Zion. An island of sanity in an ocean of savagery.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
The PLO celebrates its 40th birthday this year
Most people are unaware of this, but the PLO was founded in 1964. 3 years BEFORE Israel conquered Samaria/Judea from Jordan, 3 years before the West eagerly took over what Arafat then dubbed "the Westbank".
And for 30 40 years, this is the best the PLO could do.
Update: A reader notified me of my limited "kopfrechnung" skills. This perversion of a freedom-fighters club has been around now for 40, not 30 years! Corrected in the post. Thx!
One of the most brilliant scions of Israel (and there are many) was Abba Eban (also see here). Born in South-Africa in 1905, he was a leader of Jews his whole life, in different capacities and circumstances. He was perhaps best known for his oratory skills, in which he combined cutting wit, supreme intelligence and very broad knowledge to expose the attitude and intentions of the world at large towards Israel.
This man said the following of the UN:
"...if the Arabs were to propose to the UN a resolution that the earth was flat, it would be passed by an overwhelming majority."
He said this 30 years ago.
Shmuel Katz notes in the Jeruzalem Post that nothing has changed since then.
He then goes into one of my favourite topics, namely the disputed territories and their current and final status. He does this well, covers the basics. It is two pages, and recommended reading. Unsettling thoughts on occupation
I sometimes get despondent, when it seems the whole world is either indifferent or hostile to Israel. And the view does not change, but the mood does. Especially after reading something like this: Beware the Risen People
I say to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: Be aware of the Risen People who will sweep the enemy scourge into the dustbin of history. Know that the Jewish soul will be set free. The spectacular victories of the Israeli army and the return to Zion demonstrated that power. But it wasn't a miracle. It was just the soul of the Jew coming into its own. It was just the Jewish soul freed at last to be itself.
And I see it coming, the Jewish soul released to be itself. I see a new, proud Jewish government coming to power in Israel; a government that reclaims the Jewish holy places and restores Jewish sovereignty in all of Eretz Yisrael. I see Moslem control and Islamic sites removed from the Temple Mount to make it ready for Moshiach. I see the enemies of Israel, who raise up their hands to murder or injure Jews, driven from our Holy Land. I see the secular Jews of Israel and the world becoming more observant and returning to the Torah. I see religious Jews becoming more tolerant of diversity in Jewish practice.
I see a new Israeli foreign policy that grovels before no nation, no matter how powerful. I see Israel's Foreign Minister informing every nation that their embassies must be in Jerusalem. I see the government demanding that the Vatican return all the property it has stolen from the Jewish people during the last 2,000 years. Maybe they will refuse and we could always hold their property in Israel as a down payment. The Vatican has been used to dealing with obsequious, groveling Jews, but they will see proud, fearless Jews. I see an Israeli government that would change its relationship with America from one of subservience to one of equal alliance.
I am not a religious person in any way, I do not believe in any God. But the endurance and and influence of the Jewish people are almost enough to make me a believer.
The good thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.
This is an old saying in IT. Nowadays it also goes for Muslims in need of a politically correct face. Daniel Pipes has an article about a website where one can obtain a standard form condemning terrorism. There are even multiple versions of this form, so it won't be so obvious it's really just a formality
The Defense Ministry has completed a large-scale project to mark the existing built-up borders of all the Jewish communities and towns in Judea and Samaria - and no further construction will be allowed beyond them. Yediot Acharonot reports today that aerial photos will be sent to the United States, which will monitor every building aberration. Though the towns will be allowed to appeal the decision, every building beyond the marked borders could be subject to immediate demolition.
The US will monitor. WHAT THE F#%!? Are they monitoring the Arabs as well? I think not! Is Israel no longer a soverein nation, are they subject to whoever gets elected by Americans and not Israeli's?
This is a frightening move by Sharon. He has to go, although I don't really know who should replace him.
On April 14, Sharon triumphantly presented a letter from President Bush - which said nothing of the sort. Bush merely stated, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949" - far from an endorsement of the settlement-bloc conception.
Yesha Council head Bentzy Lieberman understood the dangers. On April 18, he said that Israel was supposed to be submitting to the Americans up-to-date aerial maps specifying the precise construction boundaries of each and every Jewish community in Judea and Samaria. "What this means is that not only are we giving up Gaza," Lieberman warned, "but the entire future of the remainder of the settlements is in doubt. As usual, the Prime Minister is hiding certain parts of the agreement, and is in fact deceiving us - and the ministers are ignoring this. Contrary to the impression that he has safeguarded the future of the settlement blocs, they are actually in grave danger."
Is it really necessary to repeat this again? I guess it is: Judea/Samaria are OFFICIALLY NOBODY'S PROPERTY. They are areas under dispute, and Security Council resolution 242 states very clearly how ownership should be resolved.
Which, among other things means that Israeli's have at least as much right to build and develop there as any Arab.
Please read the entire article. And then tell me who should be Prime Minister instead of Sharon
Of the seventeen documentary programs the BBC produced on Israel over the past four years, only one presented Israel in a positive light; the other sixteen were overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian, casting Israel as a brutal aggressor nation.
The BBC employs impartial journalists too:
As continually noted by HonestReporting (and by journalist Tom Gross in a recent article), these BBC documentaries are part of a deep-seated, institutional anti-Israel bias, a culture that drove the senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in Gaza, Fayad Abu Shamala, to announce at a Hamas rally in May 2001 that journalists and media organizations, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."
I watch the BBC a lot. As long as they do not go into ANY politics, they are a great organization. I also value their independence from commercial and/or political organizations.
But when they get into politics themselves (which they do frequently), they invariably stray to the viewpoints of the far left, as they did on the war in Iraq, and as they in the case of Israel. It's good to know others are aware of this, and are even taking action to change it.
Palestinian shot in hospital bed heads BBC. This is hilarious. What happened is this: For some reason, a Palestinian Arab finds himself in a Palestinian Arab jail. A grenade is tossed into his cell BY A POLICEMAN! Wait wait, it gets weirder! He survives the initial attack, which incidently injures 6 others, and is taken to hospital (I presume under police escort, the man was after all under some form of arrest), where he is subsequently shot to death, while under treatment. Perhaps being shot WAS the treatment, it's hard to tell.
The report also doesn't say wether the killer was the same man that threw the grenade in the first place. It's not all that unlikely, you know.
The man was shot to death because he was suspected of being an Israeli collaborator. I guess there are instances where the thugs that pose as Arafat's police can't vouch for their own actions. These instances include (but are not limited to) anything involving anything "Jewish" or "Israeli". When that occurs, the "police" understandably revert to their natural state of savage barbarians with 21st century weaponry. So who can blame them?
Yes. These people are ready to join the global community as mature civilized human beings alright.
More Kassam rockets land Only reason no one gets killed is the inhabitants of the house that was hit fled FOR FEAR OF ROCKETS.
How long before the IDF takes action? Decisive action? Does someone have to die first?
If no Jews live in Gaza, why not pave the areas the rockets are launched from, with the proper tools?
I am not a firm believer in the US' good intentions towards Israel. Granted, for the last 30 years or so it has been the best friend Israel has had in the entire world. But that doesn't really mean all that much when the rest of the world consists of two types of countries: Those who actively strive to destroy Israel, and those who won't lift a finger when that will happen.
But the history of the US attitude towards Israel (and the Jews in general) has at least as many negative sides to it as it has positive ones. And those negative ones have had a much greater impact than the positive ones (for all information on this subject read the indispensable "The Secret War Against the Jews" by John Loftus and Mark Aarons)
I do firmly believe that one of the great evils of this time is the UN. And there's no denying that the US has been on the side of Israel in this cursed organization far more often than it has been neutral, let alone against it.
But it seems like the UN has found a way to negate the Veto the US holds in the Security Council (the only part of the UN that matters at all). Read this for an ominous look at what the future may hold.
Israel is that social outcast in the world's schoolyard, known as the United Nations. The UN Charter grants permanent members of the Security Council, of which the US is one, what amounts to ultimate veto power over any UN Resolution. With this veto power, the US is able to shield Israel from the bullies in the UN who try to pulverize her through their seemingly endless supply of twisted vitriol, wrapped up and delivered in a UN Resolution.
That may no longer be true. I'll wager that few have carefully read the densely packed and dimly reasoned advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, in which the court of kangaroos jumped on and tried to crush the exposed neck of Israel, the courtyard nerd. No surprise there. But a few paragraphs tucked away in the Opinion sent a shiver down my spine.
In a rarely utilized tool about which few are aware, there lurks a means to trump the veto power protection of the US for Israel. That tool, Resolution 377 (A)(V), is known as the "Uniting for Peace" Resolution. This procedural anomaly allows a majority of the Security Council members to override a permanent member's veto of a resolution. That resolution can then be forwarded to the General Assembly for action on a measure that had otherwise - most would have assumed irreversibly - already been rejected.
Read it all. More and more reasons to disband the UN, or get out and leave it to rot.
Another great essay from Hansen.
On current attituted towards old Evil
At places like Nejmegen (sic) one now reads less about the Holocaust, the invasion of Poland, and the Nazi hijacking of German culture, and much more about the need for eternal peace, along with notes about the necessity to stop racism and oppression.
Europe now really does believe that such evil disappeared spontaneously, without Willies and Joes driving to their flaming deaths in thin-skinned Sherman tanks to stop SS murderers in 70-ton Tigers. But then in a world where George Bush last year was said to be a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein, why should one be surprised that affluent Westerners perhaps feel SS killers led by Sepp Dietrich were as much victims of war as the defenseless Belgian civilians they butchered?
On the UN
Meanwhile, the U.N. scolds Israel about its fence to keep out suicide murderers to the applause of the European and Arab worlds. Yet both sit mostly powerless while Arabs in turn systematically mass murder black Africans in the Sudan. Can we at least drop the falsity: In the new global CNN media circus, an Arab must kill 1,000 innocents deliberately to warrant the condemnation that the world allots to a Jew who kills one Arab inadvertently.
On who has evil intentions towards whom
So for the record: More Arabs go to the West than Westerners go eastward. Most U.S. troops are leaving Saudi Arabia; billions of American dollars flow to Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. We have even given billions to that wretched Arafat kleptocracy and saved Muslims from Kuwait to Bosnia. U.S. jets, not deranged riff-raff from Afghanistan, stopped Milosevic. There is no legitimate complaint of the Arab world against the United States — any more than Hitler had a right to Czechoslovakia or the Japanese to Manchuria. Just because the Japanese whined that the cutting-off of U.S. petroleum forced them to bomb Pearl Harbor didn't make it true.
On the cause of Muslim hatred for the West
Worse still, the commission has helped to resurrect the fable that we are hated for what we do or don't to Muslims rather than who we are. But the collective brain power of the commissioners could not adduce a simple explanation as to why French and Germans are busy rooting out plots to blow up their own citizens — despite billions of EU money sent to terrorist organizations like Hamas, support for Arafat, and cheap slurs leveled at America in Iraq. Why do Muslim radicals hate Europe when Europeans have no military power, no real presence abroad, give billions away to the Middle East, despise Israel, will sell anything to anyone anywhere at anytime, and have let millions of Arabs onto their shores? Are daily threats to Europeans earned because of what Europe does — or is the cause who they are?
Only it was the wrong people that left.
It should be obvious to everyone interested by now that for Israel to decrease the area of land it actually controls and occupies ("illegally" or otherwise) means that the enemy's land is INcreased. Apart from the moral victory this signifies (and that IS what it is), it also affords more and more wannabe-Jew murderers a shot at some Jews. As is happening with increasing frequency at Sderot.
In the beginning no one took these selfmade rockets serious. Now people have died, and more and more are getting injured.
As I said before, the Arabs are just lobbing these things over the fence at random. If you miss, hey, they came for free, courtesy fot the EU, UN and US. And every once in a while, you get lucky. So it's really a win-win situation.
We search the purses of little old ladies so that recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia named "Mohammed" wearing massive backpacks don't get singled out.
