Wednesday, April 02, 2008

  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Stuff (New Zealand) reports:
A last-ditch attempt to stop the deportation of an Iranian Christian has been rejected by Associate Immigration Minister Shane Jones.

Mr Jones will not overrule an Immigration New Zealand decision to deport 25-year-old Birkenhead resident Bahareh Moradi.

His decision writes off the last chance Miss Moradi had to stay in New Zealand.

Her three brothers live in New Zealand. All have refugee status.

The Moradi family had applied for the deportation to be put on hold until after a High Court judicial review of Miss Moradi’s case in July.

That request was turned down by the High Court in March.

As the North Shore Times went to print, Miss Moradi was waiting to be sent to Iran by immigration officials.

It is feared going back to Iran could be dangerous because she has become a Christian.

Under Sharia law, converting from Islam to Christianity is a sin and can be punished by death.
Not only can apostasy be punished by death in Iran, but they are considering making it the mandatory punishment. From the Christian Post last February:
The Iranian parliament is reviewing a new law that would impose a death penalty on citizens who leave Islam, a human rights group alerted recently.

In the past, the death penalty for apostasy was one of many possible punishments, including imprisonment and hard labor, for renouncing Islam, But the new law proposes to make death the sentence for all apostates, according to the Institute on Religion and Public Policy (IRPP).

“This is not something new, they just want to be more harsh towards those who are leaving Islam,” an Iranian pastor told the persecution watchdog Compass.

The death sentence was approved by the Iranian Cabinet a month ago, and appears to have the needed parliamentary support to pass, according to an Iranian Christian.

Many victims of the “apostasy” law are Muslims who convert to Christianity, but victims also include liberal thinkers and members of Iran’s Baha’i religious minority.
It appears that New Zealand questioned the sincerity of her conversion. She can only hope now that Iran is equally skeptical.
  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Qatar hosted a formal debate on the motion, "This House believes that Palestinians risk becoming their own worst enemy".

It wasn't even close.
DOHA • A crushing majority of the participants at Qatar Foundation's Doha Debates yesterday expressed the view that the destructive feud between Palestine’s Hamas and Fatah factions has cast a doubt on the Palestinians’ ability to create a unified sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza.

The motion “This House believes that Palestinians risk becoming their own worst enemy” was carried with a resounding 70.9 per cent votes against 29.1 per cent votes.

Among the panelists, Dr Munther Dajani, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Al Quds University in Jerusalem and Akram Baker, political analyst and co-founder of the Arab Western Summit of Skills (AWS), supported the motion.

"Israeli occupation in Palestine is a fact. The Palestinian movement lost its focus. The enemy is really occupying the land. If we cannot help ourselves no one else can help us. What Palestinians need is a genuine government. The Palestinian Authority should be dissolved today, not tomorrow", Baker said.

Supporting the motion, Dr Dajani said Palestinians must show the guts to grab real freedom from 'the mouth of the lion'. "The leadership is steeped in corruption and nepotism. We failed to build roads, hospitals and other basic infrastructure. We ourselves are our worst enemies" Dr Dajani said.

"Those who were holding the war responsible for Palestine's poor development must remember that there was no war in the mid '90s. We failed because the leadership was not able to put up institutions and infrastructure. There was no transparency and accountability. Now we are at the end of the tunnel", he said.
Why can Qataris see obvious truths that Western liberals are blind to?
  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From The Independent (UK) comes a familiar-sounding article:
'Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now.'

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored...

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets....

There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families....

"It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves."
What makes this article interesting is when it was written - in September, 2006.

That's right - the Gazans have been starving to death for at least 19 months, yet no one can point to a single person who has yet died of starvation.

The "starvation" meme is so prevalent that reporters don't even bother to check out the facts, they just mindlessly repeat lies. But this article makes it appear that the reporters are sometimes the people who make up the lies to begin with. In fact, in the two months after this article, many more "starving Palestinian" articles were published, as I showed in November, 2006.

Just as the "most heavily populated area in the world" meme refuses to die, and just like the "humanitarian crisis" soundbite - now at least 15 years old - will forever be with us, so will we have to live with the "starving Gazan" absurdity, thanks to "reporters" like the Independent's Patrick Cockburn.

But in case you have forgotten, here is what a starving person looks like:
And here is what Gazans looked like earlier this week, after years of poverty and starvation:

You can hardly tell the difference!
  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the NYT (h/t EBoZ, who reads it so I don't have to):
Roadside bombings of American troops in Iraq were occurring with unnerving regularity when military investigators made a disturbing discovery: American-made computer circuits sold to a trading company in the United Arab Emirates had turned up in the bomb detonators.

That finding set off a clash with Washington last year when the Bush administration cited the diversion of the computer circuits to Iran, and eventually Iraq, as proof that the United Arab Emirates were failing to prevent American technology from slipping into the wrong hands. Administration officials said aircraft parts, specialized metals and gas detectors that have a potential military use had also moved through Dubai, one of the emirates, to Iran, Syria or Pakistan.

The diplomatic face-off, which drew little public attention, prompted the United States to threaten tough new controls on exports to the United Arab Emirates, an ally. The nation had invested billions to become a global trading hub and had begun a campaign to burnish its image in the United States after the uproar in 2006 over a proposal to allow a Dubai company manage some American port terminals.

The administration backed down only after the emirates promised to pass their own export control law. But it is unclear that much has changed nearly a year after the confrontation.

...American officials have been increasingly alarmed about trade in the United Arab Emirates since 2002, when the Commerce Department sent an inspector, Mary O’Brien, there. From her spot checks of factories, freight forwarders and other companies that had ordered American products subject to export controls, Commerce officials say, it was clear that dual-use goods, including computer equipment, were being diverted on a grander scale than imagined.

An entity said to be a woodworking shop, for example, had ordered a sophisticated American machine for making metal parts. The device, Ms. O’Brien knew, could also shape components for a missile system. The supposed factory contained almost no sawdust, and the few employees could not explain how they intended to use the machine.

“This is not right,” Ms. O’Brien said she had said to herself, convinced that she had turned up her first “briefcase business”— open for inspection, but closed for good as soon as she walked out.

She pressed a Dubai pistachio wholesaler on why he had bought an American infrared camera, which can detect living objects in the dark, and where it had gone. Later she found he had arranged its return from Iran, where it had apparently been diverted, while stalling a follow-up inspection.

In nearly 40 percent of her inspections in four years, she found that regulated items were missing or that the recipient would not cooperate. Many of those companies were placed on a list, warning American exporters to be careful when selling to them.

“This was a huge sieve,” said Lisa A. Prager, a former top Commerce export control official. “Almost nothing that said it was going to U.A.E. was staying in U.A.E.
Read the whole thing. It is an increasingly rare example of real reporting, even if it comes a couple of years after the fact.
  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
The authors of "Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think" continue to produce articles with bits and pieces of their worldwide poll of Muslims with furious spinning to make Muslims look as much like Westerners as possible. This is not surprising - co-author John Esposito has written a number of apologetic books for Islam, including "Islam: The Straight Path", and the other author Dalia Mogahed is Muslim herself. The idea that this book would be objective is laughable, and I've already shown some dishonesty in how the authors present their findings.

A new op-ed by the authors in the Los Angeles Times illustrates their dishonesty as well:
For instance, Gallup found that 72% of Americans disagreed with this statement: "The majority of those living in Muslim countries thought men and women should have equal rights." In fact, majorities in even some of the most conservative Muslim societies directly refute this assessment: 73% of Saudis, 89% of Iranians and 94% of Indonesians say that men and women should have equal legal rights.
Notice the sleight-of-hand - changing the question from one of "equal rights" to one of "equal legal rights" when asking people in Muslim countries. When Muslims are referring to legal rights, they are not thinking about religious rights. Which means that if you would ask Muslims whether women should be able to have up to four spouses as men are allowed to, the answers would not be the same as to the question they asked. Yet if they really supported equal rights as Esposito and Mogahed claim, then they would by definition support polyandry as much as polygamy.

What about Muslim sympathy for terrorism? Many charge that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, but studies show that Muslims around the world are at least as likely as Americans to condemn attacks on civilians. Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are "completely justified." In Saudi Arabia, this figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it's 2%.
Again, in this case it appears that how the question is asked is far more important than the supposed answers. Since the authors show that 7% of Muslims condoned 9/11, and other polls show that a far higher number condone attacks on Israeli civilians, the cherry-picking of the answers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran proves only that the people answering the poll are more likely to support individual, real world attacks against civilians than some abstract concept of attacking civilians. The fact that there are no Americans publicly celebrating Muslim deaths is proof enough that the methodology for this question was flawed.

Looking across majority-Muslim countries, Gallup found no statistical difference in self-reported religiosity between those who sympathized with the attackers and those who did not.... On the other hand, not a single respondent who condoned the attacks used the Koran as justification. Instead, they relied on political rationalizations, calling the U.S. an imperialist power or accusing it of wanting to control the world.
The authors create a division between politics and religion that is nonsensical in much of the Islamic world. Islam is more than just a religion; it is also a political movement, and the absence of Koranic justification for 9/11 does not necessarily indicate one way or the other that terror-supporters are less religious.

In other words, all that the poll indicates is that the level of religiosity does not indicate a propensity to terror. The implication from the authors that the more religious tend to be more against terror attacks is not borne out, based on the limited information given here.

If most Muslims truly reject terrorism, why does it continue to flourish in Muslim lands? What these results indicate is that terrorism is much like other violent crime. Violent crimes occur throughout U.S. cities, but that is no indication of Americans' general acceptance of murder or assault. Likewise, continued terrorist violence is not proof that Muslims tolerate it. Indeed, they are its primary victims.
This is astonishingly dishonest. Terrorism, by definition, is political, and can only thrive when the political environment - in this case, the Muslim and Arab cultures that permeate these lands - allow it. Comparing it to violent crime is an incredible distortion, and one that has absolutely no basis in any of the polling numbers given here - it quite literally made up.
  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Last week, Saudi King called for dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims to much publicity.

Moderate Arab commentators complimented the move, but it was clear that "dialogue" to them was a one-way street:
Saudi newspaper commentaries suggested the king's motives were addressing militant violence inside Muslim countries and tension between Muslims and the authorities in Europe.

"The dialogue could clear up some facts about our religion, far from the distortions that extremists and fanatics have caused," wrote Saudi daily newspaper al-Jazirah, referring to militant violence in Saudi Arabia and the region.

Nothing about learning anything about other religions, only about lecturing about Islam. As usual, to Muslims, "dialogue" means the same thing as "Islamic indoctrination."

Now,the Saudi mufti has made it very clear that the idea of having rabbis in Saudi Arabia is pretty sickening to him:

Saudi Arabia's grand mufti Abdelaziz al-Sheikh has rejected an attempt by the government to open interreligious dialogue with Jewish rabbis.

According to a report by the official Kuwaiti news agency Kuna on Wednesday, the mufti refused to accept any visit by rabbis to a conference on interreligious dialogue, expected to be held in the kingdom's capital Riyadh.
I guess no Jews will be visiting their old digs at Khaybar anytime soon.

  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
The Palestinian Arab press has been increasing in its reporting of corruption and strong-arm tactics by Hamas in Gaza lately, seemingly to increase its revenue (beyond the $150 million a month that the PA provides to Gaza.)

Today, Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas is involved in drug trafficking and car thefts in Gaza. In addition, they report that Hamas is levying arbitrary fees on auto-repair shops in ways that look more like protection racket payoffs than taxes. Its court systems are adding large fees for judgments. In addition, Firas Press reports that Hamas is adding "tolls" on roads, pretty much stopping people and asking for money, a different amount each time.

The impression is that Hamas is building a police state with its terrorists doing whatever is necessary to extort money from the citizens it pretends to care about.
  • Wednesday, April 02, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
Hamas released a statement announcing its accomplishments for March, 2008:

Military Communiqué

Al Qassam statistic for March,2008

34 martyrs ; 89 Qassam rockets ; 534 mortar shells towards Zionist targets ; 12 Zionist were killed; other 79 were injured

First: Al Qassam martyr :

Rafah

Khanyounis

Gaza

North strip

South-Gaza

Total

5

3

10

14

2

34

Second: Resistance activities:

Qassam

Mortars

R.P.G

Bombs

Fire

Sniping

Clashes

89

534

18

7

21

8

22

Third: Zionist losses:

losses

injures

12

79

Day and date

The Zionist losses

Saturday 1st of March,2008

4 Zionist were killed

Thursday 6th of March,2008

8 Zionist were killed

Settlement

Rockets

Settlement

Rockets

Sederot

36

Natif Eitsra

4

Meftahim

10

Nahal Oz

4

Kissufim

2

Eirtz

10

Nir Eishaq

5

Zionist vehicles

18


And Islamic Jihad came out with their own numbers:
18 killed versus 2 "Zionists"
216 rockets and mortar shells

Hamas' rocket numbers are low if you assume that they are taking credit for all groups' rocket attacks, so they must only be talking about their own rockets - the total Qassam count for March was over 200.

Which implies that they are taking credit for only the Israelis killed by Hamas as well.

And since they list 8 "Zionists" killed on March 6, this means that Hamas is taking credit for the Mercaz HaRav massacre (they denied initial claims of responsibility and the only group to officially take credit was the unknown "Galilee Freedom Batallions".)

Of course, this report includes out and out lies - four Israelis weren't killed on March 1, and the total number of Israelis killed in March was 11 (they might be including the Qassam victim from February 27.)

Still, this is apparently the first official, if backhanded, claim of responsibility for the massacre.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

  • Tuesday, April 01, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
One of the bedrocks of human rights is the right of free speech. The UN recognizes this and its old Commission on Human Rights as well as its newer Human Rights Council has appointed a "Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the promotion
and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
."

This job includes:
a) to gather all relevant information, wherever it might occur, of discrimination against, threats or use of violence and harassment, including persecution and intimidation, directed at persons seeking to exercise or to promote the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression as affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, where applicable, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, taking into account the work being conducted by other mechanisms of the Commission and Sub-Commission which touched on that right, with a view to avoiding duplication of work;

b) as a matter of high priority, to gather all relevant information, wherever it might occur, of discrimination against, threats or use of violence and harassment, including persecution and intimidation, against professionals in the field of information seeking to exercise or to promote the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression;

c) to seek and receive credible and reliable information from governments and non-governmental organizations and any other parties who have knowledge of these cases; and to submit annually to the Commission a report covering the activities relating to his or her mandate, containing recommendations to the Commission and providing suggestions on ways and means to better promote and protect the right to freedom of opinion and expression in all its manifestations.
This past Friday, however, the UN's Human Rights Commission added a new job responsibility to this Special Rapporteur:

To do the exact opposite.
The amendment passed by the UN Human Rights Council in its rush to adjourn Friday told its expert on freedom of expression to report on people who abuse their free speech rights to espouse racial and religious discrimination.

The measure, proposed by Egypt and Pakistan, passed 32-0 with the support of Islamic, Arab and African nations. European nations and some other countries abstained.
This Special Rapporteur is now expected not to defend free speech, but to defend those who try to stifle free speech. It is amazing that he hasn't yet suffered from whiplash.

Now, what does the UN Human Rights Council consider "abuse" of free speech?

The previous day, the same UNHRC passed (21-10) a resolution urging states to prohibit the "defamation of religions" in a resolution that referred specifically and repeatedly to Islam and no other religion.

We all knew that the UNHRC was a corrupt joke of an organization, but at least up until now it could at least pretend to be guided by principals, even as it applied them in a ridiculously biased manner. Now the perversion is so complete that it is demolishing its very own basis.
  • Tuesday, April 01, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
The Palestine Press Agency (Arabic) is reporting that Hamas has decided to start "taking inventory" of the land and other property that belonged to Fatah members who had to flee for their lives during the Hamas coup, as a first step to formally seizing them.

Hamas has already taken over many PA-run organizations and offices in Gaza, such as the court system and finance offices.

Apparently, taking land is not considered "ethnic cleansing" when Arabs do it to other Arabs.
  • Tuesday, April 01, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon
AFP "reports:"
The World Health Organization lashed out at Israel on Tuesday for denying or delaying travel permits for critically ill Gaza Strip residents, saying the right to health appeared to be optional for Palestinians.

Ambrogio Manenti, who heads the WHO's West Bank and Gaza office, said case studies of patients who died while waiting for permits to travel to Israel for treatment "show nonsense, inhumanity and, at the end, tragedy".

"The right to health appears to be optional for Palestinians," he added.

...Between October 1 and March 2, 32 patients died in Gaza after the permits they requested were delayed or refused, the WHO said.

The number of patients who were denied permits rose from just over three percent in January 2006 -- when the Islamist Hamas movement won Palestinian parliamentary elections -- to almost 36 percent in December 2007.

"From a health perspective this is something unacceptable. I think my organisation should stigmatise this behaviour," said Manenti.

But Captain Shadi Yasin of the Israeli military liaison office for Gaza insisted the WHO report was "completely wrong."

Israel "gives high priority for all urgently needed treatment in Israel and the West Bank for Gaza people and for the entry into Gaza of medicine and medical supplies," the spokesman said.

AFP includes details (not shown here) of two cases where Israeli actions supposedly led to the deaths of Gazans. But it does not go into details of Israel's side of the story, besides a general denial.

The German news agency DPA covers the same story and adds a few sentences you would never see in the AFP version. Something called "context:"

The denial of permits rose from 3 per cent in the beginning of last year, to nearly 36 per cent in December, Manenti pointed out.

In absolute terms, nearly 670 Gazans were nevertheless treated in Israel in December 2007, compared to an in fact smaller number, under 360, in December 2006.

...A 22-year-old female Palestinian suicide bomber on her way for treatment in Israel killed three Israeli security guards and a civilian at the Erez border crossing between Israel and the northern Gaza Strip in January 2004. The woman had told the guards she had a metal plate in her leg to circumvent the metal detector.

A similar suicide attack was thwarted at the Erez terminal in June 2005, when a 21-year-old Palestinian woman tried to cross into Israel using her medical travel documents, but soldiers found a bomb belt on her.

So, three facts that AFP couldn't bring themselves to mention but DPA did: in absolute terms, Israel is treating more Gazans than ever; and that on at least two occasions Gazans used their freedom to travel to Israel as a means to try to kill as many Israelis as possible.

Another fact that neither of them managed to mention is that Egypt also shares a border with Gaza and that Egypt has been far more reluctant to treat sick Gazans than Israel has. It is unclear whether WHO even mentions Egypt as having any responsibility for this problem.
  • Tuesday, April 01, 2008
  • Elder of Ziyon


Yesterday, Saudi Arabia was host to another exciting, high speed car chase, courtesy of our heroes, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as the Muttawa.

Apparently two young couples had the audacity to travel in a car. It is unclear why exactly this is "haram" under shari'a law, but Allah knows best, and so do the Muttawa.

So our heroes, naturally, went in full pursuit with their signature white Toyota SUV:
Eyewitnesses said that they saw a commission SUV with two agents and a security officer inside following a white Ford until it crashed into a small farm with the four people inside. As the Ford was still absorbing the force of impact, the Commission’s agents fled the scene, they added.

An eyewitness said after the car had crashed into the farm, he waved at the Commission’s agents to stop but they ignored him, prompting him to report the incident and the license plate number of the SUV to the police. Another eyewitness confirmed that he saw the commission SUV at the scene of the crash as it happened.

A police source said that the eyewitnesses reported seeing the white Toyota SUV at the scene right after the crash and provided its license plate number.

Chief of Madina Traffic Department Col. Siraj Kamal said that early information and eyewitnesses’ accounts suggest that the commission SUV was in hot pursuit of the victims’ car. If the information and reports are confirmed, the case will be referred to authorities concerned, he said.

Firefighters extracted three bodies from the wreckage of the vehicle, said Madina Civil Defense spokesman Col. Mansour Al-Juhani.

The driver, 30, died of internal bleeding one hour later in hospital, said director of King Fahd Hospital in Madina Mutwakil Hajaj.

The four were not identified.
To be fair, the Muttawa deny any involvement despite the eyewitnesses. They also denied any involvement last month when eyewitnesses saw them chase another couple to their deaths.

Our heroes' body count has really been piling up in the past year, as the Saudi Gazette helpfully enumerates:
The Commission’s agents have been recently accused of involvement in many death cases.

Last week, a 29-year-old man jumped from the third-floor window of an apartment to his death while allegedly trying to avoid arrest by the Commission in Adama District, Dammam.

Earlier in March, a young man and a woman allegedly fleeing from agents of the Commission were killed when their speeding car smashed head-on into a truck on the Madina-Tabuk Road. Investigations in the above two cases are still under way.

In May 2007, the Commission’s agents in Riyadh were involved in a murder case during a forced entry into a house and the beating to death of Salman Al-Huraisi, a citizen, who allegedly possessed and sold alcohol. In June 2007, in Tabuk, the Commission’s agents spotted a 50-year-old family driver, Ahmed Al-Bulawi, driving with a woman in his car. They stopped the car, arrested the two and took the man to one of the Commission’s interrogation centers, where he died. The court ruled that the Commission’s agents were innocent in both death cases filed against it.
So the Muttawa death count is now at 9 in the past 10 months. Not bad, because, to the Commission, extremism in the defense of Sharia is no vice.

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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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