Video: IDF preparing for war on Israel's northern border?
In preparation for a possible conflict erupting on Israel's northern border, troops from the army's Golani Brigade conducted a large military exercise in the Golan Heights on Wednesday - the very area Syria insists that Israel return in exchange for 'peace' with Israel in the future. Accompanied by deputy Chief of Staff Maj.Gen. Dan Harel, Defense Minister Ehud Barak watched the troops close at hand as they conducted firing exercises and practiced attacking "enemy positions."
On Tuesday, a senior Syrian analyst with close ties to President Bashar Assad declared that Damascus will never sever its ties with Tehran or Hezbullah even in the framework of a peace agreement with Israel.
Video: Surviving the Holocaust: Zanne Farbstein's story
Zanne Farbstein was 16 years old when she was deported with her two younger sisters to Auschwitz. While working as a slave laborer, Zanne found her father's prayer shawl while sorting through the clothing of the prisoners who had been murdered in the camp. Zanne survived Auschwitz, and moved to Israel with her few surviving family members, where she began a new life (Hat Tip: NY Nana).
Canada's National Post reports that the Canadian Union of Postal Workers has no plans to block mail between Canada and Israel - yet (Hat Tip: Rightcanuck via Little Green Footballs).
This just in: The Canadian Union of Postal Workers "has no plans to block mail to and from Israel as of yet." That's a direct quote (with my emphasis added) from the union's national president. The line appears in a letter sent to the National Post today in response to my column about CUPW's loopy foreign-policy pronouncements. The letter, which will appear in tomorrow's print edition of the National Post appears in whole below.
...
Re: Jonathan Kay asks: Now that CUPW is boycotting Israel, will Canada Post deliver mail to the Israeli embassy? April 28. If Jonathan Kay admits “I’m no labour expert”, why does he direct questions about the internal workings of CUPW to everyone except the union itself? If he had bothered to ask us, we would have supplied a pretty simple answer: Unlike the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinian mail, CUPW has no plans to block mail to and from Israel as of yet. Our concern is that the policies of the Government of Israel are unjust and violate international law; therefore we will be encouraging our members to boycott Israeli made products. We are taking this position because over 170 Palestinian political parties, unions and other organizations have called for a global campaign similar to the one applied to South Africa in their apartheid era. These measures will continue until the Israeli government recognizes the right of Palestinian people to self-determination, puts an end to military assaults, hydrocide and other acts of violence that take the lives of innocent people, and until Israel fully complies with international law, including a raft of UN resolutions. It’s time to push for a fair and just settlement so that both Palestinians and Israelis can live in peace. Sincerely,
Denis Lemelin National President, CUPW
Is CUPW involved in any other political conflicts outside of Canada? Do they worry about Christians in Iraq, Zorastrians in Iran, Copts in Egypt or non-Muslims in the Sudan? Anyone want to bet that the answers to those questions are "none" and series of no's? So why are they suddenly so concerned about 'Palestine' and the fake 'Palestinian people?'
At Atlas Shrugs, Pamela reports on the City of Cambridge's 'peace commission' which apparently has the unanimous support of the uber-liberal Cambridge (Massachusetts) city council.
“It’s best not to practice your Hebrew with Palestinians even if someone uses it with you.”
·“It is better not to wear a kippah or yarmulke in Palestinian communities. Again, while hosts are glad to meet Israelis and Jews, there are many eyes and ears watching for collaborators.”
·“Israeli settlers and soldiers disguise themselves (as tourists or Palestinians) and also enter Palestinian areas boldly without disguise.”
·“If a host gives you a kuffiya (traditional Palestinian headdress for men) or other clothes to wear, it is a good idea to put them on. It will help you blend in with the community, which may be important for local security. It communicates that you belong.”
The above “travel tips” were used in orientation sessions[1] for The City of Cambridge Peace Commission as part of their official mission to Bethlehem last winter. Working closely with the Cambridge to Bethlehem People to People Committee, The Peace Commission’s solidarity mission was given a rousing sendoff by every member of the Cambridge City Council last November.
Not every municipality in this country is fortunate enough to have a Peace Commission, but, thanks to the foresight of the ever-Progressive archons of correctness, Cambridge crafted their agency more than 25 years ago to defend its citizens from the ravages of nuclear war. And so, while the rest of us wrong-thinking retrogrades are becoming toast on Massachusetts Avenue after the Big One drops, the enlightened citizens of Cambridge will survive to bond with revolutionaries from Nicaragua to Gaza.
Read it all. Only in Massachusetts does every city and town get to conduct its own foreign policy. I know. I grew up there.
Was it a coincidence that a Muslim strolling down Golders Green Road in the heavily Jewish Golders Green section of northwest London just happened to pick two Orthodox Jews to be his stabbing victims? Was it random that the stabber happened to stab two people who looked very obviously Jewish? This is from Jihad Watch:
"Man charged over Golders Green stabbings," by Kevin Bradford for the Hendon Times (thanks to Jerusalem Posts):
A man has been charged following a double knife attack on two Orthodox Jews in Golders Green.
Mohamed Jama Ahmed, 37, of North Circular Road, Cricklewood, was arrested after two stabbings which happened just meters apart in roads off Golders Green Road on Friday.
A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said the attacks, which happened at around 6pm, appear to have been random and unprovoked, but were not being treated as faith hate crimes....
Good. Wouldn't want to give the appearance of "Islamophobia."
This hit really close to home, because I have several friends who live on those "roads off Golders Green Road" and I have stayed in a small bed and breakfast located in Golders Green - not far from Golders Green Road - three times in the last five years.
Read the whole thing. Robert recognized immediately what the Metropolitan Police don't want to know: These crimes were far from random.
Hamas' newest blood libel: Israel planned the Holocaust to kill handicapped Jews
On April 18, Hamas' al-Aqsa TV televised this show which claimed that Israel planned the Holocaust to kill handicapped Jews. Sickness!
Jewish leaders planned the Holocaust to kill "disabled and handicapped" Jews to avoid having to care for them, according to a Hamas TV educational program. As much of the world prepared to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hamas TV presented its latest sinister twist on Holocaust denial.
The Hamas TV educational program, broadcast last week, taught that the murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a Zionist plot with two goals:
1- To eliminate "disabled and handicapped" Jews by sending them to death camps, so they would not be a burden on the future state of Israel.
2- At the same time, the Holocaust served to make "the Jews seem persecuted" so they could "benefit from international sympathy."
Amin Dabur, head of the Palestinian "Center for Strategic Research" explained that "the Israeli Holocaust - the whole thing was a joke, and part of the perfect show that [Zionist leader and future Israeli prime minister] Ben Gurion put on." The "young energetic and able" were sent to Israel, while the handicapped were sent "so there would be a Holocaust."
The following is the transcript,
Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) April 18 2008
Narrator:
"The disabled and handicapped are a heavy burden on the state," said the terrorist leader, Ben Gurion. [Zionist leader - Israel's first PM]
The Satanic Jews thought up an evil plot [the Holocaust] to be rid of the burden of the disabled and handicapped, in twisted criminal ways.
[Picture: Holocaust death camp, dead bodies]
While they accuse the Nazis or others so the Jews would seem persecuted, and try to benefit from international sympathy. They were the first to invent the methods of evil and oppression."
Amin Dabur, head of the Palestinian "Center for Strategic Research":
"About the Israeli Holocaust, the whole thing was a joke and part of the perfect show that Ben Gurion put on, who focused on strong and energetic youth [for Israel], while the rest- the disabled, the handicapped, and people with special needs, they were sent to [to die]- if it can be proven historically. They were sent [to die] so there would be a holocaust, so Israel could "play" it for world sympathy."
Narrator: "The alleged numbers of Jews [killed in the Holocaust] were merely for propaganda."
Let's go to the videotape.
The video was translated by Palestinian Media Watch and you can support their work by clicking on the link under their name.
UPDATE 6:20 PM
I just realized that April 18 - the day this was shown on Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV - was the same day that former US President Jimmy Carter met with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mesha'al. I guess he really got through to Hamas, didn't he?
Video: Surviving the Holocaust: Yaakov Hollander's story
For more information on the timing of this series, please go here.
Ya'akov Hollander was a ten-year-old boy living in Krakow, Poland, when WWII broke out. Deported from his home and eventually crammed into the Krakow ghetto, Ya'akov passed through twelve different concentration camps during the Holocaust. A walking skeleton when he was finally liberated, Yaakov had lost both his parents and most of his family in the Holocaust. With his world completely destroyed, Yaakov turned to music in an attempt to cope with his loss. Joining a children's choir in a camp for child survivors, Yaakov forged a lifelong bond with music, becoming a composer, musical arranger and choir conductor. Despite all of the horror he faced as a child, through the help of music, Yaakov has managed to remain an optimistic person.
Indian cleric: 'Every Muslim should be a terrorist'
In this video from India's ironically named 'Peace TV' on April 22, Indian Muslim cleric Ashraf Mohamedy tells the faithful that every Muslim should be a terrorist against the anti-social elements in society.
Arab 'justice': Jordanian man gets 6 months for 'honor killing' of 16-year old married daughter
That'll teach him to go killing his children.
A Jordanian man received a six-month jail sentence on Wednesday for the 'honor killing' of his 16-year old daughter.
The court ruled Wednesday that the man killed his married daughter because she had an affair out of the wedlock. The enraged father severely beat her with a baton and ultimately electrocuted her in November 2006. [Can someone explain to me why a 16-year old is married? I have a 16-year old daughter and I wouldn't dream of marrying her off right now even if she wanted to get married. Something tells me that this man's daughter did not want to get married. And at what age did he marry her off? 12? 14? CiJ]
Neither the father nor daughter were identified.
Like other tribal-oriented societies, many Jordanians consider sex out of the wedlock an indelible stain on the family's honor that can only be cleansed by blood.
Really? Can anyone name a non-Muslim 'tribal-oriented society' where families routinely murder their own daughters and sisters for having sex out of wedlock?
On Wednesday night, the six Holocaust survivors pictured at top left will light torches in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust (photo from JPost web page).
Note that all six of them were re-settled in Israel, do not claim to be 'refugees' sixty years later and are not the beneficiaries of international largesse through UNRWA or anything like it. There is no UNRWA for Jews.
Concentration camp doctor tops Nazi most-wanted list
Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center has released a list of the ten most-wanted Nazis in connection with Thursday's observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. Topping the list is Aribert Heim, who was a doctor at the Mathausen concentration camp. If he is alive, Heim is now 93 years old.
Heim would be 93 today, but "we have good reason to believe he is still alive," said Efraim Zuroff by telephone from Jerusalem. Zuroff is the top Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Center, which published the list.
Still, despite a $485,000 reward for Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria, he has managed to avoid capture for decades.
He is only one of hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals that the center estimates are still at large.
After Heim on the center's most wanted list are: John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps; Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.
But the nature of Heim's alleged crimes are what catapulted him to the top of the list.
Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man.
It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.
Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.
"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."
But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen.
...
Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by Germany.
He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941.
While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the fastest.
But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in 1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.
Heim's file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he was listed as having a different SS assignment.
This "cannot be correct," the indictment says. "It is possible that through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the (concentration camp) was concealed."
There is no indication who might have been responsible.
...
Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrest warrant to American authorities in Germany who initially agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians, in a Dec. 21, 1950, letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace him.
What happened next is unclear, but in 1958 Heim apparently felt comfortable enough to buy a 42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it in his own name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby resort town of Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic — also under his own name, Heister said.
In 1961 German authorities were alerted and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him — he apparently had been tipped off.
Heim continued to live off the rents collected from the Berlin apartments until 1979 when the building was confiscated by German authorities.
Proof that he is alive may lie in the fact that no one has claimed his estate. Heim has two sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but whose current whereabouts are unknown.
Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would not comment when telephoned at his Baden-Baden villa.
"All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my father, and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation, and I can't enter into that."
You can find more details about the other members of the top 10 list here. The picture at the top of this post is a 1950 photograph of Heim.
Video: Surviving the Holocaust: Mordechai Eldar's story
Wednesday night and Thursday are Holocaust Remembrance Day here in Israel. The biggest problem we face regarding the Holocaust today is Holocaust denial. With the survivors dying out year by year, more and more Holocaust deniers are being confronted with less and less human evidence. One of the things that has been done to combat Holocaust denial is the creation of videotaped testimony by survivors, which will outlive them. During the course of Wednesday and Thursday, I am going to embed some of that testimony on this blog so that you can all get an idea of what it looks like and so that you can all learn something. The testimony is accompanied by original pictures and films from the Holocaust period. The first such testimony I am posting is that of Mordechai Eldar.
Mordechai Eldar was born in 1929 in Campulung la Tissa, Transylvania. In April 1944 his family's possessions were confiscated and they were deported to the Saltina ghetto. Deported in May from the ghetto to Auschwitz, Mordechai survived Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. After the war he tried to immigrate to Palestine with his surviving sisters aboard the Exodus ship but the vessel was immediately forced by the British authorities to return to Hamburg upon arrival in Haifa. Emerging from the Holocaust a Zionist, Mordechai decided to devote his life to ensuring the national security of the State of Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces for 30 years, achieving the rank of lieutenant general.
On Tuesday night, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told the American Jewish Committee that 'Palestinians' are losing hope in the 'two-state solution' and called on Israel to make 'difficult decisions.'
"Increasingly, the Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age," Rice, 53, said in a somber speech to The American Jewish Committee at its 102nd annual meeting.
Insisting that the Bush administration will never yield to dealing with Hamas militants, Rice said, "What you don't want is that the hopelessness and the vision of the extremists have no counter."
Set to leave early Thursday for more meetings with various Arab and Israeli leaders, after talks in London designed to raise more economic support for the Palestinians, Rice called on Israel to make "difficult decisions" to provide the Palestinians with the dignity of statehood.
In fact, she said, "we have a chance to reach the basic contours of a settlement by the end of the year" - a scaling back of President George W. Bush's initial hope for a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians before he leaves office.
But in this morning's JPost, Michael Freund is singing a much different and more realistic tune: There are no 'Palestinian moderates' with whom to negotiate. In fact, I would argue that the term 'Palestinian moderate' is an oxymoron. Here's Freund:
Even for a president prone to misusing the English language, George W. Bush outdid himself last week.
Sitting next to Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, Bush gushed and swooned over the visiting Palestinian leader, describing him in terms usually reserved for heroes and saints.
"The president is a man of peace," Bush assured the gaggle of reporters who were present. "He's a man of vision. He rejects the idea of using violence to achieve objectives, which distinguishes him from other people in the region." [Video here. CiJ].
While Bush's grammar may have been uncommonly accurate that day, his description of Abbas was anything but. For even a cursory glance at some of the Palestinian president's outbursts in recent months reveal a man wholly undeserving of such praise.
On March 1, [the Holocaust denying. CiJ] Abbas had the gall to insult the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis when he declared that Israel's counter-terror operations in Gaza were "worse than the Holocaust" (Jerusalem Post, March 2).
And in an interview with the Jordanian newspaper Al-Dustur on February 28, Abbas boasted that he had been the first Palestinian to fire a bullet at Israel after the birth of the PLO in 1965.
This ostensible "man of peace" then took pride in the fact that his Fatah movement had trained Hizbullah terrorists, and he did not rule out a return to the "armed struggle" against Israel in the future. And just two weeks ago, Abbas was planning to confer the Al-Quds Mark of Honor, the PLO's highest award, to two female Palestinian terrorists who took part in the killing of Israelis (Israel Radio, April 16). The event was cancelled only after it was publicized widely in the media. Need we also mention the Palestinian president's refusal late last year to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state"?
THIS OF course puts the lie to Bush's stubborn embrace of Abbas as a reasonable and judicious leader that can be counted on to forge a peace deal. If anything, the Palestinian president has repeatedly shown himself to be an intemperate hot-head. Nonetheless, that doesn't seem to stop Washington and much of the media from bestowing upon him the coveted title of a "moderate" leader that Israel can do business with.
...
All of this shameful fawning on the Palestinian thug-in-chief raises a simple, yet rarely-asked, question: why is there such a widespread insistence on deluding the public into thinking that Abbas is a "moderate" leader who epitomizes the majority of Palestinians?
The issue is more than academic. In fact, it goes directly to the core of current US and Israeli government policy.
After all, the entire intellectual basis for the notion of granting the Palestinians a state rests on the dubious assumption that a majority of them are actually reasonable, peace-loving people. Too bad that all the available evidence appears to indicate otherwise.
Who will tell the truth to President Bush and Condi? Certainly no one in the current Israeli government.
A few days before Passover, I attended the haramat kosit (toast) of the Jerusalem branch of the Likud. One of the speakers that night was a young MK named Gilad Erdan. Erdan said something that I have not heard from anyone in power in the Likud, including leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Erdan said that it's time to tell the people of Israel the truth, because Israelis are ready to hear the truth: There is no one on the 'Palestinian' side with whom we can negotiate. Hopefully, Freund's column will be the first step at getting that message across in the mainstream media, to Israelis and to diaspora Jews.
This is a Fox News report on how cigarettes are purchased tax free from Indian reservations in upstate New York, are sold downstate (New York City) at a discount to retail but at a tremendous (and illegal - they're not supposed to be sold outside the reservations but it's not enforced) profit, and then the profits are funneled to groups like Hamas, Hezbullah and Al-Qaeda in the Middle East. Think about that if you smoke.
Let's go to the videotape.
Maybe that's why buying cigarettes is a big 'Palestinian' concern in Gaza.
I have been critical - on more occasions than I care to link - of the company kept by Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama. I have argued that Obama's association with the likes of Susan Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, the late Edward Said, Ali Abunimah and Reverend Jeremiah Wright ought to make it impossible for supporters of Israel to support Obama's candidacy. On the other hand, I have spoken very little of Hillary Clinton's associations other than the infamous kiss with Suha Arafat (pictured above).
There's an interesting piece in today's New York Daily News (among other places) that claims that yesterday's speech by Obama's 'spiritual mentor,' the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to the National Press Club, which exposed the true Reverend Wright for all Americans to see, was actually arranged by a Clinton supporter who is a close friend of Wright's.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright couldn't have done more damage to Barack Obama's campaign if he had tried. And you have to wonder if that's just what one friend of Wright wanted.
Shortly before he rose to deliver his rambling, angry, sarcastic remarks at the National Press Club Monday, Wright sat next to, and chatted with, Barbara Reynolds.
A former editorial board member at USA Today, she runs something called Reynolds News Services and teaches ministry at the Howard University School of Divinity. (She is an ordained minister).
It also turns out that Reynolds - introduced Monday as a member of the National Press Club "who organized" the event - is an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter.
"Mandela leaves as a principled man, with all but the dullards understanding why he would embrace the Palestinians, whose children are being killed and family homes bulldozed in Israel just as black families' are in Soweto. ... Moreover, if Mandela is a terrorist — as conservatives have called him — he would fit right in with U.S. patriots such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, Nat Turner, and Harriet Tubman. If it had not been for those terrorists, what would we have to wave our flags about on the Fourth of July?"
— USA Today Inquiry Editor Barbara Reynolds, June 29, 1990.
Comparing the 'Palestinians' and their supporters to patriots of the American revolution? Where have I heard that before? Comparing the 'Palestinians' to the victims of South African apartheid? That sounds awfully familiar too....
What other company does Hillary keep? Is it any better than the company Obama keeps? Inquiring minds ought to know.
Majority of Olmert's own party opposes 'significant withdrawal' from Golan
Fifteen MK's from Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert's KadimaAchora party - a majority of the party's Knesset delegation - oppose any 'significant withdrawal' from the Golan Heights under any circumstances.
The results of an internal party poll to this effect were published on the Kadima party website. The site emphasizes that the results are "fluid," as they are dependent on the precise nature of an agreement that might be signed with Syria.
Prime Minister Olmert has not denied reports of last week that he transmitted a message to Syria stating he would be willing to give up the entire Golan in exchange for peace with the North Korean ally.
The party's 29 MKs were asked whether they would support a "significant withdrawal" from the Golan Heights. This term was defined as either the uprooting of all or most of the 33 Jewish towns there, or their transfer to Syrian sovereignty with a measure of Israeli autonomy.
Fifteen of the 29 MKs said they are totally against a "significant withdrawal." These included ten members of the Knesset Golan lobby - Ruchama Avraham Belila, Eli Aflalo, Tzachi HaNegbi, Yoel Hasson, David Tal, Marina Solodkin, Ze'ev Elkin, Ronit Tirosh, Michael Nudelman, and Shai Hermesh - as well as Yaakov Edry, Sha'ul Mofaz, Avraham Hirschson, Ze'ev Boim, and Otniel Shneller. This number includes four Cabinet ministers (Mofaz, Boim, Edry and Belila).
Transportation Minister Mofaz told reporters in Washington on Monday that surrendering the Golan to the Iranian ally would mean giving Iran control of the high ground overlooking much of northern Israel. The former Defense Minister, who met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, is visiting Washington as part of the American-Israeli strategic dialogue that takes place every six months.
The position of two Kadima MKs - Minister Gideon Ezra and Amira Dotan - is not clear. Ezra has gone on record as saying that there is no point in talking with Syria at present.
Twelve Kadima MKs say they favor a "significant withdrawal" from the Golan in exchange for peace with the country the US terms a "terrorism sponsor." They are Olmert, Ministers Livni, Dichter, Sheetrit, Ramon, and Bar-On, and Shlomo Mula, Dalia Itzik, Menachem Ben-Sasson, Yitzchak Ben-Yisrael, Yochanan Plesner, and Majli Whbee.
While that sounds like good news, don't think it's the end of the story.
It is noteworthy that when Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert first floated the idea of a Disengagement from Gush Katif and northern Shomron, many of their Likud party members opposed it. As time passed and political circumstances changed, however, their opinions did as well.
Sort of. A majority of the Likud's membership (the party, not the MK's) voted against the Gush Katif expulsion in a referendum by which Sharon promised to abide. Sharon lied and Jews died instead.
This is a video of the widely reported interview with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mesha'al that took place on Friday on al-Jazeera. The big story was that Mesha'al said that Hamas' search for a 'cease fire' is 'only tactical.' But that's not the real story here because it leaves a question unanswered: If Hamas' search for a 'cease fire' is 'only tactical,' why would Israel be stupid enough to give it to them? Let's go to the videotape to see Mesha'al's answer and then I will have a couple more comments.
The lesson of this interview is how foolish it is for Israel to make 'unilateral concessions' as we did in southern Lebanon and Gaza. When we do that, the terrorists just expect more.
What Mesha'al didn't mention is that earlier in the week there were stories about the Bush administration pressuring Olmert for a 'cease fire' before President Bush's arrival here next week. I don't expect that to happen. Not only does the IDF oppose such a 'cease fire' - so does his own Defense Minister. If anything, the IDF has stepped up operations this week.
In the absence of a significant number of 'Palestinian' civilians killed (which Hamas will be all too happy to arrange when they are desperate enough), don't expect a 'cease fire' anytime soon.
One of the highlights of Israel's Independence Day each year is the finals of the International Bible Contest. Throughout the year, local and national contests are held in cities around the world and on Israel Independence Day the world finals are held here in Jerusalem. Almost everyone in the religious community here knows someone who has made it (I was in the US national finals myself in 7th, 8th and 9th grades a generation ago; after that my school stopped holding the contest). Most of the Israeli kids who are in the contest are religious and the winner is usually Israeli (although I have heard accusations of bias against the kids from abroad on occasion). The foreign kids run the gamut with those from certain countries (US, Canada) being mostly religious, but kids from other countries are sometimes less religious. But what would happen if the religious kids didn't show up? We may find out next week.
In the Muqata, Jameel reports that Yad l'Achim - the largest anti-missionary organization in the country - is threatening to organize a boycott of the religious kids in the contest. The reason is that one of the Israeli contestants - 11th grade Israeli teenager Bat-El Levy from Jerusalem...is a follower of the "Jewish Messianic" sect of Christianity. The contest's mission statement specifically states that it is for "Jewish youth."
Yad L'Achim is currently in touch with Israel's Ministry of Education and leading rabbis around Israel -- calling for Bat-El to be disqualified from participating...or for all religious participants to boycott the contest.
**Israel's Ministry of Justice has determined that according to Israeli law, Bat-El is in fact Jewish (although she and her family are part of the Jewish Messianic sect) [Note that Israeli law and Jewish law may not coincide on this issue. CiJ], and she can therefore participate. I guess they are of the opinion that once a Jew, always a Jew, despite conversion or acceptance of another faith.
Some say, let her participate and lose -- which will show that Jews in fact, do excel in Bible studies. Other are worried what might happen if she wins.
Here's my take on this. First, the odds of Israel's Minister of Re-Education disqualifying someone who is not Jewish from participating in the Bible Contest are somewhere between slim and none. Second, the odds of Yad l'Achim getting kids coming from overseas to boycott the contest are - with some exceptions - not great. If the Israeli kids other than the missionary boycott but the foreign kids don't, it would likely throw the contest to the missionary kid. Third, the odds of Yad l'Achim getting Israeli kids to boycott are good if they get the right Rabbis to sign on. Most of the Israeli kids in the contest are from the National Religious community, and while the current chief Rabbis would likely come under legal attack if they urged a boycott, if former chief Rabbis (like Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu) and other prominent Rabbis signed on, I can see the boycott of the Israeli religious kids being total. Proselytizing for other religions is an issue with respect to which - at least in the religious Jewish community here - there is a wall-to-wall consensus of opposition, which extends to much of the secular community as well.
Like Jameel, I am not sure what will happen, but I am sure we have not heard the last of this.
Video: IDF parachutists try to form the number 60 in mid-air
This is a real treat. This video is practice for Israel's 60th Independence Day next week. In it, a group of IDF parachutists jumps over Tel Aviv and practices forming the number 60. You couldn't pay me enough to do this. My palms get sweaty just watching!
Syrian minister 'optimistic' Israel will come to an end within ten years
In this April 19 interview on London's Hiwar TV, Syrian Minister Riyad Na'san Al-Agha declares: "I am optimistic that Israel will come to an end within 10 years."
Note - When I viewed this, the sound went dead around the 3:20 mark but the video continued to play. The person who posted this on LiveLeak assures me that the sound worked for him. I figure that most of my readers don't know Arabic anyway, and you will be able to see the English translation.
The message being sent to Iran and the 'Palestinians'
The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial this morning that makes it clear why Israel needs to be concerned with the Bush administration's obsession with making a deal - any deal - with North Korea on nuclear disarmament.
The prospect of nuclear technology in the hands of another terrorism-sponsoring state is scary enough. Worse is the notion that Syria's reactor is no big deal. That's the interpretation being shopped in Washington by anonymous Administration officials, presumably at State, who have been quoted as saying the CIA has "little confidence" that the goal was to build a bomb.
The no-big-deal thesis expounded by the President's men directly contradicts their boss. After briefing Congress behind closed doors, the White House put out a statement expressing "confidence" that "this reactor was not intended for peaceful activities." CIA Director Michael Hayden said yesterday an operational reactor could have produced enough plutonium to make one or two nuclear bombs.
No one disputes that the Syrians were cooperating with the North Koreans on a nuclear facility like the one currently being shut down at Yongbyon as part of the six-party denuclearization process. The previously classified intelligence shows striking similarities between the Syrian facility, going up at a desert site called Al Kibar, and Yongbyon. Other evidence includes photos of a man identified as a North Korean nuclear expert in Syria.
Nor does anyone – other than the Syrians – deny that Damascus was disguising Al Kibar from the world. The secret reactor is also a violation of Syria's obligation as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Given this background, it would be folly for anyone concerned about the national security of the U.S. to conclude that Syria's intention wasn't some sort of nuclear program, or capacity.
It is also disturbing that the Administration first tried to persuade the Israelis that Syria's outlaw actions could be settled with diplomacy, and then sat on its conclusions for seven months after Israel bombed the site.
This kind of behavior is typical of the "arms control process" that Mr. Bush has embarked on with North Korea, where violations get explained away or ignored if the violator merely promises not to do it again. Pyongyang's nuclear aid to Syria was still going on after its February 2007 pledge to give up all its nuclear programs and stop proliferating.
Meanwhile in Tehran, it's easy to imagine what the mullahs are making of all this. Washington may be talking tough again about Iran, but its leadership can see what North Korea is getting away with. If Pyongyang can pursue a nuclear program with impunity – and in violation of its promises – why not Tehran?
Why not indeed? This should concern Israelis for two reasons. First, for the obvious reason stated: Tehran looks at what Pyongyang gets away with and figures that it can do the same.
Second, there is a lesson here for the 'Palestinian' theater. The same Bush administration obsession with making a deal - any deal - with North Korea has been observed in 'negotiations' with the 'Palestinians.' And it's not only George Bush and Condi Rice who have that obsession: It's Ehud K. Olmert and TzipiFeigele Livni. It's what gave rise to the concept of a 'shelf agreement' that can come back and hit us in the face long after these four are all gone.
These are very dangerous times for Israel and Israelis. While new elections could help, we may not have time for them before the next war. That could happen this summer.
OUTRAGE! Jewish Gaza refugees still paying debts on their old farms
A group of Jewish refugees from Gush Katif in Gaza - most of whom are still homeless and jobless nearly three years after the Sharon-Olmert government expelled them from their homes and businesses - has gone to court to force the Olmert-Barak-Livni government to live up to an agreement to cancel the debts they incurred to finance their farming infrastructure (like the picture of the hothouses at the top of this post) when their communities were set up thirty years ago.
The decision to erase debts incurred by Gush Katif pioneers when they established their communities was made by the Knesset Finance Committee in 2004. As with other areas around the country, Gaza communities benefited from long-term loans from the Jewish Agency in order establish farming infrastructure, but when the Sharon Administration decided to pull out of Gaza, it became clear that local residents would be unable to repay the debts.
Because the Finance Committee had supposedly "taken care" of canceling Gush Katif debts to the World Zionist Organization, the Knesset Laws Committee did not enshrine the debt erasure in the 2005 Evacuation – Compensation Law [In Israel, this is know as "yihye b'seder" - it will be okay. It's a lousy philosophy and too much of the country runs on it. We saw the results in the summer of 2006. CiJ]. As a result, Gaza residents were left with little legal protection and saddled with debt for farming equipment and farm land they can no longer access.
According to Anita Tucker, formerly of Netzer Hazani, the debt repayment is an especially sore point for pioneers who built up Jewish Gaza soon after the area was liberated from Egypt during the Six Day War.
"When we came to Gush Katif over 30 years ago, the World Zionist Organization gave a package of benefits to encourage agriculture in development areas. We received various essentials to start a farm. I was a farmer in Gush Katif for 29 years. We were in the process of paying back those initial benefits, when the government threw us out of the land, that it had originally encouraged us to develop."
Three years after the government forcibly removed Gaza's Jewish residents from their homes, expellees continue to be scattered in a variety of temporary housing arrangements, and most remain without suitable employment options. Most refugees survive on compensation payouts they received at the time of the eviction.
To raise funds to build a new dairy infrastructure in order to create a post-disengagement source of economic stability, some former Gush Katif communities sold shares in Tnuva, Israel's largest dairy product manufacturer. There is now a foreclosure order for approximately 3 million shekels on that money in order to cover the debts the refugees owe to the Zionist organization.
The lawsuit names as defendants the government, World Zionist Organization, the Finance Ministry, the accountant general, the agriculture minister and the Sela Disengagement Authority, and asks the court to force the above-mentioned bodies to enforce the government's decision. They say the plaintiffs' real ability to restore and rebuild their lives has suffered, and due to the huge sums involved (which is more than the sum total of the payout they have received to date), it has impaired their abilities to repair their lives in the future.
Three years ago, the Sharon-Olmert government took 10,000 vibrant and thriving Jews, destroyed their communities and made them homeless and unemployed by treating them like trailer trash. Now that Sharon is (all but) gone, the Olmert-Barak-Livni government is trying to ensure that these people remain economic (and in many other ways) basket cases for life by letting the 'Jewish Agency' (controlled by a Sharon appointee) take the pittance of compensation they received for having their lives destroyed. And if Olmert and Livni and Condi Rice get their way, there will soon - God forbid - be 400,000 other Jews like them. This is disgusting beyond belief!
Video: CIA presentation to Congress on Syrian nuclear reactor
During the night, Allah posted the video presentation that the CIA made to Congress last week about the Syrian nuclear reactor (is there anything that's not on YouTube these days?). The video is in two parts. I'm going to post the first part only, which is the part that shows how Israeli intelligence (which is not mentioned) knew that it was a nuclear reactor. To watch the second part, which shows how the reactor looked after it was destroyed and how the Syrians attempted to cover up its existence, you will have to go to Allah's post. Babylon and Beyond - an LA Times blog - has made charges of fauxtography regarding the images included in these videos. In the same post linked above, Allah debunks some of B and B's claims. Having never used Photoshop, I am not familiar enough with its functionality to comment on it. I'm hoping that some of the photo experts will weigh in later today.
Charles reports that CIA Director Michael Hayden said Monday that the plant could have produced one or two weapons within a year of becoming operational. Hayden said that the site was within a few weeks or months of becoming operational. Charles says - and I agree - that the world ought to thank Israel. I don't suggest holding your breath waiting for that to happen.
When I was a college student thirty years ago, I used a book by historian Walter Laqueur called The Israel - Arab Reader. Now, Midwest Jim reports at Gateway Pundit that the book is out in its seventh edition, this one being co-authored with Laqueur by Barry Rubin.
The book provides almost 300 primary texts covering more than a century of history. It documents the British mandate and early attempts to handle the conflict; Israel's independence and the outbreak of wars; international diplomatic efforts to make peace including the 1990s’ peace process and its breakdown. Materials are presented reflecting the positions of Arab leaders and states, Europeans, Israel, Palestinians, the USSR, and the United States. The texts of international resolutions and agreements, as well as accords made during the peace process, are also provided.
Captain Ed at Hot Air has a video of Monday morning's appearance by former President Jimmy Carter on the Today Show in which Carter rewrites history by claiming that the US and Israeli boycott of Hamas started after the January 2006 election.
In fact, the policy of non-engagement with terrorists that so surprised Carter in 2005 dates back to before his own presidency in 1976. Perhaps Carter spent too much time kissing the cheek of Leonid Brezhnev to notice, but the US has always insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorist groups, which has included Hamas since the group’s inception. The election gave Hamas an opportunity to repudiate terrorism and to recognize the right of Israel to exist within borders later to be determined. It has done neither. Hamas conducted a coup d’etat in overthrowing the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and uses Gaza as a launching pad for rocket attacks on civilians in Ashkelon and Sderot, which they continued while Carter was in Israel and Syria.
Carter also claims again that Condoleeza Rice never told him not to meet with Hamas although he admits that even if she had told him (which she did), he would have defied her and met with them anyway.
Will Israel join the International Criminal Court?
In 2002, the Bush administration unsigned the Clinton administration's signature on the 1998 Rome Treaty that created the International Criminal Court.
Shortly before the court opened in 2002, the Bush administration "unsigned" the Rome Statute, which President Clinton had approved before leaving office. President Bush subsequently signed legislation authorizing military action, should the court arrest an American, and limiting U.S. dealings with the tribunal.
Clinton had nearly convinced Ehud Barak to sign it. After the US 'unsigned' the treaty, Israel under Ariel Sharon decided not to sign it. Now, the article linked above reports that the US may sign the treaty after all (Hat Tip: Debbie Schlussel).
A senior Bush administration official said Friday that the U.S. now accepts the "reality" of the International Criminal Court, and that Washington would consider aiding the Hague tribunal in its investigation of atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region.
"The U.S. must acknowledge that the ICC enjoys a large body of international support, and that many countries will look to the ICC as the preferred mechanism" for punishing war crimes that individual countries can't or won't address, John Bellinger, the State Department's chief lawyer, told a conference in Chicago marking the 10th anniversary of the tribunal's founding treaty, the Rome Statute. More than 100 countries have ratified the treaty.
Although it reiterated longstanding U.S. concerns about the court, Mr. Bellinger's speech represented a rhetorical turnabout for an administration that came to power determined to hobble the movement for a permanent war crimes tribunal.
"This is a meaty piece of work," said Richard Dicker, international justice director for Human Rights Watch. "It's impossible to imagine such a statement four years ago."
If the US signs the Rome treaty and submits itself to the court's jurisdiction, will Israel follow? I certainly hope not. Here's one reason why:
The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court can be read to make it a war crime to deprive civilians of "objects indispensable to their survival" (art. 8 (2) (b) (xxv)).
Do we really want to go to court over that issue with respect to Gaza?
Make sure to read Debbie's whole post on the US and the court and to read this article from the American Thinker (from several months ago) to consider some of the potential problems Israel may encounter with its treatment of Hamas in Gaza if we join the court. Even if we're right, if we sign the treaty, we can be dragged in anyway and be told we're wrong. Remember the fence case?
Let's hope that regardless of what the US does, Israel stays out of this.
Video: Reverend Wrong on Farrakhan, Jews and Israel
This is a video of the first ten minutes of the question and answer session with Barack Hussein Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club today. At the 3:42 mark, he is asked about his relationship with Louis Farrakhan and his answer runs until about 5:50. Wright says that Farrakhan called Zionism - not Judaism - a 'gutter religion,' and in that respect Farrakhan was no different than the United Nations which equated Zionism with racism. (I actually agree that the United Nations is no different than Farrakhan). He then goes on to refuse to disavow Farrakhan although he claims that he doesn't always agree with him.
Let's go to the videotape and then I'll have a couple more comments.
Wright refuses to disavow Farrakhan and Obama refuses to disavow Wright. Draw your own conclusions.
For the record, here's a post I did three months ago about Martin Luther King's thoughts about the State of Israel. While the letter was not actually written by King, it did correctly reflect his views on Israel - and particularly on attempts by non-Jews to separate Zionism from Judaism. It's a shame that King isn't around today to be the first black candidate for President.
Al-AP lies: 'No Palestinian collaborator executions since 2001'
Will President Bush's 'man of vision' confirm a death sentence for 25-year old Emad Saad? Saad was convicted this morning of the only 'crime' that's on a par with sullying the 'family honor': 'collaborating' with Israel. The death sentence will be carried out only if President Bush's 'man of vision' - that would be 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen confirms it. Or unless 'vigilante justice' gets to him first like they got to this man pictured above (that's his mother who's about to stamp on his dead body by the way). But to read al-AP, you would think that there hasn't been an execution of a collaborator in the 'Palestinian Authority since 2001. Maybe that's why President Bush still thinks that Abu Mazen is a 'man of vision.'
A Palestinian military court on Monday imposed the death penalty on a man convicted of collaborating with Israeli security, raising the possibility of the first such execution in seven years.
Military judges ruled that 25-year-old Emad Saad, who worked for Palestinian security, provided information to Israel that helped forces kill four Palestinian militants.
A video recording shows the judges declaring the death sentence Monday. Then Saad calmly asks for leniency, explaining he is the main breadwinner for his family. He does not deny the charges.
After the hearing, Samih Steidi, Hebron's Palestinian security commander, was pleased with the death sentence. "Let it be an example to those who sell their homeland and their people," he said.
He said Saad would be executed by a firing squad because of his military status.
However, death sentences imposed by Palestinian courts have often been commuted.
The last time a convicted collaborator was executed was in 2001. Palestinian judges last sentenced an accused collaborator to death in 2004, but the decree has not been carried out. [Really? Go look at the links above. If the courts don't execute 'collaborators,' the 'Palestinian security forces' trained by the United States will stand aside so that the 'Palestinian people' can do it instead. CiJ]
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas must approved Monday's death sentence. Abbas' aide Nimr Hamad did not say what the president would do, but he said an execution would serve as deterrence. [Now there's a 'man of vision.' /sarc. CiJ]
He also complained about Israel's use of collaborators. "I don't think that peace with Israel should mean having to accept spies for Israel. Peace is one thing and spying is another," he said. "There is enough reason for such a penalty - that he caused the death of Palestinian citizens."
A leading Palestinian rights group, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, called on Abbas "not to sign this cruel and inhumane sentence."
If Abu Mazen doesn't confirm the execution, the 'Palestinian people' will. Al-AP is lying. So what else is new?
Witnesses said the 25-year-old was killed by members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant group allied to Fatah, the party of ['moderate'] Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen.
Video: Searching cyberspace for the next terror attack
Armed with fluent Arabic and fake identities, employees of Terrogence Ltd., scour the Internet for signs of the next Islamist attack. Staff members are are all former Israeli army intelligence analysts that decided to put their army skills to work.
Let's go to the videotape.
For those interested in more details, the company's web site is here.
60 Minutes visits the IAF, the IAF visits Gaza - UPDATED
CBS News' 60 Minutes had a great segment on Sunday night in which they visited the Israeli Air Force (Hat Tip: Democast via Little Green Footballs). I'm going to embed the segment below - it's a bit long (12:15).
The comments (there are 39 pages of them) have included a lot of Muslim and leftist seething. But on a day when a mother and four children were among seven victims of an IDF attack on a home in Beit Hanoun that was being used for rocket fire (please see an important update at the bottom of this post), I'd like to point out something that one of the IAF pilots said on the program:
For the last two years, Capt. Omri has been hunting down militants in Gaza from his Apache attack helicopter.
"But you still can't take out all the people who are firing rockets at you?" Simon asked.
"They are working from very crowded, populated places and they shoot the missiles from there. And they're shooting near children. And when you are taking your weapon system and looking at the launcher, you see children running near it. It's unbelievable," Capt. Omri said.
"And you retaliate," Simon remarked. "They fire rockets. You hit back. They fire more rockets, and you hit back in a bigger way. And it just gets worse and worse."
"Yeah, I agree," Omri said.
It's a classic guerilla war - $50 rockets made in the back alleys of Gaza against Israel's $50,000 missiles. The Israelis will tell you that kind of expense buys precise weapons which limit collateral damage, but it also gives the air force the capability of assassinating their enemy’s leadership. The Israelis call this "targeted killings;" the Palestinians call it "murder."
Go back and watch that segment of the video and you will see children fleeing right after a Kassam rocket is shot.
[A]s a matter of international law it is most certainly not correct to say that "any killings of civilians is an act [sic] of terrorism." Recall that the Geneva Convention provides quite explicitly that "The presence of a protected person [i.e. a civilian. CiJ] may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations." Thus if a civilian is killed because terrorists are hiding behind him - something that the IDF sees every day in Gaza and which has been repeatedly documented in photographs and videos - that is completely legal and is not "an act of terrorism" or a violation of international law. It doesn't permit targeting civilians, but Israel's not the party that targets civilians anyway.
Additionally, we have all seen the evidence that Hamas tries to put civilians in the line of fire so that they will have civilian casualties to exploit in the media. Given all that, I thought Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the right thing this morning:
"We see Hamas as responsible for everything that happens in the area around Gaza, all of the strikes, and the IDF is acting and will continue to act against Hamas, within the Gaza Strip," the defense minister said.
"Hamas is also responsible, through its operations within the civilian population, like the laying of explosives, for wounding some civilians who are not involved in the operations," Barak stated.
Maybe he got the right answer to the question he asked six weeks ago. In this morning's 'operation,'
... seven Palestinians were killed and six wounded in an IDF attack on a home in Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, Israel Radio quoted Palestinian sources as saying.
Palestinians said that among the dead were a mother and her four children, all of whom ranged in age from 6 down to 15 months. In addition, two Palestinian gunmen were killed.
Medics on the scene identified the dead children as sisters Rudina and Hana Abu Meatik, ages 6 and 3; and their brothers, Saleh, 4 and Mousab, 15 months.
Islamic Jihad said one of its gunmen, and another unidentified man were killed about 400 meters from the family's home.
According to the IDF, an aircraft was used to attack a group of armed Palestinian gunmen. There was no confirmation about the success of the attack.
IDF Spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich said militants fired at troops from within a residential area. "It's another example of the use of civilians as a human shield," Leibovich said.
There's no choice. Israel has to stop worrying about the 'Palestinians' civilians and start worrying about its own.
Finally, here are some samples from the comments section:
Not a day passes when these scum Zionists do not drop bombs on innocents and then claim they killed 3 or 4 "militants." I look forward to the day when my brother, Ahmadinejad, has complete his mission to manufacture a cure for what the Zionists have at Dimona. I only hope I live to see the day. These Zionists slime have no right to live and breath. Their so-called god is a piece of cow dung.
Posted by shaheed8 at 01:41 AM : Apr 28, 2008
One religious extremism gives rise to another religious extremism.
If Europeans were not brought into Palestine to occupy the land of those Palestinians by force who had nothing to do with the actions of Hitler, because bible said so; Alqaeda would not get enough recruits to fly planes into buildings since koran says so.
The mother of all the evils is bible and christianity!
Posted by patriotic9 at 12:21 AM : Apr 28, 2008
qwester1:
The aggression of the Zionists against the Palestinian people is without precedent. One would think they were the Nazis who perpetuated the so-called holocaust the Zionists parade before the world at every opportunity. These people love to play the victims; in truth and fact, they are the victimizers. What a pity that I am not in the middle of J''lem with a few bombs under my waist. How I would love to visit a cafe full of Zionists talking about how their airforce killed Palestinians. I would smile as I pulled the pin.
Posted by rufisgufis at 12:21 AM : Apr 28, 2008
cfin5
I only hope that I live to see the complete destruction of the fiction called the State of Israel. I would love to see all Zionists on the face of the earth dead. Then I could die and rest in peace. I could easily give my own life to reach that goal. Maybe, inshallah, I can be a part of this event. My god did not "choose" these people.
Posted by rufisgufis at 12:14 AM : Apr 28, 2008
How dismaying to see 60 Minutes put aside investigative reporting in favor of cheerleading for the Israeli air force. If 60 Minutes were interested in educating and informing, it might have asked the following:
What evidence is there that Iran''s nuclear program is aimed at developing nuclear weapons?
Which country, Iran or Israel, has refused to allow international inspection of its nuclear facilities?
Which country has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty?
Which country is known to currently possess nuclear weapons?
Why is it okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not Iran?
Assuming that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, what effort has Israel devoted to mutual disarmament, instead of plans to bomb Iran?
Given that Iran has not attacked or threated to attack Israel , would a preemptive Israeli attack be permitted under international law?
Would it be in the US interest for Israel to stage a preemptive attack with US weapons purchased with US tax dollars? Would that make a terrorist attack on the US more or less likely?
Do any corporate sponsors of 60 Minutes manufacture weapons sold to Israel? Does its corporate sponsorship explain why 60 Minutes deals with a complex issue in such simplistic pro-Israel terms?
Posted by Seascape5 at 10:43 PM : Apr 27, 2008
That's through the middle of page 9, but it's enough to give you a flavor. There were also some pro-Israel people who objected to the segment where Simon told the pilot that he didn't "look like a killer." I suspect that was a bad editing job and with background might have come out a lot better than it did.
Anyway, I'm shocked that CBS aired a segment that was so fair to Israel. I doubt that would have happened in Dan Rather's day.
UPDATE 4:16 PM
If you watch the video below, you will see that it implies that the home in which the human shields were killed this morning may have been hit by a tank shell and not from the air.
10 North Koreans killed in IAF strike on Syrian nuke plant
According to a report on a Japanese broadcaster's [link in Japanese. CiJ] web site, which is in turn based on South Korean intelligence, ten North Koreans were killed in September's IAF strike on a North Korean-built nuclear plant in Syria.
The 10 people, whose remains were cremated and returned to North Korea in October, had been helping with the construction of a nuclear reactor in Syria, Japan's public broadcaster said. Some North Koreans probably survived the air attack, NHK said.
The Goracle and grain rationing arrive in Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv University announced on Sunday that former US Vice President Al Gore, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on 'global warming,' arrives in Tel Aviv next month to attend a conference on renewable energy.
Al Gore, Nobel laureate, former vice president of the United States and author of the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, will deliver the opening address at a conference on "Renewable Energy and Beyond," scheduled to be held at Tel Aviv University May 20-21, the university said Sunday.
Gore will be arriving on a special visit to Israel as guest of the Dan David Prize. The 2008 Dan David Prize will be awarded to Gore on May 19 for social commitment to environmental protection and the prevention of a global ecological disaster, a statement from the university read.
Tel Aviv University is organizing the international conference with the intent of addressing all issues - technological, economic, political - pertaining to moving towards using renewable energies as a substitute for oil and coal.
President Shimon Peres, National Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and Environmental Protection Minister Gideon Ezra will also attend the conference.
Ironically, also on Sunday, Israel's largest supermarket chain announced that it was limiting purchases of rice by consumers who are attempting to stock up in the face of an anticipated 60-70% price rise. The limit was lifted Monday morning as prices rose by 65% (in a country with a single-digit inflation rate since the mid-90's). Many people believe that the two events are connected.
The current rise in food prices is the most serious in the last century and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon, according to agricultural economist Prof. Yakir Plessner of the Hebrew University's Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot. A colleague, Professor Ayal Kimhi, foresees the crisis causing political shock waves in sensitive areas of the world. These will in turn lead to higher oil prices and further increases in food prices.
"We see the first signs of political instability throughout the world," Kimhi says. "Poor populations are the most vulnerable. We are talking about more than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. The political instability can lead to unpredictable results. Nigeria, for example, is an important oil producer sitting on a political powder keg. A blowup there could adversely affect the price of oil and make the food price crisis worse," Kimchi says.
Plessner says food prices will moderate only if "farmers in the United States plant huge areas of land with grain. But that will take a few years. There is no short-term solution." To get farmers to cooperate, Plessner says, the U.S. must stop subsidizing corn grown for the production of fuel ethanol.
Some observers blame a major part of the global food crisis, which has suddenly burst into the fore in the last few months, on the subsidizing of corn grown for fuel ethanol production:
One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.
“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.
Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”
“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”
Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects.
“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”
Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to those.”
Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article.
However, the scientist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore, Rajendra Pachauri of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, has warned that climate campaigners are unwise to promote biofuels in a way that risks food supplies. “We should be very, very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for overall food security,” Mr. Pachauri told reporters last month, according to Reuters. “Questions do arise about what is being done in North America, for instance, to convert corn into sugar then into biofuels, into ethanol.”
In an interview last year, Mr. Gore expressed his support for corn-based ethanol, but endorsed moving to what he called a “third generation” of so-called cellulosic ethanol production, which is still in laboratory research. “It doesn’t compete with food crops, so it doesn’t put pressure on food prices,” the former vice president told Popular Mechanics magazine.
Others would assign less blame to the use of corn to produce fuel ethanol but would blame 'environmentalists' generally for the worldwide failure to properly exploit alternative fuel sources for the past thirty years:
Collectively the intermeshed muddle of environmental movements have ensured that the dirtiest source of power (coal) is still the most heavily used for the past thirty years. They’ve done this by opposition to new oil and gas exploration, drilling, and refineries. They’ve done this through tax and regulation of fuel standards. They’ve done it through intense opposition and regulation of new nuclear plants, and NIMBY opposition to large scale wind and solar farms. They’ve opposed hydro-power wherever it’s been attempted. It seems that the only power that’s good or green is that used specifically for their house, and none other.
They’ve opposed all forms of new energy but it isn’t a vast plot - instead it fits with their general blurry vision and strategy. As stated above they just muddle their way towards a low-energy world, often working at cross-purpose without understanding the ultimate evil effect. That vision and strategy is to make energy scare and expensive, in hopes of stopping environmental degradation. Instead they insure not only environmental degradation, but also hunger and poverty in third world nations, and the eventual destruction of wealth in the US.
Is it a mistake that the high-guru of Global Warming comes from a coal mining state where the coal boomis once again on and the attempts to stop it are being fought in the state Legislature? Is it a mistake that a supposedly “environmental” Senator, Ted Kennedy, opposes windmill farms in his neighborhood?
There’s no doubt that mankind contributes some to global warming, you can prove that to yourself on any windless day by driving well outside a metro area, measuring temperature, and then driving back inside and measuring temperature. Typically you will see a 1-4 degree higher temperature inside the “heat bubble” of the metro area. (Note that both readings should be approximately the same elevation or the experiment is pointless, elevations do vary in temperature, and moderate winds will also mask urban heat bubbles.)
The policy question isn’t whether we contribute to global warming, instead it is “do we contribute enough to crush economies with carbon caps, to stifle new energy development through environmental regulation, and starve people through misguided energy policy?” Does being clean warrant people still dying in coal mines or from the pollution burning coal creates — because regardless of what the environmentalists do, the reality is that people still need energy and will get it from one source if blocked from another?
This is one reason why you hear the oxymorons “clean coal” and “carbon sequestration” so much lately. Coal is dirty no matter what you do, and the money spent cleaning it or sequestering carbon would be better spent on nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, oil, and natural gas.
So how does all this affect Israel? Let's go back to Haaretz for the gruesome details:
The global rice crisis is hitting Israeli consumers in the pocket, with prices rising between 33 percent and 65 percent Sunday in the Super Sol supermarket chain, the largest in the country, in accordance with the price update of local sugar and rice company Sugat.
The second-largest supermarket chain, Blue Square, has not yet updated its prices but is expected to raise them soon.
Sugat said demand for rice increased by hundreds of percent over the weekend, "because everyone heard about the global shortage and the expectation of a price increase and ran to the stores," said Sugat CEO David Franklin. A senior source in the retail field confirmed that rice sales late last week were three times higher than on peak sale days.
However, concern over a rice shortage in Israel has dissipated. Super-Sol has lifted its brief two-package per customer restriction, saying that "in light of the rise in prices in the world and in Israel, the Super-Sol chain wanted to prevent merchants from buying at the chain's stores in order to accumulate stock and make a fortune at the expense of the customer."
"There is no rice shortage in the world, and there is no food shortage," said Gideon Ben Nun, CEO of Shekel-AGIO Risk Management & Financial Decisions. "There is only an atmosphere of panic."
Meanwhile, the prices of products based on wheat and corn, as well as cooking oils, are expected to rise shortly by up to 10 percent, sources in the food industry said.
Price-controlled bread will be more expensive by between 10 percent and 15 percent within three months. In addition, coffee prices are expected to rise by between 5.5 percent and 8.5 percent and candy prices are due for a 5-percent hike, on average.
The expected price hikes come on top of an average rise of about 13 percent in hundreds of products over the past year.
Restaurants say they will have to raise their prices by about 10 percent in order to compensate for the increased cost of ingredients.
What to do about the problem? The government minister in charge of the issue, Yitzhak Herzog, proposes to adjust (for inflation) the minimum income guarantee allowances (havtachat hachnasa) received by low income Israelis more often than the current once per year.
Pnina Ben-Ami, senior adviser to Welfare and Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog, told The Jerusalem Post that with the price of rice and other staple foods soaring this week, compounding recent hikes in electricity and gasoline, the minister is to lead an initiative to raise National Insurance Institute allowances for the poor more often - twice rather than the current once-a-year update - to stop them from eroding.
"The erosion of allowances makes it very hard for needy people to cope in their day-to-day lives," Ben-Ami said.
The problems with this solution are that to date inflation has been generally lower than the increase in food prices, and that someone has to pay for the cost of the more frequent adjustments if they happen. Arguably, Israelis are already the most highly taxed people in the world. Can we really afford to raise our taxes further? Raising taxes further is likely to mean more working poor, more people leaving the country so that they can keep more of what they earn and will - in the long run - stifle economic growth.
"There are crazy rises all over the world, and nothing we can do will stop it," Tzvia Dori, who is in charge of internal trade and price supervision in the Industry, Trade, and Labor Ministry told the Post. "Only direct assistance to the poor people in Israel can help," she said, rejecting the idea that other commodities in addition to bread be put under governmental supervision.
That may well be true. But does that assistance have to come from the government?
There are other things that can be done. First, while there are many charities in Israel, getting Section 47 approval (the equivalent of 501(c)(3) status in the US that makes donations deductible) is almost impossible here without having a direct connection to someone on the Knesset Finance Committee. And once a charity gets approval, the tax deductions are meaningless for most Israelis because they cannot be used unless you file a tax return and most Israelis aren't required to and don't file tax returns.
Instead of concentrating on 'narrowing gaps' between high and low earners (something that caused Bank of Israel Chairman Stanley Fischer to quip "If we want to get rid of poverty in this country we should close the hi-tech sector." Why? Because poverty in Israel is a measure of inequality; it's people who are below half the median income. You can reduce the top incomes by getting rid of the parts that are prospering, and quite likely you'll reduce the relative poverty rate)," we need to concentrate on giving economic incentives (read: tax deductions) to the wealthy in return for helping out the poor.
Eran Weintraub, director of Latet, the largest charitable foundation in Israel supplying food to the poor, warned of crippling consequences for his organization and those who need its help. "Latet will have to stop buying and distributing rice very soon [because of the rising cost], and will in general buy smaller amounts of food," he told the Post. "The poor will get less from us, and will be forced to buy less in the stores, so they are being hit from all directions. People who, until now, barely kept their heads above water will now also become truly poor."
I'm sure that if you donate money to Latet, you can get a tax deduction. But only if you file a tax return. Most people in this country do not file tax returns unless they are self-employed. Would a universal filing requirement accompanied by deductibility for charitable donations encourage people to voluntarily transfer some of their wealth directly to the poor without the government acting as a go-between? After seeing how miserably socialism has failed around the world, I think it's worth a try. I wonder if Mr. Gore would agree.
The food situation also has security implications for Israel. One of the things that has driven up food prices is increased energy costs. In other words, the collapse of the dollar (something that can really only be appreciated outside the US - most of my earnings are in dollars and I am getting creamed right now financially as a result) and the accompanying price rise in oil which is purchased on dollar terms is resulting in lining the pockets of our enemies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.
That raises another way the government could help all Israelis: cut gas taxes. As of last night, a liter of 95-octane unleaded gas (petrol for you Brits) costs NIS 6.41 ($1.86). That means a gallon of gas here costs $7.04 (and you thought you were paying a lot)! And it will likely go up at midnight Wednesday night (as it does almost every month). A big chunk of that is taxes; the standard estimate here is that at least 50% of the costs of running a car consists of taxes. The government could cut the gas tax and stave off inflation (people drive anyway) that would necessitate increasing subsidies to the poor and would make more of us into working poor.
Those are some of my ideas this morning. In the meantime, Mrs. Carl bought about fifteen kilos of rice on Sunday (obviously not from Super-Sol), so we are set for a few weeks.
Video: Obama would give up America's nuclear deterrence
If Iran nukes Israel - God forbid - we will at least go down fighting. If Iran nukes the United States and Barack Hussein Obama is your President - God forbid on both counts - America won't even go down fighting because Obama won't retaliate. This is what you'll do instead:
You see, Obama will give up America's nuclear deterrence. Do you think I am exaggerating? Then let's go to the videotape. This was shown on NBC:
Video: TV camera crew penetrates IDF base at Gaza fence
Several months ago, I did a post in which I showed how a terror attack was carried out in southern Israel by using ropes to get over the fence from Gaza. Fortunately, what you're about to see was not an actual terror attack.
This report - apparently - appeared on Channel 1 (the Israeli government news station) tonight. A Channel 1 camera crew walked right through a hole in the fence of one of the IDF bases at the edge of the Gaza Strip. The narrative is entirely in Hebrew - sorry about that - but in any event they do not divulge the name or exact location of the base, except to say that it is the "forward-most" base adjacent to the Gaza Strip. The man you see walking around is referred to as a "photographer" in the report. He is wearing civilian clothes and a skullcap and is carrying around a military-issue shoulder bag. He could as well have been a 'Palestinian' terrorist.
The soldiers at the end of the report tell the crew that they are endangering themselves because they don't even have bulletproof vests. I would say that the soldiers are the ones endangering themselves (and the civilians they are protecting) because they are not keeping their base secure.
Haaretz goes wild: Small right wing journal editor calls to try Olmert and Livni for treason
Haaretz is going nuts because the editor of a small, right wing academic journal has called for the trial of Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert and Foreign Minister TzipiFeigele Livni on charges of treason for negotiating on the future of Jerusalem. Treason in wartime is punishable by death under Israeli law, but that sentence has never been carried out (the only execution this country ever carried out was that of Adolph Eichmann).
"Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, who are leading open negotiations over the handing over of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, must according to international law and guidelines on treason be sentenced to death," Aryeh Stav, editor of Nativ said on Sunday.
In response to a questionnaire submitted by Haaretz, Stav said "statesmen who hold negotiations to hand over control of their capital is something that simply does not take place any where in the world."
Stav added that in Israel, "the laws on this matter are clear, but no one enforces them or makes sure that the criminals who violate these laws are prosecuted."
This is not the first time that Stav has called for trying Israeli politicians for treason. He (and others) made the same call in the early part of this decade after the Oslo 'peace process' collapsed into the Oslo Terror War.
According to Aryeh Stav, head of the Ariel Institute for Strategic Studies, and editor of Nativ, an academic journal, "in a properly run state, these people would be put on trial," but "since Israel is not properly run," there won't be a trial. "The rules of the game developed in Israel are pathological," he says. "All the prime ministers broke the law regarding the Golan. According to the law against treason, they should have been thrown into jail for life or executed. A gang like Peace Now would be considered traitors in a properly run country, but there's no point in putting them on trial because they do express the views of the majority."
Oslo, adds Stav, "was inherently illegal. It's the closest thing to a junta. The law defines the PLO as a terror organization and says anyone who engages in negotiations with it should get 15 years in jail. That law is still on the books, but everyone is silent."
Stav's use of the term "treason" is relatively unique, but there is a debate in the right about the term criminal." Haetzni says "those who made Oslo are criminals, in the public sense of the term, even if not in the technical sense."
1. The category of acts which "impair the sovereignty" of the State of Israel section 97(a); 2. The category of acts which "impair the integrity" of the State of Israel - section 97(b); 3. The category of acts under section 99 that give assistance to an "enemy" in war against Israel, which the Law specifically states includes a terrorist organization; 4. The category of acts in section 100, which evince an intention or resolve to commit one of the acts prohibited by sections 97 and 99.
The punishment prescribed in the Penal Law for the first three kinds of acts of treason is death or imprisonment for life. The harshness of the punishment emphasizes the seriousness with which the State of Israel views the crime of treason, which it seeks to prevent by the punishment it imposes upon offenders.
So is Stav's call to try Olmert and Livni for treason so radical? Of course not. Because we know that Olmert and Livni aren't negotiating the future of Jerusalem. After all, if they were, Shas would no longer be in the government. Just ask Eli Yishai.
Video: PMW director Itamar Marcus on Carter meeting with Hamas
This is a Fox News interview with Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus discussing former President Jimmy Carter's meeting with Hamas. According to Marcus, you can't much more credibility than you can get from a visit from a former President of the United States. Why does Carter want to give a group of terrorists credibility? Go here to find out.
In this sermon televised on March 21 by Lebanon's al-Manar TV, Lebanese Shiite Leader Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadhlallah tells the faithful that the Jews extort Germany by inflating the number of Holocaust victims.
'Our friends the Saudis': 'US supports Israel because it wants to get rid of its Jews'
Former Saudi Minister Ali Al-Namla claims in this April 6 interview with Saudi Arabi's al-Majd TV that the US supports Israel because it wants to get rid of its Jews.
By the way, according to historian Deborah Lipstadt (in response to a similar claim by a Syrian cleric discussing Franklin on Al-Jazeera), the claim about Benjamin Franklin wanting to deport Jews is 'completely false.'
No proof of this statement has been found in anything Franklin said. In addition, it contains language that was not used in Franklin's times, e.g. homeland. Moreover, the statement never surfaced before the 1930s. And it comes from a book which no one has ever seen.
If you need more evidence that this a hoax and an antisemitic canard, the ADL has done a good analysis of the history of this fraudulent claim. Significantly, this ADL piece quotes a number of leading Franklin scholars who debunk this nasty effort.
Now we have to ask how this cleric got this information? It only surfaces on antisemitic and White Supremacist websites. I guess we know where he and his cohort are rummaging.
Video: Assad says nuke site a military base but pics prove otherwise
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad claims that the nuclear site that Israel bombed in September was a 'military base' because otherwise it would have been 'better protected.' But the pictures in this video (some of the best shots I've seen yet of the material that was presented to Congress last week) accompanied by narrative from Israeli expert Dr. Eyal Zisser prove otherwise.
Bush administration defends the 'honor' of insulted Dhimmi
Surprisingly, the Bush administration has registered an official protest against remarks made by Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Gillerman in which Gillerman called former President Jimmy Carter an bigotenemy of Israel for meeting with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal.
A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the U.S. administration's dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former U.S. President.
In addition, the State Department is planning to issue a public statement condemning comments made by Gillerman at a press conference in New York on Thursday, where he called Carter a "bigot."
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Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni refused yesterday to respond to the demand by MK Yossi Beilin that Gillerman be recalled for his statements against Carter. Beilin described the ambassador's statements as "mad."
A Livni aide said that the foreign minister does not normally communicate with Israeli ambassadors through the media.
However, a Foreign Ministry source said that Gillerman is due to leave his post in the coming months, following five years at the UN.
The same source said that Gillerman's attack on Carter "surprised and embarrassed" Jerusalem, which contravened direct instructions from Livni to avoid comments on the former president.
Even though Israel's political leadership expressed its reservations at Carter's intention to meet with the Hamas leaders, the Foreign Ministry contributed to coordinating his meetings and emphasized that no decision was taken to boycott him.
In other words, Gillerman is being condemned for forgetting diplomatic niceties and saying what everyone else here (and in Washington outside of the State Department for that matter) was thinking. If his term is up in a few months, look for him to join the Likud on his return to Israel. I'm sure Bibi Netanyahu is salivating at the prospect. Gillerman is the most effective UN Ambassador we have had since Bibi himself.
On the US side, I'm surprised to see the State Department defending Carter, but I guess that too is part of the diplomatic protocol.
Huda Azar Nunu, a Jewish woman who is a lawmaker in Bahrain's upper house, will be named to the Washington position, according to a report this week in A Sharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily published in London.
"The sources denied that the appointment of Nunu as a woman and a Jew is a public relations campaign by Bahrain in the West, emphasizing that Huda Nunu has proven her qualifications, whether through her membership in the Consultative Council or through her work in human rights associations, of which she is an active participant in Bahrain," the newspaper said.
Bahrain, a Persian Gulf state sandwiched between Iran and Saudi Arabia, has a tiny Jewish population dating back to Talmudic times. Nunu is descended from Iraqi Jews who migrated to the port of Manama in the late 19th century. Jews in Bahrain have kept a low profile but generally have been treated well.
An Israel Radio report today described Nunu and her family (her father is a banker) as "shomrei masoret," which means religious and usually means Orthodox.
Ten days ago, I blogged an interview with Hamas political adviser Ahmad Yousef on WABC radio, New York, in which Yousef said that Hamas wants Barack Hussein Obama to win the Presidency of the United States. I now have an audiotape of that one (as part of a video from Fox news) so let's go to the videotape:
In a bloggers' conference call on Friday, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain picked up on the theme:
"I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States," McCain, the putative Republican presidential nominee, said in a conference call on Friday with conservative bloggers.
"I think that the people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare," he said in response to a question from Jennifer Rubin of Commentary magazine.
And while the Fox newscaster in the video above correctly pointed out that a candidate cannot control who supports him, McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers is correct that Hamas support for Obama is a legitimate issue for the American people to think about:
"The reason for Hamas's praise of Senator Obama's foreign policy is his commitment to meet unconditionally with Iran... It is not only responsible to raise these critical issues in this election, but it would be the height of irresponsibility not to have this discussion with the American people," Rogers said.
Obama's foreign policy represented a "radical departure" from current standards of dealing with "rogue regimes," he said.
McCain sounded a similar theme in the conference call:
"I never expect for the leader of Hamas... to say that he wants me as president of the United States," McCain said. "I think it is very clear... why they would not want me to be president of the United States, so if Sen. Obama is favored by Hamas, I think people can make judgments accordingly."
The Obama campaign is not pleased with this latest development:
"We want to take Senator McCain at his word that he wants to run a respectful campaign, but that is becoming increasingly difficult when he continually tries to use the politics of association and makes claims he knows not to be true to advance his campaign," Hari Sevugan, the campaign spokesman, said in a statement.
"This type of politics of division and distraction not only lead to a campaign not worthy of the American people but also has failed to help our families for too long."
Obama, who has advocated meetings with leaders of "pariah states" without condition, has explicitly excluded Hamas, noting that it was recognized as a terrorist organization by the US.
You can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps. On Wednesday, Midwest Jim at Gateway Pundit did a blog post that rounded up Obama's terrorist associations as reported by the blogosphere. Go through the list. Given the company he keeps, it's astounding that Obama is this close to becoming the Democratic Presidential nominee - let alone the President.
On Friday, the presumptive Republican nominee was asked about the Hamas leader’s comments on a campaign conference call with bloggers.
“…I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” said McCain. “So apparently has [Sandinista leader] Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare…If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.”
A week ago, the Arizona senator’s campaign sent supporters a fundraising e-mail that said Hamas approved of Obama’s foreign policy vision, and is hoping for his victory this fall.
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McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told CNN's Dana Bash that the Hamas view was "a fair issue for the American people to ponder should he be the Democratic nominee for president."
“Hamas has said they want Barack Obama to win. The reason for that is his policy. He wants to negotiate with the terrorist-funding, nuclear-aspiring, holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening dictator of Iran.
“This election is being watched all around the world. The Hamas spokesman made his comments because of his [Obama’s] policy pronouncements.”
McCain himself told reporters Friday afternoon that the Hamas nod was "just a fact."
Hamas, apparently their North American spokesperson is endorsing Senator Obama. People can make their own judgment from that. I don't view that as anything but a statement of fact. If that…. is wrong, that the North American spokesman of Hamas has not endorsed Senator Obama, I'd be happy to retract my statement, and I hope there'll be corrections in the media that state otherwise."
Don't hold your breath waiting for that correction - watch the video above.
On Tuesday, I blogged a report that UNIFIL, the United Nations' 'peacekeepers' in southern Lebanon, had backed off a confrontation with Hezbullah weapons smugglerstransporters in southern Lebanon. Now al-Guardian is reporting in the Sunday Observer that Hezbullah is - shocka - building up a 'covert' army for a new assault on Israel (Hat Tip: Charles and Allah).
A trip by The Observer through villages in the Hizbollah heartland confirmed a conspicuous lack of fighting-age men. Visible were several new martyr posters, but unlike the traditional ones they portrayed anonymous, fresh-faced youngsters without military garb. According to locals, these are boys who have been killed accidentally in the latest wave of training in Iran. In the city of Tyre, too, posters showing young men killed in training exercises are cropping up. One is of Ahmad Hashem, killed while instructing recruits in the use of rocket-propelled grenades.
The initial training and selection of recruits is done in Lebanon, with Iran preferred for training on specialities - use of certain weapons, RPGs and anti-tank missiles - that require firing live rounds. 'But mostly the training in Iran is in theoretical things: philosophy, religion. The best training for fighting is done here in Lebanon,' said a fighter. 'We are so close to Israel here that our training becomes real.'
...
Losses aside, before 2006 most observers also widely overestimated the size of the military group. Some analysts put it as high as 5,000 men with more than 10,000 reservists, including its allied Amal - meaning Hope - militia supporting them.
'Ridiculous,' says the Hizbollah member. 'Before 2006 there were not more than 1,000 professional fighters, guys who manned bunkers and conducted operations full-time. The rest are trained and armed but lead ordinary lives unless called upon.'
This assessment is supported by regional intelligence services and Lebanese Shias, but now signs of the militia's dramatic expansion are alarming Hizbollah's domestic and international enemies.
The US military study described Hizbollah's military wing as 'completely decentralised'. Its commanders famously exercised this independence when they refused orders by the top command to abandon Bint Jebel in 2006 - then under massive Israeli ground assault. The town did not fall and Hizbollah rank-and-file today laud the refusal of orders as one of the biggest victories in the war. Recruiters closely watch youngsters for this kind of nerve and self-motivation, selecting the most talented boys for advanced training when they reach adulthood.
Hizbollah fighters describe a series of units - built around specialities such as rocket teams, heavy weapons experts, infantry, scouts and or part-time basis. 'Some units will be sent for training or operations for one, even two, years. Others continue to work or go to school. But even if you work your life is still Hizbollah. They call and that's it - you go. Maybe you tell your boss or professors you're going to Qatar or something for family reasons. But you never tell anyone what you're really doing.'
The decision to expand both the military wing and the supporting militias stems not from the losses during the 2006 war but from Hizbollah's success as a conventional military force in that conflict, says a Lebanese army commander who has worked with the group, his view being confirmed by the US military study. 'They were guerrillas during the occupation but shocked Israel in the war by standing and fighting from fixed positions. Even badly outnumbered, they held territory with minimal losses even under assault from tank units,' he says. 'Now they want to expand to make sure they can stop the next invasion before the tanks reach the flat plains of the Bekaa, where Israel's armoured units will have the advantage.'
There is nothing 'covert' about Hezbullah's buildup. It has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere hundreds of times over the last two years. Will there be a war this summer? It's entirely possible. Given that the same bozo who ran the war two years ago remains in power, it would probably be to Hezbullah's advantage to attack before we can oust him.
Yossi Harel, who commanded the clandestine operations that brought in four ships carrying some 24,000 illegal immigrants to Israel between 1945 and 1948, died Saturday in Tel Aviv at the age of 90. For those who were not aware, until Israel became independent in 1948, the British Mandatory government prevented Jews from immigrating to Israel to appease the Arabs (sounds familiar?). Thousands of Jews could have been spared death in the Holocaust if only the British had permitted them to immigrate to Israel.
Harel was born in 1919, a sixth-generation Jerusalemite. He joined the Haganah at age 15 and later became part of the unit commanded by Orde Wingate, where he earned a reputation for bravery.
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Harel commanded the major clandestine immigrant operations, including four ships: Knesset Israel, The Exodus, Atzma'ut and Kibbutz Galuyot. By the time he was 28 he had been responsible for about 24,000 immigrants had come in under his command, more than one-third of those smuggled into the country secretly between 1945 and 1948.
The Exodus, whose captain was Yitzhak "Ike" Aharonovich, went down in history for its heroic voyage from France in July 1947, carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors, and the fight for months to keep it from being turned back by the British. Eventually the ship was forced back to Europe and sailed to Hamburg, Germany.
As many of you know, Otto Preminger made a movie about the Exodus in 1960, which starred Paul Newman. Here are the opener and the trailer of that movie.
Harel will be buried Sunday in Tel Aviv. More on the movie here. The picture at the top is of the Exodus docking in Haifa.
Terje Reid Larsen part of the 'Jewish lobby in the US'
On Wednesday, UN official envoy for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 Terje Reid-Larsen called for disarming Hezbullah. In response, Hezbullah called Larsen a part of the 'Jewish lobby in the United States' and an 'American employee.' They also said that Larsen 'always put his fingers on the wrong side.' I wonder if they thought he was 'on the wrong side' when he declared that Israel had committed a 'massacre' in Jenin in 2002 (I thought he was on the wrong side then).
Two days after President Bush called him a "man of vision" and claimed that he doesn't advocate violence, 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen is being urged by his 'Palestinian brothers' in Hamas to declare the 'peace process' a failure.
The appeal came in response to Abbas's announcement that he had failed to make progress in his talks with US President George W. Bush last week.
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The officials told The Jerusalem Post that Abbas was "very disappointed" with the results of his talks in Washington last week. "The Americans don't want to make a commitment about the borders of the Palestinian state," said one official. "Nor do they want to put pressure on Israel to stop settlement expansion and remove checkpoints [in the West Bank]."
Another official told the Post that in the wake of the US position "it's ridiculous to talk about an agreement between the Palestinians and Israel before the end of Bush's term in office." He added that Bush's failure to exert pressure on Israel was likely to undermine the PA.
"The entire region could be headed toward a political catastrophe because of the collapse of the peace talks," the official cautioned. "Hamas and the extremists are already laughing at us because we put our faith in this US Administration."
"Frankly, so far nothing has been achieved," Abbas said in an interview on Friday with the Associated Press. "But we are still conducting direct work to have a solution."
Abbas said the "biggest obstacle" was Israel's continued construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
"We demanded the Americans implement the first phase of the road map that talks about the cessation of settlement expansion," he said. "This is the biggest blight that stands as a big rock in the path of negotiations."
Abbas expressed disappointment over the failure of the US Administration to exert pressure on i Israel to implement the road map. He also expressed disappointment because neither Bush nor US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice, with whom Abbas met separately, would not talk about the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
"We demanded that they talk about the 1967 borders," he said. "None of them talks about the 1967 borders."
Commenting on Abbas's remarks, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, said this proves that "all the talk by Bush about the establishment of a Palestinian state before he leaves office is lies and illusions."
He added: "It's time for Abbas to officially declare the failure of the talks and to resume negotiations with all the Palestinian factions about achieving national unity. The Americans don't want a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital."
A few points that need to be made. First, yes it was ridiculous from the beginning for anyone to think that Israel and the 'Palestinians' could reach an agreement by the end of 2008. The only way that was going to happen would have been if the US forced Israel to concede everything from the outset. Fortunately, the US has apparently refused to do that.
Second, reading this article, one has to wonder why we should 'negotiate' with the 'Palestinians' at all. After all, they've already predetermined the 'solution' so what's left to negotiate? Israel should just say yes or no to their 'offer' and be done with it. Personally, I would say no.
But the biggest joke is the reference to 'settlement expansion' as a 'blight.' Is something that looks like this a 'blight' on any landscape? (The picture is of Moshav Elazar from Efrat).
P.S. I hope this picture gives you some idea why I refuse to refer to the Jewish cities and towns in Judea and Samaria as 'settlements.' A 'settlement' conveys a notion of being temporary. As you can tell from the picture above, the town in question - which is in the Etzion bloc - looks quite permanent.
Video: Iran, Syria and 'Human Rights Council' slammed at Durban II prep conference
I love this video. It starts out 'tamely' with the representatives of Iran and Syria at the 'Human Rights Council's preparatory conference for Durban II claiming that they have no 'racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia or related intolerance' in their countries. Then Anne Bayefsky, the director of Eye on the UN, representing the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust (an NGO) takes the floor. She starts out saying that every addict knows that the first step in overcoming an addiction is acknowledging that you have a problem. Then she goes on to slam Iran, Syria and the 'Human Rights Council.' Watch the show - it's dynamite.
Watch this video of President Bush at the White House on Thursday with 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen. Doesn't Bush sound like he's been drinking or on drugs? When I heard him call Abu Mazen, "a man of vision" and say that Abu Mazen doesn't support violence, I understood why. President Bush had to be drugged to say those things.
Writing in yesterday's New York Sun, Eli Lake reports that the disclosure that the North Koreans were building a nuclear reactor in Syria confirms President Bush's 2002 'Axis of Evil' speech (Hat Tip: Hot Air).
[Ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Peter] Hoekstra and the president's former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, first raised the prospect of North Korea's cooperation with Syria last fall after the Israeli strikes. Both men have pressed the president to make the intelligence available to Congress and the public.
Mr. Bolton said that in 2003 he personally clashed with some members of the intelligence community on the question of whether Syria had a nuclear weapons program. "The argument then was that Syria can't be interested in nuclear weapons and it didn't have the money to build a program," he said. "But this is not about the money. North Korea can supply the technical capabilities, and Iran can supply the money."
Mr. Bolton said that he suspected Iran, which has been sanctioned three times by the United Nations Security Council for its enrichment of uranium, played some role in Syria's nuclear project. "Right now we don't know what the role of Iran was in this if any," he said. "But I would be amazed if Syria would be engaged in nuclear proliferation with North Korea without at least Iran's acquiescence and quite possibly its active cooperation." Iran and Syria signed a series of defense and intelligence agreements in June 2006. Both countries cooperate in supporting the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
The disclosures about Syrian and North Korean cooperation in some ways confirm the president's 2002 axis of evil speech, which posited that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea cooperated in support of terrorism and weapons proliferation. A co-author of that speech, David Frum, when reached for a comment said, "There is now irrefutable public confirmation of North Korean and Syrian nuclear cooperation and suggestive indication of Iranian involvement. It's almost like they formed an axis or something."
Shavua tov - a good week to everyone. For those who are wondering how an Orthodox Jew can be on the computer on what is the eighth night of Pesach (Passover) in much of the world, please go here.
Does the US spy on Israel too? And why does it seem that instances of people spying on behalf of the Jewish state are a much bigger deal in America than spying on behalf of Russia or China, for example? Two Jerusalem Post columnists devoted their weekend columns to this issue in the context of Ben Ami Kadish's arrest this past week. Both Herb Keinon and Caroline Glick take it for granted that the United States spies on Israel. But the Israeli reaction to the spying is very different from the American one. For the record, both Keinon and Glick were - like me - born in the United States. Here's Keinon:
The surprise arrest in the US this week of 84-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish for allegedly spying for Israel a generation ago highlights a fascinating little point: One never hears about the US spying on Israel.
Why not? Is Washington not interested in inside info on what Israel is up to?
Is the CIA, with agents spanning the globe, not keen on securing pre-knowledge of Israel's technological advances in defense and security fields?
Unlikely.
Rather, the more probable reason is because when US spies are uncovered here, as they surely have been over the years, it never hits the news.
Yossi Alpher, a former senior Mossad officer, cited former US officials as saying that the CIA spies on Israel, just as it spies everywhere else. "But when someone is caught here, he receives a wrap on the knuckles, and is declared persona non grata," Alpher said. "The fact that you never hear that someone was tried and put in jail for spying for the US reflects a different approach on Israel's part. It is not that we are not worried about sensitive information falling into other hands, it's just that when those hands happen to be friendly ones, we deal with it differently - unlike the US Justice Department."
And Glick:
As for espionage, as the late Yitzhak Rabin once noted, every few years Israel discovers another US agent committing espionage against the state. Rather than make a big deal about it, and in spite of the fact that some of the information being stolen is deeply damaging to Israel's national security, out of a sense of comity with Washington, Israel keeps the scandals quiet and generally deports the spies.
So why does it create such headlines in the US when someone is arrested for spying for Israel? Does the US target Israeli spies? Both Keinon and Glick argue that it does, although Keinon places the blame with the Justice Department and Glick places it mostly with the State Department and US intelligence agencies. Here's Keinon again:
Alpher, who now co-edits the Israeli-Palestinian on-line dialogue magazine bitterlemons.org - and is most definitely not a conspiracy theorist seeing an anti-Semite lurking under every US government desk [That's an understatement. I have a subscription to Bitterlemons.org. It's a newsletter that presents two Israeli views and two 'Palestinian' views on each issue. Most of the Israelis lean left. CiJ] - said he can't escape the conclusion that the US Justice Department is looking for Israel.
"When you take this case, together with the refusal to release [Jonathan] Pollard, even when spies working for the Soviet Union and China who caused death to other agents have been released, when you take into account the AIPAC case [the 2005 arrest of two senior AIPAC staffers on espionage charges], and attempts to recruit Israelis [to spy here for the US], it seems the Justice Department is targeting Israel. I don't know why, but we are being treated pretty roughly."
Alpher said it is not unheard of in the annals of espionage, both here and abroad, that when someone old and frail is caught having spied may years ago, the charges are just dropped.
But not this time.
"The Justice Department is targeting Israel," he said. "They have been looking for additional Americans spying for Israel for a long, long time."
Indeed, one senior government official said Kadish's arrest may finally shed some light on why the US has been so adamant for so long in holding Pollard, even though other spies who have spied for hostile countries - not friendly ones - have been treated more leniently.
I doubt that we're going to learn why Pollard is being held. Many years ago, I had a meeting with someone who was in the intelligence unit in the IDF that was 'handling' Pollard. He claimed that the issue with Pollard is not what he did but what he knows. He claimed that the Americans will never let Pollard go free because what he knows remains explosive to this day. Obviously, he couldn't tell me anything about what Pollard knows.
Glick places some of the blame at the Justice Department's doorstep too, but she places most of it with the Intelligence agencies and at the State Department:
Tuesday was a banner day, a proud day for Jewish conspiracy theorists in America. People like Joseph E. diGenova smiled with glee as they watched 84-year-old Ben Kadish carted into the Manhattan Federal District courthouse on charges of transferring classified information to Israel 25 years ago.
He's just like Jonathan Pollard, they whooped. Another Pollard! At last, we have proof that Israel operates spy rings and SLEEPER CELLS in America! They bragged and bragged and smiled and smiled as their terrorist metaphors got wilder and wilder.
Sleeper cells? You mean agents sent to a country to lay in wait for the command to attack? Well, not exactly.
DiGenova made his name as the federal prosecutor who railroaded Pollard into a life sentence for crimes that generally should have netted him no more than a few years in the slammer. Obviously he has a way with words. And when he told The New York Times "sleeper cells," apparently he was referring to the FBI agents who went to sleep for 23 years and then suddenly woke up and decided to cart an old man out of his nursing home and charge him with capital crimes.
...
Most Israeli commentators and unnamed government officials angrily allege that the timing of Kadish's arrest was chosen to damage Israel's relations with the US at a key moment. In two weeks President George W. Bush is scheduled to visit Israel to participate in its 60th Independence Day celebrations. It has been widely presumed that during his visit, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government will seek to secure Bush's agreement to commute Pollard's sentence and release him from prison before Bush leaves office. Kadish, it is alleged, was arrested to block any possibility that Pollard will be released.
Given the vindictiveness that has marked the US intelligence community's attitude toward Pollard since his arrest, it is possible that fear of a presidential pardon did inform the decision to arrest Kadish now. And yet, it is far from clear that an agreement on Pollard's release was ever in the cards. Bush has expressed no willingness to consider Israeli appeals for his release and neither the Sharon government nor the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has made any real efforts to secure Pollard's freedom. Indeed, in a sign of their contempt for Pollard, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has Pollard's former handler, Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan, sitting in the security cabinet.
...
Kadish was arraigned the same day that the Los Angeles Times broke the story that CIA Director Michael Hayden would be briefing Congress on Thursday about Israel's September 6 air strike in Syria. For the past six months, the administration did everything it could to prevent any information on the Israeli air strike from getting out. In the end, Hayden was compelled to inform Congress about the details of the raid after the legislature conditioned its approval of the intelligence budget on receiving a full briefing on the air strike.
According to the Los Angeles Times report and subsequent stories, Hayden's testimony would acknowledge that US intelligence agencies failed to recognize the dangers of the North Korean-built plutonium reactor that Syria had constructed not far from its border with Turkey. It was Israeli, rather than American intelligence agencies that penetrated the facility, brought back video and physical evidence of its character, and then effectively destroyed it in a complicated air strike and commando raid.
So according to US media reports, Hayden's testimony would demonstrate two basic truths that the Jewish conspiracy theorists in the US intelligence community and the State Department are uninterested in having the public or Congress notice: Israeli intelligence is superior to US intelligence; and the US alliance with Israel is vital to US national security.
Since Israel's independence 60 years ago and especially since US-Israel strategic ties blossomed after the Six Day War, Washington has been of two minds about the Jewish state. The first, public mind is that Israel is the US's strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, and that the US-Israel alliance is strong because it is based on shared values as well as shared interests.
The second view is that Israel is a burden. As purveyors of this view see things, Israel is the national "Fagin." It is underhanded, pushy and untrustworthy. Indeed, as far as the anti-Semites in Washington are concerned, Israel is the source of all the US's difficulties in the Arab world and even in Europe.
For years, the purveyors of the second view have carried out an independent foreign policy regarding Israel that is completely at odds with the official US policy of embracing Israel as an ally. Indeed, the State Department has undermined every presidential attempt to treat Israel well since 1948.
As I argued last week, both Keinon and Glick see a connection between Kadish's arrest and President Bush's impending visit to Israel for the 60th Independence Day celebration. Here's Keinon again:
However, the proximity of the arrest to US President George W. Bush's visit to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary next month does have some Israeli officials wondering whether the two events might not, indeed, be connected.
"They could have waited and done this after the Bush visit," the official posited. He speculated - and at this point it is all speculation - that there were some in the US intelligence community who wanted to keep Bush from coming here, and either announcing the release of Pollard, something that has been whispered about for the last few months, or giving Israel too many birthday presents before he leaves office, something that had been discussed more seriously.
The official pointed out that it was the same intelligence community that last year produced the National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had ditched its nuclear weapons program in 2003 - conclusions which Jerusalem largely viewed as politically motivated to keep Bush from taking military action against Iran.
Among the "gifts" reportedly on the table and being discussed as Bush's parting gift to Israel are linking Israel to the American worldwide radar system that provides early warnings of any ballistic missile fired anywhere in the world; advanced models of the Joint Direct Attack Munition smart bombs, or JDAMs; the possibility of selling Israel the F-22 Raptor, a stealth fighter; integrating Israeli defense industries into the production of the Joint Strike Fighter; and the possibility of upgrading the US-Israel strategic alliance to include some kind of defense pact.
As a result of the Kadish case, there will now be those who will ask whether these types of "goodies" should be given to a country that spies on the US.
Glick argues that Israel needs to be a lot more aggressive in its relations with the US, and notes with bitter irony that NadaProuty, who penetrated both the FBI and the CIA on Hezbullah's behalf, is likely to get off with a six-month sentence.
By arresting an 84-year-old World War II veteran in an effort to place Israel under a cloud of suspicion as its military triumph in Syria is exposed to the American people, the US is sadly showing Israel once again that nice guys finish last. If Israel wants to be treated with respect by the US, the lesson of the Kadish affair, of the Syrian raid and of the Pollard affair is that Israel had better start pushing back.
The first thing it should do is arrest officials suspected of transferring classified materials to the US without authorization. It should then publish the names and details of US spies whom Israel previously caught and treated with kid gloves. Then it should publicly demand that Bush release Pollard from the prison where he rots, while the likes of Hizbullah agent Nada Prouty - who penetrated both the FBI and the CIA - is expected to receive a six-month prison sentence for her crimes.
When Bush arrives to celebrate Israel's 60th birthday, Israel's leaders would do well to show him that at 60, Israel is a grownup country. And as such, it demands to be treated with the respect due to the US's most reliable ally in the Middle East.
I agree with Keinon and Glick. There is no doubt that Israeli spies are treated differently by the US - and with disproportionate harshness - as compared with spies for anyone else. As Glick points out, the ridiculous arrest of two AIPAC lobbyists - which has been hanging over our heads for four years now has been used by the US to avoid Israeli demands that it do anything concrete to stop Iran. I know that some Americans are going to react with hostility to this post - I have seen enough of that on LGF this week. I'm not advocating that Israel spy on the US. I'm advocating a uniform standard of justice for those caught spying for Israel as compared with those caught spying for other countries and entities. It's clear to me that standard does not exist.
A would-be Palestinian suicide bomber has turned peace campaigner after being freed from prison. Shifa al-Qudsi volunteered to blow herself up to kill Israelis during the Palestinian intifada. Sky's Middle East correspondent, Dominic Waghorn, met her. Let's go to the videotape and then I'll have a couple of comments.
There are two problems here. First, there are very few Shifa al-Qudsi's. Most 'Palestinians' lionize the 'martyrs' and approve of the violence. Even those who don't, generally are sympathetic to the terrorists. The violence has become ingrained in 'Palestinian' culture. The odds of Shifa al-Qudsi affecting a significant number of 'Palestinians' are not good.
Second, there is no indication that she or anyone else among the 'Palestinians' are giving up on their maximalist demands. While many Israelis are ready for peace, they are only ready as part of a compromise. So far, it is only the Israelis who have been willing to give anything. There won't be peace until 'Palestinians' understand that in an agreement neither side gets everything it wants. Sadly, no 'Palestinian leader' has conditioned his 'people' for that possibility.
There's a great article about Jimmy Carter in today's Wall Street Journal by Bernard Henri Levy, who apparently was at one time sympathetic to Carter (Hat Tip: Hot Air).
So what happened to this man, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?
Is it the vanity of someone who is no longer so important, who wants a last 15 minutes in the spotlight before he has to leave the stage forever?
Is it the senility of a politician who has lost touch with reality and with his own party? Barack Obama, even more clearly than his rival, has just reminded us that it will not be possible to "sit down" with the leaders of Hamas unless they are prepared to "renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and respect past agreements."
Could he be suffering from a variant of self-hatred, or in this case a hatred of his own past as the Great Peacemaker?
All hypotheses are permitted. Whatever the reason, Mr. Carter has demonstrated an unusual capacity to transform a political error into a disastrous moral mistake.
I'm a lot less sympathetic to Carter. I believe that his undoing has been his going out of his way to hate Israel and the Jewish people. That's the only explanation for behavior like this, as described by Levy.
It is one thing to say, in Dublin on June 19, 2007, that the true criminals are not those who proclaim, like Mashaal, that "before dying" Israel must be "humiliated and degraded," but those who would prefer that these charming characters be pushed out of the circles of power, sooner or later, with a distinct preference for "sooner." It is quite another to come over in person and put all one's weight behind the most radical elements, those who are the most hostile to peace, the most profoundly nihilistic in the Palestinian camp.
I don't agree with everything Levy says in his article. For example, he thinks that eventually it's necessary to talk to Hamas; I believe that if we ever talk to the 'people' in Hamas it can only be after a radical transformation of their tactics and value system. But it's well worth your while to read the whole thing.
ElBaradei leaps into action, slams the US and Israel
The feckless Mohamed ElBaradei (pictured below), whose Nobel 'Peace' Prize winning agency still cannot find nuclear weapons development in Iran, came to the defense of the 'Syrian brothers' on Friday, attacking the United States and Israel for not letting his toothless agency in on the 'secret' earlier.
The head of the UN nuclear monitoring agency on Friday criticized the US for not giving his organization intelligence information sooner on what Washington says was a nuclear reactor in Syria being built secretly by North Korea.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei also chastised Israel for bombing the site seven months ago, in a statement whose strong language reflected his anger at being kept out of the picture for so long.
...
"The director general deplores the fact that this information was not provided to the agency in a timely manner, in accordance with the agency's responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to enable it to verify its veracity and establish the facts," the statement said.
Additionally, "the director general views the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the nonproliferation regime," it said.
Israel is not a member of the NPT and is therefore not required to share intelligence with the IAEA. And given that the reactor was within a few weeks of going online, no one has the time for ElBaradei's "inshallah" attitude that has allowed the Iranian situation to drag out for years.
The alleged reactor was within weeks or months of being functional when IAF jets destroyed it, a top US official told The Associated Press in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The official said the facility was mostly completed but still needed significant testing before it could have been declared operational.
As to ElBaradei's criticism of the US, my understanding is that the US was not allowed to release the information that led to the strike to anyone without Israel's consent.
Tom Friedman is one of my least favorite New York Times columnists. Yesterday, Friedman spoke at Brown University in Rhode Island, and two 'environmental activists' gave him the pie in the face treatment.
In the early 1990's, Yitzchak Rabin referred to leftist politician Yossi Beilin (pictured), then an MK of his own Labor party, as "[Shimon] Peres' poodle." Beilin is currently an MK from the far left Meretz party. Here's the part of his bio that makes him anathema to much of the Israeli right:
Beilin's association with the peace process is the most notable element in his career. Backed by Shimon Peres, he initiated secret negotiations (then illegal according to Israeli law) in 1992 which led to the Oslo accords in 1993. Together with Mahmoud Abbas, another architect of the Oslo accords, he signed in 1995 the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement, a 'non paper' of guidelines for a permanent solution to the conflict. During 1992-1995 he headed the Israeli delegation to the Multilateral peace process working groups. In 2001 he participated in the Israeli-Palestinian Taba talks and, the initiative that he is currently most famed for, signed the Geneva Accords with Yasser Abd Rabbo.
Beilin is one of the few politicians in Israel who continues to openly support the discredited Oslo Accords.
Yesterday, Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Gillerman made headlines by calling former US President Dhimmi Carter a bigot (Hat Tip: Hot Air).
Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, "went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas," Ambassador Dan Gillerman told a luncheon briefing for reporters.
In fact, Gillerman said even more:
The ambassador called last weekend's encounter "a very sad episode in American history."
He said it was "a shame" to see Carter, who had done "good things" as a former president, "turn into what I believe to be a bigot."
Telephone calls by The Associated Press to two Atlanta numbers for Carter were not immediately returned Thursday.
During Carter's visit, Gillerman said, Hamas "was shelling our cities and maiming and injuring and wounding Israeli babies and Israeli children."
The ambassador noted that Hamas is armed and trained by Iran, whose president once called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."
"The real danger, the real problem is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the real threat is Iran," he said.
Now the Poodle, Yossi Beilin, is demanding that Gillerman be recalled from his position in New York:
"It is Gilman's [sic] prerogative to criticize Carter," Beilin said. "However, Israel has is perpetually indebted to a person who saved many Israeli lives by bringing peace with Egypt with his own hands."
Beilin is far enough outside the Israeli consensus and Carter is so reviled here for meeting with Hamas, that I believe that Beilin will be ignored.
CIA says it was a nuclear reactor; Syrian ambassador to US denies it
The CIA told the House Intelligence Committee yesterday that the building that Israel bombed in Syria in September was a nuclear reactor that was "not intended for peaceful purposes." I have two videos for you below. The first is an al-Reuters video that shows some of the images that were shown to Congress yesterday. The second is a CNN interview with Syrian ambassador to the US Imad Mustapha, in which Mustapha denies that Syria was building a nuclear plant.
Decide for yourselves whom to believe. I don't believe that was an empty building that was bombed last September (as Mustapha claims) given the reactions.
And again: 'Palestinian' terrorists murder two Jews at Nitzane Shalom
Unfortunately, there was yet another 'Palestinian' terror attack on Friday morning. 'Palestinian' terrorists murdered two Israeli Jews in their 50's at the Nitzane Shalom ("Buds of Peace") industrial complex near Tulkarm in northwestern Samaria Friday morning. Tulkarm is at the point where pre-1967 Israel is at its narrowest - about nine kilometers from the coastal town of Netanya.
According to the preliminary investigation, at least one terrorist arrived at one of the factories in the complex and opened fire at the two.
The gunmen had initially intended to infiltrate Israel but returned to the industrial complex after they were unable to penetrate the security barrier, Army Radio reported.
The two men, in their 50s, were declared dead by an MDA team that was called to the area. They were security guards at one of the factories.
Itzik Mimran, an MDA paramedic, was one of the first to arrive on the scene.
"When we arrived there were two casualties," he told Channel 10. "One of the senior medics reported that one of the casualties was dead, and that another was wounded. We immediately initiated advanced resuscitation, but sadly he died."
The two had weapons on their person, Mimran said.
The Nitzane Shalom complex was built in 1995. It houses nine factories that provide jobs to many Palestinians from the West Bank.
In other words, the complex is part of Shimon Peres' plan to give the 'Palestinians' an income so they won't be interested in committing acts of terror anymore. Right....
Haaretz adds that security forces believe that the terrorists came from Islamic Jihad. Hang on a little bit: I'm sure that the 'good terrorists' of Fatah were involved somehow.
Sources said the terrorists planned a mass murder at the factory, located in the city’s [the factory is actually in Nitzanei Oz, a small town on the 'green line' and the current northern terminus of Highway 6. CiJ] Nitzanei Shalom [Buds of Peace] industrial zone. After murdering the two men, however, the terrorist entered the building only to discover that he was alone, because all the workers were on vacation for the Passover holiday.
Security sources said it is believed the terrorists came from Tulkarm, which the Israeli government transferred to PA control within the framework of the Oslo Accords.
On August 1, 2002, Shani Ladni, a truck driver who frequented the same industrial zone was murdered there a short time after the Defense Ministry removed a curfew on Tulkarm as a confidence-building gesture to the PA, which enabled the terrorists to launch the attack. [So this attack is deja vu all over again. CiJ]
The Nitzanei Shalom Industrial Park was one of nine industrial zones established in 1995 to help provide work for Arabs in Judea and Samaria. Currently there are seven factories in Nitzanei Shalom, which produce cartons, plastic parts, exterminator sprays and other items. Some 700 Arabs are employed in the complex.
And you can bet those factories are heavily subsidized by Israel too.
UPDATE 12:55 PM
On its noontime news magazine, Israel Radio reported on the claims of responsibility for this morning's terror attack. I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear that responsibility has been taken by two unknown groups, one of which is a branch of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the 'armed wing' of the 'good terrorists' from Fatah.
On the Jewish holidays of Pesach (Passover) and Sukkot (Tabernacle), nearly everyone in Israel - or at least in Jerusalem - is off from work, and during Chol HaMoed, the Intermediate Days of the holiday, we are often hard-pressed to keep the children entertained. Because we are a large family by most people's standards, we look for things that are either free (a rarity in Jerusalem) or that have a family rate. In recent years, we are spending more and more time in Jerusalem's Old City. In fact, we were there yesterday and today.
We had three activities in the Old City today. We saw archaeological excavations from six houses in the Jewish Quarter that date back to the First Temple Period. Then we went to a museum which shows how the Jews in the Old City were defeated in 1948, and were expelled from the Old City. And then we saw a sound and light show on the walls of the Old City, outside Jaffa Gate. I want to make a couple of brief comments about the last two activities.
Most of the history that you read about the 1948 War gives the impression that the Haganah - which is what eventually became the IDF - fought to retain the Old City. The movie presentation we saw in the museum today indicates that wasn't exactly the case. The Old City's defenders - mostly a ragtag group of kids - at one point captured the highest British lookout point in the Old City from which they could dominate it. The Haganah ordered them to give it up, because it was a church. Once it was given up, the situation of the Jews in the Old City deteriorated until their eventual defeat. That attitude continued in the 1967 War. In Michael Oren's seminal work Six Days of War, he describes how Defense Minister Moshe Dayan opposed capturing the Old City. Dayan wasn't the only one. Much of the country's leadership did not want to have to 'deal with' the Holy City. But until today I did not know that the Haganah had actually ordered the City's defenders to worsen their position in 1948.
The sound and light show is a special presentation that is only for this week (as of now). It is NOT the one many of you might have seen at David's Citadel. It was done quite professionally. But here's the catch. When they discuss the Old City's liberation in 1967, they talk about how they returned to the Kotel (Western Wall - that link is to a live webcam by the way) and how they were all thrilled to see the Kotel and they draped the flag over the Kotel and how we dreamed about the Kotel for 3000 years.
I love the Kotel and it's the holiest place I go to pray (my Rabbis rule that I cannot go on the Temple Mount due to ritual impurity). I was there yesterday and God willing I plan to be there tomorrow. But it's fairly certain today that the Kotel is the outer wall of the Temple Mount and not of the Temple itself. The presentation is a lie. As the narrator described the soldiers screaming "Hakotel b'yadeinu" (the Wall is in our hands) on June 7, 1967, you could hear the truth on a radio broadcast in the background if you knew what to listen for: "Har HaBayit b'Yadeinu" (the Temple Mount is in our hands). That flag was put up on the Temple Mount in 1967 until Moshe Dayan made them take it down. But no one will say that today, except me and my right wing friends.
The good news is that the sound and light show concentrates mostly on the Old City and on Israel's connection to it. I'm sure that was done as a message to those who would divide our Holy City. I doubt they heard the message.
Israel gave US video of North Koreans inside Syrian reactor
The Washington Post reported Thursday morning that Israel gave the United States a video of North Korean technicians inside a Syrian nuclear reactor before Israel destroyed the reactor in September 2007. That video is to be shown to lawmakers as part of a presentation to be made to them on Thursday regarding the reactor.
A video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping to construct a reactor similar to one that produces plutonium for North Korea's nuclear arsenal, according to senior U.S. officials who said it would be shared with lawmakers today.
The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel's decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.
Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core's design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows "remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon," a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video "very, very damning."
Nuclear weapons analysts and U.S. officials predicted that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's planned disclosures to Capitol Hill could complicate U.S. efforts to improve relations with North Korea as a way to stop its nuclear weapons program. They come as factions inside the administration and in Congress have been battling over the merits of a nuclear-related deal with North Korea.
Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha yesterday angrily denounced the U.S. and Israeli assertions. "If they show a video, remember that the U.S. went to the U.N. Security Council and displayed evidence and images about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I hope the American people will not be as gullible this time around," he said.
U.S. officials said that Israel shared the video with the United States before the Sept. 6 bombing, after Bush administration officials expressed skepticism last spring that the facility, visible by satellite since 2001, was a nuclear reactor built with North Korea's assistance. Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal that it has never declared.
But beginning today, intelligence officials will tell members of the House and Senate intelligence, armed services and foreign relations committees that the Syrian facility was not yet fully operational and that there was no uranium for the reactor and no indication of fuel capability, according to U.S. officials and intelligence sources.
I believe that now I understand why Israel is really upset over this Congressional briefing. It has nothing to do with its potential to embarrass Assad. Someone took that video, and quite likely they took it out in the open. Israel is afraid of that intelligence source (and possibly others) in Syria being compromised. It would be a shame for Israel to lose intelligence sources because a bunch of Senators and Representatives have Bush Dementia Syndrome.
I have often expressed discomfort about the people who hang around with Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama, be they 'supporters' or 'foreign policy advisers.' But in the past three days, four major blogs have done posts that tie Obama in with terrorists and their sympathizers. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Power Line reports on Obama's connections with former Weather Underground members William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs). Those names probably don't mean much to those of you who are under 50, but people of my generation recognize those names immediately. John Hinderaker points out why Obama's excuse in this case doesn't fly:
In last week's Pennsylvania debate, Barack Obama was finally asked about his friendship with, and the political support he has accepted from, Ayers and Dohrn. Obama replied that Ayers had done reprehensible things forty years ago, when Obama was eight years old, and scoffed at the idea that Ayers's ancient history could be relevant. That was disingenuous, of course, given Ayers's 2001 regrets.
It turns out that we don't have to go back as far as 2001 to find that Obama's friends are as unrepentant as ever. Just last year, Ayers and Dohrn attended a reunion--no kidding--of what must have been the tiny remnant of SDS members who still haven't figured out that they were wrong about everything. Listen to what Bill Ayers, who hosted Barack Obama's first fundraiser, has to say about the United States. Not when Obama was eight years old, but in 2007:
Read the whole thing and listen to the audios. It's shocking for a Presidential candidate to be associating with these kinds of people.
At The Jawa Report, Rusty blogs a FrontPageMagazine article in which one of Obama's 'Palestinian' terror supporters is exposed: Hatem el-Hady.
Two years ago, Hatem El-Hady was the chairman of the Toledo, Ohio-based Islamic charity, Kindhearts, which was closed by the US government in February 2006 for terrorist fundraising and all its assets frozen. Today, El-Hady has redirected his fundraising efforts for his newest cause - Barack Obama for President.....
"KindHearts is the progeny of Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, which attempted to mask their support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable giving," said Stuart Levey, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
Not only was Kindhearts engaged in providing funds for HAMAS in Lebanon and the West Bank, it had hired as a fundraising specialist the man identified as the designated HAMAS bag man in the US, Mohammed El-Mezain.
CJ [the ubiquitous Charles Johnson. CiJ] points out that Michelle Obama is listed as a friend of el-Hady and concludes that :
In other words, Michelle Obama’s name isn’t there because El-Hady put it there — it’s there because she chose to be listed as his friend.
...
Nevertheless, this is part of a general pattern: those who support terrorism also support Obama. Obama isn't responsible for every scumbag that supports him, but his stated goal of withdrawing from Iraq meshes perfectly with those of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations; and for a guy like el-Hady, his stated willingness to talk to the terrorists in Hamas and their paymasters in Iran, Obama would definitely be the candidate of choice.
Terrorists and their supporters tend to view Obama as a man willing to give them at least some of what they want.
And over at Gateway Pundit, Jim has video and more of the Obama campaign in Gaza. That's right, in Gaza. Check it out!
The fourth blog is Little Green Footballs, which is always on this story (linked twice above).
Libyan ambassador compares Gaza to Nazi concentration camp, 5 walk out
At the end of a long speech in the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, the Libyan ambassador compared the situation in the Gaza Strip to Nazi concentration camps. Five ambassadors - the United States, Britain, France (!), Belgium (!) and Costa Rica walked out of the room, and the current Council President ended the meeting. Yes, Virginia, pigs can fly!
According to several diplomats, Libya's deputy UN Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi ended a long speech about the plight of the Palestinians by comparing the situation in Gaza to the concentration camps set up by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews. Some 6 million Jews and between 220,000 and 500,000 Gypsies were killed during the Nazi Holocaust.
Immediately after Dabbashi mentioned the concentration camps, diplomats said, French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff, Britain's deputy ambassador Karen Pierce, Belgian Ambassador Johan Verbeke and Costa Rica's deputy ambassador walked out of the council's consultation room.
South Africa's UN Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, the current council president, then ended the meeting.
"We support the South African presidency's decision to close the meeting," Britain's Pierce said in a statement. "A number of council members were dismayed by the approach taken by Libya and do not believe that such language helps advance the peace process."
Kumalo would not confirm the walkout, saying "ambassadors always walk in and out" of council meetings.
"It was very clear that we weren't going to agree (on a statement), as we haven't on many other occasions when we've tried, so there was no need to keep us in," he said, adding that some members wanted the council to address the humanitarian situation "which is horrible" while others insist on including the underlying political and security issues.
Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari, who is not a Security Council member, told reporters afterwards that he agreed with Libya's characterization of the situation in Gaza.
"We have many times compared this situation - I mean the one prevailing in the occupied Palestinian territories - to the situation in Europe during World War II," he said. "Unfortunately, those who complain of being victims of some kind of genocide are repeating the same kind of genocide against the Palestinians."
Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the situation in Gaza, accused the IDF of perpetrating "atrocious crimes against humanity ... resulting in the death and injury of hundreds of Palestinians."
In the letter, obtained Wednesday by the Associated Press, he urged Ban "to take all necessary measures in order to stop the inhumane actions of the Zionist regime, and to help alleviate the sufferings of the Palestinian people."
"There is no doubt that the continuation of this genocide and actual holocaust will bring about dangerous ramifications for the peace, stability, tranquility and security of the volataile region of the Middle East and the whole world at large," Mottaki warned.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Mottaki said "the question arises for the nations across the globe as to why the Zionist regime ... has been allowed to continue to be a member of the United Nations."
The real question is what right the United Nations has to continue to exist. It serves no useful purpose.
Maybe Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert's ridiculous offer on the Golan Heights this evening is just to try to save Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from embarrassment. At Hot Air, Captain Ed blogs a Los Angeles Times report on expected congressional testimony by the CIA tomorrow. The bottom line: Israel prevented yet another Arab country from acquiring nuclear weapons last fall.
CIA officials will tell Congress on Thursday that North Korea had been helping Syria build a plutonium-based nuclear reactor, a U.S. official said, a disclosure that could touch off new resistance to the administration’s plan to ease sanctions on Pyongyang.
The CIA officials will tell lawmakers that they believe the reactor would have been capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons but was destroyed before it could do so, the U.S. official said, apparently referring to a suspicious installation in Syria that was bombed last year by Israeli warplanes.
The CIA officials also will say that though U.S. officials have had concerns for years about ties between North Korea and Syria, it was not until last year that new intelligence convinced them that the suspicious facility under construction in a remote area of Syria was a nuclear reactor, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing plans for the briefing.
...
This answers a question that really hadn’t generated much doubt. Israel doesn’t usually risk air strikes into hostile Arab nations unless the stakes are significant. Even more revealing, Syria didn’t register any strenuous public objections after the clearly provocative attack on its nation. That could only mean that Syria had something so important to hide that it didn’t want international attention drawn to the site. That either meant a nuclear-weapons site or Saddam’s missing WMD.
Now we have our answer. It looks like Israel prevented another Osirak from completion, and with it a deadly shift in the balance of power in the Middle East.
The JPost reports that Israel is afraid that the Congressional testimony will 'embarrass' Assad.
Top defense officials expressed concern Wednesday that the details revealed in the congressional hearing would "embarrass" Syrian President Bashar Assad - who has refused to confirm reports on the nature of the site - and might create pressure from within his regime to respond militarily against Israel.
"Syria thinks it owes us for what happened in September," a senior Israeli defense official said, adding that the congressional hearing could also force Assad to reject peace talks with Israel to show leadership in the face of growing internal criticism.
"His public embarrassment will minimize the chances of him responding positively to the idea of peace talks with Israel," another official said.
So Olmert wanted to save Assad from 'embarrassment' and he did it - once again - by playing fast and loose with Israel's security.
I started to write this post as speculation - the title originally had a question mark at the end. But another JPost article confirms my suspicions.
One Israeli diplomatic official said that in a country where the press is very tightly controlled, it was necessary to ask why the Syrians had an interest in letting the story [about Olmert offering to give the Golan to Syria. CiJ] out now.
The official speculated that the reason may be linked to the congressional hearings in Washington scheduled for tomorrow, in which US Intelligence officials are widely expected to testify that North Korea was helping Syria build a plutonium-fueled reactor prior to Israel's strike on Syria on September 6.
According to this official, Syria - by raising expectations of some kind of possible deal with Israel - was trying to divert attention from that testimony, which is likely to harden congressional attitudes even further against Damascus.
Game, set and match.
I'm sure both Israel's and Syria's opposition will be thrilled to hear that Olmert is propping up the Assad regime.
From August 31 to September 7, 2001, the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa. Don't let the lofty goals on the conference's web site fool you about what went on there. The conference was all about bashing Jews and Israel. Four days later, four planes were hijacked in the United States. Two of them went crashing into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and a fourth was brought down by its passengers in a field in Western Pennsylvania killing all aboard. The timing was no coincidence.
The United States and Israel walked out of the conference in disgust. Here's why:
Given the history of anti-Israel proclamations from the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, and the hate-filled anti-Israel environment of the previous U.N. Conferences, we did not ready ourselves to go to Durban with our eyes closed. While we continued to participate in White House-sponsored town meetings across the U.S., presenting ADL programs as "best practices" for implementation in other countries, it became clear from the draft declaration that Durban would not begin a new chapter in the fight against racism, but retread old anti-Israel canards. One again charges of "Zionism equals racism," accusations of Israel of being an apartheid state and of practicing "ethnic cleansing" would be the mantra. The Palestinian experience is equated with the Holocaust even as the draft declaration diminishes the Holocaust. UN Human Rights Commissioner and conference organizer Mary Robinson claimed that this would be a "forward looking" gathering. In practice, this theatrical showcase for haters of Israel sets the fight against racism and discrimination backwards.
The reports from ADL representatives monitoring the proceedings in Durban confirmed our worst fears. Participants in this week's NGO Forum and Youth Summit were bombarded with unbridled statements and demonstrations of hate aimed at Jews, Israel, Zionism, and the U.S. With support from conference organizers and panel moderators, NGO speakers ignored their own agendas to digress into familiar Israel bashing and baiting. Jewish students distributing flowers while singing "all we are saying is give peace a chance" were drowned out by a large crowd holding Palestinian flags and banners, denouncing "Israeli apartheid" and calling for a continuation of the Intifada. Even a modest attempt by the Jewish organizations in Durban from around the world to present their concerns in a press conference were interrupted by protesters shouting anti- Israel epithets.
Now the newly revamped 'Human Rights Council,' which has already shown itself to be as bad or worse than its predecessor, is planning a second Durban Conference - to follow up on the first one. The conference will take place next year. And the 'Human Rights Council' is planning it this week and next in Geneva. You are about to see two videos from the planning session - one from Monday and one from Tuesday. In the Monday video, you will see the 'preparatory committee' spend 3/4 of the first day debating accreditation of a Jewish NGO - the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA). Don't worry - it's condensed into a few minutes! In the end, no decision has been made yet on this NGO and the question will be taken up again this coming Monday, with the 'planning conference' already more than half over.
In the second (Tuesday) video, you will see Eye on the UN director Anne Bayefsky courageously lambaste the 'Human Rights Council' for following the previous conference's agenda of hatred and anti-Semitism. Let's go to the videotapes:
If you haven't seen it already, you may also wish to see this ad (pdf), which appeared in several major newspapers across the United States on April 3.
Olmert agrees to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights? UPDATE - Syria confirms the offer
Al Shams, an independent Damascus-based website, reported Wednesday that Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert has informed Damascus via a third party that Israel is willing to conduct a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for peace with Syria. According to the report, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan informed President Bashar Assad of Israel's position. Erdogan is expected to visit Damascus on Saturday. In a recent interview, Olmert said he hoped his efforts concerning Syria would soon be realized but failed to reveal details. No Israeli Prime Minister has ever offered Syria the entire Golan Heights. In 2000, negotiations with Syria fell apart when then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak insisted on retaining a small strip of land around the Sea of Galilee.
Let's go to the videotape.
When the circusKnesset convenes after its spring break, legislation will be introduced to try to block Olmert.
House Committee chairman David Tal made the announcement in response to Syrian reports that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had relayed messages to Damascus via Turkey that he would be willing to give up the entire Golan in return for peace. The bill, originally sponsored by former Kadima MK Avigdor Yitzhaki, already passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset plenum.
"We have to prevent political thievery that would result in abdicating the Golan," Tal said. "Withdrawing from the Golan would result in Hizbullah terrorists entering the area and embittering the lives of the residents of northern Israel."
Right-wing MKs reacted to the reports by bashing Olmert, who ironically is currently vacationing in the Golan with his family. The opposition started gathering signatures Wednesday to force Olmert to cut his vacation short and attend a special Knesset session on the Syrian issue during the recess.
National Union-National Religious Party MK Effi Eitam (NU-NRP), himself a resident of the Golan, urged Olmert to speak to residents and tourists in the area while he is there so he could hear from them that he would have no support to withdraw from the region.
"The people of Israel are with the Golan, and they will not let him return it to Syria," Eitam said. "Olmert is abandoning the security of Israel in an attempt to present voters with some kind of diplomatic achievement and for that, he is willing to concede our rights to security on the northern border, which we have enjoyed for more than 40 years."
A surprising reaction came from Ze'ev Elkin, Olmert's colleague in Kadima, who said "unfortunately the prime minister, as usual, is playing games with the Israeli public and the international community by releasing trial balloons and scattering promises that he cannot keep."
Elkin, who is one of Olmert's toughest critics inside Kadima, said "just like he did when he spoke of dividing Jerusalem, a haphazard withdrawal from the Golan is also something the PM doesn't have support for, either in the Knesset or within his party."
"It's very unfortunate that Olmert is raising expectations and the State of Israel will have to pay a heavy price in years to come, [a price] that will harm its security and not bring peace," Elkin added.
More reactions from the clownsKnesset membershere.
Elkin is probably right. The problem is that these 'trial balloons' become the expectations of the 'international community' and leave Israel under pressure to carry them out.
Syria confirmed Wednesday that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had relayed messages to Damascus via Turkey that he would be willing to give up the entire Golan in return for peace.
"Olmert is ready for peace with Syria on the grounds of international conditions; on the grounds of the return of the Golan Heights in full to Syria," Expatriates Minister Buthaina Shaaban told Al Jazeera television.
The Prime Minister's office refused to respond to the report, neither confirming nor denying that such an offer was made. [In Olmert's case, that's a confirmation. CiJ]
Moments earlier, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said that if Israel is serious and wants peace, nothing will stop the renewal of peace talks.
Moallem was speaking at a press conference in Teheran after meeting his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki.
"If Israel is seriously committed to withdrawing to the June 4 lines and is interested in peace, there is nothing preventing a renewal of negotiations," said Moallem, stressing that such peace talks "must not negatively influence the peace process with the Palestinians." [Please note that in the case of Syria, the "June 4" (1967) lines are considerably less favorable to Israel than the 1949 armistice lines. CiJ]
He added that the proposed peace negotiations should not be exploited in order to tighten the blockade on the Gaza Strip or to continue attacks against Palestinians in Gaza.
British family still insists on extraditing Israeli soldier
James Miller was a photographer who was killed by Israeli troops while filming in the Gaza Strip in May 2003. Miller was filming a documentary in the Philadelphi corridor (see map) at the time of his death. That's him at the front of the picture below. I discussed the case - and the British demand that the soldier who killed Miller be extradited to Britain for trial - extensively here. Ironically, the soldier who killed Miller is not Jewish.
On Tuesday, Haaretz reported that the IDF has reached a settlement with the British government in which the Israeli government will pay 1.5 million pounds (about $3 million) compensation to the Miller family in exchange for the British government dropping the extradition request.
According to a government source, serious progress has recently been made between the Miller family and Israeli authorities. The Millers had persistently asked for a sum of over 3 million pounds sterling but recently agreed to settle for half. In the wake of deliberations involving the Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, Finance Ministry and the IDF, Israeli authorities decided to accept the Millers' proposal.
Besides talks with the family, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni also held negotiations on the matter with the British government. During talks, Israel demanded that the U.K. withdraw its intent to ask for the extradition of the soldiers involved, so they could be tried in Britain, in return for Israel agreeing to pay compensation to the Millers. British officials responded by saying that they would freeze legal procedures if the family was indeed compensated.
Israeli officials, however, were adamant that the case would not become a legal precedent. "The compensation deal is reasonable. We also reached an understanding that the legal aspect has been settled," an Israeli source said. "The issue isn't over yet, but we're very close. The affair burdened our relations with the U.K. and we are glad that the family and the British government are willing to reach a deal."
But the report below from the pro-'Palestinian' Press TV network indicates that the Miller family is not yet willing to settle. It's not clear to me whether that's because they're not willing to accept the offer, or whether because they doubt that the Israeli government will actually pay the compensation. Watch the report, and then I'll be back with a couple of comments.
In 2003, Israel was much less adept at handling these kinds of incidents than is apparently now the case, as shown by the handling of the Shana case the week before last. While I'd be very unhappy to see Israel pay any compensation in this case, the government also cannot allow itself to be put in the position of extraditing soldiers. As I noted in my comments about this case last summer,
Israel cannot be in a position where it extradites IDF troops to face trials in other countries for actions taken while in IDF uniform. Israel may have no choice but to try the IDF officer involved again. Unfortunately, should he be acquitted, we can count on our own leftists not to accept the trial's results. I believe that the IDF officer probably shot the cameraman by mistake, which is why the inquiry found him 'not responsible' for the cameraman's death. 'Palestinians' come out with white flags and start shooting all the time. The mainstream media and the West cannot or will not understand that.
Of course, if compensation is paid, I assume there will be no second trial here. In any event, we must be much more aggressive than we were in 2003 in presenting our positions and in showing the world the reality of 'Palestinian' terror.
In Wednesday's Haaretz, Amir Oren assures us of what should be obvious based on his being released on personal recognizance (albeit with his passport having been taken and his travel restricted to New Jersey and lower Manhattan): Ben Ami Kadish is definitely not another Jonathan Pollard.
If the suspicions against Kadish are proven, he will be far from being Jonathan Pollard, even though his activities are believed to have preceded Pollard's. The arrest warrant issued against Kadish Tuesday does not name any payment, so unlike Pollard, it seems he was a volunteer. Compared with the wholesale transfer of documents by Pollard to his handlers during less than a year and a half of espionage, Kadish was small time, believed to have taken dozens of documents from the library at Picattiny Arsenal over the past six years.
Yossi Yagur - not his real name - the scientific attache at the consulate in New York who was one of Pollard's handlers, is suspected of involvement with Kadish as well. Yagur did not run a ring of spies, and it is reasonable to think that each spy operated on his own.
The Pollard affair, like the current one, was part of the work of the Bureau of Scientific Relations [called Lakam in Hebrew. CiJ], which was dismantled and absorbed into the defense establishment's bureau in charge of security.
The BSR grew out of Israel's nuclear activities, the secret construction of the Dimona reactor, and until 1981 was headed by Benjamin Bloomberg. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon replaced Bloomberg with Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad officer and an adviser to prime minister Menachem Begin on counterterrrorism. Eitan resigned after it emerged that BSR was involved in the Pollard affair.
But one thing the current story does have in common with the Pollard affair is that it is likely to be a cloud on US-Israel relations - and at a very critical time. This is Yossi Melman in Haaretz
One can draw a number of conclusions from this affair: To begin with, the memory of American law and justice is very long and will not leave alone a violation even if a quarter of a century has passed.
This is known to Colonel (res.) Aviam Sela, who was involved in the recruitment of Jonathan Pollard (a U.S. citizen jailed for spying for Israel), and Yaakov Nimrodi who was involved in the "Irangate" affair (the sale of weapons to Iran). Both of these men fear arrest in the United States should they travel there.
That's a pretty poor comparison. It's one thing to say that the US would arrest Sela and Nimrodi if they ever showed up there - and understandably and rightfully so. The US never had a shot at them. But Kadish has been living in the US most of his life, and has lived there constantly since 1985. If the US wanted to charge him, they have had more than ample opportunity to do so. Melman's next argument is a better one:
Another conclusion is that Israel's argument, that the handling of Jonathan Pollard was an exceptional and one-time event, has once again been proven incorrect.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that after the Pollard affair Israel ceased spying on the U.S. and pursuing technological espionage either - one of the identifying marks of Israel's illegal activities on U.S. soil in the 1970s and 1980s.
During those years, a number of Israelis and non-Israelis were arrested and investigated on suspicion of attempting to smuggle technology, equipment and information from the U.S. to Israel.
"The content is not the only interesting thing here," said Zalman Shoval, Israel's ambassador to Washington between 1998 and 2000. "There is also the timing. If this is such an old story, why is it coming out now?"
...
The concern in the defense establishment is that this affair could have far-reaching negative consequences, such as a dampening of relations with the Pentagon, which have only recently been normalized after going through a crisis in 2003 over Israeli defense ties with China.
This is of particular worry, since several important joint deals are currently on the table, including Israel's involvement in the Joint Strike Fighter program, and the integration of Israeli systems in the advanced stealth-enabled fighter jet. A new crisis with the Pentagon could cast a dark cloud over such deals and make Israel again persona non grata in the Pentagon.
Another possibility raised is that there are elements in Washington who do not approve of Israeli efforts to obtain the release of Pollard before President George W. Bush finishes his term in office. The exposure of another Israeli spy could put an end to that.
Pollard is one of my theories as well. Someone in the Pentagon wants to make sure that when Bush hands out pardons at the end of his Presidential term in a few months, Pollard isn't on the list. Now that Caspar Weinberger is no longer among the living, this is an easy way to perpetuate his legacy. In another JPost article, Esther Pollard - Jonathan's wife - claims that this story "plays into the hands" of those in Israel who don't want Jonathan Pollard released. I find that a bit hard to swallow.
Another possibility that occurred to me as to why Kadish was arrested now is that the alleged presence of an Israeli spy in the US Army hierarchy will be used to deny Israel the types of strategic cooperation that would be expected to be a quid pro quo for entering into risky 'peace' deals with the 'Palestinians' or with Syria - or for that matter against Iran. Having this type of case pending is likely to lower the level of Israeli demands from the US.
The JPost reports that Kadish admitted to the charges in court, saying that he 'wanted to help Israel.' According to the indictment, Kadish provided Yagur with between 50 and 100 documents between July 1980 and November 1985, but was in contact with Yagur as recently as Sunday. Kadish apparently met Yagur through Kadish's brother who works with Yagur at Israel Aircraft Industries (which - ironically - means that Kadish's brother also has Israeli security clearance).
In any event, the timing of this arrest is awfully suspicious, and Kadish is not being treated like one would expect him to be treated if anyone believed that he was really a spy who has ongoing contacts with his 'handlers.' I'd like to believe this will all blow over in a few months, but I fear it's only the beginning.
Video: 84-year old Ben Ami Kadish arraigned on espionage charges
Here's a video report on the arraignment of 84-year old Ben Ami Kadish on espionage charges in Manhattan today. I have more details here and here. Watch the video and then I'll have some further comments.
The correspondent's answer to why it's taken 23 years for the US government to indict Kadish is lame. Sorry, but it doesn't take that long to put together a case, especially when the guy is allegedly reporting to the same guy as the spy you sent up for life in 1986.
Given that Kadish was released on his own recognizance after posting a $300,000 bond (a small amount by today's American standards), I gather the US government doesn't consider him very dangerous either.
In a ruling handed down in January, the Bucharest Court of Appeal overturned an earlier order from October 2007 for the children, aged three and four, to be immediately returned to Israel and to their father's custody, under the terms of the International Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction.
The treaty, which has been signed by 77 states - including Israel and Romania - was designed to "insure the prompt return of children who have been abducted from their country of habitual residence or wrongfully retained in a contracting state not their country of habitual residence."
An initial judgment accepted the argument that the children - who lived in Israel until April 2006 - had been kept in Romania by their mother unlawfully. However, on appeal, two out of three Romanian judges in the case accepted the convention's clause regarding returning a child to a country at war or one that is considered a "serious risk" to the child's safety.
"[T]he judiciary authority of the requested state is not held to order the return of the child if the person opposing such return establishes that there is a serious risk that the return of the child would expose him/her to a physical or psychic danger or, in any other manner, would put the child in an intolerable situation," the two judges wrote in their January 7 verdict, a translated copy of which the Post has obtained.
"It is true that the globalization phenomenon entailed the globalization of the terrorism but, in the pending case, the Court analyzed the official reports on the area [to which the two children would have to return]."
"Taking into account the situation of armed conflicts existing in the area where the underage children lived [in Israel] with their mother," the Romanian judges decided, the children did not have to be returned to their father. The court document also referred to a January 2008 warning from the US State Department about clashes between Palestinians and the Israelis that could result in a [security] threat to the region. However, the third and presiding judge in the case disagreed with the danger argument, pointing out that terrorism was prevalent in many other countries today, too.
"This is a dangerous precedent," commented attorney Edwin Freedman, who has represented many clients in cases of international child abduction that fall under the Hague Convention and is currently acting as the father's local lawyer and adviser.
Freedman said that while the decision of the Bucharest Appeals Court could not be overturned and the case would not be reheard in Romania, it is possible that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg would put pressure on the Eastern European nation to reconsider its final ruling.
"In several other cases [worldwide] the argument [of being a country at war] has been raised, but immediately shot down," he said. "Only where Israel is concerned has this argument been accepted to date. I believe that Israel has become a target for this defense."
Video: 84-year old American arrested for giving military secrets to Israel over 20 years ago
Here's a lengthy report from MSNBC on the arrest of 84-year old Ben Ami Kadish for allegedly passing military secrets to Israel. More on this story here.
Here's a picture of Ben Ami Kadish. And here's a 2006 story about him from the New Jersey Jewish News (Hat Tip: NY Nana).
Streisand pulls out of Independence Day celebration; Bush under pressure to do the same
President Shimon Peres' office announced today that Barbara Streisand has pulled out of the 60th Independence Day celebrations next month.
Streisand was one of the big-name guests slated to appear at a festive Jerusalem convention hosted by President Shimon Peres beginning May 13. The American diva was supposed to perform a rendition of the Hebrew prayer Avinu Malkeinu, or Our Father Our King.
But Peres' office says Streisand has now announced she will not be coming. It says she gave no reason for the sudden cancellation.
The anniversary convention's guest list still includes heads of state like U.S. President George W. Bush and technology czars like Google founder Sergey Brin.
If anyone knows why Streisand pulled out, no one is saying - yet.
US President George Bush is also under pressure to pull out from Jordanian King Abdullah. And by 'our friends the Saudis' and 'our friends the Egyptians.'
According to the report, Abdullah will advise the American president not to come to Israel unless a real agreement is struck between Israel and the Palestinians, who are in the midst of a U.S.-backed peace process.
The diplomatic sources told al-Hayat that Abdullah's position has been adopted by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who have been holding intensive talks with Abdullah over recent days ahead of the Jordanian king's visit to Washington on Wednesday.
I can't wait to hear what kind of 'gestures' we have to make to get Bush to come.
American arrested for giving nuclear secrets to Israel
It's deja vu all over again.
Haaretz has a brief item from al-Reuters reporting that an American Jew has been arrested and charged with giving nuclear secrets to Israel in the 1980's.
U.S. authorities arrested an American engineer on Tuesday on suspicion of giving military secrets involving nuclear weapons, fighter jets and air defense missiles to Israel during the 1980s, the Justice Department said.
Ben-Ami Kadish, a Connecticut-born U.S. citizen who worked at an Army engineering center in New Jersey, was suspected of reporting to the same Israeli government handler who dealt with Jonathan Jay Pollard, who is serving a life term on a charge of spying for Israel.
Court papers say Kadish's spying lasted roughly from 1979 to 1985, and his contact with the unidentified Israeli handler continued until March of this year.
I don't buy this one. The 'contact continued with the unidentified Israeli handler' is a way of making sure that the statute of limitations doesn't go stale on it. If the US government really thinks this guy gave military secrets to Israel, why hasn't it arrested him since 1985? What were they waiting for?
UPDATE 8:32 PM
JPost has named Kadish's alleged 'handler.'
Channel 10 reported that Kadish's handler was Yosef Yagur - the former scientific attache at the Israeli consulate in New York City who connected Pollard to the Israeli intelligence establishment.
Investigators believe Kadish, who was born in Connecticut, took home secret documents and let the Israeli government worker photograph them. Prosecutors say it was the same consulate employee who received information from convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard.
Authorities contend the Kadish documents included information about nuclear weapons, a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet and the Patriot missile defense system.
A Defense Ministry official told the Jerusalem Post that the defense establishment had no knowledge of the affair and learned about it from the US media.
New York's Channel 7 is reporting that Yagur left the United States in November 1985 - the same month that Pollard was arrested - and has not returned since (Hat Tip: NY Nana). My comments above stand.
UPDATE 8:35 PM
Haaretz is now reporting that Kadish is 84-years old. This gets more ridiculous by the minute.
UPDATE 2:20 AM
This story has been updated with video here and here.
Why 'our friends in the Arab world' don't support the US on Iraq
This is a very revealing interview from Iraq's Al-Salam TV on April 7 with Iraqi Government Spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh. Look why Al-Dabbagh says that the other Arab countries won't have anything to do with Iraq. Hint: It has nothing to do with the 'Palestinians.'
Al-Qaeda's number 2 Ayman al-Zawahri dissed the 9/11 troofers today for claiming that the US and Israel were responsible for 9/11. He also dissed Hamas for considering a hudna with Israel (subject to a referendum, of course).
"As for peace agreements with Israel, they (Hamas) spoke of putting it to a referendum despite considering it a breach of the Sharia (Islamic law)," Zawahri said in a message posted on the Internet.
"How can they put a matter that violates Sharia to a referendum?" he added in the message, the second in a two-part series to answer about 100 questions put to him via online militant forums.
And Zawahri hopes to put his money where his mouth is:
"We promise our Muslim brothers we will do the best we can to harm Jews in Israel and the world over, with Allah's help and according to his command," Zawahri said then.
Carter had an 'exclusive interview' with Haaretz on Sunday (with Akiva Eldar, one of their most leftist writers) in which he tried to back up his claim that US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had not asked him not to meet with Meshaal. Like everyone else, Condi was too busy to speak with the aging Dhimmi.
"Before I went to Nepal, I put in a call for Condoleeza Rice just to have a personal conversation with her about my plans," Carter said. "I went over the entire itinerary. She could not take my call because she was traveling in Europe, so she asked David Welch, who is the assistant secretary of state. We had a 20-minute conversation, which was very pleasant, never a single negative word and not a single request that I modify my itinerary."
The Bush administration explicitly warned former US President Jimmy Carter against meeting with members of Hamas, said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Tuesday.
Attending a regional meeting on Iraq's security and future, Rice contradicted Carter's assertions that he never got a clear signal from the State Department. Rice told reporters that the US thought the visit could confuse the message that the US will not deal with Hamas.
"I just don't want there to be any confusion," Rice said. "The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help" further a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
In an interview with NPR, Carter said the State Department did not warn him off the trip. A State Department spokesman in Washington took issue with that on Monday, and Rice was blunter in her account Tuesday.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Condi, but I don't recall her ever lying. I don't think she's lying this time either.
The pride and joy of foreign minister TzipiFeigele Livni, her great diplomatic 'accomplishment' during the Second Lebanon War, backed down from a confrontation with Hezbullah last month when they found the group transporting a truck full of weapons across Lebanon.
The incident was referred to briefly in a semi-yearly report submitted to the UN Security Council by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. The incident was the first time that UNIFIL forces were confronted by armed Hezbollah men south of Lebanon's Litani River, an area which Security Council resolution 1701 prohibits Hezbollah from entering.
According to a government source in Jerusalem, the incident caused great embarrassment for UNIFIL. The source described the incident, explaining that UNIFIL troops on patrol discovered the truck and chased it down and pulled it over. When the UNIFIL troops approached the vehicle, the source said, armed Hezbollah men exited the truck and threatened the troops at gunpoint. The UNIFIL patrol then went back into their cars, according to the source, and returned to their base.
The report submitted to the Security Council said the incident occurred on the night between the 30 and 31 of March. "This serious violation of the UN resolution raises concerns," the report said.
The incident was not reported in the media at the time of its occurrence.
Israeli security officials believe that Hezbollah forces are usually found in areas where the organization enjoys centralized civilian support. There are many areas that answer to that description in south Lebanon because most of the residents in the south of the country are Shiite Muslims, who support Hezbollah.
Forgive me, but I'm impressed that they were patrolling at night at all. /sarc
But Arutz Sheva reports that the UNIFIL farce may soon be coming to an end. With the re-accession to power of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Italy is demanding that the rules of engagement be changed to be more realistic.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced last week that he would be reviewing the rules of engagement for the 2,500 Italian soldiers serving in the UN force, saying the troops were being prevented from reacting to certain situations. "We pledge our support for the strengthening of democracy (in Lebanon)," he said, "but we want to look at the rules of engagement. Our soldiers find themselves in a unique situation...because they cannot react. We will re-examine the rules of engagement."
The Hizbullah-led opposition in Lebanon warned against amending UNIFIL's rules of engagement, saying that it would change it into "occupation forces." The use of that language is meant to signal that Hizbullah terrorists would begin targeting UN forces in attacks.
"Any amendment would give the international forces the jurisdiction to use force and erect checkpoints outside its area of deployment," the statement said. "That would transcend on the Lebanese Army's authorities, and would change these forces' mandate from observing implementation of resolution 1701 to occupation forces."
And you know that the first time that UNIFIL troops are targeted by Hezbullah, they are going to run away faster than you can say Ban Ki-Moon.
Gazans bribing doctors to certify them 'seriously ill'
I don't know where the 'Palestinians' of Gaza got the idea that they have a right to medical treatment in Israel. With all of the billions of dollars the world community has lavished on them, their 'leaders' have had more than ample opportunity to build up a decent medical system in the Strip. If it mattered to Gazans enough that their 'leaders' have chosen guns rather than butter, they could have (and still can) thrown them out. But Gazans believe they have a right to medical care in Israel. And now they are using that invented 'right' to try to escape the blockade around Gaza even when they don't need medical treatment. Of course, no 'Palestinian' is going to help his 'people' for free, so they have to grease the doctors' hands a little bit. That's what Israel's General Security Service reported on Monday.
"Recently there has been an increase in the exploitation of Israel's humanitarian policy by way of fraudulent medical permits in return for bribes to doctors in the Gaza Strip," a Shin Bet spokesman told The Jerusalem Post. "This, plus the requests of terrorist activists to enter Israel for medical treatment, increases the danger to state security."
The statement came in response to the latest allegations by Physicians for Human Rights, which charged that since the beginning of April, the Shin Bet has been preventing 12 new cancer patients from receiving life-saving treatment in Israel. In addition to these 12, the Shin Bet had for several weeks been preventing dozens more, including cancer and heart patients, from passing through Israel on their way to treatment in Jordan and Egypt.
PHR charged that the Shin Bet response to requests for entry permits to Israel is complicated and takes a long time, and thereby ignores the urgency of the situation. The slow processing by the Shin Bet follows an already protracted process in the Palestinian committee that approves the requests and in the IDF Liaison Office, before the matter comes to the Shin Bet.
PHR also charged that the shuttling of patients who are barred from entering Israel directly to Egypt and Jordan did not work properly. They said the shuttle operated on an average of once every five weeks, that buses could not accommodate all the patients, so some were forced to wait, that many of the shuttles were canceled and that patients did not know when the next shuttle would be running.
"The Shin Bet and the army portray the shuttle service as a genuine solution for the distress of many patients, including cancer patients, and as a worthy alternative to their demands to enter Israel for treatment," wrote PHR. "In this way, a flawed and unsuccessful procedure becomes a fig leaf for the continuation of the Shin Bet's harmful policy towards the sick population of Gaza and as a tool for the state to portray its alleged 'humanitarian' policy towards them."
In its response to these charges, the Shin Bet added that the question of allowing sick Palestinians from the Gaza Strip into Israel cut across many authorities and was not the sole responsibility of the agency.
The spokesman said that in all 12 cases, the agency had given its replies to the requests long ago, and therefore could not be held responsible for any delays that followed.
For those of you who wonder why Physicians for Human Rights is not demanding that the 'Palestinians' be allowed direct access to Egypt, I would suggest that you go here. Yes, like everyone else, Physicians for Human Rights is just another tool in the battle against the Jewish state. And it's one that is probably largely supported by Jews.
Carter: 'More harm than good'; Olmert: Inconsistent as usual
The consensus among American and Israeli policy makers is that Dhimmi Carter's mission to our region, which ended on Monday, has done more harm than good. Here's the Israeli assessment
But, while [Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai, who met with Carter. CiJ] wanted to work with Carter, one government official said the former US president had done more harm than good, even with the promise of a new letter. The Schalit family had previously received a letter from their son last June.
According to this official, Hamas is dissatisfied that, despite holding Schalit for almost two years, they have not gotten what they want from the Israeli government - the release of high-profile terrorists - for his return.
In an attempt to pressure the Israeli public to pressure the government, Hamas is interested in opening up another negotiating track which bypasses Dekel and the government, and goes directly to the public.
Carter, the official said, serves this purpose, because the impression that things could move much faster if only another channel of communications were tapped is exactly the message Hamas wanted the Israeli public to hear.
The official said it was clear that Hamas was using Carter for its purposes, and that Mashaal, who knew far in advance that Carter was coming to Damascus to meet him, could very well have had a letter to give the former president from Schalit. It's all about shaping Israeli public opinion, the official said.
The official said that Hamas also used Carter to give it legitimization.
I believe that the US State Department would agree with that assessment.
In Washington, deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey brushed aside Hamas's offer, saying the group's past rhetoric contained "all this language about truces and other kinds of issues. But the bottom line is, Hamas still believes in the destruction of the state of Israel; they don't believe Israel has a right to exist," adding it was clear "that nothing has changed" in Hamas's attitude - including that the group still refuses to explicitly recognize Israel and denounce terrorism.
And indeed, Hamas' 'truce' offer was even less than it was cracked up to be:
Khaled Mashaal, whose group has sworn to destroy Israel, told reporters in Damascus on Monday that Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank with Israel as its neighbor, but stressed that his group would not formally recognize it, a move immediately dismissed by the US as meaningless.
"We agree to a (Palestinian) state on pre-67 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital with genuine sovereignty without settlements, but without recognizing Israel," Mashaal said."We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition."
Mashaal said he made the offer to Carter during talks between the two men on Friday and Saturday in the Syrian capital.
Mashaal used the Arabic word "hudna," meaning truce, which is more concrete than "tahadiyeh" - a period of calm - which Hamas often uses to describe a simple cease-fire. Hudna implies a recognition of the other party's existence.
A hudna [also known as a hudibiyya or khudaibiya] is a tactical cease-fire that allows the Arabs to rebuild their terrorist infrastructure in order to be more effective when the "cease-fire" is called off."
But the worst thing in all of this may be the performance of the Olmert-Barak-Livni government. Once again, Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert cannot make a decision and stick to it. Olmert decided not to let Defense Minister Ehud Barak meet with Carter, but he apparently did approve Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai of Shas meeting with Carter.
It is extremely unlikely that Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai could have met with former US president Jimmy Carter about kidnapped IDF soldier Cpl. Gilad Schalit without Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's tacit approval, a senior government source said Monday, following the second Yishai-Carter meeting on the matter in a week.
The source said Olmert's office had squashed Defense Minister Ehud Barak's original plans to meet Carter, and would have easily been able to do the same to Yishai's meeting had he wanted.
Instead, the official said, Olmert had an interest in the meeting taking place to "leave no stone unturned" in efforts to secure Schalit's release. [Some stones - like releasing terrorists - are better left unturned to protect other potential kidnap victims as well as the general population. This is typical Olmert weakness. CiJ].
Barak had at first agreed to meet with Carter, the source said, but then changed his mind after being asked to do so by the Prime Minister's Office.
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The source said that of all the cabinet members, Yishai was the most logical to meet with Carter regarding Schalit, since he could say that he was trying to carry out the religious imperative of redeeming captives ("pidyon shvuyim").
When asked whether Yishai's meeting with Carter had been done with Olmert's approval, or whether Yishai was Olmert's messenger, one senior official in the Prime Minister's Office responded by saying, "Yishai is expressing his own opinion. He is not expressing the opinion of the government or the prime minister."
Yishai's associates, meanwhile, vigorously denied that Olmert had intervened in his meetings with Carter. They said Olmert had not used him to send messages to Hamas or to Syrian President Bashar Assad, and that the prime minister had neither encouraged nor discouraged Yishai from meeting Carter.
Yishai has said for months that he was ready to meet Hamas, so he had no problem agreeing to meet with Carter, a source close to him said. "He thinks that it's better to confront people with abhorrent views rather than avoid them."
As to Yishai's motivation, I believe that National Union/National Religious Party MK Effie Eitam hit it on the head:
National Union MK Effi Eitam said Yishai's meetings with Carter were intended to distract the public and make it look like he was accomplishing something by keeping Shas in Olmert's coalition.
"It's all intended to justify the shame Yishai feels for remaining in a government that should have gone home a long time ago," Eitam said. "Shas's voters will remember this and take their revenge in the ballot box."
I hope Eitam is right about Shas' voters, but I doubt it.
Philadelphia Bulletin interview with Obama advisers
As I'm sure everyone in the US is aware - and probably most people here in Israel too - today is the Pennsylvania primary, which may yet decide whether the Democratic nominee for the Presidency will be Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama. If any of you happen to be voting in Pennsylvania and to be in doubt how to vote, perhaps this will help you out. It's an interview conducted by the Philadelphia Bulletin with Obama's middle east advisers in Washington, Howard Guttman and former Californian Congressman Mel Levine, along with another Obama Middle East aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Here are some excerpts:
1. How would a President Obama relate to the security threat posed by Saudi Arabia? [Declassified security reports confirm that Saudi Arabia continues to fund groups defined by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations, while Saudi Arabia maintains an active state of war against the state of Israel since 1948.]
None of Mr. Obama's advisers could answer this question.
2. Does Mr. Obama support President Bush's policy of arming the Saudis? [The Bush administration offers major arms sales to Saudi Arabia, despite its pro-terror posture]
Neither Guttman nor Levine could tell The Bulletin whether or not Mr. Obama supports the Bush arms sales to Saudi Arabia. They checked with Mr. Obama and could not get an answer.
3. Would a President Obama support the idea that Palestinian refugees should reside in UNRWA refugee camps, under the premise and promise of the "right of return," instead of being provided with decent living conditions?
While each of Mr. Obama's advisers emphasized that the candidate opposed the Palestinian "right of return," none of them could find out what Mr. Obama's position is concerning continuing American government funding for the UNRWA agency, which fuels the right of return.
4. Would a President Obama continue Mr. Bush's policy to arm the Fatah organization, since the armed forces of the Fatah are defined by American law as an illegal terrorist organization?
The Obama advisor who spoke on condition of anonymity answered that Mr. Obama wants to continue the policy of developing Fatah as a moderate entity.
5. Would a President Obama ask for a change in the proposed constitution of the Palestinian Fatah state, which is based on the Islamic sharia law, and not allow for juridical status for any religion other than Islam?
All three Obama advisers promised to check this out with the senator. None of them could provide an answer.
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10. Would a President Obama ignore the plight of Christians who are persecuted in the PA, or would he champion the cause of the Christians to practice their religion freely in the PA, since the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem has refused to render assistance to Christians who are persecuted by the PA?
Mr. Obama's advisers promised an answer to The Bulletin with an answer to this question but did not do so.
11. What would the policy of a President Obama be to Syria in regard to Syria's continuing to host and support a plethora of terror groups?
All three of Obama's advisers indicated that they would review new directives to the Syrian government in this regard.
12. Would a President Obama support an effort to destroy the Syrian source of lethal narcotics in the Bekka Valley, since Syria continues to orchestrate the export of lethal narcotics to the world?
Mr. Obama's advisers could not answer this question.
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14. Which Middle East road map would a President Obama endorse: the road map of April 30, 2003, or that of May 25, 2003? [The second road map contains the reservations of Israel, which include detailed Israeli directives to disband terror groups as a precondition to continued negotiations.]
Mr. Obama's three advisers referred this policy question to a top adviser to Mr. Obama. However, they would not give an answer to this question to The Bulletin.
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18. Would a President Obama insist on future Israeli withdrawals, since the Gaza withdrawal indicates that Palestinians will use areas under their control to launch missile attacks against Israel?
The Obama adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity answered that the "Gaza and Lebanon precedent should be taken into consideration," considering the fact that Israel is ready for compromise.
The rest of the answers were more or less what you would expect. But how can a candidate for President who has been critical of what he calls Clinton's and Bush's 'lack of involvement' in our region not know the answers to so many questions? Read the whole thing. Here's one thing the Bulletin did not ask Obama but which came up in a debate:
Take, for example, the different responses from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama on whether they would view an attack by Iran on Israel as an attack on the United States. (Mrs. Clinton said such an attack would result in “massive retaliation from the United States,” while Mr. Obama said such an attack would be “unacceptable” and would lead him to take “appropriate action.”)
I like Clinton's answer better. But then you all know already that I am not thrilled with Obama or the people he has chosen to have around him.
A Hamas rocket attack intended for Sderot has fallen short and hit a 'Palestinian' residence in Beit Hanoun. Initial reports indicate that three residents were wounded in the attack, one seriously.
If the one who was seriously wounded dies, is he a shahid? Does he get 72 virgins?
Backing Abu Mazen a failure: More Palis support terror and Haniyeh
Here's more proof that the Olmert-Barak-Livni government and Bush-Rice administration policy of backing 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen is a failure. A new survey shows that more 'Palestinians' back terror operations and more support the man pictured at the top of this post - 'moderate' Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh - than back Abu Mazen and negotiations.
The number of Palestinians who support attacks against Israelis continues to rise and more than half of them favor suicide bombings, according to a poll published this weekend.
The survey also showed that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is still more popular than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The percentage of Palestinians who support "resistance operations" against Israeli targets rose from 43.1 percent in September 2006 to 49.5% at present. Support for this option was highest in the Gaza Strip, at 58.1%, with 24.5% in the West Bank agreeing.
Palestinians who support bombing attacks against Israeli civilians rose from 44.8% in June 2006 to 48% in September 2006 and to 50.7% now.
Again, more Gazans support these operations (65.1%), compared with 42.3% of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Palestinian public is divided on the rocket attacks on Israel: 39.3% said the firing of these rockets was "useful" to Palestinian national interests, while 35.7% said they were harmful.
The poll results showed a general feeling of frustration with regards to the future of the Palestinian cause and the peace process in light of the ongoing Israeli military operations and the split between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
...
Support for Abbas fell from 18.3% in November to 11.7% this month. The poll also showed that fewer Palestinians are satisfied with Abbas's performance.
Support for Haniyeh also went down, from 16.3% in November to 13.3% this month. The same applies to Fatah's imprisoned leader, Marwan Barghouti, whose popularity moved down from 14.3% to 12.8% during the same period.
With regards to confidence in the political parties, support for Fatah decreased from 40% in November to 32.5% this month, while Hamas's popularity went down from 19.7% to 17.8%.
The margin of error in this poll is 3%.
I know: Let's have an election. That will prove that the 'Palestinian people' really want 'peace.' Just like the last election did.
This is an account of a demonstration that was held yesterday in Gaza to protest 'Palestinian Authority' Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's failure to pay the salaries of Hamas-affiliated 'civil servants' in Gaza since last June.
There's only one catch: We know that the salaries were paid at least through October. And we also know they were paid at the end of July. Maybe someone should get them an accountant and write a new script.
Video: Fox's Reena Ninan puts the Dhimmi in his place
When the first question to Carter was "How would you have felt if someone had done this during your administration?" you knew this interview was going to be a doozer. And you'll love the punch line.
Ramallah is probably the most secular city in the 'Palestinian Authority.' The city has an annual Contemporary Dance Festival, which is scheduled to take place this week for the third time. The festival features a varied lineup of modern and traditional performances from local and international dance troupes.
The festival is organized by the Sareyyet Ramallah - First Ramallah Group - a local NGO whose goal is to "broaden the cultural landscape by introducing Palestinians to new and progressive forms of contemporary artistic expression through dance."
It seems that Hamas, which has other ideas about 'culture,' is upset that the festival is taking place. They want it canceled.
Hamas is opposed to the event mainly because it would bring men and women together. The Islamic movement also maintains that it is "inappropriate" to hold such an event while Palestinians were still fighting against Israel.
Saleh al-Raqab, Deputy Minister of Waqf Affairs in the Hamas government, said the festival "distorted" the Palestinian "struggle" and harms the image of the Palestinians.
"Those who are dancing on the pain and wounds of the Palestinian people can't be part of our people," he said. "How can they be dancing while our people in the Gaza Strip are suffering under the siege?"
Raqab claimed that the organizers were spending millions of dollars to bring international dance troupes. "They are wasting the money of our people on trivial matters," he said. "This event has nothing to do with our people's culture and history."
He urged the Palestinians to boycott the "disgraceful" dance festival and distance themselves from the organizers. "This event is an insult to all Muslims," he added. "Is this the way to liberate Palestine?"
If Hamas doesn't get their way, watch for them to bring these people into action.
Hamas 'Culture' Minister Atallah Abu Al-Subh presents excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on Hamas' al-Aqsa TV (April 10, 2008), claiming Jews try to control the world. Bonus: He even claims to quote Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
Carter's meeting with Hamas: Much ado about nothing
Here's a video report on Dhimmi Carter's meetings with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal. Carter claims that Shalit will be allowed to send another letter to his parents 'soon.' Not much new there. In fact, Shalit has even sent an audio tape as you will recall. He also said that Hamas would be willing to release Shalit to the Egyptians in the context of a' prisoner exchange.' Not much new there either. But here's where it gets curiouser. Listen to the last part of this video report:
Note that the report says that Carter claims that Hamas would be willing to live in 'peace' with Israel in a 'Palestinian state,' with Israel being confined to the 1967 borders. But it's subject to a 'referendum' of the 'Palestinian people.' And Hamas just rejected an Egyptian-negotiated deal for a 'cease fire' last night because Hamas doesn't believe in referendums. They hold that the 'Palestinian people' don't have the right to give up the 'Palestinian people's rights. So what is going on here?
"If President (Mahmoud) Abbas of the Palestinians and Prime Minister (Ehud) Olmert reach an agreement for peace, and if it is submitted to the Palestinians and the Palestinians approve it... Hamas will accept it," Carter said in a Monday interview with CNN.
My guess is that Meshaal was trying to humor Carter (or Carter misunderstood). In any event, any referendum of the 'Palestinian people' that would be acceptable to Hamas (or for that matter 'moderate' Fatah) would have to include the 'Palestinians' who live outside of Judea, Samaria and Gaza - and that will ensure that no referendum is ever accepted unless Israel (God forbid) agrees to the end of the Jewish state by allowing the 'Palestinians' to 'return' to all of what is now the State of Israel.
UPDATE 7:07 PM
Hot Air confirms my hunch on the 'Palestinian diaspora' and answers my question about whether Hamas accepts the results of referendums:
Carter said Hamas promised it wouldn’t undermine Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ efforts to reach a peace deal with Israel, as long as the Palestinian people approved it in a referendum. In such a scenario, he said Hamas would not oppose a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri in Gaza said Hamas’ readiness to put a peace deal to a referendum “does not mean that Hamas is going to accept the result of the referendum.”
Uh-huh. So Carter’s entire effort was predicated on getting Hamas to agree to abide by a referendum, and Hamas — surprise! — has already reneged. Hamas also had a much different idea of a referendum than Carter. They didn’t want a referendum of the 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but one that included the 9 million Palestinians living around the world. And even if that could be accomplished and the deal passed, Hamas still won’t commit to honoring its resolution.
I had not seen that last paragraph of the Abu Zuhri quote. It's here.
'Palestinians' used Israeli-supplied APC's in Kerem Shalom attack
Moadim l'Simcha - A Happy Holiday to all of you. For those who need to be reminded why this Orthodox Jew is permitted to be online on the Second Day of Passover, please go here.
As some of you may recall, just about a month ago, Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert approved the delivery of twenty-five Russian armored personnel carriers ("APC's" in English or nagmashim in Hebrew) to the 'good terrorists' of 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen. The approval was contrary to the recommendations of both the IDF and the General Security Services. Some of you may have wondered at the time how something that is a 'personnel carrier' could be used directly for terrorism. Have a look at the picture at the top of this post - it's an IDF issue APC. And if that's not enough for you to imagine how terrorists could use an APC, consider this account of Saturday's Hamas attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing and recall that Hamas got APC's and other pieces of military equipment when it overthrew Fatah in Gaza.
Thirteen soldiers were wounded at 6 a.m. on Saturday when an armored personnel carrier - supplied to the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s - rammed through the fence between Israel and southern Gaza near the Kerem Shalom crossing, used to transfer humanitarian aid to the Strip.
After the APC opened the gate, two vehicles - disguised as IDF jeeps and packed with 300 kilograms of explosives each - drove through. One blew up next to an IDF watchtower, causing extensive damage but no injuries to the soldiers inside. The second vehicle exploded next to a number of IDF jeeps belonging to the Southern Command's Beduin Desert Battalion.
Despite the thick fog, the deputy battalion commander spotted the second jeep as it made its way into the crossing. Thinking at first that the jeep was Israeli, the officer tried to contact the driver on the standard military radio frequency. When he did not receive an answer, he understood that it was a car bomb.
"The deputy battalion commander shouted, 'Car bomb, car bomb,' and all the soldiers ran into their armored jeeps," an officer who witnessed the infiltration said Sunday. Most of the soldiers made it into the vehicles. The 13 who didn't sustained light-to-moderate wounds.
And that wasn't the only attempt to use an APC for a terror attack on Saturday:
Moments later, another APC approached the Kissufim crossing, north of Kerem Shalom. A tank from Brigade 401 opened fire and destroyed the vehicle, which was believed to have been packed with explosives.
But if any of you think that's enough to get Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert to alter his plans to give the 'good terrorists' from Fatah more APC's, please think again.
Also on Sunday, defense officials said Israel did not plan to alter an earlier decision to permit the PA in the West Bank to receive 25 APCs from Russia, despite the use of an armored vehicle in the Kerem Shalom attack. The decision to transfer the APCs was made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert several months ago following a request by Russia to supply the vehicles to Fatah forces in the West Bank to bolster PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This government is still 'led' by idiots.
Video: Beirut's Jewish neighborhood under threat - by developers
I've been getting a lot of google hits lately because I blogged a report on Beirut's Magen Avraham synagogue last summer and that synagogue is in danger of being torn down. Now, al-Jazeera reports that it's not just the synagogue that's under threat of being torn down - it's the entire Jewish neighborhood of Beirut. It's called 'development.'
Hamas rejects Egyptian-mediated 'truce' with Israel
Hamas has rejected an Egyptian mediated 'truce' with Israel because it is not willing to sign an agreement with the 'Zionist entity' that is subject to a referendum of the 'Palestinian people.'
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu-Zuhri on Sunday rejected an Egyptian plan for a cease-fire agreement with Israel, Al Jazeera reported.
On Friday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit unveiled an Egyptian plan to restore calm in the region. The plan seeks to establish a ceasefire under which the firing of rockets in Gaza Strip has to stop while Israel also stops targeting Palestinians.
Other provisions include exchanging 400 Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israeli jails for captive Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas in 2006.
Egypt's plan also includes the opening of Gaza's border crossings and to put a peace agreement, if reached this year, to a Palestinian public vote.
"The idea of a referendum on any agreement signed with the occupying [Israeli authorities] is rejected by the Hamas movement," Sami Abu Zuhri was quoted by the Qatar-based television network as saying.
"No poll on the basic rights [of Palestinian people]. Is it possible for us to carry out a poll on al-Quds [Jerusalem] if such an agreement affects our rights in al-Quds?" he asked.
Abu Zuhri also rejected as "unacceptable" remarks by Aboul Gheit, who reportedly said Hamas' participation in a Palestinian national unity government with rival faction Fatah could thwart efforts to reach a peace settlement with Israel.
I guess we can't let the 'Palestinian people' decide something as important as the 'rights' of the 'Palestinian people,' can we?
On Saturday night in synagogue, I struck up a conversation with an Israeli I had never met before. Sensing my American-accented Hebrew, he asked from where in the US I had made aliya (immigrated) and whether I did so immediately after I got married. He was shocked to hear that we did not make aliya until ten years after we got married. He said that he has lots of relatives in America, and he believes that one of the few acts of mesirat nefesh (dedication) left in Judaism today is moving to Israel. That got me to thinking about the family pictured above. I had actually chanced upon this story a couple of weeks ago and had never gotten around to running it. Now that Arutz Sheva has run it, I figured I ought to make a couple of comments as well.
Rabbi Shalom Rosner of Woodmere, New York is picking up his wife and six children and his entire congregation (or so we are told - I hope the congregation will all come too) and making aliya (immigrating) to Beit Shemesh this summer.
"This is not a sudden decision," Rabbi Rosner explained. "My wife and I and our six children have been dreaming and planning for this day for years. It is a highly personal decision yet part of a much larger mission… Nearly 20,000 North American Jews have moved to Israel in recent years. This is a dynamic, growing trend. We have much to add to Israeli society, and the community we are embarking to develop will, with G-d's help, be a model environment reflecting our ideals and our vision for centuries to come."
Nofei HaShemesh will take some of the hallmarks of American Jewish life – community rabbis and synagogue-centric communal life – and bring it to a region already populated by a large number of olim (immigrants to Israel). Located between the existing Anglo-rich neighborhoods of Scheinfeld and Nofei Aviv, 30 families have already purchased homes in the 400-unit neighborhood now being built.
Rabbi Rosner gave classes at Yeshiva University in Talmud, Jewish Law and Bible over the past seven years since being ordained and studying at the school’s RIETS Seminary’s Kollel Elyon Talmudic fellowship.
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“Aliya is an ideal that we as Jews can all recognize as our common destiny,” Rabbi Rosner wrote to his congregants. “We hope to forge a path that will encourage other inspired Jews from around the world to become our neighbors, along with veteran Israelis who share our commitment to building a community based on a deeply rooted love of our people, our Torah values and service to our nation.”
He is not leaving due to any lack of success, having built a synagogue community of 15 families into 125 in just six years.
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“On a personal level, [Aliyah] has always been a paramount - yet elusive - quest for our family,” Rabbi Rosner said. “Before we were married, my wife and I had decided in principle that Israel would be our home. Decisions in principle are often mightily slowed down by developments on the ground. Before we knew it, my wife’s medical school was upon us, along with my rabbinic training at Yeshiva University. Starting a family and many other considerations naturally followed, all creating a situation where Aliyah remained more a beckoning dream than an immediate step.
“Despite these ‘distractions,’ rarely did even one day pass in which we both didn’t express to each other our desire to make this move. Our hearts were heavy that we were not in Israel. Whether it was the chafing distance of witnessing miraculous developments in the land or yearning to raise our children in the environment of holiness that is only available in Israel, the gravitational pull of Aliyah was a constant presence in our hearts and minds.”
Rabbi Rosner knows that the struggle is not over.
“Even while I know the period ahead will not be without its fair share of challenges and the occasional difficult days, we relish the chance to play our very own part in our people’s historic renewal,” he said. “Most exciting of all, we welcome others both from our own community and from other communities across North America and around the world who will make the decision to join us as we create a truly ideal environment in Israel…Hashem has given us the remarkable historic chance to make this land ours…and so many wonderful people who went before us have done the ‘heavy lifting’ to get us newcomers to where we are today.”
...
Dr. Tamar Rosner, the rabbi’s wife, is taking part in the Nefesh b’Nefesh Aliyah organization’s special promotion seeking to bring doctors on Aliyah. The pediatrician told the Five Towns Jewish News last year that the Nefesh b’Nefesh grant played a role in making their consideration of Aliyah a reality. “Doctors don’t move [to Israel] because of a lucrative salary,” Rosner said. “We’re going because it’s the Jewish homeland, and this fellowship is making the move more do-able. We know we are going to live a less lavish life than in the US, but we are not going to starve.”
Dr. Rosner is one of a number of doctors to apply for the special grant, which will be granted to ten docters a year by the Legacy Heritage Foundation through Nefesh B’Nefesh. The grant, in the form of an initial fellowship upon arrival in Israel and monthly supplemental income for the first two years, totals about $60,000. It is available to doctors under the age of 45 willing to practice at least nine months a year in Israel.
An ad was taken out in many Jewish newspapers in the US by Rabbi Rosner's mentors in YU saluting his decision. Those who have not seen it can find the ad here.
Many years ago, I happened to be in the home of a prominent New York Rabbi when one of the other Sabbath guests was one of the best known 'activists' for Gush Emunim. The 'activist' asked the Rabbi - some of whose children live in Israel - why he didn't make aliya. The Rabbi said "If I made aliya, half the shul would follow me." The 'activist' said, "that's wonderful." And the Rabbi answered, "but the other half would be left without a Rabbi." That fear has left many prominent American Rabbis in the US until their retirement. After retirement, they no longer feel guilty about abandoning the flock, and they come here. Now, Rabbi Rosner is presenting a different paradigm. I hope his aliya proves that you can take the congregation with you.
Video: Hamas takes responsibility for Kerem Shalom bombing
In this video from the pro-'Palestinian' Press TV, Hamas takes responsibility for Saturday morning's suicide bombing at the Kerem Shalom crossing. There were no Israeli soldiers 'critically' wounded despite the claim on the tape. But the claim that this is the beginning of an attempt to break the Israeli 'blockade' may well be true.
Hamas attacked the Kerem Shalom crossing on Saturday morning. The attack was one "the likes of which we have not seen since the disengagement," according to OC Southern Command Yoav Galant.
Hamas's attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing Saturday morning, in which 13 soldiers were wounded, is one "the likes of which we have not seen since the disengagement," OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen Yoav Galant said Saturday - referring to Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
In saying so, Galant cited the well-coordinated nature of the attack, and Hamas's attempt "to execute mass-killings and abductions" through it.
The Gaza commander said that a potential disaster had been prevented thanks to the quick response of the soldiers at the scene.
Galant added that Hamas was "harming the interest of the Palestinians themselves, by attack crossings which are the humanitarian lifelines of Gaza."
That's exactly what Hamas wants to do, isn't it? But don't expect the IDF to enter the Gaza Strip to resolve the problem anytime soon. You see, Defense Minister Ehud Barak has a warped sense of history:
A self-described history buff, Barak sees that throughout the country's six decades, the government never went to war because one of its enemies was amassing weapons and an army. This was true with Egypt and Syria in the 1960s and '70s, and most recently with Hizbullah, during the six years between the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and the war in 2006.
In the 1960's, I assume he's referring to 1967, when the Egyptians were dumb enough to oblige Israel by closing the Suez Canal, a clear act of war. In the 1970's, Israel's failure to go to war preemptively in 1973 is widely regarded as a mistake that cost hundreds of soldiers' lives, and nearly brought into question the country's very existence. And as to his own flight from Lebanon and the failure to address the Hezbullah buildup that took place from 2000-2006, everyone from the Winograd Commission on down has now agreed that was a serious mistake along with the flight itself.
Will Barak repeat his 'historical' mistake in Gaza? Or will the IDF brass pull him out of the fire? I'd bet on the former, unfortunately. Stay tuned.
Moadim l'Simcha - a Happy Holiday - to all of you. And a reminder that the reason I am online posting is because I live in Israel and I am located in Israel and therefore I only have one holiday day at the beginning (and one at the end - which is Saturday) on which I am forbidden from doing work, including being on the computer. Otherwise, I would not be on here tonight.
