[Note by Tom Gross]

This dispatch is split into two for space reasons. The first part can be read here: Abbas says one thing to the Palestinians, another to Obama (& Spain’s gay problem).

I attach six articles below, with summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full. All are written by long-time subscribers to this email list.

May I remind readers that I don’t necessarily agree with all the points made in the articles that I send out, but I highlight them to add to the debate, since these views are not granted sufficient coverage in many major international newspapers and broadcast networks.

 

ARTICLE SUMMARIES

ISLAMIC RADICALS WORLDWIDE ARE WAITING EAGERLY TO SEE IF THE WEST SUCCUMBS TO HAMAS

Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes:

In recent weeks Hamas leaders are beginning to show signs of optimism. Since the late May incident involving the Turkish flotilla of aid ships, some Americans and Europeans have been campaigning in favor of engaging Hamas.

Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists around the world all have their eyes set on the Gaza Strip. They are waiting to see if Hamas manages to win recognition of the international community.

A victory for Hamas is a victory for Islamic fundamentalists not only in Gaza, but in many different places, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq.

EU foreign ministers who are planning to visit the Gaza Strip need to make sure that their tour is not used by Hamas to win recognition as a legitimate player in the Middle East.

… It does not seem that Hamas has any incentive to change its position amid increasing calls in the West to “break” the isolation of the radical Islamist movement. On the contrary, talk in the West about the need to launch dialogue with Hamas has only served to toughen their stance.

… Not only is Hamas unwilling to accept the three conditions imposed by the Quartet members, but it has now toughened its position on the issue of reconciliation with Fatah…

 

CAN ABBAS ALLAY EGYPTIAN AND JORDANIAN FEARS OF THE PALESTINIANS?

Former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens writes in Ha’aretz:

Little noticed in the brouhaha that surrounded the Israeli interception of the “peace flotilla” that tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip were Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s remarks to the Egyptian parliament last week, as he tried to distance Egypt from the problem of allowing supplies to enter Gaza, even though Egypt shares a border with the Strip and could supply the population there with all its needs…

Egypt is afraid of the Palestinians on its border. The Egyptians will not allow Palestinian refugees to enter Egypt, nor do they want to assist the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip in any way. Continually voicing their concern for the plight of the Palestinians, Egyptian rulers over the years have done little to help the Palestinians in Gaza, out of fear that they may be reinforcing Hamas, which is an ally of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

… The Jordanian government’s policy, as well, seems to be based on the principle of keeping one’s distance from the Palestinians. Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian, doesn’t want any more to do with them. King Abdullah II sounds pathetic alarm bells every few weeks that a war in the area is inevitable unless a Palestinian state is established, but will not entertain the thought that the areas in Judea and Samaria populated by Palestinians be incorporated into Jordan as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel.

It was many years before he was born – May 15, 1948 – that his great-grandfather King Abdullah sent his British-officered and British equipped Arab Legion across the Jordan aiming to gain as much territory as possible for his kingdom... He had no intention of establishing a Palestinian state in the areas that came under his control. Instead, he annexed the areas to Jordan, granting Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinian population living there.

… In 1974, King Hussein, Abdullah II’s father, effectively renounced Jordan’s claim to Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem …with the memory still fresh in his mind of Black September in 1970, when the PLO attempted to take over Jordan, Hussein decided that he already had enough Palestinians on his hands. Better that they become Israel’s problem…

… It remains to be seen whether Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, who advocates a policy that forswears violence, can establish sufficient authority among the Palestinians so as to allay Egyptian and Jordanian fears of the Palestinians.

 

WHEN WILL THE PALESTINIANS SHOW THEY’RE SERIOUS ABOUT PEACE?

Writing in The New York Post, Abby Wisse Schachter says:

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is still the guy who has to “prove” he’s serious about peace. Netanyahu’s the one who is asking for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Yet it is the Palestinians who, instead of having to explain their reasons for refusing to meet with Israel, continue with their demands.

Whereas the list of actual concessions delivered by Israel to the Palestinians is long, the evidence that Palestinians are serious about peace with Israel is sparse to non-existent. Israel has ceded territory, Israel has ceded authority, Israel has trained and armed the Palestinians, Israel has allowed rejectionist terrorists to take control of territory that threatens Israel’s security. And what have the Palestinians done? Palestinians refuse to negotiate directly with Israel, Palestinians refuse to change their education curriculum to reflect an acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, Palestinians create children’s television programs that praise the holy war against the Jewish state.

President Obama may find it easy and convenient to pummel Netanyahu for concessions, but that won’t get him anywhere in regards a real settlement of the conflict…

 

THE FORGOTTEN PERSECUTION OF THE KURDS OF SYRIA

In the fourth article below, Jonathan Spyer writes in The Jerusalem Post:

On March 21, 2010, the Syrian security forces opened fire with live ammunition on a crowd of 5,000 in the northern Syrian town of al-Raqqah. The crowd had gathered to celebrate the Kurdish festival of Nowruz. Three people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed. Over 50 were injured. Dozens of injured civilians were held incommunicado by the authorities following the events. Some remain incarcerated. This incident was just one example of the repression taking place of the largest national minority in Syria – namely, the Syrian Kurdish population.

Kurds constitute 9-10% of the population of Syria – that is, around 1.75 million in a total population of 22 million. Since the rise of militant Arab nationalism to power in Damascus, they have faced an ongoing campaign for their dissolution as a community.

All this is taking place far from the spotlight of world attention. The current US Administration pursues a general policy of considered silence on the issue of human rights in Middle East countries. The Syrian regime remains the elusive subject of energetic courting by the European Union and by Washington.

As a result, the Kurds of Syria are likely for the foreseeable future to remain the region’s forgotten minority.

The severe repression suffered by the Syrian Kurds has its roots in the early period of Ba’ath rule in Syria… In 1962, a census undertaken in the area of highest concentration of Kurdish population in Syria – the al-Hasaka province – resulted in 120,000-150,000 Syrian Kurds being arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship.

They and their descendants remain non-persons today. They are unable to travel outside the country, to own property, or to work in the public sector. People in this category today number about 200,000 – though no official statistics exist for them. They are known as ajanib (foreigners).

A large additional group of around 100,000 Kurds in Syria remain entirely undocumented and unregistered.

… In March 2004, following the recognition of Kurdish autonomous control of northern Iraq, something resembling an uprising began among the Kurds of Syria.

The spark that ignited the wave of protests that month was the shooting dead of seven Kurds by the security forces following a clash between Kurds and Arabs at a football match in Qamishli, a city of high Kurdish population close to the Turkish border. Further shootings took place at the funerals of the dead, and unrest spread across the Jazira, and as far as Aleppo and Damascus. The army moved into the Kurdish areas with heavy armor and air cover, and the protests were crushed [and many Kurds killed].

… In August, 2005, and again in October, 2008, and then again earlier this year, there were clashes between Kurdish citizens and the security forces in Qamishli, with some deaths and many arrests…

***

Tom Gross adds: I have drawn attention to the persecution of Syria’s Kurds many times on this email list in the past, for example, here in 2004.

I only wish the BBC and others would devote a fraction of the substantial resources they employ in the Middle East to not only scrutinize every little thing Israel does but to pay a little attention to the hundreds of millions of people living in the 22 dictatorships (and one partial democracy, Iraq) in the region around Israel.

 

BRITAIN’S SILENCE OVER THE ALLEGED RUSSIAN FORGERIES IS TELLING

The Wall Street Journal editors (many of whom subscribe to this email list) tell me that their lead editorial (titled “A Tale of Two Passports”) was inspired by the points I made in my recent dispatch pointing out the double standards and discrepancies by Britain concerning Russia’s misuse of British passports and the alleged misuse of them by Israel.

The paper writes:

Remember Britain’s outrage at Israel over the forged U.K. documents allegedly used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas big shot Mahmoud Mabhouh? Compare that uproar with the remarkable silence over the forged British passport that the FBI says was used by at least one of the Russian spies recently arrested in the U.S.

At this stage during the Dubai affair in mid-February, the Labour government had already summoned the Israeli ambassador and announced criminal investigations amid furious statements from all political parties. It expelled another Israeli diplomat a month later. The Guardian newspaper ran some 17 articles highlighting the passport accusations.

By contrast, a week into the Russian forgery story, there is not a hint of a diplomatic row between London and Moscow. The Guardian mentioned the fake passport allegations in two articles that lacked the breathless condemnation directed at Israel. The paper’s editorial on the Russian spy-ring ignores the passport angle altogether.

… It’s hard to escape the conclusion that what really infuriated the British was not so much the alleged offense but the identity of its perpetrators.

 

METHODIST CHURCH MORE INTERESTED IN PREVAILING FASHION, THAN JESUS

Robin Shepherd writes in The Jerusalem Post:

The decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem will send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a feel for where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is currently heading.

… The fact that an institution professing allegiance to values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of hatred, hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of our times, and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

… In watching the discussions at the Methodist Conference which approved the boycott, there was little in the way of the visceral hatred of Israel which we have become so accustomed to seeing in academic settings or in the trade unions. Here was a group of almost stereotypically ordinary, middle-class, English Christians calmly reciting every hackneyed anti-Israeli calumny in the book.

“What is happening in Palestine today is what was happening in South Africa in the recent past,” one delegate said. Another spoke of the “66 percent of 9- to 12-month-old babies [that] are anemic in Gaza.”

Yet another described a picture, which she held up in front of her, of a small boy “with large eyes” and “deep pain” in those eyes. “This little boy lives in Gaza,” she said ominously, adding (without irony) that the conference should “speak and act for those whose voices are not heard.”

Later, the point was repeated with one speaker lamenting the position of the Palestinians who have “no one to tell of what they’re going through.”

… I spoke to the Methodist Church’s head of media relations, Anna Drew… “Don’t you realize that you’re joining a massive global campaign against Israel?” I asked.

“There isn’t a campaign against Israel,” she replied firmly. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“You don’t accept that you’ve just jumped on a fashionable bandwagon?” I asked in amazement.

“We are the first church... to do this... so we are not being fashionable,” she replied.

[All summaries above by Tom Gross]

 

FULL ARTICLES

AL-QAEDA IS WATCHING

Legitimize Hamas?
By Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson Institute
July 13, 2010

In recent weeks Hamas leaders are beginning to show signs of optimism. Since the late May incident involving the Turkish flotilla of aid ships, some Americans and Europeans have been campaigning in favor of engaging Hamas.

Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists around the world all have their eyes set on the Gaza Strip. They are waiting to see if Hamas manages to win recognition of the international community.

A victory for Hamas is a victory for Islamic fundamentalists not only in the Gaza Strip, but in many different places, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq.

EU foreign ministers who are planning to visit the Gaza Strip need to make sure that their tour is not used by Hamas to win recognition as a legitimate player in the Middle East.

Ever since it seized control of the Gaza Strip three years ago, Hamas has been desperately seeking recognition and legitimacy. Until now, Hamas’s efforts have been unsuccessful.

Since the January 2006 parliamentary election that resulted in its victory, Hamas has stubbornly refused to accept conditions set by the international community. These conditions include renouncing violence, recognizing Israel’s right to exist and honoring previous agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians.

Hamas’s position today remains unchanged. And it does not seem that Hamas has any incentive to change its position amid increasing calls in the West to “break” the isolation of the radical Islamist movement.

On the contrary, talk in the West about the need to launch dialogue with Hamas has only to toughen their stance.

Not only is Hamas unwilling to accept the three conditions of the Quartet members, but it has also adopted a tougher policy on the issue of reconciliation with Fatah. Until recently, Hamas seemed to be more willing to make concessions.

The blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt, as well as the boycott by most of the world, had finally begun to undermine its standing among Palestinians.

For the first time in several years, many disillusioned Palestinians were beginning to question Hamas’s strategy and policies. For a while, it even seemed as if Hamas were beginning to lose its grip on the Gaza Strip, especially after the Egyptian authorities launched a ruthless and massive campaign to destroy hundreds of underground tunnels being used by Hamas and its supporters to smuggle weapons, food and cash.

Today, however, Hamas has less reason to be worried as a growing number of voices in the West starts talking about ending the movement’s isolation. Hamas believes it is winning the battle for public opinion, particularly in the mainstream media and on university campuses in North America. Those who want to talk to Hamas today will soon find themselves facing calls to talk to Al-Qaeda, Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood.

Don’t all these groups, after all, share a common goal – namely, to spread and impose their dangerous version of Islam?

 

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE PALESTINIANS?

Who’s afraid of the Palestinians?
Egypt is afraid of the Palestinians on its border, and Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian, desires no more of them.
By Moshe Arens
Ha’aretz
July 6, 2010

Little noticed in the brouhaha that surrounded the Israeli interception of the “peace flotilla” that tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip were Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s remarks to the Egyptian parliament last week. Trying to distance Egypt from the problem of allowing supplies to enter Gaza, even though Egypt shares a border with the Strip and could supply the population there with all its needs, he said: “Israel is trying to shirk its responsibility to Gaza and throw it at Egypt.” He studiously ignored the fact that if Egypt had been prepared to allow supplies for Gaza to enter through the Rafah crossing, there would have been no excuse for attempting to bring supplies in by sea.

But Egypt is afraid of the Palestinians on its border. The Egyptians will not allow Palestinian refugees to enter Egypt, nor do they want to assist the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip in any way. Continually voicing their concern for the plight of the Palestinians, Egyptian rulers over the years have done little to help the Palestinians in Gaza, out of fear that they may be reinforcing Hamas, which is an ally of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Putting the burden on Israel is Egyptian policy. Their attitude to the Palestinians is not that different from that of King Farouk 62 years ago when he sent his army, navy and air force to squash the newly born Jewish state. Trying to gain control of as much as possible of the territory that British forces had evacuated in Palestine, he had no intention of establishing a Palestinian state in these areas. Soundly beaten by the Israel Defense Forces under the command of Yigal Alon, his army saved from total destruction only by the pressure applied on the Ben-Gurion government by the United States and Britain, he was finally left with a toehold in the Gaza Strip. And it remained under Egyptian military control for 19 years, until the Six-Day War. Establishing a Palestinian state was not seen as a priority for Egyptian governments.

The Jordanian government’s policy, as well, seems to be based on the principle of keeping one’s distance from the Palestinians. Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian, doesn’t want any more to do with them. King Abdullah II sounds pathetic alarm bells every few weeks that a war in the area is inevitable unless a Palestinian state is established, but will not entertain the thought that the areas in Judea and Samaria populated by Palestinians be incorporated into Jordan as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel.

It was many years before he was born – May 15, 1948 – that his great-grandfather King Abdullah sent his British-officered and British equipped Arab Legion across the Jordan aiming to gain as much territory as possible for his kingdom. After months of fighting, his army on the verge of defeat by the IDF, he managed to retain control of Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel. He had no intention of establishing a Palestinian state in the areas that came under his control. Instead, he annexed the areas to Jordan, granting Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinian population living there.

That was the situation until the Six-Day War. Seven years later, in 1974, King Hussein, Abdullah II’s father, effectively renounced Jordan’s claim to Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem by recognizing Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. At that point, with the memory still fresh in his mind of Black September in 1970, when the PLO attempted to take over Jordan, Hussein decided that he already had enough Palestinians on his hands. Better that they become Israel’s problem.

There are many reasons why Egypt and Jordan have come to fear the Palestinians. Part of the responsibility rests on the Palestinian leadership, which on almost all occasions chose the path of violence – first the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who during World War II allied himself with Hitler, and later Yasser Arafat, who headed an international campaign of terror to be followed by a wave of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel’s cities. And more recently, the Hamas leadership in Gaza that has made rocket terror attacks against Israeli civilians its specialty.

It remains to be seen whether Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, who advocates a policy that forswears violence, can establish sufficient authority among the Palestinians so as to allay Egyptian and Jordanian fears of the Palestinians.

 

“WORDS, NOT DEEDS”

Palestinians always on offense
By Abby Wisse Schachter
The New York Post
July 8, 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a successful meeting with President Obama this week but it doesn’t look like it’s going to gain him much ground or goodwill. Netanyahu is still the guy who has to “prove” he’s serious about peace. Netanyahu’s the one who is asking for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and yet, it is the Palestinians who instead of playing defense, instead of having to explain their reasons for refusing to meet with Israel, are the ones who remain on offense and continue with their demands.

“Words, not deeds,” was the assessment of chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who dismissed Netanyahu’s lip service to the peace process in an interview Tuesday with The New York Times. “We need to see deeds.”

As ever, the most effective weapon the Palestinians posses is rhetorical reversal. Whereas the list of actual concessions delivered by Israel to the Palestinians is long, the evidence that Palestinians are serious about peace with Israel is sparse to non-existent. Israel has ceded territory, Israel has ceded authority, Israel has trained and armed the Palestinians, Israel has allowed rejectionist terrorists to take control of territory that threatens Israel’s security. And what have the Palestinians done? Palestinians refuse to negotiate directly with Israel, Palestinians refuse to change their education curriculum to reflect an acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, Palestinians create children’s television programs that praise the holy war against the Jewish State.

President Obama may find it easy and convenient to pummel Netanyahu for concessions, but that won’t get him anywhere in regards a real settlement of the conflict. And Netanyahu is going to be called “hard-line” and suspicion will always be cast on his true motives regarding the Palestinians, so he might as well just argue the best position for his country that he can.

 

THE POOR FORGOTTEN KURDS OF SYRIA

The Forgotten Minority
By Jonathan Spyer
The Jerusalem Post
July 3, 2010

On March 21, 2010, the Syrian security forces opened fire with live ammunition on a crowd of 5,000 in the northern Syrian town of al-Raqqah. The crowd had gathered to celebrate the Kurdish festival of Nowruz. Three people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed. Over 50 were injured. Dozens of injured civilians were held incommunicado by the authorities following the events. Some remain incarcerated. This incident was just one example of the repression taking place of the largest national minority in Syria – namely, the Syrian Kurdish population.

Kurds constitute 9 percent-10% of the population of Syria – that is, around 1.75 million in a total population of 22 million. Since the rise of militant Arab nationalism to power in Damascus, they have faced an ongoing campaign for their dissolution as a community.

All this is taking place far from the spotlight of world attention. The current US Administration pursues a general policy of considered silence on the issue of human rights in Middle East countries. The Syrian regime remains the elusive subject of energetic courting by the European Union and by Washington.

As a result, the Kurds of Syria are likely for the foreseeable future to remain the region’s forgotten minority.

The severe repression suffered by the Syrian Kurds has its roots in the early period of Ba’ath rule in Syria. The Arab nationalist Ba’athis felt threatened by the presence of a large non-Arab national majority, and set about trying to remove it using the methods usually associated with them.

In 1962, a census undertaken in the area of highest concentration of Kurdish population in Syria – the al-Hasaka province – resulted in 120,000-150,000 Syrian Kurds being arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship.

They and their descendants remain non-persons today.

They are unable to travel outside the country, to own property, or to work in the public sector. People in this category today number about 200,000 – though no official statistics exist for them. They are known as ajanib (foreigners).

A large additional group of around 100,000 Kurds in Syria remain entirely undocumented and unregistered.

This group, known as maktoumeen (muted), similarly live without citizenship or travel and employment rights.

The bureaucratic struggle of the Syrian regime to wish away its non-Arab population has been accompanied by practical measures on the ground to alter the demographic balance of the country.

In the 1970s, a campaign of “Arabization” of Kurdish areas commenced, on the order of president Hafez Assad. The intention was to create a “belt” of Arab population along the northern and northeastern borders of Syria with Turkey and Iraq, where most of the country’s Kurds live. The purpose of this was to prevent Kurdish territorial contiguity. Kurdish place names were changed to Arab ones, Kurds were deprived of their land and instructed to re-settle in the interior. Kurdish language, music, publications and political organization were banned. It was forbidden for parents to register their children with Kurdish names.

The vigorous policy of Arabization later largely faded into bureaucratic torpor. But for a while it produced the desired result – of a divided, demoralized, repressed and largely silent population.

This situation no longer pertains. In March 2004, following the recognition of Kurdish autonomous control of northern Iraq, something resembling an uprising began among the Kurds of Syria.

The spark that ignited the wave of protests that month was the shooting dead of seven Kurds by the security forces following a clash between Kurds and Arabs at a football match in Qamishli, a city of high Kurdish population close to the Turkish border. Further shootings took place at the funerals of the dead, and unrest spread across the Jazira, and as far as Aleppo and Damascus. The army moved into the Kurdish areas with heavy armor and air cover, and the protests were crushed.

Despite conciliatory noises made by President Bashar Assad following the 2004 unrest, nothing of substance has been done to change the conditions endured by Kurds in Syria. As a result, the situation since 2004 has been one of simmering tension between the Syrian regime and its Kurdish subjects, with occasional flareups.

In August, 2005, and again in October, 2008, and then again earlier this year, there were clashes between Kurdish citizens and the security forces in Qamishli, with some deaths and many arrests.

Syrian oppositionists speak of the emergence of a young, increasingly nationalistic younger generation, estranged from the Arab opposition in Syria as well as from the regime. As yet, no single movement has emerged to reflect this sentiment. Twelve different political parties exist among the Kurds of Syria, a reflection of the peculiar divisiveness to which regional opposition movements in general, and Kurdish ones in particular, remain prone.

For a variety of reasons, the Kurds have difficulty making their voices heard on the international stage. Their oppressors are fellow Muslims, rather than Christians or Jews, so the powerful alliance of Muslim states on the international stage is not interested. Arab states are by definition indifferent or hostile to their concerns.

And with their regular lucklessness, they now face a situation where the rising powers in the region – Turkey and Iran – and their enthusiastic smaller partner Syria all have sizable Kurdish populations and a shared interest in keeping them suppressed.

The misfortune of the Syrian Kurds is compounded by the fact that contrary to the accepted cliché, the enemy of their enemy is not their friend. This is because the enemy of the Syrian Kurds’ enemy is the west and the United States. These are today led by a philosophy which believes in accommodating, rather than confronting rivals. As a result, the systematic, half-century old campaign of the Syrian Arab Republic to nullify the existence of its Kurdish minority looks set to continue apace.

 

A TALE OF TWO PASSPORTS

A Tale of Two Passports
Britain’s silence over the alleged Russian forgeries is telling.
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal
July 6, 2010

Remember Britain’s outrage at Israel over the forged U.K. documents allegedly used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas big shot Mahmoud Mabhouh? Compare that uproar with the remarkable silence over the forged British passport that the FBI says was used by at least one of the Russian spies recently arrested in the U.S.

At this stage during the Dubai affair in mid-February, the Labour government had already summoned the Israeli ambassador and announced criminal investigations amid furious statements from all political parties. It expelled another Israeli diplomat a month later. The Guardian newspaper ran some 17 articles highlighting the passport accusations.

By contrast, a week into the Russian forgery story, there is not a hint of a diplomatic row between London and Moscow. The Guardian mentioned the fake passport allegations in two articles that lacked the breathless condemnation directed at Israel. The paper’s editorial on the Russian spy-ring ignores the passport angle altogether.

Why the double standard? One possible explanation is that Israel is a friend and ally of Britain, and friends aren’t supposed to behave that way. Then again, Downing Street also claims good relations with the Kremlin. Or perhaps the difference has to do with the recent change of government. Yet Britain’s new chief diplomat, William Hague, when still shadow foreign secretary, encouraged Labour’s diplomatic arm-twisting of Israel, a point he was eager to repeat in an interview last month with Al Jazeera, no less.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that what really infuriated the British was not so much the alleged offense but the identity of its perpetrators.

 

THE BANALITY OF METHODIST EVIL

The banality of Methodist evil
By Robin Shepherd
Jerusalem Post
July 4, 2010

Boycott against goods emanating from settlements shows where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is heading.

The decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem will send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a feel for where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is currently heading.

The boycott will involve transactions of the church itself, and extends to encouraging all affiliated Methodists to follow suit. The Methodists boycott no other country.

The fact that an institution professing allegiance to values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of hatred, hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of our times, and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

But who, these days, can really be surprised about such happenings in modern Europe? It is only the banality, to appropriate Hannah Arendt, of this particular evil that still has the power to shock us. For, in watching the discussions at the Methodist Conference which approved the boycott, there was little in the way of the visceral hatred of Israel which we have become so accustomed to seeing in academic settings or in the trade unions. Here was a group of almost stereotypically ordinary, middle-class, English Christians calmly reciting every hackneyed anti-Israeli calumny in the book.

“What is happening in Palestine today is what was happening in South Africa in the recent past,” one delegate said. Another spoke of the “66 percent of 9- to 12-month-old babies [that] are anemic in Gaza.”

Yet another described a picture, which she held up in front of her, of a small boy “with large eyes” and “deep pain” in those eyes. “This little boy lives in Gaza,” she said ominously, adding (without irony) that the conference should “speak and act for those whose voices are not heard.”

Later, the point was repeated with one speaker lamenting the position of the Palestinians who have “no one to tell of what they’re going through.”

There was a lecture on the Old Testament, the Jews as “the chosen people,” the children of Abraham, and the revelations of Jesus: “Jesus... never speaks of the land or owning it; he speaks of the kingdom and joining it,” said the delegate joyfully. “...He teaches us God is not a racist God [her emphasis] who has favorites. God loves all his children [her emphasis] and blesses them.”

A student of archeology from the University of Manchester protested against accusations of one-sidedness in a report on the conflict which underpinned the boycott resolution: “No conflict is ever one-sided, “he said before concluding, literally seconds later, that “perhaps it is not the report that is one-sided, but simply the conflict.”

If total illogicality, intimations about the dangers of Jews worshiping a racist God, preposterous assertions about the Palestinian cause not getting an airing in the outside world and depraved and asinine comparisons with apartheid South Africa were the stock in trade of the ordinary delegates, the church’s sophisticates were not to be outdone.

Here is the Rev. Graham Carter, the chairman of the working group that produced the initial report. He is speaking at the end of the first debate, just after having made his (pro forma?) Reference to upholding the right of Israel to exist: “We didn’t go through the list of criticizing other governments, because there was no place to stop,” he said. “We could have criticized the United States for its past unquestioning support of the government of Israel. We could have questioned our own government for the equivocality of its approach. Where would we stop? So we concentrated simply on the situation in Palestine itself.”

In referring to criticism of governments around the world other than Israel, one might have expected that this was his cue to explain why Israel had been singled out. Not a bit of it. It never appeared to occur to him that the question of gross hypocrisy might be an issue. His only thoughts about other governments concerned the sense in which they might have been criticized for complicity in Israeli behavior! But it is when he comes to the question of anti-Semitism that he meets his undoing. “I want to state quite clearly and categorically that there is no hint of anti-Semitism in what we have said or in what we intend,” he stated boldly. “If other people want to do things like that, that is their problem. It is not our problem as a Methodist church. We need to be honest about where stand and what we feel. And if we are concerned about anti-Semitism, why don’t we talk about the anti-Islam approach?” I leave it to others to judge whether there is a “hint of anti-Semitism” in what they have said or intended.

But, in so far as his comments make any sense at all, one way of summarizing the rest could be as follows: “If this campaign against Israel results in more anti-Semitism, we in the Methodist Church wash our hands of it. We’ll act, and the Jews can take the consequences.

And what’s the big deal about anti-Semitism anyway? Can’t we talk about Islamophobia.”

I did not have the pleasure of talking to the Rev. Carter, who would certainly reject any suggestion of wrongdoing, let alone that he had taken his church down the road to bigotry. But I did speak to the Methodist Church’s head of media relations, Anna Drew, whose well prepared brief offered a lesson in where things have gone so badly wrong.

“Do you have any boycotts of other countries in the world, Saudi Arabia for example, where Christianity is banned?” I asked.

“Almost certainly not,” she said.

“So why have you singled out the Jewish state?” I asked.

“We have not singled out the Jewish state,” she replied, saying that the boycott was not against Israel, merely against the occupied territories.

And so the conversation went on, going round and round in circles as Drew summoned up every ounce of conceivable pedantry to argue that singling out the policy of a particular country was substantially different from singling out the country itself, even though such a boycott applied to no other country or its policies.

“Don’t you realize that you’re joining a massive global campaign against Israel?” I asked.

“There isn’t a campaign against Israel,” she replied firmly. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“You don’t accept that you’ve just jumped on a fashionable bandwagon?” I asked in amazement.

“We are the first church... to do this... so we are not being fashionable,” she replied.

At which point, what can you really say? Overall, a church that behaves in the manner of the Methodists has buried its credibility under a gigantic dunghill of intransigence, pedantry, lies and distortions.

But let us not allow this matter to rest with a mere recognition of whom and what they have chosen to become.

If the Methodist Church is to launch a boycott of Israel, let Israel respond in kind: Ban their officials from entering; deport their missionaries; block their funds; close down their offices; and tax their churches.

If it’s war, it’s war. The aggressor must pay a price.

[Note by Tom Gross]

This dispatch is split into two for space reasons. I attach four recent articles below, with summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full, and the other six articles can be read here: Al-Qaeda has its eyes set on Gaza (& Why Egypt fears the Palestinians).

All the writers of these articles (other than Semih Idiz and Soner Cagaptay) are longtime subscribers to this email list:

* Elliott Abrams was the U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor handling Middle East affairs in the George W. Bush administration. He is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

* James Kirchick is a writer at large with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and a contributing editor to The New Republic, and The Advocate.

* Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, in Herzliya, Israel.

* Moshe Arens is the former foreign minister and defense minister of Israel.

* Khaled Abu Toameh is a prominent Palestinian journalist.

* Abby Wisse Schachter is a comment and books editor at The New York Post.

* Robin Shepherd was formerly a fellow of the Chatham House think tank in London.

* The anonymous editorial writer at The Wall Street Journal.

(The editors and senior staff at the publications in which these articles appear – The New York Daily News, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Ha’aretz, The Jerusalem Post, and The Hudson Institute Journal – are also all subscribers to this email list.)

 

ARTICLE SUMMARIES

THE TWO-FACED STANCE OF MAHMOUD ABBAS

In the first article, Elliott Abrams writes in The New York Daily News on the crucial yet gravely overlooked issue of Palestinian incitement to kill Israelis, and the challenge it presents to peacemakers.

Abrams points out that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says one thing to the Palestinians in Arabic, another to Obama and the West in English.

“I say in front of you, Mr. President, that we have nothing to do with incitement against Israel, and we’re not doing that,” Abbas claimed during his visit to the White House last month.

Yet a few days later (as I pointed out on this email list at the time), Abbas publicly mourned the death of Mohammed Oudeh, mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre: “The deceased was one of the prominent leaders of the Fatah movement and lived a life filled with the struggle, devoted effort, and the enormous sacrifice of the deceased for the sake of the legitimate problem of his people.”

Abbas also told Arab journalists in Amman, Jordan, that “We are unable to confront Israel militarily, and this point was discussed at the Arab League summit in March in Libya. There I turned to the Arab states and I said: ‘If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don’t have the ability to do it.’”

“Why should Israelis, or Americans for that matter, believe his commitment to peace in English, when in Arabic he treats war as an acceptable option?” asks Abrams, who adds:

“At a dinner for Abbas during his Washington visit, I confronted him with several recent examples of incitement, as well as the denial that he made to the President. His reply was that of a bureaucrat, not a peacemaker: He did not deny the allegations, but said that if true they should be raised at a tripartite committee (the United States, the Palestinian Authority and Israel) that had been established by the Oslo Accords…

“Is terrorism defended and glorified by the top officials? Are terrorists who murder children branded as heroes whom schoolchildren should admire? Is war with Israel a tactic that must be set aside only for pragmatic reasons, and even then only as a short-term strategy? …

“If the Obama administration is dedicated to a major peace effort in the coming year, the incitement issue should be at the top of its agenda. Because when direct negotiations do finally begin, the key test of Palestinian commitment to peace will not be what Abbas and his colleagues say to Americans in English, but what they say in Arabic to Palestinians – about Israel, about terrorism and about real peace.”

***

Tom Gross adds: As I have pointed out on many occasions in the past, Western journalists should of course report on Israeli transgressions and abuses, but by one-sidedly ignoring or downplaying Palestinian ones, including the consistent Palestinian incitement to kill, these journalists are doing a disservice to their readers, to Western policymakers, to Palestinian democrats, and to the cause of peace.

 

SAUDI ARABIA BEHEADS GAYS. IRAN HANGS THEM. BUT SPAIN TARGETS ISRAELI GAYS.

In the second article below, James Kirchick writes in The Wall Street Journal Europe (extracts):

Earlier this month Madrid celebrated its annual gay pride festival, reputed to be the largest in Europe. It featured the usual mixture of calls for tolerance, righteous political speechifying, and raucous display of sexuality. But the Spanish capital also earned a dubious distinction this year not for anything it included, but for what it excluded: Israel.

The municipality of Tel Aviv had originally planned to sponsor a float in the Madrid parade. But Spain’s Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transgenders and Bisexuals revoked the invitation….

By joining the international campaign to delegitimize Israel, Spain’s leading gay organization undermined its purported mission: the furtherance of gay rights. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that even has gay pride parades, never mind respects the dignity of homosexuals. Saudi Arabia beheads gays. Syria arrests them in sting operations. Iran hangs them from cranes in public squares. (Speaking at Columbia University in 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that there are no homosexuals in his country, an absurd assertion nonetheless portentous for its murderous aspirations). As for Gaza, one of Hamas’s leaders has referred to gays as ‘a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick.’ …”

Like so many other democratic values, when it comes to gay rights Israel is an oasis in a sea of state-sanctioned repression… Gays serve openly in the Israeli military… the government grants gay couples many of the same rights as heterosexual ones and recognizes same-sex unions performed abroad. Many Palestinian gays seek asylum in Israel…

One would be hard-pressed to find a country that oppresses its gays and treats its Jews well, or vice versa. From Nazi Germany to the modern Middle East, societies that persecute Jews will get to homosexuals eventually – if they haven’t been dispensed with already. This is a lesson that gays ignore at their peril.

 

ERDOGAN TURNS UP THE VOLUME OF HIS DEMAGOGUERY

In the third article below, Semih Idiz writes in Hurriyet Daily News, a leading Turkish paper:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears set to milk the popularity he gained in the streets of Turkey and the Middle East after the Marmara crisis in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli forces in a seriously botched up military operation.

It is almost as if he was waiting for a new crisis with Israel to be able to work the streets in order to regain some of the political ground his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has been losing over bread and butter issues at home.

He and his party executives are clearly worried that the reinvigorated Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, may make headway given the successful manner in which its new leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has been hitting at the government over topics that really matter for the average man on the street…

Turks are fickle though, and easily swayed emotionally even if this means that the bread and butter issues of vital importance to them are pushed to the background…

So we see him increasingly turning up the volume of his demagoguery, and hitting at Israel and the United States at every opportunity that presents itself. No doubt he is keeping a close eye on the “political rating meter” as he sends his crowds to paroxysms of delirious applause with his remarks, some of which smack openly of anti-Semitism and reflect a growing anti-Western tendency…

 

ERDOGAN POISONS THE MINDS OF A GENERATION OF TURKS

Another columnist for Hurriyet Daily News, Soner Cagaptay, writes:

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has promoted the Islamist mindset of “us Muslims” in conflict with “the bad others” through the media and also by spreading Hamas’ views throughout Turkey, whether through official Hamas visits to Turkey or through AKP-supported conferences and fundraisers.

Recent changes in media ownership in Turkey under the AKP are closely related to the spread of anti-Western sentiments in the country. Media independence in Turkey is increasingly under threat…

The AKP took over the Sabah-ATV conglomerate, which represents around 20% of the Turkish media market, selling this conglomerate to a media company of which Prime Minister Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak is the CEO.

The AKP has also brought a $3.2 billion tax fine against Dogan Yayin, a conglomerate that owns around 50 percent of the Turkish media. This excessive fine exceeds Dogan’s total net worth – is political, because Dogan’s news outlets promote secular, liberal and nationalist views that often criticize of the AKP.

The transformation of the Turkish media is not an esoteric issue, for it affects the future of Turkish democracy and also has a bearing on Turkish views of the world…

A recent show on Turkey’s publicly-funded Turkish Radio Television, whose head is appointed by the AKP, and which is entirely funded by Turkish taxpayer money, ran “Ayrilik,” a show with an anti-Israeli stance, including one which depicts an imagined situation in the Palestinian territories where a newborn baby is intentionally killed by Israeli soldiers.

What do 18-year-old Turks think of Israel now? They hate it, and they will do so because of images depicted in shows like “Ayrilik.” …

Before the AKP came to power, Turkey had never hosted a Hamas conference. But in the last three years alone, there have been seven Hamas conferences and fundraisers in Istanbul…

[All summaries above by Tom Gross]

 

FULL ARTICLES

THE CRUCIAL ISSUE OF PALESTINIAN INCITEMENT TO KILL

The two faces of Mahmoud Abbas: He says one thing to the Palestinians, another to Obama
By Elliott Abrams
New York Daily News
July 14, 2010

“I say in front of you, Mr. President, that we have nothing to do with incitement against Israel, and we’re not doing that,” claimed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to the White House in June.

It is unfortunate for the prospects of Middle East peace that this denial by Abbas (who is also head of the PLO and Fatah) was just plain untrue. In fact, this two-faced stance of Abbas and his cronies – proclaiming peaceful intentions to the international community while inciting their population to hatred of Israel – is one of the primary impediments to any sort of solution to the longstanding crisis.

And yet there are countless examples of pronouncements or actions by Abbas and other Palestinian leaders that suggest a glorification of violence and terrorism and undermine the belief that they seek peace. This very month, for example, Abbas publicly mourned the death of Mohammed Oudeh, mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre: “The deceased was one of the prominent leaders of the Fatah movement and lived a life filled with the struggle, devoted effort, and the enormous sacrifice of the deceased for the sake of the legitimate problem of his people.”

Abbas also told Arab journalists in Amman, Jordan, that “We are unable to confront Israel militarily, and this point was discussed at the Arab League summit in March in [Libya]. There I turned to the Arab states and I said: ‘If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don’t have the ability to do it.’ “

Why should Israelis, or Americans for that matter, believe his commitment to peace in English, when in Arabic he treats war as an acceptable option?

President Obama is well aware that popular incitement remains a thorn in the side of serious talks. In May, the President said that he had “mentioned to President Abbas in a frank exchange that it was very important to continue to make progress in reducing the incitement and anti-Israel sentiments that are sometimes expressed in schools and mosques and in the public square, because all those things are impediments to peace.”

At a dinner for Abbas during his Washington visit, I confronted him with several recent examples of incitement, as well as the denial that he made to the President. His reply was that of a bureaucrat, not a peacemaker: He did not deny the allegations, but said that if true they should be raised at a tripartite committee (the United States, the Palestinian Authority and Israel) that had been established by the Oslo Accords.

If peace is our goal, such a response is deeply inadequate. Abbas should handle incitement by stopping it, not seeking committee meetings – and especially not by denying that incitement occurs in the first place. Of course, it’s easy to see why, politically, Abbas and others in the PLO and Fatah leadership avoid confronting these organizations’ long involvement in terrorism, but if they cannot do so, the chances for real peace are slim. A leadership whose maps do not even show an entity called Israel is unlikely to tell Palestinian refugees that it has given up their “right of return” or that their long-hoped-for Palestinian state within the 1967 borders will not include control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

In fact, the critical insight achieved by the Bush administration was that the character of that state, and of Palestinian society, are more important than final borders in achieving and maintaining peace.

Is terrorism defended and glorified by the top officials? Are terrorists who murder children branded as heroes whom schoolchildren should admire? Is war with Israel a tactic that must be set aside only for pragmatic reasons, and even then only as a short-term strategy?

Obama is right to keep raising this subject with Abbas, but Presidents have been raising it for years. As the Palestinian leadership never seems to pay any penalty for its words, America’s seriousness about the peace process is in doubt.

If the Obama administration is dedicated to a major peace effort in the coming year, the incitement issue should be at the top of its agenda. Because when direct negotiations do finally begin, the key test of Palestinian commitment to peace will not be what Abbas and his colleagues say to Americans in English, but what they say in Arabic to Palestinians – about Israel, about terrorism and about real peace.

 

SPANISH ORGANIZERS EXCLUDE ONLY ONE COUNTRY: ISRAEL

Spanish Inquisition, Part II
The Madrid gay parade bans participants from Israel – the only Mideast country that respects homosexual rights.
By James Kirchick
Wall Street Journal Europe
July 11, 2010

MADRID -- Earlier this month Madrid celebrated its annual gay pride festival, reputed to be the largest in Europe. It featured the usual mixture of calls for tolerance, righteous political speechifying, and raucous display of sexuality. But the Spanish capital also earned a dubious distinction this year not for anything it included, but for what it excluded: Israel.

The municipality of Tel Aviv had originally planned to sponsor a float in the Madrid parade. But Spain’s Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transgenders and Bisexuals revoked the invitation following Israel’s raid on the Gaza flotilla that ended with nine dead pro-Hamas activists.

“After what has happened, and as human rights campaigners, it seemed barbaric to us to have them taking part,” the Federation’s president, Antonio Poveda, explained. “We don’t just defend our own little patch.”

Mr. Poveda chose to ignore the video evidence supporting Israel’s account of self defense. But even if Israeli soldiers were at fault, why Israeli gays should be made to answer for the actions of their government was something that Mr. Poveda never bothered to explain. His justification rings of the “collective responsibility” trope that critics of the Jewish state often invoke to attack its security measures, especially the Gaza blockade, which they claim unfairly punishes ordinary Palestinians rather than Hamas.

By joining the international campaign to delegitimize Israel, Spain’s leading gay organization undermined its purported mission: the furtherance of gay rights. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that even has gay pride parades, never mind respects the dignity of homosexuals. Saudi Arabia beheads gays. Syria arrests them in sting operations. Iran hangs them from cranes in public squares. (Speaking at Columbia University in 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that there are no homosexuals in his country, an absurd assertion nonetheless portentous for its murderous aspirations). As for Gaza, one of Hamas’s leaders has referred to gays as “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick.”

Like so many other democratic values, when it comes to gay rights Israel is an oasis in a sea of state-sanctioned repression, a “little patch,” to use Mr. Poveda’s words, that he and his comrades ought to defend. Gays serve openly in the Israeli military. While gay marriages can’t be legally performed in Israel, the government grants gay couples many of the same rights as heterosexual ones and recognizes same-sex unions performed abroad. Many Palestinian gays seek asylum in Israel. And like most aspects of Israeli life, the gay scene is disputatious. This year there was not one gay pride parade but three, including one that rejected the implicitly Zionist message of the municipally-sponsored parade. As one Israeli friend joked to me, “Two gay Jews, three parades.”

The decision by Spain’s leading gay group is part of an international trend that has seen far left elements hijack what ought to be a non-partisan movement to promote individual liberty. Earlier this year, for instance, organizers in Toronto allowed an organization called “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” to march in its parade. When I suggested to a Spanish friend that I might bring a small Israeli flag to the parade route, he wrote back, “Are you out of your mind? It’s dangerous.” Instead, I lodged my personal protest by sporting an Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt. To my pleasant surprise, no one raised a fuss.

Whatever the injustice of the Spanish Gay Federation’s behavior, it had little bearing on parade-goers, who partied as if the event they were celebrating had not been blackened by the organizers’ shameful boycott of Israel. Such passivity means that actions intended to isolate the small democracy will continue. Yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki – one of the key figures behind the regime’s support for international Holocaust denial – arrived in Spain for a two-day visit to meet with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The irony in welcoming a top official from a regime that murders gays while banning the only country in the region that treats homosexuals humanely seems to have been lost on Madrid.

This boycott will divide two minority communities that ought to be allies. One would be hard-pressed to find a country that oppresses its gays and treats its Jews well, or vice versa. From Nazi Germany to the modern Middle East, societies that persecute Jews will get to homosexuals eventually – if they haven’t been dispensed with already. This is a lesson that gays ignore at their peril.

 

ERDOGAN FANS THE FLAMES

Erdogan fans anti-Israeli, Anti-American sentiments for political gain
By Semih Idiz
Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey)
June 14, 2010

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appears set to milk the popularity he gained in the streets of Turkey and the Middle East after the Marmara crisis in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli forces in a seriously botched up military operation.

It is almost as if he was waiting for a new crisis with Israel to be able to work the streets in order to regain some of the political ground his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has been loosing over bread and butter issues at home.

He and his party executives are clearly worried that the reinvigorated Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, may make headway given the successful manner in which its new leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has been hitting at the government over topics that really matter for the average man on the street. He is also concerned that the Saadet (Felicity) Party, the other Islamist party, may steal votes from the AKP given the rising dissatisfaction among the public.

Turks are fickle though, and easily swayed emotionally even if this means that the bread and butter issues of vital importance to them are pushed to the background. It is clear that there is great public animosity towards Israel today. As for the almost endemic anti-Americanism among Turks, this is also adding grist to Erdogan’s populist mill.

So we see him increasingly turning up the volume of his demagoguery, and hitting at Israel and the United States at every opportunity that presents itself. No doubt he is keeping a close eye on the “political rating meter” as he sends his crowds to paroxysms of delirious applause with his remarks, some of which smack openly of anti-Semitism and reflect a growing anti-Western tendency.

After the Marmara incident he was not only quick to use the harshest and most insulting adjectives when referring to Israel, but also had thinly veiled warnings to Washington, suggesting openly that those who stood behind Israel were also culpable in the crimes committed by that country.

Over the weekend he went further and openly named the U.S. this time, thus revealing what lies in his heart-of-hearts. This is what he had to say while addressing an adoring crowd in Rize, on the Black Sea coast, where people are not only religious but also ultra-nationalist.

“They are asking us what Turkey is doing in the Middle East, in Palestine. Why is Turkey bothered about Gaza? But could they not be asked in return what America is doing in Iraq? What is it doing in Palestine? Could it not be asked what is it doing in Afghanistan? What are France, Britain, and Holland, and so on, doing in these places?”

Erdogan went on threateningly to say, “I am calling on the Israeli supported international media and their subcontractors at home: Turkey is not like other countries.” His only tribute to sophistication during this show of demagoguery was his reference to “the Israeli supported international media.”

Previously he had made references to the “Jewish controlled international media” but must have been warned by his advisors that this was too overtly “anti-Semitic,” and thus politically incorrect. This no doubt forced him to make a slight modification in his nevertheless anti-Semitic reference to the international media.

What is worse, however, is that Erdogan is set to raise the volume of his bellicosity in coming weeks and months, given that Turkey will, for all intents and purposes, be moving into “election mode.” We had an opportunity to talk to Hikmet Cetin, a highly respected veteran politician and former Foreign Minister, the other day.

He too expressed serious concerns that Erdogan and the AKP would make anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric the centerpiece of his political campaign in the lead-up to the elections in 2011. Mr. Cetin is right to be concerned of course.

Erdogan is, after all, utilizing the least sophisticated of political tools to increase support for the AKP at home, and totally disregarding what harm he may be doing to Turkey’s well established links with the West in general and the U.S. in particular – regardless of the periodic turbulence in these ties over specific issues.

There are those who say that he is in fact doing all of this intentionally, because he is trying to turn Turkey’s direction from the West to the Islamic East. We personally believe that whatever his ultimate aim and intentions may be in this respect, Mr. Erdogan will find that it is much harder to turn Turkey’s direction than he thinks.

But it cannot be denied that he and his government are providing material for those in the West who feel Turkey is in fact “drifting away.” There is truth, of course, in the contention being also put forward by some in the West today that certain countries and leaders in Europe have made it easier for the AKP to hit at the West. This is highly apparent from Erdogan’s lambasting Europe while also pursuing his populist line of demagoguery.

Some in Europe have been clinging to Mr. Erdogan and his party as the only viable reformist force in Turkey and providing him with a benefit of the doubt way beyond what is justified (even as he feeds the anti-western undercurrents in this country.) Less admiration and more attention on their part to what he is actually saying and doing at this stage should provide a wake-up call, as his latest actions and remarks appear to have done in Washington.

The bottom line is that while some may be worrying that Mr. Erdogan and the AKP are changing Turkey’s course, the truth is that it is not clear what they are trying to do, or if they even have a viable master plan for a modern Westward looking Turkey at this stage. As matters stand it appears that Mr. Erdogan is simply riding the crest of a populist conservative and Islamist wave – with nationalist overtones – which enables him to fog some seminal questions about where he is taking the country.

As for the great strides his party made over the past eight years, this may be true to an extent but it must not be forgotten that the road had already been laid for the AKP government to move on in terms of much of what they achieved over these years.

For example Turkey’s EU orientation – which Mr. Erdogan never referred to in a positive light while in the opposition – is something that was well underway. He simply went along with it continuing a reform process that had been started under the previous Ecevit government.

The much touted “zero problems with neighbors” policy, on the other hand, was always there but was called “a policy of good neighborliness.” As for the much lauded “opening up to the Middle East” this was the pet project of a host of former Turkish politicians ranging from Suleyman Demirel to Bulent Ecevit and Erdal Inonu, and not exclusive to the AKP.

It may appear to some that nothing was achieved in this country prior to the AKP. Mr. Erdogan and his party executives are working overtime to spread that impression, of course. But it is wrong and misrepresents the facts. Mr. Erdogan’s vitriolic and bellicose attitude both in domestic and in foreign policy should help open many eyes on this score too in the coming period.

 

TAKING OVER THE MEDIA

The AKP’s Hamas policy: “us vs. them”
By Soner Cagaptay
Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey)
July 5, 2010

www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=the-akp8217s-hamas-policy-8220us-vs.-them-2010-07-02

At home, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has promoted the Islamist mindset of “us Muslims” in conflict with “the bad others” through the media and also by spreading Hamas’ views throughout Turkey, whether through official Hamas visits to Turkey or through AKP-supported conferences and fundraisers.

Recent changes in media ownership in Turkey under the AKP are closely related to the spread of anti-Western sentiments in the country. Turkey is a country with free media. Media independence in Turkey, however, is increasingly under threat.

The Turkish media remains free (in that it is not illegal to produce journalism), but the AKP is trying to curb media freedoms by transforming media ownership through legal loopholes. Such was the case in December 2005 when the AKP took over the Sabah-ATV conglomerate, which represents around 20% of the Turkish media market, selling this conglomerate to a media company of which Turkish Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak is the CEO.

The AKP has also brought a $3.2 billion tax fine against Dogan Yayin, a conglomerate that owns around 50 percent of the Turkish media. This excessive fine exceeds Dogan’s total net worth—is political, because Dogan’s news outlets promote secular, liberal and nationalist views that often criticize of the AKP.

The transformation of the Turkish media is not an esoteric issue, for it affects the future of Turkish democracy and also has a bearing on Turkish views of the world.

Where there is no independent media – as in Russia – there is simply no viable opposition to government. Whenever Turkey goes through a political spasm, analysts warn of the collapse of Turkey’s democracy. Despite this, Turkey has survived numerous crises in the past thanks to the balancing power of its fourth pillar.

As Turkish media becomes less free, there is a higher likelihood that it will become a tool for the government with which to shape an anti-Western public opinion. What is bad for secular liberal western Turks is bad for the West. Turkey’s free media needs to remain free because if it is all either state-owned or owned by pro-AKP businesses, anti-Western and anti-Israeli viewpoints will spread through the media, which we have been witnessing since 2002.

A recent show on Turkey’s publicly-funded Turkish Radio Television, or TRT, network is a perfect example. The debut of the series, entitled “Ayrilik” (Separation), came on the heels of Turkey’s cancellation of Israeli participation in the Anatolian Eagle exercises. TRT, whose head is appointed by the AKP, and which is entirely funded by Turkish taxpayer money, ran “Ayrilik,” a show with an anti-Israeli stance, including one which depicts an imagined situation in the Palestinian territories where a newborn baby is intentionally killed by Israeli soldiers.

What do 18-year-old Turks think of Israel now? They hate it, and they will do so because of images depicted in shows like “Ayrilik.” These are the images they have been seeing for the last seven years and this is what they’ll continue seeing. A Turk who has come of age under the AKP is now more likely than not to hate Israel and the West after seven years of such propaganda. Unlike Turks now in their forties or older who came of political age in a different Turkey, younger Turks in their twenties and thirties have more radical and negative views of the West as a result of what they see in government-controlled media as well as media owned by pro-government businesses.

THROUGH CONFERENCES

While government-controlled media promotes an evil image of the Israelis, international Hamas conferences in Turkey build legitimacy for Hamas and other extensions of the International Muslim Brotherhood movement. Before the AKP came to power, Turkey had never hosted a Hamas conference. Now, such conferences render the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood agenda more accessible to Turks, making Hamas’ violent struggle against Israel a part of daily political debate in Turkey.

In the last three years alone, there have been seven Hamas conferences and fundraisers in Istanbul. The first one of these, held in July 2006 and attended by one of the spiritual leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, was given the title “Muslims in Europe.” Qaradawi’s visit was funded by the British Foreign Office, and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood came to talk about Muslims in Europe, exposing Turks and European Muslims to Hamas and its ideology.

The list continues: other Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood conferences in Turkey include a November, 2007 conference called “Jerusalem Day,” co-organized by nongovernmental organization the Association of Turkish Volunteer Organizations, or TGTV, close to the AKP and Islamic Association of Muslim World Nongovernmental Organizations, or IDSB. This conference, entitled “Jerusalem Day,” called for “liberating Jerusalem through jihad from the Zionists.”

Other conferences followed in February 2009, April 2009, May 2009, and July 2009. What is interesting is that the frequency of these conferences has been steadily increasing, with four such meetings alone held in 2009.

Moreover, these meetings have started to espouse a violent agenda. For instance, at the February 2009 conference, Hamas members called for a jihad centered on Gaza. The April 2009 meeting was a “Masjid al-Aqsa symposium” which called to “liberate Masjid al-Aqsa” and it was organized by the Istanbul Peace Platform, or IBP, which includes a number of NGOs close to the AKP. The symposium called on all Muslims to liberate al-Aqsa through violence, if necessary, and also claimed that Israel has plans to demolish it. The “Palestine Collaboration Conference” in May 2009 called for “continued resistance to liberate Palestine.” Conference participants included former Sudanese President Mushir Sivar Ez-Zeheb, President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars Yousef al-Qaradawi, and Hamas Representative and Spokesman in Lebanon Usame Hamdan. In his speech at this conference, AKP deputy Zeyd Aslan said that Israel “commits genocide in Palestine.”

On the other hand, the “Environment Conference” in July 2009 was organized by the Earth Centre of Dialogue Partners in cooperation with the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the city of Istanbul, and the Fatih University in Istanbul. The conference, attended by al-Qaradawi, concluded with the declaration of a seven-year-action plan on climate change. The conference also served as platform to bring Hamas and MB members to Istanbul.

These conferences are organized by NGOs close to the AKP government. Although they appear to be civil society initiatives, the meetings are held in city halls of Istanbul or convention centers under the control of the AKP city government, which in essence means that taxpayer funds help pay for these events.

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

NETANYAHU REAFFIRMS POSSIBILITY OF AN INDEPENDENT PALESTINIAN STATE

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has granted very few television interviews since assuming office last year. His longest one to date (lasting a full hour) was with CNN’s Larry King. It was broadcast internationally on CNN yesterday. A number of people have asked me for the transcript of the interview, and it is attached below. For those that prefer to watch the interview, I have a posted a video of it (in five parts) if you scroll down down this page below.

Netanyahu makes a number of interesting points in it, as well as affirming that he “absolutely favors a Palestinian state” so long as it will not be used as a launching ground for armed attacks on Israelis.

It is worth taking the time to read or watch this interview since Netanyahu’s positions are so often misrepresented by supposedly informed commentators, for example, time and again on the editorial pages of The New York Times.

 

A TWEET TOO FAR

Before that, I attach a follow-up item to Sunday’s dispatch, “The secret war against Iran” (& CNN reporter mourns Hizbullah spiritual leader), and Wednesday’s dispatch, (The Obama-Netanyahu love fest (& CNN’s Octavia Nasr says sorry).

In the 24 hours after I first drew attention to it on Sunday, dozens of media who subscribe to this list, including Fox News, The Weekly Standard and others reported on the twitter comments by CNN’s Senior Editor of Arab Affairs Octavia Nasr praising Hizbullah leader Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah, who was classified by the U.S. government as a terrorist. Various activist organizations that subscribe to this list also took it up the day after I sent it out and posted it.

Nasr posted a note on the CNN website “deeply regretting” having lauded a man who she now noted “regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated.”

In spite of her apology, CNN fired her yesterday, a decision I have some concerns about because there are far worse journalists working at CNN and elsewhere whose prejudices against Israel are much deeper than Nasr’s, and I feel that CNN may be “sacrificing” one “older female” reporter (Nasr had worked at CNN for 20 years) in order to avoid examining deeper issues about their news coverage by the likes of correspondent Ben Wedeman and others.

I attach an article from The Jerusalem Post below in which I note this.

***

See also last year’s: dispatch, Exclusive: This is CNN (& BBC-UNRWA connection revealed), about CNN’s Arabic affairs producer in its Jerusalem bureau, Nidal Rafa, who has now also been dismissed.

 

OUTRAGE AS UK AMBASSADOR PAYS HOMAGE TO FADLALLAH

The British ambassador to Lebanon on Wednesday paid homage to Ayatollah Fadlallah on her British government internet blog.

“When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person,” Ambassador to Lebanon Frances Guy wrote in her blog, which is hosted by the British government. “The world needs more men … daring to confront old constraints.”

She did not mention his Holocaust denial or his repeated support for terrorism against Israeli civilians. Her comments sparked outrage in America, in Israel, among the majority of Lebanese who do not support Hizbullah, and among many in Britain who said they were embarrassed by her comments.

Fadlallah was staunchly anti-American and linked to the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine base in Lebanon which killed more than 260 Americans. In 1985 Fadlallah escaped a CIA assassination attempt.

Tens of thousands of supporters, chanting “Death to America! Death to Israel!” swarmed around Fadlallah’s coffin as it made its way through the streets of south Beirut to a mosque for burial on Tuesday. It is not believed the British ambassador was among them.

 

UK OFFICIAL GOVT. WEBSITE: THE PASSING OF A DECENT MAN

The British government removed this entry from their website overnight, but I had kept a copy of it from yesterday. It reads:

http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/guy/entry/the_passing_of_decent_men

The passing of decent men

Posted 05 July 2010 by Frances Guy | 11 comments

One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious. People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most. It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own. I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most. Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims [sic] throughout the world. When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person. That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith. Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday. Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon’s shores. I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim [sic] acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right. If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples’ lives will be truly blighted. The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.

 

HOW HIZBULLAH’S OWN AL-MANAR TV WEBSITE REMEMBERED FADLALLAH

I attach the following, from Hizbullah’s own website, because so many Western media wrote about the death of Fadlallah, without properly mentioning the negative aspects of his character.

EXTRACTS FROM AL-MANAR:

Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlullah inspired the leaders for the resistance group [Hizbullah], and served as a highly influential beacon of truth for all the oppressed peoples of the world.

From the pulpit of the Imam Rida mosque in the Bir al-Abd neighborhood (Beirut’s southern suburb), Sayyed Fadlullah’s sermons gave shape to the political currents … till the last days of his life.

… “What martyrdom is greater than making yourself a human bomb detonating it among the enemy? What spiritualism is greater than this spiritualism in which a person loses all feeling of his body and life for the sake of his cause and mission?”

… “All of Palestine is a war zone and every Jew who unlawfully occupies a house or land belonging to a Palestinian is a legitimate target. There are no innocent Jews in Palestine…They confiscate our water and freedom.”

… In an interview with Al-Manar TV on March 21, 2008, Sayyed Fadlullah stated: “Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this holocaust beyond imagination.”

(Full al-Manar obituary here.)

 

“RIGHT UP THERE WITH ABU NIDAL AND CARLOS THE JACKAL”

Con Coughlin, Foreign Editor of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, writing in the Telegraph on July 5, 2010:

“Don’t be fooled by all the tributes that are pouring out following the death in Beirut at the weekend of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. The U.S. State Department’s classification of Fadlallah as a terrorist was spot on, and when you look back at his track record you can see he was right up there with other infamous terror masterminds, such as Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal. One of Fadlallah’s last acts before he died was to issue a fatwa authorising the use of suicide bomb attacks.”

 

HAMAS STOPS ENTRY OF NEWSPAPERS INTO GAZA STRIP

Hamas on Wednesday banned the distribution of three leading Palestinian newspapers – Al-Quds, Al-Ayyam and Al-Hayat al-Jadida – in the Gaza Strip.

Since then, Hamas policemen have been confiscating any copies that did manage to find their way into Gaza. All three newspapers have carried articles about some of Hamas’s human rights abuses in Gaza – articles of a kind that many anti-Israel Western reporters refuse to publish.

The Fatah-controlled Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in the West Bank condemned the Hamas move and called for the lifting of the ban.

However, the silence of Western human rights organizations and media freedom groups in regard to this latest Hamas clampdown, is deafening.

 

CNN SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT: OCTAVIA COMPROMISED HER CREDIBILITY

CNN fires Mideast editor over tweet
By Yaakov Lappin
The Jerusalem Post
July 9, 2010

www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=180778

Three days after posting a message on her Twitter account expressing sadness at the death of the Lebanese Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, CNN’s senior editor of Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, was fired from the international news network.

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hizbullah’s giants I respect a lot,” Nasr wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

The comment touched off a firestorm of controversy.

Nasr’s 20-year career in the news network ended after CNN executives concluded that “her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised,” according to an internal CNN memo published by the Mediaite Web site on Wednesday night.

Nasr had attempted to limit the damage caused by her Twitter message by posting a detailed message on her CNN blog, in which she expressed regret over what she described as “an error of judgment.”

Nasr added that she regretted writing “such a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work.

That’s not the case at all.

“It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated. But it was his commitment to Hizbullah’s original mission – resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon – that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect,” Nasr said.

CNN executives found the explanation to be insufficient.

Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president of CNN international newsgathering, said in the internal memo on Wednesday, “I had a conversation with Octavia this morning and I want to share with you that we have decided that she will be leaving the company... As she has stated in her blog on CNN.com, she fully accepts that she should not have made such a simplistic comment without any context whatsoever. However, at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

Political and media commentator Tom Gross told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that “It was wrong of Nasr to praise Fadlallah, who was among other things a Holocaust denier, on Sunday. It was right of her to apologize on Tuesday.

“But it was probably an overreaction by CNN to fire her yesterday over a tweet, and after she had apologized,” Gross added. “There are other reporters who are far more prejudiced against Israel at CNN and even more so at the BBC and other networks, that deserve to be fired before Nasr was.”

Prior to her sacking CNN issued a statement to the ADL in which it criticized Nasr’s tweet. Responding to CNN’s statement, the Anti-Defamation League published its own statement, saying it was pleased with CNN for “making clear that her action did not meet the network’s editorial standards. Nasr herself has recognized that the tweet was a mistake.

“We commend CNN for taking this as a serious matter and dealing with it immediately,” the ADL added.

 

VIDEOS OF INTERVIEW WITH NETANYAHU ON CNN

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

PART 5

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

THE OBAMA-NETANYAHU LOVE FEST

Since many prominent newspapers, such as The International Herald Tribune (which bills itself on its masthead as “the Global Edition of The New York Times”) have today woefully misreported the positive Israeli-U.S. events of yesterday (the IHT instead filled up 3 of its 6 news pages today with pieces slandering Israel concerning other matters), I attach below an unedited transcript and video of the remarkable hug-in yesterday in the Oval Office between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After that I attach an editorial on their meeting from today’s Wall Street Journal, and a report on it from The Washington Post.

But first some thoughts on the news conference yesterday between Obama and Netanyahu…

 

A REMARKABLE PUBLIC TURNAROUND BY OBAMA

* President Obama’s public display of support yesterday for Israel’s democratically-elected leader was remarkable when one compares it to the incredibly frosty way he treated and shunned Netanyahu on his last trip to Washington in March, which I wrote about at the time.

NUCLEAR POLICY

* Obama’s reaffirmation of the policy of nuclear ambiguity towards Israel, given what Obama said were Israel’s unique security concerns, is very significant. This is especially so in light of the fact that some Obama administration officials had been hinting at abandoning Israel on this matter, which would be potentially catastrophic for Israel’s national security deterrence. Obama said yesterday that the U.S. will work to see that Israel is not singled out at the September meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Obama also made clear that Iran having nuclear weapons is what concerns America and the world, not Israel’s perhaps having them.

DIRECT TALKS

* Obama’s call on the Palestinian Authority to begin direct talks with Israel before the expiration in September of Israel’s 10 month freeze on settlement expansion, is also important. (The BBC and other media are completely misreporting this, suggesting that it is the Palestinian Authority that wants direct final status negotiations and Netanyahu that is refusing to enter into them – a complete reversal of the truth.) Of course, if the Palestinian Authority agree to direct talks, they will eventually have to make some actual compromises, as Israel has already repeatedly done, which is why the PA is trying to avoid such talks. (Predictably, within hours of the Obama-Netanyahu news conference yesterday Saed Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, ruled out the possibility of a return to direct peace talks with Israel. This has been widely reported throughout the Middle East but not by certain prominent Western news outlets who seem to want to blame Israel alone for everything wrong in the region.)

SHARED STRATEGIC INTERESTS

* It was important that Obama explicitly affirmed at the beginning of his comments yesterday that Israel and the U.S. share “national security interests” and “strategic interests.” This comes after several months of senior U.S. officials hinting that Israeli and U.S. strategic interests were diverging. Some Obama administration officials had even gone so far as to suggest that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was somehow responsible for the actions of the Taliban against NATO troops in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

REMEMBERING WHO ONE’S FRIENDS ARE

* For the first eighteen months of his presidency, Obama spent much effort making overtures to America’s enemies and ignoring or even insulting (in the case of Israel and some other countries) America’s friends. Now he appears to have realized that this has gotten him nowhere (indeed America’s position is in many ways weaker internationally than when he took office) and it appears he has instead decided to improve relations with one of America’s closest allies, Israel.

THE IRANIAN THREAT

* Obama appears to realize that it would be catastrophic for America and the world to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, and realizes that he may have to call upon Israel’s help to keep this from happening, and this may be a factor in his decision to mend fences with Israel.

THE MIDTERMS

* It could well be that Obama’s motives in suddenly publicly supporting Israel have nothing to do with a strategic rethink by the president and everything to do with his domestic problems. Obama is concerned about what could turn out to be a very poor showing for the Democratic Party at the mid-term elections in November and realizes that he and his party need to stop alienating and attacking Israel, a country that enjoys strong across-the-board support among Americans of left and right. (During the presidential campaign in 2008, Obama also made pro-Israel comments only to retract them shortly afterwards.)

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST NEWS BROADCASTER

*At any rate, after yesterday’s performance, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, who wrote in an article for the BBC website two months ago that it was “enjoyable” that Israel and the U.S. governments were not getting along, will no doubt be disappointed.

 

VIDEO OF OBAMA-NETANYAHU NEWS CONFERENCE IN OVAL OFFICE YESTERDAY

Tom Gross adds:

Netanyahu appeared this morning on Good Morning America, and is due to appear later today on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and will give an extended interview to Larry King on CNN (the American version) tonight, which will be broadcast on CNN International tomorrow mid-morning European time.

Videos for these media appearances will be posted here on this website after they happen.

***

In order not to report on Obama’s positive approach to Israel yesterday, the Israel-obsessed British newspaper The Independent plastered its entire front page today with a dubious “expose” about highly unreliable accusations of Israeli “wrongdoings” the paper said it was revealing. But in fact far from being new “news,” The Independent was just repeating a story that The Independent had first run in May 2007, as the media monitoring group “Just Journalism” has pointed out.

Any informed observer of the Middle East knows The Independent is a laughing stock when it comes to the truth in its reporting about Israel. Unfortunately some British MPs and BBC-types actually believe what they read in the paper.

 

REMARKS BY ISRAELI PM NETANYAHU AND U.S. PRESIDENT OBAMA

Official transcript supplied by the White House:

President Obama: I just completed an excellent one-on-one discussion with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and I want to welcome him back to the White House. I want to first of all thank him for the wonderful statement that he made in honor of the 4th of July, our Independence Day, when he was still in Israel.

It marked just one more chapter in the extraordinary friendship between our two countries. As Prime Minister Netanyahu indicated in his speech, the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable. It encompasses our national security interests, our strategic interests, but most importantly the bond of two democracies who share a common set of values and whose people have grown closer and closer as time goes on.

During our discussions in our private meeting, we covered a wide range of issues. We discussed the issue of Gaza. And I commended Prime Minister Netanyahu on the progress that’s been made in allowing more goods into Gaza. We’ve seen real progress on the ground. I think it’s been acknowledged that it has moved more quickly and more effectively than many people anticipated.

Obviously, there are still tensions and issues there that have to be resolved, but our two countries are working cooperatively together to deal with these issues. The Quartet has been, I think, very helpful as well. And we believe that there is a way to make sure that the people of Gaza are able to prosper economically while Israel is able to maintain its legitimate security needs in not allowing missiles and weapons to get to Hamas.

We discussed the issue of Iran. And we pointed out that as a consequence of some hard work internationally, we have instituted, through the U.N. Security Council, the toughest sanctions ever directed at an Iranian government.

In addition, last week, I signed our own set of sanctions coming out of the United States Congress - as robust as any that we’ve ever seen. Other countries are following suit. And so we intend to continue to put pressure on Iran to meet its international obligations and to cease the kinds of provocative behavior that has made it a threat to its neighbors and the international community.

We had an extensive discussion about the prospects for Middle East peace. I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants peace. I think he’s willing to take risks for peace. And during our conversation, he once again reaffirmed his willingness to engage in serious negotiations with the Palestinians around what I think should be the goal not just of the two principals involved, but the entire world; and that is two states living side-by-side in peace and security.

Israel’s security needs met, the Palestinians having a sovereign state that they call their own: those are goals that have obviously escaped our grasp for decades now. But now more than ever I think is the time for us to seize on that vision. And I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu is prepared to do so.

It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be hard work. But we’ve seen already proximity talks taking place. My envoy, George Mitchell, has helped to organize five of them so far. We expect those proximity talks to lead to direct talks. And I believe that the government of Israel is prepared to engage in such direct talks. And I commend the prime minister for that.

There are going to need to be a whole set of confidence-building measures, to make sure that people are serious and that we’re sending a signal to the region that this isn’t just more talk and more process without action.

I think it is also important to recognize that the Arab states have to be supportive of peace, because although ultimately this is going to be determined by the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, they can’t succeed unless you have the surrounding states having a greater investment in the process than we’ve seen so far.

Finally we discussed issues that arose out of the nuclear nonproliferation conference. And I reiterated to the prime minister that there is no change in U.S. policy when it comes to these issues. We strongly believe that given its size, its history, the region that it’s in, and the threats that are leveled against it that Israel has unique security requirements. It’s got to be able to respond to threats or any combination of threats in the region. And that’s why we remain unwavering in our commitment to Israel’s security. And the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine their security interests.

So I just want to say once again that I thought the discussion that we had was excellent. We’ve seen over the last year how our relationship has broadened; sometimes it doesn’t get publicized but on a whole range of issues - economic, military-to-military, issues related to Israel maintaining its qualitative military edge, intelligence sharing, how we are able to work together effectively on the international front - that in fact, our relationship is continuing to improve.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the excellent work that the prime minister has done, so I’m grateful. And welcome, once again, to the White House. Thank you.

PM Netanyahu: Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. Thank you.

The President and I had an extensive, excellent discussion in which we discussed a broad range of issues. These include of course our own cooperation in the fields of intelligence and security. And exactly as the President said, it is extensive. Not everything is seen by the public. But it is seen and appreciated by us. We understand fully that we will work together in the coming months and years to protect our common interests, our countries, our peoples against new threats and at the same time we want to explore the possibilities of peace.

The greatest new threat on the horizon and the single most dominant issue for many of us is the prospect that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is brutally terrorizing its people, spreading terrorism far and wide. And I very much appreciate the President’s statement that he is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That has been translated by the President into his leadership at the Security Council, which passed sanctions against Iran; by the U.S. bill that the President signed just a few days ago. And I urge other leaders to follow the President’s lead and other countries to follow the U.S. lead, to adopt much tougher sanctions against Iran, primarily those directed against its energy sector.

As the President said, we discussed a great deal about activating - moving forward - the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. We’re committed to that peace. I’m committed to that peace. And this peace I think will better the lives of Israelis, of Palestinians; and certainly would change our region.

Israelis are prepared to do a lot to get that peace in place, but they want to make sure that after all the steps they take, that what we get is a secure peace. We don’t want a repeat of the situation where we vacate territories and those are overtaken by Iran’s proxies and used as launching ground for terrorist attacks or rocket attacks.

I think there are solutions that we can adopt. But in order to proceed to the solutions, we need to begin negotiations in order to end them. We’ve begun proximity talks. I think it’s high time to begin direct talks. I think with the help of President Obama, President Abbas and myself should engage in direct talks to reach a political settlement of peace, coupled with security and prosperity. This requires that the Palestinian Authority prepare its people for peace in schools, textbooks and so on.

But I think at the end of the day peace is the best option for all of us, and I think we have a unique opportunity and a unique time to do it. The President says that he has a habit of confounding all the cynics and all the naysayers and all those who preclude possibilities. And he’s shown it time and time again. I think I’ve had my opportunity to confound some cynics myself. And I think if we work together with President Abbas, then we can bring a great message of hope to our peoples, to the region and to the world.

One final point. Mr. President, I want to thank you for reaffirming to me in private and now in public, as you did, the long- standing U.S. commitments to Israel on matters of vital strategic importance. I want to thank you too for the great hospitality you and the first lady have shown Sarah and me and our entire delegation.

And I think we have to redress the balance. You know, I’ve been coming here a lot. It’s about time you -

President Obama: I’m ready.

PM Netanyahu: - and the first lady came to Israel.

President Obama: We look forward to it.

PM Netanyahu: So (anytime ?).

President Obama: Thank you.

PM Netanyahu: Anytime.

President Obama: Thank you very much.

PM Netanyahu: Thank you.

President Obama: Thank you. Good.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. As far as the steps which need to be taken to move possibly - (off mike) - direct talks, do you think it will be helpful for Israel to extend the - (off mike) - settlement moratoriums set to expire in September? And if I could briefly ask the prime minister, with regards to the sanctions measures, do you think that these measures will contain or halt Iran’s nuclear program - (off mike)?

President Obama: Well, let me first of all say that I think the Israeli government, working through layers of various governmental entities and jurisdictions, have shown restraint, over the last several months, that I think has been conducive to the prospects of us getting into direct talks.

And my hope is, is that once direct talks have begun, well before the moratorium has expired, that that will create a climate in which everybody feels a greater investment and success, not every action, by one party or the other, is taken as a reason for not engaging in talks, so there ends up being more room created by more trust. And so, you know, I want to just make sure that we sustain that over the next several weeks.

I do think that there are a range of confidence-building measures that can be taken by all sides, that improve the prospects of a successful negotiation. And I’ve discussed some of those privately with the prime minister. When President Abbas was here, I discussed some of those same issues with him.

I think it’s very important that the Palestinians not look for excuses for incitement, that they are not engaging in provocative language; that at the international level, they are maintaining a constructive tone as opposed to looking for opportunities to embarrass Israel.

At the same time, I’ve said to Prime Minister Netanyahu - I don’t think he minds me sharing it publicly - that, you know, Abu Mazen working with Fayyad have done some very significant things, when it comes to the security front. And so us being able to widen the scope of their responsibilities, in the West Bank, is something that I think would be very meaningful to the Palestinian people.

I think that some of the steps that have already been taken in Gaza help to build confidence. And if we continue to make progress on that front, then Palestinians can see in very concrete terms what peace can bring that rhetoric and violence cannot bring.

And that is people actually having an opportunity to raise their children and make a living and, you know, buy and sell goods and build a life for themselves, which is ultimately what people in both Israel and the Palestinian territories want, so.

PM Netanyahu: I think the latest sanctions adopted by the U.N. create illegitimacy or create delegitimization for Iran’s nuclear program. And that is important. I think the sanctions the President signed the other day actually have teeth. They bite. The question is, how much do you need to bite, is something I cannot answer now. But if other nations adopted similar sanctions, that would increase the effect.

The more like-mined countries join in the American-led effort that President Obama has signed into act - into law, I think, the better we’ll be able to give you an answer to your question.

Q: Mr. President, in the past year, you distanced yourself from Israel and gave a cold shoulder to the prime minister. Do you think this policy was a mistake? Do you think it contributes to the bashing of Israel by others? And because of the changes now, do you trust Prime Minister Netanyahu?

And if I may, Mr. Prime Minister, specifically, did you discuss with the President a continuing of the building of settlements after September? And did you tell him that you’re going to keep on building after this period is over?

President Obama: Well, let me, first of all, say that the premise to your question was wrong, and I entirely disagree with it. If you look at every public statement that I’ve made over the last year and a half, it has been a constant reaffirmation of the special relationship between the United States and Israel; that our commitment to Israel’s security has been unwavering. And in fact, there aren’t any concrete policies that you could point to that would contradict that.

And in terms of my relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I know the press, both in Israel and Stateside, enjoys, you know, seeing if there’s news there. But the fact of the matter is, is that I’ve trusted Prime Minister Netanyahu since I met him before I was elected President, and have said so both publicly and privately. I think that he is dealing with a very complex situation in a very tough neighborhood.

And you know, what I have consistently shared with him is my interest in working with him, not at cross-purposes, so that we can achieve the kind of peace that will ensure Israel’s security for decades to come.

And that’s going to mean some tough choices, and there are going to be times where, you know, he and I are having robust discussions about what kind of choices need to be made. But the underlying approach never changes, and that is, the United States is committed to Israel’s security, we are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.

We are going to continually work with the prime minister and the entire Israeli government, as well as the Israeli people, so that we can achieve what I think has to be everybody’s goal, which is that people feel secure. They don’t feel like a rocket’s going to be landing on their head sometime. They don’t feel as if there’s a growing population that wants to direct violence against Israel. That requires work, and that requires some difficult choices and both at the strategic level and the tactical level. And this is something that the prime minister understands and why I think that we’re going to be able to work together not just over the next few months but hopefully over the next several years.

PM Netanyahu: Thank you.

The President and I discussed concrete steps that could be done now, with the coming days and the coming weeks, to move the peace process further along in a very robust way. This is what we focused our conversation on. And when I say the next few weeks, that’s what I mean, and the President means that too.

Let me make a general observation about the question you forwarded to the President - and here I’ll have to paraphrase Mark Twain - that the reports about the demise of the special U.S.-Israel relationship aren’t just premature: They’re just flat wrong.

There is a depth and richness of this relationship that is expressed every day our teams talk. We don’t make it public. The only thing that’s public is that you can have differences, on occasion, in the best of families and the closest of families. That comes out public, and sometimes in a twisted way, too.

What is (natural ?) is the fact that we have an enduring bond of values, interests, beginning with security and the way that we share both information and other things to help the common defense of our common interests and many others in the region who don’t often admit to the beneficial effect of this cooperation.

So I think there’s a - the President said it best in his speech in Cairo. In front of the entire Islamic world, he said: The bond between Israel and the United States is unbreakable. And I can affirm that to you today.

President Obama: Thank you very much, everybody.

 

“FOLLOWING MR. NETANYAHU’S DISASTROUS MEETING WITH MR. OBAMA EARLIER THIS YEAR …”

When Bibi met Barack (Take Four)
At least Israel’s Prime Minister is no longer a White House pariah.
Editorial
Wall Street Journal
July 7, 2010

Of all the diplomatic noises heard during Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting yesterday with President Obama, the most significant may have been the clicking cameras of the White House press pool. Unlike at their last two encounters – both closed to the media – the Israeli Prime Minister is at last being accorded the ordinary courtesies granted to visiting foreign leaders.

It’s good to see Mr. Obama finally treating a key American ally as something other than a pariah. The President even went one better, calling America’s bond with Israel “unbreakable,” cautioning Palestinians to avoid seeking “opportunities to embarrass Israel,” and rejecting suggestions that there had ever been any strain in his relationship with his Israeli counterpart.

“If you look at every public statement I have made,” he declared, “it has been a constant reaffirmation of the special relationship between the United States and Israel.” Note the lawyerly use of the word “public.”

The reality is nearly the opposite, which goes far to explain why this Administration has been able to make so little progress in advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Israel’s willingness to take the “risks for peace” invariably demanded of it has always been anchored in a sense among Israelis that whatever they might cede in territory the U.S. would make up for in security, as well as diplomatic and economic backing.

That was the case when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005: It received nothing from the Palestinians but got a written commitment by President Bush that the U.S. would not expect Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders (themselves the product of a 1949 armistice agreement) in any future settlement with the Palestinians. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton disavowed that commitment last year, saying Mr. Bush’s pledge “did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

The same goes for the Administration’s surprise decision in May to support a U.N. resolution that demanded Israel’s nuclear disarmament while making no mention of Iran, a vote that contravened a decades-old understanding regarding Israel’s nuclear posture.

And it was no less true in March when the White House reacted with bullying fury to the news that an Israeli bureaucrat had approved a step in a planning process for a new housing project in north Jerusalem that could only be considered a “settlement” in the most expansive (and pro-Palestinian) sense of the term.

No wonder, then, that so many Israelis look askance at the prospect of making further concessions to the Palestinians. Israel is a democracy, and Mr. Netanyahu cannot simply deliver a “peace” on his own. So far, Mr. Obama’s actions have only made the political prospects of selling any prospective deal to Israel’s public – to say nothing of its fractious ruling coalition – that much more difficult.

Mr. Obama’s tilt against Israel has also been noticed by the Palestinians, who take it as reason to hope that they can hold out for even better negotiating terms. The Administration’s overwrought reaction to the March housing announcement sparked some politically opportunistic rioting by Palestinians that might have led to a third bloody intifada. As it is, since Mr. Obama came to office the Palestinians have retreated to “proximity talks” mediated by U.S. emissary George Mitchell instead of dealing directly with the Israelis, a retreat from the practice of the previous 16 years. The Palestinians are no fools: They know how to push a friendly U.S. Administration to push Israel.

Now the question is whether the 18 months that Mr. Obama has wasted will have longer-term consequences. Yesterday, Mr. Netanyahu spoke optimistically of returning to direct talks with the Palestinians in the coming weeks, and perhaps that will happen. But it’s difficult to see what progress can be made so long as Palestinians continue to insist on the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees to Israel, which contravenes the point of a two-state solution and would mean the demographic annihilation of the Jewish state. Mr. Obama could help if he continues to make it clear as President – as he did as a candidate – that there is no such right.

Overhanging all of this is the threat of a nuclear Iran, a country sworn to Israel’s destruction if it can acquire the means to accomplish it. We find it hard to imagine how Israel could live alongside a Palestinian state if that state were destined to become, under the leadership of Hamas, the tip of an Iranian nuclear spear. Mr. Netanyahu had warm words yesterday for the recent U.N. and U.S. sanctions against Iran. The trouble is that even CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly conceded two weeks ago that these sanctions are unlikely to deter Iran from its drive to acquire an atomic weapon.

Following Mr. Netanyahu’s disastrous meeting with Mr. Obama earlier this year, we noted the Administration’s habit of squeezing America’s friends while coddling its enemies. It’s good to see at least one of those friends no longer getting the squeeze. Now Mr. Obama has to get serious about the enemies.

 

“WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS MIGHT HAVE INSTEAD FLOWN THE WHITE FLAG OF SURRENDER”

Netanyahu hears no discouraging words from Obama
By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
July 7, 2010

A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender.

Four months ago, the Obama administration made a politically perilous decision to condemn Israel over a controversial new settlement. The Israel lobby reared up, Netanyahu denounced the administration’s actions, Republican leaders sided with Netanyahu, and Democrats ran for cover.

So on Tuesday, Obama, routed and humiliated by his Israeli counterpart, invited Netanyahu back to the White House for what might be called the Oil of Olay Summit: It was all about saving face.

The president, beaming in the Oval Office with a dour Netanyahu at his side, gushed about the “extraordinary friendship between our two countries.” He performed the Full Monty of pro-Israel pandering: “The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable” . . . “I commended Prime Minister Netanyahu” . . . “Our two countries are working cooperatively” . . . “unwavering in our commitment” . . . “our relationship has broadened” . . . “continuing to improve” . . . “We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up.”

An Israeli reporter attempted to summon the effusive American back to reality: “Mr. President, in the past year, you distanced yourself from Israel and gave a cold shoulder to the prime minister. Do you think this policy was a mistake? . . . Do you trust Prime Minister Netanyahu?”

Obama assumed an amused grin. “Well, let me first of all say that the premise of your question was wrong, and I entirely disagree with it,” he said. He said he had always engaged in “a constant reaffirmation of the special relationship” with Israel, and “I’ve trusted Prime Minister Netanyahu since I met him before I was elected president.”

So that business about Hillary Clinton calling Israel’s settlement action “insulting” and the State Department accusing Israel of a “deeply negative signal” that “undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America’s interests”? You must have imagined it.

Obama came to office with an admirable hope of reviving Middle East peace efforts by appealing to the Arab world and positioning himself as more of an honest broker. But he has now learned the painful lesson that domestic politics won’t allow such a stand.

On Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House on Tuesday, liberal activists protested what many of them see as a betrayal. “We want to appeal to Obama to stand up for once, to get a little vertebrate in his invertebrate back and speak to Netanyahu in no uncertain terms,” protester Ray McGovern shouted into a bullhorn. Obama, he added, is “a president who by all indications is what we call in the Bronx a ‘wuss’: a person who will not stand up for what he knows is right.”

Even before Obama’s surrender to Netanyahu, Muslims were losing faith that he would be the transformational figure who spoke to them from Cairo last year. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that the percentage of Muslims expressing confidence in Obama fell from 41 percent to 31 percent in Egypt and from 33 percent to 23 percent in Turkey.

Obama snubbed Netanyahu at their last meeting, shortly after Israel’s announcement during a visit by Vice President Biden that it would build new housing in a disputed area of Jerusalem. No statement or photograph of the meeting was made public. But Israel didn’t back down, and neither did it heed administration pleas to use “caution and restraint” before the deadly raid by Israeli commandos on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza.

Netanyahu arrived at the White House to see bulldozers and piles of rubble along the West Wing driveway from a construction project on the North Lawn. Inside, he found more construction underway: Obama feverishly rebuilding the U.S.-Israel relationship. The president’s opening statement in front of the cameras contained not a word of criticism of the Jewish state.

“Well, I just completed an excellent one-on-one discussion with Prime Minister Netanyahu,” he began. For those tuning in late, he added at the end: “So I just want to say, once again, that I thought the discussion that we had was excellent.”

Netanyahu was pleased with the pandering. “Mr. President, I want to thank you for reaffirming to me in private and now in public, as you did, the long-standing U.S. commitments to Israel.”

Obama didn’t even mention Israel’s settlements until a reporter inquired -- and then he declined to say that Israel should extend a moratorium on settlements that expires in September. Avoiding any criticism of Israel, he instead directed Palestinians not to look for “excuses for incitement” or “opportunities to embarrass Israel.”

Netanyahu celebrated victory. “To paraphrase Mark Twain,” he said, “the reports about the demise of the special U.S.-Israel relationship aren’t just premature, they’re just flat wrong.”

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

SLOWING DOWN IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

I attach two articles from recent days, below. Before that I attach a number of other items.

The first article concerns Meir Dagan, who after an extended eight year term judged to be among the most successful in the organization’s history, is stepping down as head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

As Dagan noted last week, only the Mossad’s mistakes tend to become known to the public, not its many recent successes.

Among other things, Dagan has successfully waged a campaign to slow down Iran’s nuclear program.

As The Jerusalem Post reports below (and as I have alluded to in past dispatches on this email list), in recent years, Iranian scientists have gone missing; equipment sent to Iran for its nuclear program arrived broken; warehouses in Europe where equipment for Iran’s nuclear program was stored before being shipped went up in flames; and Iran has been plagued by a number of mysterious military plane crashes. These are some of the key reasons that Iran does not yet have a nuclear arsenal.

 

U.S. AND BRITISH INVOLVEMENT TOO

The second article below is from The New Republic, titled “Operation Sabotage. Our secret war against Iran,” and concerns similar American efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. With the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon in tatters, the U.S. is also stepping up incidents of sabotage, reports The New Republic, which adds that sabotage has long been a staple of modern warfare, by the U.S. and many other countries. The British have also reportedly been involved in sabotage operations against Iran’s nuclear program.

The authors of these articles (Yaakov Katz and Eli Lake, both of whom are well-informed reporters on intelligence and security matters) are subscribers to this email list. I am quoted at the end of the first article below.

Of course, slowing down Iran’s nuclear program can only be effective up to a point, and eventually Iran will likely acquire nuclear weapons unless more decisive action is taken.

 

PLANNER OF MUNICH OLYMPICS MASSACRE DIES, PEACEFULLY, IN DAMASCUS

Mohammed Oudeh, the key planner of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered, died yesterday in Damascus, aged 73, of kidney failure.

Oudeh, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Daoud, was the key organizer of the attack on September 5, 1972, although he said that he was aided in financing the attack by Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority, who was then deputy to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

In an interview in 2006 with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Abu Daoud said he “regrets nothing” about the death of the Israeli athletes. “You can only dream that I would apologize,” he said.

Until his death, he was provided with security protection and a comfortable standard of living by the Assad regime in Damascus.

 

HIZBULLAH’S SPIRITUAL HEAD FADLALLAH DIES, PEACEFULLY, IN BEIRUT

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who was classified by the U.S. government as a terrorist but referred today to by the BBC’s Beirut correspondent Jim Muir as a “moderate” with “progressive views,” died this morning in Beirut, aged 74.

Fadlallah was the founder and “spiritual guide” of the Lebanese Shia terror group, Hizbullah. He was born in the Shia holy city of Najaf, in Iraq, and moved to Lebanon in 1966 after completing his studies.

He won a militant Shia following both in Iraq and Lebanon, extending his influence as far as Central Asia and the Gulf.

 

CNN REPORTER MOURNS A TERRORIST

In a twitter feed today, CNN’s Senior Editor of Arab Affairs Octavia Nasr (who often appears on CNN as an expert and commentator) writes:

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants. I respect a lot”

***

(Tom Gross adds: In 2004, when Yasser Arafat died, the BBC Middle East correspondent Barbara Plett famously cried on camera, she said she was so upset. More details here . The BBC governors later sanctioned her for it although the BBC news editors defended her crying.)

 

FADLALLAH: JEWS EXAGGERATED HOLOCAUST “BEYOND IMAGINATION”

Fadlallah was reported to have said that Jews have exaggerated the number of Holocaust victims “beyond imagination.”

(Fadlallah, above with his Hizbullah bodyguards in Lebanon in the 1980s)

And as historian Andrew Boston mentions in his book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism:

“In his sermons, Fadlallah repeatedly refers to anti-Jewish archetypes in the Qur’an, hadith, and sira: the corrupt, treacherous and aggressive nature of the Jews; their reputation as killers of prophets, who spread corruption on earth; and the notion that the Jews engaged in conspiratorial efforts against the Muslim prophet Muhammad.”

 

PALESTINIAN JOURNALIST: SYRIAN PEOPLE NEED FREEDOM FLOTILLAS MORE THAN PALESTINIANS DO

In an article posted on the liberal website Aafaq (www.aafaq.org) , Palestinian journalist Zainab Rashid writes that the Syrian propaganda apparatus has sought to use the Gaza flotilla to divert attention from what is happening in Syria, and that “the Syrian people needs freedom flotillas more than the Palestinian people does, because of its oppression at the hands of the Assad family, and because the economic and human rights situation in Syria is worse than in Gaza.”

She writes (translation courtesy of Memri, whose senior staff subscribe to this email list): “When people hear that Syrians participated in the so-called ‘Freedom Flotilla’ [to Gaza], they get the impression that the Syrians have overcome all of their domestic and foreign problems, and that they have nothing left to do but to participate in mitigating the problems of others, and in ending the siege on them.

“… I and everyone else know that the Syrian officials’ treatment of the Syrian flotilla participants, and Syria’s official propaganda stance vis-à-vis the flotilla, are only an attempt to … divert [public] attention from the situation in Syria, from the complete deterioration in all areas, and from statements and the groaning of the freedom fighters imprisoned in the various, and numerous, bastilles [of the Syrian regime], both aboveground and underground.”

“Until the Hamas takeover, Gaza’s economic and educational situation, and its living conditions and freedoms, were much better than those in Syria under the rule of the Assad family and its oppressive security apparatuses – which have set Syria back decades, and made its honorable people one of the poorest in the region and in the world. They have strangled the freedoms, and ‘taken captive’ any who raised their voices to ask for [even] a minimum [of freedoms].

“… Gaza has no mud schoolrooms, like those in many Syrian provinces. Gaza does not have 60 students to a single classroom. Even after Gaza was besieged, food is not scarce as it is in Syria, where many food products do not reach the markets except for those smuggled in across the Syria-Lebanon border. Gaza’s Internet services are vastly superior to the pitiful Internet services in Syria. Gaza and the West Bank have no lists of hundreds of banned websites. Until Hamas came to power, Gaza’s water and electricity situation was much better than that in Syria. The average Gaza Strip income is higher than Syria’s... So who needs freedom flotillas more? The [Gaza] Strip residents, or the Syrian people?

“Prior to Hamas’ Gaza takeover, various media outlets there expressed various and even contradictory opinions, and carried out their work with a reasonable measure of freedom. Satellite television channels, radio stations, magazines, and newspapers represented all of the various factions, including the independents.

“… The Gaza residents were never massacred in prison like [Syrian prisoners were] in [2008 at] Sidnaya Prison and [in 1980] at Tadmor – or [in 1982] in the city of Hama. Their prime minister and interior minister were not assassinated, like Mahmoud Al-Zu’abi [in 2008] and Ghazi Kana’an. Gaza has no nefarious emergency laws like those that have been in force in Syria for 40 years. So who is more deserving of freedom flotillas, so that the world will notice the oppression, repression, and coercion under which they suffer?”

 

EGYPTIAN COLUMNIST: “WHAT SIEGE IN GAZA ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT?”

In his column in the Egyptian daily Roz Al-Yousuf, dated June 29, 2010, Muhammad Hamadi cites statistics from a Hamas website showing that “despite all the talk of a siege on the Gaza Strip, so many goods are streaming into Gaza that supply is greater than demand – and that as a result, produce, poultry, and beef are cheaper there than in Egypt.”

He adds (translation by Memri): “ A kilo of watermelon in Gaza costs less than one Egyptian lira, while in Egypt it costs over two lira; a kilo of tomatoes in Gaza costs less than half a lira, while in Egypt it costs 1.5 lira; a kilo of potatoes in Gaza costs half a lira, while in Egypt it costs two lira; a kilo of onions in Gaza is one lira, while in Egypt a kilo of onions is 1.5 lira; a kilo of garlic in Gaza is 10 lira, while in Egypt it is 15 lira.

“A kilo of chicken in Egypt is 20 lira, and in Gaza it goes for only 10 lira. The average price of a kilo of beef in Egypt is 60 lira – while in besieged Gaza it goes for five lira. A tray of eggs in Egypt is 19 lira, while in Gaza it is only 10 lira.”

“This comparison of prices between Egypt and Gaza, which has been under siege for three years, as they say, shows that life under siege is cheaper, more convenient, and easier...

“So what siege are they talking about? Does the siege cause prices to drop? And how are goods flowing into Gaza despite the siege? ...

“These questions are not being raised [here] in expectation of an answer from Hamas, but they are directed at all Hamas supporters in Egypt who see nothing wrong with accusing their own country of betraying the Palestinian cause and of starving the helpless Palestinian people with the oppressive siege on Gaza.

“If this is what it’s like in Gaza under siege, then the Egyptian people, who have been burned by the fire of prices and who peel off part of their limited income to save the besieged Gaza residents, [should] pray to Allah to smite them with [such a] siege, if the siege will lead to lower prices and make it possible for every common citizen to buy eggs, meat, and poultry like the Gaza residents do.”

***

KUWAITI COLUMNIST: “PRO-GAZA ACTIVISTS ARE NOTHING BUT TERRORISTS”

In a follow-up to his June 3, 2010 article on the Gaza flotilla, Kuwaiti columnist Abdallah Al-Hadlaq, who writes in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Watan, wrote another column on the issue. In it, he wrote of the “contrast between the global interest in what is happening in Gaza with the disregard for other, graver, humanitarian crises across the world” and added that “the activists working to remove the siege on Gaza were not peace activists but terrorists disguised as humanitarians, and that therefore Israel was fully entitled to defend itself against them.”

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

FORGED PASSPORTS BACK IN THE NEWS

I wonder what outrage the British government will express concerning the latest reports of forged British passports (Story below). Will furious denunciations be made, and senior Russian diplomats in the U.K. be deported?

Or is such action only reserved for Israelis – even when there is no evidence Israel was involved in the Dubai incident earlier this year, for which a senior Israeli diplomat was expelled from London? (This set the precedent for similar expulsions of Israeli diplomats in recent weeks from Australia and elsewhere.)

The Daily Telegraph (London) reports:

Russian spy “held fake British passport”.

At least one of the 10 people arrested in the United States for allegedly being a Russian spy held a fake British passport, according to U.S. government papers.

It is alleged that the 10 secret agents of Russia’s intelligence service, the SVR, were tasked with gleaning intelligence on nuclear weapons, foreign policy and Congressional politics.

… U.S. Department of Justice papers said that Tracey Lee Ann Foley travelled on a “fraudulent British passport prepared for her by the SVR”. Foley was arrested in Boston on Monday.

… It also emerged that one of the 10 was in contact with a subsidiary group of Oxford University.

… Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general who was a Soviet spy in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s under “legal” cover as a diplomat and Radio Moscow correspondent, said he believed the project was more ambitious than similar attempts by spies during the cold war.

He told The New York Times: “It’s a return to the old days, but even in the worst years of the cold war, I think there were no more than 10 illegals in the U.S., probably fewer.”

***

For past dispatches on Dubai and discussion of the widespread use of forged passports by espionage agencies, please see:

* Is Israel the only suspect over Dubai death?
* Journalism 007: Reporting fiction as fact
* Only one group could be behind the latest hit -- the Irish Jews

 

YET MORE EVIDENCE OF CREEPING ISRAELI AUTHORITARIANISM

Not.

Israel’s best-selling daily Yediot Ahronot reports:

TA city folds, will allow marijuana rally
June 27, 2010

(English translation by the newspaper)

Following a Yediot Ahronot report on the Tel Aviv Municipality’s refusal to allow a rally for the legalization of marijuana, the city on Sunday announced that after reexamining the situation, it has decided that there are no grounds to forbid the rally, pending police approval.

Earlier Sunday, Yediot Ahronot reported that the Tel Aviv Municipality was placing hurdles for Liora Gelber, who hoped to organize a rally in Rabin Square.

According to Gelber, “The police did not give us any trouble, but the municipality said it would cost us NIS 16,600 (about $4,300) to hold the rally at Rabin Square,” said Gelber.

“We began to raise the money, and various artists confirmed their participation. The notice we received today infuriated us. The municipality did not even give us a reason for why it is not authorizing the rally.”

“We live in a democratic country and we have the right to protest,” she said.

In response to a Yediot Ahronot appeal, the municipality said, “All mass events in public places in the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo require permits from the city and the police. The matter was reexamined by the city’s legal advisor, who ruled that there are no grounds to forbid the gathering/protest aimed at changing the existing law on the use of cannabis.”

 

UNRWA CONDEMNS SECOND ATTACK ON GAZA CHILDREN’S SUMMER CAMPS

Since many “peace activists” profess not to believe reports of the kind regularly carried on these dispatches, about increasing Hamas repression in Gaza, perhaps they will take note of this latest press statement from UNRWA, the UN agency, which has a long track record of condemning Israel. (The poor English in some sentences in this press release are UNRWA’s, not mine.)

UNRWA
Press Release
Gaza
28 June 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UNRWA condemns second attack on Summer Games locations

At 02.30 on Monday 28 June 2010, a group of approximately 25 armed and masked men attacked and set fire to and destroyed an UNRWA Summer Games recreation facility on the beach in Nuseirat, Gaza. The guards at the facility were physically assaulted and handcuffed but they were not injured. Fortunately no one else was hurt in the incident.

The attack is the second of its kind in a month, following on from an attack on Sunday 23 May 2010 when a group of approximately 30 armed and masked men attacked and set fire to an UNRWA Summer Games recreation facility then under construction on the beach in Gaza city.

UNRWA’s Director of Operations in Gaza, John Ging, condemning this second “cowardly and despicable act” said that “the overwhelming success of UNRWA’s Summer Games has once again obviously frustrated those that are intolerant of children’s happiness.” He went on to say that “this is another example of the growing levels of extremism in Gaza and further evidence, if that were needed, of the urgency to change the circumstances on the ground that are generating such extremism.” Ging said that UNRWA’s response would be simple:

“UNRWA will rebuild the camp immediately and will continue with its Summer Games program which is so important for the physical and psychological wellbeing of Gaza’s children, so many of whom are stressed and traumatized by their circumstances and experiences.” Ging also complimented the emergency services who were quick to respond and ensured that the damage caused by the attack was minimised.

UNRWA’s Summer Games, conducted for the fourth year with the full support and involvement of the community, is the largest recreation program for Gaza’s children providing a diversified set of activities including sports, swimming, arts and crafts, theatre and drama. The Summer Games commenced on 12 June and will run through 5 August, providing 1,200 summer camps for over 250,000 refugee children across the Gaza Strip.

For more information please contact:

Sami Mshasha
UNRWA Arabic Spokesperson
Mobile: +972-(0)54-216-8295
Office: +972 (0)2-589-0724
s.mshasha@unrwa.org

Chris Gunness
UNRWA English Spokesperson
Mobile: +972-(0)54-240-2659
c.gunness@unrwa.org

 

SUDDEN SILENCE

Chris Gunness, the UNRWA spokesman who wrote the press release above, is a former senior BBC Foreign correspondent and a good friend of the BBC’s Chief Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen. (See here.)

So why aren’t the BBC and other media reporting on this major attack by Hamas on a summer camp for their own (Palestinian) children, in anything like the way they report on the slightest incident concerning Gaza which involves Israel?

Why aren’t they reporting the views of many Gazan inhabitants who tell local media that they are nostalgic for the “good old days” when Israel ruled the Strip and women were free to wear jeans or sing or dance – or speak freely?

(I am not, of course, advocating a return to the Israeli occupation of Gaza. I am, however, making it absolutely clear that for the interests of Palestinians, Israelis and all who want peace, international journalists and human rights groups should stop covering up for the repressive acts of Hamas, and Western governments should stop pumping money into Gaza in a way that bolsters Hamas rule there.)

***

For a report on the previous attack on the UNRWA summer camp, please see notes 6, 7 and 8 in this dispatch:

6. Who burned down the summer camp? (No, it wasn’t a rampaging mob of American Jews on an AIPAC lobbying trip.)
7. “A summer program of arts and sport” unacceptable to Islamists
8. “Teaching schoolgirls dancing and immorality”

 

WOMEN IN GAZA HAVE ACID SPLASHED IN THEIR FACES FOR DRESSING “IMMODESTLY”

I attach an article below by Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, who is a long-time subscriber to this email list. He writes in relation to the forthcoming “women’s flotilla to Gaza”:

Here is some last-minute advice to the group of women who are planning to organize another aid ship to break the Israeli naval blockade on the Gaza Strip: Do not forget to wear the hijab and cover other parts of your body before you arrive at the Hamas-controlled area. And make sure that none of you is seen laughing in public.

Otherwise, you are likely to meet the same fate as other Palestinian women who have been physically and verbally abused by fundamentalist Muslims in the Gaza Strip such as those who have had acid splashed in their faces for allegedly being dressed “immodestly” or for being seen in public with a male who is not a husband, father, brother or son.

… It is ironic (and sad) that some of the women who are behind the new flotilla adventure come from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Kuwait – countries that not only have killed Palestinians, but also continue to oppress them and impose severe restrictions on them.

… Have the Kuwaiti women on the planned trip ever thought about protesting against the mistreatment of Palestinians in their emirate?

Following the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwait expelled some 400,000 Palestinians who were part of a thriving immigrant community in the emirate. The Palestinians were being punished because of the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait a year earlier.

Most recently, Palestinians complained that Kuwait denied entry permits for members of a Palestinian team of disabled athletes who were supposed to take part in an international tournament in the emirate….

(Abu Toameh’s full article is below.)

 

ISLAMISTS MURDER SOCCER FANS IN SOMALIA FOR WATCHING THE WORLD CUP

In their latest attack on fellow Muslims, the radical Islamists that have gained control of parts of Somalia and imposed strict Islamic rule there, have shot dead two soccer fans solely because they were watching a World Cup match. The Islamists stormed into the house, and fired at the TV, condemning the group that had gathered inside for watching soccer. Two were then immediately taken outside and summarily executed and 10 others arrested.

The Islamists have banned the viewing of the World Cup as “un-Islamic.”

Experts say that the Islamists who run parts of Somalia have already banned music and dancing, and are now targeting the participation in and watching of “secular” sports.

Predictably, neither the World Cup governing body, FIFA, nor many Western “human rights” groups, have condemned this murder of sports fans in the name of imposing Sharia law.

***

Tom Gross adds: For a report of Hamas breaking up music concerts for youth in Gaza, please see this dispatch:
No Joke: UN adds Iran to Women’s Rights Commission (& Hamas extends crackdown on fun)

***

For a report on the double standards of FIFA – which does condemn one country (yes, you guessed it, Israel), please see this article I wrote shortly before the last World Cup. (That article is also carried at the end of this dispatch.)

 

UK TIMES: HUGE INCREASE IN BRITISH INMATES CONVERTING TO ISLAM FOR JAIL PERKS

The Times of London reports:

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, warned last week that some convicted criminals are converting to Islam in order to receive benefits only available to practicing Muslims and to gain the protection of powerful Muslim gangs.

The number of Muslim prisoners in the UK has risen dramatically from 2,513 in 1994, or 5% of the population, to 9,795 in 2008, or 11%.

All prisons offer a halal menu, which some inmates see as better than the usual choices. Some converts admitted that they had changed faith because they got more time out of the cells to go to Friday prayers.

In some of the most secure jails, the size of the Muslim population is well above average. Two years ago, Muslim inmates accounted for a third of prisoners in Whitemoor, Cambridgeshire, and a quarter of inmates in Long Lartin in Worcestershire.

Inmates convert after learning about Islam from other inmates, to obtain support and protection in a group with a powerful identity and for material advantages. One inmate said: “I’ve got loads of close brothers here. They share with you, we look out for each other.”

***

Tom Gross adds: There is, of course, nothing wrong with persons converting to Islam, except that we know from many reported cases that terrorist leaders are deliberately recruiting from among new converts to Islam among the prison population in Britain and elsewhere. Following their conversion in prison, several have been brainwashed into carrying out acts of terror. Among several such examples, was the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a transatlantic air flight. (Reid is the reason that many of us still have to take our shoes off in security checks at airports.)

 

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH APOLOGIZES FOR “DISPARAGING AND INACCURATE” ATTACK

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York, today issued a statement apologizing for the “inappropriate, disparaging, inaccurate, condemnatory, intemperate personal attacks” on gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, after Tatchell criticized Islamic treatment of gays.

At the end of this dispatch, I attach press statements from Tatchell and Roth.

Israel is still waiting for an apology from Human Rights Watch for the catalog of lies they told about Israel, which lead to HRW board member Richard Goldstone to write the UN’s Goldstone Report. I have detailed the behavior of HRW toward Israel in a series of dispatches, including:

* HRW senior staff compare Israeli conduct to the 3.5 million dead and raped in Congo
* Israel criticizes Human Rights Watch for its fundraising from Saudi regime
* Nazi scandal engulfs Human Rights Watch - at last covered properly by a major paper
* Sarah Leah Whitson, who runs the Human Rights Watch section charged with assessing the human rights records of countries in the Mideast and North Africa, has a poster of “Paradise Now”, a movie that attempts to humanize Palestinian suicide bombers, on her office door.

 

I attach three articles and two press releases below. The one article not previously mentioned above is: “Netanyahu to ‘human rights’ activists: Sail to Tehran”.

Activists from various countries are planning to sail several more flotillas to Gaza in the coming weeks, in spite of the fact there is no shortage of food, medicine, or indeed luxury goods, in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on human rights activists who participate in Gaza-bound flotillas to sail to Tehran instead, where he says real human rights violations exist.

(Among previous dispatches on the recent Gaza Flotilla incident, please see here and here.)

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

U.S. WARSHIPS AND ISRAELI VESSEL SAIL THROUGH THE SUEZ CANAL

A fleet of a dozen U.S. warships including the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman have reportedly sailed through the Suez Canal under heavy Egyptian guard. They were reportedly joined by at least one Israeli vessel. The fleet is the largest military armada in years to head from the Mediterranean toward the Red Sea.

The London-based Arabic paper Al-Quds Al-Arabi quoted unnamed eyewitnesses saying the Egyptians had closed down the entire canal over the weekend to commercial and civilian traffic and confined Egyptian fishermen to ports in the southern lakes as a security precaution. The Israeli navy declined to comment on the report. Egyptian opposition figures were quoted as saying that the move was in preparation for a possible strike on Iran, although I think this seems unlikely in the immediate future.

In a separate development, representing a hardening of his previous stance, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told “Fox News Sunday” yesterday:

“I don’t think we’re prepared to even talk about containing a nuclear Iran. Our view still is we do not accept the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons. And our policies and our efforts are all aimed at preventing that from happening... We obviously leave all options on the table.”

 

TURKS KILL 130 KURDS

If you look extremely closely around the Western media you will find reference to the killing of Kurds by the Turkish government last week. (I attach a small item from the website of America’s CBS News below).

Of course, the Kurds are far more numerous than the Palestinians, many centuries older as a nation, are far more persecuted, both historically and today (millions are not even allowed to speak in their own language, other Kurds have been subjected to chemical warfare), and are arguably more deserving of an independent state than the Palestinians (though the Palestinians too, like around another 200 stateless people around the world, ought to have their own state if that is what they want, so long as they don’t threaten to use it as a launching pad to kill citizens of a neighboring state).

But charities like Oxfam – obsessed with demonizing the world’s Jewish state – haven’t spent tens of thousands of pounds taking out adverts in British newspapers this month highlighting the plight of the Kurds, as they have on anti-Israel ads (jointly paid for with their fellow “charities”) in British newspapers.

Nor could they seemingly care less about the over 2,000 dead and one million Uzbeks made homeless in Kyrgyzstan last week. The victims are only Sunni Muslims after all.

***

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/18/world/main6594228.shtml

Turkey: Air Raid Kills 100 Kurd Rebels in Iraq
Military Commander Says U.S. “Providing Intelligence About Kurdish Rebel Positions”

ANKARA, Turkey, June 18, 2010

Maj. Gen. Fahri Kir, the head of the military’s internal security operations, said the rebel casualties occurred in a series of raids in the Hakurk area.

Another 20 rebels were killed in northern Iraq this week, he said.

Kir said the number of rebels killed since March has exceeded 150, including 30 guerrillas killed in clashes inside Turkey. Turkish security forces have suffered 43 losses in the same period, he said.

The United States has been providing intelligence about Kurdish rebel positions, he said, in what he described as successful cooperation.

***

Tom Gross adds: The above news report makes no reference to the dozens of Kurdish civilians killed over the last month by Turkey.

 

THE EGYPTIAN BLOCKADE THAT NO-ONE REPORTS

I attach an item below from AFP, reported in The Egyptian Gazette, but not in thousands of other news outlets around the world that subscribe to AFP.

Egypt bans Gaza activists
Egyptian Gazette
June 14, 2010

RAFAH - Egypt banned hundreds of activists from Gaza, igniting protests at the Rafah border that is the only non-Israeli entry into the Palestinian enclave, a security official has said.

Hundreds of Egyptian activists headed to the Rafah border crossing on Friday (11 June) but were denied entry into the Gaza Strip, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“They spent the night in front of the crossing asking to be let in and continued protesting on Saturday (12 June),” the official said.

Authorities also denied entry to two trucks carrying humanitarian aid sent by the people of the Egyptian province of Daqahliya.

The Egyptian opposition has long campaigned against the government’s refusal to fully open the Gaza border.

***

Tom Gross adds: Egyptian border guards opened fire on Palestinians trying to cross over into Egypt this weekend, wounding several people. This was reported in Middle East media but not in most Western media.

 

TOYS IN GAZA

The world’s biggest news broadcaster, the BBC, lead its world news bulletin yesterday with a report telling its audience of up to 230 million people that there were no children’s toys in Gaza. This is just a blatant lie.

For example, here is a photo of a toy shop from a pro-Hamas newspaper in Gaza from last November:

The BBC implied to its audience in four different reports on Gaza last week that people don’t have enough food there.

Below, a photo of a Gaza supermarket taken last week:

And this from an outdoor food market in Gaza:

For other photos, please see here and here.

 

ANOTHER TEENAGER SHOT DEAD

Those in the U.S. media so quick to condemn Israel are strangely silent about deaths in America this month, like the ones mentioned below…

Mexico anger high as US Border Patrol kills teen
June 9, 2010
By Olivia Torres and Christopher Sherman

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) - Mexicans are seething over the second death of a countryman at the hands of U.S. Border Patrol agents in two weeks, an incident near downtown El Paso that is threatening to escalate tensions over migrant issues.

U.S. authorities said Tuesday a Border Patrol agent was defending himself and colleagues when he fatally shot the 15-year-old as officers came under a barrage of big stones while trying to detain illegal immigrants on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.

About 30 relatives and friends gathered late Tuesday to mourn Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereka, whose shooting Monday evening came along the border with Texas. He died on the Mexican side of the river.

“Damn them! Damn them!” sobbed Rosario Hernandez, sister of the dead teenager, at a wake in the family’s two-room adobe house on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez…

“May God forgive them [the U.S. border agents] because I know nothing will happen” to them, his mother Maria Guadalupe Huereka said.

Above the casket was a photo of the youth wearing his soccer uniform and his junior high school grade cards, which showed A’s and B’s. His mother said he was a good student who never got in trouble. He was the youngest of five children, played on two soccer teams and had just finished junior high school, she said…

The boy was shot once near the eye, Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state Attorney General’s office, said… Sandoval said Mexican investigators were questioning three teenagers who were with the victim at the time of the shooting.

The boy’s sister, Rosario, told Associated Press Television News that her brother was playing with several friends and did not plan to cross the border…

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department said its records indicate that 17 Mexicans have been killed or wounded by U.S. immigration authorities so far this year…

***

Tom Gross adds: You can read the full story here.

I am waiting for Obama administration officials, the EU and the UN to call for an international investigation into this as they have so vehemently demanded of Israel…

 

WILSON CENTER HONORS TURKISH FOREIGN MINISTER WITH “PUBLIC SERVICE AWARD”

The U.S. taxpayer-funded Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, headed by former Congressman Lee Hamilton, presented its annual award for public service last Thursday to Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Davutaoglu “personifies the attributes we seek to honor at the Woodrow Wilson Center,” Hamilton said at the event, adding that his “contributions have been numerous and significant.”

Among those “contributions” not mentioned by Hamilton was the Turkish foreign minister’s statement a week earlier that the Israeli incident aboard the Gaza flotilla “is like 9/11.” (And Hamilton, who serves on President Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, was formerly the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission.)

Davutoglu (below) was also a key figure in the Brazilian-Turkish drive to head off new U.N. sanctions on Iran, an agreement the Obama administration has dismissed as inadequate and unhelpful.

House Foreign Affairs Middle East subcommittee chairman Gary Ackerman, D-NY, wrote to Hamilton to express his “deep concern and dismay” over the award to Davutoglu.

“Turkey’s foreign policy under Foreign Minister Davutoglu’s leadership is rife with illegality, irresponsibility and hypocrisy,” Ackerman wrote, citing Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide, its occupation of northern Cyprus, its vote against new Iran sanctions, and its ongoing “demonizing” of Israel as exhibited in its latest form during the flotilla crisis.

Rep. Eliot Engel, D-NY, called recent actions by Turkey “disgraceful.”

The Wilson center was created in 1968 by an act of Congress as a private/public partnership, and U.S. taxpayers contribute about a third of its annual budget.

In a statement, the Wilson Center explained, “Awardees are not chosen for their political views ... and we do not endorse the views of Woodrow Wilson Awardees on specific issues.”

 

ORGANIZERS OF LEBANESE FLOTILLA PLANNED TO SAIL SOON FOR GAZA “HAVE TIES TO HIZBULLAH”

The organizers of a new flotilla that is planning to set sail soon from Lebanon to Gaza has ties to Hizbullah and to those involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, according to this report:

Tom Gross adds: The Lebanese government said yesterday that it will not allow the flotilla to embark for Gaza. The Lebanese Labor Minister reiterated that “Lebanese law requires official permit for every ship leaving Lebanese ports.”

 

THE USEFUL INFIDELS (GERMAN BRANCH)

Those on the previous Turkish flotilla have ties to Milli Gorus (Islamist nationalists) and BBP (Turkish nationalist extremists) according to this German TV report from ARD, the respected German public broadcaster. Among other things, the BBP are wanted for the murder of a Christian Armenian journalist.

ARD questions why German “peace activists” aligned themselves with Islamist extremists.

(You will almost certainly never see this kind of report on the British, French or American public broadcasters.)

These German “peace activists” (in the communist era Lenin would have referred to them as “useful idiots” – today we might call them “useful infidels”) aboard the Mavi Marmari claim not to have noticed the 400 Islamic radicals, who held battle rallies like this the day before their clash with Israelis. See video below.

 

NEW VIDEO: THE BRIEFING GIVEN TO THE “PEACE ACTIVISTS” THE DAY BEFORE THEY FOUGHT ISRAELIS

Please see this newly-released video footage, taken on board the Mavi Marmari on May 30, 2010, in which IHH leader Bulent Yildirim clearly instructs his followers to throw any Israelis overboard. His speech was made in Turkish and repeated in Arabic by a translator.

 

CASUALTIES ON BOARD THE MAVI MARMARA NOW CONCLUSIVELY IDENTIFIED AS ISLAMIST RADICALS

Almost all of the casualties on board the Mavi Marmara have now been identified as members of Turkish Islamist organizations, and about half of those killed had publically declared their wish to die as “martyrs,” according to new findings by the well-connected and reliable Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (the director and staff of which subscribe to this email list). You can read their new report here.

***

Here are pictures of the expired medical supplies the Turks were attempting to bring to Gaza.

The population of Gaza has plenty of medical supplies, given to them by Israel (and which helps to explain the above average heath enjoyed by the population of Gaza compared to the rest of the Arab world) – supplies which have not expired.

There is nothing humanitarian about the activists trying to smuggle expired medicine, which is course can be dangerous to one’s health if used, into Gaza.

 

THE THREE TENORS (OR THE THREE TERRORS)

Below is a new satirical video, featuring the leaders of Turkey, Syria and Iran (Erdogan, Assad and Ahmadinejad), that you may find amusing. It was made by Latma, which is headed by Caroline Glick, a subscriber to this email list, and who previously produced the highly popular “We Can the World” video:

***

I attach a piece below by Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and one of the leading African-American intellectuals of our age.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

RARE PRO-ISRAEL PIECES ABOUT THE “MASSACRE IN THE MED”

[Note by Tom Gross]

Amidst the torrent of anti-Israel invective in the media in recent days concerning what the front page headline of Britain’s Daily Mirror called the “Massacre In The Med,” there has been some rare pro-Israel commentary dotted around.

I attach four pieces below from Australia, Ireland and Canada, and would urge the hundreds of anti-Israel journalists who are among the thousands of subscribers to this list, to read them. I have prepared summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.

(I prepared these articles for sending several days ago, but having already sent out four dispatches on my main list and a further five mini-dispatches on my smaller list on this subject this month, I didn’t want to overburden people by sending too much at once. Previous main dispatches on the can be read here. Incidentally, in the days after I sent out this dispatch, I added various updates to it, in case you want to take a fresh look at it.)

 

UPDATE: EXTRA NOTE

Meanwhile, this is what passes for informed comment on the editorial page of the bestselling Sunday edition of the prestigious New York Times...

Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Judt and his 15 year-old-son.

 

SUMMARIES

UN ROARS INTO ACTION AT THE DIPLOMATIC EQUIVALENT OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Writing in The National Post (Canada), Rex Murphy (who is a weekly commentator on Canada’s CBC TV’s The National, and is a host on CBC Radio) says:

I don’t suppose the world needs to remember Rwanda (or Darfur, Tibet, Chechnya, North Korea, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Iran and so on) to note how sluggish in the face of imminent horror the United Nations is and can be. But… on one subject, and toward one state, the United Nations acquires a strange and uniquely transformative power. Bring Israel under its gaze and the diplomatic sloths at UN headquarters morph into the swiftest of gazelles. From lotus-eaters to adrenalin junkies in the twinkling of an eye. Quite amazing, really.

So naturally when the debacle over the so-called “freedom flotilla” – news media should be wary of letting activists choose the names of things – roared into the headlines, the UN reacted at the diplomatic equivalent of the speed of light. The Security Council issued its “condemnation,” and in a wonderful reversal of cause and effect also called for an investigation into what it had “condemned.”…

If the flotilla’s real purpose was to bring aid, then merely by complying with Israel’s request to dock at Ashdod – as five of the ships did, with no bloodshed and no international headlines – the supplies on the sixth ship would have been taken straight to Gaza…

As to the “peace activists” on that sixth ship, the ones who received the Israeli soldiers boarding the ship with bats, pipes, knives and chains – well, the video footage of the moments preceding the boarding and the boarding itself will make most rational people review their understanding of peace and activism and some of the organizations that fly the flags of these conveniently fungible designations…

 

“THE SCALE AND VENOM OF THE REACTION AGAINST ISRAEL HAS LEFT ME SPEECHLESS”

Writing on the websites of both The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) and The Age (Australia), Dvir Abramovich says:

… The speed and intensity by which the world recklessly rushed to blame Israel, and only Israel over the flotilla incident, and the scale and venom of the reaction, has left me speechless… I don’t know how to depict a world that clamours to indict Israel while exonerating its enemies, that uses double standards in promoting false and baseless accusations, and that has forgotten history so as to use the language of the Holocaust to portray Israelis as the epitome of evil. I don’t know what to make of a world that is silent when Israelis die in homicidal bombings or rocket attacks, or a Europe that tries to seek forgiveness for its colonial past by defaming Israel time and again and is silent when atrocities are committed against Israelis. I am still shocked by intellectual and cultural figures who ceaselessly denounce Israel, leading the charge for boycott and divestment, and seek Israel’s isolation.

It’s hard to understand why countries, journalists and commentators have turned a blind-eye to the obvious provocative nature of the flotilla, the role Hamas plays in the suffering of Gaza, or to its charter that calls for the destruction of Israel, or to the fact that when Egypt opened its borders with Gaza shortly after the incident, thousands of residents massed at the border, hankering to get out – only to be stopped by Hamas. It’s hard to fathom why TV channels, radio stations and newspapers have sought to paint a one-sided picture that takes no account of Israel’s account and defensive needs.

But beyond the actual [flotilla] incident, the blistering demonization, and delegitimization of Israel, and the viciousness of such vilification by the media, and international governments who should know better, is mind-blowing…

How many journalists have explained that both Israel and Egypt have imposed a naval blockade of Gaza, and that Israel did so to prevent the re-arming of the Iranian-backed Hamas? How many journalists have noted that no country allows ships to enter its waters without inspection for illicit goods of military weapons and ammunition? … How many journalists have alerted readers to the brutal Hamas regime in Gaza that is stockpiling weapons for eventual targeting of Israeli cities, violently puts down any political opponents, and is slowly imposing fundamentalist Islamic law? …

Consider that no similar condemnation and media attention has been applied to North Korea’s recent sinking of a South Korean boat and its monstrous regime, or to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and oppression of its citizens, or to the genocide in Darfur and Congo, or to Zimbabwe’s dictator, or to the Russian invasion of Georgia, or the human rights abuse in Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or to the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and Tibet, or to India’s military occupation of Muslim Kashmir. And the list goes on.

As one commentator observed, these dictators must be sitting back and laughing at the world’s reaction to the flotilla episode given their crimes. Or as Tom Gross notes about the recent killing of an al-Qaeda leader, “plus his wife, three of his daughters, his granddaughter, and other men, women, and children” by an American missile strike: “No one seems to be getting hysterical about this anywhere in the world. Now imagine if Israel had been involved…”

And what was Fairfax Media’s journalist Paul McCeough thinking when he described Israeli soldiers as hyenas. Did he not feel that such a description was loaded with inflammatory bias? Could he not think of another turn of phrase? Such language is extravagantly prejudicial and hurtful, drawn from vocabulary and a time we thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history… Such incitement only fuels anti-Jewish sentiment…

 

“ISRAEL HAS AT LEAST SIX MILLION EXTRA REASONS”

Writing in The Belfast Telegraph (Northern Ireland), Lindy McDowell says:

… Even before it set sail for Gaza, the “freedom flotilla,” we were assured, was carrying “humanitarian aid”. Those on board were “peace activists”. “International peace activists” to boot. God, how could you be against anything in that lot…

But Israel unfortunately didn’t actually have a choice. Gaza, where the boats were headed, is under the control of the terrorist grouping Hamas which has been responsible for pounding Israeli towns (and Israeli civilians) with increasingly sophisticated missiles for years…

All of us in the West live in countries which maintain a similar right to ensure the safety of their own civilian populations. Most countries have reasons why they would not be confident to leave this role up to the international community. Israel has at least six million extra reasons…

According to news reports, we now know, however, that the first soldier to rappel on board was battered unconscious. Three Israeli soldiers were disarmed and taken hostage. When found, reports say, one commando was chained up with a gun held to his head. Pictures of the soldiers show them bloodied and beaten. One was shot…

There are obviously two sides to this story. Not that we’ve been getting much of a whiff of that in the Western media. The language, never mind the actions, of the “activists” goes unchallenged.

Gaza is “the biggest open air prison in the world”. (Um, where does that leave North Korea?)…

 

MESHAAL TELLS GUARDIAN: I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT ROUND OF “FIGHTING WITH ISRAEL”

In an article in The Irish Independent (the first part of which is critical of Israel), Eamon Delaney notes:

In a Guardian interview, published on the very day of the flotilla-storming, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal almost jauntily looked forward to the next round of “fighting with Israel”. “It won’t be a picnic,” he said and reiterated his organisation’s complete unwillingness to recognise the original Israeli state. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to be funded by the Syrians and Iranians, anxious to stoke bloodshed, but suitably far away enough not to suffer the consequences.

With proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needn’t feel too disappointed that he hasn’t yet got nuclear weapons so that he can fulfil his repeatedly stated ambition of “wiping Israel off the map”. (And still Western critics say Israel should get over its hang-up with the ‘holocaust’!)…

The reality is that Hamas should be blamed for bringing ruin and destruction to the people of Gaza. Hamas now enforces an authoritarian regime, and has imposed a repressive Islamic culture…

***

(Tom Gross adds: There are other Irish journalists who wish to be fair to Israel too, such as Eoghan Harris, a subscriber to this email list and a columnist for the Sunday Independent, who attacks the “idiotic anti-Israeli left” in Ireland’s mainstream media.)

[Summaries above by Tom Gross]

ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOONS IN AN ILLITERATE REGION

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

The media in countries like Britain, France, Sweden and Greece are not alone in voicing vile reactions – often replete with lies, and sometimes spilling over into blatant anti-Semitism – to the recent Israeli operation to thwart hundreds of armed Turkish Islamists heading to join Hamas in Gaza.

The Arab world too – including supposedly moderate countries at peace with Israel – has produced a number of repulsive cartoons about Israel and Jews. Several, which appeared in mainstream Arab newspapers, compared Israelis to Nazis. A large number of people remain illiterate in Arab countries (most governments there have made little use of their vast oil wealth to educate their citizens, and especially women) so cartoons are particularly influential in Arab countries.

I attach a selection of cartoons below. (Research courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League, the senior staff of which subscribe to this email list. The commentaries and headings below are mine.)

Most print media in the Arab world are under the full or partial control of the ruling regimes.

 

SAUDI ARABIA: SWASTIKA ON AN ISRAELI FLAG

Al-Iqtisadiyya, June 2, 2010

(Reminder: Saudi Arabia, which is one of the world’s most oppressive states, is often referred to as “moderate” by the very same New York Times editorial board that berates Israel on an almost daily basis.)

 

KUWAIT: DEFACING THE STAR OF DAVID

Al-Jarida, June 2, 2010

Al-Jarida, June 1, 2010

(Reminder: When Western cartoonists dared to draw Mohammed, over 200 people were killed in riots worldwide. Yet Muslim cartoonists have no trouble defacing the Star of David, and no one complains.)

 

LEBANON: BLOOD AND FANGS

Al-Balad, June 2, 2010

Al-Balad, June 1, 2010

(The headline says: “19 were killed in the Israeli Massacre against the Freedom Flotilla” – as is so often the case, journalists simply invent numbers.)

 

OMAN: HASIDIC JEWS AND MENORAHS

Oman, another “ally” of the United States, has no problem insulting religious Jews and using the Jewish holy symbol, the menorah, to represent a murder weapon.

Al-Watan, June 2, 2010

Al-Watan, May 30, 2010

Oman, June 1, 2010

 

EGYPT: THE COUNTRY WHOSE BLOCKADE ON GAZA IS MORE SEVERE THAN ISRAEL’S

Al-Yaum as-Sabe, June 1, 2010

 

QATAR: HOME OF AL-JAZEERA

Al-Watan, June 2, 2010

(This stereotypical hook-nosed, black-hatted Jew holds a bloody machete in one hand and an assault rifle in another, while his lower body is composed of tentacles. Cartoonists in Nazi Germany also drew Jews with octopus-like tentacles – and as lice.)

“RACHEL CORRIE IS ON HER WAY”

By Tom Gross

I have had leaked to me emails from the boat “Rachel Corrie” which is fast approaching the coast of Gaza and due to try and land there this (Saturday) morning at about 10 am local time (about 6 hours from now).

The Israeli authorities have pleaded with the organizers to land the boat in the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod, where Israel has promised to offload any supplies from the boat (other than those that can be used to build rockets and other weapons) and take them over land into Gaza. The boat sailed from Ireland (paid for largely by Malaysian government money) and Israel has promised that representatives of the activists, the UN and the Irish government, can observe the whole process and enter Gaza by land with the supplies, once they have been checked.

But the latest email sent from the boat, the subject line of which is “Rachel Corrie is on Her Way,” makes clear that “We are on our way to Gaza and there is no way we are going to Ashdod.”

REMEMBERING THE VICTIMS

Among those on board the “Rachel Corrie” are various journalists, including a three-member camera crew from Malaysia TV3.

This might be an appropriate moment to remember who the real Rachel Corrie was, and who were the victims of the Palestinian terror groups she did so much to support.

Below is my article “The Forgotten Rachels” published in The Spectator in 2005.

It would be better to read it here if you can, in order to look at the pictures on the page, including the photos of the Ethiopian-Jewish child victims at the foot of the page.

Greta Berlin, the organizer of the “Free Gaza" movement behind the “Rachel Corrie” boat this week admitted to The New York Times that she doesn’t believe Israel should exist.

 

Thanks to Mark Steyn (“There’s never been a better time to read Tom Gross’ piece on ‘The Forgotten Rachels’,” says Steyn), Chas Newkey-Burden and other commentators for recommending this piece today.

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

TURKISH PAPER PUBLISHES PHOTOS OF STABBED, BEATEN ISRAELI SOLDIERS

Photos taken by the Turkish “peace” activists on the Mavi Marmari boat, published in the leading Turkish paper Hurriyet, show Israeli soldiers bruised, beaten and bleeding having been attacked by “peace” activists on the boat. They also back up Israeli accounts that there were attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers (possibly creating more Gilad Shalits), and put paid to the lies being told by British, French and Irish “peace” activists day after day last week in European and Middle Eastern media that no Israelis were attacked on the boat and that “the IDF is lying” when they said they were.

More photos here from Hurriyet’s website.

The Israeli army has consistently said that it only gave permission for troops to fire some time after they had boarded the boat, once the lives of Israeli troops – who had tried to peaceably reach an agreement with the activists – were put at severe risk.

The Turkish media don’t run the fabricated accounts of the Western press saying the Israelis “shot from the helicopter and murdered civilians within seconds of landing on deck.” Instead they mock the IDF for being so reluctant to use lethal force for so long even when attacked.

Respectable Western journalists apparently continue to believe the American and British run “Free Gaza” movement is telling the truth when it says in its press release that the Israelis “began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep.”

***

Update, June 6, 2010

It appears that Reuters may have deliberately cropped the Hurriyet photo so as to remove the knife that the “peace activist” was holding (Reuters photo, below, right). If so, it wouldn’t be the first time Reuters had been caught altering photos to make them less sympathetic to Israel. Reuters did so, for example, in the 2006 Hizbullah-Israel war.

(For background on Reuters, please see here.)

Update, June 7, 2010:

Reuters has acknowledged photo cropping to remove the knife from a “peace activist” and Reuters has restored the knife to the photo following pressure from key people in media and business, including people who tell me they were informed about the Reuters knife cropping yesterday by this weblist / website.

***

Update, June 8, 2010:

The Israeli paper Ha’aretz asked me for a quote on the matter, here:

www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/reuters-under-fire-for-removing-weapons-blood-from-images-of-gaza-flotilla-1.294780

Political commentator Tom Gross told Ha’aretz that “this isn’t the first time Reuters had been caught altering photos to make them less sympathetic to Israel. They did so, for example, in the 2006 Lebanon war.”

“Everyone makes mistakes, including journalists, but every time Reuters says it makes a mistake, it does so to Israel’s detriment, and this looks suspiciously like a deliberate pattern.”

“The father of Julius Reuter – the German Jew who founded Reuters – was a rabbi. He must be turning in his grave at how Reuters if helping to stir up delegtimization against the Jewish state.”

***

The Ha’aretz piece has been picked up elsewhere during the course of the day, for example, here in The San Francisco Sentinel: www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=76546

And for example, here in the influential magazine The Week: http://theweek.com/article/index/203829/reuters-fauxtogate-scandal

 

AMERICA’S MOST SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: JEWS BACK TO GERMANY

Helen Thomas, the White House correspondent for the Hearst newspaper chain (publishers of 53 newspapers), is one of the most senior journalists in America. Last week she said Jews “must go back home to live in Germany and Poland”.

Photo below, Jews “at home in Germany”: Bergen-Belsen death camp

 

NEWS REPORTER OR POLITICAL ACTIVIST?

Here is Helen Thomas attacking White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs for America’s initial reaction to Monday’s events off the coast of Israel. This is a press conference and Thomas is meant to be one of America’s leading journalists, but she once again reveals her sympathies for Israel’s enemies. (At least she is open about her prejudices. I have heard plenty of other foreign reporters say repulsive things about Israelis – and about Jews in general – in the privacy of post-press conference gatherings in Jerusalem.)

Helen Thomas has been virulently anti-Israeli for years. Here she is, for example, putting the Hizbullah case to George W. Bush’s press secretary Tony Snow:

In spite of this a number of members of the White House press corps have defended her over her recent “Jews back to Germany” remarks.

President Barack Obama is said to be among those who is a fan of Thomas.

Update, June 7, 2010:

Helen Thomas forced to resign.

 

HUMANITARIAN AID?

Here is new footage of the weapons captured from the al-Qaeda-linked Islamist “peace activists” on the boat Mavi Marmara.

They include plenty of knives (the really nasty ones used to cut people rather than steak), gas masks, body armor, night-vision equipment for raids from Gaza to kill Israelis, and electric saws, of the kind Hamas routinely uses for torturing Palestinian political opponents in Gaza.

 

WHILE ISRAEL ENGAGED FLOTILLA, HAMAS RAIDED GAZA NGOS

The following is a press statement sent by the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Robert Serry. (So biased are the media, that almost none have reported it.)

For immediate release

3 June 2010, Jerusalem

I am deeply concerned at reports from Gaza that Hamas has broken into a number of NGO offices in Gaza City and Rafah in recent days and closed them down, confiscating their materials and equipment in the process. This targeting of NGOs, including UN partner organizations, is unacceptable, violating accepted norms of a free society and harming the Palestinian people. The de facto authorities must cease such repressive steps and allow the re-opening of these civil society institutions without delay.

(Tom Gross adds: One of the few to mention this is the UN’s own website.)

 

WASHINGTON POST: GAZA PHARMACIES LOOK AS WELL-STOCKED AS THOSE IN THE U.S.

As anyone who follows the Middle East closely knows, Israel supplies Gaza with ample goods. Indeed the standard of living there is higher than it is in many other areas of the Arab world – or in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. For example, 20 per cent of all Gazans own a personal computer (i.e. an average of more than one per family).

An outstandingly ignorant commentator, The Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens, today writes (in a piece flagged at the top of the front page of The Financial Times under the heading “Israeli power is now the enemy of peace”) that Palestinians are denied adequate food and water in Gaza.

At least some American journalists attempt to tell the truth about Israel.

The Washington Post Middle East correspondent reported yesterday: “If you walk down Gaza City’s main thoroughfare – Salah al-Din Street – grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.”

“When Western people come, they have this certain image of Gaza,” Omar Shaban, an economist who heads Pal-Think for Strategic Studies in Gaza, told The Washington Post. “We have microwaves in our homes, not only me, everybody. If you go to a refugee camp, the house is bad, but the people and the equipment are very modern. The problem is the public infrastructure.”

Israel has never had a problem with anyone who might want to supply Gaza with goods. Israel does have an issue with those who would allow the unfettered entry into Gaza of weapons and militants (of the kind on the Mavi Marmara) which would make a future war with Israel much more likely.

(To see photos – from the Palestinian press in Gaza – of how there is plenty of food in Gaza, please click here and scroll down the page.)

 

LEADING FRENCH ANTI-TERROR JUDGE: TURKISH ORGANIZERS OF GAZA FLOTILLA TIED TO AL-QAEDA

“The Turkish Islamic charity behind a flotilla of aid ships that was raided by Israeli forces on its way to Gaza had ties to terrorism networks, including a 1999 al-Qaeda plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, France's former top anti-terrorism judge said Wednesday (June 2, 2010).

The Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, had “clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad,” former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told The Associated Press.

Bruguiere led the French judiciary’s counterterrorism unit for nearly two decades before retiring in 2007. “They were basically helping al-Qaeda when (Osama) bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil,” he said.

 

OFFSPRING OF BIN LADEN MENTOR WERE ON MAVI MARMARI

Reliable Palestinian sources have revealed that among the activists who were onboard the Mavi Marmari were the grandson and son-in-law of Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the radical teacher and mentor of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Azzam’s 19-year-old grandson, Muhammad, was accompanied by his father, Abdullah Anas, who is married to the sheikh’s daughter, Summaya. Another grandson, Ahmed, 17, is planning to join the next convoy to Gaza.

In a speech he made while in Brooklyn, Azzam urged his followers to wage jihad in the U.S. He explained that jihad “means fighting only, fighting with the sword.”

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Azzam moved to Afghanistan declaring that “jihad to the death” was fard ayn [a personal obligation] for all Muslims.

He later convinced his friend and long-time associate, bin Laden, to come to Afghanistan and join the jihad.

Azzam’s trademark slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues.” He was killed by a bomb blast in his car in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1989.

His daughter, who lives in London, said she was proud to be raising her children in the path of their grandfather.

She told the Safa news agency that her husband phoned her on Monday evening to inform her that he and Muhammad had not been hurt in the confrontation between IDF soldiers and some of the activists.

Summaya added: I was prepared to “sacrifice myself and my five sons as martyrs for the sake of Allah. This is not much and we will give until the last drop of blood.”

***

AFGHAN VETERAN ON MAVI MARMARA

Further sources reveal that Azzam’s son-in-law, who is listed amongst the British participants under his birth name, Boudjema Bounoua, was himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a senior figure in the Afghan jihad, where he fought for several years.

He is credited with establishing the Makhtab al-Kidmat, which brought Arab fighters to Afghanistan and is generally seen as the forerunner of al-Qaeda. After Afghanistan he is said to have become a senior figure in the Algerian FIS before settling in Britain.

 

NOT A LOVE BOAT

On Wednesday evening, Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Mavi Marama “was no “Love Boat.”

This is how many in Israel expressed agreement with Netanyahu:

I suggest you watch this short video through to the end.

(For the younger, non-Americans on this list, the Love Boat was a popular TV drama series.)

 

SURREALISM TODAY

Cartoon by Nate Beeler, of The Washington Examiner.

 

THE GUARDIAN, ONCE AGAIN HINTING THAT JEWS ARE NAZIS

The British paper The Guardian has been running headlines such as “British survivor tells of Israeli assault on Gaza aid ship” and speaking of “survivors” – the latest in a long line of hints that Israel is carrying out some kind of Holocaust.

The Guardian (several editors of which subscribe to this email list) has previously been criticized by myself and others for running cartoons comparing Israelis with Fascists. Their cartoonists have perhaps now backed off from doing so (at least for the time being), but instead are making almost as offensive and utterly ridiculous comparisons between these Islamists and the plight of biblical Jews.

 

EVEN THE REGIONAL PRESS ARE OBSESSED WITH COVERING ISRAEL

Here, for example, is the beginning of a lead story today (Friday, June 4, 2010) from The Leicester Mercury (a paper published in the British midlands):

A Leicestershire man has described the horror of seeing people shot and killed around him on an aid boat bound for Gaza.

Ismail Patel said he saw a man shot dead in front of him, as bullets rained down from a helicopter.

The 47-year-old optician from Oadby was speaking of the traumatic events which saw hundreds of activists clashing with Israeli commandos on a fleet of six ships.

... Kevin Ovenden is an aide to the former MP George Galloway and was travelling with Mr Patel on the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara.

Speaking to the Mercury from another Istanbul hotel, he said: “The word horrific is over-used but it truly was horrific. Myself, Ismail and other Britons saw people shot directly through their heads with live rounds so hard that they burst open their skulls.”

***

Tom Gross adds: If Israel was prepared to use fire from the helicopter as Patel claims, why on earth was it necessary for the IDF soldiers to be beaten up on the boat?

The Leicester Mercury also doesn’t mention that Patel has previously publicly said that the 9/11 attacks were a Mossad plot. And yet I am told by a source at the BBC that they are so enamored by him, that they have asked Patel to appear this Sunday morning on a BBC TV discussion program about how uniquely awful Israel is.

And for those who don’t know who Galloway is, he is famous, among other things, for his grovelling praise of Saddam Hussein.

 

LEADING EXILED TURKISH IMAM CRITICIZES GAZA FLOTILLA

Imam Fethullah Gülen, who lives in exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and who is considered one of Turkey’s most influential religious leaders, has criticized the Turkish-led flotilla for trying to deliver aid without Israel’s consent.

Gülen said that the organizers’ failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters.”

From his exile, Gülen is playing a key role in the struggle between moderates and radicals for the future of Turkish Islam. His words of restraint come as many in Turkey gave flotilla members a hero’s welcome on their return home.

His newspaper columns, weekly Internet sermons and other messages have been collected into more than 60 books. His adherents number, by various estimates, three million to eight million.

Followers have established hundreds of schools in more than 100 countries. About 70% of Turkey’s police force are thought to be Gülenists – a counterbalance to Turkey’s powerful military, which is a secularist bastion.

 

SWEDEN, NORWAY ACT AGAINST ISRAEL

International action against Israel is intensifying.

In Sweden, dockworkers are set to launch a weeklong boycott of Israeli ships and goods, a union spokesman said today.

Peter Annerback, a spokesman for the Swedish Port Workers Union, said workers are urged to refuse handling of Israeli goods and ships during the June 15-24 boycott.

Norway’s military says it has canceled a special operations seminar because the Defense Ministry objected to the inclusion of an Israeli army officer in the program, AP reported.

A spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry said a dock action like the one being urged in Sweden was illegal, according to rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.

 

ALL ISRAELI FLIGHTS TO TURKEY CANCELED

All Israeli flights to Turkey have been canceled due to the escalating political crises between the two countries, effectively closing the most popular budget holiday destination for Israelis.

Well over half a million Israeli tourists visited Turkey in 2007 and 2008.

There is great anger against their own government’s provocations and threats to Israel among Turkish hotel operators, who are now losing money.

On Thursday, a Catholic bishop was murdered in Turkey. Some reports say the killer may be a suspected Islamist.

 

TURKS, BRUTALIZERS OF THE KURDS, KILLER OF ARMENIANS, OCCUPIERS OF CYPRUS

The present Turkish government – which helped to organize the Islamist flotilla – are exactly the kind of people that Ataturk warned against.

There are calls in Israel for the Knesset (parliament) to pass a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of 1915 and memorializing its victims. The Turks, as readers no doubt know, still insist those 1.2 million Armenians just vanished into thin air.

Meanwhile, Turkish hackers have been going into Jewish websites – including synagogues and Jewish charities – writing obscene messages about how Israel carried out the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, and claiming that the Holocaust never happened.

***

Below, I attach a notable article from today’s Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer, who is a subscriber to this email list.

Update (June 5): I also attach The Washington Post editorial and recommend taking the time to read it, below. (The Washington Post’s editorial page editor and deputy editorial page editor are both subscribers to this email list.)

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

VIDEOS OF TODAY’S INCIDENT OFF THE COAST OF ISRAEL

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

Israeli naval patrol boats intercepted six blockade-running vessels overnight. The boarding turned violent on one of the boats, when pro-Hamas activists attacked the Israelis with long metal bars, knives and hammers. Some reportedly managed to seize weapons from the Israeli sailors and turned on them with live fire prompting Israel to open fire in response.

On a personal note, to state the obvious, any loss of life including those who lost their lives last night, is deeply regrettable, but it is important to be properly informed of the context in which this incident occurred in order to decide where the blame ultimately lies.

 

THROWING AN ISRAELI OFF THE TOP DECK OF THE BOAT

Below is aerial footage showing the misnamed “peace” activists throwing an Israeli off the top deck of the boat, and beating up other Israelis with iron bars:

Here they use firebombs and metal pipes against Israelis:

Here, “Peace activists” stab an IDF soldier:

(Ten Israelis were seriously injured, including from stab wounds. In a search aboard the Marmara carried out later, Israeli soldiers found caches of bats, clubs, knives, and slingshots used by the rioters.)

 

THE CHANTING OF ANTI-SEMITIC SLOGANS

Before they set sail from Turkey, I published this video footage, showing participants on board one of the ships chanting violent anti-Jewish slogans.

To watch it, please scroll down to the end of section 4 titled “An industry of lies” here:

www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001114.html

 

WHO ARE THESE PEACE ACTIVISTS?

This research by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (an organization with which I am well acquainted and is very reliable) outlines who the IHH (the group involved in the violence aboard the boat, which the BBC and others are uncritically calling “Turkish peace activists”) really are:

www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hamas_e105.htm

This research from the Danish Institute for International Studies details the part played by the IHH in Islamist terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and their links to al-Qaeda:

www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2006/DIIS%20WP%202006-7.web.pdf

(Please also see section 11 below titled: UPDATE: Wanting to kill Israelis and die.)

UPDATE:

“The Turkish Islamic charity behind a flotilla of aid ships that was raided by Israeli forces on its way to Gaza had ties to terrorism networks, including a 1999 al-Qaeda plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, France's former top anti-terrorism judge said Wednesday (June 2, 2010).

The Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, had “clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad,” former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Bruguiere, who led the French judiciary’s counterterrorism unit for nearly two decades before retiring in 2007. “They were basically helping al-Qaeda when (Osama) bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil,” he said.

 

NETANYAHU FLIES HOME

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to cut short his visit to Canada and return to Israel. He also spoke by phone with U.S. President Barack Obama and apologized that he would not be able to come to Washington tomorrow as scheduled. Netanyahu and Obama have decided to set a new meeting at a later date.

 

SIX TURKISH SOLDIERS DIE IN PKK ATTACK

Kurdish fighters fired a rocket into a Turkish army base on the Mediterranean Sea killing six soldiers on Sunday. The base at Iskenderum was hit by a rocket fired from a road overlooking the port where the base is located. The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) has been fighting for autonomy for twenty-five years. The international media doesn’t appear to be interested in reporting about these particular dead Turks in the way it is covering the ones on the boats off Gaza.

 

ONE OF THE REASONS ISRAEL HAD REASON TO BE SUSPICIOUS OF THE BOAT

This video, taken on November 4, 2009, shows the Israel navy intercepting the “Francop” cargo ship, smuggling a massive 500 tons of weapons hidden among civilian cargo. 36 containers were sent from Iran and destined for terrorist groups to attack Israel. (Of course, the international media barely bothered to report about this at the time, or subsequently, since they are not interested in giving the Israeli side of the story.)

 

SOME INITIAL MEDIA REACTION

Some of the west European media reaction is worse than the Turkish and Arabic media reaction.

The headline in Aftonbladet, Sweden’s most read-paper, famous for its concocted anti-Semitic organ-harvesting story (which was outlined on this website last year), is:

“Israel Sinks to a New Low: Usually, Only Dictators and Bandits Attack Humanitarian Aid”

(In Swedish: “Israel sänker sig till ny bottennivå: Bara diktatorer och banditer brukar attackera hjälpsändningar”)

www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/analys/wolfganghansson/article7216680.ab

(The story is by Wolfgang Hansson, Aftonbladet’s “foreign correspondent”.)

***

AKP, Turkey’s ruling party, and CHP, the secularist opposition consider the timing of Israeli operation and PKK attack in Iskenderum “suspiciously coordinated”.

www.zaman.com.tr/haber.do?haberno=990182&title=ak-parti-ve-chp-ayni-goruste-saldirilarin-es-zamanli-olmasi-tesaduf-mu

***

What a surprise, here is the leading headline by the British paper, The Guardian:

“Israel accused of state terrorism after attack”

(The Guardian’s story is already one of the most recommended today on Facebook.)

(It is most odd, but The Guardian doesn’t use the same terms when reporting on the British army killing people in Afghanistan, or in reference to one of the hundreds of other conflicts around the world.)

The Guardian editorial that has just gone online for tomorrow’s edition (June 1) might as well have been written by a member of Hamas, it contains so much false spin.

By contrast, the (London) Daily Telegraph editorial writers (who subscribe to this list) attack Turkey in their editorial.

 

NEW BRITISH GOVERNMENT, SAME PREJUDICES

Britain’s new foreign secretary, William Hague, issues a statement “deploring” Israel – his second anti-Israeli statement since assuming office two weeks ago.

***

“Saw anger at London protest at Israeli embassy I’m more used to seeing in Mid-east than Europe,” says ABC News correspondent Jim Sciutto on Twitter.

***

A large petition signed by many Israelis in recent hours is “demanding an immediate, fair, and unbiased investigation into the organizations behind the flotilla (and the national governments that assisted them) and their role in the violence that ensued as a result of their actions.”

 

JEWS FOR JIHAD

Also reported in the Swedish media: One of those detained by the IDF aboard one of the boats was Dror Feiler, the hateful Israeli-born Swedish artist who has created installations comparing Islamic Jihad suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat (who murdered 22 people, including a number of children, in a Haifa restaurant) with an angel.

***

And here, Canadian Jew Naomi Klein (best known for her incredibly high level of narcissism) stages another anti-Israeli diatribe on the streets of Toronto two hours ago:

 

UPDATE: WANTING TO KILL ISRAELIS AND DIE

Prior to Monday’s incident, the official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida carried an interview with three of the Turks who died on the boat saying they wished to die as “Shahids (suicide martyrs) for the Palestinian cause.”

Here is another one of the Turks who died in the fighting, being interviewed on the boat the day before, telling Iran’s Press TV the same thing:

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

THE LIES THE MEDIA AND NGOS TELL ABOUT GAZA

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

In recent days, the international media, particularly in Europe and the Mideast, has been full of stories about “activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”

The BBC World Service even led its world news broadcasts with this story at one point over the weekend. (The BBC yesterday boasted that its global news audience has now risen to 220 million persons a week, making it by far the biggest news broadcaster in the world.)

Yet the BBC and other media fail to report on the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets.

No, this would spoil their agenda. Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy. If we had their vast taxpayer funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the UK. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.

Of course there is poverty in Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. (When was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?)

But the way the BBC and other prominent Western news media are deliberately misleading global audiences and systematically creating the false impression that people are somehow starving in Gaza, and that it is all Israel’s fault, can only serve to increase hatred for the Jewish state – which one suspects was the goal of many of the editors and reporters involved in the first place.

 

STEAK AU POIVRE AND CHICKEN CORDON BLEU

If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.

The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza.

And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).

Please take a look at the pictures on the above website. They are not the kind of things you see in The New York Times or CNN or in Newsweek, whose international edition last week had one of the most disgracefully misleading stories about Gaza I have ever seen, portraying it in terms which were virtually reminiscent of Hiroshima after a nuclear blast.

And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant:

In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video (which is up on the club’s own website), I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.

In a piece for The Wall Street Journal last year, I documented the “after effects” of a previous “emergency Gaza boat flotilla,” when the arrivals were seen afterwards purchasing souvenirs in well-stocked shops.

And please see here for more pictures of Gaza’s “impoverished” shops.

***

The front of the Roots Club flyer reads:
Ambiance galore.
Beautifully designed buffets.
Every detail handled for you.

 

STARVED OF WATER AND BUILDING MATERIALS?

While Western media, misled by corrupt and biased NGOs, continue to report on a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports on the Olympic-size swimming pool that opened in Gaza last week. (Article below).

As reader Joy Wolfe of Manchester, England, a subscriber to this list, points out to me in an email: “How does an area that claims to be starved of water and building materials and depends on humanitarian aid build an Olympic size swimming pool and create a luxury lifestyle for some while others are forced to live in abject poverty as political pawn refugees?”

Another reader, Barry Shaw, writes from the Israeli town of Netanya:

“Gaza City recently opened an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Netanya does not have a municipal Olympic pool. Neither does Ashkelon, or Sderot. Gaza City is part of the Palestinian territory operated by the Islamic terror regime, Hamas. Netanya has been hit by repeated Palestinian suicide attacks, car bombings, and terrorist gunmen that have left over fifty of its citizens dead and more than three hundred injured. The Palestinians receive record amounts of international funding. The victims of Palestinian terror get nothing.”

Another subscriber, Michael Horesh, points out, “The Financial Times of London, a leading media beacon in international money matters and no friend of Israel, observes that ‘Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Snickers and Heinz ketchup are both cheap and widely available in Gaza… [as are] Korean refrigerators, German food mixers and Chinese air conditioning units.’”

 

AN INDUSTRY OF LIES

While middle class Palestinians plead poverty and receive excessive amounts of international funding, elsewhere in the world (in places like Congo and Zimbabwe and Bangladesh) millions of children really are dying of starvation and disease, all but ignored by those very same governments and aid agencies that pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the Palestinian coffers.

Of course, there is a whole industry of people (UN and EU staff, NGO workers, journalists) who make their living and have a vested interest in continuing to propagate lies about Gaza and West Bank.

As the boats of “humanitarian aid activists” (including a number of European politicians and journalists) left Turkey on Saturday I wonder if they understood what the crowd was chanting.

Video below form Turkish TV:

The crowd shout:

“Intifada, intifada, intifada!

“Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed will return!”

 

GAZA’S OLYMPIC-SIZED SWIMMING POOL

The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports (May 18, 2010):

www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=285242

“Gaza – Ma’an – Gaza’s first Olympic-standard swimming pool was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club during a ceremony on Tuesday held by the Islamic Society.

“Gaza government ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, leaders of Islamic and national governing bodies, as well as club members and athletes were among those at the opening ceremony, where Secretary-General of the Islamic Society Nasim Yaseen thanked the donors who helped realize the project.

“Yaseen praised the As-Sadaka club for a number of wins in international and regional football, volleyball and table tennis matches.

“As-Sadaka athletes performed a number of swimming exercises in the new pool to mark its opening.”

 

WHO BURNED DOWN THE SUMMER CAMP?

(No, it wasn’t a rampaging mob of American supporters of Israel on an AIPAC lobbying trip.)

A UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children was burned to the ground on Sunday and the UN staff threatened with murder. Tens of thousands of Gazan children were due to attend the camp this summer, as they have every summer in recent years.

This is a rare occasion when the international media did report on Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, although most downplayed any criticism of Hamas or other Islamists in their reports.

***

“A SUMMER PROGRAM OF ARTS AND SPORT”

The BBC reported online:

Masked gunmen have attacked a UN summer camp being set up for children in the Gaza Strip, UN officials say.

The attackers burned tents and destroyed other equipment after tying up a guard.

They also left a letter threatening the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), John Ging…

“The armed men torched the camp, which contained recreational equipment and swimming pools, and completely destroyed it,” UNRWA spokesman Abu Hasna told journalists.

The camp is one of dozens of beach facilities set up by the UN offering a summer programme of arts, sport and other activities for some quarter of a million children in the Gaza Strip…

***

“TEACHING SCHOOLGIRLS DANCING AND IMMORALITY”

CNN explained that the Islamists of Gaza object to the fact that boys and girls were due to participate in activities together at the camp:

CNN began its online report: “A U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza was burned Sunday hours before it was due to open, witnesses said, blaming Muslim extremists who apparently object to boys and girls going to camp together.”

***

Reuters also reported:

“About 20 men, some carrying assault rifles, tore up large plastic tents and burned storage facilities at the site, where tens of thousands of children are due to attend camp sessions…

“Two days earlier, a previously unknown militant group, The Free of the Homeland, issued a statement criticizing the camp’s organizer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for, ‘teaching schoolgirls fitness, dancing and immorality.’”

***

The Al-Jazeera report online adds:

“Dozens of armed attackers also vandalized bathrooms… and assaulted a guard and tied him up… the men also left a letter with four bullets, threatening the agency’s Gaza director and sending a chilling message to the camp’s organizers.”

 

FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS AND NGOS IGNORE HAMAS’S WORSENING HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD

In an editorial, The Jerusalem Post reflects on the atrocious human rights situation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and notes that “an iron curtain of a strict theocracy is slowly descending on Gaza, but many human rights proponents still prefer to depict it as the embattled bastion of freedom fighters…

“Both foreign governments and NGOs, in their inaction, are signaling to Hamas that domestic oppression by its tyrannical regime is tolerable so far as the international community is concerned,” said the paper.

 

DOZENS MORE WEST BANK ROADBLOCKS TO BE DISMANTLED

Following a meeting between IDF OC Central Command and Palestinian security officials yesterday, Israel has announced the further dismantling of 60 roadblocks and the easing of travel throughout the West Bank. Most West Bank roadblocks have been dismantled since the government of Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel last year.

The Israelis explained that the success of the Palestinian security forces in fighting terror led to the decision to ease restrictions.

The IDF pointed out, however, that it will “continue to operate firmly against terrorism while sustaining liaison and coordination with Palestinian officials, in order to maintain the life routine and security of all residents” of the West Bank and Israel.

 

SHIMON PERES ATTACKS THE GUARDIAN’S BLATANT LIES

Israeli President Shimon Peres yesterday accused the British paper The Guardian of telling blatant lies about Israel in a front page story that slandered Israel in general, and Peres in particular.

It is quite something when the president of a country sees the need to criticize a foreign newspaper for failing to maintain elementary journalistic standards – failing to ask for his response before publishing a massive defamation of him, for example. But such are the depths to which The Guardian sunk yesterday. (As I noted on this email list, The Guardian recently had to apologize for running a notorious organ trafficking libel about Israel.)

Additional Israeli government sources added that “documents that Guardian journalist Chris McGreal – who has a long track record of writing anti-Israel pieces – used to run his story are completely fabricated.” (The alleged documents come from a new book by a publicity-seeking anti-Zionist American researcher.)

The story concerned an alleged offer to sell arms, including nuclear warheads, by Israel to South Africa in 1975. Quite why The Guardian decided this is now lead front-page breaking news 35 years later, is beyond me, given how much real current news there is in the world.

Of course, The Guardian has nothing to say about the arms sales by Britain and many other Western countries to Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Could its continuous singling out of Israel perhaps be because Israel is a Jewish state?

***

UPDATE:

Yossi Beilin, a former leftist minister, has also dismissed The Guardian’s article and the book on which it was based, as complete nonsense, as has Avner Cohen, the world’s leading expert on Israel’s alleged nuclear arms.

In an interview with the South African Press Association, Pik Botha, who served as South Africa’s foreign minister in the waning years of apartheid, also dismissed the article’s claims as untrue.

Nevertheless, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and other prominent media today picked up and reported on The Guardian’s article, and The Guardian’s demonization of Israel continues to spread.

The Guardian has a whole news page and a lead editorial on the subject again today. To say that they are obsessed with Israel would be an understatement. More background here. (Note the Al Jazeera interview in that post.)

 

OBAMA SLOWLY PAVING THE WAY FOR MILITARY STRIKES ON IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM?

Regarding the last line below, it looks like President Obama might – finally – be inching in that direction...

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: NYTimes News Alert
Sent: Mon, May 24, 2010 8:59:37 PM
Subject: News Alert: U.S. Is Said to Order Expanded Use of Covert Action in Middle East

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Mon, May 24, 2010 -- 8:59 PM ET

U.S. Is Said to Order Expanded Use of Covert Action in Middle East

WASHINGTON -- The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.

The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

GUESS WHAT THE FIRST DEMONSTRATION AGAINST CAMERON WAS ABOUT?

Here is a video of the very first organized rally on any issue in London outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Downing Street since David Cameron became British Prime Minister a week ago. Yes, while the economy may be in shambles, telling lies about Israel is the first priority for British activists.

Have they perhaps heard about Britain’s operation in (some would call it an occupation of) Afghanistan, where far more civilians were killed by the 44 countries who have soldiers there – Britain has the second highest contingent – than Israel has killed in the West Bank? And unlike what Palestinians have been trying to do in Israel, Afghans aren’t trying to blow up British shopping malls and school buses on a daily basis.

Among those in attendance at the rally were representatives of the Green Party, UNITE, UNISON, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition and CND.

 

SELF-RIGHTEOUS “LUVVIES” APPEAR TO HAVE VERY LITTLE INTEREST IN BLACK AFRICANS

After the demonstration, a petition against Israel was delivered to the door of Downing Street signed by, among others, film director Ken Loach, Lib Dem peer Jenny Tonge, “comedian” Jeremy Hardy, notorious Jewish anti-Zionist Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, actress Miriam Margolyes, Guardian journalist and editor Victoria Brittain, New Statesman columnist John Pilger and playwright Caryl Churchill (author of “Seven Jewish children,” a play denounced by many as anti-Semitic -- See the note “anti-Semitism in London’s theatreland” here).

The petition called, among other things, for Cameron to back down on his commitment to change British universal jurisdiction law so that Israeli politicians, such as the leader of the center-left opposition party Kadima, Tzipi Livni, can visit Britain without being arrested for “war crimes”.

One wonders how much these self-important theatrical and media types know about the hundreds of other conflicts raging around the world. For example, do they know or care about the latest bomb attacks on Monday in Rwanda at a crowded market and at the capital’s busiest bus station that killed and injured civilians, or the heavy clashes in Sudan last weekend that left over 160 dead. (An estimated 300,000 people have died in the conflict in Darfur since 2003.)

They also apparently couldn’t care less about conflicts inside Europe itself, such as the shootout by Albanian separatists in Macedonia that left four dead last week. (Albanians, who are discriminated against, make up about one quarter of Macedonia’s population). Or the continued flare-ups resulting from the Russian military occupation of the Transdniester region of Moldova.

 

ACTIVISTS STORM SAINSBURY’S IN CENTRAL LONDON ON SATURDAY

Here pro-Palestine activists descended on the Holborn branch of Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, in central London last Saturday to protest the on-going sale of Israeli fruit and vegetables.

Among those who can be seen in the video is Deborah Fink, a professional singer and a tireless Jewish campaigner against Israel, who for the last seven years has been leading a group of anti-Zionist activists who sing Christmas carols inside and outside London churches with the words changed to reflect “Israeli war crimes”.

For more on Fink, please see the dispatch: ‘Tis the season for anti-Israel tunes (& “Jews for Christmas”) (Dec. 24, 2008).

See also the dispatch of Dec. 20, 2003, titled “On the twelfth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me...”.

After these carols were sung in St James’s, Piccadilly, one of London’s most prestigious churches (thereby insulting both Christians and Jews), Michael Gove (who is a founding subscriber to this email list, and as of last week serves as the British government’s Minister for Education) writing in The Times of London, called it a “festival of anti-Semitism.”

(Among those attending the sham “carol” service was Liberal Democrat peer and former party spokesperson, Baroness Jenny Tonge, who alleged Israeli medics went to Haiti after January’s earthquake not to save lives but to harvest organs, a lie reminiscent of the kind told in Nazi Germany.)

***

For more dramatic scenes of anti-Israel activists storming into shops in Paris and London (H & M, Carrefour, Tesco), please watch these videos here.

 

MORE ZIONIST CRIMES!

Since the mass demolitions described below were carried out by Hamas, very few Western media reported prominently on this, even though it was carried on the main Associated Press news wire, to which most media outlets in the world subscribe:

AP reports:

Hamas destroys dozens of homes in southern Gaza

By RIZEK ABDEL JAWAD | AP

Published: May 17, 2010 02:54

RAFAH, Gaza Strip: Hamas police wielding clubs beat and pushed residents out of dozens of homes in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on Sunday before knocking the buildings down with bulldozers, residents said.

Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers said the homes were built illegally on government land. Newly homeless residents were furious over Palestinians on bulldozers razing Palestinian homes.

For years, Palestinians have criticized Israel for destroying houses, mostly because they were built without permits issued by the military. Now, Rafah residents complained, their own government, run by the Islamic militant Hamas that seized power in Gaza in July 2007, has done the same.

“They promised reform and change – instead they’ve destroyed our homes,” shouted Miasar Gan, a 54-year-old woman. Gan said she and her husband had nowhere else to go.

“I found my mattress, and that’s where I’ll be sitting,” she said, standing next to the concrete chunks – all that was left of her house.

Her neighbor, Nazira Abu Jara, 56, said policewomen wearing face veils typical of conservative Muslim women beat her with clubs until she fled her house with her husband and two children. “Neighbors help us get by with charity. We can’t afford to build again,” Abu Jara said.

Others picked through rubble to retrieve dusty clothing and mangled furniture.

Residents said between 30 and 40 homes were torn down, ranging from concrete structures to tin shacks. They did not know how many people were affected. Hamas officials did not allow reporters into the area until the demolition was over.

Residents said more demolitions in the area were expected Monday.

(Full article here from the independent Arab daily, Arab News.)

***

One of the few media outlets to cover this story, having come under pressure from critics (including myself) to stop covering up for the crimes of Fatah and Hamas, is the BBC, albeit online (here) rather than on air, and with a much lower profile than they grant anti-Israeli stories.

Western human rights groups are suddenly strangely silent. As are all those demonstrators in London, Paris and elsewhere.

 

FIRST GREENHOUSES, NOW PEOPLE’S HOUSES

Perhaps even more perversely, Hamas bulldozed the impressive greenhouses – the most economically-productive in the Middle East – which Israeli settlers in Gaza had built and the Israeli government had left for the people of Gaza so that they would help the Palestinian economy, when Israel withdrew in 2005.

This has never been properly reported in the Western media. Please scroll down to the foot of the page here and look at these photos.

These high-tech greenhouses had provided employment for thousands of Palestinians and produced an array of fruits and vegetables in the midst of a barren desert.

 

IMPENDING SEVERE FOOD SHORTAGE IN ARAB WORLD

Meanwhile, a severe food shortage may soon affect the Arab world, according to Tareq A-Zadjali, director general of the Arab Organization for Agriculture Development. He said Arab states need to invest a staggering $144 billion in agriculture over the next twenty years to meet the food demands of the growing population.

The Arab population in the Middle East, currently numbering around 335 million, is projected to grow to 545 million by 2030. In spite of the enormous wealth of many Middle Eastern countries, tens (if not hundreds) of millions already live in dire poverty there, heavily dependent on basic foods.

 

EGYPT REPORTEDLY SEVERS LINKS WITH HAMAS

There are reports in the Arab media that Egypt has decided to cut all ties with the leaders of Hamas, which would in effect make it hard for them to leave Gaza. This move follows Cairo’s anger at Hamas’ refusal to accept an Egyptian-brokered plan for Palestinian reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and displeasure with what they say is a campaign of incitement against Egypt led by Hamas leaders.

As reported in one of last week’s dispatches on this list, Hamas recently accused Egypt of using poison gas inside smuggling tunnels that killed at least four Palestinians.

 

ISRAEL’S MISTAKE AS NOAM CHOMSKY BARRED FROM ENTERING

What has been described as an “overzealous clerk” at Israel’s border crossing with Jordan refused to allow Noam Chomsky, the anti-Israel American-Jewish academic, and darling of the international Far Left, to enter the country. Chomsky had been invited by Palestinians to lecture at Bir Zeit, one of the West Bank’s most radical universities, where incitement is rife against Israel and against Jews in general.

Israel has barred two other prominent American Jews from entering in recent months – Professor Richard Falk and Norman Finkelstein. In Falk’s and Finkelstein’s cases both had agitated in a way that could help terrorist groups and adversely affect Israel’s national security (in Finkelstein’s case arising in part from his liaisons with Hizbullah on a visit to Lebanon).

Their language is also notorious. Last year, as I pointed out on this list at the time, Norman Finkelstein told The Tehran Times that Israel is a “vandal state,” an “insane state,” a “lunatic state,” a “terrorist state,” a “satanic state” from “the boils of hell” which “is committing a holocaust in Gaza”.

Although Chomsky has made many odious political pronouncements, and his seeming justification for various massacres during the twentieth century, notably those carried out by Communists, is repugnant, his agitation against Israel is not in the same league as Falk’s and Finkelstein’s. It was clearly a mistake of Israel to refuse him entry, as indeed the Israeli government acknowledged yesterday, saying Chomsky would be welcome if he returned.

 

TOP WORLD NEWS?

Nevertheless, given how much else is happening in the world, it is still an amazing judgment by news editors to lead their world news pages with Chomsky’s non-entry into Israel as The Times of London, The New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune, and other papers did yesterday. (The International Herald Tribune printed a further editorial on it today, calling the treatment of Chomsky “outrageous” and saying “Israel has lost its last remnants of tolerance” – I don’t recall them ever calling America’s killing of civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere “outrageous”.)

Israel’s interior ministry said the official at the border crossing who had refused Chomsky entry was being reprimanded – not that most international papers mentioned this in their often hysterical stories yesterday about Israel’s behavior.

“There is no change in our policy,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority.”

After being barred from entering, Chomsky was quoted as comparing Israel with “Stalin’s regime.”

As everyone knows (perhaps even Chomsky) Stalin murdered tens of millions of innocent people.

 

ELTON JOHN BANNED FROM EGYPT FOR BEING GAY

In contrast to the breaking news surrounding Chomsky, very few Western news outlets reported on the banning two weeks ago of British pop star Elton John from performing at a private concert in Egypt for being gay. The news was widely reported in the Middle East and by international agencies like the DPA. Elton John has been forced to call off his concert there by the government-controlled Egyptian Musician Union, but will still perform in Israel, where gays are welcome.

There has barely been a peep of protest about the Egyptian decision from his fellow pop stars, including fellow British pop star, Elvis Costello, who did however this week call off his concerts in Israel on June 30 and July 1 following pressure from anti-Israeli activists in Britain.

The Facebook page for Elvis Costello already includes remarks from people criticizing him for the decision: www.facebook.com/ElvisCostello

In a statement, Costello made criticism of Israel (about which he seems to know nothing other than from the highly distorted coverage in the British media) but added, presumably by way of saying sorry to Israelis:

“My thanks also go to the members of the Israeli media with whom I had most rewarding and illuminating conversations. They may regard these exchanges as a waste of their time but they were of great value and help to me in gaining an appreciation of the cultural scene.

“I hope it is possible to understand that I am not taking this decision lightly or so I may stand beneath any banner, nor is it one in which I imagine myself to possess any unique or eternal truth. It is a matter of instinct and conscience.”

Costello issued a further statement saying he couldn’t imagine ever being invited again to perform in Israel. From the angry reaction in Israel’s media it seems there’s little chance of that ever happening.

 

OLD-FASHIONED ANTI-SEMITISM ISN’T PC; DEMONIZING ISRAEL IN ITS PLACE IS

Below I attach an article by Ralph Peters from The New York Post.

Peters served for over two decades in the U.S. Army, as an enlisted man and officer. He writes for The New York Post and Armed Forces Journal, and is a subscriber to this email list.

He writes: “It’s no longer socially acceptable to accuse Jews of sacrificing Christian infants. But it’s quite fashionable to blame Israelis for the suffering of Palestinian children. One doesn’t mention ‘Jews.’ But calumnies against ‘Israelis’ are the new, politically correct blood libel.”

Peters (who is not Jewish) says he takes “personally” the fact that some in the U.S. military appear to falsely blame Israel for a “negative effect on our regional policy”.

“I ask the gripers for any evidence that our betrayal of Israel would have the slightest positive effect. The Saudis wouldn’t even drop the price of oil for 24 hours.”

He also says (correctly of course) that “Israel needs to rediscover public relations. With the global media rabidly pro-Palestinian, Israel had better get back in the information fight.”

(His full piece is below.)

[All notes above by Tom Gross]