Thursday 23 April 2009

CFCAThe Palestinian Authority – Hamas' blood libel: Jews drink Muslims' blood

The Palestinian Authority – Hamas' blood libel: Jews drink Muslims' blood


The organization "Glance at the Palestinian Communication" has published a theatre "play" presented by the Hamas theatre in which it is said numerous times that Jews drink Muslims' blood and believe that God wants the Jews to hate the Muslims.

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CFCA - The Palestinian Authority – Hamas' blood libel: Jews drink Muslims' blood

Medina, Islam's second holiest city, was originally a Jewish "settlement"

Medina, Islam's second holiest city, was originally a Jewish "settlement"

Although the fact is little publicized, more than one historian has affirmed at the Arab world's second holiest city, Medina, was one of the allegedly "purely Arab" cities that actually was first settled by Jewish tribes.1

And like the 16th Century English Protestants who financed their endeavors through the plunder of Catholic monasteries in England, the roots of Islamic anti-Semitism might be found in the initial plunder of Jewish settlements, and the imposition of a "poll tax" to fund Arab campaigns.
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Medina, Islam's second holiest city, was originally a Jewish "settlement"

Israel Matzav: Video: How Hamas uses human shields in 3-D

Video: How Hamas uses human shields in 3-D


This video explains in 3-D the background to operation Cast Lead, specifically the terrorist tactics that Hamas employs. It shows how Hamas smuggles in weaponry in order to arm itself and how it employs the civilian population and infastructure in order to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel. Hamas' use of human shields during operation Cast Lead caused many civilian casualties
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Israel Matzav: Video: How Hamas uses human shields in 3-D

Israel Matzav: Pope Benedict the chic 'Palestinian'?

Pope Benedict the chic 'Palestinian'?

Sorry folks, but this is just sickening (Hat Tip: Shy Guy).

Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday met in the Vatican on Wednesday with a group of Palestinian Catholics, who presented him with traditional Palestinian scarf as a gift.

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Israel Matzav: Pope Benedict the chic 'Palestinian'?

Israel Matzav: A surprising defense

A surprising defense

On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch issued a report that accused Hamas of murdering 32 'Palestinians' in the Gaza Strip - 18 during Operation Cast Lead and 14 from the Operation's conclusion through March 31, 2009. In addition, 'dozens' of people were maimed by being shot in the kneecaps.
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Israel Matzav: A surprising defense

Israel Matzav: Government may drop AIPAC charges

Government may drop AIPAC charges

I've already gone on record saying that I believe that the timing of the charges against California Democrat Jane Harman is no coincidence, and that the charges that Harman offered to try to assist AIPAC lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were intended to shore up the US government's weak case against the two men. Wednesday's Washington Post all but confirms the connection.
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Israel Matzav: Government may drop AIPAC charges

Israel Matzav: The Geneva hatefest is all but over

The Geneva hatefest is all but over

In his Tuesday night report from Geneva, Roger Simon explains why the Durban II hatefest adopted its final statement on Tuesday even though it technically doesn't end until Friday.
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Israel Matzav: The Geneva hatefest is all but over

Israel Matzav: Do they really want a state?

Do they really want a state?

Jakub Grygiel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins may have finally figured out the 'Palestinians,' and because of him so has Robert D. Kaplan, a writer at the Atlantic. Although I disagree with much of Kaplan's article (which includes encouraging the Obama administration to pressure Israel - if he's correct in his diagnosis of the 'Palestinians' there is no moral justification for doing that), this part in the middle is dead on. The 'Palestinians' don't have a state because they don't want one:
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Israel Matzav: Do they really want a state?

Israel Matzav: Switzerland's immoral 'neutrality'

Switzerland's immoral 'neutrality'

If any of you were surprised by Sunday night's meeting between Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you should not have been. Merz claimed Switzerland's 'neutrality' as justification for him to meet with the man Israeli Knesset speaker Ruby Rivlin called the 'Persian-speaking Hitler.' Switzerland has a long history of making claims like that. For instance, look at its behavior during World War II.

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Israel Matzav: Switzerland's immoral 'neutrality'

Israel Matzav: What America's World War II leadership knew about Auschwitz

What America's World War II leadership knew about Auschwitz

With everything going on in Geneva, I ignored most of the Holocaust Remembrance Day stories on Tuesday. This one deserves some attention. It's the story of a 19-year old who disclosed to those who were willing to listen what was going on at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. A lot of Americans still believe that their government did all that it could do to save European Jewry during World War II. Sadly, that's not the case. There were also Israelis who could have done more to save European Jewry and did not, but that's another story.
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Israel Matzav: What America's World War II leadership knew about Auschwitz

Israel Matzav: Israel's biggest scandal: Sitting ducks in Sderot

Israel's biggest scandal: Sitting ducks in Sderot

Over the past three years, I have done more posts than I care to count or remember criticizing the Israeli government for its insistence on developing the Iron Dome short-range missile defense system to protect Israel's border areas against (mostly 'Palestinian' but also Hezbullah) short-range missiles instead of buying an American system. The US actually developed two systems to intercept short-range missiles. One was called Nautilus and later Skyguard; I don't know what its status is today. The other system, called Phalanx (pictured), became operational in 2006.
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Israel Matzav: Israel's biggest scandal: Sitting ducks in Sderot

FINDINGS FROM GAZA


The IDF today presented the findings from its investigations of the Gaza operation. I've looked for the reports themselves, but if they've been put online I can't find them - and it's not likely they'd have been put online in the first place, if you think about it. And if you don't, I'll come to it in a moment. Until then, however, bear in mind that none of the people who will be making utterances about this subject will have read the reports themselves (which are anyway in Hebrew). Like myself, they'll all be responding to other reports in the media. As an historian who is required to relate to documents not hearsay, I recognize the problem.

The investigations themselves seem to have been serious and unhurried. The allegation in the Guardian, say, that Israel wasn't even investigating, seems to have been disproved.

The findings themselves seem about as acceptable as such things can be. The investigators didn't find a single case where IDF troops consciously shot civilians with the intent to kill. So much for that allegation, published in Haaretz and quoted the world over. Which is important, because the entire case for war crimes is severely undermined if there was no intent. Of course, the myriads of hypocrites who care about the laws of war only if they can be used against Israel will be unmoved by the fact that there's no legal case to answer - the folks in Norway who are trying to indict Olmert, Livni, Barak and others, for example.

The findings didn't dispute that Palestinian civilians were killed by the hundreds - an unknowable number between 295 and 457, out of 1,157. In the single worst incident, 21 members of the al-Dahiyeh family in Zeitun were killed when their house was rocketed instead of the intended target nearby. That's what war is about, and if there was no intention to hit civilians, and measures were made not to hit them - successful in thousands of cases and unsuccessful in dozens - it's hard to see where the criminality lies.

The White Phosphorous allegations seem to have been refuted: what use was made of such ordinance was in accordance with international law, say the investigators, and on the 7th of January an order was sent to the units to desist completely from using such shells as the PR damage was felt to be greater than the value of using them.

So much for the facts. Now to the discussion about them.

Israeli Left-wing organizations who haven't read the reports any more than I have are loudly rejecting the findings. If they were serious they would at least have waited a day or to to give appearance they'd read the reports, assuming the army will grant such access, but their actions demonstrate they're not serious. Which is regrettable, because the army - like any organization in the democratic world - is more likely to be careful with what it says if knowledgeable skeptics will be reading its reports and responding to them. That's why democracy is ultimately such a fine system. If, sometime down the line, people with access to the findings begin to tell us what faults they've found in them, I'll be listening, and so will our media, which never misses an opportunity to bash the powers that be and especially the politicians (remember the aftermath of the war in Lebanon in 2006?). But that will be next week, or next month. Not 3 minutes after the findings are first cited.

Some of the critics, in Israel and of course everywhere else, reject the findings automatically because they're the findings of the IDF. Case closed. To which there are a number of responses. One, if the IDF is automatically regarded as lying, there isn't much to discuss, is there. That's an ideological position, not a rational statement. Second, if it's facts you're interested in, there isn't much choice but to listen to the IDF. The people doing the shooting, after all, were Israeli soldiers and Hamas; if it's the Israelis you're trying to convict, there isn't much choice but to ask them what they were doing, what they thought they were doing, what their orders where, what information they had, what conditions they were in when they acted, and myriads of additional very specific questions.

Which brings us to the matter of IDF investigators versus international ones. The assumption of international impartiality in matters of Israel is, of course, so vacuous as to be comic. Yet even if, against decades of experience, it were possible to appoint a commission of Martians to investigate the matter impartially, what sovereign country would allow foreigners free run of its military to carry out the investigation? In order to reach meaningful results, you'd have to know almost everything about the inner workings of the IDF - a condition no army would allow, and certainly not one still at war. The demand that Israel enable foreigners to investigate the minutiae of its army's combat behavior is a demand that it weaken itself dramatically; an Israeli politician who would allow such a thing would rightfully be drummed out of town.

Which brings me to the comparison with any other army. I don't claim to know everything, and am willing to be corrected - as you all know, I don't block comments. So far as I know, however, most armies never have investigations of the sort the IDF just had, in which each and every incident of a war is investigated; painstaking efforts are made to name every single person killed; and at the end of the process, the results are partially made public, while being fully open to parliamentary oversight which includes representatives of the opposition. I'll retract this statement if anyone shows me this is actually standard practice; until then: Israel is more meticulous in investigating its failures than any other army in the world.

The Guardian editorial said Israel has a case to answer? Here's the answer. Now let's see the Guardian admit it, or even acknowledge its existence.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

THE STUFF OF COMMUNAL IDENTITY


Earlier today, as I was walking by the school for children with severe learning impediments that's around the corner, a child was chatting with the school guard. During the brief moment I was within earshot I picked up the stuttering child's story. "... he was the principle of an orphanage, and when they came they told him could go home now but he said No I want to die with them..."

Is there a Jew in Israel above the age of ten who wouldn't immediately recognize the story of Janusz Korczak? Is there one tenth of one percent of the college-educated adults in the rest of the world, Jews aside, who would recognize the story even if told in its entirety?

If you want to understand the communal identity of a society, talking to 12-year-old children with disabilities would probably be as good a place to start as any.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

NAZI GERMANY WITHOUT HINDSIGHT


Barry Rubin has a new blog, The Rubin Report. May he be as popular as Juan Cole, without being as silly. At the moment, his top post contains four interesting letters written in the mid-1930s by a young German woman to a pen-pal in New Zealand (pen pals were a stone-age precursor to Facebook friends, for those who don't recognize the term). The letters have the advantage of lacking any hindsight, and of telling a story of how a young German woman saw the Hitler regime from the inside without realizing where they were going with it. This is the way 100% of human experience actually works. We never know with certainty what the results of our actions will be; then again, we bear full responsibility for them. Complicated.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

THE REAL MEANING OF NEVER AGAIN




"We, pilots of the Israeli Air Force, flying in the skies over the extermination camps, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims, carrying their silent cries, saluting their bravery, and vowing to be a shield to the Jewish Nation, and to its Land, Israel."

An oft-repeated cliche repeated by both Jewish leaders and the international community is that of "never again". Presidents and Prime Ministers visit Yad VaShem, pay tribute at Holocaust Memorials and shed crocodile tears over the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, while proceeding to condemn and attack Israel. The same leaders that stood silently in commemoration of the Holocaust denounced Israel with the most hateful vitriol during its moment of greatest need, as it was fighting to defend itself and its citizens. Never again, they pledged. Never again? Is that really so?

The Holocaust teaches many universal messages. It teaches mankind to be ever vigilant against the forces of hatred and intolerance, whenever they arise against any people or group. It warns us never to allow bigoted speech and ideas fester and grow. It shows the ease with which an entire nation can descend to the depths of depravity and immorality. Yet, for the Jewish people, the Holocaust has one sharp and poignant message: Never again to be weak.

Since the destruction of the Second Temple, for two millenia, Jews lived as strangers in foreign lands, minorities under the rule of others. In Christendom and in Islamic lands, Jews were forced to lived in ghettos, mellahs or juderias, to wear distinctive and humiliating clothing, had restrictions on their professions and employment and endured severe discrimination. Jews were at the mercies of the lords of the land and had to comply with their wishes, whether it be being forced to hear a conversionist sermon delivered by a priest in a synagogue on Shabbat, or to pay a jyziah tax in a debasing ceremony to their Muslim overlords. Jews were spat upon and cursed, beaten and abused at will. The two thousand years of Jewish life in Europe and the Middle-East, with the exception of occasional periods of prosperity and tranquility, was marked with constant fear and insecurity. Ravaged by pogroms and Crusades, Inquisitions and forced conversions, massacres and jihads, Jews lived with their lives always hanging in a narrow balance. A new king or pope, ruler or clergyman, could put the Jews in peril.

In this climate of ingrained loathing and despising of the Jews, Hitler came along. He used the traditional anti-semitic motives of the Catholic church as well as new anti-semitic racial theories to stir up the people's hate. The policies of the Nazi Regime, even before the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was implemented, were designed to crush and dehumanize the Jews. The Jew looked in trepidation at the Nazi brownshirts, Gestapo and SS, unable to defend or stand up for himself. Like animals, Jews were crammed into cattle cars, suffocated in gas chambers and burnt in ovens. The Nazi beasts could not have accomplished their genocide without the help of their Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, etc. collaborators and executioners. Nor could they have managed without the world's silent approval. The Pope looked away when the Jews of Rome were rounded up from under his very window. Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill all knew about the death camps, about the killing fields and mass graves in the Ukraine, about the gas chambers and crematorium in Poland, yet closed their doors to Jewish refugees. Allied bombers flew over Auschwitz but the military didn't see the use of bombing the train lines. As Jews needed a place to flee to, the British, at the urging of the Arabs and the Nazi-collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, may his name be accursed, prevented Jewish aliyah to the Land of Israel, and even sent refugees back into the hands of the Nazis.

Just yesterday, on Holocaust Memorial Day, a group of partisans who fought the Nazis in the forests of Europe, visited an IDF air force base. One woman asked an officer in our air force if our pilots could reach Iran. "They can reach anywhere," he answered. This answer, powerful and moving for its simplicity, conveys the true meaning of never again. Never again will we wait in vain for Allied planes to bomb the gas chambers. Never again will we wait for world aid which did not come. Never again will we allow ourselves to be weak, to be victimized, to be powerless. Never again will we accept any conditions on where we can live, what we can wear, on our professions or possessions. Never again will we be at the mercies of the gentiles, begging for our lives. This pilot was saying that we may have been 60 years too late for the Jews of Europe, but we were not too late for the Jews of Yemen or Ethiopia. Never again will we be too late! We may not have been able to save the Jews of Warsaw, but our planes reached Iraq and Entebbe. Our planes can fly to Lebanon or Gaza, and they may yet fly to Iran, destroying the enemies of the Jewish people. We will not stand idly by our brothers blood, whether they are being rounded up and deported to annihilation, living under constant bombardment and rocket attacks or in the shadow of a nuclear attack. We know that the world abandoned the Jews to their fate, that deals were not made and safe havens closed off. Today, we can reach anywhere.

Another survivor made her own request of the air force of Israel, "What I ask of you is to make sure that there will not be another Holocaust." As long as brave Jewish men and women don the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force and protect the Jewish people from on land, sea and air, there can never be another Holocaust. We have learnt the terrible price of being weak. Being defenseless and without a homeland came at the horrendous cost of a third of our nation. The hatred of the world for the Jews has not diminished one iota since the trains came to a halt and the crematoriums stopped giving off their accursed smoke. Across Europe and North America, in public forums and university campuses, the Jewish State is being delegitimized and marked as a pariah. We must not heed the words of these haters for we know too well how dearly we pay without a state of our own. The only thing that stands between us and Auschwitz-Birkenau are the soldiers of the IDF. Those who condemned the army going in to Gaza must know that they only went in there to protect and defend the Jewish people. They are what keeps us from the narrow brink, from the mound of ashes at Majdanek, from the halls of shoes and piles of hair. To the Jews of Europe, massacred because of the world's apathy and our own weakness, scattered in the forests of Teblinka, the fields of Birkenau or the mass graves of the Ukraine, we promise never again to be weak, to allow ourselves to be bullied and beaten. For this is the true meaning of "Never Again".

taken from:For Zion's Sake

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