyah, all across the Umma, people want to see Amerikiyah humiliated and the Jews pushed into the sea! Ha ha ha.

Ali: You goat! Did you not hear what he said? This is beyond haram!

Farouk: Oh, the multiculturalism. But Ali, the imam says every Friday that Jews, like Christians, must be protected for they are also Children of the Book! The ones that are not filthy Zionists and Crusaders, that is.

Ali: If I were to shake your head right now, Farouk, we would hear the rocks rattling around inside. Forget the Zionists. Of course we would protect them if they would just pay the Dhimmi tax and submit dutifully to the will of the Umma … which they do not! Knock the dust from your ears … this President Hussein has just admitted that the United States is an unprincipled, sinful nation which embraces even unbelievers! Idol-worshippers! Go straight to the Sword, do not pass Go! It is exactly as the Tall Sheikh has said. Al-Amerikiyah is in the grips of Shaitan. As it has been written, to save this nest of Godless contagion, we must destroy it!

Farouk: Wait, Ali. Listen. I think he is preparing to submit.

… my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.

But ultimately, people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration’s actions. And I think that what you will see over the next several years is that I’m not going to agree with everything that some Muslim leader may say, or what’s on a television station in the Arab world - but I think that what you’ll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful, and who is trying to promote the interests not just of the United States, but also ordinary people who right now are suffering from poverty and a lack of opportunity. I want to make sure that I’m speaking to them, as well.

Farouk: You see? In the nuanced language of diplomacy he has just pronounced, “There is only One God and Mohammed is … ”

AL ARABIYA: Tell me, time is running out, any decision on from where you will be visiting the Muslim world?

Ali: Yes, get it out of him!

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I’m not going to break the news right here.

AL ARABIYA: Afghanistan?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: But maybe next time …

Ali: Well, nice try. You know, I am thinking, Farouk. Maybe there is something to what you say about Hussein Obama submitting his nation of filthy unbelievers of the Greatness of God.

… We’re going to follow through on our commitment for me to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital. We are going to follow through on many of my commitments to do a more effective job of reaching out, listening, as well as speaking to the Muslim world.

And you’re going to see me following through with dealing with a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so that Iraqis can start taking more responsibility. And finally, I think you’ve already seen a commitment in terms of closing Guantanamo, and making clear that even as we are decisive in going after terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians, that we’re going to do so on our terms, and we’re going to do so respecting the rule of law that I think makes America great.

Achmed: Rule of law … did you hear that? He favors Sharia! You know he has ordered the closing of the hated Crusader Gulag of Guantanamo.

Ali: Oh, don’t speak of it! It was so horrible there! They made me fat and flushed my Koran down the toilet! Also, I was compelled to listen to the music of Shaitan very loud. “I love you, you love me!” all day long! It was hell. Only by the blessed and miraculous intervention of Allah was I released from this torture to resume my jihad.

AL ARABIYA: President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, “war on terror,” and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people - Islamic fascism. You’ve always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al Qaeda and their collaborators. And is this one way of…

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that you’re making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations – whether Muslim or any other faith in the past – that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith’s name.

And so you will, I think, see our administration be very clear in distinguishing between organizations like al Qaeda – that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it – and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop. We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down.

But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.

Ali: Well, if he has been shaking hands with Jews I’m afraid that will be a no-go. But I see what you say, Farouk. From the subtlety of his speech it is clear he is preparing to submit. He says that it is his “language that matters.” Perhaps what he is saying he will use his words. No more of those damned Hellfires. That would be a tremendous relief.

Achmed: Yes, I see it, too. “Violence that is done in that faith’s name.” Clearly he speaks of righteous Jihad that must not be painted with brushes. “We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful” … Yes, of course, as long as everyone is up to date on their Dhimmi taxes.

Farouk: Also, he talks of “innocent civilians.” Any fool can tell you that does not include Zionists and unbelievers.

AL ARABIYA: Can I end with a question on Iran and Iraq then quickly?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It’s up to the team…

AL ARABIYA: Will the United States ever live with a nuclear Iran? And if not, how far are you going in the direction of preventing it?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I said during the campaign that it is very important for us to make sure that we are using all the tools of U.S. power, including diplomacy, in our relationship with Iran.

Now, the Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that’s not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past – none of these things have been helpful.

Ali: I must respectfully disagree. The Persians may be vile pigs, but they have been very helpful.

But I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress. And we will, over the next several months, be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.

Ali: There he goes with the unclean hand again … But Farouk, I believe you have interpreted these remarks correctly. Clearly, after this time of great trials we are on the verge of a New Dawn of Ameriki Leadership, in which Crusaders and Jews have recognized the futility of resistance and will capitulate, Godless infidels will be put to the sword, and the Caliphate will be restored! All thanks to the vision of the dhimmi Hussein Obama!

By land or by sea

2009-01-27T16:04:00.000+02:00

Hamas finds ways to get the weapons it needs
Jan. 27, 2009

Apparently tunnels aren’t enough. An Iranian freighter believed to be carrying weaponry for Hamas is currently docked in the Red Sea outside the Suez Canal and is being monitored by Israel. Egypt refused to permit it to cross the waterway to the Mediterranean.

The US Navy recently boarded an Iranian vessel that was carrying artillery shells and other weaponry, according to a report received at the Defense Ministry.

Israeli officials are concerned that Iran is trying to supply Hamas with new Grad-model Katyusha rockets and the Fajr missiles, both stronger and longer range than the homemade Kassam rockets.

The London Times reported that the US Navy in the Gulf of Aden has been instructed to track Iranian arms shipments to Gaza. Last week, the article claimed, troops from the USS San Antonio boarded a former Russian cargo vessel that was flying a Cypriot flag and was reportedly carrying weaponry destined for Hamas.

Israeli officials expect Egypt to take similar steps to uncover and destroy the smuggling tunnels on the border. Israel is sharing intelligence and tunnel-detection technology with its neighbor.

Germany is also on standby to deploy to Egypt four border police experts and equipment to detect the smuggling tunnels, according to a senior government in Berlin.

Palestine, a left-wing cause?

2009-01-27T15:38:00.003+02:00

Jan. 27, 2009

For many leftists in Western countries, the Palestinian cause is adopted as one of their own. It automatically goes on the left's agenda. The funny thing though is that the left-wing agenda, for the most part, would be punishable by death in Palestine and other Muslim states.

Denis Maceoin, writing in the Jerusalem Post, draws some interesting parallels in his column, Marching for Hamas:

In a bizarre reversal of all their commitment to human rights and the struggle of men and women for independence and self-determination, the European Left has chosen again and again to side with the bullies and to condemn a small nation struggling to survive in a hostile neighborhood. It is all self-contradictory: The Left supports gay rights, yet attacks the only country in the Middle East where gay rights are enshrined in law. Hamas makes death the punishment for being gay, but “we are all Hamas now.” Iran hangs gays, but it is praised as an agent of anti-imperialism, and allowed to get on with its job of stoning women and executing dissidents and members of religious minorities. If UK Premier Gordon Brown swore to wipe France from the face of the earth, he would become a pariah among nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to do that to Israel and is invited to speak to the UN General Assembly.

Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab alike, but it is dubbed “an apartheid state”; Hamas, ever the bully, kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we march on behalf of Hamas. The Left prefers the bully because the bully represents a finger in the face of the establishment? Almost no one on the Left has any understanding of militant Islam. Their politics is a politics of gesture, where wearing a keffiyeh is cool but understanding its symbolism is too much effort even for intellectuals.

Israeli general: Palestinians have never recognized our state

2009-01-27T15:33:00.002+02:00

Former chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Moshe “Bogey” Ya'alon, spoke at the Jerusalem Conference yesterday, noted that no Palestinian leader has ever recognized Israel's right to exist.

“We suffer from inertia in our way of thought. We pretend that there is a Palestinian entity which has recognized Israel. But from the dawn of Zionism there has not been an Arab movement that was willing to recognize Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish nation. Mahmoud Abbas said it well before Annapolis: ‘Why should Judaism, this religion, have a state?’ But we didn't want to listen. We blur this in the political and public debate.”

“We pretend that the problem began in the Six Day War. But did the Arabs recognize us before the Six Day War? We wanted peace in exchange for territories, but we received terror for territories. And when we exited Gaza unilaterally, we received rockets for territory... After the Disengagement we went to Annapolis anyways. We didn't change the concept. Isn't this confusion?”

“We pretend that the conflict is the Middle East is a territorial one but it is a clash of civilizations. We retreat from Lebanon and we think that this will cancel the Hizballah's reason for existing but the exact opposite happens.”

“We must stop talking about territories for peace, about the division of Jerusalem, and let the Arabs in Judea and Samaria have autonomy. Just by talking about retreats we give jihadist Islam a boost.”

“We need leadership that doesn't say 'we are tired of fighting wars.' The nation is not tired and the army is not tired. If the leadership is tired it should be changed. As for another statement, that the state of Israel is finished if we do not return to the 1967 borders: time works in favor of whoever makes good use of it.”

Hamas' idea of a ceasefire: Bomb Israeli patrol, kill soldier

2009-01-27T15:11:00.004+02:00

Jan. 27, 2009

A day after claiming it was seeking a year-long cease-fire, Hamas bombed an Israeli patrol, on the Israeli side of the border, killing one soldier and wounding three.

The powerful bomb was detonated under the soldiers' vehicle and was a flagrant violation of the cease-fire. Previous violations were the now acceptable mortars, many of which were launched at Israel last week, and various shootings at Israeli soldiers as they were on their way out of the Strip last week.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak called the incident "severe" and promised an Israeli response. The army said Hamas fired a rocket into the sea on Sunday to test the range of rockets still in its arsenal.

Bravo l'journalista Italiana

2009-01-22T16:24:00.004+02:00

Grazie to reporter Lorenzo Cremonesi for doing a reporter's job: investigating claims
Jan. 22, 2009

A reporter from Italy's Corriere della Sera said no more than 600 people died in Gaza based on tours of hospitals in the Gaza Strip and interviews with families of casualties. He also interviewed many Gazans who accused Hamas of blatantly using them as human shields.

The story is reminiscent of 2002 when Palestinians claimed a "massacre" of 500 hundred Palestinians in a Jenin refugee camp at the hands of Israeli troops. In the end, the death toll was 54, most of them armed men.

The numbers of dead and wounded in Gaza were repeated by the Red Cross and the United Nations based on Hamas claims. Cremonesi said the wounded numbered far lower than 5,000.

"It is sufficient to visit several hospitals [in the Gaza Strip] to understand that the numbers don't add up," he wrote.

The hospital in Rafah showed many empty beds as did the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. In the privately-run Amal Hospital, Cremonesi reported that only five out 150 beds were occupied.

Gazans told the Italian how Hamas gunmen used civilians as human shields. One Gazan recalled civilians in Gaza shouting at Hamas and Islamic Jihad men, "Go away, go away from here! Do you want the Israelis to kill us all? Do you want our children to die under their bombs? Take your guns and missiles with you."

"Traitors, collaborators with Israel, spies of Fatah, cowards! The soldiers of the holy war will punish you. And in any case you will all die, like us. Fighting the Zionist Jews we are all destined for paradise. Do you not wish to die with us?" the religious fanatics of Hamas reportedly responded.

Other Palestinians told Cremonesi that Hamas operatives wore paramedic uniforms and commandeered ambulances. A woman spoke of Hamas using UN buildings as launch pads for rockets. The local population was terrified of Hamas, Cremonesi said.

Thank you Cremonesi for doing what a journalist should do: Find out for yourself rather than merely repeat the claims of both sides.

Peres honors Bush, deifies Obama

2009-01-21T16:49:00.002+02:00

Jan. 21, 2009

Israeli President Shimon Peres to outgoing President George W. Bush:

"You have made a historic contribution to the entire world and the Jewish people in particular. Your call for two states for two people living. Had the world acted against Hitler the way you did against Saddam Hussein, the lives of millions would have been spared."

To President Barack H. Obama:

"Today is a great day not only for the United States of America, but for the entire world. Obama was elected by the United States, but as a matter of fact, he was chosen by the whole of humankind.
...I pray here in Jerusalem that Barack Obama will be a great President of the United States. If he will be a great President of the United States, he will serve all humankind, all nations and all persons"

Iran rushing to Hamas' aid

2009-01-21T16:42:00.002+02:00

Islamic state promises better missiles this time
Jan. 21, 2009

And what, pray tell, will be coming through those hastily repaired tunnels we are writing about? (Fox News, by the way, had a reporter there with video footage if you can catch it on TV). The Jerusalem Post reports:

Iran has renewed efforts to supply advanced weaponry to Hamas and the IDF is concerned that the terror group will try to smuggle long-range Fajr missiles into the Gaza Strip.

According to the latest intelligence assessments, Iran, which was responsible for writing Hamas's military doctrine, has already launched an internal probe to determine how the plan it had created for Hamas failed to cause more IDF casualties.

Iran also promises combatants as well, if you can believe the government-run news service. More than 70,000 Iranian students have volunteered to carry out suicide bombings against Israel. According to the official IRNA news agency, hardline student leader Esmaeil Ahmadi said the students want to fight Israel in support of Hamas.

US military analysts: Israel won the battle but not the war

2009-01-21T16:28:00.003+02:00

Jan. 21, 2009

"Israel did not want to destroy Hamas. I believe you should have," said Lt.-Gen. Thomas McInerney, a 35-year veteran of the US Air Force and a Fox News military analyst.

"Your leadership is too sensitive about world opinion. I know why Israel didn't [drive deeper into Gaza] - you have an election coming up and a new [US] president taking office, but you need to gain the freedom of operation in Gaza that you have in the West Bank."

Tough words from two US military analysts visiting Israel this week. Both said Israel stopped too soon and should've gone deeper into Gaza.

Lt.-Col. Rick Francona, a former US Air Force intelligence officer in several theaters and military analyst for NBC News, said the cease-fire was "just the end of this round, and that seems to be Israeli policy right now. The best Israel can go for is to manage the conflict until Hamas can be made to go away."

Terror war shifts once again to civil war in Gaza

2009-01-21T15:52:00.003+02:00

Hamas goes back to targeting fellow Palestinians rather than Israelis
Jan. 21, 2009

Hamas members have executed several Fatah activists who may have collaborated with Israel during Operation Cast Lead and has rounded up hundreds, according to a Hamas official. The Hamas crackdown was ongoing during the fighting, but intensified after the cease-fire went into effect Sunday morning.

Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of Hamas's political wing, told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that his organization had executed several people who they believe helped the Israeli air force bomb key targets.

"We will bring to justice those who were involved in helping Israel mark the location of Interior Minister Said Siam," he said.

Indeed, Israel’s ability to find Hamas weapons caches, hideouts, tunnels and bunkers points to the work of Israeli intelligence services and the information obtained from captured militants and from Fatah officials who escaped, with Israel’s help, from Gaza.

“Israel must win against Hamas for the sake of the civilian population, both in Gaza and in the south of Israel,” said a close aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “We have not forgotten how Hamas threw Fatah members from the roofs of Gaza to their deaths [around the time of the Palestinian civil war] in 2007.”

“Hamas is the source of evil,” Yousef, a 39-year-old taxi driver in Ramallah, told us. “Since Hamas was elected the devil governs Gaza.”

A Fatah official in Ramallah told The Jerusalem Post that at least 100 of his men had been killed or wounded as a result of the massive Hamas crackdown and some had been brutally tortured.

He said that at least three of the detainees had their eyes gouged out by their interrogators, who accused them of providing Israel with wartime information about the location of Hamas militiamen and officials.

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas's house-arrest orders.

"What's happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah," he said. "Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?"

The activist said that Hamas's security forces had also confiscated cellular phones and computers belonging to thousands of local Fatah members and supporters.

Preparing the way for The One

2009-01-21T14:49:00.002+02:00

Jan. 21, 2009

Israeli troops kindly withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip before Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as US president.

No one said, but every speculated, that the decision was linked with Israel's desire to get off to a smooth start with the new US administration. Government spokesman Mark Regev would not confirm the timetable.

If only Israel would prepare the way for the real Messiah as readily. Oy vey.