Fifteen police were hurt on Friday in what is being described as a 'successful attempt' to quell rioting on the Temple Mount that featured stone-throwing onto the Western Wall Plaza below. Fifteen policemen were lightly wounded in their attempt to restore order on the Temple Mount after Arab youths emerging from Friday prayers started hurling rocks down onto those worshiping at the Western Wall.
Having restored calm with the use of stun grenades, and following helpful intervention by other Muslim worshipers to defuse the clash, police eventually withdrew in coordination with the Waqf to allow older worshipers to leave the Temple Mount.
Ron Krumer, a spokesman for Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, confirmed a Palestinian woman was wounded in the head by a rubber bullet and hospitalized in serious condition. Palestinian medics reported 13 injuries.
Police denied using rubber bullets to disperse the riot.
Najeh Btirat, a Waqf official, said the clash followed a mosque sermon on the issue.
"The Friday sermon focused on the Islamic sites that are being targeted by Israel and the need to preserve them," he said. About 300 young men threw stones at police after prayers, he said.
Rock-throwing then spilled over into Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter. Police deployed stun grenades, restoring calm.
In response to a query by JPost reporter Abe Selig, Human Rights Watch disclosed on Friday that Marc Garlasco resigned from the organization on February 15. Garlasco was the organization's senior military analyst until he was suspended in September after his hobby of collecting Nazi memorabilia was uncovered by bloggers. Garlasco's name remained on Human Rights Watch's website as late as Thursday. After HRW was queried regarding Garlasco’s status on Thursday evening, the group’s communications director, Emma Daly, responded in an e-mail stating, “Human Rights Watch regretfully accepted Marc Garlasco’s resignation on February 15th [and] he is no longer listed as a staff member on Human Rights Watch’s Web site.”
However, according to the NGO Monitor announcement, which had been sent to the Post on Thursday morning, “As of March 4, 2010, [Garlasco’s] name remains on the list of HRW employees, listed as a ‘senior military analyst.’”
While Garlasco’s name was visible on HRW’s online list of employees on Thursday afternoon, Daly insisted in a phone conversation on Thursday night that his name had been removed from the list. “You’re looking at an old Internet cache,” Daly told the Post.
A subsequent search revealed that Garlasco’s name had in fact been removed, leaving a blank space where it had appeared hours prior.
As for the “pending investigation,” Daly repeated that Garlasco had resigned and said, “We are not commenting on it any further.”
The belated “resignation” of Marc Garlasco, who held the position of senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, underscores HRW’s lack of credibility and its need to launch an external organizational investigation.
Since Garlasco was revealed to be an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia in September 2009, NGO Monitor had repeatedly called for an independent examination of HRW’s policies and hiring practices.
“Although Garlasco no longer works with HRW, the organization’s reliance on his supposed ‘military expertise’ raises alarming questions about the credibility of its activities, and the Goldstone report, which relied heavily on HRW’s claims,” said Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “HRW’s problems go far deeper than the Garlasco case.”
Steinberg noted that Garlasco co-authored numerous HRW reports alleging “Israeli war crimes” during the 2009 Gaza war, and if these publications are shown to be based on inaccurate, false, or biased claims, both HRW and Goldstone, who was on HRW’s board, should issue retractions. Additionally, since 2004, Garlasco co-authored many of HRW’s reports condemning Israel, each of which needs to be investigated or withdrawn, Steinberg said.
NGO Monitor urges HRW to mount an independent investigation focusing on the relationship between Garlasco and its Middle East and North Africa division. MENA heads Joe Stork and Sarah Leah Whitson – who were both active in anti-Israel campaigning prior to joining HRW – appear to have worked closely with Garlasco. This relationship, under the leadership of Executive Director Kenneth Roth, may have propelled HRW’s highly disproportionate focus on Israel, as documented by NGO Monitor and by HRW founder Robert Bernstein.
“As James Hoge Jr. prepares to chair HRW’s board, his first priority should be launching an independent investigation of this human rights superpower, particularly of its Middle East and North Africa division,” said Steinberg.
The 'proximity talks' (indirect talks) with the 'Palestinians' will not start where former Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert left off with Abu Mazen in 2008 according to a report in Friday's Jerusalem Post. The question of where the talks would start was one of the major sticking points between the parties. Olmert offered the Palestinians nearly 94 percent of the West Bank, a land swap to compensate for most of the rest, an arrangement on Jerusalem, and the return of a small number of refugees into Israel as a “humanitarian gesture.”
Abbas rejected the offer, telling The Washington Post in May that the gaps were “too wide.”
The Post has also learned that the proximity talks will not immediately focus primarily on borders, another Palestinian demand, with Israel saying there can be no credible discussion of borders without first knowing what security arrangements will be in place.
Hamas speaker Ahmad Bahar expressed fury Thursday following the Arab League's decision to approve mediated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. As long as Hamas doe not share power in the Palestinian Authority, negotiations with Israel “would not meet any standards of legitimacy,” Bahar said.
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Bahar warned PA Chairman Abbas that Hamas supporters would refuse to recognize decisions made in negotiations with Israel as long as Fatah is the sole negotiating party.
Bahar also criticized the Arab League, and suggested that the league reconsider its decision.
Hamas insists that the land Israel is on belongs to the Muslim world, and that the entire land should be given to PA Arabs. The terrorist group has agreed to observe a tadhiya (temporary calm) at various points, but refuses to sign any permanent treaty with Israel, which it does not recognize and to which it refers as “the Zionist entity.”
I don't envy the kinds of decisions these people had to make, but it's fascinating to read how they make them.Under normal circumstances, triage involves setting priorities among patients with conditions of various degrees of clinical urgency, to determine the order in which care will be delivered, presuming that it will ultimately be delivered to all. After the Haitian earthquake, however, it was impossible to treat everyone who needed care, and thus the first triage decision we often had to make was which patients we would accept and which would be denied treatment. We were forced to recognize that persons with the most urgent need for care are often the same ones who require the greatest expenditure of resources. Therefore, we first had to determine whether these patients' lives could be saved.
Our triage algorithm consisted of three questions: How urgent is this patient's condition? Do we have adequate resources to meet this patient's needs? And assuming we admit this patient and provide the level of care required, can the patient's life be saved?
In the first days of our deployment, most of the patients we saw had recently been removed from the rubble. The majority had limbs that were compromised by open, infected wounds. Untreated, open fractures meant infection, gas gangrene, and ultimately death. Clearly, the sooner after injury the patient received medical attention, the better his or her chances of survival. Late-arriving patients who already had sepsis had a poor chance of survival. But there was no clear cutoff time beyond which patients could not be saved; each case had to be evaluated individually.
One of the dilemmas we had to confront repeatedly was whether to accept a patient with a crush injury. In such patients, rhabdomyolysis often develops, with resulting impairment of renal function. Given the absence of functioning dialysis facilities, the chances of survival in this scenario were low.
The potential for rehabilitation was an additional consideration in the triage process. Patients who arrived with brain injuries, paraplegia secondary to spinal injuries, or a low score on the Glasgow Coma Scale were referred to other facilities. Since we had neither a neurosurgical service nor computed tomography, we believed it would be incorrect to use our limited resources to treat patients with such a minimal chance of ultimate rehabilitation at the expense of others whom we could help. But denying care to some patients for the benefit of others was not a course of action that came readily to physicians accustomed to treating all who seek care.
Patients who had just been rescued presented another dilemma. We believed it would be inappropriate to deny treatment to a patient who had survived days under the rubble before a heroic rescue, even though this policy meant potentially diverting resources from other patients with a better chance of a positive outcome. Indeed, one patient who was rescued a week after the quake was brought to us in dire condition. She was admitted, was intubated, and underwent surgery but ultimately did not survive.
Problem is, if left unchallenged, proponents of the apartheid analogy are liable to stifle free speech and trample open debate on campuses by using intimidation and bullying tactics. They recently prevented Ambassador Michael Oren from finishing a speech at UC Irvine, and on the same day in Cambridge they interrupted Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, allegedly shouting in Arabic, "Slaughter the Jews." Meanwhile, Cambridge University’s Israel Society bowed to pressure from Muslim students to cancel a speech by historian Benny Morris.
The events of “Israel Apartheid Week” in the world opened this year with “freedom fighter” Leila Khaled’s emotional plea to “continue the armed struggle against Israel.” Khaled, a certified airplane hijacker and a well-known favorite of the radical Left in Western European delivered her words of “reconciliation, peace, and brotherly love” in a videotape shown to participants of a Mideast studies convention held at University of London last weekend.
UN 'humanitarian coordinator' John Holmes told the Jerusalem Post on Thursday evening that the 'two-state solution' may soon no longer be possible. “You are not far off from the point where the two-state solution becomes impossible,” said Holmes. “If you are going to have a meaningful Palestinian state, it needs to have a meaningful piece of land that goes with it.”Since the creation of 'Palestinians' in 1964, the 'Palestinians' could have had their state in 1968, in 2000 and in 2008. Each time, they turned it down, thinking there would be a better deal in which they could destroy the Jewish state.
He listed the ways in which Israel had stymied Palestinian national aspiration over the years, including, as he saw it, Israel’s “illegal annexation of Jerusalem.”
Other items on his list were divisions in Area C of the West Bank, such as the security barrier, settlements and the roads connecting them that Palestinians cannot use.
“This is not contiguous territory. It is territory that is split up. It is a very funny kind of state. That is why people are not sure that a solution is available,” said Holmes.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting in Washington on Thursday, Committee Chair John Kerry and ranking Republican Richard Lugar (no friend of Israel) slammed both Israel and the 'Palestinians' for the 'lack of progress' on 'peace.' Lugar also threatened to cut US assistance to both sides. The senators also took Israel to task at times during the hearing on making progress toward Middle East peace, with Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) calling for improvements in “the dire conditions in Gaza,” terming it “a great disappointment that so little has been rebuilt” following the war there a year ago. He urged the import of more reconstruction materials, some of the many items Israel has barred in blockading the crossings.
In addition, ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) raised the specter of reducing American support for Israel and the Palestinian Authority if they don’t comply with US demands on the peace process. Both parties receive generous American aid packages, though Lugar did not mention these monies in his comments.
“The consequences might be that you really don’t receive our support – for a while you’re on your own. Take it or leave it,” he suggested as one possible scenario, noting that many would dismiss such an action because of the close US-Israel relationship and the pivotal view of the Palestinians in the Middle East.
But, he warned, “The consequences of a failure to move ahead have to be evident at some point. Somebody has to worry about this.”
The Palestinians were also not immune to castigations from Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania). He contended that “the Israelis have shown, certainly in the last year, that they’ve been willing to make real concessions. I can’t say the same, in my judgment, about the Palestinians. I think there’s been a real reluctance or even refusal to engage in real negotiations.”
But most of the criticism voiced Thursday focused on the US approach toward peace-making in the region. “Because of the Goldstone Report and the way in which the settlement issue was handled, publicly hanging [PA] President [Mahmoud] Abbas out to have an expectation that that was the standard and then going back from it, left him weakened,” Kerry said, referring to two Obama administration policies though he didn’t mention the US by name.
A new book to be published later this year by Yitzchak Rabin's English-language speech writer and close friend Yehuda Avner claims that Rabin believed that peace with the 'Palestinians' was a 'long-shot,' but that he reluctantly tried it because he feared that fundamentalist Islam was taking over the 'Palestinian' population. The claim is based on an interview with Rabin just three days before his death (Hat Tip: Eliyahu P). As the veteran diplomat, today 81, explains in a new book, he had just completed an ambassadorship to Australia in late 1995 and had been invited by Rabin to rejoin his team.
“I met him at his Jerusalem office on Wednesday, 1 November,” Avner writes in The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, which is being published this month by Toby Press. “My first question was, ‘Why did you shake Yasser Arafat’s hand?’”
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“Number one,” he recounts Rabin as saying, “Israel is surrounded by two concentric circles. The inner circle is comprised of our immediate neighbors – Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon and, by extension, Saudi Arabia. The outer circle comprises their neighbors – Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. Virtually all of them are rogue states, and some are going nuclear.
“Number two,” the prime minister went on, “Iranian-inspired Islamic fundamentalism constitutes a threat to the inner circle no less than it does to Israel. Islamic fundamentalism is striving to destabilize the Gulf Emirates, has already created havoc in Syria, leaving twenty thousand dead, in Algeria, leaving one hundred thousand dead, in Egypt, leaving twenty-two thousand dead, in Jordan, leaving eight thousand dead, in the Horn of Africa – the Sudan and Somalia – leaving fourteen thousand dead, and in Yemen, leaving twelve thousand dead. And now it is gaining influence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
“Iran is the banker,” Rabin pointed out, “pouring millions into the West Bank and Gaza in the form of social welfare and health and education programs, so that it can win the hearts of the population and feed religious fanaticism.
“Thus,” he continued to Avner, “a confluence of interest has arisen between Israel and the inner circle, whose long-term strategic interest is the same as ours: to lessen the destabilizing consequences from the outer circle. At the end of the day, the inner circle recognizes they have less to fear from Israel than from their Muslim neighbors, not least from radicalized Islamic powers going nuclear.”
Next, Rabin came to the thinking at the heart of his decision to pursue the Oslo process: The Israel-Arab conflict, he said, “was always considered to be a political one: a conflict between Arabs and Israelis. The fundamentalists are doing their level best to turn it into a religious conflict – Muslim against Jew, Islam against Judaism. And while a political conflict is possible to solve through negotiation and compromise, there are no solutions to a theological conflict. Then it is jihad – religious war: their God against our God. Were they to win, our conflict would go from war to war, and from stalemate to stalemate.
“And that, essentially,” the prime minister summed up to his longtime adviser, “is why I agreed to Oslo and shook hands, albeit reluctantly, with Yasser Arafat. He and his PLO represent the last vestige of secular Palestinian nationalism. We have nobody else to deal with. It is either the PLO or nothing. It is a long shot for a possible settlement, or the certainty of no settlement at all at a time when the radicals are going nuclear.”
Earlier this week, I reported on a New York Times story that claimed that two of Hamas terrorist and arms dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's liquidators had flown to the United States after the liquidation. I raised five questions regarding that report: First, do you mean to tell me that one of the suspects who supposedly left Dubai within a day actually remained there until February 14 and Inspector Tamim missed him? Pretty shoddy police work in my book.
Second, if the US fingerprints anyone who enters and leaves the country on a foreign passport, couldn't someone also have taken the passports and duplicated them when this person was on a trip to the US, just as the Israelis have been accused of doing?
Third, is there no way to leave the US these days without being tracked? Canada? The Caribbean Islands? Mexico?
Fourth, the US is a big country - someone can find an awful lot of places to hide there.
Fifth, who is Payoneer and how are they connected to this? Someone issues American credit cards in Israel? Bring it on....
Law enforcement authorities told ABC News that a records search turned up no evidence that two suspects in the murder of a top Hamas military commander entered the United States on the dates now circulating in published reports. While officials stressed that the records search was preliminary, and had only been done in response to claims in the media, one of the officials said it did not appear anyone using the names of the two suspects had been in the U.S. on any date after the murder.
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One highly placed official also said that Dennings and Cannon were actually run through the database for every day from Jan. 19, the day of al-Mabhouh's death, through the end of February without a hit. "They [checked] all dates," said the official. "It wasn't just based on those [two] specific dates."
A second official said "most" of the more than two dozen names cited by Dubai police as suspects were run through the same database for the specific dates cited in the press reports about Dennings and Cannon, Jan. 21 and Feb. 14. None of the names turned up a hit for those two dates.
The official said the database was only searched in response to the published reports. "Without a U.S. nexus, there is no need or requirement to run every name on every day," said the official. "If a foreign law enforcement partner came to us and said, we need assistance, we think our investigation is pointing towards the fact that someone did enter the United States on x or y date under this name then we would check it, but we have not been asked."
With the IAEA all but ruling out Syria's claims that Israel used munitions containing depleted uranium to bomb its al-Kibar nuclear reactor in September 2007, and therefore ruling out such depleted uranium as the source of uranium particles found at the site, Syria has been inventing what can only be called conspiracy theories regarding how the uranium traces made it to the site. The latest such theory claims that Israel dropped uranium particles at the site. Good luck with that."Over the past two years, we have noticed a troubling pattern in Syria's behavior," Chief US delegate Glyn Davies told the meeting. "The more evidence the agency uncovers that Syria was engaged in serious safeguards violations, the more Syria has tried to actively hinder the agency's investigation."
Here's a very disturbing report regarding how long it might take Iran to produce weapons grade uranium once it has reached the 20% level (which it has already reached, although there is not yet evidence of it having done so in large quantities). In a freshly released report by ISIS, David Albright and Christina Walrond discuss the puzzling transfer decision in relation to the overall centrifuge performance at the Natanz site, where IAEA reports have indicated a steady decrease of active centrifuges alongside an increase in monthly output of LEU from the dwindling number of functioning centrifuges. Nobody knows why Iran has fewer and fewer centrifuges working — are they malfunctioning, is it maintenance? — and Iran is not about to tell. But the move of its LEU (3.5 percent) to produce higher enrichment grade uranium (19.75) while few centrifuges work at all may have troubling implications for its military program. In particular, Albright and Walrond note that,
Iran’s recent decision to start producing 19.75 percent low enriched uranium (LEU) in the pilot plant from 3.5 percent LEU, ostensibly for civil purposes, is particularly troubling. If Iran succeeds in producing a large stock of 19.75 percent LEU, in a worst-case scenario, the FEP is large enough to turn this LEU into sufficient weapon-grade uranium for a weapon within a month. Its production could even occur between visits by IAEA inspectors, a time period that Iran could easily lengthen by positing some emergency or accident that requires a delay in permitting the inspectors inside the plant.
The important caveat for this scenario to play out, from a technical point of view, is that Iran has enough 19.75 percent uranium stockpiled to go to higher enrichment levels. This is not the case yet, at least not as far as declared stockpiles are concerned. But that could change.
At the beginning of the week, I reported that an updated National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was due out in the next couple of weeks. Now, it seems that estimate is going to be delayed. The reasons behind the latest delay are murky; two of the officials said the precise reasons for the latest delay are classified. But it is likely that the various intel agencies are still reviewing, revising, and debating the document to reach an agreement about what it should say. In the past, this has been a long and sometimes contentious process. The final product is supposed to reflect the consensus view of U.S. intelligence as a whole, though dissents often pepper the footnotes.
But in some ways the report update seems a bit of domestic political kabuki, since that judgement is clearly not informing the Obama adminitration's thinking. The U.S., as well as Russia, France, the UK and the International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors have rebuked Iran for failing to disclose a secret enrichment facility in Qom under construction since 2006. U.S. officials have previously indicated they believe Iran is hiding nuclear trigger research it has conducted. A report earlier this month by the IAEA's Director General Yukiya Amano says Iran is not fully cooperating with the Agency and the Agency can therefore not be sure that Iran's nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes.
The Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish, has suggested that Jews be stopped from praying at the grave of Shimon HaTzadik (Simon the Righteous) for an hour so that 'Palestinians' may be allowed to demonstrate there against their eviction from apartments in the area for non-payment of rent for more than 40 years. High Court judge Dorit Beinish on Thursday castigated police, who had refused to grant a permit to Arab residents of the Shimon Hatzaddik neighborhood (called Sheikh Jarrah by Arabs) to demonstrate Saturday night against the evictions of families illegally squatting on Jewish property. Jerusalem Police Chief Aharon Franco said that allowing the demonstration to be held at all was likely to lead to disturbances, as Arabs and leftists have proved time and again in recent weeks, throwing rocks and stones at police and at Jewish worshippers at the tomb of Shimon Hatzaddik. The only way to allow a demonstration and ensure the safety of Jewish worshippers, who use the site to pray throughout the day and night, was to allow the demonstration to be held only at a distance.
In response, Beinish said that perhaps the Jewish worshippers “could stop praying for an hour” in order to allow the Arabs to demonstrate.
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