Share
-
Heaven On Earth
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Public Secrets and Conspiracies of Silence: How French media reported riots taking place in Paris, on June 20th
The following is a report “from the field” (i.e., the MSNM wars), by Michelle Schatzman about the coverage of a riot in the troubled streets of Paris itself (Zones Urbaines Sensibles – ZUS) of Paris. It illustrates the dynamics of a society in the process of decomposition, and probably sheds more light on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire than many ancient texts. What we see at work is the presence of gang culture of territorial expansion and confrontation – the Arabs and their sub-Saharan black allies – operating in an area supposedly (and previously) governed by the rule of law. In the case of the Roman Empire, it was imperial law, in 20th century France, it was democratic (isonomic) law.
The open aggression of the Arab/African street in France goes back to the last decade of the 20th century, but has become much more prominent since the first riots/demonstrations of the new millennium, those of October 6, 2000 in Paris.
This phenomenon of Muslim aggression on a civic level, which reached a momentary paroxysm in the riots of 2005, is perhaps the single most pervasive evidence that Muslims populations in Europe are grabbing power both by street violence and by taking over streets for prayer and (in practice) policing them as part of “their (Islamic) turf.” The same police-gang entente against citizens marked for dhimmitude seems to operate in England as well.
The story at Belleville seems to indicate that a) the cops are, as policy, protecting the Muslims from the law, and b) the news media does not know how to talk about this: it will name the “Chinese” (even when they’re lumping together the folks from far-east Asia), but not the Muslims or the sub-Saharan African street gangs. In the end they end up doing the same thing the police do – cover for the aggressors.
The parallels with what probably happened at the fall of Rome are startling.
A demonstration by 8500 people, mostly from far-eastern origin, took place yesterday afternoon in Belleville, an area in the north-east of Paris.
This demonstration was organized by franco-chinese associations, and motivated by insécurité, i.e. a high level of crime, directed mainly against Chinese-looking people in the Belleville area, where this population is now residing in significant numbers. There have been several waves of immigration to France from the Far-East. The Belleville immigrants have been coming from China in the last ten years. The main other two waves are the wave which arrived in the seventies from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, at the time of the boat people, and the wave of the nineties.
The demonstration started quietly and ended in riots between some demonstrators, some non-demonstrators and the police. Eventually, the quiet was restored around 10 pm. So, we got reports in the three most important national newspapers : Libération, Le Figaro and Le Monde. In fact, Le Monde was content with a commented diaporama.
Dupes or Demopaths? Homeland Security wants to deport “Son of Hamas”
I’ve seen various items on this and couldn’t believe that it was true (or at least, that it would continue very long). It would be just too stupid and vicious…
The Department of Homeland Security wants to deport Joseph (Masab) Yousef, the “Son of Hamas,” who has so ringingly denounced the cult of death spawned by his father and other Hamas leaders.
But it looks like it’s for real (see his facebook page). Which raises a question for me.
I’m not given to conspiracy theories, but I’m not stupid enough to think that they don’t happen. I’ve read Paul Sperry’s disturbing Inflitration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington, which I find perfectly plausible. And given the paralyzing political correctness of the current administration, which couldn’t recognize a “radical Islamist,” much less denounce him or her, why would Radical Islamists not take advantage of our principled stupidity?
They’re not that stupid.
So I want to know: Who in the Department of Homeland Security put together a set of quotes from Yousef’s book to make him look like a spy for Hamas? Either he’s a complete idiot, or he’s doing Hamas’ work. The odds stack up as follows: either someone, in good faith, completely misread the book (how did he find it without knowing what it’s about?), or someone has infiltrated Homeland Security and is working to kick Yousef out as a message to anyone else who thinks USA is safe haven from Muslim enforcers.
I hate to say it, but they’re probably both plausible. I just think it’s worth knowing which is the case.
United States looking to deport ‘Son of Hamas’ spy
By Avi Issacharoff
U.S. authorities are seeking to deport Mosab Hassan Yousef, the “Green Prince,” who reportedly worked as a Shin Bet security service agent from 1997-2007.Yousef, who now lives in the United States, had unparalleled access to Hamas, which his father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, helped found and led in the West Bank. He first described his experiences to Haaretz earlier this year, and has since published a book, “Son of Hamas,” on the subject.
Recently, however, the Department of Homeland Security asked a California court to approve his deportation, on the grounds that he “provided material support to a [Tier 1] terrorist organization” – namely, Hamas.
The request is based on quotes from Yousef’s book, “Son of Hamas” – in which he described how he worked within Hamas to obtain information for the Shin Bet. Taken out of context, the quotes make it seem as if he worked for the group.
A San Diego immigration court is to hear the case on June 30. Yousef said he will appeal if it rules against him.
The deportation request is the Department of Homeland Security’s response to Yousef’s asylum application. Yousef, who converted to Christianity in 2005, wrote on his blog that he was stunned by the move.
“If Homeland Security cannot understand a simple situation like mine, how can they be trusted with bigger issues?” he demanded.MK Einat Wilf (Labor ), a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, recently began collecting MKs’ signatures on a letter thanking Yousef for his contribution to Israel’s security.
Shades of Reutersgate 2.0. We need to know who did this job of cropping.
In the meantime, sign the petition.
Demopaths, Cognitive Warfare and the UN: On banning Islamophobia
One of the key dimensions of global Jihad’s cognitive war against the West is the need to disguise the nature of the “weak” aggressor in this asymmetrical war. If the West knew what radical Islam wanted, they’d oppose it firmly, and they’d have no chance to position themselves favorably over time. Thus, while some of them play tough cop (violent Jihadis like Osama and other Salafi Jihadis), others play nice cop, and argue they would be “moderate” if only we treated them fairly.
Since this desire on the part of violent, fascist, even genocidal Islamic triumphalists who want to create a global Dar al Islam, is so ferocious and painful to contemplate, most liberals prefer to believe their demopathic pretences to moderation. As Barry Rubin points out, in some ways, the media tells us things that will pacify us, and keeps the bad news – news that might swell the voting ranks of (gasp!) conservatives and hawks — out of sight.
This approach has, by and large, dominated the approach of the MSNM for the last decade. The results: a president who thinks he can charm the Muslim world, even the radicals, and whose advisors think that it’s best not to even speak of “radical Islam” lest we offend “true Muslims” who know that any violence is against the “true teachings” of Islam – a useful infidel’s fatwa against Osama and his ilk, if you will. Shades of Grima Wormtongue literally sickening King Theoden of Rohan in The Two Towers.
(Note that I took this from a site which posted in 2008, suggesting that McCain was Theoden, and his advisors Wormtongue. I think that gets it exactly wrong. Tolkien, who had the Nazis in mind, had Wormtongue as a councilor of appeasement, in league with the warmonger Saruman, arguing that Rohen should not go to war.)
Of course, it’s hard not to notice the raging bull behind the curtain. And Muslims are becoming increasingly aware that their “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra is wearing thin. So what do they do? Go to the UN and ask it to ban Islamophobia in the name of “human rights.”
HT for much of this post to Elder of Ziyon.
Muslim states seek UN action on West’s “islamophobia”
16 Jun 2010 17:37:06 GMT
Source: Reuters
* Want investigation into West’s media on religion
* Say racism, xenophobia rife in Europe
* Part of majority group on U.N. rights council
By Robert EvansGENEVA, June 16 (Reuters) – Muslim states said on Wednesday that what they call “islamophobia” is sweeping the West and its media and demanded that the United Nations take tougher action against it.
Delegates from Islamic countries, including Pakistan and Egypt, told the United Nations Human Rights Council that treatment of Muslims in Western countries amounted to racism and discrimination and must be fought.
“People of Arab origin face new forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance and experience discrimination and marginalisation,” an Egyptian delegate said, according to a U.N. summary.
And Pakistan, speaking for the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), said the council’s special investigator into religious freedom should look into such racism “especially in Western societies”.
Acting for the OIC, Pakistan has tabled a resolution at the council instructing its special investigator on religious freedom “to work closely with mass media organisations to ensure that they create and promote an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for religious and cultural diversity”.
The OIC — and its allies in the 47-nation council including Russia, China and Cuba — dub criticism of Muslim practices and linking of terrorism waged under the proclaimed banner of Islamism as “islamophobia” that pillories all Muslims.
BOUND TO PASS
Barry Rubin on the Corruption of the Information Professionals
Barry Rubin has written another valuable contribution to the discussion of how far off the MSNM and academia have drifted over the last years, to the point of destroying their own credibility. He doesn’t do much on academia. For that, see the article by Brendan Goldman, Middle East Studies Profs Usurp New Roles to Censure Israel over Gaza Flotilla.
Media, Academia Destroying Themselves Over Israel
Institutions are crumbling as the lies needed to uphold the Israel narrative become too much to bear.
June 15, 2010 – by Barry Rubin
The irrational slander and hatred of Israel is not destroying Israel. It is destroying the institutions — media and academic, especially — being driven to madness by this obsessive irrationality and decline from their own proper standards.
Like an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, the number of lies, logical fallacies, concealments, and strategic misconceptions necessary to make Israel look bad has grown so large that it threatens the health of the media and intelligentsia.
I’d say this has been happening for a decade, and begins with the enormous “oil-spill” of toxic contents into our information circulation systems represented by Al Durah, the Icon of Hatred.
For in their assaults on Israel, these particular news media — of course, not in all they do nor in the work of all who report for them — have left behind professional ethics, rationality, and their own credibility. Political correctness has eclipsed factual correctness, and the purpose of some newspapers has been redefined from reporting the news to merely reporting the news that furthers the political agenda of editors and journalists.
The above, of course, is strenuously denied by those who embody such behavior, though it is of no surprise to those who are reading these words. And in this growing gap, the former lose credibility and the latter lose respect for what should be one of the main pillars of Western democracy and defense against the ideologies of dictatorship.
Read the essay by George Orwell, “Pacifism and War,” (1942) in which he accuses the pacifists (appeasers) of being “objectively pro-fascist.”
There is no institution that is more clearly typical of this malady than the once-respected and now justly often-ridiculed New York Times. Only the Times could donate a huge space to Tony Judt, a man without qualification to discuss the Middle East, claiming that the idea Israel is being delegitimized was a propaganda myth created by the Netanyahu government … while Judt daily delegitimizes Israel.
For my fisking of Judt’s 2003 essay, “Israel: The Alternative” – one of the more astonishingly fatuous pieces on the conflict by an otherwise serious historian, written at the height of the anti-Israel hysteria provoked by – of all things – the suicide terror campaign against Israel.
The Times apparently views any statement made by Israel or its supporters to be false until proven true beyond its ability to think up some excuse for not accepting it.
I remember when I came to Israel during the second intifada, someone in the IDF Spokesman’s unit told me that they have storerooms of material they had put out for journalists who wouldn’t touch them because, as far as they were concerned, Israeli government information was hopelessly biased. Instead they believed what Palestinian stringers told them. As Shmuel Trigano said at the height of the wave of anti-Semitism in France around the same time, “Jews are not allowed to bear witness.” Indeed, one French group called it “the Glass Ghetto.” What good is it if you put your canary in a sound-proof cage?
Can the Ambush Flotilla become a turning point
In the story of the emperor’s new clothes, when the boy says, “Daddy, why is the emperor naked?” his father responds, “hush child.” It’s only when someone else in the crowd says, “No, listen to the boy,” that the spell is broken.
Is it possible that the absurdity of the knee-jerk response to the Flotilla ambush has actually begun the process, that anti-Zionism has reached such a level of absurdity and self-parody that people have begun to wake up, to shake off the bonds of self-delusion, to question the “halo effect” of the allegedly liberal, human rights advocates and media stars who have systematically poisoned us with their own delusions?
Here’s a (paraphrase of a) letter written to Barry Rubin, one of (if not the most) astute and prolific analysts of the current scene:
The author loves reading Rubin’s articles, e.g., Media, Academia Destroying themselves over Israel. He’s British, not a member of the Jewish community, and has been aware of the slant / bias in the media against Israel for a very long time. Now, however, he feels it’s gotten to a stage where it is actually dangerous. Quite a few people he speaks with willing to admit that they are upset with it. He points to the plummeting readership of the Guardian, and the difficulty of NGOs like Amnesty and Oxfam (for whom Israel is a “malign obsession”) to keep up their donations. He suspects that these organizations are probably looking for a Zionist conspiracy in the increasing troubles when, actually, it’s just the case that “most (thinking) people recognise hysterical propaganda when they see it and don’t approve.”
I have been saying for years now, that in the coming five to ten years, there will be an awakening in Europe (and the rest of the West), that independent minds who are not in the opinion-making elite will begin to realize how badly their leaders have misinformed them, and that when that happens, there’s a window of opportunity whereby we can suggest to them that the anti-Zionism of their elites has operated as a form of cultural AIDS, preventing them from taking self-preserving action.
I welcome any contributions from readers that suggest either a similar response, or (alas) evidence to the contrary. Here’s hoping that the second decade of the 21st reverses the terrible damage of the first decade.
Just How Crazy Have Europeans Become? Insights into the Flotilla Madness
Hopefully one of the benefits of the Flotilla Madness, in which a deeply morally compromised state (Turkey, with its record from Armenian genocide to the current Kurdish situation) got to set the international agenda with high moral dudgeon, is the number of people at last willing to look at whether the Emperor’s New Clothes are real or not.
In any epistemological crisis, as the anomalies become both abundant and painful to those who must cling to their paradigm of reality, there emerge almost comic moments, moments when the absurdity of this kind of dance of denial becomes laughable.
This happened recently in Europe – more specifically in Luxembourg. For 15 years, the French philosopher Robert Redeker has published a weekly book review for the Tageblatt, even after he ran afoul of radical Muslims who threatened his and his family’s life and drove him into hiding. And just last week, without any warning, they fired him.
This happened, not because of his “Islamophobic” remarks, but because of his choice of book to review – and to review favorably. The book? The latest study of the European descent into anti-Semitic madness in the 21st century by Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle propagande antijuive. The journal not only rejected the review, but ended any association with Redeker.
But perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the story is the reason the editor gave for rejecting the review:
The readers would not understand that someone might be favorable to Israel.
In an irony that only the sane can appreciate, Taguieff had written specifically about the mentality the editor articulated. As Redeker noted in his review:
The blanket demonization of Israel is the daily bread of the media. That Israel is Evil seems to be self-evident. And yet, these opinions, that mutate into passions, are ideological constructions disseminated by a clever work of propaganda which Taguieff examines exhaustively. They recyle the old – the traditional Anti-Jewish stereotypes – in new forms.
Apparently, in reading those lines, the editor found not a description of her own mentality, but an assertion so absurd she could not allow it to be published. (Alternatively, this was just an excuse not to admit the real source of her anxiety, namely the fear that a favorable review of a book that tore the mask off of the Jihadi-Leftist hatefest might alienate the wrong people.)
As Kofi Anan said in 2002 about Jenin, echoing what Ehad Ha-am said in 1892 about the pogroms: “Is it possible that the whole world is wrong and the Jews/Israelis are right?” Don’t be ridiculous.
Robert Redeker, interdit d’écrire du bien d’un livre
lundi 14 juin 2010, par Emmanuel Lemieux
Le supplément littéraire du quotidien luxembourgeois Tageblatt a refusé la critique favorable du livre de Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle Propagande antijuive (PUF), mettant également un terme à une collaboration de 15 ans avec l’auteur de l’article, l’écrivain Robert Redeker menacé de mort par des islamistes.
Robert Redeker, agrégé de philosophie, écrivain et ancien chroniqueur du supplément littéraire du Tageblatt.
“J’avais ma page dans le supplément littéraire du Tageblatt depuis 15 ans, je n’ai manqué aucun numéro. C’était l’analyse d’un livre, généralement de philosophie. Pour le numéro de juin, j’avais choisi d’écrire sur le dernier livre de Taguieff. J’ai écrit un texte favorable à ce livre. C’est ce texte qui m’a valu d’être censuré. La directrice de ce supplément m’a écrit : “notre collaboration s’arrête là”.
Sec ! Viré ! confie Robert Redeker. D’après la rédaction en chef, les lecteurs ne comprendraient pas qu’on fût favorable à Israël ! ”
Insights into the Workings of the Guardian: Dennis MacEoin gets the thumbs-down
The Guardian, a paper whose obsession with Israel was illustrated during the Lebanon War of 2006 when they bragged about having 19 correspondents covering various aspects of the conflict (more than any other place or country in the world; apparently few to spare for Congo, or Darfur, or Sri Lanka), has just rejected an article by Denis MacEoin, the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, because they’ve published too much already on the subject.
The refusal would be comic, given that they’ve already published 37 articles on the topic, 76% of which are anti-Israel, and 11% (4) pro-Israel (one a surprise they couldn’t avoid because it was one of their own columnists). Nor is this an isolated incident. When Antony Lerman, one of the “alter-juifs” of England, savaged Robin Shepherd’s A State Beyond the Paleindictment of the Western media’s coverage of the conflict, the Guardian refused the author the right of rebuttal.
But it illustrates one of the fundamental aspects of Western media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict: when the slanders are out, the MSNM runs the story; when they prove false, the press falls silent. Raphael Israeli already pointed this out in a close study of the Jenin “poisoning” scandal of 1983, one of the early episodes in the history of Pallywood.
MacEoin turned to CIFWatch, one of the most exemplary “shadow sites” of a major MSNM production (Comment is Free), which documents and refutes the systematic channeling of anti-Semitic themes via the socially acceptable avatar of anti-Zionism. Here is MacEoin’s piece via the internet, just the kind of thing that could not happen in the 20th century.
What the Guardian Doesn’t Publish: How many Seas…? by Denis MacEoin
June 14, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Guardian, Brian Whitaker, Denis MacEoin, Flotilla, Distortion | by HawkeyeThis is a guest post by Denis MacEoin.
Those of you who take an interest – and, in most cases, that’s going to be a malign interest – in matters relating to Israel, Palestine, and the strangely lovable terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah – will have been greatly stirred by the troubling episode of the boat that tried to break a blockade imposed by a state acting within its legal rights, but which ended up with nine of its activists dead. What a rush to judgement this has been. Within hours of the event, half the world had decided it knew all the facts and wasn’t going to back down, regardless of any new facts that may come to light. I have some of those for you, but wait a little. What you need first is context, something in short supply in discussions of these matters.
If, like myself, you have a serious interest in Middle East affairs, you can’t be unaware of an accusation that has infected the Arab world and beyond. It’s very simple: take a war (any war will do), a revolution (ditto), a tragedy, and, lo and behold, the Jews are behind it. Here’s a string of such claims from a bog-standard white supremacist website [Warning hate site]. And here’s a representative (and much shortened) statement from Egyptian general Hasan Sweilem:
‘The Jews stood behind wars and internal strife, and that caused European rulers to expel them and kill them. For example, the Crusader armies, passing through the Rhine basin on their way east, massacred them and burned their houses as an act of repentance to their God. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, they collected the Jews in a synagogue and burned them live. Their kin in Russia suffered a similar fate….They were expelled from France, England, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Austria, Holland, and finally from Spain, after they underwent the Inquisition trials for their conspiracy to penetrate Christian society like a Trojan horse….The Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe generated civil revolutions, wars, and internal strife….The Cromwell Revolution failed in 1649 in England, following the Jewish conspiracy to drag England into several wars in Europe….Then the French Revolution broke out, which the Jews had planned, based on the first conference of their rabbis and interest-loaners that had been convened by the first Rothschild in 1773 in order to take over all the world resources….That conference adopted twenty-four protocols, including the uprooting of the belief in God from the hearts of the Gentiles, distracting people by distributing among them literature of heresy and impurity, destruction of the family and eradication of all morality….’
The Jews went on, he says, to start the First and Second world wars and to lay the foundations of both communism and Nazism.
The thing about these claims is that everything bad that has ever happened to Jews has been legitimate defence by those whom the Jews have harmed. The Holocaust, for example, was the deserved punishment for a people mired in every sort of treachery and hatred for mankind.
On the nature of Islamophobia: Jacobs vs. the “liberal” Rabbis on the Boston Megamosque
In the following post, I’ll discuss two documents, both published in the Boston newspaper, the Jewish Advocate. One, by Charles Jacobs, criticizes the Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick for his interaction with the Muslim American Society in Boston which ends with a short paragraph that mentions a Rabbi, whom Jacobs essentially accuses, along with Patrick of being (in my terminology), “dupes of demopaths.”
The Second is a response by a fairly long list of Rabbis and rabbinical students who find Jacobs criticism as unacceptable. This second piece offers a fascinating insight into the mind of earnest non-Muslims still deeply committed to believing that Islam (which sees them as infidels) is as capable of modern, tolerant reciprocity, just like most Christians and Jews in the USA.
And lest anyone consider me an essentialist for talking about Islam, let me anticipate myself by pointing out that these rabbis, not me and not Charles Jacobs, are the ones incapable of distinguishing various kinds of Islam, of essentializing Islam.
By Charles Jacobs
June 5, 2010Just days before the Gaza flotilla, Jews were attending to a smaller but more proximate fight: State Treasurer Tim Cahill, who is campaigning as an independent for governor, charged that Deval Patrick’s May 22 visit to the Muslim American Society’s (MAS) Saudi-funded Roxbury mega-mosque was a case of “pandering” – and of not taking the threat of terrorism seriously.
In response, the MAS – which is called by federal prosecutors “the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America” – gathered a few hundred people at the mosque and did what it does best when critics raise concerns about who are the trustees and what do mosque leaders teach Boston Muslims about Jews, gays, women, Christians and America. The mosque leaders ducked the questions and charged their critics with bigotry. The MAS lambasted Cahill.
As if on cue, media stenographers dutifully took down and reported the bigotry charge against Cahill as though it was obviously true. And, again as if on cue, prominently noted and photographed was kippah-wearing Rabbi Eric Gurvis, hugging Bilal Kaleem, who heads MAS.
The real story is what actually happened during the governor’s visit?
Hamas Refuses Manipulation Flotilla Aid: My First Report for PJTV
I just produced my first TV news item for PJTV (whose temporary Jerusalem Bureau Chief I’ve just become). They do not permit embeds, so please view the story at their site, leave comments there and constructive criticism here.
In my title to this post I mention an expression from the COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) official who briefed us that fell out of the video report in the editing process. Answering one reporter’s question about how Hamas could ignore these materials sent to the inhabitants (I can’t use the word “citizens”) of Gaza, he replied: “It was never about these goods; it was about the media. It’s not a humanitarian flotilla, it’s a manipulation flotilla.” Dupes and Demopaths anyone?
Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric has sent me the following series of posts in which Hamas (and other Palestinian “leaders”) have victimized the Palestinians in order to demonize Israel.
*2006*
Vulgar Palestinian Propaganda Succeeds with International Media – Again!
Palestinians Reject Israeli Humanitarian Efforts – Easier to Demonize Israel That Way
Palestinians Intentionally Create Humanitarian Crisis, Red Cross and Reuters Parrot Their Claims
2007
Hamas Trying To Turn Gaza Into A Humanitarian Disaster – They’re Stopping Gazans From Getting Medical Aid
Hamas Blocks Israeli Food Shipments, Intentionally Starves Gaza
Civilians To Create A Humanitarian Disaster – Again!
UN And “Gaza Businessmen” Agree: It’s Israel’s Fault That Hamas
Has Intentionally Created A Humanitarian Disaster In the Gaza
Strip By Blocking Food and Medical Shipments
AP: Yup, Humanitarian Crisis Intentionally Caused By Hamas Is
Still Israel’s Fault
Hamas Intentionally Creating Humanitarian Disaster In Gaza – Now
They’re Shutting Down The Few Medical Clinics That Are Still
Working
UN Set To Blame Israel For Intentional, Hamas-Engineered
Humanitarian Crisis In Gaza
IDF Colonel: Hamas Creating Humanitarian Crisis. No Kidding.
Palestinians Going Global With Program To Demonize Israel For
Deliberate, Hamas-Engineered Gaza Humanitarian Crisis (Updated:
WaPo Hops On Board)
Hamas Intentionally Creating Humanitarian Crises In Gaza By
Stealing Fuel From Hospitals For Their “Operations” Against Israel
Palestinians Intentionally Creating Humanitarian Crises In Gaza By
Refusing To Accept Israeli Fuel
2008
Hamas Soldiers Tank Up As Israel Restores Full Fuel To Gaza
Palestinians Shut Down Generator To Create Gaza Humanitarian
Crisis, UN Blames Israel
UN: Gazans Have More Than Enough Food, But Lack Of Fruits And
Vegetables Is A Humanitarian Crisis
UN Statement On Gaza Humanitarian Crisis Somehow Misses “Hamas
Intentionally Causing It” Part
Hamas Confiscates Aid Trucks, Promises To Deliver Them Some Time
Later
Breaking: Two Israelis Murdered By Fatah, IJ Terrorists – /While
Supplying Fuel To Gaza/ (UPDATE: Israeli Towns Shelled For Hours
Before And After Attack)
Hamas Creates Humanitarian Crisis By Stealing Fuel For Terrorism,
Preventing Israeli Gas Shipments, And Cutting Off Gaza Civilians.
/Again/. (Plus: International Press, Human Rights Groups Blame
Israel. /Again/)
New Data Confirms Old Data: Blaming Israel For Gaza’s Medical
Collapse Is A Vicious Lie
Fuel Shipments Renewed After UN, EU Blame Israel For Hamas’s
Intentionally Created Humanitarian Crisis
Palestinian Authority: /Of Course/ Gaza Humanitarian Crisis Is
Manufactured By Hamas (Plus: United Nations Still Trying To Blame
Israel)
Evil Israeli Apartheid State Responds To Weekend Rocket Barrages
By Delivering Humanitarian Aid To Gaza
AFP Lede: “Crippling Israeli Blockade”
Evil Israeli Apartheid Regime Responds To Another Day Of Rockets
By Sending Money Into Gaza
Breathless HuffPo Headline About Gazans Eating Grass Contradicted
By Rest Of Headline, Linked Picture, Reality (Plus: Anti-Semitic
Comments Ensue Anyway)
Hamas Now Doing Everything Humanly Possible To Generate Gaza
Civilian Casualties
2009
Gaza Hospitals Overflowing With Hamas Weapons, Palestinian
Vigilante Murder
Confirmed: Gaza Has More Fuel Than Most Of Eastern Europe As
Russia Shuts Down Gas Pipelines
UN Imposes Collective Punishment On Gaza Population In Response To
Hamas Crimes, Suspends Humanitarian Shipments
Hamas Soldiers Threw “Medicine Grenades” At The IDF
2010
Aww… Glut Of Gaza Products Putting Small-Time Smugglers Out Of
Business
UN Officials Hosting Anti-Israel Tours And Media Events In Gaza.
Obama State Dept Boosts Their Funding [Video]
Analysis of Abbas-Obama meeting by Barry Rubin: LCE carries the day
Don’t have time to comment. But Barry Rubin is possibly the political analyst who best understands the cultural dynamics at work in Arab politics. No cognitive egocentrism here, except, alas, where our POTUS is concerned.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010
Obama Meets Abbas: And Shows He Understands Neither Hamas Nor Israel, Neither the Middle East Nor Islamism
Please be subscriber 16,520. Put your email address in the box, upper right-hand of the page.We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page. By check: “American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
President Barack Obama has announced an additional $400 million in aid for housing, school construction and business development in Gaza and West Bank in his meeting with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Calling the status quo in Gaza unsustainable, Obama said he was talking with Europeans, Egypt, Israel, and the PA on how to have a better approach that takes into account the security concerns of Israel and the needs of people in Gaza.
He also urged the need to rush ahead on a peace process which has no chance of success, calling this situation, too, unsustainable. It is in fact Obama’s policy which is unsustainable.
Obama said, “As part of the United Nations Security Council, we were very clear in condemning the acts that led to this crisis and have called for a full investigation.” What does this mean? Which acts? The acts of provocation and attacks on Israeli soldiers or is he blaming Israel? Who knows? The president of the United States is not supposed to be inscrutable.
Moreover, the president of the United States shouldn’t hide behind the UN. What is his policy? Where is the leadership?
Eileen Read at HuffPo calls for Caroline Glick’s dismissal for “We Con the World”
There’s a joke about “how many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“That’s not funny.”
(The original one was, “5, 1 to do it and 4 to write about it.” But that got the above-mentioned response so often that it got replaced by it.)
Now I’m not bringing this up to accuse feminists of lacking a sense of humor (another post), but rather to focus on feminists as a subset of radicals who take themselves entirely too seriously. Eileen Read, now a columnist for the Huffington Post has an interesting profile which suggests just the kind of earnest “we can save the world” milieu that Caroline Glick’s Latma piece is designed to skewer.
Her response: “that’s not funny” in the current aggressive-progressive mode: that’s racist.
And typically, she misreads the song from start to finish.
If this is what passes for intelligence in the “progressive” community, we’re all in trouble. (HT/Daled Amos)
The Jerusalem Post Should Fire Caroline Glick for Making a Racist Video
Eileen Read
Los Angeles-based journalist focusing on foreign policy
Posted: June 5, 2010 05:07 PMComments 323
‘We Will Slaughter the Jews,’ goes a blatantly racist music video that has had nearly 700,000 views on YouTube.Its title is, ‘We Con the World,’ sung to the tune of ‘We are the World.’
However, the video’s keffiyah (headscarf) wearing, knife-wielding ‘Arabs’ and other members of the ‘Flotilla Choir’ clearly aren’t Turks or Gazans. They’re Jewish Israelis singing “there’s no people dying” about the Gaza humanitarian-aid flotilla, in which nine people were killed last Monday by Israeli commandos, and many others were shot. A 19-year-old American aboard was shot five times at close range.
The lyrics begin:
There comes a time when we need to make a show
For the world and CNN
There’s no people dying so the best that we can do
Is create the greatest bluff of allThe press office of the Prime Minister of Israel sent this video around the world. Apparently inadvertently, according to spokesman Mark Regev. Regev notes nonetheless that “”I called my kids in to watch it because I thought it was funny. It’s what Israelis feel.”
Clearly not all Israelis, since thousands and thousands of them massed in Tel Aviv today to protest the mess their extreme right-wing government is making of their nation’s image abroad.
“It was not intended for general release,” said a statement from the press office. “The contents of the video in no way represent the official policy of either the Government Press Office or of the State of Israel.”
On her blog, the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, claims credit for the video. I never take Glick-bylined pieces seriously because they’re all the same, since she constantly talks about continuing the occupation of Palestine, trashes Obama (and she is from Chicago!) and is a favorite on the lowest-level of American right-wing tv, like the Laura Ingraham show.
But this is lower than I’ve ever seen someone go who carries a management title at a journalism organization. I’m ashamed to say that Glick and I are both Columbia alums. Even if she hates people of another race or religion and is allowed by her editors to poke fun at them in a tasteless and blatantly racist way, she should be fired for making fun of the dead.
It’s hard to think of a better example of the kind of aggressive stupidity that inspired the title of my next book: They’re so smart cause we’re so stupid: A medievalist’s guide to the 21st century. Think Eric Holder, and John Brennan, and the Department of Defense, and the list of useful infidels goes on and on.
To be a little less polemical, Eileen, if you really care about people who really suffer, and want to oppose the people who make them suffer on purpose, you need to consider the following possibility: your definition of racism makes it impossible to criticize precisely people in the latter category.
Caroline, and all of the rest of us who find that video a bitter sweet-piece of right-on, know what you apparently don’t. That the demopaths they’re spoofing are not “the Palestinian people,” much less the “Arab race,” but a bunch of thugs who present themselves as their “leaders,” but who, in typical pre-modern fashion, exploit their own people.
And when you allow them to dupe you, you enable their oppression.
And when you jump on us for “racism,” you both silence our voice, and impoverish the ability to deal with reality of all those who care about human dignity.
Nidra Poller and I on Live-TV about Muhammad al Durah
Last January, Info-live interviewed Nidra and me about the al Durah case. I never heard back about the final product, but here it is. Nidra’s remarks about the crucial element of accusation of intention and its functioning in the blood libel are especially important.
Leveling the Playing Field: From Soccer to the Middle East
David Thompson has a wonderful post about a rule in a kids soccer league that any team that wins by more than five goals loses by default.
Israel’s dilemma is, that in order to survive, it has to win by ten points (thereby “humiliating” the poor Arabs).
I think the MSNM believes that its job is to declare the default.
Bob Simon opined in the case of Muhammad al Durah: “In the Middle East, one picture can be worth a thousand weapons.”
When I ask journalists if they believe that they can help “level the playing field” by giving the Palestinians a “PR” win, often enough they respond: “Sure.”
Bret Stephens and Israel’s Liberal “Friends”
Bret Stephens has an excellent piece up at the WSJ about the attitude of liberals towards Israel. A few comments sprinkled throughout… (HT/LK)
Israel and Its Liberal ‘Friends’
Why don’t they apply the same tough love to the Palestinians?
By BRET STEPHENSQuestions for liberals: What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What does it mean to be a friend of the Palestinians? And should the same standards of friendship apply to Israelis and Palestinians alike, or is there a double standard here as well?
It has become the predictable refrain among Israel’s liberal critics that their criticism is, in fact, the deepest form of friendship. Who but a real friend, after all, is willing to tell Israel the hard truths it will not tell itself? Who will remind Israel that it is now the strong party, and that it cannot continue to play the victim and evade the duties of moral judgment and prudential restraint? Above all, who will remind Israel that it cannot go on denying Palestinians their rights, their dignity, and a country they can call their own?
The answer, say people like Peter Beinart, formerly of the New Republic, is people like . . . Peter Beinart. And now that Israel has found itself in another public relations hole thanks to last week’s raid on the Gaza flotilla, Israelis will surely be hearing a lot more from him.
Of course, Beinart is just the current poster-boy. (I still haven’t fisked him, although is article cries out for it. One of the best responses was Noah Pollak’s. But the real flotilla of liberal “friends” is at J-Street.
Now consider what it means for liberals to be friends of the Palestinians.
The Consequences of Media Failure: Demopaths Setting the Global Agenda
[I have a video-embedded article up at Pajamas Media. Here's the opening segment:]
The Consequences of Media Failure: Demopaths Setting the Global Agenda
An examination of just how badly CNN failed to accurately cover the flotilla incident — repeating nonsense when better information was available — and the ramifications.
June 8, 2010
- by Richard Landes
The latest explosion of anti-Israel rage, driven by the Muslim world and echoed by both the MSM and the international diplomatic community, raises important questions. How is it that in a world where North Korea and South Korea may go to war, Iran may get nuclear weapons, and jihadis are killing fellow (non-) Muslims by the dozens in mosques and hospitals, Israel’s killing of nine streetfighting jihadis sets the international agenda?
Amidst the many elements contributing to the sight of a world gone mad, I’d like to focus here on the role of the media.
For some time now, critical observers have warned about the “halo effect” that “human rights” NGOs have benefited from even as they were taken over by radical political activists who had strong links to jihadi organizations and individuals. This halo effect works in two directions: it extends to the “allies” of these hijacked NGOs (“peace activists”) and also to the MSM which tends to convey the “testimony” of the NGOs as reliable news. All of this comes to a grotesque climax in the flotilla affair.
Let’s begin with an interview CNN’s Rosemary Church conducted with a “peace activist,” Osama Qashoo.
As a flotilla of boats heads towards Gaza to break the blockade, CNN has anchor Rosemary Church perform an interview with a participant from one of the boats, “Free Gaza” activist Osama Qashoo. The report has so many flaws, it’s hard to list and analyze them all. (For the entire interview, click here.)
Let’s focus on the main flaws.
The Nature of the Flotilla
Read the rest at PJMedia
From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century “Intellectuals”
[The following is a transcript of a talk I gave at a conference on Intellectuals and Terror, a month ago. I held back publishing it because I wanted to give some good examples. The Flotilla offers precisely that "in spades." I will add links later on.]
Lenin allegedly referred to Western intellectuals who so supported the communist experiment that they disguised its horrors from the West as “useful idiots,” because their idiotic romantic attachment to communist dreams made them highly useful allies in deceiving the West and preventing it from opposing the Soviet Union when it was still vulnerable.
Today observers use the term to describe liberal intellectuals who enjoy freedom and prosperity, yet undermine both by giving moral and material support to revolutionary movements hostile to such bourgeois values. But that’s actually a mild accusation against useful idiocy. By covering up the engineered famines in Ukraine and in China, by dismissing evidence of the Gulag Archipelago or the Cambodian killing fields, all of which killed tens, even hundreds of millions of people, useful idiots have been responsible for aiding and abetting the terrifying death machines.
Given that history itself revealed that they had been dupes of the most staggering sort, even such brilliant ones as George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre lost their credibility. One would think, therefore, that with the lessons of the last century still fresh in our minds, these memories would immunize us to the appeal of useful idiocy in the late 20th, early 21st century.
A fortiori, one would expect the wisdom so painfully gained in the course of the 20th to insulate the West from serving as useful idiots to a revolutionary movement with none of the idealistic appeal of communism, but rather with a record of regressive, gynophobic, authoritarian, and nihilistic traits that virtually guarantee that any success such a movement might have would be a catastrophe for those so unfortunate to have these revolutionaries “liberate” them.
So why would a late 20th century progressive sympathize with, support, run interference, even lie and deceive, for a movement that manifested all the worst traits of totalitarian megadeath from the 20th century – the cult of death, the embrace of nihilism, paranoia, and genocidal hate-mongering? At least the fellow travelers of the early and mid-20th century had a noble ideal for which they carried out their campaigns of misinformation. But now, we have intellectuals from a wide range of fields running interference for Islam, even in its most regressive forms.
And of course, at this asymmetrical stage in the war that Global Jihad wages against the West, nothing is more critical to the capacity of Jihad to mobilize – to recruit, indoctrinate, train, and deploy – its forces than a cognitive victory in which its targets in the West are kept in the dark about its real intentions. And given the yeoman job that apologists like John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Juan Cole perform in this sense, I think it worthwhile to use the expression “useful infidel” for this new breed of fellow travelers. Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions to subject the entire world to Sharia than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace that is perfectly consonant with democracy, and that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal, deviation from true Islam.
I want to argue that this astonishing paradox – Islamic Jihad is the last thing one would expect reasonable, progressive intellectuals to support – strips away the pretence of naïve good intentions that the older “useful idiot” used to plead. Once we confront the “irrationality” of useful infidelity, and realize the urgency of trying to understand a phenomenon that pushes us in the direction of cultural, even civilizational suicide, we must confront the underlying (self-destructive) emotions.
Demopaths and their Dupes
It seems to me that the phenomenon of useful idiocy revolves around a particularly dysfunctional relationship, that between demopath and dupe. Demopaths arise in response to democratic cultures, which they target in a cognitive war suited only to assaults on such societies, that is, ones that embrace principles of a human right to freedom. They themselves embrace authoritarian principles of dominion by force, what Lee Smith has chronicled so chillingly in his latest book, The Strong Horse. Their line of attack: “you (democratic target) do not live up to your commitments; and in particular, you violate our (demopathic belligerent) rights in preventing us from participating in your democracy.”
Quintessence of the Useful Infidel: Spanish Gay Pride Parade bans Israeli Delegation
An article at Ynet illuminates the combination of insanity and cowardice that now animates much of the Western “left.” The largest Gay Pride parade in the world disinvited the Israeli contingent because of pressure from increasingly violent anti-Israel demonstrators in Spain, especially since the Flotilla Fadiha.
On the one hand, we have Israel, the only country in the Middle East where Gay Pride Parades occur, the only country which, despite being labeled a theocracy run by a bunch of rabbis who think homosexuality is an abomination, even allows Gay Pride parades in the holy city of Jerusalem, right in the face of the religious zealots, without violence.
On the other, we have the Palestinians and other Arab and Muslim countries, where homosexuality is repressed harshly, where killing a homosexual son is a widely approved form of honor-killing, where zealots roam unopposed by governments and kill homosexuals, where homosexuals flee to Israel for asylum, to hang out in the free atmosphere of cities like Tel Aviv.
And in between, we have progressive, peace-loving, free-spirited, rather flamboyant Western homosexuals, who side with the Arab homophobes. Why? It’s hard to gauge the part that’s idiocy (Palestinians are a progressive cause) and the part that’s cowardice (we’re afraid of security problems). But it sure does add up to produce yet another fine example of the useful infidel.
Spanish pride parade doesn’t want Israelis
Sources say pro-Palestinian groups led Madrid to cancel invitation extended to LGBT delegation
Yoav Zitun
Published: 06.08.10, 00:44 / Israel NewsOrganizers of Madrid’s pride parade, scheduled for the beginning of next month, have announced that they are cancelling the invitation of Israeli representatives slated to appear there, Ynet learned Monday.
The Israeli delegation, made up of members of the LGBT association and the Foreign Ministry, was scheduled to run an Israeli “bus” in the parade, for the first time since its establishment.
But the delegation has recently received hints from Spain that their arrival may cause anger among local pro-Palestinian groups, which may require excess security and, more importantly, cause a lot of embarrassment.
And we don’t want to be embarrassed when we’re being proud, do we?
Reutersgate 2.0: Honor-Shame vs. Liberal MSNM
It looks like Charles Johnson and his crew (TG?) have caught Reuters’ photography division doing work unbecoming a journalist. And a second case.
[Correction below]
The first time Reuters photo department got into trouble, in Lebanon in 2006, they ran photoshopped pictures from an Arab photographer (Adnan Hajj) which emphasized the violence.
This time, they cropped photos provided by Turkish media (the high-circulation weekly Hürriet), to remove traces of violence. See Elder of Zion and CAMERA for analyses (LGF seems to be down).
That doesn’t seem consistent, until you consider the context.
In the case of Adnan, the photocopying emphasized Israeli violence against Arab victims. That kind of image raised no red flags in a MSNM office (Reuters Photography) that framed the conflict as Israeli Goliath vs. Palestinian David. They were receiving a flood of such photos and passing on the best, of which Hajj’s photo of the Beirut skyline covered in plumes of smoke was a good one among many.
On the other hand, here, we have something else. The Turkish journal published these photos because they, and their Turkish audience, are proud of the damage they inflicted: from their point of view, this photo is embarrassing to the Israelis. Just like the Egyptians have a museum to their (brief moment of) victory in 1973 (October 6), so too the Turks now have a moment where they had the upper hand on Israeli soldiers. In a tribal warrior honor-shame culture, these photos are the equivalent of counting coup.
Of course, oops, that was supposed to be a peace-activist flotilla, with nothing but love for the whole world. As the NYT (Isabel Kershner) reported:
“Our volunteers were not trained military personnel,” said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. “They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms.”
(Note: It’s one thing to quote Mr. Dede, it’s another thing not to probe the validity of his statement.)
And indeed, the worldwide indignation over Israel’s killing the nine on board depends on this story. If they were a bunch of bloodthirsty, street-fighting Jihadis, armed for close quarter combat, then the story doesn’t quite work.
So what does Reuters do with a picture like this?
Insight into the deeply troubled mind of the Israeli organizer of the flotilla
One of the main organizers of this flotilla is Dror Feiler, an Israeli expatriate in Sweden. Six years ago, during the “Suicide Intifada” he created an piece of “art” 6: A sailboat with the name “Snow White” floating on “blood,” and placed like a sail was a photo of a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, the female lawyer who blew herself up in the Haifa suicide bombing attack against Maxim Restaurant, October 4, 2003 which killed 21 Israelis, including a number of Arabs.
Snow White and the Madness of Truth
Ellen Horowitz has added Feiler’s work to her cartoon about the Flotilla.
UPDATE: Dror Feiler in concert. It explains a lot. (HT/EH)