From Al-Arabiya: Not only does this give official Lebanese status to an independent army that doesn't answer to the government, it also is clearly against UN resolution 1701, which called for "no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon; and it also implicltly contradicts the paragraph that calls for "strong support for full respect for the Blue Line." It is effectively the continuing surrender of Lebanon to Hezbollah. |
I would like to thank you for reading my blog, and making this a very successful year. |
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Remember all those panicky headlines that said that Mahmoud Abbas would resign over his displeasure with the "peace process" that he personally stopped? Remember how the world freaked out, begging him to stay? Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday he plans to stay on his post until the next election is held, but repeated he will not run for reelection.Elections cannot be held unless Hamas approves. Hamas won't approve until it is certain it would win or if it changes PA policy to support Hamas' positions. Therefore, no new elections - and Abbas stays on forever. Very few people publicly mentioned this scenario, although some did, during his dramatic theater designed to gain sympathy, take pressure off himself and boost his incredibly tiny ego. |
Middle East Online has an amazingly paranoid article, written by a Maidhc Ó Cathail, that has to be seen to be believed: The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions for Palestine campaign should widen its scope to target non-Israeli companies who contribute significantly to the oppression of Palestinians. As part of this broader strategy, priority should be given to one of the most egregious offenders, the prestigious British publisher, Oxford University Press. As unlikely as it may seem, the world's largest university press is responsible for one of the greatest obstacles to justice for Palestinians – The Scofield Bible.So here is his thesis: that Scofield's annotations to the Bible, published in 1909, somehow twists the Bible into making it into a more Zionist book than it already is. How so? Here's an example. Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield's commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield's notes have been italicized in the following passage:At least Cathail implicitly admits that anti-Zionism is usually a manifestation of anti-semitism! Scofield's interpretation of the passage, which actually can be found at Genesis 15:18, is pretty straightforward, and the idea that God cannot be referring to groups of people or nations is a bit tendentious itself. Anyway, once Cathail has established that Scofield was a horrible Zionist, he needs to explain not only that he was a scoundrel, but also that he was really manipulated by a Jewish Zionist, the real Jew force behind this Zio-Bible: Being a "born again" preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men's club in 1901. In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield comments, "The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield."See? Those nefarious Jews didn't only give the Bible to the world...they kept manipulating it by controlling unsuspecting Christians and forcing them to write Zionist commentaries decades before the State of Israel was reborn! How could Oxford University Press be so blind to have bought into this century-old Jewish conspiracy? |
From Al Arabiya:
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Sometimes, even I don't feel like posting anything. |
Palestine Press Agency reports that two Gazans were injured when a Qassam rocket that was aimed at Israel went awry and landed inside a house at the Nuseirat camp. |
Remember when the Arab League was ticked off at the joking suggestion that Israel mediate between Algeria and Egypt in their simmering dispute over football? The Libyan news agency reported that the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Mussa, called Gaddafi on Monday and asked him to intervene as Chairman of the African Union on the basis of his "high visibility, which is distinguished by the leader of each of the parties to an Arab."OK, maybe the Libyan news agency isn't the most objective source for this story, but it is not out of the realm of possibility. Libya is right in between both countries, after all. And from the Arab League perspective, Qaddafi is a lot better than any Israeli would be! |
From Al Arabiya: American President Barack Obama is "doing nothing" to restart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview published on Tuesday.Ah, the honeymoon is over. Of course Abbas is upset that Obama is "doing nothing" - that's Abbas' job! |
From the Free Gaza mailing list: On November 7 and 8, The Free Gaza interim board of directors met in London to plan our strategy for 2010 as well as to schedule the next mission to Gaza.FGM is saying explicitly that "this aid" by the donor countries and aid agencies mentioned in the previous sentence "is paying for Israel's occupation." It is very clear: FGM says that money should be spent on pressuring Israel instead of feeding Gazans and that the aid itself is part of the evil that is the nonexistent "occupation" of Gaza. And, to FGM fanatics, if Gazans do actually starve to death in order to make that greater good happen, all the better. They just won't quite say that part out loud. They are also very frustrated that money that could go to their vanity boats is going instead to feeding Gazans. They are a very sick class of people. Something to keep in mind the next time your newspaper refers to Free Gaza as a "humanitarian" or "aid" group. It is nothing of the sort - it is an extremist political organization that is against the UN, Red Cross, Jordan, Qatar and Egypt giving aid to Gazans! Notice also that these progressive people have no qualms accepting money from an anti-semite. |
National Donut Week is coming up, where you can send IDF soldiers sufganiot for Chanukah and brighten their day! |
Egyptian authorities seized a car full of explosives and weapons near the Rafah crossing on Tuesday. The explosives were already packaged in plastic bags to make it easier to smuggle them through the tunnels to Gaza terrorists. This is in addition to the ton of explosives caught yesterday in a pickup truck. |
Ma'an reports: Palestinian prisoners will receive 550 New Israeli Shekels for the Eid Al-Adha holiday and for October and November, according to a statement released by Palestinian Minister of Prisoners and Ex-Detainees Issa Qaraqe on Monday.Since the PA budget is dependent on money from Western countries (far outstripping oil-rich Gulf nations) this means that well over a million of our tax dollars are going towards terrorists in the next month alone. Notice that taking care of people who tried to kill Jews is a major priority for the "moderate" PA, a cabinet-level position. Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners are paid as well. |
Hamas' Al Qassam website reports that two commanders were killed in an explosion while performing a "jihad mission" in eastern Gaza. |
From Al-Arabiya: The Arab League is currently mulling several proposals after it was forced to step in, rebuffing a provocative Israeli offer, to end a bitter tit-for-tat spat between Egypt and Algeria following their 2010 World Cup qualifier playoff match in Sudan.Did Israel really offer to mediate between Egypt and Algeria? The idea is preposterous, as Israel and Algeria do not have any diplomatic relations themselves. Not to mention that Egypt and Algeria would probably prefer all-out war to the indignity of being counseled by Israel. My guess is that some Israeli pundit or politician made that suggestion as a joke to tweak the Arabs on their internal international football crisis, and that the super-sensitive Arab League took it as a real offer, one which would of course cause add to the embarrassment they feel for the actual kerfuffle itself. This brings up an entirely new avenue for world diplomacy: whenever Westerners have a problem with an Arab country, or when Arabs have their own internal disputes, the UN should threaten to send Israeli mediators to resolve the issues. They can justify it by saying that Jewish lawyers are well-known to be sly and smart. The thought is so scary to Arabs that they would redouble their efforts to solve their problems peacefully. Let's try it with the Saudis and the Houthis! |
On Saturday night, Israel struck a number of targets in Gaza in retaliation for a rocket attack. Wire services described the target in Jabalya as "a metal foundry" which Israel claimed was a weapons factory. |
As I reported yesterday, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP denied that they signed onto any Hamas deal to stop rocket attacks into Israel. |
I woke up wondering what American prime-time scripted TV show was the most successful in history, if you include not only the number of seasons it ran but also the number of seasons its spinoffs ran. |
From The Hindu: The former Union Law Minister and senior lawyer, Ram Jethmalani, caused a flutter at an international conference on terrorism here on Saturday by alleging that Wahabism was responsible for terrorism, provoking a walkout by Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to India Faisal-al-Trad.Interestingly, Mr. Jethmalani also said this: “It was unfortunate that entire Islam as a religion was being blamed for terrorism. There are also Hindu terrorists and Buddhist terrorists.” He said he was a student of all religions, including Islam, and had the highest respect for the Prophet, who he said was a man of peace.So he didn't insult Islam, just Wahhabism. |
From Fox News: The United Nations detained an outspoken critic and booted her from its New York headquarters in what the woman, a human rights watchdog, is calling an effort to silence her opposition to the world body. Anne Bayefsky claims that as retaliation for giving a two-minute impromptu speech defending Israel, her 25-year career of monitoring the U.N. is now in jeopardy — likely to be placed in the hands of a committee chaired by the genocidal regime in Sudan. Bayefsky gets special access to U.N. meetings in her capacity as the director of a non-governmental organization, the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at New York's Touro College. But the longtime U.N. observer has found herself in what she calls a "Kafkaesque" gray zone, where the U.N. confiscated her credentials, then denied to reporters that her access had been blocked. "This is no accident," she told FoxNews.com, arguing that she is being denied access to vital meetings concerning her prime focus: defending Israel. "This is keeping [the U.N.'s] major critic absent during the heart of the year." Following a vote Nov. 5 at the U.N. General Assembly, a microphone was set up outside the UNGA chamber for delegates to tout their endorsement of the controversial Goldstone Report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its invasion of Gaza last winter. Without an invitation, Bayefsky approached the empty podium to offer what she thought would be a counter-balance to speeches from the Libyan president of the UNGA and the Palestinian observer, who both supported the resolution. "I didn't expect that there would be a problem at all," said Bayefsky, who noted that she and other NGOs have spoken there in the past without incident. (Archived U.N. video shows an official from the NGO Human Rights Watch speaking in praise of the U.N. at the same podium in May 2007.) Bayefsky blasted the Goldstone Report and called the U.N. a "laughingstock" for singling out Israel and ignoring human rights violations committed by the terrorist organization Hamas against Israeli and Palestinian civilians during the three-week campaign in December and January. "This is a resolution that purports to be evenhanded; it is anything but," she said of the document approved by the UNGA. "It is a travesty — it calls for accountability, and in fact what we see instead is impunity for the Palestinian side." Soon after she finished speaking, Bayefsky was swarmed by four U.N. security guards, who brought her to their security office, confiscated her NGO pass and kicked her out of the building, she said. But the U.N. told reporters a different story at a press conference Tuesday — claiming that there has been no change in status for Bayefsky, even as she continues to sit in limbo. Yet the U.N. continues to bar Ms. Bayefsky from the premises, despite calls on her behalf by the U.S. mission and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Best-case scenario, one U.N. insider tells us, is that "they'll put her on probation." We hear the U.N.'s NGO accreditation committee, chaired by Sudan, will likely make the final decision. The full details, including text of the UN denials and then reversal can be seen at Inner City Press, which has followed this story from the beginning and concludes that "The UN likes to expel its critics, then deny doing so." |
Al Arabiya, AFP and others have reported that Hamas announced that it reached an agreement with other armed groups in Gaza to stop rocket attacks on Israel: "The agreement between (Ezzedine) Al-Qassam (Brigades) and other factions to stop rocket (fire) is not a sign of weakness," the group said in a statement.The Al-Qassam website, which publishes all of the Al Qassam Brigades press releases, has nothing on this purported agreement. Not only that, but Islamic Jihad and the PFLP have both denied that any such agreement took place, according to Palestine Press Agency. At least 4 Qassams have been fired at Israel this month. |
(I was sent this book for review.) |
From JPost: Prominent French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann expressed "shock" last week that German leftists in Hamburg had violently prevented the showing of his debut documentary film, Why Israel, about the role of the Jewish state as a homeland for refugees.This happened last month, and it took three weeks for Der Spiegel to report it. The organizers plan to try to show the film again in December. |
Not in the mood to post, so I leave it to you to find interesting items to share. |
From the Tehran Times: French actor and political activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala met with Deputy Culture Minister for Cinematic Affairs Javad Shamaqdari here on Thursday.Dieudonné has been convicted multiple times in French courts of anti-semitic remarks. Tribu Ka is proudly anti-semitic as well. So Iran, which loudly claims not to be anti-semitic, proudly hosts anti-semites, and even mentions the fact that they are anti-semitic on their government-run news sites! |
From Daylife/AP: Palestinian supporters of the Fatah movement loyal to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during a march in the west bank city of Nablus. Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009. The "moderate" PA pretended to outlaw public displays of weapons in 2005 outside of their security forces. Apparently, that doesn't apply to Fatah. These sorts of organized rallies, together with Mahmoud Abbas' latest statements, all indicate a conscious decision on the Palestinian Arab side to abandon negotiations with Israel and to move towards the more traditional Arab model of diplomacy via threats and intimidation. |
From JPost: A team at Jerusalem's Hadassah University Medical Center has managed for the first time in the world to separate platelets and adult stem cells from the blood and bone marrow of patients with fractures and inject them - causing the bones to meld in a quarter to third of the time it usually takes to repair bones, and repairing some breaks that without the therapy would fail to heal at all.(h/t Sigmund, Carl and Alfred) |
Mahmoud Abbas was interviewed in Arabic by the BBC last night, and he proved yet again that the oft-used appellation "moderate" is a misnomer. "Those who have to resist are the people, and there are different types of resistance, like in (West Bank villages of) Bilin and Naalin, where people are injured every day" Protests that happen in Bilin and Na'alin (weekly, not daily) are anything but peaceful, and IDF soldiers often get injured from the violence.  "Hamas talks about the importance of resistance, but why aren't they resisting now. There is a truce between them and Israel, and since the war in Gaza Hamas has not carried out any act of resistance." Abbas went on to accuse Hamas of negotiating with Israel over final status issues, including accepting temporary borders. The Arabic reports of the interview show that Abbas actually contrasted the two points, first saying that Hamas has abandoned resistance even while talking about it incessantly and then proudly saying that the West Bank Arabs are doing real resistance. He accused Hamas of attempting to deceive Gazans with its slogans of resistance, noting that "you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." When asked why the Netanyahu government was allegedly secretly negotiating with Hamas and not with Abbas' PA, Abbas again placed himself as being more intransigent than Hamas, responding haughtily in third person, Because Mahmoud Abbas wants the 1967 borders, in full, and wanted to solve the refugee problem on the basis of international resolutions, wants Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, and wants a solution of water, and illegal settlements. On the other hand, even while Abbas taunted Hamas for stopping rocket fire, he rejected the "militarization" of resistance, acknowledging that such a move is not in the interests of the people. He claimed that he was a "man of peace" and that he refused to fight Hamas in Gaza because of his supposed pacifism! Gazans who aren't happy living under Hamas' regime, take note of how Abbas is bragging about abandoning you to the Islamists. UPDATE: A Nazareth newspaper says that the Fatah Central Committee is calling for a "third intifada" centered around demonstrations (and presumably Bilin-style projectiles,) and that Abbas is supporting it. |
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