* Jerusalem mayor’s office in an official statement: “BBC’s Panorama by Jane Corbin is a completely and utterly false representation of the facts and a distasteful distortion of reality”
* Iranian TV: the reason Israel sent so many doctors to Haiti was “to steal more body parts”
* London Times just can’t run a straight news story about Israel
* Bashing Israel for saving Haitians
* New report released today outlines “systematic bias of BBC’s Jeremy Bowen”
There are two dispatches today and then there won’t be any more for the next week because of other work commitments. Today’s other dispatch titled “Obama: misjudging his misjudgment (& Israeli and Iranian ministers shake hands)” can be read here.
CONTENTS
1. BBC head responds to claim that its bias towards Israel is reminiscent of Soviet propaganda
2. British media may now be more dangerous than Iranian one as far as telling lies about Israel
3. Jerusalem mayor’s office: BBC program an “utterly false and distasteful distortion of reality”
4. More nastiness against Israel from the London Times
5. Saving lives right to the end
6. Israelis may adopt Haitian orphans
7. Israel set to respond officially to Goldstone; Judge Advocate General: it’s “a vicious lie”
8. Female casualties: another indication that Goldstone and his team are not telling the truth
9. New report released today outlines “systematic bias of BBC’s Jeremy Bowen”
10. Israeli GPO calls for journalist visa for foreign press
11. “Finally, good press for Israelis” (By Tom Gross, JC, Jan. 21, 2010)
12. “BBC denies organ blood libel to Evgeny Kissin” (By Robyn Rosen, JC, Jan. 21, 2010)
13. “BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion” (By Robin Shepherd)
14. Official response by the Jerusalem municipality to BBC Panorama program
15. “Haiti and Gaza are not the same” (By Catherine Philp: London Times, Jan. 21, 2010)
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
BBC HEAD RESPONDS TO ACCUSATION THAT ITS BIAS TOWARDS ISRAEL IS REMINISCENT OF SOVIET PROPAGANDA
This dispatch is about the media and is partly a follow-up to last week’s dispatch (titled “And his name will be ‘Israel’: Mother of Haitian baby honors IDF rescuers”) which can be read here.
The Jewish Chronicle asked for some of the points made in that dispatch to be turned into a short analysis piece on the media to go with their Haiti news feature. That piece is below.
In it I also point out that Iran’s government-controlled Press TV – available as part of the SkyTV package in the UK and elsewhere, widely watched by Muslims and others, and which is also available on the Internet for free – claims that Israel sent doctors to Haiti to steal body parts.
(This is in line with the infamous historic anti-Semitic blood libel about Jews stealing gentile organs, which gave rise to so many pogroms throughout history, and has most recently been given a fresh airing in supposedly respectable Swedish, British and other European media.)
***
The Chronicle also reports on the letter the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, sent to Russian-born Evgeny Kissin, one of the world’s greatest living classical pianists, in reply to Kissin’s public letter to Thompson saying the “BBC’s slander and bias towards Israel [are] painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda.”
A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in London called the BBC’s “attempts to claim that Israelis have been involved in the harvesting of Palestinian organs” “despicable”.
The paper also asked for a comment and published the following:
Media analyst Tom Gross told the JC that Mr Thompson was wrong and that the BBC’s coverage of the case had been quite different from that of the AP and other media. “The BBC website used a sensationalist and shocking photo, which was not in fact even from Israel, to give the false impression to readers that the Israeli government had been involved in wrongdoing.” (Full article below.)
BRITISH MEDIA MAY NOW BE MORE DANGEROUS THAN THE IRANIAN ONE AS FAR AS TELLING LIES ABOUT ISRAEL
As noted in last week’s dispatch, while other media were offering very positive accounts of Israel’s central role in rescuing and treating injured Haitians, the BBC (the world’s biggest news broadcaster, which is lavishly funded by the British taxpayer) was minimizing the centrality of the Israeli role. I wrote “instead Panorama, the flagship news program of the BBC’s main domestic channel, BBC1, this evening again devoted the entire program to another piece of anti-Israeli agitprop.”
BBC viewers are told Israel “is the most racist state in the world” – clearly a highly offensive and ridiculous notion for anyone familiar with many countries throughout the world.
While we all know the Iranian media lies, the British media’s manipulation, sometimes stemming from the blatant anti-Semitism of certain British journalists, is in many ways far more dangerous since well-meaning people around the world watching British media (such as the BBC) or reading respected British publications online, might actually believe they are telling the truth.
Below (in the full articles section) I attach a piece about that Panorama program by Robin Shepherd, who is a longtime subscriber to this email list. He writes:
“On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary programme Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.”
JERUSALEM MAYOR: BBC PROGRAM “UTTERLY FALSE”
Also attached below is an official statement reacting to the Panorama program from the office of the mayor of Jerusalem, which was emailed to thousands of journalists, including myself.
It says: “Throughout the program, Ms. Corbin presents a completely and utterly false representation of the facts and a distasteful distortion of reality. It would be prudent to ask Ms. Corbin what happened to her alleged list of 40 planned demolitions since her filming in late 2009. You’ll easily find yet another one of her distasteful distortions.”
MORE NASTINESS AGAINST ISRAEL FROM THE LONDON TIMES
As I have pointed out before, since James Harding became editor of the London Times, its news reporting has become as bad as, if not worse than, that of its rival British paper The Guardian. James Harding is The Times’ first Jewish editor and it only goes to show it can be a fatal mistake (if you are interested in Israel being given fair coverage) to appoint a Jew as editor.
(Many people have asked me in the past how Rupert Murdoch, who own The Times of London, and remains in private a firm friend of Israel, allows such coverage in The Times. The answer is that – as I know from private sources in News International – Murdoch has always been insistent that the editor of The Times is free to exercise his own judgment.)
While media outside Britain were praising the truly extraordinary and heroic efforts of Israeli rescuers in Haiti, The Times was belittling them. By way of example I attach a piece below by The Times’ news pages columnist Catherine Philp, which ran alongside another utterly one-sided anti-Israel piece from The Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief James Hider. Together the two articles took up the whole page.
SAVING LIVES RIGHT TO THE END
Even as the government of Haiti was declaring the search for survivors over, Israeli rescue teams, who didn’t want to give up, were pulling people out of the rubble alive.
These included two students buried under the ruins of a university in Port-au-Prince, a 6-year-old girl, and an elderly woman.
Here is a video from earlier in the week of the IDF rescuing a man and taking him to the IDF field hospital:
***
Another point that has not been noted much by the media is that the IDF delegation brought with them very sophisticated communications and wifi systems that have been allowing Haitians to make satellite phone calls to relatives abroad for virtually no cost.
Journalists from around the world reporting from Haiti have also taken advantage of the IDF giving them around-the-clock access to one of Israel’s Amos communications satellites – not that any journalists have thanked them publicly to my knowledge.
The IDF have also set up video conference systems in surgery theaters to give field surgeons the ability to consult with top experts back in Israeli hospitals. “They can turn on the camera and even watch the surgeries in Israel as they occur in Haiti,” he said.
***
This blog from Yael Bar Tur, a young Israeli woman with the Israel Defense Force in Haiti, has some beautiful pictures, including five Haitian babies being delivered by Israeli medics in a single day.
ISRAELIS MAY ADOPT HAITIAN ORPHANS
Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Services is looking into the possibility of allowing Israelis to adopt some Haitian children orphaned by the earthquake. Minister Isaac Herzog said that he has “ordered an examination into the possibility of adopting orphans in Israel in line with international and Israeli law, in order to offer help in the wake of this terrible distress.”
The number of children Israel might take will be decided in consultation with the Haitian government, he said. Non-profit organizations that would be involved with adoptions are making preliminary plans to proceed.
ISRAEL SET TO RESPOND OFFICIALLY TO GOLDSTONE REPORT; JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL CALLS IT “A VICIOUS LIE”
The New York Times reported yesterday that, after a thorough investigation into each and every aspect of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report, Israel’s Advocate General is soon to give the UN an official response. The New York Times quoted the author of Israel’s response, Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit, as attacking the Goldstone report as “a vicious lie.”
Please see previous dispatches on this list from last September and October rebutting many of the claims of the Goldstone report.
Those dispatches also outline the anti-Israel prejudices of some of Goldstone’s team and the way in which they seem to have simply cut and pasted into their official report whole extracts from thoroughly discredited reports about Israel from political organizations masquerading as human rights groups, such as the partly Saudi-funded, New York-based group Human Rights Watch, which is led by an anti-Israeli American Jew, Ken Roth.
FEMALE CASUALTIES: ANOTHER INDICATION THAT GOLDSTONE AND HIS TEAM ARE NOT TELLING THE TRUTH
Here is one further point that I didn’t make in previous dispatches concerning Goldstone’s distortions. He claims that Israel randomly and willfully targeted civilians during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Yet the number of Palestinian female causalities in the operation ranges from 49 (from the Israeli list of deceased persons) to the highest number 116 (listed by the Palestinian Center For Human Rights), a figure representing only 8 percent of what they claim to be the total number of Palestinian casualties.
How does Goldstone explain that if the IDF was deliberately and randomly targeting civilians by bombing Palestinian homes from above, the vast majority (about 80 percent) of those Palestinians killed (by Hamas’s own admission) were males aged between the age of 16 and 40, i.e. of fighting age?
NEW REPORT RELEASED TODAY OUTLINES “SYSTEMATIC BIAS OF BBC’S JEREMY BOWEN”
Trevor Asserson and colleagues, who run BBC Watch (and who are longtime subscribers to this email list) today make public the report they have submitted to the BBC outlining the systematic bias of the BBC’s chief Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen during Operation Cast Lead.
They find that of 58 reports the BBC ran by Bowen on their various networks during that three week period, 38 were unbalanced and staggering 98 percent of those portrayed Israel in a negative light.
As a publicly-funded corporation, the BBC is under a legal obligation in the UK to be balanced.
To read the report you have to go to this website and fill in a form.
I have written about Bowen several times before. For example, I revealed that Chris Gunness, the UNRWA spokesman who lied about Israel’s shelling of a school in Gaza and alleged live on the BBC that Israel had killed 40 people there, previously worked at the BBC with Jeremy Bowen who he remains in close contact with.
(Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Jerusalem, and other senior officials have now acknowledged that Gunness got it wrong and several newspapers, misled by Gunness, have run minor corrections. Others have not.)
ISRAELI GPO CALLS FOR JOURNALIST VISA FOR FOREIGN PRESS
Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) is pushing for the introduction of a U.S.-style journalist visa for foreign reporters, as part of a bid to filter out political activists posing as media employees, The Jerusalem Post reports.
The GPO is concerned that foreign members of political nongovernmental organizations and political activists are attempting to deceive immigration authorities by claiming that they are working as journalists.
“Some activists offer their services to foreign media outlets, and then claim they are journalists. A journalist visa would require foreign citizens who say they are journalists to demonstrate their qualifications, and to prove that they worked for a news agency before arriving in Israel,” GPO Director Danny Seaman said.
***
I attach several items below.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
FULL ARTICLES AND ITEMS
FINALLY, SOME GOOD PRESS FOR ISRAELIS
Finally, good press for Israelis
By Tom Gross
(London) Jewish Chronicle
January 21, 2010
Over the past week, Israel has been receiving its most positive TV coverage since the advent of cable news over two decades ago. It is sad that it took such a tragic event as the devastating Haiti earthquake halfway across the world for this to happen, especially as there are many great stories in Israel itself which journalists regularly ignore.
But nevertheless it makes a welcome change to the often appallingly unfair way Israel is treated in the media, and Israel deserves every bit of it. In America, all three major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) and the two leading cable ones (CNN and Fox) have run detailed stories outlining the central role the IDF has played in the rescue and medical efforts.
CBS (in a piece also rebroadcast on Sky News) called the Israeli hospital “the Rolls Royce of emergency medicine in Haiti” and noted that Israel had also helped after disasters in Kosovo, Turkey, Kenya and India.
A report on CNN – a channel which has so often been hostile to the Jewish state – called the level of medical care Israel was providing “amazing”. “The Israelis came from the other side of the world” and yet “had bought much more sophisticated medical aid than almost any other country,” said the channel. It quoted one American relief worker standing by the large IDF field hospital saying, “it makes you almost embarrassed to be an American”.
ABC and Fox explained that because of Israel’s long history of enduring bomb and missile attacks, the IDF is one of the most experienced in the world in treating mass injuries and using specially trained sniffer dogs to locate wounded people in the rubble. They filmed as Israelis risked their lives in highly complex manoeuvres to extricate trapped Haitians. They reported that the mother of one baby boy delivered by IDF medics said she will call him “Israel”.
Sky’s Mideast correspondent Dominic Waghorn, who flew to Haiti on an IDF jet, has been filing heart-warming reports giving Israel full credit. (This contrasts with some very unfair coverage he has given Israel from the Middle East recently.)
One notable exception has been the BBC which, by contrast with other networks, has gone out of its way to minimise the central role the Israelis have played.
And as for Iran’s Press TV, they haven’t actually blamed the Jews for causing the earthquake yet, but they have said that Israeli doctors are there “in order to steal more organs”.
(You can watch some of the videos referred to above here: www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001083.html )
THOMPSON IS WRONG
BBC denies organ blood libel to Evgeny Kissin
By Robyn Rosen,
(London) Jewish Chronicle
January 21, 2010
The director-general of the BBC has defended its coverage of the conflict in the Middle East after internationally renowned pianist Evgeny Kissin complained about its “bias against Israel”.
Mr Kissin, who was a child prodigy in his native Russia and is now widely recognised as one of the greatest living pianists, accused the BBC’s Persian Service of a “blood libel, concerning Israel’s alleged harvesting of Palestinian organs and blood for future transplant”.
Writing to director-general Mark Thompson in December, Mr Kissin said: “I receive verified reports on an almost daily basis of the BBC’s slander and bias towards Israel, painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda.
“It beggars belief that the British taxpayer should be funding an organisation aligning itself with Iran’s despotic leader in its antisemitic propaganda.”
But Mr Thompson replied: “The BBC World Service would like to make it clear that this report was not created by the BBC, but was a translation of a news story which appeared on Israeli television. The same news story was carried by several other media outlets including Al Jazeera and the Associated Press.
“I am also assured by the World Service that the Israeli government has not denied the story since it broke.”
Mr Thompson maintained that the BBC had “high standards of impartiality” but as a response to complaints from “all sides of the Israel/Palestine issue”, they “constantly review” their coverage on an “almost daily basis, in order to get it right”.
A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy said: “Despicable attempts to claim that Israelis have been involved in the specific harvesting of Palestinian organs only harvest anti-Israel sentiment.
“Legal steps were immediately taken to cease this highly regrettable incident that caused pain to the families of dead Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. To emphasise simply one component is an attempt to manipulate the hearts of the readership. If the Guardian has seen fit to apologise for its headline, we expect other media outlets to do similarly.”
Media analyst Tom Gross told the JC that Mr Thompson was wrong and that the BBC’s coverage of the case had been quite different from that of the AP and other media. “The BBC website used a sensationalist and shocking photo, which was not in fact even from Israel, to give the false impression to readers that the Israeli government had been involved in wrongdoing.”
“WELCOME TO THE SLIPPERY WORLD OF THE BBC”
Prime time BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion
By Robin Shepherd
January 19, 2010
On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary programme Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.
Entitled “A Walk in the Park” – a reference to the parkways which link settlements across East Jerusalem – the programme was introduced by veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Vine: “Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes; Israelis are moving in, even underground,” he tells us. The drama then shifts to Jerusalem itself where Jane Corbin, narrator and reporter on the ground, is ready to begin a demolition job all of her own.
Right away, the documentary cuts to the destruction of a Palestinian home: “…roads were sealed. The Israelis don’t make it easy to see what’s going on,” we are ominously told as she skips daringly down a dirt track to avoid the watchful eye of the dastardly Israelis.
So why, one wonders, would the Israelis be so keen to hide their dirty little secret? “Under international law,” she tells us earnestly, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory; its status shouldn’t be changed.”
Well, good to know that we haven’t wasted much time before she introduces her very own, and quite definitive, interpretation of international law. But objective versions of the law are soon complemented by a historical narrative which forms the backdrop to the entire programme:
“When the State of Israel was born in 1948, Jerusalem was divided,” says Corbin. “The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours.”
And that’s it. That is the broad historical context offered to a prime time British audience on the BBC’s most prestigious weekly documentary programme. Is her version accurate? Well, yes, modern day Israel was formed in 1948 and Jerusalem was indeed divided – Jordan on the one side and Israel on the other. It is also true that “following war” with its Arab neighbours in 1967 East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel.
But as an instance of propagandist methodology in airbrushing out vital context, especially in a documentary about the status of Jews in Jerusalem and the underlying causes of the wider conflict, this really rather takes the biscuit.
Consider another way of phrasing that paragraph which, once again, is vital to the documentary since it serves as the key context for a largely uninitiated British audience. Try this, with the salient points in italics:
“When the State of Israel was born in 1948 – following Arab and Palestinian rejection of a peace agreement accepted by Israel which would have seen the internationalisation of the city – Jerusalem was divided. The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan – which expelled Jewish residents and forbade Jews from praying at all of the city’s holy sites. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours. That war was caused by Arab governments and the Palestinians who had the aim of eliminating the state of Israel in its entirety and expelling its Jewish residents.”
Well, that would really cast a different light on things wouldn’t it?
Next we come to Corbin’s “walk in the park” which starts in Sheikh Jarrah and winds its way through the Mount of Olives and Ras al Amoud to Silwan.
Stopping off in Ras al Amoud the documentary now introduces “an Israeli lawyer”, who serves throughout the programme as the objective analyst providing a neutral point of reference to enhance the credibility of the narration.
That Israeli lawyer is none other than, Danny Seidemann, a well known (but not to British viewers) left-wing lawyer-activist. No countervailing Israeli opinion from a similar kind of source is offered.
But the slippery and blatantly biased tactics of the programme makers are immediately revealed as the objective reference point offered by Seidemann is then counterbalanced by the opinion of an Israeli, Arieh King of the Israel Land Fund.
A purportedly neutral anti-settlement view is thus juxtaposed with the views of an interested party whose work we are told (to a background of darkly melancholic music), “is paid for by wealthy backers [ie Jews] in America and Europe.”
Then we are offered another piece of “context”: “Peace deals proposed so far reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.”
Hmm. I wonder what’s missing from that one then? Again, here’s another way of putting that point with my suggested additions in italics:
“Peace deals proposed so far – all of which were rejected by the Palestinians – reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.”
The omission is so blatant it is almost laughable. In this desperate attempt to support the long-standing BBC narrative that Israeli “occupation” forms the root cause of the conflict, it has become necessary to mention peace deals without pointing out that such peace deals were offered by Israel but flatly rejected (in favour of violence, one might add) by the Palestinians. To raise that issue would clearly undermine the ideological edifice. It would suggest that the root cause of the conflict is Palestinian rejectionism and anti-Semitism – two concepts that the BBC is apparently unable to deal with.
The distortion is reinforced as we then move to a catalogue of instances of how settlement policy is making a two state solution difficult if not impossible.
Harrowing stories are told of Palestinians kicked out of their homes. The briefest of references is made to the claim of the settlers that they are taking back land and property which was seized from them by Jordan in 1948. But it is done in such a way that no lay audience could possibly see any real justification for the settlers’ position.
We are told of, and shown, instances of Palestinians being thrown out of homes they have “lived in for generations”. This is stated as fact by the narrator. When the counter argument, that the land they have lived on was stolen from Jews in the first place, this is ventured as the mere opinion of Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem.
Arriving in Silwan, the narrator just happens to drop in at the very moment a Palestinian house is being demolished. A Palestinian activist, Jawad Siyam, is given prominence as the articulate and reasoned voice of the oppressed. He cries out: “It’s the most racist state in the world, you see…” Pointing to Israeli policemen he adds: “You are the most racist people in the world.”
No voice from the Israeli side is offered to protest about terrorism or Palestinian anti-Semitism. Nothing. With the historical context largely obliterated earlier in the programme, few uninitiated viewers could disagree with Siyam’s diatribe.
Fading in the melancholic music again, we are then told ominously that many of the settlers come from abroad as we are introduced to the Adlers, a family of American religious Jews who have settled in Silwan. (American, religious, Jewish and settlers? That’s the sort of combination that gives BBC reporters sleepless nights).
As a warning of how Israeli policy is leading to tensions, we are later introduced to a Palestinian man, Ahmed, (complete with close-up of crying son) who was shot in the right thigh by an Israeli following a scuffle. No instance of Palestinian violence is offered for balance. Ahmed then tells of how the Israeli stepped over him and “shot a child”.
As the documentary draws to a close, the narrator once again interjects with her own tendentious opinions: “Those who know Jerusalem warn that this is a powder keg,” she says. “More than the city could be ignited if the Israelis persist in what they are doing.”
“Those who know Jerusalem?” Who might that be then? We cut back to Danny Siedermann, the BBC’s objective analyst of events. Widening the discussion and placing responsibility for the overall conflict squarely with Israel, he says: “This is the volcanic core of the conflict…what begins in Jerusalem doesn’t stay in Jerusalem.” He adds darkly that regimes could be destabilised from Pakistan to Morocco in the ensuing cataclysm.
Finally we move to the wider settlements outside Jerusalem and “The Wall”. Corbin concludes the documentary with the words: “The face of the city is changing and that makes the chances of peace even more remote.”
Well, you get the picture. Obviously the issue of Jerusalem excites passions inside Israel and outside it. Reasonable people can disagree on it. There are many shades of opinion to be assessed. And there is no reason why a BBC documentary should not reflect that. The problem is that the documentary does not reflect that reality at all.
Every Jewish step in East Jerusalam is presented as wrong and dangerous. All the important context has been removed. A clear ideological agenda has been pushed at the expense of basic standards of fair reporting.
Welcome to the world of the BBC. And welcome to yet another illustration of the slippery path to the deligitimisation of the world’s only Jewish state.
OFFICIAL RESPONSE BY THE JERUSALEM MUNICIPALITY TO BBC
Official response of the Jerusalem Municipality’s to Jane Corbin claims on BBC Panorama’s “A Walk Through the Park” (Thursday, January 21, 2010)
Jane Corbin claimed on BBC Panorama’s “A Walk Through the Park” about eastern Jerusalem (aired on Monday January 18th at 2030 GMT) that: “Demolitions have been increasing in recent days, and in fact, we’ve got hold of a list that shows there’s another 40 to go before the end of the year. That’s because the municipal government has a budget that it has to use up for demolitions.”
In response, Stephan Miller, Foreign Media Spokesperson for Mayor Nir Barkat, issued the following statement:
“The amount of demolitions carried out by the Jerusalem Municipality every year is determined solely by the number of illegally constructed buildings erected by those residents who flouted the law. The number of structural demolitions conducted in eastern Jerusalem by the Jerusalem Municipality actually decreased in 2009 – from 86 in 2008 to 65 in 2009, a 25% decrease. Further, there is simply no connection whatsoever between the annual budget of the Jerusalem Municipality and the number of demolitions conducted. Throughout the program, Ms. Corbin presents a completely and utterly false representation of the facts and a distasteful distortion of reality.
“It would be prudent to ask Ms. Corbin what happened to her alleged list of 40 planned demolitions since her filming in late 2009. You’ll easily find yet another one of her distasteful distortions.”
LONDON TIMES JUST CAN’T RUN A STRAIGHT NEWS STORY ABOUT ISRAEL
“Haiti and Gaza are not the same”
By Catherine Philp: Analysis on news pages
From The Times
January 21, 2010
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6996028.ece
While dispensing with work permits crucial to aid work in the Palestinian territories Israel has been noisily trumpeting its own relief efforts – thousands of miles away in Haiti.
Israel’s image-burnishing efforts there stand in marked contrast to the barriers it is now throwing up to the same aid organisations it is sweating alongside in the rubble.
The work of Israeli doctors at an emergency field hospital in Port-au-Prince – where a 220-strong military medical team has treated thousands in a huge field hospital – has become the subject of an e-mail campaign lauding the relief mission.
Newspapers around the world, including The Times, have been flooded with identical e-mails contrasting the criticism of Israel’s disproportionate use of military force with the scale of its response to the Haiti earthquake.
“Many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza,” the e-mail says. “It is time that the world media speak of another disproportionate response from Israel.”
Israel calls this the “hasbara war”, or the struggle to control the PR aspects of the conflicts in which it is embroiled. Having learnt that a bad press can be as damaging to its standing as bombs are to its citizens, it exerts huge efforts to put across its side of the story. The struggle has reached a higher pitch this year in the wake of the Goldstone report into the war in Gaza, in which a UN investigator said that Israel and Hamas committed war crimes.
Yesterday the UN drew a comparison between the situations in Haiti and Gaza, noting that while the quake was an act of God, the collapse of Gaza’s health care system was the consequence of Israel’s man-made blockage.
* Fatah: we will back “fraternal” Iranian regime against Iran’s pro-democratic opposition
* Russia to strengthen ties with Hamas
* Russia confirms it will help Iran launch nuclear plant this year
* Saudi Princess: The Shia practice paganism
* Saudi government minister: suspend beating your children during visits to U.S.
Please note there is also another dispatch today, titled Iran: “Israeli doctors stealing Haitian organs” (& Jerusalem mayor attacks BBC “lies”).
CONTENTS
1. Obama: misjudging his own misjudgment
2. Official Fatah website drops all material from Iranian sources opposing the regime
3. An exclusive interview with Hamas leader Dr. Khalil Al Hayya
4. Russian foreign minister: Moscow strengthens contact with Hamas
5. Russia confirms it will help Iran launch nuclear plant this year
6. Senator-elect Scott Brown, a strong supporter of Israel
7. Israeli, Iranian ministers share a rare handshake
8. Syrians turn backs, while Palestinians talk cooperation
9. Palestinian forces rescue injured Jewish settler
10. Saudi government minister: suspend beating your children during visits to U.S.
11. Riot in Saudi women’s prison, and rare Saudi openness in reporting it
12. Saudi Princess: The Shi’ites injected pagan customs into Islam
13. France vows to prevent any Israeli strike on Lebanon’s infrastructure
14. French company to revamp Lebanon’s Gazelle helicopters, equip Pumas
15. “Pentagon refusing Israeli F-35 requests”
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
OBAMA: MISJUDGING HIS OWN MISJUDGMENT
Time magazine reports:
In an exclusive interview published this week in Time magazine, U.S. President Barack Obama admits he erred during his first year in office by raising too high expectations of a Middle East breakthrough.
“I’ll be honest with you, this is just really hard,” Obama said when asked about the Middle East.
“This is as intractable a problem as you get,” Obama said. While Jerusalem showed a willingness “after a lot of time” to make “some modifications” in policy, it “still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures.”
“I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn’t produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high,” Obama said.
***
Tom Gross adds: Based on his record so far, Obama is proving to be the most naïve president for decades regarding foreign policy.
As outlined in previous dispatches on this list, his initial policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were very unhelpful to both Israeli and Palestinian moderates. Luckily both groups ignored him and Obama’s first year in office from late January 2009 until the present, turned out to be one of the healthiest for Israelis and Palestinians in over 15 years – not that Obama seems to grasp this.
Among the factors that made the first 12 months of Obama’s presidency better for peace prospects (for those of us who want a two-state solution) than previous years:
* There was less violence both between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Palestinians and Palestinians, than there has been for years.
* 2009 was the first year without any successful suicide bombs against Israel for a long time.
* The Palestinian security forces in the West Bank have finally started to behave as a security force rather than as a terrorist group.
* There was strong economic growth in both Israel and the Palestinian territories relative to most of the rest of the world, for which 2009 was a bleak year.
* A Likud leader recognized the principle of an independent Palestinian state.
* Benjamin Netanyahu made the most sweeping freeze on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank since 1967.
Yet Obama and his advisors have now gone from being ridiculously optimistic, to becoming ridiculously pessimistic.
OFFICIAL FATAH WEBSITE DROPS ALL MATERIAL FROM IRANIAN SOURCES OPPOSING THE REGIME
The official website of the Fatah movement, the Voice of Palestine, announced over the weekend that they are removing all material from their website from Iranian opposition sources.
He said that “the relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah is a fraternal relationship and the Iranian regime must not be offended from the pages of electronic media and that the Palestinian Fatah will not allow news of any form to be distributed which affect the fraternal relations between the two countries.”
Full announcement in Arabic here.
RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: MOSCOW STRENGTHENS CONTACT WITH HAMAS
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday that Moscow is intensifying its contacts with Hamas, which it considers “vital”. Lavrov’s comments were made during a news conference in Moscow to discuss his assessment of 2009 and the priorities for Russian foreign policy in 2010.
In a separate development, Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas will visit Russia this week. The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports that Abbas and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev will meet in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on January 26.
RUSSIA CONFIRMS IT WILL HELP IRAN LAUNCH NUCLEAR PLANT THIS YEAR
Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, has confirmed that his country will launch Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant in 2010.
“All the work is going as scheduled. The tests are a success. This year will be the year of the launch of Bushehr,” AFP quoted Kiriyenko as saying on Thursday. Israel and other countries fear Iran will use nuclear fuel to make nuclear weapons.
It seems a sinister coincidence that The International Herald Tribune ran this as a small story in their “news briefs” section next to an item announcing that the stolen entrance sign to Auschwitz has been restored at the camp. Israel fears the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East will lead to a nuclear conflict which could result in a nuclear Holocaust being inflicted upon the Jewish state.
Of all the foreign policy issues Obama has mishandled in his first year in office, the question of how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been the gravest.
In saying that I believed Hillary Clinton would be the better of two poor candidates by then remaining in the race to be the Democratic presidential nominee, I wrote in April 2008 (particularly with the Iranian nuclear issue in mind): “As an intelligent man, Obama is no doubt capable of mastering foreign policy but it will take some time; and while he’s doing so, in an extremely dangerous world, it may well prove a very costly education for the rest of us.”
To my great regret – since I want to see a strong America with a strong and wise commander in chief (otherwise powers such as China, Russia and Iran will fill the gap) – I stand by that assessment.
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH HAMAS LEADER DR. KHALIL AL HAYYA
Dr. Khalil Al Hayya confirms to Hamas’s Al Qassam website that the “Hamas movement receives Iranian support financially, politically and morally without paying any political price.”
You can read the full interview on Hamas’s English language website here.
SENATOR-ELECT SCOTT BROWN, A STRONG SUPPORTER OF ISRAEL
Incoming Republican Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is on record as having a clear understanding of the security threats Israel faces. Here is his position paper on the matter.
He may help tilt the balance away from the increasingly cool stance towards Israel of many in the Obama administration and the State Department.
ISRAELI, IRANIAN MINISTERS SHARE A RARE HANDSHAKE
Israeli and Iranian ministers exchanged a rare handshake last week while attending the International Tourism Trade Fair in Madrid.
Israel’s Tourism Minister Stas Mezeshnikov (a member of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party) approached his Iranian counterpart, held out his hand, and said “We are both from the same region and tourism can serve as a bridge for dialogue and to wider understanding,” Reuters reports .
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state, and has also repeatedly questioned whether the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, had indeed occurred. Tensions have been aggravated by the Iranian nuclear program, which Israel views as an existential threat.
Mezeshnikov further said to the Iranian minister, Hamid Baqaie, “The Israeli people see the Iranian people as a friend, but Iran must stop its wild incitement against Israel and return to the family of nations.”
Baqaie made no response, but did briefly shake the Israeli’s hand when offered it. A number of the more junior Israeli and Iranian tourism officials also exchanged pleasantries, according to Israeli news reports.
Mezeshnikov was quoted as replying that he hoped “the day that Israelis can visit Iran will soon return, but this would require a regime change in Iran.”
Israel enjoyed relatively warm ties with Iran until the Islamic revolution in 1979.
SYRIANS TURN BACKS WHILE PALESTINIANS TALK COOPERATION
By contrast the Syrian tourism minister, whom Mezeshnikov also approached at the fair, refused to shake his hand. Instead he and his whole delegation immediately turned their backs on the Israelis.
However, the Israeli and Palestinian tourism minister enjoyed what was termed as “a very nice conversation” at the tourism fair. Mezeshnikov said: “We are cooperating with the Palestinians on several joint tourism projects as well as in the bid to have the Dead Sea make it into the New Seven Wonders of the World competition.”
(Tom Gross adds: I also had lunch with the Palestinian tourism minister in Bethlehem last month and she spoke warmly of developing joint tourism projects with Israel. The minister, who is from a small village in the West Bank, recently returned from doing her PhD in Germany and speaks good German and English.)
PALESTINIAN FORCES RESCUE INJURED JEWISH SETTLER
The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports that Palestinian Authority civil defense crews rescued an Israeli settler who was trapped under her overturned car on Friday near Qalqilya in the northern West Bank.
The injured woman’s condition was described as serious.
A Palestinian civil defense unit arrived at the scene shortly after it learned that a car had flipped near a bridge, PA sources said.
Palestinian forces used special equipment to rescue the trapped woman, and offered initial emergency treatment. Israeli medics then arrived on the scene, and transferred the woman to a hospital in Israel for further treatment.
Tom Gross adds: Although there are still all kinds of problems with the Palestinian Authority security forces, there have also been great improvements over the last year. Whereas they previously would probably have shot such an Israeli settler, they are now regularly assisting in such cases as car accidents.
SAUDI GOVERNMENT MINISTER: SUSPEND BEATING YOUR CHILDREN DURING VISITS TO U.S.
Saudi Arabia’s Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Muhammad Al-Shammari, said on Friday that Saudi students who are going to live and study in America should be careful not to beat their children while in the U.S. as it is against the law there, according to Saudi media reports in Arabic. (And in English here.)
RIOT IN SAUDI WOMEN’S PRISON, AND RARE SAUDI OPENNESS IN REPORTING IT
Four inmates and several staff were injured when a riot broke out at a women’s prison in the holy city of Mecca last week. The head of social affairs in Mecca described it as a “mutiny” and threatened harsh action against the instigators.
The Saudi Gazette reports: “A few years ago, that would probably have been the last anyone heard of the matter. But Saudi Arabia is changing, as was seen last month by the public outcry over the authorities’ mishandling of the Jeddah floods. When things go wrong, Saudis are beginning to demand accountability.
“No fewer than four government departments are now investigating the background to the prison riot, the kingdom’s National Society of Human Rights has become involved, and The Saudi Gazette has kept up a barrage of reports on the affair for three days running. The paper even has quotes from some of the inmates.
“They said that they had no choice but to protest because of the alleged abuse they suffered at the hands of the guards and prison officials. They said they were severely beaten, often went hungry and had to bear the agony of solitary confinement.”
SAUDI PRINCESS: THE SHI’ITES INJECTED PAGAN CUSTOMS INTO ISLAM
Against the backdrop of ongoing tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and between Sunnis and Shi’ites throughout the region, Saudi Princess Basma Sa’ud bin Abd Al-Aziz has written an article in the Saudi daily Al-Madina, condemning the rites performed by the Shi’ites on the Day of Ashura, which she says are “among the ugliest and most primitive pagan rites banned by the Prophet.”
“These [Shi’ite] disciples take to the streets by the thousands and scour [their own flesh] with chains and sticks. They spill their own blood in the name of [Hussein] – the Martyr of Islam, the grandson of the Prophet and the Master of the Youth of Paradise – whose teachings made no mention of these despicable customs of [self-] flagellation. [In fact, these customs] are among the ugliest and most primitive pagan rites banned by the Prophet,” she wrote, according to a translation by Memri.
“At a time when our Prophet is cursed and attacked [by Westerners], the Shi’ites are preoccupied with bemoaning the fate of his grandson. They have forgotten that the Prophet is the core!
“Isn’t it time to wake up and repent? Let us unite and defend our Prophet in the face of the [non-Muslim] enemy.”
FRANCE VOWS TO PREVENT ANY ISRAELI STRIKE ON LEBANON’S INFRASTRUCTURE
The leading Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported yesterday that “well-informed Lebanese sources confirmed that French President Nicolas Sarkozy informed Lebanese officials that France has vowed to try to prevent Israel from bombarding Lebanon’s basic infrastructure ‘but no more than that.’ Sarkozy stressed to Lebanese officials that it was imperative to ‘control the internal situation in Lebanon and prevent any provocations.’”
The Lebanese government is concerned that if Hizbullah attacks Israel again, as it did in 2006 (and this time Hizbullah has thousands of Iranian and Syrian-supplied missiles which can hit Tel Aviv), Israel will strike back at infrastructural targets in Lebanon.
As Hizbullah builds up an ever greater and more powerful arsenal in south Lebanon along Israel’s border, and as the Italian-and French-led UNIFIL forces there do next to nothing to prevent this (contrary to their obligations under their UN mandate), there are increasing tensions between Lebanon and Israel.
FRENCH COMPANY TO REVAMP LEBANON’S GAZELLE HELICOPTERS, EQUIP PUMAS
Lebanon has signed an agreement with the French company Euro Tech to revamp 13 Gazelle-type helicopters owned by Lebanon, and equip the Puma helicopters granted by the UAE to Lebanon, according to Lebanese news reports.
Lebanese pilots will also be trained to fly the French-manufactured Puma helicopters. The first batch of Pumas are expected to arrive in Lebanon by June.
An earlier report in the Pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat said that France was worried that any weapons, including missiles for the Gazelle helicopters, provided to the Lebanese army could end up in the hands of Hizbullah. French officials have now decided to go ahead with the sale in spite of these fears.
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri had asked for the Gazelle missiles since the Lebanese airforce used up all its rockets against Palestinian Fatah al-Islam militants during the battle of Nahr el-Bared in northern Lebanon in 2007. The Lebanese army massacred a great many Palestinian civilians in that operation but all those people in the West who claim to campaign for the well-being of Palestinians were largely silent and seemingly couldn’t care less because Israel wasn’t involved.
“PENTAGON REFUSING ISRAELI F-35 REQUESTS”
The U.S. insists it will prohibit the use of any Israeli radar and electronic technology in F-35’s purchased by Israel – making Israel dependent on the U.S. for repair and maintenance and in effect curtailing Israel’s free use of the aircraft in future.
The Israeli Defense Ministry says it only wants to purchase the new stealth-enabled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from America if it is allowed to replace 50 percent of the systems with Israeli-made technology.
The F-35 will be one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world and, according to the IAF, would significantly boost Israel’s deterrence. The planes are expected to cost around $130 million each.
The U.S. is also refusing to allow Israel to independently maintain the aircraft. Under the current proposal, if a customer encounters a mechanical malfunction, the plane will have to be sent to a special maintenance center, likely to be set up in Italy.
“This is not something we can live with,” the Israeli official said. “Can you imagine that during a war we will send one of our aircraft to Italy to be fixed?”
***
Meanwhile, as outlined in the dispatch titled Science fiction soon to become reality as Israel develops robot weapons, the Obama administration is sending billions of dollars worth of sophisticated arms to Arab countries, including:
* 2,742 anti-tank missiles for Saudi Arabia
* 1,808 anti-tank missiles and 162 launchers with night vision systems for Jordan
* 1,600 laser-guided “smart bombs” and 800 one-ton and 400 bunker buster bombs for the UAE
* 12 of the latest C-130 Hercules military cargo planes also for the UAE
* 16 Chinook helicopters also for the UAE
* 24 F-16s for Morocco, the first acquired by that country’s air force
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
Those being directed to this web page from other websites in order to watch the Israel-Haiti rescue VIDEOS, should scroll down to item three below (titled “CBS News: the Israeli army hospital is the ‘Rolls Royce’ of medicine in Haiti”).
* Has the Haitian earthquake been blamed on the Jews yet?
* Israel at forefront of Haiti rescue efforts; Arab countries conspicuous by their absence
(Please see the short CNN video which I attach at the end of the second item below, titled “Israel’s disproportionate response”)
* National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau, a hardliner from Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu party, becomes the first Israeli cabinet minister allowed to visit Abu Dhabi
* Latest round of Palestinian-upon-Palestinian violence in Gaza again ignored by international media: a hardware store, a billiard hall, a pharmacy and two cafes among those targets bombed
* Norwegian Deputy Prime Minister: I wish the United Nations would fire missiles at Israelis
* Norwegian government invests $30 million to celebrate the late Knut Hamsun, a writer who dedicated his Nobel Prize to Joseph Goebbels and in 1945 eulogized Hitler
EXTRA NOTE
Condolences to the family of Erich Segal, who passed away yesterday evening. Erich, who was a great classical scholar, a strong supporter of Israel and the author of the popular bestseller “Love Story” was, together with his wife and daughter, a long time subscriber to this email list, as well as being a close family friend. Erich also wrote the screenplay for The Beatles’ 1968 motion picture, Yellow Submarine.
CONTENTS
1. International aid to Haiti: Arabs opt out
2. Israel’s disproportionate response
3. CBS News: the Israeli army hospital is the “Rolls Royce” of medicine in Haiti
4. Copts demonstrate against “BBC bias” following murder by Islamists
5. Shabak report 2009
6. Dubai rape victim jailed for sex outside marriage
7. For the first time, an Israeli cabinet minister visits Abu Dhabi
8. Poll: Israelis more tolerant of Islam than Swiss
9. OECD Sec-Gen. visits Israel tomorrow, prior to a decision about inviting Israel to join
10. Al-Qaeda reportedly behind failed bomb attack against Israeli diplomats in Jordan
11. Saudis admit to slaughtering Yemenis; world silent
12. Norwegian political leader: We are embarrassed at our government’s hostility to Israel
13. Crete’s only synagogue nearly burnt down in second anti-Semitic attack
14. NY Daily News: “Accused terrorist Aafia Siddiqui says toss Jews from jury pool”
15. Bombs detonated in pharmacy and two coffee shops in the Gaza Strip
16. Damascus plans metro system
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
INTERNATIONAL AID TO HAITI: ARABS OPT OUT
This CBS / Associated Press report lists countries providing aid to Haiti in the wake of that country’s devastating earthquake. Conspicuous by its absence is the entire Muslim world, including the extremely rich oil producing nations.
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/14/world/main6097735.shtml
However, Arab countries do not discriminate against non-Muslim countries. Their help was missing after the earthquakes in Turkey and Iran and during war and famine in Muslim Africa too.
ISRAEL’S DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE
Because of Israel’s long history of enduring bomb and missile attacks the Israeli army (the IDF) is one of the most experienced in the world in treating mass-injuries and using specially trained sniffer dogs to locate wounded persons in the rubble.
The IDF was one of the first on the scene in Haiti last week (sending considerably more troops and doctors than, for example, Britain and France did). Hundreds, if not thousands of Haitians have already been treated (and many life-saving surgeries performed) in the IDF Medical and Rescue Field Hospital, set up in a large tent on a soccer field in Port-Au-Prince. In addition, Israeli forces have located and rescued survivors trapped in ruined buildings, including many who were injured during the collapse of the UN headquarters.
In addition to teams from the IDF’s canine unit, Israel sent 52 doctors and 25 nurses as well as paramedics, and has set up a pharmacy, a children’s ward, a radiology department, an intensive care unit, an emergency room, two operating rooms, a surgical department, an internal medicine department and a maternity ward. Israel has since sent a further 220 doctors, medics and nurses. Israel also sent a number of French-speaking translators to aid doctors.
Yesterday, a baby boy was delivered inside the Israeli field hospital. The mother of the child said she will call him Israel.
***
You can see some photos here.
CBS NEWS: THE ISRAELI ARMY HOSPITAL IS THE “ROLLS ROYCE” OF MEDICINE IN HAITI
Here are some positive stories from major international media.
This is perhaps the most positive TV news coverage I have ever seen on Israelis since the advent of cable news.
This is a heart-warming piece here on WABC News (18 January): A brother of a resident of Queens, New York, is pulled out of the rubble by an Israeli rescue team after four days.
In this piece from Britain’s Sky News, the Israelis rescue a man alive after a very dangerous 8 hours digging in the debris.
This short CNN report piece (18 January) is worth watching:
As is this item from Fox News (17 January):
Below (and also here) NBC’s main evening news (January 19) says Israel “created the best field medicine available” and “What the Israelis have brought is a model for medical disaster response.”
CBS News (as repeated here on Sky News) (18 January) calls the Israeli IDF hospital the “Rolls Royce” of medicine in Haiti:
And here is a story from ABC News (18 January): Miracle birth amid Haiti's rubble.
And as for the BBC (the world’s biggest news broadcaster)? Instead Panorama, the flagship news program of the BBC’s main channel, BBC1, this evening again devoted the entire program to another piece of anti-Israeli agitprop.
COPTS DEMONSTRATE AGAINST “BBC BIAS” FOLLOWING MURDER BY ISLAMISTS
More than 100 activists from “Copts Abroad Britain” organized a protest in front of the headquarters of the BBC on Friday morning to protest and condemn what they charged was the “biased and distorted way” the BBC has covered the recent murders of Christian Copts in Egypt. As reported on this email list, Copts were gunned down as they left church services during the Coptic Orthodox Christmas earlier this month. Seven worshippers died and others were injured.
Dr. Ibrahim Habib, the head of the United Copts Organization said this was the first time that Copts had held a demonstration in Britain. He said Copts were furious at the way the BBC had covered the killings, which, he said, “showed a complete lack of objectivity and effectively sided with the Islamist killers of innocent Christian worshippers.”
In a related development, Free Copts and the Coptic Voices Organization in the United States called for a peaceful march and demonstration tomorrow, January 19, in front of United Nations headquarters in New York, to protest the recent violence by Muslims against Christians in Egypt.
SHABAK REPORT 2009
Israel’s security and domestic intelligence agency, the Shabak, today publishes in English on its website its “Annual 2009 Summary of Data and Trends in Palestinian Terrorism”. It can be read here.
DUBAI RAPE VICTIM JAILED FOR SEX OUTSIDE MARRIAGE
A 23-year-old woman who was raped in Dubai on New Year’s Eve has been jailed for having sex outside her marriage. The woman, who was spending a 3-day holiday with her fiancé to celebrate their engagement, reported to police that she was raped by a hotel worker. She was then arrested and jailed for having sex without being married, which is illegal in the United Arab Emirates.
In March 2007, this email list highlighted the case of a Saudi gang-rape victim who was given 90 lashes and a jail sentence as punishment for having sex outside marriage. This email list was strongly critical of major newspapers such as The New York Times and the BBC for ignoring that story, even though the punishment was meted out by the Saudis on International Women’s Day.
After a sustained campaign by myself and others, in an effort to force the mainstream media to report it, The New York Times eventually did so eight months later, after which Hillary Clinton, who was then senator for New York, spoke out against the punishment, and the victim’s jail time was reduced. This list continues to be strongly critical of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for failing to speak out properly on behalf of Arab victims of Arab violence. But, as I reported last year, this is not surprising since Human Rights Watch has solicited funds from the Saudi regime.
Please see these dispatches for background on the above note:
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000835.html
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000909.html
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001047.html
FOR THE FIRST TIME, AN ISRAELI CABINET MINISTER VISITS ABU DHABI
Abu Dhabi has for the first time allowed Jerusalem to send a cabinet minister to meetings in the United Arab Emirates, a Persian Gulf country that has no diplomatic ties with Israel.
However, National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau, a hardliner from Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu party, told The Associated Press yesterday that he did not meet with any Emirati officials while attending a conference of the International Renewable Energy Agency, based in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi. The agency’s activities are open to Israel because it is a member state.
Landau said the Israeli delegation entered the country after “special arrangements” were made. “They had to do it since they committed themselves to making it possible for all member states, with or without relations, to participate in the agency’s activities,” Landau said in a phone interview from Abu Dhabi.
Last year, as reported in this email list, the UAE denied entry to Israeli tennis player Shahar Pe’er, who was due to play in an international tournament in Dubai.
POLL: ISRAELIS MORE TOLERANT OF ISLAM THAN SWISS
A survey by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding found that a quarter of all Israeli Jews support banning minarets on mosques in Israel. This is a far lower percentage than populations in Europe. “The results prove there is room for respectful coexistence between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs when it is based on religion rather than politics,” the foundation’s president, Rabbi Marc Schneier, said.
Last November, 57.5% of voters in Switzerland approved a referendum banning the construction of minarets on mosques in their country. Opinion polls in other European countries show similar results to the Swiss referendum. The strongest opposition to banning minarets in Israel came from religious Jews.
OECD SEC-GEN. VISITS ISRAEL TOMORROW, PRIOR TO A DECISION ABOUT INVITING ISRAEL TO JOIN
OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria will visit Israel tomorrow to meet with senior Israeli political and economic figures, prior to the upcoming decision on whether to admit Israel to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).
In May 2007, the Council of the OECD, which numbers 30 member states, decided to initiate a process of co-opting to the organization Israel, Chile, Russia, Estonia and Slovenia. The organization submitted a road map to Israel at the beginning of 2008 in which it was asked to undergo a large number of check-ups and hearings by the organization’s professional committees. This process should be completed in the first quarter of this year.
The Israeli foreign ministry said in a press statement: “Joining the OECD, which has among its membership the major players in the global economy, will open up possibilities for Israel of ongoing dialogue with representatives of these economies; upgrade Israel’s public administration; improve Israel’s corporate management; expand trade opportunities, and improve Israel’s credit rating.”
AL-QAEDA REPORTEDLY BEHIND FAILED BOMB ATTACK AGAINST ISRAELI DIPLOMATS IN JORDAN
The detonation of sophisticated remote-controlled bombs in Jordan last Thursday, when a convoy of four Israeli diplomats drove from Amman toward the Allenby Bridge, was apparently the work of al-Qaeda, a Jordanian security official told the al-Ghad newspaper
No one was injured in the blasts, but the two vehicles sustained damage. The road is normally considered safe. The Jordanian security official told al-Ghad that the explosions were a message to Jordanian authorities and that those behind the attack were capable of infiltrating Jordan’s security establishment and hitting its strategic assets.
Israeli security sources said the attempt, which took place 30 miles west of the capital Amman, was a well-planned ambush, which failed due to inaccurate timing only by a matter of seconds.
They said that based on preliminary reports, it appeared the attackers had good intelligence. “They knew when the diplomats were traveling and where they were going,” one security official said.
This is the second breach of security in recent weeks for Jordan, which prides itself on its effective intelligence and security services. The suicide bomber who killed C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan last month was a Jordanian intelligence agent.
SAUDIS ADMIT TO SLAUGHTERING YEMENIS; WORLD SILENT
Following up previous references on this email list to the ongoing bombing of northern Yemen by Saudi Arabia (a bombing campaign which is being all but ignored by those very same media, governments and “human rights” groups that constancy criticize Israel), Prince Khaled bin Sultan, the Deputy Saudi minister of defense and aviation for military affairs, has admitted – in effect boasted – that Saudi Arabia has killed many hundreds, if not thousands, of Yemenis in recent weeks.
Although the Saudis are primarily dropping bombs on Yemeni rebel positions, they have hit at least two crowded markets and other buildings, including schools, killing an untold number of civilians.
Prince Khaled said the number of Saudi soldiers killed in the fierce fighting had reached 82 with 21 Saudi soldiers missing and 470 soldiers injured.
NORWEGIAN POLITICAL LEADER: WE ARE EMBARRASSED AT OUR GOVERNMENT’S HOSTILITY TO ISRAEL
It is easy to understand why many Israelis view Norway as a hostile country, a Norwegian opposition leader told the Israeli paper Ha’aretz prior to the arrival of the Norwegian foreign minister in Israel yesterday.
“Instead of saying there’s no problem, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store should listen to the concerns of Israel regarding the Norwegian government’s attitude,” said Hans Olav Syversen. Syversen is in charge of foreign policy for the Christian Democratic Party, Norway’s sixth largest party.
Many Israelis have been furious with Norwegian Foreign Minister Store who last month endorsed a book by the pro-Hamas Norwegian doctors Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse which accuses Israeli troops of deliberately hunting down children to kill in Gaza. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg expressed gratitude to the authors for their efforts, describing them as “a voice to the world.”
“FIRE MISSILES AT ISRAEL”
Israel is also unhappy with the appointment in November of Ingrid Fiskaa from the Socialist Left Party as deputy minister. In 2008 she told a Norwegian paper she wished the United Nations would fire missiles at Israelis. In September, Norway’s finance minister announced a major Norwegian pension fund would divest from Israeli companies. Last January, a Norwegian diplomat serving in Riyadh compared Operation Cast Lead to the Holocaust.
In Durban II last year, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the conference, virtually all European representatives left the hall – except for the Norwegian foreign minister.
Norway is a NATO member, but failed to protest when NATO bombed Serbia, killing many innocent civilians in its efforts to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Nor has Norway protested about innocent civilians killed by NATO in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Last year, the Norwegian government invested $30 million in support of major celebrations in honor of the late Knut Hamsun, a writer who had dedicated his Nobel Prize to Joseph Goebbels and in 1945 eulogized Hitler.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has accused Norway of adopting a “hostile stance” towards the Jewish state and being indifferent to anti-Semitism.
Syversen said 26 Norwegian parliamentarians had come to Israel as a show of support for the Jewish state and said they would hang their heads in shame at the attitudes of their own government.
CRETE’S ONLY SYNAGOGUE NEARLY BURNT DOWN IN SECOND ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACK
Greek fire fighters have narrowly managed to save Crete’s historic Hania synagogue following the second arson attack on it so far this year.
The Etz-Chaim Synagogue was targeted by arsonists for the second time in two weeks, police said yesterday. An unknown number of people entered the building at around 4 am on Saturday, broke through a first-floor door and started a fire, they said.
The fire brigade said the blaze partly destroyed the synagogue’s wooden ceiling, as well as many of its archives, computers and CDs. It estimated the damage at $43,000.
In an earlier attack on January 6, investigators found evidence of arson, including a bottle with a flammable liquid still burning when they doused the flames at the synagogue, the only one on the island of Crete. The synagogue also functions as a museum and memorial to the town’s Jews. The 300 members of the Hania Jewish community were shipped out by the Nazi invaders in 1944, and died when their ship was sunk in transit by an Allied torpedo.
BOOKS DESTROYED
About 2,500 books, many of them rare editions, were destroyed in this and the previous arson attack, police said.
Greek media also reports that bars of soap were left in the synagogue by the perpetrators of the first attack. A common Greek anti-Semitic expression (based on Nazi practice) is “We’ll turn the Jews into bars of soap”.
Leading Greek-American groups joined Jewish groups in condemning the arson attack and urged the Greek government to do more to stem the rising tide of Greek anti-Semitism. For over 200 years, beginning in the sixteenth century, the Greek city of Salonika was home to the world’s largest Jewish community, who made up 54% of the city’s population. The city’s Jews were all but wiped out in the Holocaust. Among those who supervised deportations from Greece was Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian diplomat and politician, who later served as a two-term Secretary-General of the United Nations and was elected President of Austria even after his Nazi background was exposed.
NY DAILY NEWS: “ACCUSED TERRORIST AAFIA SIDDIQUI SAYS TOSS JEWS FROM JURY POOL”
Under the headline “Accused terrorist Aafia Siddiqui says toss Jews from jury pool,” the New York Daily News reported that “Jury selection in the ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ trial got off to a bizarre start yesterday with the accused terrorist demanding Jews be excluded from the jury.”
Siddiqui, 37, a U.S.-trained neuroscientist, is charged with attempted murder. She is accused of picking up an M-4 Army rifle and firing two rounds at a team of FBI officials who tried to question her in Afghanistan on July 18, 2008.
Prosecutors said she screamed, “Allah Akbar” and vowed to kill Americans before she was wrestled to the ground. She also allegedly had two pounds of poisonous sodium cyanide and hundreds of pages of notes and documents on how to build chemical and biological weapons.
Her notes indicated she planned to target the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, prosecutors said.
Siddiqui vowed at previous pretrial hearings to ignore her legal team and instead demanded a meeting with President Barack Obama. Siddiqui, a native of Pakistan, is a specialist in neuroscience who trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Brandeis University.
BOMBS DETONATED IN PHARMACY AND TWO COFFEE SHOPS IN GAZA
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has issued a statement condemning the latest round of Palestinian-upon-Palestinian violence in Gaza. “In the past 4 days,” it said “unknown persons detonated bombs in a pharmacy and two coffee shops in the Gaza Strip. Such attacks are the result of the state of security chaos and proliferation of weapons in the Palestinian territory.”
The international media continues to ignore Palestinian-upon-Palestinian violence, which I report about occasionally on this email list. Instead some Western media and “human rights groups” have dishonestly added those Palestinians killed by other Palestinians onto death tolls of “Palestinians killed by Israelis”.
In further violence, two Palestinians were killed when the explosives they were carrying accidentally detonated near the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. And in separate incidents, according to the PCHR, bombs were detonated in Gaza city in a hardware store, a billiard hall, a police vehicle and a private vehicle belonging to a member of the naval police.
DAMASCUS PLANS METRO SYSTEM
The Syrian capital Damascus, one of the world’s oldest cities, is to have its own metro system. The Syrian State Planning Commission says it needs to raise another $864 million for the construction of a light railway in Damascus. So far the European Investment Bank and the French Government have said that they are willing to contribute to the project.
Damascus is one of the world’s oldest cities, with signs of human activity recorded as far back as 6300 BC and planners say they will take extra care not to damage historical artifacts they may find when they dig up the streets.
Similar concerns have been faced by planners in the Israeli capital Jerusalem, which is in the midst of building a light railway. Due to poor planning, Tel Aviv has yet to start building a metro.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
* “British universities offer the most conducive environment an Islamic extremist could inhabit outside Waziristan”
* Shortly after he tried to bring down flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became the fourth former head of a British university Islamic Society to have been charged with a serious terrorism offense
* “Italian companies – with Rome’s backing – have equipped Iran’s military and contributed to the regime’s satellite and possibly nuclear programs”
* Next month, Silvio Berlusconi, who claims to be a great friend of the Jewish state, will speak in the Israeli parliament. I wonder what he will have to say about economic sanctions against Iran?
CONTENTS
1. The Iranian regime finds a friend in Italy
2. China snubs Obama, sends junior diplomat to today’s Iran nuclear talks
3. British universities in denial about Muslim radicals on campus
4. Invited as guest of honor to address students in London, targeted by a U.S. drone in Yemen
5. 60% of members of British universities’ Islamic societies believe killing nonbelievers is ok
6. Taliban may be descended from Jews
7. “The Rome-Tehran Axis” (By Giulio Meotti, Wall Street Journal Europe, Jan. 14, 2010)
8. “British radicalization studies” (By Douglas Murray, Wall Street Journal Europe, Jan. 8, 2010)
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
THE IRANIAN REGIME FINDS A FRIEND IN ITALY
(This first item was originally published on the websites of The National Review (in America) and The National Post (in Canada) on January 15, 2010.)
Italian double speak on Iran
By Tom Gross
National Review / National Post
There is an eye-popping story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal Europe. Italian companies – with Rome’s backing – have equipped Iran’s military, including the Revolutionary Guards, and contributed to the regime’s satellite and possibly nuclear programs.
As its author Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, writes: “When it comes to appeasing the Islamic Republic, no other Western nation has stooped lower than Italy.”
So much for the Italian government’s claim to be a strong supporter of the United States and of Israel, a country which the Iranian regime has threatened to destroy.
Despite international sanctions against Iran, Italian exports to the Islamic regime rose 17% in 2008 to 2.17 billion euros, according to the Italian statistical office. For the past three years, Italy has been Iran’s No. 1 European trading partner.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini also said that the West should “avoid those [sanctions against Iran] that are connected with Iranian national pride.”
The responses by some of the over 1000 Italian companies that do business with Ahmadinejad’s Iran are just incredible, and the website of the Italian-Iranian Chamber of Commerce states: “Iran and Italy were rivals and two great powerhouses in ancient times, but in the contemporary world they are great partners.”
Next month, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who claims to be a great friend of the Jewish state, will speak in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. I wonder what he will have to say about economic sanctions against Iran?
(Meotti’s full article is further down this dispatch.)
CHINA SNUBS OBAMA, SENDS JUNIOR DIPLOMAT TO TODAY’S IRAN NUCLEAR TALKS
After successfully delaying for some time a meeting of the six-power talks, China announced on the eve of today’s scheduled session that it will send only a junior diplomat, while the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Russia will all be represented by senior officials.
Western powers say the aim of the talks is to find a formula, likely to include sanctions, which will persuade Iran to suspend its nuclear program.
China’s move is a clear snub to U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama had agreed to postpone the deadline for the talks, most recently set for the end of 2009, so that China’s deputy foreign minister He Yafei could attend.
China (and possibly Russia) seem intent on allowing Iran to pursue its nuclear program.
BRITISH UNIVERSITIES IN DENIAL
British universities have been so busy arranging for academics to deliver propaganda-like sermons against Israel, and attempting to arrange boycotts of the Jewish state, that they seem not to have noticed that some of their Muslim students have become so radical that they sympathize with terrorists, or even commit acts of terror themselves.
It was a graduate of the London School of Economics who kidnapped and beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. It was two undergraduates from Kings College London (part of London university) who carried out a suicide bombing in Mike’s Place bar in Tel Aviv the following year that killed and injured a number of Israeli and French Jews.
And then there was the Detroit Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was chairman of the Islamic Students Society of University College London (also a part of London university).
Often, such terrorists (contrary to the misinformation regularly printed in liberal media about being motivated by poverty) come from very rich families, such as Dhiren Barot, formerly one of al Qaeda’s main operatives in Britain, who was the son of a banker, and a convert from Hinduism.
Even if not wealthy, they tend to be highly educated, such as Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the gang behind the 7/7 London transport suicide bombs, who was a teacher.
Others are converts to Islam such as Jermaine Lindsey, another of the 7/7 suicide bombers, Brian Young, one of the 2005 liquid explosives airplane plotters, and Nicky Reilly, who tried to blow up a restaurant in Exeter in South-West England.
And yet many in the British establishment and media, instead of looking inward, are still busy attacking Israel over false reports that the Jewish state committed war crimes.
INVITED AS GUEST OF HONOR TO ADDRESS STUDENTS IN LONDON, TARGETED BY AN AMERICAN DRONE IN YEMEN
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Douglas Murray, a leading expert on radical Islamists in the U.K. (and a long-time subscriber to this email list), writes that:
“Shortly after he tried to bring down flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became the fourth former head of a British university Islamic Society to have been charged with a serious terrorism offense. This is only the tip of the problem. Shaming as it is, during his time studying at University College London, Abdulmutallab was in the most conducive environment an Islamic extremist could inhabit outside Waziristan. It is a situation that has come about despite repeated warnings.”
Murray describes the situation as “surreal”. “Just before Christmas, the al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki was the subject of an airstrike on his Yemen home that killed many al Qaeda operatives. Only last April my organization was trying to explain to London’s City University why he was not a suitable person to address, by video-link, their Islamic Society. Despite already having been known to be spiritual mentor to two of the 9/11 hijackers, he has been advertised as the ‘distinguished guest’ speaker at the U.K.’s Federation of Student Islamic Societies’ annual dinner in 2003, and at Westminster University [another university in London] in 2006. Awlaki is now thought to be the connection between Abdumutallab and the people who gave him the bomb with which he intended to bring down the Detroit flight.”
60% OF MEMBERS OF BRITISH UNIVERSITIES’ ISLAMIC SOCIETIES BELIEVE KILLING NONBELIEVERS IS OK
Murray also points to a major survey of Muslim student opinion in the U.K (carried out by the leading polling company YouGov).
“The results were deeply disturbing,” he says. “The poll showed that one in three Muslim students believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified. That figure almost doubled to 60% among respondents who were active members of their universities’ Islamic Societies. Other results included the discovery that 40% of Muslim students polled supported the introduction of sharia law into British law, and that 58% of students active in their Student Islamic Societies supported the idea of the introduction of a worldwide Caliphate.
“These horrifying opinions rightly shocked the public. But the response from government and the university authorities was not to tackle the problem, but rather to attack the messengers.”
While Murray himself was prevented from speaking on behalf of Israel during a debate at the London School of Economics last year, he writes that “every month in Britain extremist Islamic speakers preach a message of intolerance and hatred at the invitation of Islamic societies. It is one of the reasons people like Abdulmutallab are so often created and nurtured here in Britain.”
“Only last month I wrote to the president of Abdulmutallab’s former university at the University College of London, asking why he had, for the second time in a year, allowed a speaking invitation to go out to Abu Usama adh Dhahabee. Dhahabee’s views include that women are mentally deficient, and that apostates from Islam, as well as homosexuals, should be killed.”
(Douglas Murray’s full article is below.)
***
A reader writes:
Murray says: “The U.K.’s universities offer the most conducive environment an Islamic extremist could inhabit outside Waziristan.” This is untrue. There are no Predators loitering over London waiting for actionable intel to launch strikes. London is a far safer place for Islamists than Waziristan.
TALIBAN MAY BE DESCENDED FROM JEWS
The ethnic group at the heart of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan may be descended from their Jewish enemy, according to researchers in India.
Experts at Mumbai’s National Institute of Immunohaematology believe Pashtuns could be one of the ten “Lost Tribes of Israel”.
An Indian geneticist has taken blood samples from the Pashtun Afridi tribe in Lucknow, Northern India, to Israel where she will spend the next 12 months at Israel’s Technion Institute comparing DNA with samples with those of Israeli Jews.
The samples were taken in Lucknow’s Malihabad province because it was regarded as the only place safe enough to conduct such a controversial project for Muslims.
There are an estimated 40 million Pashtuns around the world including more than 14 million in Afghanistan and 28 million in Pakistan. There have long been rumors they are of Jewish origin. It is believed they may be descended from the tribe of Ephraim which was driven out of Israel by the Assyrian invasion in around 700BC.
Evidence of ancient Jewish settlement has been found in Herat, close to Afghanistan’s border with Iran, where a graveyard contains tombs inscribed in Hebrew.
Navras Aafreedi, a leading researcher on the Lost Tribes of Israel, said the DNA investigation could have major political repercussions: “If scientific validation is given to the traditional belief about the Israelite origin of Pashtuns, it would have interesting ramifications for Muslim-Jewish relations in particular and the world at large.”
***
I attach two articles below -- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
ITALY’S CONCERN FOR “IRAN’S NATIONAL PRIDE”
The Rome-Tehran Axis
By Giulio Meotti
The Wall Street Journal Europe
January 14, 2010
Rome -- When it comes to appeasing the Islamic Republic, no other Western nation has stooped lower than Italy. Amid the international outrage over the Iranian regime’s brutalization of its own people, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini warned Europe “must not burn every bridge because Iran is a key figure” in the region. While rejecting any military action to stop Tehran’s nuclear weapons program, Mr. Frattini urged the West to “avoid those [sanctions] that are connected with Iranian national pride.” What may sound like a naïve appeal for more failed diplomacy may just as easily be thought of as a bid to secure lucrative business interests.
To understand Mr. Frattini’s concerns for “Iranian national pride,” one has to know that next to Germany – where such bogus arguments against economic sanctions are also very popular – Italy is Iran’s most important European trade partner. The list of about 1,000 Italian companies active in Iran includes such household names as Eni – the energy giant is Iran’s biggest business partner in Europe according to the Italian-Iranian Chamber of Commerce – as well as Fiat, Ansaldo, Maire Tecnimont, Danieli and Duferco. Italian companies are not just busy in the civilian and energy sectors – Maire Tecnimont just signed a €200 million gas deal with Iran – but have equipped the regime’s military and contributed to Iran’s satellite and possibly even nuclear weapons program.
Take the case of Carlo Gavazzi Space. The Italian technology company helped Iran with its Mesbah communications satellite program. “Communications satellites” can of course be easily diverted for military purposes and used, for example, as spy satellites and, more ominously, to help pinpoint nuclear strikes. Despite these risks, the Mesbah project enjoyed Rome’s political backing, as La Stampa reported at the time. Italy’s ambassador to Tehran back then, Riccardo Sessa, was even present at the 2003 signing ceremony of the deal, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
Under the terms of the agreement, Carlo Gavazzi Space did not just sell a finished product but also transferred technology and know-how. In a 2005 presentation of the Mesbah project posted on the Internet, L. Zucconi, managing director at Carlo Gavazzi Space, explained that his company “has worked in close cooperation with ITRC (Iran Telecommunication Research Center) / IROST (Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology) in the design, development and manufacturing of the MESBAH system. . . The Flight Model has been manufactured partly in Italy and partly in Iran, with the work sharing scheme defined together with ITRC / IROST. . . The MESBAH satellite will be controlled from one Ground Station located at Teheran and operated by ITRC / IROST personnel. . . The 1000 (user) terminals to be used for the service will be produced by Iranian Industries.”
“Having initiated the MESBAH project, the I.R. (Islamic Republic) of Iran has acquired a space infrastructure and space capacity,” making Iran “a new player in the space community prepared to face new challenging projects.” Carlo Gavazzi Space “look[s] forward for future cooperation.”
Two months ago, Gen. Mahdi Farahi, director of Iran’s Aerospace Industries, said Carlo Gavazzi Space would also help launch into space the successor model, the Mesbah-2. The Italian company denies this.
Asked about their Iranian business, Carlo Gavazzi Space’s general director, Roberto Aceti, told me Wednesday that his company trusts the “Iranian information about the ultimate use of our satellite,” rejecting any possible military use of their hardware as “unrealistic.”
***
Another example is Fiat’s subsidiary Iveco. The truck maker has since the early 1990s delivered thousands of vehicles to Iran and boasts on its Web site about its joint-venture assembly line in Iran. The problem is that some of these trucks, as shown on the nearby photograph, can also be used to transport Iranian missiles.
Iranian Opposition members say these trucks also serve another sinister purpose: the public hangings of homosexuals and dissidents. I have seen a photograph showing these executions on Iveco trucks at an October 2007 exhibition in Rome organized by Italy’s largest organization against the death penalty, “Nessuno tocchi Caino.”
Maurizio Pignata, director of Iveco’s press office, assured me Wednesday that their “vehicles, like the ones in the photograph with missiles in Tehran, are always sold for civilian purposes.” He added however that the company “can’t know the ulterior exploit of our vehicles. The photograph of the truck with Iranian rockets shows normal Iveco vehicles converted for different goals. In China they used our vehicles for public executions of prisoners. So we can’t know if our trucks are used in Iran for military or repressive purposes.”
***
Even the Revolutionary Guard – whose role is to protect the regime and train terrorists – benefits from Italian engineering. The paramilitary security forces purchased frame and design plans of the patrol boat “Levriero” from the Italian company FB Design in 1998. When Italian media reported this and other business deals the company has made with the Iranians, FB Design’s founder and owner, Fabio Buzzi, was surprisingly frank. “It’s true, it’s not a mystery, I sold boats and technology to the Iranians,” he told ANSA in 2008. “We regularly sold design and technology to the Iranian secret services,” he admitted. Mr. Buzzi said in the same interview that he stopped his Iran business only after U.S. officials questioned him in 2005 about his supplies to the Revolutionary Guard.
Citing Pentagon sources, Emanuele Ottolenghi writes in his 2009 book “Under a Mushroom Cloud – Europe, Iran and the Bomb,” that Iranian-made copies of the FB Design Levriero were part of the Revolutionary Guard speedboats that seemed bent on provoking a confrontation with three U.S. warships two years ago. In January 2008, in the Strait of Hormuz, these boats sailed too close to the American vessels and made threats over the radio.
Italians may have also – even if unknowingly – helped to protect Iran’s nuclear program. A spokesman for Seli told me last week that the construction equipment firm was working on several Iranian tunnel projects worth more than €220 million, including for the Tehran metro and water tunnels in Nosud and Kerman. The company’s Web site says that one of the contracts it just recently finished involved the sale of equipment and technical assistance to the Iranian company Ghaem – a Revolutionary Guard firm, according to the U.S. Treasury.
The technical know-how and machinery to build tunnels is of course crucial for the regime’s efforts to hide its nuclear installations. “Intelligence reports have repeatedly suggested that much of Iran’s clandestine nuclear program is being built deep underground, in bunkers that are accessible through tunnels – tunnels that only technology such as the one provided by [German company] Wirth and Seli can build,” a 2008 report by the Israeli Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies concluded.
When asked about his Iran business, the president of Seli, Remo Grandori, told me Wednesday that “Our machines and expertise are not used for military purposes, or we couldn’t have received the authorization of Italian Foreign Ministry.” When I pressed harder, he acknowledged that Seli “tunnels are like large mines. Iran can certainly use these tunnels to hide weapons, but I don’t know anything about it.”
Mr. Grandori also had interesting insights into Rome’s support for Italian companies seeking Iranian contracts. “The Italian embassy in Tehran brokers deals for us, helps us to meet the large supply gap created by U.S. restrictions. There is inevitably a political role in our big deals.”
***
Despite international sanctions against Iran, Italian exports to the Islamic Republic rose almost 17% in 2008 to €2.17 billion, according to the Italian statistical office. During that same year, overall trade also rose almost 17% to €7 billion, representing more than a quarter of the European Union’s total trade with Iran. For the past three years, Italy has been Iran’s No. 1 European trading partner.
“Iran and Italy were rivals and two great powerhouses in ancient times, but in the contemporary world they are great partners,” the Italian-Iranian Chamber of Commerce proudly proclaims on its Web site.
Created in 1999 following an Italian-Iranian cooperation agreement signed three years earlier under former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, the Italian-Iranian Chamber of Commerce is today the largest such bilateral chamber in Italy. Its board members not only include business leaders but high-ranking government officials from both sides, including Cesare Ragaglini, Italy’s ambassador at the United Nations, Alberto Bradanini, the Italian ambassador to Tehran, Amedeo Teti, director of commercial policies at the Italian ministry for economic development, and Fereidoun Haghbin, Iran’s ambassador in Rome, who serves as the board’s honorary chairman.
The Italian-Iranian political-industrial complex was on full display at a 2008 Tehran military parade, where slogans such as “Israel Must be Wiped off the Map” were written on Shihab-3 missiles that can reach the Jewish state. Unlike other European Union countries who avoid sending emissaries to such hate-filled rallies, Vittorio Maria Boccia, Italy’s military attaché in Tehran, was seated right among the assorted ayatollahs and generals. The other Western diplomat who attended this spectacle was Mr. Boccia’s German colleague. Call it the Rome-Berlin-Tehran Axis.
The sturdy link between Italy and Iran has also irked the Obama administration. When asked about Rome’s dealings with Tehran, David Thorne, U.S. Ambassador to Italy, told reporters after taking office two months ago that “there are certain Italian foreign policy positions which continue to concern us.”
Rome’s policies toward Iran, however, continue to follow the old Roman proverb. “Pecunia non olet” or “Money Doesn’t Smell.” When asked about his business ties to Iran, Eni’s chief executive Paolo Scaroni told Forbes magazine in 2007: “I intend to respect Italian laws, not the American ones. You don’t find oil in Switzerland.”
Italy is like the two-faced Roman god Janus. Rhetorically, Rome is part of the Western front against the Iranian regime. Mr. Berlusconi even called Ahmadinejad “Hitler.” But when it comes to translating this rhetoric into foreign policy, business interests trump everything else.
Next month, Mr. Berlusconi, who claims to be a great friend of the Jewish state, will speak in the Israeli parliament. It would be a good opportunity for him to prove his friendship by finally announcing tough economic sanctions against Iran.
LONDONISTAN MEETS WAZIRISTAN
British Radicalization Studies
By Douglas Murray
The Wall Street Journal Europe
January 8, 2010
Shortly after he tried to bring down flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became the fourth former head of a British university Islamic Society (ISOC) to have been charged with a serious terrorism offense. This is only the tip of the problem. Shaming as it is, during his time studying at University College London (UCL), Abdulmutallab was in the most conducive environment an Islamic extremist could inhabit outside Waziristan.
It is a situation that has come about despite repeated warnings. And I should know, because I’ve been one of the people trying to do the warning.
The results are often surreal. Just before Christmas, the al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki was the subject of an airstrike on his Yemen home that killed many al Qaeda operatives. Only last April my organization was trying to explain to London’s City University why he was not a suitable person to address, by video-link, their Islamic Society. Despite already having been known to be spiritual mentor to two of the 9/11 hijackers, he has been advertised as the “distinguished guest” speaker at the U.K.’s Federation of Student Islamic Societies’ (FOSIS) annual dinner in 2003, and at Westminster University in 2006. Awlaki is now thought to be the connection between Abdumutallab and the people who gave him the bomb with which he intended to bring down the Detroit flight.
A year and a half ago the think tank I head in London released “Islam on Campus.” The reasons for commissioning the report struck me as obvious: The list of Muslim students from the U.K. who had become active in Islamist terrorism was substantial and growing.
It was a graduate of the London School of Economics who kidnapped and beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. It was two undergraduates from Kings College London who carried out a suicide bombing in a bar in Tel Aviv the following year.
But as the list of British students turning to terrorism grew, so did the denial that there was anything wrong.
Our report, published in the summer of 2008, uncovered routine extremist preaching on U.K. campuses as well as the propagation of extremist texts. In conjunction with the polling company YouGov, we also carried out and published what remains the only major survey to date of Muslim student opinions in the U.K. The results were deeply disturbing.
The poll showed that one in three Muslim students believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified. That figure almost doubled to 60% among respondents who were active members of their universities’ ISOCs. Other results included the discovery that 40% of Muslim students polled supported the introduction of sharia law into British law, and that 58% of students active in their ISOC supported the idea of the introduction of a worldwide Caliphate.
These horrifying opinions rightly shocked the newspaper-reading public. But the response from government and the university authorities was not to tackle the problem, but rather to attack the messengers.
FOSIS, which had been heavily criticized in the report, “rejected the conclusions utterly.” The National Union of Students followed suit.
Then Higher Education minister, Bill Rammell, entered the debate – and studiously stepped onto the wrong side. Mr. Rammell congratulated FOSIS and the National Union of Students, expressing himself “pleased at the speed with which [they] have dismissed the findings.” I hope those words don’t come back to haunt him.
Mr. Rammell’s reaction epitomizes the problem. University authorities and the government would rather ignore the embarrassment than tackle it. And when they do address it, it is almost always to attack those shouting “fire” rather than those working to start one. Last year during Israel’s operation in Gaza, I was due to chair a debate at the London School of Economics on Islam and democracy. Radical students already holding an “occupation” on campus apparently threatened violence if I – known to be a critic of radical Islam and a friend of Israel – was to appear. The result was that the university authorities asked me to stay away from campus, saying they could not ensure my security or that of the audience.
As I enjoyed a quiet evening in, the irony of the situation was not lost. Every month in Britain extremist Islamic speakers preach a message of intolerance and hatred at the invitation of Islamic societies. It is one of the reasons people like Abdulmutallab are so often created and nurtured here in Britain.
Only last month I wrote to the president of Abdulmutallab’s former university at the University College of London, asking why he had, for the second time in a year, allowed a speaking invitation to go out to Abu Usama adh Dhahabee. Dhahabee’s views include that women are mentally deficient, and that apostates from Islam, as well as homosexuals, should be killed. He also teaches where and when to carry out violent jihad. His invitation to UCL was rescinded only after heavy pressure from campaign groups. Last February my organization stepped in twice to prevent Hamas adviser and advocate Azzam Tamimi addressing UCL students on campus. In an interview with the BBC, Tamimi famously said that if he had the opportunity to become a suicide bomber “for Palestine . . . I would do it.”
Such poison has spread throughout our universities. It means students at a vulnerable stage of their development are routinely subjected to views that most people, including many British Muslims, would find hair-raising. On campus, such views are normalized and excused.
Just weeks before the attempted massacre on Christmas Day, FOSIS spokesman Qasim Rafiq, who succeeded the Detroit bomber as president of the UCL’s ISOC, said “There is no substantial evidence to suggest extremism is prevalent on any U.K. campus.” It is a line that many people would like to hear. But it is also a lie.
That lie has once again been exposed. But it must also be dealt with. That means both dealing with the extremists, and dealing with all those who, through ignorance, malice, or fear, have become the assistant idiots of Islamist terrorism, enabling the radicalization and recruitment of a generation. Even now the president of UCL is trying to divert attention by accusing his critics of “Islamophobia.” It strikes me that our ivory towers, like our Parliament, are more than overdue for a clear-out.
* Has British MP George Galloway, who recently compared Israeli doctors to Auschwitz torturer Dr. Josef Mengele, even heard of the 285,000 acutely malnourished children of Somalia?
* Egypt bans Galloway from ever entering the country again, accusing him of inciting the riots that resulted in the death of an Egyptian policeman last week. (Canada banned Galloway last year.)
* “The BBC and especially its World Service had always been a beacon of light, of truth and objectivity to those of us behind the Iron Curtain, in the Evil Empire. Today its slander and bias towards Israel is painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda.”
* “In 2006, Hizbullah had around 15,000 rockets, most of them with a range of 20 to 40 kilometers. In 2010, it has around 40,000 missiles, some with ranges of hundreds of kilometers. The next confrontation with Hizbullah will not involve only southern Lebanon and northern Israel, but also areas deep inside both countries. Not since 1948 has the Israeli home front been menaced as it is today.”
***
To save readers time, I have shortened some of the items below from Iran’s Fars news agency and the Palestinian Ma’an news agency, but included the URLs for those who want to read the full items. Due to other work commitments, there will be no other dispatches this week.
CONTENTS
1. A note from Evgeny Kissin
2. On the BBC today, you can hear echoes of “the old soviet anti-Zionist propaganda”
3. An act of courage
4. Egypt: No more aid convoys through Rafah
5. Galloway compares Israel to Nazi doctor Mengele
6. If only the Euro-Left paid some attention to Somalia
7. An interview on South African radio
8. Iran rejects John Kerry’s request to visit
9. Hizbullah upset over Hamas training in Lebanon
10. Iran specifies location for 10 new nuclear sites
11 Iran, Russia set to increase trade, energy cooperation
12. CEO of France’s Peugeot: Auto industry untouched by Western sanctions on Iran
13. Mumbai’s Chabad House threatened with new terrorist attack
14. Escalation of rocket attacks from Gaza on the Negev and Ashkelon
15. Another Palestinian woman dies at the hands of the Palestinian police
16. Palestinians bid to join World Trade Organization (WTO)
17. Iranian soccer official apologizes for sending New Year’s greetings to Israel
18. “Not since 1948 has the Israeli home front been menaced as today”
19. “Why no ‘Viva Somalia?’” (Editorial, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 8, 2010)
20. “Storm clouds on the far horizon” (By Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz, Jan. 7, 2010)
21. “If this isn’t terrorism, what is?” (By Tom Gross, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 1, 2008))
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
A NOTE FROM EVGENY KISSIN
Evgeny Kissin, the world-famous classical pianist, who is a subscriber to this email list, asks me to point out that some news reports have wrongly stated that he is launching a campaign against the BBC. He is not launching a campaign, but what he has done is written an open letter sent to the Director-General of the BBC (so far unanswered) based on my dispatch of December 23, 2009, titled BBC feeding infamous anti-Semitic lies to Iranians -- in Persian.
Kissin, now 38, was already known as a child prodigy in the Soviet Union. He became a British citizen in 2002. His letter is below.
ON THE BBC TODAY, YOU CAN HEAR ECHOES OF “THE OLD SOVIET ANTI-ZIONIST PROPAGANDA”
Open letter to the Director General of the BBC
From: Evgeny Kissin
Dear Sir,
I first came to live in this country thirteen years ago and became a British subject seven years ago, having grown up in the Soviet Union. I was inspired and proud to belong to the country of Winston Churchill, who famously said “There is no anti-Semitism in England because we do not consider ourselves more stupid than the Jews” Above all, the BBC and especially its World Service had always been a beacon of light, of truth and objectivity to those of us behind the Iron Curtain, in the Evil Empire. Reaching out to far corners of the world, it was the voice of a country which for us was a model of democracy and human rights.
Since a long time now, I receive verified reports on an almost daily basis of the BBC’s slander and bias towards Israel, painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda. This culminated with the BBC’s Persian Service’s blood libel concerning Israel’s alleged harvesting of Palestinian organs and blood for future transplant. It beggars belief that the British taxpayer should be funding an organisation which is aligning itself with Iran’s despotic leader in its anti-Semitic propaganda.
Other print media, like the Guardian, which erroneously printed this libel, propagated by Israel’s enemies, have since apologised. I am not aware of any such retraction from the BBC.
Is it not high time for the BBC to return to the values for which it was so much respected before it finds itself in the garbage of history together with Pravda, Tass, Volkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff?
Yours faithfully,
Evgeny Kissin
AN ACT OF COURAGE
Tom Gross adds:
The arts world is not exactly friendly toward the Jewish state. Some of the greatest contemporary classical musicians even boycott Israel, despite the fact that Israel is home to many of the world’s foremost musicians. Even though Kissin is at the top of his profession, he may face vilification from some of his colleagues for his courage. Let us hope not.
You can see a photo and the BBC Persian blood libel story if you scroll down here.
Among other articles I have written about the BBC, please see here and here.
EGYPT: NO MORE AID CONVOYS THROUGH RAFAH
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu Al-Gheit announced yesterday that the Egyptian authorities will set up a new mechanism for shipping international aid to Gaza, following the violence resulting from last week’s “Viva Palestina” aid convoy for Gaza led by British parliamentarian George Galloway and other European extreme leftists.
All aid for delivery to Gaza will in future need to be handed over to the Egyptian Red Crescent at the Al-Arish terminal, he said. The aid will be processed by the Red Crescent and handed over to the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza following an inventory.
The decision came after violence last week at the Rafah border initiated by international activists in coordination with Hamas, in which one Egyptian policeman was shot dead by Hamas.
All but a handful of the 1,300 activists were denied entry into Gaza, and a series of protests in Egypt were quashed. Egyptian law prohibits public gatherings of more than six people. Some 50 “Viva Palestina” “peace activists” broke away from the crowd of hundreds, pelting Egyptian troops with rocks.
Egypt has declared Galloway persona non grata, accusing him of incitement that led to the riots. A Foreign Ministry statement on Friday said Galloway will not be allowed to enter Egypt again. Galloway left Egypt that morning from Cairo airport.
Mosques throughout Egypt took advantage of Friday prayers to criticize Hamas, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported on Saturday. Imams in many of the 140,000 mosques operating under the auspices of Egypt’s Ministry of Awqaf took part in the verbal onslaught on the Palestinian Islamist group, blaming it and not Israel for the blockade imposed on Gaza.
“Its leaders want to stay in power, even at the cost of their own people’s suffering,” the imam of Cairo’s Al-Rahma Mosque said during his sermon.
GALLOWAY COMPARES ISRAEL TO NAZI DOCTOR MENGELE
George Galloway has compared Israel to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who experimented on Jews – men, women and children – in the Auschwitz death camp without using any anesthetic. (His atrocities included removing the eyeballs from live children, particularly twins.)
In an article published in Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper entitled “Dark Echoes of the Holocaust”, the MP followed up on the recent false claims that Israel had removed organs from Palestinians, saying Israel was just like the Nazis and comparing Israeli doctors to Mengele.
Galloway referred to the concocted articles of Swedish journalist Daniel Bostrom, who wrote in Scandinavia’s most popular newspaper Aftonbladet that Israelis were kidnapping and murdering Palestinian children for their organs. (See past dispatches on this list for more on this.)
IF ONLY THE EURO-LEFT PAID SOME ATTENTION TO SOMALIA
I attach an editorial (“Why no ‘Viva Somalia?’”) by The Jerusalem Post about the spectacle of the Euro-Leftists and their Gaza convoys. “It points out that “there’s a revealing comparison to be made between the ‘siege’ of Gaza and what is happening in Somalia, where the World Food Program this week was forced to abandon one million tormented people because Islamist gunmen have made it impossible for its staff to operate.
“The al-Shabab accuses the WFP of being spies for the infidels and has murdered a number of aid workers. The extremists are enraged that the WFP will not pay protection money. Overall, 3 million Somalis depend on WFP relief, but the plight of 285,000 acutely malnourished children is especially heart-rending.
“Naturally, the WFP also operates in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’ – that is, the area where the Palestinians refuse to create a demilitarized state of their own.
“The WFP – through no fault of its own – is part of a web of international bodies that is enabling, rather than trying to overcome, dependency among Palestinians. For 60-years-plus, UN agencies have gone along with the Arab world’s insistence that their Palestinian brethren remain perpetual refugees.
“Unlike the Somalis, the Palestinians have been fortunate in having Zionists for their enemies. How else could they attract celebrity politicians, like MP George Galloway, and superstar campaigners, like the International Solidarity Movement’s Hedy Epstein, a hunger-striking 85-year-old lady who ‘survived’ the Holocaust in London where she arrived in 1939.”
AN INTERVIEW ON SOUTH AFRICAN RADIO
My Wall Street Journal op-ed last month is still generating considerable interest and has been republished in a number of places. Several radio stations have also asked me for an interview about it and for those interested, here is one interview from last Thursday with one of the leading news shows in South African.
IRAN REJECTS JOHN KERRY’S REQUEST TO VISIT
Below is the text from the Iranian government-controlled Fars news agency. Iran’s pro-democracy activists fear that any visit to the government in Tehran by U.S. Senator John Kerry would likely bestow increased legitimacy on the regime at a time when it is brutally cracking down on pro-democracy demonstrators, students, feminists, trade unionists and others. Kerry, the 2004 American Democratic Party presidential candidate, would have been the highest-ranking American politician to meet with the regime since the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution. -- Tom Gross
Lawmakers Reject John Kerry’s Request for Visiting Iran
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8810131533
TEHRAN (FNA) - Iranian legislators on Sunday rejected a request filed by Head of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry for paying a visit to Iran.
“Members of the Iranian parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue,” Head of the Committee Hassan Ebrahimi told FNA.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast last week confirmed reports that John Kerry has filed a request for visiting Tehran.
“Since it (the request) is for a parliamentary visit, the issue has been referred to the parliament. The legislative officials are studying the case and they are in charge for providing a response,” Mehman-Parast said at a weekly press conference here in Tehran on Tuesday.
Earlier, the US daily Wall Street Journal had reported that the Massachusetts Democrat is considering an emissary trip to Iran.
HIZBULLAH UPSET OVER HAMAS TRAINING IN LEBANON
The semi-independent Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports the following:
Hizbullah upset over Hamas training in Lebanon
Published 06/01/2010 18:57
www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=252345
Bethlehem - Hizbullah communicated “deep disappointment” to the Hamas leadership over the discovery that the party was conducting military drills in a residential building in Lebanon without the party’s knowledge, the country’s An-Nahar newspaper reported Wednesday.
Information around the training was uncovered during the course of an investigation into an explosion in Haret Treik that killed two Hamas members last week, the paper said. Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Al-Murr said the blast targeted Hamas Representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan.
According to the London-based Arabic daily Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, the attack was carried out as Hamas members received live ammunition training in the basement of the building under Hamas control.
The daily said Hizbullah told Hamas it would not intervene, and that Hamas “would have to resolve the problem on its own.”
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat also reported that Hamas decided to close its office in Haret Hreik until the situation was resolved.
IRAN SPECIFIES LOCATION FOR 10 NEW NUCLEAR SITES
Iran’s Fars news agency reports the following:
Iran Specifies Location for 10 New N. Sites
January 9, 2010
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8810190862
TEHRAN (FNA) - A member of the Iranian Parliament announced that the study phase for locating proper sites for 10 new nuclear enrichment plants has been accomplished.
Member of the Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Karami-Raad told the Iranian students news agency that the issue of finding locations for the country’s new nuclear sites has been discussed in a meeting between the Head of Iran’s Nuclear Safety Organization and a number of officials from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).
He noted that during the said meeting, the Iranian officials also discussed initiating physical measures to protect the sites and strengthen the safety codes.
IRAN, RUSSIA SET TO INCREASE TRADE, ENERGY COOPERATION
Iran’s Fars news agency reports the following:
Iran, Russia Set to Draw Road Map for Energy Cooperation
January 9, 2010
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8810191361
TEHRAN (FNA) - Iran and Russia plan to draw a road map for developing mutual cooperation in energy fields in a joint meeting due to be held in Moscow in the near future.
The meeting of the Iran-Russia joint working group for energy will be held within the framework of an agreement signed by the Iranian Oil Ministry and Russian Energy Ministry at a last month meeting of the two countries’ joint economic commission.
Iran’s Deputy Oil Minister for International and Trade Affairs Hossein Noqre-Kar Shirazi is due to lead a 20-member Iranian delegation to Russia to the same end.
The delegation is scheduled to leave Tehran for Moscow next week.
Russia’s Deputy Energy Minister for Oil and Gas will lead the Russian side in the upcoming meetings with Noqre-Kar and his accompanying group.
The volume of Iran and Russia’s trade exchanges is estimated at $3.7 billion and the two countries are resolved to significantly increase their exchanges.
CEO OF FRANCE’S PEUGEOT: AUTO INDUSTRY UNTOUCHED BY WESTERN SANCTIONS ON IRAN
Iran’s Fars news agency reports the following:
Peugeot CEO: Auto Industry Untouched by Western Sanctions on Iran
January 3, 2010
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8810131405
TEHRAN (FNA) - Chief executive of France’s giant carmaker, Peugeot, said that the sanctions imposed by the West on the Islamic Republic have had no negative impact on the relations of the western auto industry with Iran.
“Challenges brought up in media are not related to the auto industry,” Peugeot CEO and Manager of Peugeot and Citroen Brands Jean-Marc Gales said in response to a question about his company’s solution to challenges imposed on Iran’s largest car-manufacturing company, Iran-Khodro (IKCO), as a result of international sanctions.
… Commenting upon Peugeot’s short and long-term strategy for cooperation with the IKCO, the Peugeot CEO noted, “Peugeot’s strategy is based on dynamism, profitability and growth of market share, specially outside Western Europe. In this regard, Peugeot and IKCO 20-year prosperous cooperation plays a significant role.”
MUMBAI’S CHABAD HOUSE THREATENED WITH NEW TERRORIST ATTACK
The Jewish Chabad House in the Indian city of Mumbai, which was one of several sites targeted by Islamic terrorists in November 2008, has received anonymous threats in recent days warning of another attack.
Most of the terrorists in 2008 were from Pakistan but one of the masterminds was an American-born son of a Pakistani immigrant. Six people inside Chabad House, including its director Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, were murdered.
At the end of this dispatch I include my article for The Wall Street Journal about the attacks (“If this isn’t terrorism, what is?”), which still has relevance today for those interested in how the Western media misreports terrorism.
ESCALATION OF ROCKET ATTACKS FROM GAZA ON THE NEGEV AND ASHKELON
There has been an increase in rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza into Israel in recent days.
Since Thursday, 10 mortar shells and at least five rockets, including a Katyusha, have been fired into Israel, the highest number in such a short period since Israel’s Operation Cast Lead ended a year ago.
On Thursday night, for the first time since Cast Lead, a Katyusha rocket landed on the outskirts of Ashkelon, one of Israel’s biggest cities. No injuries or damage were reported.
In response to the attack on Ashkelon, the Israeli airforce bombed an arms-smuggling tunnel along the Gaza-Egypt border.
The Kassam attacks on Saturday followed a Hamas announcement on Friday that it had managed to smuggle new types of weapons into Gaza despite the blockade.
The Izzadin al-Kassam Brigades published photographs of weapons, including missiles with a double warhead, 107mm caliber missiles designed to penetrate fortified structures, and a new type of armor-piercing RPG missile.
Hamas spokesman Abu Ubeida said that the group has “thousands of good weapons capable of harming Israel.”
ANOTHER PALESTINIAN WOMAN DIES AT THE HANDS OF THE PALESTINIAN POLICE
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has issued the following press release (below). (Press releases of this kind are regularly issued, but the Western media almost never reports Palestinian-upon-Palestinian killings and torture. I occasionally carry them in these dispatches. The PCHR demands for an investigation to be carried out have almost no chance of taking place under the Hamas regime in Gaza.)
-- Tom Gross
www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2009/01-2010.html
PCHR Demands Investigation into the Circumstances of the Death of Nazira al-Sweirki
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) expresses its grave concern regarding the circumstances of the death of Nazira Jaddou’a al-Sweirki, 56, from al-Tufah neighborhood in Gaza City, who died in the custody of the Palestinian police in Gaza. PCHR demands that the competent authorities immediately open an investigation into the circumstances of al-Sweirki’s death. The Centre also calls for the results of this investigation to be made public, and for the perpetrators to be prosecuted and brought to justice.
According to investigations conducted by PCHR, four vehicles belonging to the Palestinian police arrived at al-Sweirki’s home at approximately 20:00 on Friday, 1 January 2010. The policemen demanded to see the victim’s son, Mohammed al-Sweirki, 22, who was in his shop on the ground floor of the building to blow out candles that had been lit on the balcony, apparently to celebrate the anniversary of Fatah movement. Fatah supporters light candles to celebrate the anniversary of the movement because the security services in Gaza prevent them from organizing celebrations on this occasion. A dispute arose between the policemen and the victim’s sons Sami, 40, Amer, 27, and Mohammed, 22; the policemen beat the three civilians and arrested Mohammed and Amer. In his testimony to PCHR, Sami al-Sweirki stated: “When she saw my two brothers in the jeep, my mother – who was in the shop – tried to pull them out of the jeep. My mother suffered from a heart disease and from high blood pressure and diabetes. One of the policemen hit her on the back and another policeman pulled her into the jeep. Then they drove away at a very high speed.”
Amer al-Sweirki testified: “My mother began to suffocate and told my brother and me to take her to hospital. The policemen did not respond to her appeals and continued to drive to al-Tufah Police Station. She began to lose consciousness. Then the policemen took her to al-Shifa Hospital in the jeep. Her condition continued to deteriorate until she died before arriving at the hospital.”
PCHR notes that this incident represents part of a larger-scale campaign implemented by the security services of the government in Gaza over the past few days. This campaign aimed at preventing Fatah supporters from celebrating Fatah’s 45th anniversary on 1 January 2010 and included the delivery of summons to hundreds of activists and supporters of Fatah across the Gaza Strip.
In view of the above incident, PCHR:
1. Calls upon the competent authorities to open an immediate investigation into the circumstances of al-Sweirki’s death, to announce the results of the investigation to the public, and to hold the perpetrators accountable.
2. Calls upon the competent authorities to ensure the issuance of strict instructions to law enforcement officers who must adhere to the law in all of their actions.
3. Affirms the right of civilians to freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, and peaceful assembly, all of which are granted in the Palestinian Basic Law as well as in relevant international instruments. PCHR also stresses that suppression of celebrations represents part of a policy of political repression and is a flagrant attack on public freedoms.
**************************************
For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza, Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 - 2825893
PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip.
E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage www.pchrgaza.org
PALESTINIANS BID TO JOIN WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO)
The Palestinian Authority is forming a “national team” to help lobby to gain membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the team would lead efforts to reform Palestinian economic institutions as part of the campaign to gain permanent observer status and eventually membership to the WTO. Fayyad, an American-trained economist, is trying to implement a two year plan to create governing institutions capable of managing an independent Palestinian state.
IRANIAN SOCCER OFFICIAL APOLOGIZES FOR SENDING NEW YEAR’S GREETINGS TO ISRAEL
The head of Iran’s soccer federation has been forced to issue a public apology and a member of his staff has been forced to resign after the federation mistakenly sent a New Year’s greeting to its counterpart in Israel.
“It was a big mistake sending an e-mail to the Zionist entity’s football federation,” Ali Kaffashian, president of the Iran Football Federation, said in a statement. “However, I am sure the director of the foreign relations office did not do it on purpose.”
Kaffashian said Iran’s soccer association routinely sent greeting cards to all members of the world football federation, FIFA, except for Israel. Iran has refused to meet with Israel in international sports competitions.
“NOT SINCE 1948 HAS THE ISRAELI HOME FRONT BEEN MENACED AS TODAY”
I attach three articles below, two of which I referred to above. In the other, Ari Shavit, a leading commentator for Ha’aretz, writes of the dangers Israel faces in 2010 concerning:
(1) Iran, which two years ago had only a few active centrifuges for enriching uranium and now has 8,000 centrifuges, 4,000 of which are operating at full capacity and without problems.
(2) Missiles: In 2006, Hizbullah had around 15,000 rockets, most of them with a range of 20 to 40 kilometers. In 2010, the Shi’ite militia has around 40,000 missiles, some with ranges of hundreds of kilometers. The next confrontation with Hizbullah will not involve only southern Lebanon and northern Israel, but also areas deep inside both countries. Not since 1948 has the Israeli home front been menaced as it is today.
(3) Legitimacy: Both in 2006 and in late 2008, the international community displayed far-reaching patience for Israeli use of force. In 2009, [without President Bush to lobby for Israel] this changed radically. The belated response to Operation Cast Lead showed that the world is sick of Israel, for whom it now has zero tolerance for any use of force. As a result, even in areas where Israel enjoys military superiority, it’s not clear to what extent it will be able to use it.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
FULL ARTICLES
THE 285,000 ACUTELY MALNOURISHED CHILDREN OF SOMALIA
Why no ‘Viva Somalia?’
Editorial
The Jerusalem Post
January 8, 2010
What could be worse than being forgotten in the rubble of war? As The New York Times reported this week, Gazans feel forsaken. The constant flow of humanitarian aid is staving off hunger and disease, but a pall of listlessness besets the Strip.
It is so dreary that B’Tselem, an Israeli-staffed organization that’s funded mostly by European governments and American foundations, has distributed video cameras to 18 young people just to get them out and about.
They make really cool videos about all sorts of subjects – such as smuggling laundry detergent through tunnels between Gaza and Sinai; resisting the “occupation” by singing hip hop music; there’s also one about a girls’ soccer team.
The videos have found their way onto Ynet, a popular Hebrew news Web site.
THERE’S a revealing comparison to be made between the “siege” of Gaza and what is happening in Somalia, where the World Food Program this week was forced to abandon one million tormented people because Islamist gunmen have made it impossible for its staff to operate.
The al-Shabab accuses the WFP of being spies for the infidels and has murdered a number of aid workers. The extremists are enraged that the WFP will not pay protection money. Overall, 3 million Somalis depend on WFP relief, but the plight of 285,000 acutely malnourished children is especially heart-rending.
Naturally, the WFP also operates in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” – that is, the area where the Palestinians refuse to create a demilitarized state of their own.
The WFP – through no fault of its own – is part of a web of international bodies that is enabling, rather than trying to overcome, dependency among Palestinians. For 60-years-plus, UN agencies have gone along with the Arab world’s insistence that their Palestinian brethren remain perpetual refugees.
UNLIKE THE Somalis, the Palestinians have been fortunate in having Zionists for their enemies. How else could they attract celebrity politicians, like MP George Galloway, and superstar campaigners, like the International Solidarity Movement’s Hedy Epstein, a hunger-striking 85-year-old lady who “survived” the Holocaust in London where she arrived in 1939 on the kindertransport.
Galloway’s “Viva Palestina” procession left London on December 6 and arrived in El-Arish this week. He quickly picked a fight with the Egyptians over how many vehicles could enter Gaza from Sinai. Cops and activists threw sand at each other and fought with sticks.
The “Viva Palestina” spectacle was coordinated with Hamas, which needed a pretext to orchestrate an “intifada” against the anti-smuggling barrier Cairo has belatedly begun installing under the Philadelphi Corridor.
On the Gaza side of the border, Palestinians shot dead an Egyptian guard, as other guards opened fire on Palestinian rioters, critically wounding five.
Late Wednesday, Egypt allowed Galloway and 55 fellow travelers into Gaza, “bandaged, bleeding and bruised… because they tried to bring medicine to … people under siege in Gaza,” said the intrepid British parliamentarian.
Too bad that Galloway and Epstein, along with the play-by-play Al-Jazeera coverage they engender, didn’t drive their convoy of 150 truck and 500 international activists – self-satisfied Europeans, mostly, but also 17 Turkish legislators – straight to Somalia to face down the al-Shabab.
THE DIFFERENCE between Somalia and Gaza is that the people of Somalia are not only forgotten in the rubble, their desperation is… simply not interesting.
They are people without options.
Those responsible for their plight are Islamists, not Zionists or Westerners – though, for the Euro-Left, it’s all America’s fault somehow.
In stark contrast, the people of Gaza do have options that would end their misery.
They could stop supporting Hamas, which has mobilized their polity against coexistence with Israel; they could make peace among themselves and allow the comparatively moderate West Bank Palestinian leadership – which is recognized by the international community – back into the Strip. They could free IDF soldier Gilad Schalit whom they kidnapped in 2006. They could stop launching mortars against Israel’s civilian population, as they repeatedly did this week. They could choose a two-state solution and accept that Jews also have a right to a homeland. They could end the “siege.”
They could build instead of reveling in the rubble and in their victimization.
DANGERS AHEAD FOR ISRAEL
Storm clouds on the far horizon
By Ari Shavit
Ha’aretz
January 7, 2010
Investors on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange have made a strategic decision: Things are going to be just fine. The same goes for buyers of luxury apartments in upscale towers. When share indexes soar 33 percent in half a year, when one square meter on Rothschild Boulevard costs $20,000, when you can’t get a table at a posh restaurant on New Year’s Eve, it’s clear what kind of mood we’re in. Unlike early 2009, it’s an optimistic mood. Everything’s going to be just fine, just great.
The exhilaration springs from relief. Against all the gloomy forecasts, a global economic holocaust never happened. In Israel at the moment, neither an economic nor a diplomatic apocalypse is discernible. The calm on the security front plays its part, too. In the past 11 months, only one Israeli has been killed inside the Green Line in a terror attack. Both the northern and southern borders are quiet. There’s no war in the offing. The economy is flourishing, even under Benjamin Netanyahu’s unwieldy government.
But if you can take your gaze away from the partying, with the help of a telescope, you’ll see a distant bank of clouds. Yes, Pakistan is far away, but it’s relevant. Afghanistan is remote, but what happens there has local repercussions, and Afghanistan is in deep trouble. Iraq is nearing the moment of truth when the American forces leave. In Yemen, Al-Qaida is making itself felt. Much closer to home, in Egypt, the end of the Mubarak era is nearing, and there’s always Hizbullah. Even Turkey is playing with fire. If all this isn’t enough, for the last three years, out of sight, Israel’s national security has undergone attrition in three different spheres.
Iran: In 2007, Iran had only a few active centrifuges for enriching uranium. In 2008, the number increased, but their efficacy was still limited. Early in 2010, Iran has 8,000 centrifuges, of which 4,000 are operating well. This does not mean that the end is nigh, but it does mean that Israel has failed to keep Iran from the nuclear-weapons threshold. With 1,800 kilograms of enriched uranium already stockpiled in underground bunkers, Iran has the capability of putting an atomic bomb together within one year.
Missiles: In 2006, Hizbullah had around 15,000 rockets, most of them with a range of 20 to 40 kilometers. In 2010, the Shi’ite militia has around 40,000 missiles, some with ranges of hundreds of kilometers. The next confrontation with Hassan Nasrallah will not involve only southern Lebanon and northern Israel, but also areas deep inside both countries. The longer-range, greater firepower and accuracy of Hizbullah’s arsenal have fundamentally changed the strategic situation. And when Hamas’ rockets and Syrian and Iranian missiles are factored in, a worrying picture emerges. Not since 1948 has the Israeli home front been menaced as today.
Legitimacy: Both in 2006 and in late 2008, the international community displayed far-reaching patience for Israeli use of force. In 2009, this changed radically. The belated response to Operation Cast Lead showed that the world is sick of Israel, for whom it now has zero tolerance for any use of force. As a result, even in areas where Israel enjoys military superiority, it’s not clear to what extent it will be able to use it. The assault on Israel’s right to defend itself has damaged its deterrence, security and stability.
The implications are clear: Israel must prepare seriously for the possibility that another round of fighting will be forced on it, while it must do everything it can to avoid a flare-up. Seen from this angle, the bid to get talks going with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is positive.
But this won’t be enough. Experience has shown that it is very doubtful a clear-cut outcome can be reached with Abbas. This highlights the need to relaunch talks with Syria. An end to the conflict between Jerusalem and Damascus is the sole diplomatic move that could provide a bulwark against the negative regional trends encircling Israel. Only an Israeli-Syrian peace treaty can spur an immediate, positive strategic turn in the Middle East.
It’s hard to say if this is feasible. Bashar Assad leads a double life. In the daytime he faces west, but at night he plays forbidden games with the East. With one eye he puts out peace signals, with the other he winks at the terrorists. No intelligence agency can predict which way he’ll go in the end, when he has to choose. But when the horizon is as cloudy as it is, Israel has no choice but to make an effort.
NO, THEY WEREN’T “PRACTITIONERS”
If this isn’t terrorism, what is?
By Tom Gross
The Wall Street Journal
December 1, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122816892289570229.html
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTJhMjA1MDZiNDkzYTE0MzI0NmI2MjdiMTNiMDBhYTg=
Last week, in Mumbai, India, we witnessed as clear a case of carefully planned mass terrorism as we are ever likely to see.
The seven-venue atrocity was coordinated in a highly sophisticated way. The terrorists used BlackBerrys to stay in touch with each other during their three-and-half-day rampage, outwitting the authorities by monitoring international reaction to the attacks on British, Urdu and Arabic websites. They followed news updates and live TV streams, using them to their advantage so as to maximize causalities.
It was a meticulously organized operation aimed exclusively at civilian targets: two hospitals, a train station, two hotels, a leading tourist restaurant, and a Jewish center.
There was nothing remotely random about it. This was no hostage standoff. The terrorists didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted to murder as many Hindus, Christians, Jews, atheists and other “infidels” as they could, and in as spectacular a manner as possible. In the Jewish center, some of the female victims even appear to have been tortured before being killed.
TERRORISTS OR DOCTORS?
So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain’s most respected TV journalists, use the word “practitioners” when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors? Why did Reuters describe the motivation of the terrorists, which it preferred to call “gunmen,” as “unknown”? Were we meant to suppose that it might have been just anything – that to paraphrase Mark Steyn, they were perhaps disgruntled former employees of Lehman Bros embarking on an exciting midlife career change?
Again, why did Britain’s highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the “militants” showed a “wanton disregard for race or creed” when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected.
Why did the “experts” invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?
Unfortunately in recent years we have become used to leftist media burying their heads in the sand about the threat that Islamic fundamentalism poses, in much the same way as they once refused to report accurately on Communist atrocities. But what are we to think when even such a renowned publication as The Times of London feels the need to refer to terrorists as “militants”, rather than calling them by their right name? “Militant”, after all, can be a neutral term in many contexts, and a favorable one in others. What is the motivation of journalists in trying to mangle language? Do they somehow wish to express sympathy for these murderers, or perhaps make their crimes seem almost acceptable? How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can’t even identify them as such?
BLAME IT ON THE ZIONISTS
But then the terrorists in Mumbai didn’t need to make any public announcements. They knew that many deluded Western journalists and academics will do that job for them, explaining that the West is to blame, especially the Zionists.
We have started seeing this already on the BBC – the world’s largest TV and radio network, which broadcasts in dozens of different languages around the world, and is lavishly funded by the British taxpayer.
You would be hard pressed to find any talk of radical Islam on the BBC in recent days, or mention of the fact that Islamists think India should be a Muslim country. Instead the BBC continues to try to persuade its massive global audience that “it is a local Indian problem,” that “the subcontinent has a history of unrest,” and so on.
Even the Pakistani angle has been presented as some kind of local Pakistan-India dispute rather than as a problem with radical Islam – this despite the fact that according to numerous reports the Mumbai terrorists themselves were screaming “Allah Akbar” (Allah is the Greatest) as they murdered “the Jews and the infidels” in line with Bin Ladenist ideology.
For some time, many have argued that an element of anti-Semitism has distorted the way the BBC covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, following the Mumbai events, we can perhaps see that anti-Semitism may even be at work in the way BBC covers foreign news in general.
For most of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that “an office building” had been targeted (referring to the Jewish center as such).
Then on Friday morning, TV pictures of Indian commandos storming the besieged Jewish center were broadcast by networks around the world. Heavily armed commandos, their faces covered by balaclavas, rappelled from helicopters onto the roof while Indian sharpshooters in buildings opposite opened fire as a helicopter circled overhead. Huge crowds of onlookers could be seen looking aghast as they watched from nearby streets. While Sky News and other channels were gripped by these dramatic pictures, BBC World was not, almost pretending there was no siege at the Jewish center – even though by then it was one of only two sites that remained under attack in Mumbai. Had the terrorists chosen to besiege a church or mosque instead can you imagine the BBC ignoring it this way?
“AN ACCIDENTAL HOSTAGE SCENE”?
Meanwhile – perhaps even more disgracefully – a New York Times report on the last day of the siege stated: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
Has The New York Times learned anything since the Holocaust when, even after the war ended in the spring of 1945, the paper infamously refused to report that the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and so on killed in the camps had been Jews, and killed as Jews?
Dozens of eyewitness accounts by local Indians said the gunmen shouted “Allah Akbar” from the Jewish center. It is housed in a non-descript block and is not obviously marked from the outside as a Jewish center. It is the one Jewish building in a densely crowded city of millions. And the Times, the self-proclaimed paper of record, wants to let readers think it might have been an accidental target?
Even the Times’s British equivalent, The Guardian, began its news story: “The inclusion of the headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group was obviously intended to send its own message.”
Does The New York Times think that the seeking out and murder by Muslim terrorists of the only New York rabbi in Mumbai and his wife was “an accidental target”?
Indeed, there was nothing accidental about any of the seven sites that the terrorists attacked. And it was no accident that Mumbai was hit. It is the most multi-religious city in India – with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees and Jews living in relative harmony.
* When armies clash in the not-too-distant future, remotely-operated robotic weapons will fight the enemy on land, in the air and at sea, without a human soldier anywhere on the battlefield.
* The first robotic systems are already being used by the Israel Defense Forces and other armies, and only budgetary constraints seem to be keeping science fiction from becoming reality.
* Spy satellites that today weigh several tons will be shrunk down to as little as one kilogram, with engines the size of postage stamps.
* Israel is developing weapons with pin-point accuracy for urban warfare, where there will be almost no civilian casualties. It will be possible to send a missile launched 50 miles away through a specific window of a certain house at a specific gunman. New rockets will also be able to think by themselves to enhance their accuracy.
* Meanwhile, the Obama administration, while not agreeing to sell new American weapons to Israel, is sending billions of dollars worth of sophisticated arms to Arab countries.
CONTENTS
1. Humans on the frontline could soon be a thing of the past
2. Small wonders from a small country
3. Arab countries sign massive arms deals with U.S., while Israel left out
4. More deals worry Israel
5. “Does this sound like a country that needs cruise missiles?”
6. Israel successfully tests new short-range missile defense system
7. Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport revolutionizes security with Unipass biometric system
8. Why you don’t see a lot of German stand-up comedians
9. “Israel’s military avatar: Robots on the battlefield” (By Ora Coren, Ha’aretz)
HUMANS ON THE FRONTLINE COULD SOON BE A THING OF THE PAST
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
Most subscribers to this list in its early years came from within the ranks of the print and broadcast media around the world. Over recent years many politicians, political advisors and academics also asked to join. So too have people connected to security and defense, and this dispatch may be of particular interest to them.
I attach a lengthy article from Ha’aretz, preceded by an extract from it for those who don’t have time to read it in full. According to the article, with the advent of self-detonating grenades, thinking bullets and robot warriors, humans on the frontline could soon be a thing of the past.
I also attach a number of other items related to defense and security matters.
SMALL WONDERS FROM A SMALL COUNTRY
Ha’aretz reports (extract):
When armies clash in the not-too-distant future, remotely-operated robotic weapons will fight the enemy on land, in the air and at sea, without a human soldier anywhere on the battlefield.
The first robotic systems are already being used by the Israel Defense Forces and other armies across the world, and only budgetary constraints seem to be keeping science fiction from becoming reality.
In places where there is no choice but to send in troops, constantly improving broadband technologies, developed from the civilian communications industry, will serve as an essential part of the infrastructure for all modern military forces.
A helicopter that spots suspicious movement on the ground will, for instance, be able to relay a command to a drone aircraft to photograph the site and transmit the picture in real time to troops on the ground and to the command posts in the rear.
Soldiers will be able to mark their target by its coordinates and with lasers, allowing missiles launched from dozens of kilometers away to be guided by global positioning systems, ensuring accuracy and destruction of the target.
The systems will be coded to prevent enemy interception of the operation. Spy satellites that today weigh several tons will be shrunk down to anything between one and 100 kilograms or less, with engines the size of postage stamps. Infantry rifles will be computerized and fire “smart” rounds telling them when and where to explode. New rockets will also be able to think by themselves to enhance their accuracy.
Israel’s military industries, already world leaders in arms technology, are hard at work developing weaponry for the 2020s. Development of new weapons for the IDF is generally carried out with assistance and in coordination with the Defense Ministry’s research and development arm.
The Israeli military’s demands are the cornerstone of the local weapons industry, and they can be summed up in two words: miniaturization and accuracy. The former will enable the troops in the field to carry their weapons or communications equipment more easily, and the latter will help avoid civilian casualties.
***
Tom Gross adds: It is worth reading the rest of this lengthy article, attached further down this dispatch.
ARAB COUNTRIES SIGN MASSIVE ARMS DEALS WITH U.S., WHILE ISRAEL LEFT OUT
The Obama administration has given the go-ahead for U.S. airplane manufacturer Lockheed Martin to sell 24 F-16 jet fighters to Egypt in a $3.2 billion deal. Egypt will also receive four batteries of highly advanced Harpoon Block II anti-ship cruise missiles, four fast missile boats, 450 Hellfire anti-tank missiles, and 156 jet engines for F-16 aircraft. A Pentagon report says the Egyptian F-16 deal is aimed at helping “Egypt’s own self-defense needs”. (Yet some of Egypt’s war games exercises have had Israel as a potential enemy.)
Relations between the United States and the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak have strengthened since Barack Obama assumed power. Whereas President George W Bush had denied Egypt some of its arms requests in reaction to the torture of bloggers, journalists and human rights activists in Egyptian prisons, that policy has changed under the Obama administration, which is no longer pressing Egypt vigorously on its human rights record.
In a separate incident, yesterday was the Orthodox Christmas, and as Egyptian’s Christian Coptic minority celebrated, six Christians were shot dead, reportedly by Islamic gunmen, as they left church.
MORE DEALS WORRY ISRAEL
The enlargement of the Egyptian arsenal is not the only military deal approved by the Obama administration which is worrying Israel. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates have also signed new military procurement contracts with the United States.
The U.S. will supply:
* 2,742 anti-tank missiles for Saudi Arabia
* 1,808 anti-tank missiles and 162 launchers with night vision systems for Jordan
* 1,600 laser-guided “smart bombs” and 800 one-ton and 400 bunker buster bombs for the UAE
* 12 of the latest C-130 Hercules military cargo planes also for the UAE
* 16 Chinook helicopters also for the UAE
* 24 F-16s for Morocco, the first acquired by that country’s air force
“DOES THIS SOUND LIKE A COUNTRY THAT NEEDS CRUISE MISSILES?”
The Israeli press has criticized Obama for the sales. For example, The Jerusalem Post editorialized yesterday:
“The sale of weapons to Egypt is hard to fathom. Cairo wants state-of-the-art Harpoon II anti-ship cruise missiles ($145 million); four high-speed missile craft for its navy ($1.29 billion), and 450 Hellfire air-to-surface anti-armor missiles. Throw in 156 replacement engines, plus 24 new F16 fighters, and you are dealing with a lot of firepower.
“The Pentagon insists none of this will ‘adversely affect the military balance in the region.’
“We’re somewhat less sanguine about these weapons. Egypt, which faces no threat from its neighbors, officially spends roughly $2-3 billion annually on its military and fields a 450,000-man standing army – on top of its mammoth domestic security apparatus. Cairo recently established a strategic military relationship with its old partner, Russia.
“Egypt is a poor country with relatively weak political institutions and no assured mechanism for presidential succession. Its stability is one of Israel’s highest strategic interests. Practically half of Egypt’s 83 million people are under age 25. Many live on two dollars a day. Compounding the official unemployment level of 9% is endemic structural unemployment. Corruption is rampant; infrastructure is crumbling. Does this sound like a country that needs cruise missiles?”
ISRAEL SUCCESSFULLY TESTS NEW SHORT-RANGE MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM
The Iron Dome short-range missile defense system has passed a series of tests in recent days, successfully shooting down Qassam rockets, Grad rockets and mortar shells one after the other. It even succeeded in determining which missiles to shoot down – those whose trajectory made them likely to land in a populated area – and which to ignore.
This was the first test of the entire system rather than of its individual components. The system was developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.
The first Iron Dome battery will be delivered to the Israeli air force in about six weeks and is due to become operational in May. A single missile battery is enough to protect a medium-sized city like Sderot.
It would take about 20 batteries, each costing some NIS 50 million (about $14m), to defend the entire northern and southern border regions of Israel. That will require either diverting substantial funds from other defense projects or a significant increasing in Israel’s defense budget.
Although missile fire from Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza has been greatly reduced since Israel’s three week operation against the missiles last January, Hamas is still shooting the occasional missile into Israel and is believed to be stockpiling a vast arsenal of rockets for use in future conflict.
TEL AVIV’S BEN-GURION AIRPORT REVOLUTIONIZES SECURITY WITH UNIPASS BIOMETRIC SYSTEM
As international aviation officials look to Israel for techniques to safeguard air travel after the failed Christmas Day bombing over Detroit, Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport on Tuesday launched a biometric security system for outbound passengers, heralding a new era of hi-tech passenger screening, reports The Jerusalem Post.
The Unipass system, the first system of its kind in the world, is initially being tested on El Al Frequent Flyer Club members, before being gradually expanded to include all departing passengers who voluntarily register.
In the first stage, passengers will arrive at a registration desk, where a machine will scan their passports, and take fingerprint and facial imaging samples to create a biometric signature.
The information will then be stored on a personal smart card that will be issued to each passenger. The registration is a one-time process. Equipped with their smart cards, passengers can then proceed to the first security stand, where they will be asked to swipe their cards and passports through the machine. As the computer confirms a biometric match, a touch screen panel will present the passengers with a series of security questions that until now were asked by airport personnel.
Guards will stand next to the stands to help anyone who runs into difficulties, the Israel Airports Authority said. “We’re not giving up on human interaction,” a spokeswoman observed.
WHY YOU DON’T SEE A LOT OF GERMAN STAND-UP COMEDIANS
The Associated Press reported yesterday:
BERLIN - A German man was temporarily detained at Stuttgart airport after he repeatedly told security personnel that he had explosives in his underwear, police said.
The 42-year-old man apparently was joking about the failed attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day by igniting explosives concealed in his underwear.
Police said a full body search of the German man did not turn up any explosives. However, Tuifly airline refused to let the man, his wife and daughter board the plane to Egypt, where they planned a vacation.
The police said in a statement that the family would not be refunded for the cost of their canceled trip and could “expect a fine of up to 1,000 euros ($1,444) and possible costs for the police operation.”
***
I attach one article below -- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLE
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE
The next generation – defense industries
Israel’s military avatar: Robots on the battlefield
By Ora Coren
Ha’aretz
January 2010
When armies clash in the not-too-distant future, remotely-operated robotic weapons will fight the enemy on land, in the air and at sea, without a human soldier anywhere on the battlefield.
The first robotic systems are already being used by the Israel Defense Forces and other armies across the world, and only budgetary constraints seem to be keeping science fiction from becoming reality.
In places where there is no choice but to send in troops, constantly improving broadband technologies, developed from the civilian communications industry, will serve as an essential part of the infrastructure for all modern military forces.
A helicopter that spots suspicious movement on the ground will, for instance, be able to relay a command to a drone aircraft to photograph the site and transmit the picture in real time to troops on the ground and to the command posts in the rear.
Soldiers will be able to mark their target by its coordinates and with lasers, allowing missiles launched from dozens of kilometers away to be guided by global positioning systems, ensuring accuracy and destruction of the target.
The systems will be coded to prevent enemy interception of the operation. Spy satellites that today weigh several tons will be shrunk down to anything between one and 100 kilograms or less, with engines the size of postage stamps. Infantry rifles will be computerized and fire “smart” rounds telling them when and where to explode. New rockets will also be able to think by themselves to enhance their accuracy.
Israel’s military industries, already world leaders in arms technology, are hard at work developing weaponry for the 2020s. Development of new weapons for the IDF is generally carried out with assistance and in coordination with the Defense Ministry’s research and development arm.
The Israeli military’s demands are the cornerstone of the local weapons industry, and they can be summed up in two words: miniaturization and accuracy. The former will enable the troops in the field to carry their weapons or communications equipment more easily, and the latter will help avoid civilian casualties.
Military censorship prevents disclosure of the Israeli arms industries? Most exciting and futuristic devices, but a good picture of what can be expected can be compiled using what is already in the public domain.
PIN-POINT ACCURACY
“The Protector, which we are already marketing, is a vessel that sails all over in all kinds of places without a living soul on board,” says Roni Postman, vice president for R&D at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. “It can get close up to a terrorists’ boat, address it through a loudspeaker, and open fire at it. In the past, a thing like this required a boat with seven or eight crewmen who were in constant danger. This type of remote control is one of the clearest characteristics of the future battlefield. It will be a battlefield devoid of troops, with vehicles doing what soldiers have done until now.”
Unmanned boats, land vehicles and aircraft will be either controlled remotely or will function autonomously, pre-programmed to carry out a mission from start to finish, such as reaching an enemy bunker, transmitting a photograph back to a command post, launching a projectile at it, and returning, or blowing itself up to destroy the target and the people inside it.
Another characteristic of weapons now undergoing development is pin-point accuracy for urban warfare, especially in a world that has become less accepting of “collateral damage.”
“Whereas up to a decade ago, planes would drop bombs that destroy everything within a 20 or 30-meter radius without any restraints in order to hit a certain target, that’s all over today,” Postman says. “We are working on capabilities that will make it possible to place a missile launched 70 kilometers away through a specific window of a certain house. It is also a question of costs. Armies will pay a lot for a missile only if they are sure that it will hit the target head-on.”
On top of these requirements, the weapons of the future will also be more efficient in terms of the ordnance delivered to the target. No longer will the same bomb or missile be used to deal with a man on a bike and a three-story building.
Forces will be equipped with what they need to deal with certain objectives and not simply with “the lowest common denominator,” says Postman.
On the other hand, Rafael is also developing cross-platform systems for armies looking to cut down on costs. For example, one goal is a missile that can be fired from a helicopter, a fixed-wing plane, a boat, or a land vehicle and that can destroy tanks and above-ground structures and bunkers.
“The miniaturization trend that has taken hold of the civilian market enables the introduction into military systems of things we couldn’t even dream of before, because of their size, weight and volume,” says Postman. “This is a worldwide tendency and future battlefields will be full of weapons and other items that are much smaller than they have been until now. For example, something that is today a square meter will be reduced to five square centimeters. This is especially useful in unmanned air vehicles, whose weight-carrying capacity is limited by the size of their engines, the amount of fuel they must carry and the altitudes they have to attain. Every gram counts. If they are loaded down with heavy systems, they won’t be able to carry out their missions.”
Israel Aerospace Industries, for example, has developed the Mosquito, a UAV with a 40-centimeter wingspan and a silent engine, that can be launched from the shoulder of a single soldier. Even this device may be shrunken down, if the military so requires.
MICRO-SATELLITES AND NANOTECHNOLOGY
The future battlefield will also include outer space. GPS-based technology fed by satellites are already becoming a fundamental element in future military systems. Moreover, the ability to equip satellites with IAI-produced radar that sees through clouds will enable every field commander to obtain, in daylight and at night and in any weather conditions, a picture of his target.
Moreover, space-based weapons, or satellites, will also serve as a component in projects for the destruction of long-range missiles from distant enemies facing Israel, such as Iran. And when satellites become a critical means in military operations, defending them becomes just as critical, making space wars a realistic development.
Israel is one of seven members of the club of countries that have proved their independent ability to put satellites into orbit, alongside the United States, Russia, India, China, Japan and Western Europe - which has a unified space program based on French capabilities. Iran has recently also demonstrated a preliminary capability to launch satellites.
Israel’s satellites are all manufactured by IAI, and include optical observation and radar platforms as well as communications satellites. IAI engineers are working on technologies for future satellites, ranging from construction materials to advanced designs that will enable, for example, the deployment of antennae with a radius of dozens of meters in space.
Such antennae could lead to a revolution in advanced satellite communications.
At the same time, IAI is working on developing integrated systems of up to 10 smaller satellites that will upgrade inter-satellite communications and the data picked up by land stations.
“Within this group, technology-wise, we are second only to the United States, and in certain niches we are even number one, especially in mini-observation satellites,” says Isaac Ben-Israel, chairman of the Israel Space Agency, referring to an observation satellite developed by IAI and Rafael, which also serves espionage purposes and weighs 300 kilograms. The American counterpart weighs three or four tons.
The need to reduce the size of the satellite sprang from the fact that unlike other countries which launch their orbiters eastward and can therefore take advantage of the speed of the earth’s spin, Israel launches westward for regional security reasons, against the direction of the earth’s rotation. As a result, the Israeli launches lose a great deal of energy.
The solution was to reduce the size of the satellite and all of its component parts, its engine and photographic instruments.
“Our miniaturization capability comes from the security requirements,” says Ben-Israel. “It was strengthened after the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, because ironically it was then that we found ourselves unable to send planes on aerial photography missions into Sinai to check out the deployment of forces there.”
Launching a 250-kilogram satellite costs an estimated $75 million, while the satellite itself costs $100-200 million, depending on its payload.
They last for six or seven years in space. The evolving threats require ongoing technological upgrades.
“We want to go down to satellites that weigh less than 100 kilograms,” says Ben-Israel. “That way, the launch obstacle will be removed. Today, to launch a satellite at the appropriate speed an expensive rocket is required. If it were possible to launch it from a jet fighter aircraft, for example, it would be a much easier proposition. It would be possible to put satellites in orbit for much less money and at any time. It is beginning to become feasible in these very days.”
The next generation of satellites, now being developed, will weigh ten kilograms (micro-satellites) or one kilogram (nano-satellites) and some speak of even lighter ones. They will orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometers above the surface of the earth. Ben-Israel says one way of sending up a 100-kilogram orbiter without losing any of its operational capability is to break it into 10 units each weighing 10 kilograms.
But technology must be developed that will be enable each part to migrate to the correct place after launch, after which they will continue to orbit together as a cluster.
“That’s the direction being taken,” says Ben-Israel. “That way, each part can be shot from a plane separately and even at different times, and in this manner build the satellite in space over a week.”
Rafael’s Postman believes that a satellite weighing less than 100 kilograms will cost eight to 10 times less than a large orbiter. “Because it will cost less, it will be possible to put a formation of 10 satellites into space, and to time their orbits in such a way that it will be possible to maintain an unbroken 24-hour watch over the enemy,” he says.
The main problem with micro-satellites is that their shelf life in space is shorter than larger ones, by approximately one or two years. However, because of the relatively lower costs, he believes, this will be the direction taken by many states seeking to avail themselves of observation satellites.
“I believe that Israel will bring these good tidings to the world, because it requires miniaturization of communications and electrical propulsion that not every country is capable of.”
SMALL WONDERS FROM A SMALL COUNTRY
Even without any miniaturization, Israel possesses unique technologies that can upgrade future satellites. Elbit Systems is working on an advanced optical system that will be able to transmit multicolored pictures and that will be able to function at night. In addition, IAI radar will improve the resolution of the pictures. Today, satellite pictures can be found on the open market with a resolution of 70 centimeters.
Israel already has technologies for satellite photography at higher resolutions, and they are expected to yet improve. The achievements of Israeli space technologies are reflected in both the MSAR (mini-synthetic aperture radar) project of the U.S. space agency NASA and the French Venus project.
“MSAR is a mission undertaken by NASA in order to map the surface of the planet Venus, to see if it will be possible to land there in the future,” explains Ben-Israel.
Venus is surrounded by clouds of toxic gases and the project requires synthetic aperture radar which can take photographs through fog, dust and darkness. There are seven countries capable of developing synthetic aperture radar systems and one of them is Israel, through ELTA, a subsidiary of IAI. Israel’s miniaturization capabilities were also helpful in this project.
American satellite radar weighs four tons, and the Venus satellite has to be relatively light, so NASA put out a tender for bids that was won by IAI over aeronautical giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
NASA is now weighing whether to launch satellites to Venus or Mars or other planets, as it can’t afford to do them all simultaneously.
“If the mission to Venus is the one that is budgeted, in five years we’ll be seeing the first photographs of that planet from a satellite which will apparently be constructed entirely in Israel, because of our unique miniaturization abilities,” says Ben-Israel, adding that the Northrop Grumman will be the marketer of the project.
THE SOLDIER OF THE FUTURE
What will the next war look like? Will it be waged on land, tank against tank, like previous wars? Will it be waged against terrorist organizations? Or against the threat of long, medium and short-range missiles?
“From the point of view of Elbit Systems, life is complex and a response must be found for Iran, for terrorists in Gaza and also for Syria,” says Haim Rousso, vice president for technological and engineering excellence at Elbit. “Intelligence will always be necessary, in both peace and wartime, so we at Elbit are constantly working on developments in the sphere, from satellites to tactical systems on the ground.”
He says that the systems are evolving in the direction of giving real time information, with analysis and application capability, making it possible to respond immediately.
To cope with the challenges emanating from Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Elbit is working on perfecting its multispectral camera, Rousso says.
“In the security world what they look for is camouflaged targets; they want to be able to distinguish between what is real and what only looks like a target, to find things that are buried under the ground,” he says. “So we do not ask what the eye can see, but rather what is the color or the combination of colors that is being sought. The great challenge is to build a camera with a reasonable size and price tag that can be carried on an uncomplicated platform and which we can tell precisely which colors to find - first color A, then color B. Another challenge is to build a bank of targets, to understand what we are interested in, and what is the spectral signature of the target. This involves research, collection and construction of databases, because colors change in different weather conditions, for instance. This camera will be able to see things that no other instrument today can see. We expect this to be a key element of the future battlefield.”
The defense establishment’s demand for products that are light, small and not too expensive is a function of the nature of land warfare, which will continue to keep military forces occupied for years. It will require miniaturization in optics, electronics and power supply.
“We want to give every soldier the capability to identify targets and other objects, and to communicate with the whole world, and when such large quantities of equipment are involved, the price becomes a significant element,” says Rousso. “Everyone in the world - the United States, Europe, Australia – is busy working on the soldier of the future. In the war on terror, a low-intensity conflict, the individual soldier is given a great deal of weight. He needs the means of talking to the system, to get a picture and to transmit data. Technologically speaking, each soldier is a sensor and a platform.”
Rousso says nanotechnology is on its way.
“It was not developed for the military but the anticipated evolution of the next decade could cause a revolution. That’s why we are studying the technology and its military applications. Also of interest to us are the mini-robots that can get into tunnels or buildings and move around mapping the interior and transmitting pictures. It already exists, but in the long term it will be honed and use of it will increase. Elbit has developed the Viper robot, and we are already speaking of a family of smaller robots. In the sphere of unmanned aircraft we are also talking about ongoing upgrades in the construction materials, the aerodynamics, the ability to stay longer in the air at higher altitudes and better maneuverability.”
In addition to their UAVs, both Elbit and Rafael have developed sea-faring drones, and Elbit and IAI have developed unmanned land vehicles that carry out pre-programmed missions, as distinct from remotely-controlled robots.
The goal is to give the vehicles a degree of artificial intelligence that will enable them to react like human drivers in cases where they encounter unanticipated obstacles on the way, such as large puddles of water. These vehicles will also possess an attack capability.
“It will apparently take many years before these things are actually built,” says Rousso. “But today we already have intelligent systems that know how to identify dangers and to think what has to be done to cope with them. An investment in the technology of artificial intelligence, in computerized vision and accurate navigation is required.”
THE THREAT FROM AFAR
IAI is currently aiming to give soldiers on the ground capabilities that are today available only to the air force, says the company’s vice president for R&D, Dan Peretz, adding that IAI has moved over from producing traditional weaponry to advanced comprehensive systems.
GPS is being used for the first time, through miniaturization, for the next generation of smart rockets, making them more accurate.
“Accuracy is no longer a function of range. The same degree of accuracy can be had at 250 kilometers as at 10 kilometers.” says Peretz. “And when I have an accurate system, I don’t need a large warhead anymore, because I hit the target right on the nail. There are already some accurate missiles, but they are expensive. The introduction of GPS into warfare has already begun in the United States in the sphere known as Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. It enables forces under fire to return fire without calling in air support, as the Americans did in Iraq.”
The Tzayad (Hebrew for “hunter”) system in use in the Israeli army, developed by Elbit, enables a commander in the field today equipped with a handheld computer to get a picture from a UAV and to call in helicopter fire. The new IAI system will be able to mark the target’s coordinates, making it possible to hit it from the rear with smart rockets.
The system included GPS-guided or laser-homing rockets.
“I put a laser dot on a target, and a laser sensor in the rocket head can home in on it,” says Peretz. “There are systems today that work on laser detectors - the smart, accurate missiles. Now there will also be laser-guided rockets.”
Lev Tahor (“pure heart”) is a smart mortar shell. It carries a GPS computer and can do what until now only missiles could do, but it is 10 times smaller.
“We are the first in the world who have taken a laser detector system to rockets, the first in the world to fire mortar shells that are guided by GPS,” says Peretz. “We are developing the ability to hit targets with the first shell, without hitting the wrong target.”
Peretz says IAI is collaborating with the American company Raytheon to sell the systems to the U.S. military, with the first demonstrations due in 2010.
“In five years’ time, this technology will be taken for granted,” he says.
Another development that miniaturization has made possible is Refaim (“ghost”) which involves fitting a tank’s fire-control system onto a rifle, enabling it to gauge the range of a target and to order the projectile that it fires to explode where it will do the most damage.
For example, a grenade could be told to explode at a point above enemy personnel hiding behind a wall.
“The Refaim system will include a 40mm round that contains a computer and I can command to explode in the air at a certain range, to explode on contact, or to explode after contact. If I want to shoot into a room, I would tell it to explode three meters after going through the window, in order to kill the people inside. It can also self-destruct, so as not to leave dangerous explosives on the ground if it doesn?t hit its target.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often mentions the threat facing Israel from afar, or the “third circle” of enemies not inside or bordering Israel, like Iran.
The IAI is continuing to develop unmanned aircraft and is going on to new tasks defined for it by the defense establishment, including handling the third circle.
Moreover, the unique radar that penetrates fog and dust will be miniaturized in the future so that it will have more applications and be more accurate and able to identify the sources of fire within the first and second circles, in all weather conditions.
Sources in the defense establishment say that the IAI is directing much of its resources to address the threats of the third circle, first and foremost an advanced Arrow system for the accurate interception of long-range missiles. The Arrow will leave the Earth’s atmosphere and enter outer space, employing innovative technologies to locate its target and destroy it.
In facing far-reaching enemies, the defense establishment must develop lightweight and accurate ordnance that can be carried by small aircraft or on the American F-35 jets now under development, which has outstanding stealth properties but is relatively small.
The Israel Navy is not being left out of planning for the future, and its vessels are to be equipped with a new anti-aircraft missile system that IAI is developing in collaboration with India, integrated with advanced radar and fire control systems. Submarines will also have a key role in future wars, and they will be equipped with technology enabling them to stay underwater for longer periods and with new attack capabilities.
* “When Orel (an 8 year-old boy hit by a Hamas rocket in Beersheba, the largest town in southern Israel) arrived here a year ago, he could not hear, see, talk or walk. Now he does them all haltingly. Half his brain is gone. Doctors were deeply pessimistic about his survival. Today they are amazed at his progress although unclear how much more can be made.”
* “Nine years ago, Muna seduced a 16-year-old Israeli boy over the Internet, luring him into a liaison that resulted in his death. At the time, Muna was a 24-year-old Palestinian journalist from the West Bank city of Ramallah when she began trawling Internet chat rooms. Now she could be one of the murderers Israel releases for Gilad Shalit.”
* “Her injuries the night the suicide bomber exploded his device were so horrific that the doctors gave her only a 2 percent chance of survival. She remained in a coma for four months. When she awoke, she changed her name from Kinneret to Kinneret Chaya (meaning “Kinneret Lives” in Hebrew). In her own words, “Kinneret died that night in the flames, but Kinneret Chaya was born.” With her horrifically disfigured body, the doctors said she had only a very slim chance of a successful pregnancy, yet this beautiful former teenage ballerina is now shortly to give birth to her second child.”
CONTENTS
1. Not forgetting the survivors
2. A season of goodwill to all except Israel
3. Half his brain was gone
4. The cold-blooded internet murderer Fatah and Hamas want free
5. Miraculous news as Kinneret Chaya pregnant again
6. Just one of thousands
7. “It’s season of goodwill to all except Israel” (Belfast Telegraph (UK), Dec. 31, 2009)
8. “A Mideast bond, stitched of pain and healing” (New York Times, Dec. 31, 2009)
9. “The woman in the way of a Palestinian prisoner deal” (Time magazine, Dec. 30, 2009)
10. “Where is the Palestinian Anwar Sadat?” (By Tom Gross, Wall Street Journal)
NOT FORGETTING THE SURVIVORS
[Note by Tom Gross]
This dispatch focuses on the victims and survivors of Middle East terrorism and violence. I attach four articles, and have prepared summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.
There are some very moving passages here, though of course there are things that make one very angry too.
SUMMARIES
A SEASON OF GOODWILL TO ALL EXCEPT ISRAEL
Colin Nevin writes in The Belfast Telegraph (Northern Ireland):
Christmas is a time that brings out the best in many people and also time when many give to charity. Yet over recent years it has become increasingly a time for organizations and individuals to release scathing diatribes with the now annual mention of Bethlehem – notably blaming all its residents’ ills on the state of Israel.
One such article appeared in The Belfast Telegraph on Christmas Eve – “Merry Christmas, war is over (unless you live in Bethlehem)” by Eamon McCann who obviously couldn’t resist the opportunity to have another bash at Israel which he alludes to as “a host of vengeful thieves”.
… McCann states that mothers are “forced to stand endless hours at checkpoints”, yet when I visited Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Hebron in the “West Bank” in late October, all the checkpoints we passed on board a local Arab bus were completely unmanned and we did not get stopped once all the way from east Jerusalem.
Perhaps Mr McCann needs to update his information before he lambasts the Israeli security precautions set in place to ensure safety from the unrelenting terror attacks which regrettably emanate from the heart of Bethlehem.
***
(Tom Gross adds: I went to Bethlehem a few days before Christmas, for meetings with the town’s mayor and Palestinian security officials. I wasn’t asked to show any identity documents when leaving Israeli-controlled Jerusalem but was just waved through. Nor were we asked to show documents when we left Bethlehem for Jerusalem later that evening. I was travelling with Palestinians and others.)
HALF HIS BRAIN WAS GONE
In a moving article, Ethan Bronner reports in The New York Times on two child victims of the Mideast conflict, one Palestinian, one Israeli who have become close friends as they recuperate in their Israeli hospital bed, as have their parents. Both are aged 8.
Bronner writes:
He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s [rooms next door to each other] without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.
Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies…
When [the Israeli boy] Orel arrived here a year ago, he could not hear, see, talk or walk. Now he does them all haltingly. Half his brain is gone. Doctors were deeply pessimistic about his survival. Today they are amazed at his progress although unclear how much more can be made.
Marya’s spinal cord was broken at the neck and she can move only her head. Smart, sunny and strong-willed, she moves her wheelchair by pushing a button with her chin. Nothing escapes her gaze. She knows that Orel is starting to prefer boys as playmates and she makes room. But their bond remains strong.
In a way, a friendship between two wounded children from opposing backgrounds is not that surprising. Neither understands the prolonged fight over land and identity that so divides people here. They are kids. They play.
But for those who have spent time in their presence at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem, it is almost more powerful to observe their parents, who do understand. They have developed a kinship that defies national struggle.
“The wounds of our children, their pain, our pain, have connected us,” noted Angela Elizarov, Orel’s mother…
It was two weeks into Israel’s Gaza war last January when Orel was hit [by a Hamas rocket -- TG]. After days in a shelter his mother took him out in the car. As they drove around Beersheba [the largest town in southern Israel], a siren blared, warning of an incoming rocket. She pushed Orel to the ground, lying protectively on him. When she heard the explosion in the distance, she rose in relief. A second rocket exploded and she saw her son’s head bleeding profusely.
A surgical nurse, she flagged down a passing motorist who drove them to the hospital where she works.
“I saw his brain coming out, everything around me was burning, and I was not even scratched,” she recalled. “When I got to the emergency room, I said to the doctor: ‘You can’t kid me. I know he has no chance of survival.’ The doctor looked away. But after six operations, he is actually making some progress…
Her husband, Avrel, who works with children, spends much of the week at home with their 18-month-old daughter but comes often. The couple, originally from Azerbaijan, had been childless for years, and Orel’s birth, coaxed along by infertility treatments in Israel, seemed a miracle…
THE COLD-BLOODED INTERNET MURDERER FATAH AND HAMAS WANT FREE
Journalist Matthew Kalman (who is a longtime subscriber to this email list) reports in Time magazine on Amneh Muna, who is high on the list of Palestinian prisoners Hamas wants to be exchanged for the young Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Muna was a member of Fatah in addition to being a “respected” journalist.
Kalman writes:
Serving a life sentence, she has become a symbol of Palestinian women prisoners, a hard-line agitator for Palestinian prisoners’ rights and a constant thorn in the side of her Israeli incarcerators. But the crime for which she has been convicted is so heinous in the eyes of Israelis that few see any justice in letting her go, even for the freedom of one of their own soldiers.
Nine years ago, Muna seduced a 16-year-old Israeli boy over the Internet, luring him into a liaison that resulted in his death. At the time, Muna was a 24-year-old Palestinian journalist from the West Bank city of Ramallah when she began trawling Internet chat rooms at about the time of the second intifada. She soon found Ofir Rahum, a schoolboy from the Israeli city of Ashkelon. She said her name was Sali, a newly immigrated Moroccan Jew, and soon initiated a sexually charged cyber-relationship. The young man was bedazzled by the thought of an older woman being so passionate about him.
Just weeks after their online liaison began, she convinced Rahum to skip school and hang out with her in Jerusalem. “I miss you Ofir,” Muna wrote in a series of passionate exchanges. “I hope you are coming on Wednesday ... please don’t say no I need you to be with me ... please. I will be waiting for you on Wednesday. I will have a good dream about you ... You don’t know how much I am waiting for Wednesday. Love you dear.” She described herself as “169 cm, black hair bob, hazeled eyes” and asked for his description so she could meet him off the bus. Rahum didn’t tell his parents where he was going. He withdrew his savings and told close friends he was off on a tryst with his online lover.
***
Tom Gross adds:
When the young Israeli boy got there, Muna and her accomplices murdered him in cold blood. Interestingly, though she was a journalist, the various international journalist federations (many of whom frequently criticize Israel) have not condemned the crime.
After confessing to the murder (in fact boasting of it), Amneh Muna [also spelled Mona and Amana in some news articles] was sentenced to life in prison. She has become a radical leader of women prisoners and a Palestinian heroine, celebrated in the Palestinian media. In 2004, Muna sparked two riots in Sharon Prison near Netanya. Warders said she terrorized the women’s cell block with threats of violence, punishing anyone who challenged her authority. In 2006, she was transferred for severely beating up a fellow prisoner.
There are several mass murderers whose release Hamas is demanding as part of a deal for Gilad Shalit. Time magazine’s heading (“The woman in the way of a Palestinian prisoner deal”) is thus misleading as she is not the worst of the killers Hamas wants Israel to set free. For reasons I have explained before in my writings, I think it would be a terrible strategic, tactical and moral error for Israel to release these convicted murderers, however much Israelis want to see the young, innocent Gilad Shalit – who, then a teenager, was kidnapped from inside Israel while he slept – set free.
“Moderate” Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has also demanded Muna’s release, as I explained in this dispatch in 2008: A long way from Entebbe: Hizbullah’s triumph, as Israel lets murderers go free (July 16, 2008)
MIRACULOUS NEWS AS KINNERET CHAYA PREGNANT AGAIN
Last March I wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal urging the Obama administration to be careful before forcing Israel into making concessions which could lead to renewed terrorism.
I focused on the case of my friend Kinneret Chaya Boosany, whose sister subscribes to this email list.
I am happy to report that, miracle of miracles, Kinneret is due to give birth to her second child at the end of this month.
I wrote in that Wall Street Journal piece:
At the very moment that Barack Obama was delivering his historic victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park in the early hours of November 5 2008, a small miracle was happening over 6000 miles away in Israel when Kinneret gave birth to her first child.
Six years earlier, Kinneret, then a 23-year-old part-time dancer and student of alternative medicine, was blown up as she worked as a waitress in a small coffee shop on Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street. (Like many young Israelis, she worked as a waitress to earn extra money. She was also exceptionally good-looking: Heads would turn wherever she went.)
Her injuries that night were so horrific that the doctors gave her only a 2 percent chance of survival. She remained in a coma for four months. When she awoke, she changed her name from Kinneret to Kinneret Chaya (meaning “Kinneret Lives” in Hebrew). In her own words, “Kinneret died that night in the flames, but Kinneret Chaya was born.”
JUST ONE OF THOUSANDS
She is just one of the thousands of Israelis – both Jews and Arabs – injured by Palestinian suicide bombers who were sent out on their deadly missions by either the Islamist Hamas movement or by the Fatah faction headed by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. The number of Israelis killed in buses and pizza parlors and shopping malls has been greatly reduced in recent years after the government built a security fence to make it harder for bombers to get through.
Today Kinneret has one fully operating lung, sees in only one eye and hears in only one ear. Her skin still bears the scars of burns over 85 percent of her body. She spends many hours in a heavy pressure suit and face mask to prevent the scarring getting worse, and she cannot go out in the day because the sun has become her enemy.
But Kinneret has struggled back to life, through countless operations and long sessions of physiotherapy, learning to accept her disfigured body and to smile in spite of her scarred face. And then in November, even though the doctors said she had only a very slim chance of a successful pregnancy, this beautiful former teenage ballerina, who got married at the start of last year, gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
… Like most Israelis Kinneret Chaya, who I saw again last week, desperately wants peace with the Palestinians. Indeed it is my experience of covering the region as a reporter for many years that no one wants the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be peaceably resolved more than Israelis do.
… Kinneret Chaya is an exemplary and courageous figure. The international community owes it to her and the countless other terror victims to confront the basic realities of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. By all means pressure Israel into making concessions that do not threaten its security. But Israeli concessions will never resolve the conflict in themselves. They will only work if there is corresponding pressure on the Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and to make aid to the Palestinians conditional on putting an end to their inciting for the destruction of Israel.
(This, and the other full articles, are below -- Tom Gross.)
FULL ARTICLES
A SEASON OF GOODWILL TO ALL EXCEPT ISRAEL
It’s season of goodwill to all except Israel
By Colin Nevin
Letter to Belfast Telegraph (UK)
December 31, 2009
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/letters/its-season-of-goodwill-to-all-except-israel-14617490.html
Christmas is a time that brings out the best in many people and also time when many give to charity. Yet over recent years it has become increasingly a time for organisations and individuals to release scathing diatribes with the now annual mention of Bethlehem - notably blaming all its residents’ ills on the state of Israel.
One such article appeared on Christmas Eve - ‘Merry Christmas, war is over (unless you live in Bethlehem)’ by Eamon McCann who obviously couldn’t resist the opportunity to have another bash at Israel which he alludes to as “a host of vengeful thieves”. This was is in relation to Jewish housing in the Bethlehem vicinity which he cites as “illegal under international law”.
One law higher than that of man is God’s. Modern revisionsts try to position King David’s ancient town of Bethlehem as being “in Palestine”, yet when the Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream after the family had fled to Egypt to avoid King Herod, the Angel instructs: “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, and go to the Land of Israel.”
I think as a New Year resolution we should use the name that God uses, namely Israel, rather than man-made modern labels such as ‘Palestine’ named after the Philistines, Israel’s ancient and most bitter foes. Bethlehem, too, is in ‘Judea’ - not the often-used ‘West Bank’ which conveniently erases its inextricable Jewish link.
Mr McCann states that mothers are “forced to stand endless hours at checkpoints”, yet when I visited Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Hebron in the ‘West Bank’ in late October, all the checkpoints we passed onboard a local Arab bus were completely unmanned and we did not get stopped once all the way from east Jerusalem.
Perhaps Mr McCann needs to update his information before he lambasts the Israeli security precautions set in place to ensure safety from the unrelenting terror attacks which regrettably emanate from the heart of Bethlehem.
COLIN NEVIN
Bangor, Co Down
TWO CHILDREN PLAY
A Mideast Bond, Stitched of Pain and Healing
By Ethan Bronner
The New York Times
December 31, 2009
JERUSALEM – He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s homes without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.
Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies.
“He’s a naughty boy,” Marya likes to say of Orel with an appreciative smile when he gets a little wild.
When Orel arrived here a year ago, he could not hear, see, talk or walk. Now he does them all haltingly. Half his brain is gone. Doctors were deeply pessimistic about his survival. Today they are amazed at his progress although unclear how much more can be made.
Marya’s spinal cord was broken at the neck and she can move only her head. Smart, sunny and strong-willed, she moves her wheelchair by pushing a button with her chin. Nothing escapes her gaze. She knows that Orel is starting to prefer boys as playmates and she makes room. But their bond remains strong.
In a way, a friendship between two wounded children from opposing backgrounds is not that surprising. Neither understands the prolonged fight over land and identity that so divides people here. They are kids. They play.
But for those who have spent time in their presence at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem, it is almost more powerful to observe their parents, who do understand. They have developed a kinship that defies national struggle.
“The wounds of our children, their pain, our pain, have connected us,” noted Angela Elizarov, Orel’s mother, one recent day as she sat on a bed in the room she shares with her son. Next door is Marya, her 6-year-old brother, Momen, and their father, Hamdi Aman. “Does it matter that he is from Gaza and I am from Beersheba, that he is an Arab and I am a Jew? It has no meaning to me. He sees my child and I see his child.”
It was two weeks into Israel’s Gaza war last January when Orel was hit. After days in a shelter his mother took him out in the car. As they drove around Beersheba, a siren blared, warning of an incoming rocket. She pushed Orel to the ground, lying protectively on him. When she heard the explosion in the distance, she rose in relief. A second rocket exploded and she saw her son’s head bleeding profusely.
A surgical nurse, she flagged down a passing motorist who drove them to the hospital where she works.
“I saw his brain coming out, everything around me was burning, and I was not even scratched,” she recalled. “When I got to the emergency room, I said to the doctor: ‘You can’t kid me. I know he has no chance of survival.’ The doctor looked away. But after six operations, he is actually making some progress. God took my son from me, but he has given me another one. A year ago, he was the best in his class in sports, the best in math. Now he is learning to walk and talk.”
Her husband, Avrel, who works with children, spends much of the week at home with their 18-month-old daughter but comes often. The couple, originally from Azerbaijan, had been childless for years, and Orel’s birth, coaxed along by infertility treatments in Israel, seemed a miracle.
Their hospital neighbor, Mr. Aman, is a 32-year-old construction worker from Gaza who not only cares for his own two children but helps with Orel. He is regarded as a luminescent presence, an inspiration to staff, volunteers and fellow parents.
This is partly because the pain in his own story is hard to fathom.
More than three years ago, Mr. Aman and his uncle had split the cost of a car and, having paid for it two hours earlier, took it on the road. With them were Mr. Aman’s wife, their three children and his mother.
Prowling above, an Israeli jet fighter on an assassination mission was seeking its target, a militant leader named Ahmad Dahduh. Two missiles were fired at Mr. Dahduh’s car just as it passed Mr. Aman’s, killing Mr. Aman’s oldest son, wife and mother. Marya was thrown from the car.
He and his children have been at Alyn Hospital, which specializes in young people with serious physical disabilities, for nearly the entire time since. The Israeli government, which brought him here for emergency help, wanted him and his children either to return to Gaza or to move to the West Bank. But attention in the Israeli news media produced a bevy of volunteers to fight on his behalf. Marya would not survive in either Gaza or the West Bank. The government has backed off, supporting Mr. Aman on minimum wage and paying for Marya to go to a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew school nearby.
But Mr. Aman has no official status and is also raising a healthy and bright son in a hospital room. He wants residency or a ticket to a Western country where his children will be safe and Marya will get the care she needs.
Volunteers who help are often religious Jews performing national service. Some ask Mr. Aman how he can live among the people whose army destroyed his family.
“I have never felt there was a difference among people – Jews, Muslims, Christians – we are all human beings,” he says. “I worked in Israel for years and so did my father. We know that it is not about what you are but who you are. And that is what I have taught my children.”
Mr. Aman’s hospital door is rarely closed. Asher Franco, an Israeli Jew from Beit Shemesh who has been coming to the hospital for six months for his daughter’s treatments, was a recent visitor. They greeted each other warmly. A manual worker and former combat soldier, he was asked about their friendship.
“I was raised as a complete Zionist rightist,” he said. “The Arabs, we were told, were out to kill us. But I was living in some fantasy. Here in the hospital, all my friends are Arabs.” Ms. Elizarov, Orel’s mother, noted that in places like Alyn Hospital, political tensions do not exist. Then she said, “Do we need to suffer in order to learn that there is no difference between Jews and Arabs?”
THE INTERNET KILLER
The woman in the way of a Palestinian prisoner deal
By Matthew Kalman
Time magazine
Dec. 30, 2009
Amneh Muna is high on the Hamas list of Palestinian prisoners to be exchanged for the soldier Gilad Shalit. Serving a life sentence, she has become a symbol of Palestinian women prisoners, a hard-line agitator for Palestinian prisoners’ rights and a constant thorn in the side of her Israeli incarcerators. But the crime for which she has been convicted is so heinous in the eyes of Israelis that few see any justice in letting her go, even for the freedom of one of their own soldiers.
Nine years ago, Muna seduced a 16-year-old Israeli boy over the Internet, luring him into a liaison that resulted in his death. At the time, Muna was a 24-year-old Palestinian journalist from the West Bank city of Ramallah when she began trawling Internet chat rooms at about the time of the second intifadeh. She soon found Ofir Rahum, a schoolboy from the Israeli city of Ashkelon. She said her name was Sali, a newly immigrated Moroccan Jew, and soon initiated a sexually charged cyber-relationship. The young man was bedazzled by the thought of an older woman being so passionate about him. (See pictures from the saga of Gilad Shalit.)
Just weeks after their online liaison began, she convinced Rahum to skip school and hang out with her in Jerusalem. “I miss you Ofir,” Muna wrote in a series of passionate exchanges. “I hope you are coming on wednesday ... please don’t say no I need you to be with me ... please. I will be waiting for you on Wednesday. I will have a good dream about you ... You don’t know how much I am waiting for Wednesday. Love you dear.” She described herself as “169 cm, black hair bob, hazeled eyes” and asked for his description so she could meet him off the bus. Rahum didn’t tell his parents where he was going. He withdrew his savings and told close friends he was off on a tryst with his online lover. “He was very enthusiastic about her because she was older than him. I think that’s what attracted him, her age. We never imagined such a thing could happen,” said his friend Shlomi Abergil.
In her confession, Muna described how she met Rahum in Jerusalem on that day in January 2001, took a taxi to the northern suburbs and from there drove her own car to the Palestinian city of Ramallah. The two cities are almost touching. Rahum probably didn’t know he had left Jerusalem. Muna told police she intended to hold Rahum as a hostage to prod the Israelis to release Palestinian prisoners. But in Ramallah, one of her co-conspirators, Hassan al-Qadi (a “senior armed terror operative,” according to Israeli intelligence), allegedly shot the boy dead at point-blank range. (See how Hamas is wrestling over a prisoner-exchange deal with Israel.)
When Rahum failed to return that night and his parents discovered that he hadn’t been to school, they alerted the police. Logging onto the chat room through his computer, Rahum’s sister tried contacting Sali but there was no reply. “I knew about his relationship with the woman but neither of us knew that she was from Ramallah,” said the boy’s friend Abergil. “She misled him. He told us that she was from Jerusalem.” Israeli police discovered the body of a boy on the outskirts of Ramallah. Israeli intelligence traced Muna’s screen name to an Internet café in Ramallah and tracked her down to her parents’ home in Bir Naballah, a village north of Jerusalem, where she was seized days after the murder.
At trial, her lawyer Jawad Boulos said Muna never intended to kill the boy. “What happened, happened out of her control, without her knowledge and certainly without her consent,” he said. But in courthouse interviews, she reportedly told reporters, “I am proud of myself. I am proud of myself.” In November 2001, Muna was given a life sentence by an Israeli military court. The gunman al-Qadi, meanwhile, had been killed in an explosion in Ramallah in April 2001. It was never established whether he had been targeted by the Israelis or was the victim of a bomb he may have been handling at the time.
Behind bars, Muna became a radical leader of women prisoners and a Palestinian heroine. To the Israelis, however, she was a troublemaker. In 2004, Muna sparked two riots in Sharon Prison near Netanya. Warders said she terrorized the women’s cell block with threats of violence, punishing anyone who challenged her. In 2006, she was transferred for beating up a fellow prisoner. Declaring she was too disruptive to mix with other inmates, officials put Muna in solitary confinement. In 2007, however, she went on hunger strike to protest her isolation, kept in her cell for up to 23 hours a day. In June 2008 she was moved to the Damon Prison in northern Israel, where she has told visitors the conditions are slightly better.
Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, says Muna’s notoriety helped get her on the Hamas list but it also makes Israel unwilling to release her. “She committed a heinous crime but if she is released she’ll be greeted when she returns as a symbol and a heroine. For that reason Israel strongly resists allowing her out, or if she is released they want to expel her from the area. Israel has resisted this exchange for more than three years. The majority of Israelis find the deal distasteful but accept it as the price necessary to bring back an Israeli soldier that was kidnapped,” says Steinberg.
A SURVIVOR’S STORY
Where is the Palestinian Anwar Sadat?
By Tom Gross
The Wall Street Journal
March 2, 2009
Hillary Clinton arrives in Israel today on her first visit since becoming Secretary of State, at a time when many influential people in America and beyond are clamoring for the Obama administration to pressure Israel into making major concessions.
Before she succumbs to those pressures, she might want to bear in mind the pain Israel suffered the last time it was forced to make such concessions – when Mrs. Clinton’s husband was president.
It is a pain that has many names and faces. One of them is Kinneret Chaya Boosany. At the very moment that Barack Obama was delivering his historic victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park in the early hours of November 5, a small miracle was happening over 6000 miles away in Israel when Kinneret gave birth to her first child.
Six years earlier, Kinneret, then a 23-year-old part-time dancer and student of alternative medicine, was blown up as she worked as a waitress in a small coffee shop on Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street. (Like many young Israelis, she worked as a waitress to earn extra money. She was also exceptionally good-looking: Heads would turn wherever she went.)
Her injuries that night were so horrific that the doctors gave her only a 2 percent chance of survival. She remained in a coma for four months. When she awoke, she changed her name from Kinneret to Kinneret Chaya (meaning “Kinneret Lives” in Hebrew). In her own words, “Kinneret died that night in the flames, but Kinneret Chaya was born.”
JUST ONE OF THOUSANDS
She is just one of the thousands of Israelis – both Jews and Arabs – injured by Palestinian suicide bombers who were sent out on their deadly missions by either the Islamist Hamas movement or by the Fatah faction headed by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. The number of Israelis killed in buses and pizza parlors and shopping malls has been greatly reduced in recent years after the government built a security fence to make it harder for bombers to get through.
Today Kinneret has one fully operating lung, sees in only one eye and hears in only one ear. Her skin still bears the scars of burns over 85 percent of her body. She spends many hours in a heavy pressure suit and face mask to prevent the scarring getting worse, and she cannot go out in the day because the sun has become her enemy.
But Kinneret has struggled back to life, through countless operations and long sessions of physiotherapy, learning to accept her disfigured body and to smile in spite of her scarred face. And then in November, even though the doctors said she had only a very slim chance of a successful pregnancy, this beautiful former teenage ballerina, who got married at the start of last year, gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
This story is worth reflecting on as Hillary Clinton arrives here in Israel. Barely a day goes by without Jimmy Carter and assorted European politicians calling on Obama to coerce Israel into hastily withdrawing from more land no matter what the security risks. The reigning Nobel Peace Prize laureate, for instance, former Finnish Prime Minister Martti Ahtisaari, went so far as to use the prize ceremony as a soapbox to urge Obama to make pressure on Israel the principal focus of his first year in office.
NOT A VOTE AGAINST PEACE
Like most Israelis Kinneret Chaya, who I saw again last week, desperately wants peace with the Palestinians. Indeed it is my experience of covering the region as a reporter for many years that no one wants the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be peaceably resolved more than Israelis do.
But Israelis are also very aware of the dangers of naively handing over territory to terrorists, as was done during the presidency of Secretary of State Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, in the 1990s. The vote by Israelis in elections two weeks ago was not a vote against peace as many Western commentators claim. It was a vote for realism and security.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s likely next prime minister, has been wrongly vilified as being against a two-state solution. In fact he is open to the creation of a Palestinian state but only if it is one that will live in peace with Israel. And for this, Netanyahu argues, you can’t simply wave a magic wand at some fancy signing ceremony on the White House lawn and say “hey presto” – which is exactly what leftist politicians tried to do at the Oslo signing ceremony in 1993.
First the Palestinians need to do the hard work of building institutions that would allow such a state to succeed – a functioning economy, the rule of law, and so on. And Netanyahu is very willing to offer Israeli assistance in building such mechanisms.
Avigdor Lieberman, one of Netanyahu’s possible coalition partners, who has been misleadingly described as an extreme rightist by many journalists, has been even more explicit than Netanyahu in calling for a two-state solution, including the division of Jerusalem between Israel and a future Palestinian state.
PERES: UNILATERAL ISRAELI CONCESSIONS A MISTAKE
Even Shimon Peres, Israel’s dovish president, now has second thoughts about unilateral Israeli concessions. Having long championed territorial withdrawals to attain peace, Peres last week acknowledged that it was a mistake for Israel to withdraw from Gaza in 2005 without first having a peaceful and democratic Palestinian party to hand that territory to.
Israel has always shown a willingness to make peace if a peace partner exists, as it did in the case of the late Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Jordan’s King Hussein. Israelis are still waiting for a Palestinian Anwar Sadat.
One of Netanyahu’s most difficult challenges during his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 was coping with the Clinton administration that berated him for his belief that peace must be built from the bottom up through the liberalization of Palestinian society, rather than from the top down by giving land to terrorists. The question is whether President Obama and Hillary Clinton have come round to Netanyahu’s way of thinking.
Kinneret Chaya is an exemplary and courageous figure. The international community owes it to her and the countless other terror victims to confront the basic realities of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. By all means pressure Israel into making concessions that do not threaten its security – into not expanding West Bank settlements, for instance. But Israeli concessions will never resolve the conflict in themselves. They will only work if there is corresponding pressure on the Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and to make aid to the Palestinians conditional on putting an end to their inciting for the destruction of Israel.