29-Jul-11: Gunmen/bombers and their motivations

Texas is not Norway.

While a lone gunman was left undisturbed by the Norwegian authorities for several hours to bomb, shoot and cold-bloodedly murder his way through the streets of Oslo and then a nearby island where 600 youngsters were engaged in a political summer camp, an American serviceman was stopped today before he managed to fire off a single round.

Each had the massacre of innocents on his mind. But an alert American police system acted in time while the actions of the Norwegians raise a long list of troubling questions. Nidra Poller ["Mayhem in Norway"] asks

Where were the police?  Where weren’t the young people trained in self-defense?  Where were the heroes that would tackle the killer and save their comrades?  Anders Breivik committed mass murder because no one and nothing stopped him.  Where were the police? ... We are told that the call for help came in at 17:30 — one half-hour after the shooting began — and the police arrived one hour later at 18:30 (approximate figures).

We have other questions. The name of the American serviceman arrested in Texas is Naser Abdo. The very essence of his story is Islam. He took on the religion of his father, a Moslem, when he was 17. He joined the military in 2009, and a year after the 2009 massacre of 13 unarmed men at Fort Hood by a fellow Moslem, he condemned the shooter, according to the Washington Post  because such actions “run counter to what I believe in as a Muslim.” Last summer his name was in news when he refused to deploy with his unit to Afghanistan. The reason again was his Moslem faith - he claimed it prevented him from serving. He fought the army's plans from then onwards and gave multiple interviews to the media, referring each time to his Moslem values. As this ABC News report quotes him saying:

"Overall, as a Muslim I feel that I will not be able to carry out my military duties due to my conscientious objection," Abdo wrote in his application for the status. "Therefore, unless I separate myself from the military, I would potentially be putting the soldiers I work with in jeopardy." 

The New York Times ["Soldier Held Amid Claim of Terror Plot at Fort Hood"] runs through all these facts, including Abdo's confession that he specifically planned to attack Fort Hood... mentioning the soldier's religion exactly once - as the reason for his conscientious objection. It draws no conclusions about the evident inconsistency of a man refusing to deploy with his fellow soldiers because of his religion and then a year later plotting to open fire on them for the same reason.

Reuters, in a syndicated report titled "Police say arrest of soldier foiled "terror plot"", manages to pull off the same feat. The sole mention of Islam, Moslem, Muslim or anything linguistically close comes in the absolute-last line of the article:

"Abdo applied for conscientious objector status in 2010 because he said Islamic standards prohibited his service in the U.S. Army in any war, military officials said."

Al Jazeera's coverage ["Arrested US soldier 'admits to terror' plot'"] suffers from no such delicacy. Trumping Reuters and the NY Times, its English-language editors manage to tell the whole story without a single mention of the man's religion or any possible religious motivation.

But to their credit, Al Jazzera does mention a connection to a previous mass killing at the same Ft Hood carried out by someone named Nidal Hasan. And the connection between Hasan and Abdo? Why, that would be the fact that both purchased weapons from a store called Guns Galore (which is true, but far from being the central issue in this story.)

And lest we forget the European side of the house (hat tip to CIF Watch), The Guardian [US soldier arrested near Fort Hood 'admits to attack plan'] skips any reference to the terrorist's Islamic motivations or connection. Not a single word from the paper whose code of ethics begins with a lecture on the importance of the bond of trust between the publication and its consumers.

Yes, incisive, courageous journalism at its best. All the news that's fit to print - provided it doesn't disclose more than we, the unwashed and ignorant masses, can be trusted to be told.

28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.

Palestinian children: European and American return on investment 

Governments who take their citizens' tax money and send it to the Palestinian regimes - both of them - have steadfastly refused to answer for the evil that this funding enables.

The issue is not new. Arnold Roth (one of this blog's two authors) wrote about this under the title "Blood, Money and Education" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal eight years ago [the article is reproduced here]. And the issue was by no means new or unknown then.

The years go by. Some people get smarter, some get stupider and some just don't want to know.

Palestinian Media Watch, a courageous and intellectually-honest Israel-based organization that monitors Palestinian Arab culture and media, presented a study to members of the US Congress this week. It focuses on money that starts out in Washington and ends up in the hands of the families of people who have carried out some of the most barbaric terrorist attacks the world has known.

To state the findings briefly:

• More than 5,500 Palestinians serving time in Israeli prisons for terrorism are getting salaries from the Palestinian Authority [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 14, 2011] 
• Those payments do not go to Palestinian car thieves. They do go to every terrorist - including hundreds of murderers - serving time in Israeli prisons. 
• We do not plan to check into this, but it's almost certain such payments also go to the murderers of our daughter Malki.
• We already know via the official PA daily that the man who built the bomb that killed our child, a man called Barghouti, is a "heroic prisoner". [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 13, 2011, via this week's PMW report]. There's simply no room for doubting the lionization of such monsters by every official level of Palestinian Arab society.
• The money payments go either to the terrorist himself/herself or to the terrorist's family and are retrospective to the day of arrest. [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 15, 2011] 
• To be clear about this: Palestinians charged with terrorism have long received such stipends from the PA. It's part of the general, systematic government-level support for terrorism by both Palestinian regimes that is methodically ignored or hidden by complicit Western governments abetted by many parts of the news media.
• What's new is these payments became formalized in April 2011 under a new PA law. We wrote about this here [20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?] 
• The United States gives more than $600 million to the Palestinians annually. $225 million of it goes directly to the PA.
• The 2010 law that approved aid to the PA required the US State Department “take all appropriate steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to or through any individual, private or government entity, or educational institution that the Secretary knows or has reason to believe advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in, terrorist activity.”
• It's self-evident that this law has been breached. The requirement imposed on the State Department is a bad joke.
• The payment of salaries to convicted terrorists currently runs at $5.2 million per month [May 2011 figures - source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 19, 2011], and is a clear violation of this law.
• The PMW analysis shows that these terrorism-supporting payments are larger, on average, than the salaries paid to Palestinian civil servants and military personnel. This makes it clear to every Palestinian Arab family which career path the Abbas/Faayad regime seeks to encourage.

Something might now happen in the US Congress, though it's a long shot. 

But when it comes to European government support for the identical double-dealing, the encouragement of terror, and the opaque fund transfers to both of the pro-terror Palestinian Arab regimes, there's no reason to expect anything will change. Unless Itamar Marcus and his research staff at PMW can manage to bring their presentation in front of European politicians. And even then... 

28-Jul-11: A nightmare called Syria

Life for Syrians under the Assad regime has never been a bed of roses, even when the news media of western countries turned a blind eye to the relentless repression over a period of decades. Currently, with the mis-named "Arab Spring" underway, there's less of a blind eye. But for most news consumers, it remains a remote and fuzzy story. That's a pity because casting a cold, hard eye on what's happening just across Israel's northern border will reveal some horrible truths.

The social activism organization/website Avaaz is going public today with a devastating indictment of what Basher al-Assad and his cronies are doing to the citizens under their heels. The key numbers, according to AP:

• 3,000 Syrians have gone missing since the start of the uprising against Assad four months ago.
• Avaaz estimates that "one person is disappearing in Syria every hour". 
• More than 1,600 have been killed, most of them unarmed protesters.

We would organize a flotilla if our sense of humor were sufficiently morbid.

28-Jul-11: Once more, they're firing at us again. Again.

Ashkelon: Choice target for the freedom fighters (excuse the
deep sarcasm) of Hamas-controlled Gaza

From Ynet, a report of an incoming rocket early this morning (Thursday), the 24th such attack this month alone:

"Relative state of calm in south breaks early Thursday as rocket hits open area; no injuries reported. Residents in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council woke up Thursday morning to siren alarm sounds. A Qassam rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel and exploded in an open area south of Ashkelon. No injuries or damage were reported."

Ashkelon is a city. An Israeli city. It's not a military base. It's not a dusty, pockmarked war-zone with shanties and bomb craters. It's a place filled with ordinary civilians, and the bustle of normal, constructive, peaceful lives.

Which is precisely why the Gazan jihadists and their thuggish Hamas masters find it so hard to desist from lobbing bombs and other explosives in the general direction of its many children and kindergartens. There are no innocent bystanders or victims caught in the crossfire when it comes to the terrorists. All of us are in their crosshairs. All of us are at war with them, whether we wish it or not.

24-Jul-11: Now Norway

The Oslo bombing and then the massacre that propelled the name Anders Behring Breivik into the headlines is sickening. To what levels have we sunk that columnists, analysts and bloggers can read the alleged murderer's words ("gruesome but necessary") and see in them a basis for understanding what this is about? 93 people were killed, 96 were injured according to media reports and others are still missing, so the numbers may yet rise further. The challenge in front of us is to look beyond numbers. The victims are people, many of them children and young adults. As with acts of terrorism everywhere else and at every other time, none of the Norwegians was an innocent victim caught in the crossfire. Yes, the gunman/bomber did not know his victims. But he hated every one of them. And every single one of them, rather than being caught in some mythical crossfire, was the deliberate cold-blooded target of his unspeakable act of unfathomable hatred.

21-Jul-11: So who's winning in the war against the terrorists?

From ABC News

A new intelligence report from the US Department of Homeland Security issued yesterday (Wednesday) says America's public utilities - including water, gas and waste facilities - are the targets of several kinds of terrorism.

• "While DHS has no specific, credible intelligence of an imminent threat posed to the private-sector utilities, several recent incidents highlight the ongoing threat to infrastructure in the utility sectors from insiders and outsiders..." DHS spokesman Matthew Chandler said." [Source]
• Entitled "Insider Threat to Utilities," the government report warns "violent extremists have, in fact, obtained insider positions" and that "outsiders have attempted to solicit utility-sector employees" for damaging physical and cyber attacks… There is substantive evidence that  ongoing recruitment of 'insiders' at utilities is rampant.
• The DHS document refers to the 2010 case where a U.S. citizen, arrested in Yemen during a round-up of suspected al Qaeda members, was found to have worked for multiple contractors "performing non-sensitive maintenance at five different U.S. nuclear power plants from 2002 to 2008" [Source]
• Among the materials recovered after the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in May, US officials found evidence bin Laden sought to repeat the carnage of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on or around its ten year anniversary.
• A former Homeland Security chief of staff Chad Sweet says a utility attack is the 'only way you can actually kill the large-scale number of Americans' as the former Al Qaeda leader was planning.

The news reports themselves sound dramatized and somewhat sensationalist. This is a shame because the tendency to dismiss warnings of the existential threat posed by terrorists is itself dangerous and undermines the preparations such threats demand.

20-Jul-11: How the media hijacked the campaign to free Gilad Shalit

New York's Jewish Week today published the op ed below written by one of this blog's authors.

How The Media Hijacked The Campaign To Free Gilad Shalit

Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Frimet Roth - Special To The Jewish Week
Something awful has happened to the campaign to free Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped more than five years ago.

Jerusalem July 8, 2010: A huge crowd join the parents of Gilad Shalit,
held hostage by the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza
for four years (at that time - now it's  five) in a protest march
supported by Israel's media.

The liberal Israeli media has transformed what began as a non-partisan consensus effort into a political confrontation. The media goal, alongside the rescue of Gilad, is to achieve the mass release of Palestinian terrorists.
The catch phrase “we must free Shalit at any cost" has come to mean at any cost that involves the release of Palestinian murderers from Israeli prisons. As if no other cost is a valid option.
It is striking that Israel’s mass media, ostensibly bolstering the Shalit family, has not lent support to the family’s recent attempts to save Gilad by the following means: stemming the cash flow from Israel to the Palestinian Authority; canceling Israeli prison perks for Palestinian prisoners; interrupting services (gas, water, electricity) to Gazan residents; and pressuring the United States and Europe to halt their financial assistance to Hamas.
Columnist Alon Idan conceded this politicization in the pages of Haaretz last week when he wrote: "The left is in favor of releasing Shalit, the right is against it and the center says it's in favor but acts against it."
He ignored the fact that the largely liberal media itself is a prime culprit. Its decision to support one exclusive means to rescue Shalit, in exchange for the mass release of prisoners, has profoundly affected the situation.
Any time that the Shalit family has embraced alternative tactics, the media has ignored them. Only the prisoner “swap”, as the lopsided proposed exchange is called, has garnered supportive articles.
The press has presented myriad arguments to boost its position. A favorite has been to ridicule, as Idan does, the “mumbles of objection.” He posits that “the tumult” surrounding this issue is just a way of “dealing with the need to keep prisoners with ‘blood on their hands’ where they belong.”
As if this "need" were some irrational, infantile whim.
Another Haaretz columnist mocked this concern when he wrote that Netanyahu, upon becoming prime minister, “began discussing one of his favorite topics – terror and its danger,” insinuating that this is just one of his childish pastimes.
Denying the existence of a terror threat is behind the consistent use of the euphemism " blood on their hands” when referring to some of those to be released in a Shalit deal. Journalists prefer it to the charged but accurate “murderers,” a word that might deter the public.
No less disingenuous has been the repeated mention of six former Israeli defense officials who favor the swap. During a press conference in March, the group urged Israel to accede to all of Hamas’ demands. Former Shin Bet Chief Yaakov Peri argued that“ Israel is “strong enough… to deal with these murderers with blood on their hands in case they revert to their evil ways.” He conceded that “there’s a risk involved, but we've taken larger risks in the past.”
Other security experts have expressed the opposite view but the media shows no interest in them. Former IDF chief of staff, and current Deputy Prime Minister, Moshe Yaalon, for instance, was interviewed in March, but his thoughts about Shalit’s captivity went unreported in any of the major Israeli news services.
"We are stuck,” Yaalon said then. “Hamas insists on 1,000, but in our experience this will bring the murder of more Israelis. Do we release prisoners knowing hundreds of Israelis will be murdered? There is [also] concern over encouraging more kidnapping…. This is not a simple issue that we are debating but we have a clear policy on the matter. The Prime Minister set conditions and Hamas rejected them."
When asked whether Israel will create a more austere environment for terror prisoners held in Israeli jails due to Hamas´ refusal to allow the Red Cross to verify Shalit´s status, Yaalon said, "we are doing so, but some things are better left unsaid”.
Yaalon’s warning about public discussion of the Shalit matter is one that eludes activists and the media. Otherwise they would long ago have stopped doing Hamas’ dirty work for them. Maligning the Israeli government for its handling of this affair has clearly emboldened Hamas.
We Israelis owe Gilad Shalit every reasonable effort to bring him home. We owe all of our soldiers the promise that we would do the same for them. But we also owe them the assurance that when they risk or sacrifice their lives to bring terrorists to justice they will not have done so in vain. We owe them the assurance that those terrorists will not be freed soon after they are caught.
I fervently hope this government withstands the relentless media pressure to trivialize the threat and horror of terrorism.
Perhaps the words of one particularly evil terrorist will strengthen its resolve. Ahlam Tamimi was convicted of murdering 15 men, women and children in the 2001 bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant, among them my own daughter, Malki. Widely reported to be on the Shalit-deal list of prisoners to be released, Tamimi said: "I'm not sorry for what I did. We'll become free from the occupation and then I will be free from prison."
Shalit must be brought home without fulfilling the prophecy of this monster.

....
Frimet Roth is a freelance writer in Jerusalem. Her daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in the Sbarro restaurant bombing in August 2001. Roth and her husband founded the Malki Foundation, which provides support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

20-Jul-11: And you, how well did you sleep last night?

Rubens: Two sleeping children (not Israeli)

Yet again, with the world's media and political analysts and thought leaders looking the other way.

A rocket - a flying device filled with explosives, capable of killing and maiming innocent civilians and destroying their homes, cars, schools, buses, centers of worship, shops and shelters - was fired by the terrorists of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip into Israel during the dark hours of this past night.

Ynet says there are no injuries or damage. We say: let's remind ourselves that attacks by this form of deadly weapon are calculated to create fear and disturbance of the most profound kind among a civilian population. They have negligible effect on military forces. They are indiscriminate firings, with a history of producing deaths and destruction, and they are being initiated from a postage-stamp-sized territory ruled by an iron fist by a totalitarian and highly ideological regime intent on causing maximum harm to innocent people because of their innocence.

This is what makes it terrorism.

Israel's ambassador to the UN delivered an articulate statement today of the dangers we Israelis see from the increase in such firings across Israel's border. He writes that they "highlight the serious consequences that result from the illegal smuggling of arms into the Gaza Strip – an integral part of Security Council resolution 1860 that does not receive the attention that it deserves from the international community."

No one seriously expects either the Security Council or Mr Ban Ki-moon to do anything about this. Equally, almost no one recognizes that the failure to respond, or even to pay attention to the fact that it's happening, leaves Israel's authorities with no alternative but to deal with the terrorists themselves.

18-Jul-11: Even plainer talk about why we are in an ongoing war

Visceral hatred: Jordanian Palestinian expressing
what pollsters don't need to survey. [Source]

Two days ago, we wrote here about how and why, in the words of the incisive analyst Khaled Abu Toameh, the Palestinian Arabs "cannot accept less than 100%". The more radical among them demand 100% and the very idea of compromise is anathema. The somewhat-less radical say they cannot and will not make concessions of any kind to Israel on territorial issues, but (being less radical) say they are ready to return to the negotiating table - provided Israel agrees in advance to 100% of their demands. Both camps, which means the entire Palestinian Arab spectrum of opinion, say even if Israel were to accept their demands in their entirety, they will not commit to ending the conflict i.e. this ongoing war. 

If you don't find this depressing, you probably live far from our neighbourhood.

Now the political columnist Evelyn Gordon, writing in Commentary Magazine ["New Poll Shows Real Cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict"], drills down hard on one of the central ideas about the generations-long terrorism that has been directed at Israelis: the notion that the conflict is because of Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza. The corollary, beloved of 'peace' 'activists' from all over, is that if Israel would only stop its 'settlement' activity, peace and harmony would immediately erupt.

How wrong are those two matched ideas? Judge from the data.

Ms Gordon analyzes a major opinion survey of Palestinian Arabs reported in the Jerusalem Post ["6 in 10 Palestinians reject 2-state solution, survey finds"] this past Friday. This was a face-to-face survey, done in Arabic, of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It conducted by respected American pollster Stanley Greenberg, together with the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion in Beit Sahour.

The Palestinians were asked if they agreed with the statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people”, propounded by President Obama. Only 34  percent said yes and 61 percent disagreed. From the JPost:

...66 percent said the Palestinians’ goal should not be a permanent two-state solution, but a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to the ultimate goal of a single Palestinian state in all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – a goal that amply explains their opposition to recognizing Israel as the Jewish homeland.

Concerning Jerusalem:

92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said the capital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city.

And the Jewish connection to this land:

Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem.

On terrorism:

62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools... When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees... 45% said they believed in the charter’s statement that the only solution to the Palestinian problem was jihad. 

Evelyn Gordon writes that the conclusions of this landmark poll will not get wider media coverage because:

it throws the real cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into uncomfortably stark relief... Withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza won’t help if Palestinians don’t accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders and see the two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone toward the ultimate goal of Israel’s eradication – exactly as prescribed by the PLO’s famous Phased Plan of 1974, which called  for establishing a “Palestinian national authority” in any territory available and then using it as a base for “completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory.” It seems for most Palestinians, almost 20 years of peace talks haven’t changed this ultimate goal one whit. This is the root of the conflict and has been ever since Britain first backed a “national home for the Jewish people” in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. It’s why no Palestinian leader has ever been able to say “yes” to any Israeli offer – and never will be able to, no matter how much the offer is improved, unless this  changes. Until the international community recognizes this and starts working to change Palestinian public opinion, the “peace process” will continue to be mere wasted effort.

What does this have to do with understanding how to deal with terrorism, terrorists and the amen choir who provide the 'activists' and 'militants' with cover for the hate-filled jihadist crimes that we have been describing in this blog for years? Everything.

17-Jul-11: Two more missile attacks on Israel during the night

Israel Army Radio reported in its 07:00 bulletin this morning (Sunday) that two more missiles emanating from the terrorist lair in Gaza crashed into Israel during the night. There are currently no reports of damage or injury, but no one who follows the ups and downs of the war against the terrorists doubts that damage and injury is always the goal, and it's civilians, not the military, who are the explicit target of the terrorists and their hinterland of supporters both inside and outside the Gaza Strip.

UPDATE Sunday 11:00am: Ynet says the overnight rocket attacks numbered three, not two. See here. It also reports that yet another rocket was fired by Gazan terrorists at Israel on Friday night. The Jerusalem Post is saying the same this morning, offering this analysis:

"The recent escalation in rocket fire is viewed in the IDF as part of an effort by global jihad-aligned groups in Gaza to undermine Hamas’s authority and rule by attacking Israel. It is believed that Hamas is not currently interested in a large-scale conflict, and therefore is not sanctioning the rocket attacks. Another possibility is that Hamas is turning a blind eye to the attacks as part of an effort to remind Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the world that it should be taken into account in ongoing efforts to get a diplomatic process back on track. The Hamas leadership in Gaza is also believed to be increasingly frustrated with its failure to establish a unity government with Fatah and by the PA’s plans to declare statehood at the United Nations General Assembly session in September without taking the Gaza-based group into consideration."

What's clear to those of us at the receiving end is there is very little incentive for the terrorists to stop. Their attacks get the barest of mentions in the Israeli media, and virtually none outside Israel. Israeli responses do get reported, and almost invariably have the effect of putting Israel's spokespeople and policy-makers on the defensive. Speaking as victims of cold-blooded Palestinian Arab terror, this situation - not new - is outrageous, infuriating, dangerous and demeaning.

15-Jul-11: Plain talk on why we are in an ongoing war

The Palestinian Arab analyst Khaled Abu Toameh writes some of the most incisive, courageous and well-informed journalism  around. On the Hudson Institute website, he has a new article called "Palestinians Cannot Accept Less than 100%". He reminds us that the Palestinian Arabs are divided into two camps today: the more radical and the less radical. The differences between them? Not so great.

The radical camp, headed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, says: We want 100% of everything and we will not make any concessions to Israel. We want all the land. We want to replace Israel with an Islamic state. There is no point in talking about the possibility of negotiating with this radical camp about peace, especially as its declared goal is to eliminate Israel - not make peace with it.
The less radical camp, headed by the PLO, says it wants 100% of the pre-1967 lines - meaning the entire West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem. The "moderate" camp is also saying that it will not and cannot make any concessions to Israel on its territorial demands. They say they are ready to return to the negotiating table, but only if Israel agrees in advance to give them 100% of their demands.
Yet even if Israel does accept all their demands, neither camp is willing to commit to ending the conflict. 

The entire short essay, like most of what Mr Abu Toameh publishes, deserves your attention (here).

14-Jul-11: Yet more incoming Gazan rockets this evening, hunting for Israeli victims

Around 10 o'clock this evening (Thursday), two more Gazan missile attacks on Israel according to Ynet with  Qassam rockets fired from the northern Gaza Strip and landing minutes apart in an open area near the Gaza border. (They are the fifth and sixth of the day - one ordinary day.) Fortunately there are neither injuries nor damage - but this was never the intention of the terrorist thugs who fired it. Their desire to hit civilian targets may be far beyond their ability to achieve this, but their intentions are clear and unambiguous.

14-Jul-11: Three more rockets fired at Israel this afternoon; that's 8 since Wednesday morning

Qassam rockets are the weapon of choice of the
Gazan terrorists in this ongoing war. 

As interested as you probably are in news emanating from this part of the world, we'll bet you're at least a little surprised by the headline. News coverage of rocket attacks on Israeli communities simply don't get reported unless the story includes blood.

Yet more Gazan missiles, fueled by hatred and flung in the general direction of anything Israeli or Jewish, crashed into Israel this afternoon (Thursday). Ynet says there were three of them, adding to the one from this morning and yesterday's four incoming rockets.

This afternoon's three exploded in unidentified (for security reasons) open land in southern parts of Israel. Missing people, schools, kindergartens, factories, buses and homes was not the plan. The thugs of Gaza fire these flying bombs because they are conducting a terrorist war against Israeli civilian society. Being indiscriminate about their targets is part of the character of a terrorist war. It's one of the main reasons these people and the Hamas regime that encourages, protects and equips them, qualify as terrorists.

Why do you think the only places you can read about these constant missile attacks is in blogs like this one and in selected parts of the Israeli media?

14-Jul-11: How not to overturn the hatred that underpins terrorism

Palestinian Arab schoolboys: Feed them a steady
diet of hatred and contempt for the 'other' and there
is no room for doubt about the outcome

The State Dept. has an official envoy on anti-semitism and she has some comments about how well her work achieves its goals in the Arab Middle East.

Her name is Hannah Rosenthal, and in an article syndicated by JTA yesterday, she says what happened when she visited Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia last month on a mission to persuade officials to remove from their textbooks intolerance aimed at non-Muslims and to introduce positive references to Judaism.

The most common response, she said, was avoidance and of a hoary variety: Talk about Jews almost inevitably led to grievances about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. “As soon as a conversation about religious tolerance becomes tense, they shut it down or they go to Israel-Palestine.” 

Is it all awful? No, there are 'bright' spots.

Rosenthal’s signature achievement on the trip was extracting from Saudi officials a pledge to remove anti-Semitic references from curricula, including some apparently rooted in the notorious forgery positing Jewish world domination, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." “I got commitments from the ministries of education and culture that they were ready to work with us,” she said. “I am taking all of this at face value.” A Saudi Embassy spokesman in Washington did not return a request for comment. Rosenthal said a typical initial response in Saudi Arabia was for officials to challenge her to produce evidence of intolerance. When she did – for instance, a passage describing Jews as the spawn of “monkeys and pigs” -- she was told the book was outdated and no longer in use. 

And if you (or she) are looking for some good news when it comes to the education of Palestinian Arab children, then better look elsewhere.

Rosenthal also confronted officials of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the body that cares for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, about their failure to teach U.N.-created Holocaust materials. A high-ranking official with UNRWA told JTA that the agency is bound by agreements with host countries to use local textbooks. Additionally, in some areas -- notably the Gaza Strip -- UNRWA officials have faced threats from Islamist groups for reports of plans to introduce Holocaust and tolerance teaching into the curriculum. In Lebanon, Rosenthal sought out organizations that seek to promote tolerance among the “Abrahamic faiths” only to find that Judaism was not included. “It turned out ‘Abrahamic’ meant Islam and Christianity,” she said.

When you next hear political analysts pontificating about what they like to call terrorism's root causes (which invariably presents Israel's wrongs as the rootest of the causes), think of the grotesque distortion that passes for education among the millions of hope-deprived children being raised today in Palestinian Arab society. And know that there's absolutely no reason to be hopeful that something is changing for the better.

14-Jul-11: The rockets of Gaza keep coming though no non-Israeli reporter wants to see them

From Ynet earlier today:

Palestinians fired a rocket at southern Israel Thursday morning.
The projectile landed in an open area in Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council. No injuries or damage were reported. The Color Red alert sounded prior to the explosion. So far, security instructions for the area's residents have remained unchanged, and their everyday routine is maintained.

Here again is what we wrote after yesterday's rocket attack. Other than the Israeli media, the usual situation applies: no coverage, no mention in the news media for whom these indiscriminate firings of lethal weapons directed at a civilian population may just as well never have happened. Ignoring these deadly attacks - which is what the non-Israeli media routinely do - is akin to saying they never happened. Or if they did, they never really posed a mortal danger to Israel's civilian population.  It's impossible to understand Israel's defensive measures if the terrorists' actions are systematically swept under the carpet - which we assume is exactly what lies behind the decision of foreign editors and journalists to not report them.

14-Jul-11: Trying to understand how the world's most important multinational forum lost the plot on racism, terrorism and the efforts to stop them

This is a brief video, less than four minutes long. But it's well put together and it packs a message that ought to cause rational people to think (or re-think) their intuitive sense of support for the world's most important multinational forum. Something went very seriously wrong at the United Nations, starting in the mid-1970s. The starting point for re-channeling its efforts back to what its charter lays out comes with knowing what those seriously wrong things are. Worth passing along to people we know.

13-Jul-11: Make that four (rocket attacks on Israeli civilians)

Ynet reports (and the Hebrew language NRG here, as well) that in the past half hour yet another Gazan explosive-laden rocket crashed into Israel, landing near a residential area in the Eshkol region. Fortunately no injuries or damage were reported but this is not and was not the intention of the terrorists who despatched it. Four such rocket attacks have occurred since last night (Tuesday). Virtually the entire gamut of global news media channels has ignored all four, as if they had not happened.

13-Jul-11: Three more Qassam attacks on Israel (but since they're not reported abroad, did they even happen?)

The result of a previous Qassam rocket assault on an Israeli home.

An explosives-packed Qassam rocket, originating in Hamas-controlled Gaza, crashed into the vicinity of a community in southern Israel this morning (Wednesday). Ynet says no injuries or damage were reported in the Shaar Hanegev region, though everyone paying attention to these endless attacks understands that "no injuries" was not the goal of the terrorists. [UPDATE Wednesday 13-Jul-11 at 1:00pm: YNet has corrected its earlier report and now says "one of the rockets lightly damaged a home, exploding just a few meters away from it." Just the sort of footnote that means nothing to 99% of humanity and everything to the people directly impacted.]

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that two additional Qassam rockets were fired in Israel's general direction last night (Tuesday) from Gaza, with one landing close to a kibbutz and again - through no fault of the terrorists who pray for Jewish injuries and Jewish damage - there are no reports of injuries or damage.

Other than the Israeli media, the usual situation applies: no coverage, no mention in the news media for whom these indiscriminate firings of lethal weapons directed at a civilian population may just as well never have happened. Ignoring these deadly attacks - which is what the non-Israeli media routinely do - is akin to saying they never happened. Or if they did, they never really posed a mortal danger to Israel's civilian population.  It's impossible to understand Israel's defensive measures if the terrorists' actions are systematically swept under the carpet - which we assume is exactly what lies behind the decision of foreign editors and journalists to not report them.

11-Jul-11: When the means of terror are in the hands of a government, expect presidential tantrums to look like this (at first)

From this source

It's been a violent day in Damascus.

The New York Times uses laconic language to describe "Syrian government supporters" in the item below, but for the more blunt-minded among us, this (the violence today in the Syrian capital) is what happens when a terror-minded regime gets offended or angry or both. And it's likely to get more violent as the ruling clique - the Basher al-Assad family, clan, tribe and retainers from the minority Alawite elite - find themselves more and more pushed into a nasty corner by violent opponents all over Syria.

U.S. Embassy in Syria Is Attacked    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS         Published: July 11, 2011    BEIRUT (AP) - Syrian government supporters smashed windows at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus on Monday, raised a Syrian flag and scrawled graffiti calling the American ambassador a "dog" in anger over the envoy's visit last week to an opposition stronghold, witnesses said.French Embassy security guards in the capital fired in the air to hold back supporters of President Bashar Assad's regime who were also protesting the French ambassador's visit to the same city, Hama, in central Syria. Protesters smashed embassy windows and shattered the windshield of a diplomatic SUV outside the compound. The French flag was removed and replaced with a Syrian one."God, Syria and Bashar. The nation that gave birth to Bashar Assad will not kneel," read graffiti written outside the embassy. One witness said three protesters were injured when guards beat them with clubs. The witness asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation. There was no immediate word on casualties among protesters at the American Embassy demonstration.

Barry Rubin over at Pajamas Media translates this into plain English.

"Syria, unlike Mubarak’s Egypt, is a real totalitarian regime. The rulers believe, and experience has taught them, that violence and intimidation always wins. It is the kind of government that President Barack Obama and the well-meaning peace processers and those holding university degrees in conflict resolution can’t understand. It is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq without any more-human face. This is a regime that sponsors terrorism to kill Americans in Iraq. It has sponsored terrorism against Israel for 50 years and continues to do so. It has assassinated political leaders, journalists, and judges in Lebanon. A few blocks away from where visiting U.S. officials a few months ago were tweeting about the wonderful coffee in cafes, dissidents were being tortured... The previous Bush Administration took a hard line on Syria with sanctions and other pressures. That didn’t work, said the Obama team, so we’re going to try a little tenderness. For 2.5 years it let Syria get away with murder. Senator John Kerry and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attested to the reformist and moderate nature of this murderous regime. The White House did everything possible to reduce sanctions against Syria. But that didn’t work. The two sides were playing entirely different games. The idea that the United States had not the slightest chance of splitting Syria from its Iranian patron was always absurd but the media and academia largely censored out the multiple, persuasive arguments on that point Only a few days ago, the Syrian ambassador was called into the State Department and told that the United States knew Syrian agents were filming demonstrations in America held by anti-Asad Syrian students and Syrian-Americans. Can anyone doubt that the next step was to intimidate through punishing their relatives back home? ...The attack on the embassy was a response to very mild U.S. criticisms and the visit of the U.S. ambassador to Hama. A Western-style regime, even a dictatorship, would say: Great! The Americans are leaving us alone except for a few gestures and meaningless statements. Let’s play along with them. But this is the Middle East and the Syrian regime demands of the United States and France what it also demands from its own people: total support or they get bludgeoned into submission." 

He asks the question that is on the minds of Israelis watching the mis-named Arab Spring (actually an Arab fall): will the overthrow of the Syrian regime bring to power an Islamist regime - something like Hamas in Gaza?

Rubin's take is:

"We cannot know for sure. I would emphasize that the chances are lower than in Egypt. Other organized political forces exist. Forty percent of the country is not Sunni Arab Muslim and would oppose an Islamist regime. The figure in Egypt is 10 percent, and they are all Christians who have absolutely no political influence... [but] this is only the beginning." 

He predicts there will be an upsurge of anti-Americanism, and reminds us that for despots like al-Assad, it always works out better when you are feared than when you are liked.

On the whole, having Canada, New Zealand or Switzerland as your neighbour is a lot less complicated. But that experience also tends to get you to make serious mistakes about what to expect from the country next door when, as in our case, it happens to be run by people who are terrorists in every sense of that word. 

11-Jul-11: Suggesting some context for the media's focus on the Corries

Malki, our daughter, spent the last week 

of her life in the summer of 2001 as a 

volunteer counselor at a camp for

cognitively-challenged special-needs

children on the shores of the Sea

of Galilee. She was murdered in the 

Hamas massacre deliberately targeting
women and children at Jerusalem's
Sbarro restaurant two days later.

The CiF Watch blog is "dedicated to monitoring antisemitism and combating the assault on Israel’s legitimacy in the Guardian newspaper’s ‘Comment is Free’ blog".

‘Comment is Free’ is the online home of the Guardian and Observer newspapers that carries articles designed to engender debate and discussion through a post-moderated comment thread. The Guardian is one of the most influential media outlets in the world and the ‘Comment is Free’ blog is among the most popular blogs on the internet.

The article below appeared yesterday on the CIF Watch site.

If Arnold Roth held a news conference at the American Colony Hotel, would the Guardian cover it?

CIF Watch July 10, 2011
On the heels of her CiF essay, (US collusion in the Gaza blockade is an affront to human rights, July 8th), the mother of slain International Solidarity Movement activist Rachel Corrie, Cindy, held a news conference at Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel today to discuss the conclusion of testimonies in her family’s civil case against the State of Israel for their daughter’s death.

While I hope I never have to know the pain of losing a child, and plain decency demands that Cindy’s loss not be minimized, demeaned, or sanitized, it is equally fair to ask, in the context of the extraordinary amount of press the story has received, that some perspective be provided and some degree of fairness honored.

While I’ve never met Cindy Corrie, I have met Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malka was murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber at the Sbarrro bombing in Jerusalem.

On August 9, 2001 a resident of the village of Aqaba, north of Tulkarm, Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri, son of a well-to-do land-owning family, entered the busy Sbarro restaurant at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road at lunchtime on a school vacation day in Jerusalem. The restaurant was filled with customers, most of them children and mothers. 15 Jews, including Arnold’s daughter Malka, were killed, and 131 were injured in various serious degrees when the explosive device – containing screws and nails added to maximize the carnage - al-Masri was carrying (in a guitar case) was detonated.

The massacre was coordinated and planned by Hamas’s Ramallah branch.

Six weeks later, a triumphal exhibit at Al Najah University, the largest in the West Bank, featured a mock-up of the Sbarro restaurant including gnawed pizza crusts and bloody plastic body parts suspended from the ceiling as if they were blasting through the air.

The accident which led to Corrie’s death was indeed tragic, and while the facts of the civil trial haven’t all been revealed some things are clear.

Though the ISM, the group Rachel Corrie was working with at the time of her death, tries to maintain the veneer of a “peace group,” they have a  history of actively aiding terrorist movements.

The bulldozers Rachel and her fellow “internationals” were trying to stop on March 16, 2003 in Rafah were working to uncover part of the underground  tunnel network used to smuggle explosives from Egypt, into Gaza. These tunnels had been built under civilian Arab homes and structures in order to smuggle weapons and explosives into Israel. What Rachel and many of her “international” companions did not likely consider, and were not told by their ISM handlers, was that for every tunnel they succeeded in saving many more Israelis and Palestinians would suffer due to increased terrorism and Israeli military responses.

The ISM intentionally placed Rachel and other “internationals” between 50 ton bulldozers and Rafah homes and so, along with the Hamas terrorist movement they were protecting, would seem to bear a large measure of moral responsibility for her death.

When you search for Rachel Corrie in the Guardian’s search engine you get over 150 results, some referencing the play which toured internationally named, “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

When you search for Malka Chana Roth, you get two – one in 2002 dryly noting her death in the context of a list of Palestinian and Israeli children killed during the Intifada till that time, and the other containing a partial list of the victims in the aftermath of the Sbarro attack, which noted:

“Malka Roth, 15, from Ramot, on the western edges of Jerusalem, was the 15th victim to be identified yesterday morning.”

That’s it.  A mere twenty words.

There were no plays and no international media interest in the innocent teenage girl murdered by a movement so cruel as to venerate the murderer as a Shahid, a righteous martyr for the cause.

I don’t think it exploitative, nor insensitive, to simply ask if, under any circumstances, the Guardian would ever offer Arnold Roth, or his wife Frimet, the chance to express their grief, describe their family’s unimaginable pain, or pay tribute to their daughter’s memory in a manner similar to what they continue to provide for the family of Rachel Corrie.

We're not planning any news conferences, and if we were then frankly the American Colony in East Jerusalem would not be top of the list of possible venues. That aside, we support Adam Levick's thesis.

UPDATE Monday 11-Jul-11 at 9pm: A Polish-language translation of this article is posted on the website of Racjonalista.

9-Jul-11: Don't tell the flotillistas but more rockets are being fired into Israel right now

YNet is reporting in the past ten minutes that three rockets were fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip into  Israel. It's Saturday evening, a few minutes before midnight, and the reports are that two rockets (at least) crashed into open areas of the Ashkelon Beach region. A third rocket exploded within the Gaza Strip, but if past performance is any guide, damage, loss of life or injury by Gazans on Gazans will simply never make it to the news. More as we learn more.

9-Jul-11: New Israel-reaching missiles from the island of "calm"

The Islamicists of the peace-loving island of "calm" announced today they now have missiles that can reach - and have already been fired into - the Indian Ocean. 

A Reuters report ["Two long-range missiles within range of striking Israel said to have been tested at the beginning of 2011"] quotes the head of the Revolutionary Guards' aerospace division saying on Saturday that the Iranians claim a range of 1,900 kilometers. Ramming the point home, Reuters says the goal was "to prove Tehran's longstanding claims it can hit targets beyond its borders... showing Iran is ready and able to hit back at U.S. bases in the Middle East and at Israel... Analysts have often doubted Iran's claims of technological progress in its defense industry which is under tight international sanctions due to Western concerns it is seeking nuclear weapons capability."  
An Iranian news source goes further than Reuters today, quoting Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh at a press conference in Tehran saying:

“We have an appropriate space of about 1000 square kilometers in (our) deserts for test-firing missiles… our missile range is at most 2000 kilometers and we do not need (missiles with) a longer range since our targets are within a shorter radius”

It's a puzzle why so-called analysts keep denying what the Iranians so plainly threaten to do, and are doing.

8-Jul-11: An island of "calm"

There are hundreds of similar Iranian images on the web. This AP photo
was originally published in The Guardian.

We need islands of calm in the troubled neighborhood. Just not islands like this horrible one:

As the Arab spring flourishes throughout the Middle East, Iran, one of the region's most prominent targets on Amnesty International's watch list seems to be an "island of calm". The reason, according to Iranian human rights groups, international watchdogs and country experts is that Tehran is pursuing a campaign of public intimidation and covert killing to subdue political opposition and quell turbulence caused by the region's revolts while claiming that it is cracking down on drug trafficking and other criminal activity. According to Amnesty International, Iran has admitted executing 190 people between January and the end of June this year; an additional 130 reported executions have gone unacknowledged. These figures put Iran on course for a record year for capital punishment. In 2010, 252 people were executed, according to official figures, with 300 more also believed to have been killed... Iran's execution "average" is running at almost two people per day in 2011, making the regime the world's number two executioner after China.

The entire article is here.

Israel's head of Military Intelligence Maj.- Gen. Aviv Kochavi spoke to a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting this week. He addressed [report here] some additional aspects of Iranian mischief in the area. Some highlights:

• The Iranians are attempting to influence the political process in Egypt via their connection with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is pressing for elections to take place as soon as possible, because they are “the only group that’s ready for elections.”
• Iran will be able to produce a nuclear explosive within two years.
• Iran has recovered from the last wave of economic sanctions imposed by the west. The international consensus surprised them, but they got over it and are undamaged.
• There are signs of closer relations between Iran and Turkey. These are mainly focused on trade, but they include military matters.
• The current upheaval in the Middle East is being leveraged by Iran to deepen their infiltration into states and organizations in the region including Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq and Gaza.
• Iran continues to work on its nuclear project.
• It continues to transfering weapons and radical Islamic ideology throughout the Middle East.
• The potential for an Iranian cyberattack is growing, and will become a larger threat than Iran’s other weapons.
• Iran took and active role in planning Nakba Day and Naksa Day provocations against Israel at Lebanon's border with Israel. (We wrote about them here and here.) They wanted more trouble (read: deaths) at the border crossings and were disappointed with the moderate outcome.
• Iran's Hezbollah client in Lebanon has an active partnership with the Syrian regime in oppressing democracy protesters. Iran supplies the Syrians with crowd-dispersal equipment, knowledge and technical aid.
• The mullahs of Iran have a deep fear of the Syrian demonstrations and the threat to their partnership with the Bashar al-Assad family regime. The IDF view is they have little to fear so long as Assad’s regime manages to prevent mass protests in Damascus and Aleppo. So far, they are succeeding in this. The Syrian army remains loyal to Assad, especially high-ranking Alawite officers. And that's the key.

And did we mention that the Iran leadership, frenetic developer of nuclear strike capability, now proudly says it possesses impenetrable missile silos (click to view an Iranian propaganda video). Whether or not the mullah's claims are factual, the clarity of their belligerence is not really open to doubt. These people hate on a level that is world-class.

5-Jul-11: If Hamas money is behind the 'humanitarians', what do the 'activists' of the flotilla actually stand for?

No real handcuffs on their wrists but what the hey; they're
not actual peace activists either [Source]

Three Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza so far this week [source] with the barest of murmurs (standard practice) from the world's media. (Were they reported where you live?)

That's partly why we're trying not to devote too much space to the 'humanitarians' of the Gaza-bound flotilla. We find it tasteless and offensive that they're being depicted far and wide as peace activists who cry, literally cry, for the suffering of the Gazan Palestinian Arab population.

But when you take a look at who they are, dig into who's behind them and what they are really doing as opposed to what they claim to be doing, you get to quite different conclusions, and it's enraging.

Take for instance Amin Abou Rashed. Not a household name unless you're focused (as we are) on the ways in which Hamas manipulates pretensions to charity and good deeds to mask the nasty reality of its deep devotion to terrorism. Abou Rashed took an active role in the 2010 flotilla that ended with the violence on the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara.

Abou Rashed, like most of the people behind the 2011 edition of Gaza or Bust, comes with some history. A front-organization called Holy Land Foundation was prosecuted by law enforcement officials in the US government starting in 2007. Far from a mere side show, this was America's largest Islamic charity. It was based in Richardson, Texas and originally operated under the name The Occupied Land Fund before its operators got smart to how Americans think. But not smart enough because its assets ended up being frozen by the European Union and U.S. governments. Determining that it was a front for channeling money into the huge maw of the terrorists of Hamas, the authorities outlawed it. AFP at the time (2008) called this the "largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history"[source]. The Foundation's founders were sentenced to life imprisonment [source].

During the Holy Land trial, the authorities produced a letter from Mr Abou Rashed to one of the directors of Holy Land Foundation, Akram Mishaal, a clansman of the current head of Hamas, the Damascus-resident Khalid Mashaal. In his letter, Abou Rashed - today's Flotilla promoter - states names, addresses and bank numbers of what are euphemistically termed “charitable organizations working for Palestine in Europe”. Abou Rashed wrote as a representative of Al-Aqsa Foundation. The American government, via its Department of Treasury, lifted the mask of this "Foundation" revealing it to be a channel for the financing of terror and calling it “a critical part of Hamas’ terrorist support infrastructure.” The allegedly “charitable organizations” cited in Abou Rashed’s document were found by Treasury to be funding  terrorism, principally Hamas terrorism, and and permanent court orders were issued to freeze their assets.

The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf this past Thursday termed Abou Rashed "the brains behind the Gaza flotilla". The article makes clear that even if he lacks brains, he certainly provided the funding, causing several Dutch journalists and activists to walk off the Dutch flotilla ship citing a betrayal of their non-violent principles. A year earlier, the same paper called Abou Rashed the head of Hamas activities in the Netherlands, so surprised the 'activists' cannot plausibly claim to have been.

That it's incontrovertibly connected to the overt terrorism [source] and intentional child-murderers of Hamas ought to have been a showstopper for the humanitarians giving their support to the Flotilla. But it's plainly not. We find the chorus of highly public support for this faux humanitarianism nauseating. Whatever they may claim to stand for, knowing who is organizing this means the participants in this fleet of fools are revealed as hypocrites who ought to bear full criminal responsibility for the consequences of their vanity.

5-Jul-11: September 2011 - how it's looking from here

From a report issued today by Pinhas Inbari, a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs [full text online here]:

There are signs that the long period of quiet since the Second Intifada is going to end after September or just before it, and that Abbas' Fatah organization is already preparing for the "Third Intifada." Ahmad Abu Ruteima, a Hamas activist in Gaza, describes the objective of the Third Intifada: "The struggle is about the very existence of Israel and not about the 1967 borders. The defense minister, Ehud Barak, confirmed that the [Israeli] army is incapable of confronting a human influx from all directions." The post-September scenarios discussed in the upper Fatah echelons involve a return to the struggle. A senior member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, Hatem Abd al-Qader, noted that in case Israel obstructs the Palestinians' political plans, Abbas will step down, the PA will dissolve itself, and nothing will prevent the Palestinians from returning to the struggle. And even if elections are held, the new president will come from the younger generation, abolish the Oslo agreements, and lead the Palestinians back to the struggle.

Not mincing words, the report is called "What Are the Palestinians Planning after September?"

For visiting Martians and anyone else who has not been paying attention to the events of this ongoing war, those repeated references above to "the struggle" are a euphemism for a shooting/bombing war conducted by non-uniformed combatants and directed not at an army but explicitly at civilians: Israeli civilians.


Hatem Abd Al-Qadr has been speaking of "the struggle" for some time. In this MEMRI clip from an October 2010 Al-Jazeera TV interview, "I Don't Believe We Can Achieve Anything in the Negotiations Without Resistance" he expounds on what appears to be a favorite position.

1-Jul-11: Gazan liberal and other oxymorons

"Gazan liberal" is to "Liberal" as "National Socialist" is to "Socialist"... though from what we're learning of the antics of the Flotillarati, 'useful idiots' would seem a more accurate descriptor.

Hat tip to Elder of Zion. 

1-Jul-11: Memo to Hamas: Fixing Gaza's problems is not that hard to do...

Well done, Arthur Pelicier.