It has been a totally crazy week work-wise (hence the light posting), and it's only going to get worse - I'm flying early tomorrow morning to the US for about a week and a half. Multiple destinations....
I still Tweet more often than I post....
Suspected 'Palestinian' hackers hacked into Israel's Channel 2 on Friday night. (The link goes to the video - I didn't post the video because it would play automatically and I did not see a way to disable that).
During the airing of a popular television show "Big Brother" on
Channel 2, the broadcast was briefly interrupted by a clip showing
images of terror attacks and threatening messages in Hebrew.
"Stay in your homes," begins the ominous text. "The story is not over...there is more to come."
At the bottom of the message reads in Arabic: "Al-Quds Intifada."
Al-Quds
intifada refers to the rash of terrorist violence Israel has experience
for some six months, seeing nearly 30 Israelis killed and dozens more
injured.
Earlier in the day, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) together with the IDF and Israel Police shut down an Islamic Jihad media channel in Ramallah, according to security forces.
The
move comes one day after the security-diplomatic cabinet approved a
decision to close Palestinian media outlets that incite to terrorism
against Israelis. The decision was taken following a spate of
Palestinian knife and firearm attacks around the country in recent days.
The Falastin Al-Yom outlet is a television broadcast station, which also uses social media networks to send out its content.
The
channel's manager, 34-year-old Faruk Aliat, from Bir Zeit, an Islamic
Jihad operative who has been in an Israeli prison in the past, was
arrested during the raid.
The move to shut down inciting media is long overdue.
Abu Mazen last night in Beit Lechem: We oppose murder or bloodshed of any person without connection to his sex/origin/religion. Our opposition will continue to be peaceful and we will not encourage otherwise.
Today, a 15-year old was arrested in connection with the murder of Daphna Meir HY"D (May God Avenge her blood), a mother of six children who was murdered in her own home in front of her children on Sunday. How does a 15-year old become incited to murder?
This video is from 'Palestinian' television in October of 2015. The senior 'Palestinian' official was commenting on the murders of Eitam and Naama Henkin HY"D (on which Abu Mazen had no comment - see the link).
When a child is fed this kind of support for murder with his mother's milk and thereafter for all of his brief life, is it really surprising that he decides that his duty is to murder Jews in front of their children (God Forbid)?
Abu Mazen doesn't oppose bloodshed. He lives for it. He's a liar.
And for this we can thank President Hussein Obama and his European Union friends, which continue to let the 'Palestinian Authority' off scot free for this type of incitement.
Official PA TV broadcast a cartoon last month that showed a math teacher pointing to a map of "Palestine" as an example of "a number that is indivisible." The map included both PA areas and all of Israel.
Text on blackboard under map: "Palestine: A number that is indivisible." [Official PA TV, Feb. 21, 2014]
Fatah also continues to promote this idea. Fatah's Facebook administrator recently stated that before teaching them "to read and write," Palestinians teach their children that "Palestine" is indivisible, so that they "will only agree to one rule, which cannot be added to, subtracted from, or calculated: that Palestine cannot be divided":
"We educate our children on the national anthem every morning. They will memorize the anthem of 'return'; they will engrave the four-colored [Palestinian] flag on their hearts; they will learn the foundations of the revolution before they learn to read and write; they will only agree to one rule, which cannot be added to, subtracted from, or calculated: that Palestine cannot be divided."
[Facebook, "Fatah-The Main Page," March 5, 2014]
The text was accompanied by a photo of a teacher pointing to a map of "Palestine" replacing all of Israel drawn on the blackboard, with the explanatory text rejecting Israeli jurisdiction over Israeli cities: "Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle, Safed, Beit Shean, were and will remain Palestinian cities."
Looks like US Secretary of State John FN Kerry has gone a long way toward convincing the 'Palestinians' to accept a 'two-state solution.' Great job Obama and Kerry!
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the mayor of Jerusalem
condemned the attack on the club last Friday. More than a week earlier
President Shimon Peres criticized fans for inciting violence against
Arabs and Muslims. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a lifelong Beitar
supporter, said he was outraged by the fans’ behavior and vowed not to
attend another game.
These are welcome reactions. Not only is Beitar waging a battle against
its bad image, but many Israelis seem determined to no longer turn a
complacent ear to what they once dismissed as the predictable racist
clamor of rowdy sports fans. At last, Israel — itself a country built by
refugees fleeing discrimination — is banning, investigating and
legislating against racism in sports.
Monday morning, after the tense game against Bnei Sahknin, I heard
Beitar’s general manager, Itzik Kornfein, a former goalkeeper, repeat
the same message on several radio shows: He said he was determined to
clamp down on unruly fans but reminded listeners that the culture and
sports minister, the police and legal authorities would have to keep
battling discrimination after the “dust settles down.”
Only after examining the way Arafat went about creating his regime,
and the nature of the landslide that he won as a result of these
efforts, can we return to the question of whether he deserves the kind
of legitimacy he now enjoys among many leaders in the West.
In the full article, Polisar went into more detail:
What made the PA security forces particularly effective in stifling
dissent was their wide range of political activities. The intelligence
units,especially the PSS, sought to identify opponents of Arafat and the
PA,and to win their cooperation or their silence. Their officers engaged
in numerous tactics that are off-limits to police in democratic states:
Threatening political opponents, censoring the media, intimidating NGO
leaders and human rights activists, and enforcing business monopolies
given to Arafat’s allies. Though limited by the Oslo accords to the Gaza
Strip and Jericho, Palestinian intelligence units boasting 5,000 men
operated throughout the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, which was the
base of operations for the leading Palestinian newspapers and
human-rights activists. Top-ranking Israeli security officials approved
this departure from the written accords via the Rome Agreement, a secret
understanding reached with Dahlan and Rajoub in January 1994, which
conditioned the extra geographic latitude given to PA police on their
pledge to fight Islamic and leftist militants planning attacks against
Israelis from these areas.
In fact, the PA police did little to combat terrorism aimed at Israelis,
but were highly effective in silencing Arafat’s would-be critics,
weakening potential challengers, and intimidating the local population.
With the security forces lined up foursquare behind him, Arafat was able
to use them to enforce decisions made by the corrupt civilian
government, to intimidate judges, to bring the media around to
supporting the Palestinian Authority, and to persuade human rights
activists to temper their criticism—in short, to shape the institutions
of government and civil society in a manner most conducive to a
dictatorial regime. It is to the first of these, the civilian government,
which we now turn.
David Keyes, wrote Palestine's Democratic Deficit
for the New York Times and shows how Mahmoud Abbas has continued this
tradition (and how the West has abetted him, in the name of "peace.")
It should come as no surprise that the Palestinian Authority is
cracking down on basic freedoms. From the top down, a culture of
repression reigns supreme. President Abbas’s term ended four years ago.
He has clung to power as an unelected autocrat for nearly half a decade.
In November, a senior adviser to Mr. Abbas, Mohammad Shtayyeh, told me
that Mr. Abbas had no desire to continue ruling, but that he simply
could not leave because of the divisions in Palestinian society.
Suppressing criticism by resorting to a 50-year-old Jordanian law —
designed to punish critics of Jordan’s monarchy when it ruled over the
West Bank — has not helped burnish the questionable democratic
credentials Mr. Abbas so often claims when meeting Western leaders.
This is not the first time the Palestinian Authority has used antiquated
laws to clamp down on Internet activists. Last year, the Palestinian
blogger Jamal Abu Rihan was arrested for starting a Facebook campaign
called “The People Want an End to Corruption.” Like Mr. Awwad, Mr.
Rihan’s crime was “extending his tongue” against the Palestinian
leadership. In April, the university lecturer Ismat Abdul-Khaleq was
arrested for criticizing Mr. Abbas on Facebook. Days later, a
journalist, Tarek Khamis, was detained for criticizing the Palestinian
Authority’s treatment of Ms. Abdul-Khaleq. George Canawati, the director
of a Bethlehem radio station, and the journalist Rami Samar were
similarly detained for posting criticisms of the Palestinian Authority
on Facebook.
So long as Mr. Abbas says he is committed to peace, there appears to be
little pressure from the West on issues of human rights. Human rights
for Palestinians, it seems, continue to play second fiddle to the peace
process.
While it's true that this is less pro-Israel than it is anti-Abbas, it
is an important antidote to the regular opinion articles in the New York
Times blaming Israel for the lack of peace. It's also important to keep
in mind the next time you read Thomas Friedman write about how Israel
is risking its democracy by failing to make peace. Aside from the
dubiousness of the claim, why doesn't he express a similar fear about
the Palestinians, who have never had democracy to lose? (Answer:
Friedman only believes in blaming Israel.)
Amazing, isn't it? In the space of one day, the New York Times had two
very good opinion articles about the Middle East. Someone is slipping.
In 25 cities across five continents, community centers, consulates,
army barracks and houses of worship have been targeted for destruction.
Thousands have been killed. The perpetrators are agents of Hezbollah and
the Quds Force, sometimes operating separately and occasionally in
unison. All take their orders from Tehran.
Hezbollah's relationship with Tehran is "a partnership arrangement with
Iran as the senior partner," says America's director of national
intelligence, James Clapper. The Lebanon-based terror group provides the
foot soldiers necessary for realizing Iran's vision of a global Islamic
empire. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah says his organization was
founded to forge "a greater Islamic republic governed by the Master of
Time [the Mahdi] and his rightful deputy, the jurisprudent Imam of
Iran."
With funding, training and weapons from Iran, Hezbollah terrorists have
killed European peacekeepers, foreign diplomats and thousands of
Lebanese, among them Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. They have hijacked
American, French and Kuwaiti airliners and kidnapped and executed
officials from several countries. They are collaborating in Bashar
Assad's slaughter of opposition forces in Syria today.
Then, in February 2008, Imad Mughniyeh, the organization's military
commander and Nasrallah's close associate, was killed in a car bomb in
Damascus. The assassination of the man who topped the FBI's most-wanted
list prior to Osama bin Laden was a severe blow to morale, as well as to
Hezbollah's strategic capabilities. Nasrallah was convinced that the
Mossad was responsible, and vowed to take revenge "outside of the
Israel-Lebanon arena."
Israel also paid particular attention to former East German Stasi
agents who had maintained contacts with their Palestinian allies even
after the fall of communism. When East Germany collapsed, many of its
spies packed up whatever sensitive documents they could obtain and then
vanished. They used the sensitive information contained in their stolen
files to sustain a comfortable living for themselves even long after the
end of the Cold War. Israel set about locating them and offering
generous payments to anyone with useful information. Before long, a
former Stasi agent reached out to a Mossad agent in Berlin: He had the
Stasi file on Mughniyah, and it was available for a price. The meeting
between Mossad representatives and the ex-Stasi spy took place at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. A large file containing
Mougniyeh’s latest photographs was exchanged for a brief case containing
$250,000. Le Carré would have approved.
This was a major coup in the hunt for Mughniyah, but it required a
further lucky break to give Israel the information it needed to bring
Mughniyah down. As recounted by David Markovsky in his article “The
Silent Strike,” published last fall in The New Yorker, in 2007, Israeli
agents infiltrated the home of Ibrahim Othman, head of the Syrian Atomic
Energy Commission. Once inside, they bugged his computer. While Israel
had been looking for information about the Syrian nuclear weapons
program (and indeed, in September of 2007, bombed a nascent nuclear
reactor inside Syria), access to this computer allowed Israel to
compromise other computers inside the supposedly secure networks of
Syria’s rulers. Among the information obtained through this operation
were details of weapons transfers from Syria to Mughniyah.
These Syrian files, the ex-Stasi documents and the intelligence
trickling in from Mossad’s spies in Lebanon began to provide a detailed
picture of Mughniyah’s recent locations and activities. Israel was
getting closer, and in January of 2008 made a breakthrough — it
developed intelligence indicating that Mughniyah was having an affair
with a woman in Damascus, and would often spend time with her inside a
luxury condo in the Syrian capital. The condo, owned by a cousin of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was put under surveillance. It is
believed that Mossad was able to get photos of Mughniyah as he came and
went from this condo, and that they matched the Stasi files.
Ambassador Oren's article reminds us that Hezbollah doesn't just
threaten Israel, but the West too. Unfortunately too many in Europe
believe that silence in the face of Hezbollah's provocations is the way
to security.
The 'Palestinians' show their appreciation to the United States
The 'Palestinians' believe that they owe the US nothing. They believe - to the extent that they acknowledge US beneficence at all - that everything the US has done for them was because they deserved it. They don't acknowledge that anything the US (or Israel for that matter) has done for them or for any of them was an act of kindness.
The official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper has accused the
United States of ordering radical Islamists to commit atrocities in
order to justify America's war on terror and its actions against Arabs.
A recent opinion piece in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida claims that after
the fall of the Soviet Union, the US needed "a new straw man, whose
existence would justify all its wars, all its conspiracies and its
policies of supporting oppression."
The writer, Fuad Abu Hajla, who is a regular columnist at the paper,
alleges that the US subsequently "urged Islamist movements to commit
atrocities that tarnished the image of Islam and Muslims in the world,"
thereby allowing it to use its war on terror as an excuse to overthrow
Arab regimes.
The columnist insists that the American-led "lunatics" were forbidden to
operate in Israel - "the Israeli tyrant" - but continue to be
responsible for murders, kidnapping and terror in Syria and Algeria.
You can bet that if President Obama meets with Abu Mazen while he's here (which he undoubtedly will), he won't raise anything like this.
'We're terrorists too, so please give us some human rights'
The Independent Commission for Human Rights issued the following press release last Tuesday (received by email).
The Independent
Commission for Human Rights (ICHR)
appreciates the role of Palestinian journalists and media professionals in covering
the Israeli violations, which was characterized by high level of professionalism
in exposing the aggression on the Gaza Strip and in revealing the truth to the whole
world. ICHR considers that the mission of the media complements and is
consistent with the mission of Jurists in spreading and circulating the truth,
in promoting the values of democracy, the rule of law and in the exposure of
human rights violations.
What the Palestinian arena is
witnessing of positive atmosphere towards ending the division and the achievement
of the national reconciliation, especially aftergranting Palestine
a non-member observer State status at the United Nations, requires an end to all
outstanding issues relating to human rights, first and foremost, the media and
press freedoms in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
The international conventions and
national legislation, in particular the amended Palestinian Basic Law (2003)
and the Press and Publication Law of 1995 have emphasized on the need to launch
full freedom to the audio, visual and written media and freedom of printing,
publication, distribution, broadcasting, and to prohibit all forms of
censorship over them.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
