* Hamas supreme leader Khaled Meshal in Damascus said to be target
* Meshal on par with Zarqawi and Bin Laden in world terror league
* Israeli deputy PM Shimon Peres: We would prefer it if the EU and UN asked for Meshal to be taken to the International Court in The Hague
* Israeli troops enter Ramallah, currently searching for second abducted Israeli teenager, Eliyahu Asheri
CONTENTS
1. Saving Corporal Shalit
2. Hamas deeply involved in the attack
3. The use of Hamas funds
4. Associated Press misleads again
5. “Second Israeli teenager kidnapped”
6. “The world cares not at all”
7. Europe’s role in prolonging the conflict
8. PA political leaders advocated kidnapping policy
9. “When you’re ready to sue for peace-and-quiet, let us know”
10. Hamas’s rival points of power
11. “When you empower terrorists, terrorists are empowered”
12. “We shot at the Jews and they fled Gaza”
13. “Tie a blue ribbon for Gilad” (Ha’aretz, June 26, 2006)
14. “Europe, Palestine and peace” (Wall Street Journal Europe, June 23, 2006)
15. “PA political leaders advocated kidnapping policy” (PMW, June 27, 2006)
16. “An end to ambiguity” (New York Sun, June 27, 2006)
17. “Cracks in the Hamas edifice” (Jerusalem Report, July 10, 2006)
SAVING CORPORAL SHALIT
I attach several articles below relating to Hamas and the kidnap of an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit.
But before that, here are a few observations:
Some news media have not made clear that the attack and kidnap of Shalit at Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, which happened at 5.40 am last Sunday morning, was unprovoked, occurred in sovereign Israeli territory, and that two other Israeli soldiers were shot dead in the raid and four others wounded, one critically.
Few international media have mentioned that Gilad Shalit is a teenager (he is 19). The BBC has referred to him as a “missing man” while in the very same news bulletins has referrred to Palestinian “youths” who are in fact the same age as Shalit.
HAMAS DEEPLY INVOLVED IN THE ATTACK
Many international news media have not made clear that Hamas (along with the Popular Resistance Committees terror organization) claimed responsibility for the attack.
The idea that the Hamas leadership is not responsible is ridiculous. Indeed full details and photos of the attack can be seen at the main Muslim Brotherhood Arabic forum at www.ikhwan.net/vb/showthread.php?t=19349.
The details of the operation, given the name “Scattered Illusion” by Hamas (probably referring to Mohammed Abbas’s referendum idea to recognize Israel) have also been placed on this forum.
Browsing the site, one can see the video clip of the operation that was released and three joint statements (under the Hamas Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades logo): the first claiming responsibility for the attack, the second naming the terrorists that were killed during the attack, and the third demanding the release of all women prisoners and under 18s from Israeli prisons in return for information concerning the kidnapped soldier. All participants in the discussion on this Muslim Brotherhood webpage fully support the operation.
It is important to point out that Article 2 of Chapter one of the Hamas Charter states Hamas is “the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.”
(See www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hamas_charter.htm)
From their side, Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt and elsewhere constantly praise and support Hamas acts of violence, regarding Hamas as the “spearhead of Muslim resistance.”
Lately there have been many indications that the British government and the EU are trying to engage in a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, wrongly considering it to be a moderate organization.
THE USE OF HAMAS FUNDS
Almost no news organization has pointed to the fact that the abduction operation cost Hamas a considerable amount of money. Some news media are still even continuing to emphasize that the Hamas-led Palestinian government is short of money. The abduction involved building a 650-meter tunnel well into Israel, which takes substantial resources, and (expensive) mortar and anti-tank fire were also used in the assault. Who provided the money? Was it from charity accounts?
Almost no news organizations have mentioned that the Palestinian women whom Hamas is demanding Israel release have been convicted of serious offenses, including murder.
Few news media are reporting that the Israeli military build up comes after the daily missile bombardment of Israel’s southern towns and villages. Over 1,000 Qassam rockets have been fired at civilians in Israel since Israel left Gaza deliberately aimed to kill and maim civilians.
Almost no western media mention that several Israelis (usually poor ones, from Ethiopian, Russian or North African backgrounds) have been killed as a result of the Qassam fire. These include the children Dorit Benisian, age 3, Afik Zahavi, 4 and Yuval Ababeh, 5. A dozen other Israeli Jews have been murdered by Qassams in what is euphemistically referred to on the BBC as “resistance.” The rockets have also killed a Bedouin shepherd and his son, as well as Thai workers.
ASSOCIATED PRESS MISLEADS AGAIN
Yesterday, an Associated Press report, titled “Hamas-Fatah to implicitly recognize Israel,” carried in newspapers around the world, wrongly claimed that the Hamas/Palestinian Authority government has implicitly recognized Israel by accepting the “Prisoners’ document,” the plan put forward for referendum by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
On the contrary, the Fatah-Hamas deal was not completed until amendments were added that made it very clear that Hamas does not recognize Israel, a position that has been reiterated by Hamas spokesmen since.
Israel’s right to exist is not mentioned in the “Prisoners’ plan,” which actually endorses terrorism, calling for “resistance” [i.e. violent attacks] 15 times. And by calling eight times for the so-called “right of return,” it is not recognizing a solution of two states for two peoples.
“SECOND ISRAELI TEENAGER KIDNAPPED”
Israeli authorities fear that assertions by a Palestinian group claiming to be holding an 18-year-old Israeli that were at first dismissed may be true. Eliyahu Asheri has been missing from Itamar, since Sunday. This morning the group claiming to be holding Asheri told Al Jazeera that unless Israel called off its incursion into the Gaza Strip, the teenager would “be butchered in front of television cameras.” In the last few hours the so-called Palestinian Resistance Committees have presented Asheri’s identification card at a press conference in Gaza.
“THE WORLD CARES NOT AT ALL”
I attach a number of articles below about the kidnapping of Shalit and Hamas in general.
Although this list/website has a strict policy of not including appeals or press releases, the first article is included just as an indication of how traumatized Israelis are over the kidnapping, even those who read and write for the liberal daily Ha’aretz who were so keen on pulling out of Gaza while Hamas and other groups were still so heavily armed.
Writing in Ha’aretz, Bradley Burston urges readers to “tie a blue ribbon” for the kidnapped Israeli soldier, pointing out that “when the missile hit his tank, Gilad Shalit was guarding our pre-1967 war border.” Burston asks why “the world cares not at all” about “this kidnapping of a soldier in an army which has withdrawn from the internationally recognized whole of the once-occupied Gaza Strip.”
This article is an example of how emotional people are in Israel: “Our ability to care, our very ability to notice, has been compromised by a reign of terror of such enormity, of such horror, of such duration, that the threshold of our emotional attention has become all but unreachable.”
EUROPE’S ROLE IN PROLONGING THE CONFLICT
In the second article, Daniel Schwammenthal, a subscriber to this email list, writing in The Wall Street Journal Europe, questions the role of Europe in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Even after almost 60 years, Europe still allows the Palestinians to dwell in some fantasy land, where, according to the degree of their delusion, they have been dreaming either of Israel’s destruction or and this is the ‘moderate’ view of Israel’s retreat to what many military experts consider indefensible 1967 lines and the ‘return’ of Palestinian refugees.”
As a result “by refusing even to hint at rewarding Israel for uprooting thousands of Jews and leaving most of the territory, it makes it less likely that such an agreement will ever be reached. What Europe in effect does is to create a safety net for Palestinian extremists. Their terror war is much easier to pursue knowing that no matter how irresponsible their action, the Palestinians will never lose Europe’s backing of extreme positions.”
“Do the normal rules of history not apply to the Palestinians? How long can successive Palestinian leaderships wage a terror war against Israel that stands ready to negotiate before Europe considers extracting a price for this behavior? Instead, Brussels just decided to resume aid payments to Hamas-led Palestine.”
PA POLITICAL LEADERS ADVOCATED KIDNAPPING POLICY
Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus reports that on their website, Palestine-info.net, Hamas has celebrated the killings and kidnapping “in graphic posters of smoldering and destroyed Israeli positions, with the words: ‘Smashed Illusion Operation,’ and ‘Crushing Blow on Zionist Enemy.’”
Saed Siam, the Palestinian Authority Interior Minister, who is now supposedly charged (according to gullible Western journalists) with locating Gilad Shalit, said on Abu Dhabi TV before Hamas came to power that “There is nothing the resistance cannot do When there is a kidnapping, and it is secured, each case in its own time, has its own negotiations.”
Marcus, who is also a subscriber to this list, points out that in March this year Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmud Al-Zahar told the Saudi paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that “Hamas will not hesitate to kidnap Israeli soldiers.”
“WHEN YOU’RE READY TO SUE FOR PEACE-AND-QUIET, LET US KNOW”
Hillel Halkin, writing in the New York Sun, has urged the Israeli government to respond to the Palestinian raid into Israel and killing of Israelis last Sunday as an “act of war.”
Halkin urges the Israeli government to tell the Palestinian Authority that “The charade is over. While we are willing to negotiate through neutral parties a prisoner exchange involving Gilad Shalit, we are also declaring war on you. From now on we will treat you as any country treats another country it is at war with. We will close all our borders with you, cease providing you with all services, and consider any branch of your government, any of its members, and anyone on your side contributing to your military effort, legitimate war targets. We will do our very best to avoid harming civilians, and we will expect you to do the same, but anyone else, from Prime Minister Ismail Haniya down, is from now until further notice a legitimate target. And when you’re ready to sue for peace-and-quiet, let us know.”
HAMAS’S RIVAL POINTS OF POWER
In the final piece attached below, the veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Ya’ari (who is also a long-time subscriber to this list) says that the Hamas victory in the recent elections “has led the organization into deep crisis.” According to Ya’ari no fewer than five rival power centers have emerged. These are in Damascus, Gaza, the armed wing of Hamas, the West Bank and in Israeli prisons.
“WHEN YOU EMPOWER TERRORISTS, TERRORISTS ARE EMPOWERED”
I would also draw attention to two other pieces, not attached below for space reasons, which show how some leading Israeli commentators blame the “misguided” withdrawal from Gaza last year while Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups were still so armed and active there, for the current round of events.
Caroline Glick (another subscriber to this list) writing in the Jerusalem Post under the title “Israel’s rude awakening,” argues that “the IDF was not in Gaza to protect the Israelis who lived there. The IDF was in Gaza to protect Israel.”
The world view of Ehud Olmert and other Israelis so eager to withdraw from Gaza, she says, “involves a denial of a basic, fundamental truth: When you empower terrorists, terrorists are empowered.”
“We have been in this situation before. Six years ago, in October 2000, on the eve of Yom Kippur then prime minister Ehud Barak gave Yasser Arafat an ultimatum. He was ordered to end all the violence he had fomented within 48 hours or face the consequences. When as the deadline passed Arafat continued the violence, Barak did nothing. He did nothing because he could do nothing. His entire government was based on the idea of making peace with Arafat by empowering him. When Arafat chose war, Barak had nothing to say. [Now it is the turn of] Olmert and his colleagues.”
“WE SHOT AT THE JEWS AND THEY FLED GAZA”
Michael Oren, writing today in The Wall Street Journal in an article titled “Stop Terror at Its Source” says “While the [impending Israeli] operation may flex [Israel’s] military muscle, it cannot restore Israel’s deterrence power or prevent future rocket attacks and kidnappings. Indeed, the attack may well prove Pyrrhic inflicting greater injury on Israel than on the Palestinians. The quandary Israel confronts today originated in the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli settlers and soldiers from Gaza last August even those Israelis most in favor of the Gaza pullout understood that many Palestinians would interpret the move as a strategic retreat and a victory for Hamas and al-Aqsa terror. ‘We shot at the Jews and they fled Gaza,’ they would say, ‘so let’s keep shooting and they’ll abandon Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.’
“Israel could have refuted that claim by responding immediately and massively to every infiltration and to every rocket fired, irrespective of whether the attacks caused Israeli casualties. Gaza is now a de facto independent state, Israel should have declared, and like any other state it must bear the consequences of its aggression. But Israel did none of this. On the contrary, infiltrations and rocket strikes began almost the day after the Gaza disengagement.
“ Israel’s inaction has provided a bonanza to Hamas. By firing the rockets from densely populated neighborhoods, the Palestinians have forced Israel to kill and wound civilian bystanders, sullying its reputation abroad. Indeed, many world leaders and virtually all of the press hastened to condemn Israel for allegedly firing a shell onto a Gaza beach that killed eight Palestinians. That the IDF denied firing the shell and that the Palestinians destroyed exculpatory evidence by gouging shrapnel from the victims’ limbs could not repair the damage to Israel’s image. Collateral damage not only hurts Israel’s international standing, it also divides the country internally. Many Israelis grieve over the deaths of innocent Palestinians, even those incurred in successful strikes against terrorists. Israel’s Supreme Court is now considering two lawsuits against the IDF, both filed by Israelis, for the unintentional deaths.”
“ There is, however, one way to avert a public relations disaster for Israel, to limit casualties, and to restore Israel’s deterrence power: Israel must return to the targeted-killing policy that enabled Mr. Sharon to triumph over terrorist organizations. Israel must target those Palestinians who order others to fire rockets from within civilian areas but whose families are located safely away from the firing zones. No Hamas or Islamic Jihad leader should be immune from such reprisals neither Prime Minister Ismail Haniya nor Khaled Meshal, who masterminds Hamas from Damascus ”
I attach five articles below.
-- Tom Gross
[Additional notes by Tom Gross]
“LONDONISTAN” AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
Relating to yesterday’s dispatch on “Londonistan,” several of you have written to me noting that last Sunday (June 25), the New York Times magazine carried a piece titled “After Londonistan.” I am aware of that. The author of the piece, Christopher Caldwell, went out of his way not to mention Melanie Phillips’ book, and as I said yesterday, the New York Times has been markedly absent from the otherwise widespread coverage of the book in the U.S.
ANOTHER ISRAELI SOCCER PITCH HIT BY MISSILE
In Football killing fields, I wrote of the double standards employed by world football’s governing body FIFA, who condemned an Israeli strike on an empty Palestinian football (soccer) pitch that had been used for terror training exercises, but refused to condemn a Palestinian missile attack on an Israeli soccer pitch. Last week at the height of the soccer World Cup another Palestinian rocket hit another Israeli soccer pitch, and again FIFA said nothing. On the morning of Sunday June 18, moments before the daily training session was set to begin, the Palestinian rocket hit the home of the local Sderot team, a member of the Israeli Football Association playing in the 4th division. A photograph of the aftermath of the attack was published in the sports section of Yediot Ahronot on Monday June 19. No one outside Israel has condemned the attack.
TIE A BLUE RIBBON FOR GILAD
Tie a blue ribbon for Gilad
By Bradley Burston
Ha’aretz
June 26, 2006
There’s an inexplicable calm regarding Gilad Shalit.
Must be the way the world works.
When the missile hit his tank, Gilad Shalit was guarding our pre-1967 war border.
The border that Hamas has been talking about for months. The one to which, should we withdraw, they would make peace with us for generations.
Or until Sunday morning, whichever came first.
When the missile hit his tank, two of his crewmates, Hanan Barak and Pavel Slutzker, were killed in the blast. A third was seriously injured.
And there was Gilad, this kid, bleeding, alone, dragged off into the Gaza Strip by men who would probably rather kill him than look at him.
There’s this heartbreaking photograph of a kid not 20 years old. The wide, unspoiled smile, doubtless unchanged from when he was small.
There is this lovely family, their guard let down because they believed him to be serving in the north, far from danger. A father who, in the depth of his dread, can say to the kidnappers, “We believe that those who are holding him also have families and children, and that they know what we are feeling.”
The world can’t give a fallen fig.
When the missile hit, there was this kid, stationed at a quiet IDF position, not in the territories, nowhere near Palestinians.
And here is this kidnapping of a soldier in an army which has withdrawn from the internationally recognized whole of the once-occupied Gaza Strip.
The world cares not at all.
Perhaps we should care more. Perhaps it’s time people made a small statement in as many places as possible.
Tie a blue ribbon on a tree for Gilad. So that people will ask what it’s for, and you can tell them.
So that he won’t be left alone, nor his family.
Ignore the voices you can hear them already saying that he had it coming, as a member of a military that attacks Palestinians the Palestinians that fire Qassams into homes, schools and medical clinics, the Palestinians that fire Qassams every single day, sometimes as many as seven times a day.
The world doesn’t give a fallen fig.
The world has washed its hands of the Palestinians. The world has washed its hands of Hamas.
The world is tired of our troubles as well.
There’s a sense that this is a kidnapping that even Hamas would rather not think about.
The answer may well lie somewhere between the Twin Towers and Faluja. Mass murder in the name of God, beheadings in the name of God, bombing after bombing after bombing after bombing in the name of God, gets to us after a while. Our ability to care, our very ability to notice, has been compromised by a reign of terror of such enormity, of such horror, of such duration, that the threshold of our emotional attention has become all but unreachable.
But just this once ...
We should tie a blue ribbon for Gilad. For his parents, his older brother, his younger sister.
So that people will ask what it’s for. And so they’ll find out.
“DO THE NORMAL RULES OF HISTORY NOT APPLY TO THE PALESTINIANS?”
Europe, Palestine and peace
By Daniel Schwammenthal
The Wall Street Journal Europe
June 23, 2006
Imagine a sovereign country trying no, eager to bring about the birth of an enemy state, fully aware that its leadership and a large part of its population want to destroy its “midwife.”
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposes to do just that with his “realignment” plan. His Israel is to be the midwife to a Palestinian state. It is a unique endeavor in human history. Without a negotiating partner willing to make peace, Israel has decided to end the conflict unilaterally, whether the Palestinians like it or not. Mr. Olmert’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, emptied Gaza of Jews. Now Mr. Olmert wants to withdraw from about 90% of the West Bank to make space for Palestine.
Israel’s critics in Europe ought to be thrilled. The Jewish state, as demanded, is ending “the occupation” that’s supposedly the root cause not just of this conflict but the Muslim world’s anger at the West. World peace is about to break out! But no, Mr. Olmert wasn’t greeted with church bells and parades when he came last week to sell Europe on his plan. He got the cold shoulder.
Now why would Europe have second thoughts? Some legitimate reasons come to mind. Israel’s enemies might interpret a unilateral withdrawal as a sign of weakness and evidence that terrorism works. Living next door to a hostile country run by a terrorist Islamic organization might generally not be a very good idea for the Jewish state. Israel’s friends voice these concerns.
The European Union doesn’t share them. Its skepticism is rooted in, let’s say, due process. At their summit last Friday, the bloc’s leaders made clear what they think of the Olmert plan: “The European Union will not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders other than those agreed to by both sides,” the final conclusion read.
Obviously, the Israelis would prefer a negotiated solution as well. Handing over land that’s critical to the territorial security of a small country still threatened by enemies, not to mention one that is associated with three millennia of Jewish history, would be easier to sell to a wary Israeli public if, in return, Israel got a peace treaty. But the new Palestinian government, run by terrorist group Hamas, refuses even to recognize Israel. Insisting on a negotiated solution gives Hamas veto power and discourages Israel from leaving the West Bank. Absurd doesn’t quite capture it.
The phrase “pre-1967 borders” gives some clues to European resistance. In fact, there never were either pre- or post-1967 borders only armistice lines following the Arab attempt in 1948 to extinguish newly created Israel. At the end of that war, the West Bank and Gaza did not become part of a Palestinian state but were occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively. Israel conquered these territories only in 1967, which is why it prefers to speak of “disputed” and not “occupied” land. In a legal sense occupation requires that the territory in question was the recognized part of a sovereign state before its conquest.
By getting this history wrong, the EU implies that the complete withdrawal to the 1967 lines would return the region to some previous state of order. Acknowledging that there never were any borders to begin with would make the insistence on the complete withdrawal to arbitrary battle lines appear less than objective.
And this leads us to the real “root cause” of the conflict. Even after almost 60 years, Europe still allows the Palestinians to dwell in some fantasy land, where, according to the degree of their delusion, they have been dreaming either of Israel’s destruction or and this is the “moderate” view of Israel’s retreat to what many military experts consider indefensible 1967 lines and the “return” of Palestinian refugees. That return would take place not to a new-born Palestinian state but to Israel. The influx of millions of hostile Palestinians, the vast majority of them descendants of refugees born outside the country, would amount to nothing less than the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. So the difference between so-called moderates and extremists is largely academic. While Europe rejects the extremists, it has yet to tell the “moderates” to give up on their dreams as well.
That is exactly what U.S. President George W. Bush did when he assured Mr. Sharon in a 2004 letter that Israel can’t be expected to remove the large population centers just across the armistice lines or to welcome millions of Palestinians. Some European diplomats will tell you at cocktail parties that they agree with Mr. Bush’s letter but they will not publicly endorse it. The official reason is that as a neutral party they could not possibly prejudge the outcome of the negotiations. Of course, by accepting total withdrawal as the default position, they are doing just that. The same applies to Europe’s refusal to take a stand on the refugees. Pretending that the “return” of the refugees is even a theoretical possibility is to entertain the idea of Israel’s destruction clearly incompatible with the position of a neutral partner.
Of course in a cosmic sense, Europe is right. Real peace can come only once both sides agree to it. But by refusing even to hint at rewarding Israel for uprooting thousands of Jews and leaving most of the territory, it makes is less likely that such an agreement will ever be reached. What Europe in effect does is to create a safety net for Palestinian extremists. Their terror war is much easier to pursue knowing that no matter how irresponsible their action, the Palestinians will never lose Europe’s backing of extreme positions.
Do the normal rules of history not apply to the Palestinians? How long can successive Palestinian leaderships wage a terror war against Israel that stands ready to negotiate before Europe considers extracting a price for this behavior? Instead, Brussels just decided to resume aid payments to Hamas-led Palestine.
By giving tacit support to radical and unrealistic expectations full withdrawal and “return of the refugees” the EU is not doing the Palestinians any favors. It only weakens the position of true Palestinian moderates who are ready to find a workable compromise and it prolongs the conflict and suffering on both sides.
PA POLITICAL LEADERS ADVOCATE KIDNAPPING-FOR-HOSTAGE POLICY
Palestinian Authority political leaders advocated kidnapping-for-hostage policy
By Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
Palestinian Media Watch
June 27, 2006
Foreign Minister, Mahmud Al-Zahar: Hamas will not hesitate to kidnap Israeli soldiers “to exchange for [Palestinian] prisoners, should the opportunity arise.”
[Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, March 7, 2006]
Interior Minister Saed Siam: “It is inevitable to kidnap soldiers to exchange for them... There is nothing the resistance cannot do. And when there is a goal and a good plan, the goal can be achieved... [In the past] Hamas succeeded in kidnapping and hiding bodies, but unfortunately, two bodies were handed over for nothing.”
[Undated video clip from Abu Dhabi TV before Hamas came into power]
The Palestinian Authority political leadership has been attempting to distance itself from the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Yesterday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas instructed PA Prime Minister Haniyeh and Interior Minister Saed Siam to “guarantee the release of the abducted soldier.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 27, 2006]
However, one must question the sincerity of such public displays, especially by the Hamas leadership. A review of policy articulated by Hamas political leaders, including Interior Minister Siam himself and the PA Foreign Minister, shows that it was the avowed policy of the Hamas political leadership to kidnap Israeli soldiers as hostages to exchange for terrorists.
There’s another clear show of support for the kidnapping from the political leadership. The Hamas website, Palestine-info.net, has celebrated the killings and kidnapping in graphic posters of smoldering and destroyed Israeli positions, with the words: “Smashed Illusion Operation”, and “Crushing Blow on Zionist Enemy”.
Another poster in English on their web site has the names of the three groups accepting responsibility, which includes the Al Qassam Brigades of Hamas, followed by the words: “In the first movie Mission 1 Be Back!” [See below]
The following are policy statements of both Hamas political leaders and Islamic Jihad:
Mahmud Al-Zahar, Hamas, Foreign Minister: “The Head of Hamas party in the Palestinian Legislative Council, [and current Foreign Minister-ed] Dr. Mahmud Al-Zahar, said that his movement would not hesitate to kidnap soldiers of the occupation in order to exchange them for [Palestinian] prisoners, should the opportunity arise.”
[Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, March 7, 2006]
Saed Siam, PA Interior Minister (now charged with locating the hostage): “In the past Hamas succeeded in kidnapping many Zionist soldiers.
There are thousands of prisoners of our forces, they have to think how to free these prisoners. And I believe that it is inevitable to kidnap soldiers to exchange for them. In the past Hamas kidnapped 10 soldiers.
There is nothing the resistance cannot do. And when there is a goal and a good plan, the goal can be achieved, especially about the prisoner issue, [which] is top priority.
During the PA administration, Hamas succeeded in kidnapping and hiding bodies, but unfortunately, two bodies were handed over for nothing. When there is a kidnapping, and it is secured, each case in its own time, has its own negotiations.”
[Undated video clip from Abu Dhabi TV before Hamas came into power]
Fathi Hamad, Member Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas: “The Islamic resistance movement “Hamas” yesterday threatened to carry out kidnapping operations of soldiers in the Israeli army, in order to release Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. The threat was announced by Hamas Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Fathi Hamad.”
[Al-Ayyam, March 16, 2006]
Sheik Halid Al-Batash, Islamic Jihad: “[Palestinian Authority] Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah emphasized the importance of forming a mechanism for the release of our heroic prisoners who are held in the jails of the occupation, without making concessions...
Prominent Islamic Jihad movement leader, Sheik Halid Al-Batash... called for seeking different mechanisms for the release of our heroic prisoners. He emphasized that among the mechanisms is the kidnapping of Zionists to exchange for the release of the [Palestinian] prisoners.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, April, 17 2006]
Sheik Halid Al-Batash, Islamic Jihad: “The Islamic Jihad [Movement] says: kidnapping of Israeli soldiers the fastest way for the release of the prisoners. Islamic Jihad movement senior official [Halid Al-Batash] called on the factions of the resistance to kidnap Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners, who Israel holds and refuses to release.”
[Al-Ayyam, May 9, 2006]
(For the pictures that accompany the above article, please see
www.pmw.org.il/LatestBulletins.htm#b270606.)
“THE CHARADE IS OVER”
An end to ambiguity
By Hillel Halkin
New York Sun
June 27, 2006
“An act of terror,” Israel’s chief-of-staff Dan Halutz called the Palestinian raid on an Israeli military outpost on the periphery of the Gaza Strip last Sunday, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed, several more were wounded, and one, 19-year-old Gilad Shalit, was captured and is now being held in Palestinian territory.
It was in fact anything but that. If terror consists of randomly killing and maiming non-combatant civilians for the purpose of sowing fear and insecurity, Sunday’s raid, carried out by the military wing of Hamas, was the antithesis: A well-planned and well-executed attack on a strictly military target that was chosen long in advance and reached through the laborious digging of an underground tunnel half-a-mile long.
Why, when geologists can detect relatively minor underground tremors deep in the earth, Israeli scientists have been unable to develop equipment to detect the digging of tunnels, which have been widely used by Gaza Palestinians for the smuggling of weapons and occasional raids on Israeli positions, is a question in itself. What is not in question, though, is that if Israel and the Palestinian Authority are in a state of war, the attack in question was a perfectly legitimate act of war.
Indeed one might say, with one’s tongue only partially in one’s cheek, that attacks like Sunday’s, if the alternative to them is suicide bombs, should be encouraged by Israel. Since its inception, the greatest blot on the generally unsavory record of the Palestinian “liberation movement” has been its clear preference for terror over military action. For every Palestinian attack on Israeli soldiers in the four decades since the 1967 war, there have been many dozens of attacks on Israeli civilians, even though in many cases it would have been just as easy to target soldiers.
True, soldiers shoot back and civilians generally don’t. But if you are a suicide bomber sworn to die anyway, why not trade your bomb for a gun and open fire on soldiers, who are not exactly difficult to find in Israel? The only real answer to this question is that the Palestinian organizations have wanted to kill civilians rather than soldiers because this is precisely the message they have wished to deliver namely, that their enemy is not specifically the Israeli “occupation,” nor even the Israeli army, but the entire Jewish population of Israel.
And it is because of this, too, that the Israeli response to Sunday’s raid should not be Chief-of-Staff Halutz’s. Rather, it should be: “Fair enough! You fought this time like soldiers rather than like terrorists we will treat you this time like soldiers rather than like terrorists.”
In practice, this means two things. The first is that, if Hamas wishes to suggest a prisoner exchange in which Gilad Shalit is swapped for Palestinians in Israeli jails, Israel’s response should not be an automatic “No.” It should be: “Very well. We will not swap terrorists for an Israeli soldier because an Israeli soldier is not a terrorist, but among the many Palestinians incarcerated by us there is a small number that behaved like soldiers and attacked only soldiers on our side and about them we are willing to negotiate.”
The second thing is to make it clear that, as far as the government of Israel is concerned, it and the Palestinian Authority are now in a state of war and that Israeli policies will be adjusted accordingly.
Until now, ever since the creation of the Palestinian Authority by the 1993 Oslo accord, Israel’s relations with this Authority have been absurdly ambiguous. On the one hand, the PA has supported anti-Israel terror, both by funding it and its organizations, and by turning a blind eye to it when it has been committed and refusing to bring its perpetrators to justice. Yet on the other hand, because the Palestinian Authority has always publicly disclaimed responsibility for terroristic acts, and has mendaciously asserted that it is not to blame for them and has done all it could to prevent them, Israel has refrained from declaring it an enemy state.
Although this has been a gross charade all along, there have been perhaps justifiable political and diplomatic reasons, from an Israeli perspective, for allowing it to take place. But these reasons have now exhausted themselves. The Palestinian Authority now has a Hamas government and however this government may twist or turn, and however it may have tried to disassociate itself from the hundreds of Kassam rockets shot from the Gaza Strip into Israel with its complicit knowledge in recent months, it can not disassociate itself from the Hamas soldiers who raided the Israeli outpost on Sunday.
Israel should therefore say to this government: “The charade is over. While we are willing to negotiate through neutral parties a prisoner exchange involving Gilad Shalit, we are also declaring war on you. From now on we will treat you as any country treats another country it is at war with. We will close all our borders with you, cease providing you with all services, and consider any branch of your government, any of its members, and anyone on your side contributing to your military effort, legitimate war targets. We will do our very best to avoid harming civilians, and we will expect you to do the same, but anyone else, from Prime Minister Ismail Heniya down, is from now until further notice a legitimate target. And when you’re ready to sue for peace-and-quiet, let us know.”
Rest assured that Hamas will sue fast. This time, though, Israel will have to insist that the quiet, if not the peace, be real and lasting.
HAMAS “HAS BECOME ANOTHER ELEMENT IN THE PREVAILING ANARCHY”
Cracks in the Hamas edifice
By Ehud Ya’ari
Jerusalem Report
July 10, 2006
The Hamas movement is not what it used to be. It is not able to rule effectively, even though it is in charge of all the ministries. It has not succeeded in imposing its order on the streets, despite having pulled all the members of the Izz aI-Din al-Qassam Brigades out of the underground and deployed them all over the Gaza Strip like some pseudo-police militia. Nor has its leadership managed so far to overcome the economic and diplomatic siege enforced by Israel, the United States, the European Union and most of the Arab states as well. Hamas does not have the wherewithal to resume a concerted campaign of terror, and most important, it finds it increasingly difficult to maintain its internal cohesion. Significant cracks are appearing in the top ranks of the movement, and they threaten to grow into an open schism.
In other words, Hamas’s victory in the January elections has led the organization into deep crisis. Still, there is no cause for joy just yet. Hamas is far from singing its swan song; and is not about to break up or admit to failure.
But in the course of its ongoing struggle against Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Fatah, the inner tensions are breaking out. In recent weeks, no fewer than five rival power centers have emerged:
The Damascus leadership: Khaled Mashal, head of the Hamas political bureau, is now undoubtedly the most senior figure in the organization. Born in the West Bank and exiled from Jordan in 2001: he has set up headquarters in the Syrian capital. But he does not have ultimate authority and there is a lot of internal criticism about his arrogant behavior and belligerent statements. Even his deputy, Dr. Musa Abu-Marzuk, hints at reservations. Mashal’s approach is dogmatic and confrontational, and is perceived back in the territories as being excessive in its extremism. He commandeers a significant portion of the funds that Hamas raises in the Muslim world and the Arab states, but he does not sufficiently control the local branches of the movement inside the Palestinian territories.
The Gaza leadership: Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Gaza, has won a lot of respect among the younger cadres for his restrained and smiley manner, but he is not ranked highly among the members of the Shura Council, the supreme decision-making body of the organization whose members are elected from all the different branches. Even the Hamas leadership inside Gaza is not prepared to bestow on him the status of first among equals. Often his instructions are not acted upon. In a number of instances Haniyeh has given Abu Mazen his word for example, on the removal of the Hamas militia from the streets of Gaza and later it transpires that he does not have the power to make good on his promises. His own interior minister, Said Siam, simply ignores him.
The military leadership: It is now absolutely clear that the commanders of the armed wing of Hamas do not see themselves as automatically subordinate to the political echelon. Since the liquidation of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Dr. Abd al Aziz Rantisi, in 2004, there has been no one figure that they obey without question. The acting commander, Ahmed Ja’abari, and his comrades are in touch with the Damascus leadership, behind the back of Haniyeh and his colleagues. They are pushing for a violent confrontation with Fatah and for a resumption of terror against Israel.
The West Bank leadership: Unlike Hamas in Gaza, which emerged from the womb of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the West Bank leadership is traditionally connected to the more accommodating Jordanian Muslim Brothers. The prominent figures in the West Bank such as Adnan Asfour and Hassan Yusuf hold more moderate positions than the Gazans and seek understandings with Fatah. Also, because of the absence of armed Hamas forces in the West Bank, they feel weaker opposite Fatah and more vulnerable to Israeli attack.
The prison leadership: The Israeli prisons have long been a finishing school for Hamas’s top brass, and still are today. A long list of senior figures are sitting in the jails, exerting their influence from behind bars and routinely taking part in decision-making. Imprisoned Hamas leader Sheikh Abd al-Khaleq Natsheh from Hebron, together with Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti, formulated the “Prisoners’ Document” that Abu Mazen threatened to put to a referendum on July 26. The document is supposed to lead to a partnership between Fatah and Hamas, on the basis of a joint political platform and power-sharing within the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.
This complex power play is taking place mostly behind the scenes, but Hamas can no longer hide it completely. In private conversations, senior activists cast harsh aspersions on each other in ways they never did before. There is suspicion and bitterness, and even gossip about corruption, which was unheard of till now. At the peak of the combined efforts to abort the Hamas government, the movement itself is divided, with no consensus on a leader and no clear institutional hierarchy. So long as the financial boycott continues, and Fatah demonstrates an ability to fight back, the cracks will only get wider.
Hamas is no longer the Palestinians’ “great white hope” when it comes to energizing policy and running an efficient administration. Rather, it has become another element in the prevailing anarchy. It no longer holds out an attractive promise, but has become just one more problem. Hamas is not solving the Palestinian national crisis, but worsening it.
That’s why they are desperately in need of a time-out to regain their breath. Hammering out an agreement with Abu Mazen has become the preferred option. And this is winning proof that the pressure on Hamas is bearing fruit, and that it is therefore imperative to keep it up.
CONTENTS
1. “Londonistan”
2. “A human cactus”
3. “I’d rather take ricin than publish this”
4. “While England sleeps” (By Tom Gross, New York Post, June 18, 2006)
5. “Home office funds Muslim council of Britain” (Freedom of Info Centre, June 5, 2006)
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach below a slightly longer version of my review in the New York Post of “Londonistan,” the important new book by British journalist Melanie Phillips.
“Londonistan” was generally very well received in America, and widely reviewed though true to form, The New York Times has so far ignored it.
The book has also received some good reviews in Britain, for example from Michael Gove in the Mail on Sunday. Leading British bloggers Clive Davis and Stephen Pollard have also generally welcomed “Londonistan” (while, like myself, disagreeing with some of Phillips’ more conservative views on social issues.) “On the really big issues, she is frighteningly right,” writes Davis.
“A HUMAN CACTUS”
But, the British left rather than openly debate the issues have viciously attacked the book and its author in a number of different publications.
In a piece by Jackie Ashley in The Guardian, Phillips is described as “quick to take offence,” “a human cactus” and patronizingly told to “keep your hair on, Mel.” According to Ashley “The problem is that Phillips’s hysterical tone repels frank and thoughtful argument.”
Last weekend there was also a particularly cheap review in The Observer by Peter Preston, the former editor of The Guardian who sums up Londonistan as “a ferocious denunciation of new London’s many faiths and traditions.” This is simply not true. Phillips goes out of her way not to criticize Muslims per se, let alone Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs (many of whom have written to her welcoming her book).
Phillips previously worked at The Guardian for almost two decades, which is one reason the newspaper is now so bitter about her changing views.
Brendan O’Neill, writing in the New Statesman (the house magazine of the British left) in a review titled “Losing the plot” says “I have thought hard about the best word to use to describe Phillips’s book, and really only one will do: hysterical.” He also writes that since 9/11, Phillips’ writing “has become increasingly shrill and paranoid. She says Britain has been ‘subverted’ by radical Islamic ideology, when in fact it is she who has been subverted.”
In his review, O’Neill dismisses last year’s deadly London transport bombs as merely a “stunt executed by four bored and overgrown adolescents who had nothing better to do.” That is how he engages with the argument.
On a BBC TV program, a guest who was brought in to challenge Phillips tried to dismiss her book with the bizarre accusation that she had written in defense of Menachem Begin (which she says she has not).
“I’D RATHER TAKE RICIN THAN PUBLISH THIS”
Despite being one of Britain’s most read journalists, Phillips had great trouble finding a publisher in Britain. Phillips tells me that one British Jewish publisher told her: “I’d rather take [the deadly poison] ricin than publish this.”
Whether one agrees with everything Phillips says or not, it should be clear to anyone who has read “Londonistan” that it is not written in an exaggerated or hysterical tone. Phillips presents her case thoughtfully and persuasively. (For more, see my review below.)
The final item below reveals that the British government Home Office has quietly been funding the Muslim Council of Britain last year the MCB received at least £150,000 (approx $275,000). In a letter now made public, the Home Office set out a series of terms for the grant, including the fact that their work with the MCB “may need to be on a strictly confidential basis.” The MCB was led until earlier this month by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who among other things refused to attend Holocaust memorial commemorations for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and five months later was rewarded with a knighthood by the English Queen.
This MCB funding appears to support Phillips’ view that the British authorities have still not responded adequately to the radicalized Muslim minority in its midst.
-- Tom Gross
A MESSAGE THAT WOULD BE DANGEROUS TO IGNORE
While England sleeps
By Tom Gross
The New York Post
June 18, 2006
www.nypost.com/postopinion/books/while_england_sleeps_books_tom_gross.htm
Britain is probably America’s most important ally. So what happens there has repercussions here too. And if British writer Melanie Phillips is right in her grim portrayal of “Londonistan” the phenomena of increasing Islamic radicalism and the British failure to confront it then Americans have good reason to be concerned.
While the United States provides the muscle to defend the free world against what Phillips terms “Islamic Fascism,” Britain the originator of the values that America defends provides much of the backbone. The “special relationship” between the two countries, she argues, is as vital today as when they stood shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany.
So could America really “lose Britain”? In short, thinks Phillips, yes. The situation is bad, very bad, “so much so that if we were fighting World War II now, we’d lose.”
That Prime Minister Tony Blair has shown great resolve and determination obscures the true picture, she says. For Blair is largely alone in a British establishment rife with anti-Americanism and the desire to placate Islamic extremists.
Even Blair’s own wife has made sympathetic comments about suicide bombers. Others in his governing Labor party notably the leftist mayor of London, Ken Livingstone have done their utmost to welcome Muslim Brotherhood radicals into the heart of British life.
After embracing (literally) the notorious bigot Sheikh Qaradawi, Livingstone dismissed an unprecedented coalition of British Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, gays, and lesbians who objected, claiming their protest was a Mossad conspiracy to defame Islam. Yet Livingstone remains popular among Britain’s liberal elite, who are obsessed, says Phillips, with promoting multiculturalism, political correctness and Islamist-chic.
Indeed according to Phillips, many if not most members of Britain’s governing class its politicians, judges, intellectuals, journalists, church leaders, and even senior police have turned right and wrong on their heads and encouraged Londonistan to develop. And this is, amazingly, still the case even after last year’s quadruple suicide attack on London’s transport system, carried out by British-born, British-raised, middle-class Muslims.
For two decades now, the British political and intelligence establishment has simply turned a blind eye to the substantial network of radical Islamists who have made London their home, preaching hatred of the West, indoctrinating impressionable young British Muslims and recruiting for jihad. (And not only in London: the phenomenon extends to other British cities.) Wrongly believing that these imams posed no threat to Britain itself, the authorities ignored them, repeatedly turning down extradition requests by Saudi, Algerian and Egyptian governments.
Radical Islamists in Britain have already produced some of the organizers behind the Bali bombings and the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and suicide bombers that have murdered innocent Israelis, Iraqis and Indians. British-based terrorists have also been behind attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Russia.
Yet even now, when they have struck (and are trying to strike again) inside the UK itself, the country, warns Phillips, is still in a state of deep denial. In London, the chattering classes are simply asleep, or worse still are busy scapegoating Israel and “the Jews” rather than acknowledging the Islamist threat they actually face.
Many of her fellow countrymen regard Phillips as misguided. But such was the reaction too, to the few who spoke out in Britain against appeasing Hitler in the 1930s.
Phillips is a powerful writer and her book makes compelling reading. She sets out the evidence skillfully and even if she occasionally overstates her case, her message is one that would be dangerous to ignore.
(Tom Gross (tomgrossmedia.com) is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph.)
BRITISH HOME OFFICE FUNDS MUSLIM COUNCIL OF BRITAIN
Home office funds Muslim council of Britain
Freedom of Information Act Centre
June 5, 2006
Letters between the home office and a high-profile Muslim group reveal that the government has given at least £150,000 to it. The Muslim council of Britain (MCB), led at the time by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, received the grant after asking the government for £500,000, according to correspondence disclosed under the freedom of information act (FOIA).
The financial relationship between the group and the home office is bound to raise questions especially among Muslims about the MCB’s independence from the government.
However, correspondence between Sacranie and a home office minister shows that he has been critical of the government.
Ministers have seen the MCB, which in June 2006 elected Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari to replace Sacranie as secretary general, as the organisation through which to reach out to Britain’s Muslim population in the wake of the September 11 attacks in America and the bombings in London last July.
However, some British Muslims complain that the MCB does not speak for them.
In February last year, a policy advisor at the home office’s ‘cohesion and faith’s unit’ (CFU) sent a letter to the MCB’s treasurer Dr Akber Mohamedali offering the group a grant of £148,160 for the financial year ending the following March.
The money was to fund five projects that the MCB had proposed: MCB leadership development programme; MCB leadership mentoring programme; MCB direct, a web portal for information on Islam and Muslims; British citizenship programme; and British Muslim equality programme.
The home office set out a series of terms and conditions for the grant, including: “MCB will contribute to policy development work by attending meetings, submitting ideas, debating issues, etc, which may need to be on a strictly confidential basis.”
“MCB will be prepared to work in partnership with CFU on the development and implementation of policy initiatives.
“MCB will act as a source of expertise and experience to government on issues relevant to the work of the organisation.”
The MCB had submitted, in January last year, a £500,000 bid to fund the programmes in a proposal entitled, “British Muslims: from alienation to engagement.”
The proposal says: “There is now a growing body of evidence that British Muslim communities suffer some of the sharpest forms of both race and religious discrimination and disadvantage. They are, however, inadequately protected from either.”
“It is suggested that this defining experience of Muslims, of discrimination and disadvantage, often leads to detachment and alienation from the mainstream of British society.
“This alienation has been further fuelled more recently in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 by a backlash of increased levels of Islamophobia in all sections of society, the over-zealous use by law enforcement agencies of new draconian anti- terrorism provisions resulting in a disproportionate impact on Muslims, the intense focus of the media on Muslims as the ‘enemy within’, the gains of the far right across Europe and Britain’s role in the ‘war on terrorism’ in Muslim countries.
“The level of alienation is in some cases so high that it results in not just ‘parallel lives’ but such high levels of disaffection as to threaten the kind of disorder experienced in some northern cities in 2001. It also helps the recruitment of young men by extremist tendencies.”
“Much is already underway on different fronts to address the British Muslim experience and what may be brewing just below the surface as a result.
“The government’s new strategy on race, faith and community cohesion will not only add to these activities but also provide a more coherent framework for them. The purpose of the initiatives proposed in this bid is to complement those activities from within the Muslim community.”
The released correspondence shows that, since being offered the £150,000 grant, the MCB has sought more funding from the home office.
In one e-mail from Mohamedali to a home office official last August, the MCB makes a bid for another £35,000, including £9,300 for “an incident monitoring service” and £5,000 for the MCB’s website.
He writes: “Home office funded developing the merged MCB website, which is completed and ready for testing and then going live. This will enable the community at large to access the work and services of the MCB in a much more user-friendly way.” The additional £5,000 is “to get the merged MCB website technically tested and go live on the web.”
The released correspondence does not include the response to this further bid.
The financial relationship between the MCB and the home office did not stop Sacranie from criticising the government’s response to the terrorist threat in the wake of the July attacks in London in a letter last August to Hazel Blears, then a home office minister.
He wrote that the MCB remained committed to working with the government to defeat terrorism.
“However, we are concerned that the current proposed strategy will not be the most effective in dealing with this problem.”
“The starting point must be for the government to institute a full statutory judicial inquiry into the terroristic incidents of July 7 and July 21.”
The government continues to refuse calls for such an inquiry.
* But Western press don’t report HRW findings
* While UK, US and other newspapers rushed to blame Israel using highly emotive language and photographs, Germany’s largest newspaper simply asks: how come it is claimed that the 10-year old girl pictured was not wounded because she was swimming in the sea at the time of the explosion, yet she is “running around in dry clothing?” How come “footage shows a dozen men with typical Hamas-style beards removing evidence from the site” and other media didn’t mention this? How come only the German press interviewed the Palestinian cameraman who took the footage, who then hinted he had been given stage directions as to what pictures to take?
* Report yesterday: “It’s Final: IDF Not Guilty of Death on Gaza Beach: Physical proof exists that the seven Arab family members who died on a Gaza beach were not killed by an Israeli shell”
CONTENTS
1. Introductory remarks
2. “We do not believe the Israelis were targeting civilians”
3. Yet more flawed reporting on Israel
4. Missing shrapnel
5. “Palestinians sometimes bend the truth”
6. Kofi Annan retracts his accusations
7. Arab media also accuse Israel
8. Dana Olmert demonstrates against Gaza beach deaths
9. “The Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic”
10. “The Western press falls for these scams again and again”
11. “The war of the pictures” (Sueddeutsche Zeitung, June 16, 2006)
12. “Too quick to atone” (By Gerald Steinberg, Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2006)
13. “Who is to blame for grief on a beach?” (By Charles Krauthammer, W. Post, June 16, 2006)
14. “Untold story of Gaza (and Haditha?)” (Washington Times, June 19, 2006)
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
By now, close followers of the Israeli media are probably aware that Israel has again been unfairly targeted for blame by the international media for civilian deaths it was not responsible for. But readers and viewers in the rest of the world would have had to look very closely to discover the truth, given the lack of balanced coverage and the mass of emotive reporting and distressing photos that dominated the pages of many prominent newspapers for several days last week.
The prominence given, and the rush to blame Israel, was not just startling in itself, but so too was the complete lack of coverage of other news during these days. For example, The Times of London was (as far as I could tell) alone among British papers to prominently report on the shooting deaths of at least five Iraqi civilians, including a woman and a six-year-old child, by British troops in southern Iraq on June 11. And of course the British are not trying to stem a tide of Kassam rockets raining down on their civilians, as Israel is.
(70 flying bombs fell on the working class Israeli town of Sderot last weekend alone, all aimed at civilians, yet barely reported on outside Israel. One Israeli journalist on this list tells me he did a search for “Sderot” on the AP photo wires and came up with just one result. Type in “Gaza” and you get 151 hits.)
The following is a partial glimpse into the unfair way the international media and community treats the Jewish state.
“WE DO NOT BELIEVE THE ISRAELIS WERE TARGETING CIVILIANS”
On June 9, 2006, television viewers around the world were informed of a tragedy on a Gaza beach. An explosion had claimed seven lives of a family out enjoying a picnic. Arab television and the western media all covered extensively a survivor of the explosion, a young girl named Huda Ghaliya, screaming for her father. A man held up a limp body to the cameras and called out: “Muslims! Look at this!” Highly emotional language, and horrifying pictures were used, of a kind rarely employed for all the countless other conflicts and tragedies, let alone accidents, around the world.
Immediately following the explosion, Israel was blamed for a “war crime” and accused of carrying out a “massacre” both by the Arabic-language media and by the mainstream western press.
European countries in particular rushed to conclusions. I cite the British press because this list and website is in English, but many other European news media were equally bad.
As the basis for many of their stories last week, BBC News, the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph and the Times of London all cited a single “expert,” Marc Garlasco, from the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, who claimed that the Palestinians were killed by a stray Israeli shell. This conflicted with the version of events provided by an Israeli army investigation.
Yet, in recent days and all but unreported in the British and international press Marc Garlasco has now conceded that he could not contradict the Israeli army findings into the deaths of seven Palestinian civilians on a Gaza beach on June 9, 2006.
Garlasco met with the head of the Israeli army investigation, Major Meir Klifi, and praised the IDF’s professionalism in investigating the blast, which Garlasco said was most likely caused by unexploded Israeli ordnance left lying on the beach, a possibility also raised by Klifi and his team.
(Not only has Hamas planted many mines on beaches to propel any seaborne commando raid, but as Colonel Mike Dewar, a respected British military expert, pointed out, “It seems unlikely Israeli shelling was responsible. I’ve spent much time in that part of Gaza and it is littered with old munitions some dating back to the 1967 war.”)
Garlasco also commented that he was impressed with the IDF’s system of checks and balances concerning its artillery fire in the Gaza Strip and unlike Hamas, which specifically targeted civilians in its rocket attacks, he pointed out that “We do not believe the Israelis were targeting civilians.”
The Israeli investigation into the incident concluded that some of the injured Palestinians, who are incidentally being treated in Israeli hospitals, had shrapnel removed in their bodies that did not match the metal composition of Israeli artillery shells. Major Klifi said “It is possible that it occurred as a result of something [a bomb] that someone placed, in order to prevent operations by our forces.”
It should be noted that while Garlasco did backtrack from his original comments blaming Israel he has continued to call for “an independent, international investigation.”
YET MORE FLAWED REPORTING ON ISRAEL
Last week, the Independent and the Guardian both rushed to accuse Israel of a “massacre.” The Independent titled one of their numerous articles on this incident: “Revealed: the shrapnel evidence that points to Israel’s guilt.”
Chris McGreal, the notorious mideast correspondent of the Guardian, also promoted Garlasco’s comments in a lengthy account (more than 1500 words) which included the sub-heading, “Guardian investigation casts doubt on Israeli claim that army was not to blame.”
The Daily Telegraph told its readers that the family were “killed by Israeli artillery while enjoying a beach picnic.”
The Times’ banner headline was “Babies die as artillery barrage hits families on picnic beach.” The first line of the report (which incidentally was written from Jerusalem, not Gaza) was “ISRAELI artillery fire killed a Palestinian family on a Muslim holiday.” The enormous photo of a wailing child was captioned “Children were among the casualties after an Israeli artillery shell ”
The British press enthusiastically reported that the victims’ injuries and the craters on the beach were consistent with shells dropping out the sky. As one blogger has asked in recent days “Will the British and international press now publish HRW’s change of story and reflect on what it says about Garlasco’s credibility as a professional expert?”
Not one of the many newspapers and news organizations who quoted Marc Garlasco last week as a supposedly objective and independent witness mentioned that he has a history of severely criticizing Israel, in 2004 he wrote a report titled “Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip.”
Newspapers in the U.S. are also guilty of blaming Israel for the blasts, The Washington Post titled one article, “Israeli Fire Kills 7 Beachgoers in Gaza,” and The New York Times proclaimed “Errant Shell Turns Girl Into Palestinian Icon.”
MISSING SHRAPNEL
Only the Israeli media bothered to report that Hamas operatives came and moved much of the evidence following the blast.
It has also emerged that one of the Palestinian victims from the Gaza beach, being treated at Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv, was received from a hospital in Gaza with cuts all over her body. It appears that the medics in Gaza had removed all the medically reachable shrapnel, Ichilov hospital said, adding it had never before received a patient who had been the victim of an explosion who had shrapnel removed from their bodies prior to admission to Ichilov.
To date, the BBC News, the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph and the Times of London have all failed to report on the recent developments to this story. It would appear that when it comes to demonizing Israel, as in the cases of Jenin and Mohammed al-Dura. they are not interested in the truth.
Melanie Phillips has commented on the flawed reporting by the western media who “rushed to damn Israel over an incident on which they not only had no reliable information but where it was obvious from the start that the Palestinians’ claims were suspect, not least because of the way they obstructed attempts to inspect the evidence.”
“PALESTINIANS SOMETIMES BEND THE TRUTH”
German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung (the largest quality daily published in Germany) was one of the few media outlets in the world to cast doubt on the pictures taken soon after the bloody incident. In an interview with Zakaria Abu Irbad, a photographer for the Ramattan News Agency and the first to arrive on the scene of the tragedy, they questioned the veracity of his pictures and note that this may be another “example of how Palestinians sometimes bend the truth.”
Among the most pertinent questions asked in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung article (translated into English and attached as the first article below) is, if Huda Ghaliya, the 10-year-old girl pictured, was not wounded because she was swimming in the sea at the time of the explosion, how is she “running around in dry clothing?”
The German newspaper also asks why the “footage shows rescue workers in green hospital uniforms and a dozen men with typical Hamas-style beards apparently removing evidence from the site Did the Hamas men remove pieces of evidence as was claimed by the Israeli media and Palestinian eyewitnesses?”
The questions continue, “If the artillery shell that killed the Ghaliya family was from the Israeli army, why don’t the Palestinians present the fragments?”
“And: Why didn’t Irbad think of calming the hysterical Huda down instead of following her for several minutes with his camera? Irbad says ‘she asked me to film her. She wanted to be seen with her dead father and wanted to show the world what criminals the Israelis are.’ Is it possible that the saddened 10-year-old Huda, who just lost seven family members, could have been giving Irbad stage directions?”
I recommend reading the article in full below.
KOFI ANNAN RETRACTS HIS ACCUSATIONS
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has a track record of speaking out against Israel, no doubt to placate the bigots in his organization, had also rushed to express doubt over the Israeli army version of events. Speaking to Al-Hayat, a Saudi-owned Arabic newspaper published in London, he labeled the Israeli version of events as “strange.” Revealing that he knows next to nothing about the operational methods of Hamas and Fatah in Gaza, Annan was also quoted by reporters at U.N. headquarters saying that “To find a mine on the beach is rather odd.”
According to press reports of a phone call between Annan and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert following the Gaza beach deaths, when Olmert asked why Annan had not also called to express similar concern about the many missiles raining down on southern Israel daily, Annan replied “What missiles?”
Following a meeting with Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Gillerman, Annan retracted his remarks. Will Chris McGreal, Donald McIntyre of the Independent, and BBC News now retract some of their own reports and inform their readers of Human Rights Watch’s renewed findings casting doubt that Israel was to blame?
(The last time this happened, they certainly didn’t. In February, 20 Palestinians were killed in an explosion in a Gaza refugee camp that was wrongly blamed on Israel, and now turns out to have been beyond any doubt caused by a spate of Hamas rocket attacks aimed at Israel.)
ARAB MEDIA ALSO ACCUSE ISRAEL
Palestinian television last week repeatedly broadcast doctored scenes showing file footage of Israeli naval vessels, interspersed with video of the beach victims. The Israeli army investigation also rejected the possibility that the Palestinians were hit by shells fired from a navy ship.
In the leading Saudi-owned, London-based paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, Safi Nar Kazem, writing in the opinion section following the events in Gaza, argued that the American war on terror does not concentrate on the “main terrorist country,” Israel.
DANA OLMERT DEMONSTRATES AGAINST GAZA BEACH DEATHS
Those on the far left in Israel also rushed to blame the Jewish state without any evidence. Among these was Dana Olmert, the leftwing academic daughter of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. She joined 200 activists in a protest outside the house of Israeli army chief Dan Halutz. The demonstration, which took place a day after the incident, included chants calling Halutz a “murderer” and a “war criminal” and that “the Intifada shall prevail.”
Gerald Steinberg, writing in the Jerusalem Post (article attached below), criticizes the demonstrators who “provided legitimacy to another round of anti-Israel demonization.”
“THE PALESTINIANS’ CLASSIC AND COWARDLY HUMAN-SHIELD TACTIC”
Charles Krauthammer, commenting on the Gaza beach incident in the Washington Post, asks “Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?”
He answers: “This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic ‘Israeli massacre’ picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.”
“THE WESTERN PRESS FALLS FOR THESE SCAMS AGAIN AND AGAIN”
Mona Charen, writing in the Washington Times, cites a “glaring missing ingredient to the media coverage is what happened before Israel fired on Gaza (Israel acknowledges aiming at terrorists in a different area of Gaza that day). In the 10 months since Israel withdrew from Gaza, some 1,000 missiles have been fired at Israel from Gaza. More than 800 have hit the country.”
Charen goes on to point out that “The world press, very much including the mainstream U.S. media, tends to take the word of Palestinian spokesmen about civilian deaths, although experience should have taught them by now to be more guarded. In 2005, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl was killed by gunfire. U.N. and Palestinian officials blamed her death on Israel until it was determined a bullet fired by Palestinians shooting into the air to celebrate their pilgrimage to Mecca hit her.”
Charen concludes that “The Western press falls for these scams again and again. Their credulity betrays their partiality, and it dishonors them.”
Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of the Jewish Week, questions why “Few in the media or in seats of power seemed to note that while Israeli-inflicted casualties on civilians are unintentional, swiftly apologized for, and the result of defensive responses, the Palestinian attacks are part of a consistent and acknowledged plan to kill Jewish men, women and children. Virtually every legal system in the world distinguishes between accidental and premeditated killings, so where is the moral outrage over the Palestinians’ murderous intentions?”
For those who are still unaware of the extent to which film footage from Gaza is falsified, one should watch the “Pallywood” and other movie clips, which I have recommended before.
As David Frum, another subscriber to this email list, writes in the Canadian paper The National Post: “The makers of the film have compiled documentary footage to reveal a startling series of faked funerals, staged gun battles, and professional weeping grandmothers. They dub the Palestinian propaganda complex, ‘Pallywood,’ and ask hard questions about the readiness eagerness of much of the world media to be deceived.”
(Charles Krauthammer, Gerald Steinberg, Melanie Phillips, David Frum and Gary Rosenblatt are all subscribers to this list.)
I attach four articles below.
-- Tom Gross
* See also this article published since this dispatch was compiled:
“It’s Final: IDF Not Guilty of Death on Gaza Beach: Physical proof exists that the seven Arab family members who died on a Gaza beach were not killed by an Israeli shell. IDF Spokesman comes down hard on Israeli (and foreign) newsmen who spread PA fabrications.” (www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=105806)
“NOTHING NEW ABOUT PALESTINIANS PUBLISHING FALSIFIED OR FABRICATED PICTURES”
(Translated from German)
The war of the pictures
Seven dead on the Gaza Beach: Was it Israeli artillery fire or a Palestinian landmine? An example of how Palestinians sometimes bend the truth
By Thorsten Schmitz
Sueddeutsche Zeitung
June 16, 2006
www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/315/78237/
Last Friday, ten-year-old Huda Ghaliya woke up early in the morning even though she did not have to go school. She was excited. Final exams were over and summer vacation had just begun. Huda’s father had promised the children on Friday of last week that they would go to the beach in northern Gaza for a picnic.
According to her cousin, Huda was one of the best students in her class. She loved mathematics, biology and reading. Her favorite poem is called “Identity Card,” by Mahmoud Darwish. It is a sad poem about a homeless Palestinian and his hatred of the occupiers.
Carrying plastic tables and chairs, and baskets filled with corn on the cob and pita bread, this large family left their home in Beit Lahiya (population of 35,000), and traveled the short distance to the beach. Beit Lahiya is known for its strawberries, as well as for the fact that short-range rockets are fired from this city toward Israel.
The picnic ended in death for her father, one of his two wives, and five of his children. Around 5 PM, there was an explosion in the middle of the family. Seven people lost their lives on the beach and on their way to the hospital that Friday afternoon.
The bloody picnic made Huda Ghaliya world famous in just a few hours. For this, she has photographer Zakaria Abu Irbad to thank. In the blink of an eye, after a metal-filled device exploded, the 36-year-old photographer from Gaza City took his camera and recorded the misfortune.
A Lucrative Job
Irbad works for the Arab TV Production company, Ramattan News Agency. The agency has bureaus in the West Bank city of Ramallah and Gaza City, which is the main city in the Gaza Strip.
The largest TV networks in the world, including CNN and ABC, news agencies such as Reuters and AP, and German TV stations work together with Palestinian cameramen when it comes to news from Gaza. Pictures of the hopeless world in the Gaza Strip are first distributed by Palestinian cameraman. Working as a cameraman for the western media is a very lucrative business for the Palestinians. Some cameramen earn as much as $250 per day. Some Palestinians don’t make that much money in a half a year.
This past Friday, Irbad had professional good fortune. He was the first to arrive at the scene of the tragedy. His agency, Ramattan News Agency, sold the heart-rending footage of the hysterical and crying Huda Ghaliya to media all around the world. His pictures of Huda as she pulls her hair, beats her chest, falls over her dead father in the sand, and wanders in the sand crying appeared in Australia, India, Europe and the US.
The cause of death of the Gahliya family members was very clear to the Arab world and the Palestinian community already on Friday: Israeli artillery fire. To reinforce this assumption, the Arab TV networks inserted archived footage of Israeli soldiers firing artillery shells among the images provided by Irbad.
Following the story, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Fatah President Abu Mazen claimed the family was killed by Israeli artillery fire. Both used the term “massacre.” In a rare display of agreement between Hamas leader Haniyeh and Abbas, they symbolically adopted Huda on Saturday. A Palestinian child who lost his father served as a witness to the adoption. (Huda’s beloved mother Hamdiyah was wounded but survived the blast). A team of US Human Rights Watch activists determined that Israeli artillery was responsible for the explosion.
Human Rights Watch carefully analyzed the scene after visiting the site and conducting interviews with eye witnesses, policemen, and physicians. It strongly suggested that Israeli artillery was responsible for this tragedy. The report of this human rights group does not take into account that the supporting evidence from the beach was examined a day after this unfortunate event enough time to remove any important evidence.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense, using initial reports from radar and satellite pictures, explained that the explosion that killed the seven Palestinians did not come from the army. Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said Israel regrets the death of the Palestinians but that does not mean “that we are responsible for the deaths.”
According to Israeli army reports which relied on film footage and physicians’ reports, but not on an on-site investigation, the Israeli army fired six artillery shells in the direction of the Gaza beach on that Friday afternoon. In accordance with reports from Halutz, five of the six shells were fired between 4:31pm and 4:48pm, approximately 250 meters north of the position of where the family was picnicking. The purpose of the artillery shelling was to stop Palestinian rocket fire.
An unmanned Israeli army drone recorded the Gaza Strip at the time of the firing. From the film, one can see civilians located 250 meters south of where five craters created by the artillery fire on the beach were visible. According to army information, the explosion on the strip of sand where the Ghaliyas were picnicking must have occurred between 4:57 PM and 5:10 PM. Prior to 4:57 PM, the army film shows a normal scene at the beach.
It is strange that the over-flight film does not show beachgoers fleeing after the artillery shells landed 250 meters away. The next pictures from army film show the ambulances as they arrive at the beach. That is at 5:15 PM. The hospital from which the ambulances arrived is five minutes from the site of the explosion.
A Possible Unexploded Shell
The Israeli army cannot determine the site of impact for the sixth artillery shell which Human Rights Watch and the Palestinian Government claim was an unexploded shell that caused the deaths of the seven family members. But the army asserts that it is “impossible” that the shell could have landed 250 meters from the site it was targeting.
As further evidence, Israel claims that there were four wounded people from the beach who received treatment in a Tel Aviv hospital. A piece of shrapnel taken from the body of one of the wounded could not have come from weapons in the Israeli arsenal.
The Israeli army does not discount the possibility that the explosion was caused by a mine planted by Palestinians to prevent Israeli marines from entering the Gaza beach.
Irbad’s footage has great significance due to the contradictions it raises. This footage generates more questions than clarifications. Segment of the original footage are so questionable that the CNN website is only showing abbreviated clips.
Irbad explained to the SZ that he learned about the explosion from the medics and followed the ambulances to the site of the blast in his own car. From the footage that Irbad took of the hysterical ten-year-old Huda, it appears as if he was a witness to the explosion. He also filmed the arrival of the emergency workers to the site which must mean that he was already on the beach. Furthermore, some of the dead and wounded were covered with blankets who did that?
Irbad explains to the SZ that Huda was not wounded because she had been swimming in the sea. But in his video, Huda is running around in dry clothing. For minutes, Irbad ran after Huda and recorded images of the dead and wounded.
Suddenly, the camera captures footage of a man next to Huda’s dead father, who was also covered by a blanket and lying motionless, standing up with a machine gun in his hand. The footage shows rescue workers in green hospital uniforms and a dozen men with typical Hamas-style beards apparently removing evidence from the site.
In any case, one has to ask why the emergency workers didn’t treat the wounded and make sure that police arrived at the site. Did the Hamas men remove pieces of evidence as was claimed by the Israeli media and Palestinian eyewitnesses?
The Cameraman’s Evasive Answers
Curiously, Irbad’s footage does not include an identifiable crater. The more Irbad was asked about this by the SZ, the more evasive he was. Was he at the site before the ambulances arrived? Who are the civilians who are cleaning the beach? Where is the armed man who suddenly got up from the ground? If the artillery shell that killed the Ghaliya family was from the Israeli army, why don’t the Palestinians present the fragments?
And: Why didn’t Irbad think of calming the hysterical Huda down instead of following her for several minutes with his camera? Irbad says “she asked me to film her. She wanted to be seen with her dead father and wanted to show the world what criminals the Israelis are.” Is it possible that the saddened ten year old Huda, who just lost seven family members, could have been giving Irbad stage directions?
Pallywood
There is nothing new about Palestinians publishing falsified or fabricated pictures during the Middle-East war. Since the airing of a “60 Minutes” investigative report, the term “Pallywood,” modeled after the Hollywood film industry, has been used by the media. In the report, for example, there are Palestinians from the early days of the Intifada who are carrying a dead person. One of those carrying the dead stumbles, and the supposed corpse falls to the ground and springs back onto the stretcher, lies down, and mimics a dead person.
The most recent example of this effort of the Palestinians to openly mislead the world occurred when Israel attacked three member of the Islamic Jihad last Tuesday, killing eight civilians, including two children. Shortly after the attack on the car in which the three terrorists were sitting, one can see three men on the other side remove a short-range rocket from the car.
For two days, the sentence: “Urgent: News for our clients” flashed on the Internet site of the Ramattan News Agency. As the agency fears further dissemination of the Huda video whose authenticity is called into question by many people, they assert they have exclusive rights to the footage. No one else has the right to further disseminate these pictures without their consent.
TOO QUICK TO ATONE
Too quick to atone
By Gerald Steinberg
The Jerusalem Post
June 18, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1150355513677&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
The speed with which a small group of Israelis gathered on Shabbat morning to protest the tragic deaths of members of a Palestinian family in an explosion on a Gaza beach was impressive.
Without bothering to wait for verification, these worthy citizens, including Dana Olmert, the prime minister’s daughter, accepted responsibility on behalf of the IDF, chanting “murderer, murderer” opposite the Tel Aviv residence of IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz.
In this way, deliberately or by default, they also provided legitimacy to another round of anti-Israel demonization, accompanied by dramatic images of bereaved Palestinian children. Journalists and others who might be accused of double standards were covered. The Israelis were themselves protesting this brutality.
Neophyte Defense Minister Amir Peretz also seemed to accept this view. In a news briefing the night of June 10, Peretz announced an immediate end to Israeli retaliatory shelling into Gaza. This policy had constituted one of the primary countermeasures to the Palestinian missiles and rockets that have rained down on Sderot and other communities in recent months.
In a certain sense, the moral fervor of these Israelis is admirable. They claim to embody the deep Jewish tradition and commitment to morality and human rights. Setting themselves up as moral paragons in the model of the Jewish prophets, they wasted no time in condemning what they were convinced was Israeli culpability.
But there are other, less admirable reasons behind this rush to judgment, including the psychological pressure to find an easy way out. If this war is indeed Israel’s responsibility, all we have to do is change our evil ways and the conflict will end.
This is a naive response to generations of Arab violence and hatred. Instead of the complexities of defense, deterrence, dismantling terrorist groups and difficult negotiations, all that is needed for these secular messianic prophets is for Israel to apologize, withdraw and dismantle its military.
This form of “instant peace” is also patronizing to Palestinians they are not independent actors, but reduced to responding to Israeli policies. Similarly, their missile attacks and other forms of terror are not given credit as independent acts expressing the goals of a nation.
In this way, 60 years of inflexible, principled and unswerving Arab and Palestinian rejectionism are erased, leaving Israel as the only actor that counts.
Despite their appeal in some quarters, such emotional and ideological dimensions overwhelm any rational or considered responses to these violent events. Sure of the moral high ground, these few hundred Israeli neo-prophet protesters felt no need to wait until investigations produced reliable information, providing a firm basis for moral judgment.
The track record of the Palestinians in artificially promoting stories of Israeli “atrocities” should have been a warning against a rush to judgement. The widely spread Jenin “massacre” myth during April 2002, and the remaining inherent contradictions and questions regarding evidence (particularly the raw footage from France-2 TV) surrounding the alleged killing by Israel of Mohammed al-Dura in October 2000 are cases in point.
Similarly, video footage of Palestinian fake funerals (in which the body was accidentally dropped, stood up, and ran away), would suggest a more cautious approach to assigning and accepting blame.
In fact, the tragic incident on the beach that Friday afternoon shares many of the hallmarks of such events, including the speed with which New York-based Human Rights Watch supported the Palestinian version in a massive public relations campaign.
The qualifications of HRW’s “military expert,” Mark Garlasco, have never been examined independently, and his experience in the US is limited. Garlasco was among the authors of HRW’s publication, Razing Rafah, (October 2004), based on unverifiable Palestinian claims and published to justify the active involvement of HRW in the anti-Israel boycott campaigns following the Durban strategy.
Neither Garlasco nor HRW has produced a report on the origins of Palestinian missiles, again highlighting this group’s primary political bias.
In this case, Garlasco again relied on Palestinian sources and claims without questioning their accuracy. Some of the evidence he produced at the Gaza news conference was conveniently found nearby, or provided by what he refers to as the “Palestinian police explosives department.”
And there was no mention of the suspicious Palestinian activity to reshape the site of the explosion.
In contrast, the IDF, having learned something (though not enough) from the previous experiences, immediately set up a commission of enquiry and avoided premature statements (notwithstanding the minister of defense’s initial comments). The commission produced a detailed and credible preliminary report within a few days (in the case of al-Dura, this took months), showing that the condemnations of Israel were not justified by the available evidence.
We may never know what caused these tragic deaths, but the anti-Israel demonization campaign that resulted has been slowed.
For those who cling to the myth of peace via atonement, even for sins Israel did not commit, these events will not change anything. But for others there is some comfort in the improvement of the IDF’s response to such political and media assaults.
“THE PALESTINIANS PREFER VICTIMHOOD TO STATEHOOD”
Who is to blame for grief on a beach?
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
June 16, 2006
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/15/AR2006061501794.html
It was another one of those pictures that goes instantly around the world. A young Palestinian, wailing in wretched sorrow, grieving over her dead father, stepmother and five siblings who had been killed by an explosion on a Gaza beach. Then came the blame. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (he’s the moderate) immediately called the killings an act of Israeli “genocide” and, to dramatize the crime, legally adopted the bereaved girl.
The sensational coverage and sensational charges raise the obvious question: Why would Israel deliberately shell a peaceful family on a beach?
The Israeli government, clumsy as ever, seemed to semi-apologize by expressing regret about the deaths, implying that perhaps they had been caused by an errant Israeli shell targeting a Palestinian rocket base. But then, a few days later, an army investigation concluded that it was not Israel’s doing at all.
First, because the shrapnel taken from the victims (treated at Israeli hospitals some “genocide”) were not the ordnance used in Israeli artillery. Second, because aerial photography revealed no crater that could have been caused by Israeli artillery. And, third, because Israel could account for five of the six shells it launched at the rocket base nearby, and the missing one had been launched at least five minutes before the one that killed the family.
An expert at a local chapter of a human rights group disputes the Israeli claims. Okay. Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the question of whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?
Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic “Israeli massacre” picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.
But there is an even larger question not asked. Whether the rocket bases are near civilian beaches or in remote areas, why are the Gazans launching any rockets at Israel in the first place about 1,000 in the past year?
To get Israel to remove its settlers, end the occupation and let the Palestinians achieve dignity and independence? But Israel did exactly that in Gaza last year. It completely evacuated Gaza, dismantled all its military installations, removed its soldiers, destroyed all Israeli settlements and expelled all 7,000 Israeli settlers. Israel then declared the line that separates Israel from Gaza to be an international frontier. Gaza became the first independent Palestinian territory ever.
And what have the Palestinians done with this independence, this judenrein territory under the Palestinians’ control? They have used their freedom to launch rockets at civilians in nearby Israeli towns.
Why? Because the Palestinians prefer victimhood to statehood. They have demonstrated that for 60 years, beginning with their rejection of the United Nations decision to establish a Palestinian state in 1947 because it would have also created a small Jewish state next door. They declared war instead.
Half a century later, at the Camp David summit with President Bill Clinton, Israel renewed the offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, with not a single Jewish settler remaining in Palestine, and on a contiguous territory encompassing 95 percent of the West Bank (Israel making up the other 5 percent with pieces of Israel proper).
The Palestinian answer? War again Yasser Arafat’s terror war, aka the second intifada, which killed a thousand Jews.
This embrace of victimhood, of martyrdom, of blood and suffering, is the Palestinian disease. They are offered an independent state. They are given all of Gaza. And they respond with rocket attacks into peaceful Israeli towns in pre-1967 Israel proper, mind you.
What can Israel do but try to take out those rocket bases and their crews? What would the United States do if rockets were raining into San Diego from across the border with Mexico?
Now look again at that terrible photograph and ask yourself: Who is responsible for the heart-rending grief of that poor Palestinian girl?
“THE WESTERN PRESS FALLS FOR THESE SCAMS AGAIN AND AGAIN”
Untold story of Gaza (and Haditha?)
By Mona Charen
The Washington Times
June 19, 2006
washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060619-123756-9130r.htm
The story was everywhere and was everywhere the same. On June 9, Israel had fired a rocket onto a Gaza beach killing seven picnicking Palestinian civilians.
The New York Times carried a huge, Page One picture of a 12-year-old girl weeping as she searched for her father’s body in the sand (the photo was excerpted from video broadcast around the world). CBS News reported, “The ruling Hamas group fired a barrage of homemade rockets at Israel on Saturday, hours after calling off a truce with Israel in anger over an artillery attack that killed seven civilians in Gaza.”
The New York Times characterized it this way: “Hamas fired at least 15 Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, ending a tattered 16-month truce with Israel, a day after eight Palestinians were killed on a Gaza beach, apparently by an errant Israeli shell.” CNN went even further, explaining, “Hamas’ rocket attacks were prompted by a string of Israeli attacks, including an artillery shell blast that killed at least seven Palestinians picnicking on a northern Gaza beach on Friday.”
Just another brutal attack on civilians by the Israel Defense Forces? So we are invited to conclude. But the IDF, after initially apologizing and offering assistance to the families of those killed, has now investigated and concluded the explosion was not caused by an Israeli shell. Full stop.
First, consider this elemental difference between Israel and the Palestinians: Israel apologizes and tries to make amends if its missiles go astray and kill civilians. The Palestinians, by contrast, aim at civilians and dance in the streets when they are killed.
The Israelis say the explosion on the beach may have been caused by a land mine placed there by Palestinians to thwart any Israeli assault, or possibly by unexploded ordnance from an earlier skirmish. According to the Israelis, shrapnel taken from the bodies of victims did not match Israeli shells but looked more like bomb fragments.
Another glaring missing ingredient to the media coverage is what happened before Israel fired on Gaza (Israel acknowledges aiming at terrorists in a different area of Gaza that day). In the 10 months since Israel withdrew from Gaza, some 1,000 missiles have been fired at Israel from Gaza. More than 800 have hit the country.
In May alone, more than 30 Qassam rockets were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip. On May 21, a Qassam slammed into a classroom in Sderot it was empty as the children were at synagogue. On May 16, a Katyusha landed in a farm. On May 31, four Qassams struck Sderot (Hamas has vowed to make that town of 20,000 into a graveyard). One hit an apartment building wounding two. On April 17, a suicide bomber killed 11 and wounded more than 70 when he exploded his bombs in a Tel Aviv cafe.
The world press, very much including the mainstream U.S. media, tends to take the word of Palestinian spokesmen about civilian deaths, although experience should have taught them by now to be more guarded. In 2005, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl was killed by gunfire. U.N. and Palestinian officials blamed her death on Israel until it was determined a bullet fired by Palestinians shooting into the air to celebrate their pilgrimage to Mecca hit her.
Muhammad al-Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy supposedly shot by Israelis has become a worldwide symbol of Israeli brutality, though it has since been firmly established Israelis could not and did not kill him.
And, of course, the “Jenin Massacre” proclaimed by Palestinians high and low (5,000 innocents were slaughtered, they claimed) and condemned by the United Nations, turned out to be a complete lie (only 52 were killed, along with 23 Israeli soldiers who went house to house to avoid civilian casualties).
After the Gaza incident, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke by phone with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who demanded an explanation for the Gaza deaths. When Mr. Olmert asked why Mr. Annan had not shown similar concern about the scores of missiles hitting Israel, Mr. Annan was nonplussed. “What missiles?” he asked.
Two weeks ago, I was critical of those who leaped to conclusions about what happened at Haditha. It now looks as though news from Haditha may have been manipulated just as news from the Palestinian territories routinely is.
The Western press falls for these scams again and again. Their credulity betrays their partiality, and it dishonors them.
* Arab League receives official apology, after Ghana’s World Cup soccer player waves Israeli flag in an on-field celebration of his team’s goals in what he calls “an act of solidarity with the Israeli people”
* Ghana player is “obviously a Mossad agent,” say Egyptian journalists
* UK Jihadists attack “religion of soccer,” warn Muslims against taking part in this “colonial crusader scheme”
CONTENTS
1. “Soccer is against Islam”
2. “The best public relations since Entebbe”
3. “Many Israelis have now become supporters of Ghana”
4. Ghana player is “obviously a Mossad agent”
5. Do cry for me Argentina
6. Protests at Iranian World Cup games
7. Thoroughly unIslamic Iranian women
8. World cup audiences soar, and Germany flies the flag again
9. “Jihadist site: Soccer is against Islam” (Yediot Ahronot, June 21, 2006)
10. “From Ghana with love” (Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2006)
11. “Apology follows Pantsil gesture” (BBC News, June 19, 2006)
12. “Fury in Egypt over Ghana’s Israeli flag waver” (AFP, June 19, 2006)
13. “1,000 protest before Iran World Cup match" (AP, June 17, 2006)
14. “Iran’s women defy Islamic ban to cheer on their team” (Times, UK, June 19, 2006)
This dispatch concerns the ongoing soccer World Cup, the world’s biggest sporting and television event, currently taking place in Germany.
“SOCCER IS AGAINST ISLAM”
A Jihadi website, called The Saved Sect, has attacked the “religion of soccer” and warned Muslims against taking part in this “colonial crusader scheme.”
The website, one of a number which call on Muslims to establish an Islamic state in Britain, also attacked the current “football fever” sweeping the world since the start of the World Cup two weeks ago.
The website claims that soccer plants the seeds of nationalism to divide Muslims and causes them to stray from the vision of a unified Islamic identity, and instead waste their time following this “false religion.” For more, see the first article below. It should be noted that several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia are competing in the World Cup finals.
“THE BEST PUBLIC RELATIONS SINCE ENTEBBE”
Whilst Israel did not qualify for the soccer World Cup, John Pantsil (also spelt Pentsil and Paintsil), a defender for the Ghanaian national team, became a hero to Israeli soccer fans last weekend after he repeatedly waved the Israeli flag on the pitch in front of a television audience of hundreds of millions. TV broadcasters in Iran, Syria and Gaza did not have time to remove the images, as broadcasts of the match were carried live.
Pantsil, who plays professionally for Hapoel Tel Aviv, pulled an Israeli flag from his sock and waved it above his head straight at the television camera following both Ghana goals and also at the end of the game against the Czech Republic.
One Israeli media expert said “this was Israel’s biggest PR coup in front of a global audience since Entebbe in 1976. Black Africans voluntarily shared their love of and appreciation for Israel in front of all those Arabs and Europeans constantly fed the Israeli apartheid lie.”
The Ghana “Black Stars” 2-0 win was one of the biggest shocks in the tournament so far, as the Czechs are ranked second in the world, and had already defeated the Americans 3-0. Whilst FIFA, soccer’s governing body, say they would not object to the gesture*, following pressure on Ghana from various Arab governments, the Ghanaian Football Association this week apologized to “anybody who was offended” and promised that “it will never happen again.”
Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League said the League had received an official apology from the Ghanaian government expressing regret at the incident. The memo said Pantsil’s action had no official support and Ghana hoped the incident would not affect relations with friendly countries.
Lots of people in Ghana, however, said they welcomed Pantsil’s move. Pro-Israeli sympathies are still quite common in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, Sheila Raviv, a subscriber to this list, notes that at the dinner for the Governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last week, doctors and health-care specialists from African countries, and from the Palestinian Authority, were guests of honor. The Hebrew University allows them to study without any university fees, and gives them the tools to return to their homes and cope with their specific medical problems. Dr Eugene, from Cameroon, gave the keynote speech in which he expressed his deep gratitude to Israel for extending this helping hand.
(* FIFA said that while Pantsil violated no rules, it hopes the scene would not be repeated when Ghana play the U.S. today. Since the article Football killing fields was published in April, FIFA have been very careful not to directly criticize Israel.)
“MANY ISRAELIS HAVE NOW BECOME SUPPORTERS OF GHANA”
Following the game, the Israeli Sports Minister Ofir Pines-Paz praised Pantsil for his actions and proclaimed that “We have an Israeli at the World Cup. Pantsil’s gesture has warmed our hearts and many Israelis have now become supporters of Ghana.”
Pantsil himself said “The people in Israel have been very nice to me. I wanted to make them happy.”
Many among Tel Aviv’s Ghanaian community live in a working class district close to the city’s central bus station, an area that has repeatedly been the target of deadly Palestinian suicide bomb attacks. Many black Africans, in contrast to white intellectuals in Europe and North America who spout nonsense about “Israeli Apartheid,” say they love Israel and its people. Two other players of the Ghana national soccer squad play for Israeli clubs (goalkeeper Sammy Adjei plays for Ashdod, and defender Emmanuel Pappoe for Hapoel Kfar Saba).
GHANA PLAYER IS “OBVIOUSLY A MOSSAD AGENT”
The live commentator on the Arab satellite channel broadcasting all World Cup matches in the region abruptly cut short his trademark “goooaaaaaaal” when Pantsil brought out the Israeli flag. The commentator then asked “What are you doing, man?”
Some Egyptian newspapers subsequently described Pantsil as a “Mossad agent,” whilst others claimed “an Israeli had paid him to do it.”
A sports analyst for Al-Ahram (whose content is controlled by the Egyptian Ministry of Information) claimed that “The real reason (for the flag-waving),” is because many Ghanaian players go through soccer training camps set up by an Israeli coach.
The lies of Egyptian journalists are becoming more imaginative all the time. According to Hassan el-Mestekawi, “The training program for these children starts every morning with a salute to the Israeli flag.”
The Arab media has paid a lot of attention to the waving of an Israeli flag at the World Cup, al-Arabiya featured the news as the first item on its home page.
For a photo, see: www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/06/17/24815.htm.
In the past, the World Cup has been used for anti-Israeli gestures. For example, Italy dedicated their 1982 Word Cup victory to the PLO, according to an editorial in the International Herald Tribune last week.
DO CRY FOR ME ARGENTINA
Whilst many Israelis say they will now support Ghana, since the start of the tournament the Israeli newspaper and TV coverage has been dominated by support for Argentina as both the head coach (Jose Pekerman) and team captain (Juan Pablo Sorin) are Jewish, and say they are glad to be so.
Adrian Stoppleman, an Argentine Jewish sportswriter, told the Jewish Telegraph Agency that “in the past, Argentina has had a sprinkling of Jewish players in its local league. But to have two such key people like the coach and team captain being Jewish is truly an achievement to be proud of.”
Pekerman, 56, has lived much of his life in the Jewish neighborhood of Villa Crespo in Buenos Aires. Under his guidance, the Argentine under-23 teams won three world championships. In 2004, he was promoted to coach the national team.
Sorin, 30, a defender-midfielder for the Spanish club, Villareal, has a “dynamic blend of spirit, leadership and intelligence that made him an obvious choice as team captain,” according to Argentine news reports.
Argentina has played very well so far (for example, beating Serbia & Montenegro 6-0), and many soccer experts think they may win the tournament, which concludes in Berlin on July 9.
PROTESTS AT IRANIAN WORLD CUP GAMES
Over 1,000 people demonstrated peacefully last Saturday before Iran’s second game at the World Cup in the German city of Frankfurt, in protest against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s comments to “wipe Israel off the map,” and his repeated assertions that the Holocaust was a myth.
Demonstrators waved Israeli flags and held up signs saying “Support Israel!” and “Israel has the right to exist.” Included in the demonstration were a small group of Iranian dissidents with their country’s flags. The Iranian dissidents applauded respectfully as Holocaust survivor and scholar Arno Lustiger told the rally that any welcome for Ahmadinejad would “be a provocation to all German Jews.”
Iran’s participation in the World Cup is now over, following defeats against Portugal and Mexico and a draw yesterday with Angola.
About 250 people demonstrated against Ahmadinejad in Leipzig just hours before the start of the Iran-Angola match.
The rally in the downtown area, far from the city stadium, was organized by Jewish and anti-Nazi groups, and was attended by the mayor of Leipzig, Burkhard Jung. During the rally he said Iran’s soccer fans were welcome in the city, but anti-Semitic speeches by its president were not.
THOROUGHLY UNISLAMIC IRANIAN WOMEN
For all three of Iran’s games at the World Cup thousands of women, who would be banned from attending games in their homeland, have turned out to watch their national team. See the article in the dispatch of May 19 titled Israel to have its own baseball league (& Iran bars women from soccer matches).
As the Times (of London) article (below) notes, some of the women “wore headscarves and long, modest dresses in keeping with the dictates of religious tradition in the Islamic republic but many more, mainly the daughters of the middle-class diaspora scattered across Europe, painted their faces red, white and green, dyed their hair and draped themselves in the national flag.”
The Iranian women supporters attending the World Cup matches were rejecting the laws of the ruling Iranian regime which believes it is unIslamic for women to see the bare legs of men who are not their husbands. Women are routinely detained at the Azadi stadium in Teheran if they try to gain admission to a soccer match.
WORLD CUP AUDIENCES SOAR, AND GERMANY FLIES THE FLAG AGAIN
Global television audiences for the 2006 World Cup have surged, with audiences up nearly 30% for the opening matches compared with 2002. The study by media analyst Initiative found that the tournament was very popular in countries that did not have a team playing. Brazil is the most popular team among viewers.
The tournament has also seen the biggest outpouring of national pride in Germany since the Third Reich. After 60 years of inhibition and embarrassment, the national colors of black, red and gold are fluttering all over the country, from windowsills and cars, shrouding shops, town halls and high-speed trains.
The newspaper Die Welt declared in an editorial: “One and a half centuries after 1848, we have learned to value and show the colors of our flag as a sign of our democratic nation Neither the 1972 Munich Olympics stained by the murder of Israeli athletes nor the 1974 World Cup was like this. Nor, even was the moment the Berlin Wall crumbled.”
“Deutschland! Deutschland!” a chant that in the 1930s made the world tremble, was last week roared by hundreds of thousands of German soccer fans around the Brandenburg Gate. The novelist Thomas Bruessig says that there has not been such naked spontaneous German patriotism since the start of the First World War in August 1914.
According to the Times of London, “Young women are buying black-red-gold underwear so that every time a goal is scored they can raise their skirts and flash the flag.”
I attach six articles below
-- Tom Gross
FROM GHANA WITH LOVE
From Ghana with love
By Sharon Solomon
The Jerusalem Post
June 18, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1150355513691&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
The Israeli national soccer team failed to qualify the World Cup Finals, so the local fans were stunned when the Israeli flag made a surprise appearance on a field in Germany Saturday.
John Pantsil, a Ghana defender who plays professionally for Hapoel Tel Aviv, pulled a blue-and-white flag out from his sock following both of his team’s goals against the Czech Republic as the “Black Stars” pulled off the tournament’s most significant upset so far.
The frequently criticized and underrated side from West Africa played a tactically sound game, including an effective defensive effort against Juventus left winger Pavel Nedved. Pantsil was a major contributor in shutting Nedved down.
Ghana shocked the Czech Republic which defeated the United States 3-0 last Monday with brilliant strikes by Gyan Asamoah and Sulley Muntari, after w