11:25pm
Last night I attended the annual dinner of the Community Security Trust, the organisation that provides the astounding degree of security now needed to help protect Britain’s tiny Jewish population against attack. Sitting there listening to the appeal for money to finance this organisation, and watching the video of what it does and why it is needed, I was struck afresh by the shocking nature of this situation. The video showed Jewish schools in Britain being fitted with bomb-proof windows, Jewish children in Britain being taught how to fend off attack. Jews in Britain are now attacked more frequently than any other minority group.
Although racists have always attacked each and every minority group and that situation has not changed, the fact remains that minorities such as Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims don’t need to be guarded at their communal events; it is only Britain’s Jews for whom that is considered a necessity, and they are guarded at every single synagogue service or communal event. Indeed, the street outside the London hotel where last night’s dinner was held was knee-deep in police and CST volunteers. I was sitting with some very decent people, non-Jews, of the kind who might have been called in a different age the backbone of England. Did they not think that all this was quite extraordinary? I asked them. Shameful, they said; absolutely shameful and appalling; and they shook their heads in sorrow that such a thing should be the case in Britain in 2008, that British Jews should be at such risk that the task of guarding them was quite beyond the regular police and had to be undertaken in large measure by a standing force of Jewish volunteers.
At this dinner the guest of honour was David Cameron. He made a simply outstanding speech ripping into the moral bankruptcy of the useful idiots and worse who are appeasing Islamism in Britain — a speech of a strength, clarity and passion that I had not heard before. It marked a notable step change in Tory policy on terror and Islamism. It was basically a speech which said in effect ‘They shall not pass’ and it threw down the gauntlet to the government which has effectively been prostrating itself before the Islamists instead.
I can’t find the speech at present on the Conservative Party website, but here are some highlights of what Cameron said:
To us, it seems self-evident that there is a clear dividing line between those who set out to kill and maim innocent civilians and those who do not. But the extremist mindset constantly seeks to muddy the water, to blur the distinction and even to invert the reality. Last year I visited Birmingham Central Mosque. While there, I was told that the 7/7 bombers were innocent and that, in fact, MI5 may have carried out the atrocities.I was particularly shocked because the person who said this was not some teenage hothead…he was the chairman of the Mosque…
During protests against the conflict in Lebanon, we witnessed the nauseating sight of well-scrubbed, middle class English people… marching through central London holding placards that read ‘We are all Hizbollah’. That is the extremist mindset in action. These are the same people who urge a boycott of Israeli goods and academics… while saying nothing about China, Iran or Zimbabwe. Unless we challenge such attitudes and expose them for the morally-bankrupt nonsense they are… they will spread through the body politic and become the received wisdom of millions…
Gordon Brown recently banned Yusef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a notorious preacher of hate, from Britain. A man who justifies suicide bombing and calls for homosexuals to be murdered has no place here. That’s why I raised the matter in the House of Commons and asked the Prime Minister to keep him out. But at the same time I also called for him to exclude the head of Hezbollah's notoriously anti-semitic TV station, Ibrahim Moussawi. Moussawi was recently banned by the Irish government but for some reason he has now been allowed into Britain. He’s here at the moment, on a speaking tour, spreading his vile message. The government cannot afford to split the difference with the extremists – excluding Qaradawi, letting in Moussawi. Terrorist apologists should be kept out. Full stop. Period…
Hizb-ut-Tahrir is an extremist organisation that poisons the minds of young Muslims against Jews, Christians and other unbelievers. Some of those who have been through its ranks have ended up in Al Qaeda. In short, it is a conveyor belt to terrorism. Tony Blair declared in 2005 that it would be banned. That didn’t happen. Instead it is still active, recruiting on campuses and from London street gangs. There’s only one responsible course of action. It’s time to close down Hizb-ut-Tahrir…
The government has allocated hundreds of thousands of pounds to local authorities to improve community cohesion. But there are worrying signs that ministers have taken their eyes off the ball. Tower Hamlets council has received extensive funding for such projects. But it has now been revealed that one of the organisations it has given thousands of pounds to is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood called the Cordoba Foundation. And what was the first thing this organisation did with the money? It organised a public debate with the title 'Has Political Participation Failed British Muslims?' And who did they invite to speak? The leader of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Even the most basic research would reveal that the Cordoba Foundation has close connections to people with extremist views, including Azzam Tamimi, the UK representative of Hamas.
There are indications that this problem is more widespread. In the weeks ahead I will be making proposals to isolate extremists and make certain they cannot obtain public grants or get invited to sit on public bodies. That won’t just apply to Islamic extremists. We will be equally vigilant in ensuring that groups linked to the BNP or animal rights militants are excluded too. The message should be clear: To those who reject democracy. To those who preach hate. To those who encourage violence. You are not part of the mainstream. You will not get public funding. You are not welcome as part of our society. We will only defeat the extremist mindset if we understand and confront it.
It was, as I say, a very good speech. But the problem is yet deeper and wider still. For the Islamisation of Britain is proceeding apace. Here is a press notice that has reached me from the London law firm Clifford Chance about the £1 billion Islamic financing of Chelsea Barracks:
Clifford Chance has advised Project Blue (Guernsey) Limited in the acquisition and financing of Chelsea Barracks. Chelsea Barracks, situated in the City of Westminster, is the most valuable development site purchase in UK history. The purchase was completed on 31 January 2008 for a price of £959 million, with the payment split evenly over five years. The Islamic financing was for an amount in the region of £1 billion and is believed to be the largest Islamic financing of UK land.
Project Blue (Guernsey) Limited is majority owned by Qatari Diar, with investment from CPC Group, a Guernsey based Development Company owned by Christian Candy. It has appointed Candy & Candy as development managers and interior designers for the proposed residential scheme for the site. Clifford Chance real estate partner Mark Payne comments, ‘This extraordinary site continues to set the bar for acquisition and residential development. Its many fascinating aspects now include one of the most complex and innovative financings ever seen in the UK. We are breaking new ground by creating and implementing an Islamic financing on this scale on a major development site in the UK. It was a tremendous team effort with a Clifford Chance real estate team combining market leading expertise in real estate, finance and tax…The site was sold by the Ministry of Defence advised by Philip Page of Michelmores LLP. The banks who underwrote the financing were Masraf Al Rayan, HSBC Amanah, BNP Paribas, Calyon Credit Agricole and Qatar National Bank, advised by a team from Norton Rose led by Anthony Pallett and Lucy Wolley Dod.
The Prime Minister has said Britain must become the global centre of Islamic banking. More and more public companies are being taken over by Islamic interests; we now have ‘sharia-compliant’ mortgages, and the Treasury is moving towards a system of Islamic bonds. The government seems completely unaware however that sharia banking comes with a devastating IOU—the Islamisation of all those who use it. That’s why Investor’s Business Daily recently warned:
Shariah-compliant finance involves investments and other transactions that have been structured to conform with the orthodox teachings of Islamic law…
Wall Street is jumping into this hot new market oblivious to the risks not just to the bottom line, but to national security. It knows little about Shariah law and is turning to consultants to create ‘ethical’ products to sell. Lost in the hype over these Muslim-friendly funds is that they must ‘purify’ their returns by transferring at least 3% into Islamic charities, many of which funnel funds to terrorists. So the Street may unwittingly be helping the evildoers launder blood money. Shariah law obligates that a sizable portion of zakat, or giving — one of the pillars of Islam — go to support jihad. So many of the purification donations generated from Shariah finance could wind up in the hands of our enemy…
These funds offer little transparency. They fail to disclose either the radical ties of the scholars who are advising and running them or the tenets that dictate the structuring of the investments. The prospectuses explain simply that the investments are ‘ethical’ or ‘socially acceptable,’ when in fact they're grounded in a religious doctrine that threatens America and the West. The main purpose of Shariah law is to promote Islam as the only legitimate governing system and to help establish its rule worldwide. Shariah-compliant finance is a means to that end. Ignoring in a time of war the moral hazards associated with such financial products, and treating them as if they were as benign and secular as any other, may be the height of corporate recklessness.
The attitude towards Islamism displayed by the British government and significant parts of the security establishment is reckless, ignorant and lethally misguided. If David Cameron keeps up this new approach and finds the courage — and he’ll need it — to develop it yet further, he could find that finally his moment has arrived.
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7:28pm
Reuters continues to poison public debate about the Middle East. A piece that it has put out by
Nidal al-Mughrabi —which, like all wire copy, feeds countless media outlets around the world — is a sickeningly sanitised homage to a Hamas terrorist, painting this volunteer in an army whose aim is genocide and the slaughter of the innocents as a heroic and even saintly freedom-fighter.
A window into the gruesome actuality by contrast is provided on
WorldNet Daily, where Aaron Klein produces more evidence of the way in which Hamas is deliberately using its civilians as air-strike fodder to bring about as many civilian deaths as possible:
Amid Israel's ongoing ground operation in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas terrorist group has been drawing Israeli forces into populated civilian areas, shooting at Jewish fighters from occupied civilian homes while women and children were inside, an Israel Defense Forces commander fighting in Gaza told WND.
‘Hamas terror operatives shooting at us took up positions inside civilian homes while the civilians were still inside,’ said the commander, who was speaking from the outskirts of an IDF operation in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. ‘The aim is to draw us into killing civilians to bring about international pressure to end our operation,’ the commander said, speaking on condition his name be withheld due to Israeli military restrictions on media interviews by fighting forces. The commander said in one case today, four Hamas snipers shot at Israeli forces about from the open window of a home where women can be clearly seen in the background.
This strategy —which, as I have previously observed, relies on the western media to act as willing dupes for such diabolical manipulation —clearly places the Israelis in a hellish dilemma. If the strategy is to lure them back into Gaza, they must not be thus lured; but the attacks on Ashkelon in particular would seem to leave them no alternative but to wage proper war inside Gaza; but as we can see, if they do so Hamas will place as many civilians as possible in harm’s way in order to maximise the actual (and falsified) casualty rate, further inflame the Muslim world, provide a pretext for further attack and ensure that the so-called civilised world sits on its hands while Israel goes under.
For what the myopic or bigoted west fails to grasp is that the new reality of asymmetric warfare reverses the usual calibration of a country’s military strength. This is because the asymmetry is not confined merely to military hardware. It is because it also relates to the moral calculus of that country. The bitter irony of the western liberals’ grotesque claim that Israel is involved in ‘disproportionate’ violence in Gaza is that, on the contrary, Israel is totally constrained by its own ethical code from fighting on the same basis as the Arabs. So while Israel is earnestly consulting its Supreme Court on the legal criteria of proportionality and human rights that must govern its military strikes, the Arabs not only deliberately target Israeli innocents for mass murder but offer up their own people as bomb fodder. That is what they mean when they gloat that they will win because ‘we love death while you love life’. A contest between those for whom life is sacred and those for whom their own and others’ lives are utterly without value and wholly dispensable on the way to the next world is no contest.
This reality of asymmetric warfare and the way in which it all but negates conventional calibrations of military strength is well explored in this
article in the Middle East Quarterly:
The Israeli military faces a serious dilemma because it adheres to a specific moral code. Despite Arab propaganda to the contrary, Israeli military planners respect human life.
[6] Tel Aviv University philosophy professor Asa Kasher and current Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence chief Amos Yadlin write that, even when dealing with terrorists, Israeli soldiers conduct operations ‘in a manner that strictly protects human life and dignity by minimizing all collateral damage to individuals not directly involved in acts or activities of terror
’[7] When trying to oust terrorists from Jenin in April 2002, for example, Israeli commanders decided to pursue a house-to-house ground strategy rather than employ the kind of airpower that would keep Israeli soldiers out of danger but would heighten the risk of collateral civilian casualties.
[8] This decision cost the lives, in one incident, of thirteen IDF soldiers in an ambush in the Hawashin district on April 9…
The result is an asymmetry in which Israel restricts itself in accordance with international law from indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets while groups such as Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah intentionally target Israeli civilians and employ their own civilians as human shields to deter an Israeli response. Avi Dichter, Israel's public security minister, spoke to this predicament in the context of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war: ‘You can [conduct military operations] in a short time; you can flood southern Lebanon with ground troops, and you can bomb villages without warning anyone, and it will be faster. But you'll kill a lot more innocent people and suffer a lot more casualties, and we don't intend to do either.
’[15] Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland, Israel's national security advisor from 2005 to 2006, explained the Israeli decision-making process: ‘We are forced to kill someone only when four conditions are met: Number one, there is no way to arrest someone. Number two, the target is important enough. Number three, we do it when we believe that we can guarantee very few civilian casualties. And number four, we do it when we believe that there is no way that we can delay or postpone this operation, something that we consider as a ticking bomb.
’
The problem, however, is that Israel is in not just an ethical but a geo-strategic trap which is closing ever tighter by the day. That is why the genocidal sabre-rattling from the Islamic world which is growing ever louder must be taken seriously.
Al Nahar reports, for example:
Lebanese researcher Anis Al-Naqash said in a lecture that talk of a new Middle East without Israel indicated a fact that will come true, and that the next victory will be soon and will include the destruction of the Israeli army.
Israel faces not just Hamas in Gaza, but in Lebanon Hezbollah has reportedly assembled 10,000 long-range and 20,000 short-range rockets (so much for the international peace-keepers) pointing once again at Israel’s northern towns and villages.
So what to do to escape this nightmare? It seems to me that, in a situation where there are no good options only less terrible ones, there needs to be a conceptual leap. Asymmetric warfare paralyses the good and delivers victory to the bad; conventional warfare enables a just war to be fought by the good which can defeat the bad. I have said before that all roads lead back to Iran. It is Iran which is delivering the Katyushas being fired at Ashkelon; it is Iran whose army Hezbollah is poised to fire the rockets in the Lebanon at northern Israel; it is Iran which is racing to develop a nuclear weapon to finish Israel off; it is Iran which has played so successfully for time, which has boxed Israel in, which is sheltering behind its asymmetric proxies and which is the puppet master of this whole infernal drama of the apocalypse.
There is therefore only one way out of this trap. Regime change in Iran.
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2:44pm
This morning’s Times leader seemed remarkably confused, not to mention falling smartly into the by now well-rehearsed trap (see multiple posts below) :
And so Israeli politicians, responding to public frustration, have spoken of ever more serious consequences, even unwisely threatening Gaza with the emotive word shoa, the normal Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Groan.
And then it went on:
Israel's friends, including Britain, have reaffirmed the country's right to defend itself. But Western public opinion regards the deaths of more than 100 Palestinians for three Israelis, whatever the extenuating circumstances, as disproportionate. And when these Palestinian casualties are caused by the Israeli Defence Forces, the very idea of self-defence is brought into question. Over time that is disastrous for the credibility of Israel's claim to the right of self-defence. Israel's action is both legitimate and counter-productive.
Eh?? Why does using its armed forces bring the very idea of self-defence into question? True, the western world clearly doesn’t think Israel should exercise
any military self-defence and should never under any circumstances kill any Arabs, regardless of their aggression; but since when did the Times agree with that? As for the next sentence:
The brutal fact is that all sides have more interest in war than peace
how can they possibly assert that Israel has no interest in peace? Do they really believe that, after sixty years of living under siege from the annihilatory Arab onslaught, Israel actually wants more of the same?
What kind of planet is the Times now inhabiting?
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4:22pm
Alarmed about Gaza? Here’s worse. In the Washington Post, Michael Oren outlines the doomsday scenario keeping Israeli strategists up at night:
It begins with a single Qassam rocket, one of the thousands of homemade projectiles fired in recent years by the Islamic radicals of Hamas from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel. The rockets have made life nightmarish for many Israelis but have largely missed their targets. But this one gets "lucky": It smashes into an elementary school, wounding 40 children and killing 15.
The Israeli government, which had heretofore responded to the Qassams with airstrikes and small ground raids, cannot resist the nationwide demand for action. Within hours, tens of thousands of Israeli troops and hundreds of tanks are rushing into Gaza, battling house-to-house in teeming refugee camps. Just as swiftly, Palestinian officials accuse Israel of perpetrating a massacre and invite the foreign press to photograph the corpse-strewn rubble. The images flash around the Middle East on al-Jazeera TV and trigger violent demonstrations in Arab capitals.
Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite militia, then gets into the act, raining Katyusha rockets on northern Israel. But when Israeli warplanes bomb the Katyusha batteries, Syria leaps in, sending its commandos to retaliate by capturing key Israeli bunkers atop the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel's counterattack succeeds only in precipitating a hailstorm of Syrian Scud-D missiles, some armed with chemical warheads, into Israeli cities. Then, just as Israeli planes are incinerating the main electrical plant in Damascus, the first of hundreds of Shehab-3 rockets, pre-targeted at Tel Aviv, lift off from Tehran.
Sound fantastical or too horrific to ponder? Not to Israeli intelligence analysts it doesn't.
This is why what is -- with such tragic inadequacy -- called the 'bias' of the western media against Israel is of such monumental importance. The manipulation of world opinion is a key strategic component of the Islamists' war against the Jews in particular and civilisation in general. That is why the western media -- with its structural animosity towards Israel and the key role it is playing in ensuring that such distortions and incitement trap Israel so that it is damned whatever move it makes -- must now be considered the Islamists' key strategic asset in that war.
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3:56pm
One of the objectives of the Hamas propaganda from Gaza is to paint the Israelis as child-killers. It is true that Arab children have died in the current fighting as a result of the Israeli strikes. This is deeply regrettable, but fair-minded people need to reflect on the following points:
1) Civilian or child casualties in war are always regrettable but often unavoidable, as is accepted under international law. The crucial point is whether civilians are targeted for killing or are killed inadvertently. Hamas and Fatah terrorists deliberately target Israeli civilians for attack. Israel targets terrorists, never civilians.
2) As with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza deliberately situate their rocket launchers and weapons factories in the middle of civilian populations, using them purposely as human shields and exploiting the inevitable civilian casualties that result from Israel’s targeting of the terrorist infrastructure. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre at Herzliya has put out a
bulletin in which it details actual calls by Hamas for civilians to form human shields:
During the IDF activity in the Gaza Strip both Hamas and the PIJ called upon Palestinian civilians to gather in places where, they claimed, the IDF was about to attack. That was done to have them serve as human shields, exploiting the fact that the IDF avoids deliberately harming Palestinian civilians. The terrorist organizations operating in the Gaza Strip have used the tactic before. 8
20. The following are examples of calls in the Palestinian media for Palestinians civilians to serve as human shields:
1) Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV and PalMedia Website called upon civilians to form a human shield at the home of Abu al-Hatal in the Sajaiya neighborhood (in Al-Sha'af according to other version) because the IDF had threatened to blow it up (March 1).
2) Al-Aqsa TV called upon the Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to go to the house of shaheed Othman al-Ruziana to protect it because the IDF was threatening to blow it up (February 29).
3) Al-Aqsa TV called upon the residents of Khan Yunis to gather at the house of Ma'amoun Abu ‘Amer because the IDF was threatening to blow it up (February 28). An hour later dozens of Palestinians from Khan Yunis were reported to have gathered on the roof of Abu ‘Amer's house to serve as human shields to prevent the house from being hit (Pal-today Website, February 28) .
4) Al-Aqsa TV called upon Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to go to the house of shaheed Musab al-Ja'abir to protect it because Israel was threatening to blow it up (February 29).
5) The PIJ's Radio Sawt al-Quds called upon civilian to gather around the house of Fawzi Abu al-Hamed in the Absan al-Kabira region to prevent it from being blown up by the IDF (March 1).
21. Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya boasted to Al-Jazeera TV of the “firm stance” of the Palestinians. As an example he said that the “occupation” had threatened to blow up buildings but nevertheless hundreds and thousands of Palestinians had left their homes “in the middle of the night” and gone up on the roofs of the houses the Israelis had threatened to blow up (Al-Jazeera TV, February 29).
In other words Hamas deliberately put their civilians in harm’s way — and then start screaming about ‘war crimes’!
3) The British media have been claiming that around half of the Arabs who were killed were civilians. The Israelis say the vast majority of the casualties were terrorists. The ITIC
bulletin says the following:
Over the past five days, in our assessment more than 80 Palestrinians were killed. Most of them were terrorist operatives, primarily belonging to Hamas's Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, who were killed in battle or in IDF attacks on terrorist targets. Among the operatives killed were the sons of two senior Hamas figures, the son of Khalil al-Hiye and the son of Muhammad Shihab, both Hamas-faction members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Civilians were accidentally killed during the fighting, since terrorist bases, positions and buildings from which the terrorist organization conduct their battles against the IDF were built close to their homes, and rockets were also fired from nearby. Among those killed were a number of children.
13. On February 29 Hamas's Palestine-info Website posted a table with data about the 34 Palestinians killed during the first two days of the escalation (February 27 and 28). Eleven of the names were of Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades operatives, eight belonging to other terrorist organizations (the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade), a policeman, a guard and 13 civilians, some of them children…
14 The propaganda machine of Hamas and the other terrorist organizations, backed up by the Palestinian Authority and Al-Jazeera's Arab TV channel, broadcast horrific picture of children who had died during the fighting and blamed Israel for deliberately targeting women and children. The propaganda, which focused on civilians, ignored the fact that most of those killed were terrorist operatives, and that the fighting took place within the terrorist infrastructure rooted in the heart of the civilian population.
15. The Palestinian propaganda machine used the expressions ‘genocide,’ ‘slaughter’ and even ‘holocaust.’ It was not the first time senior Palestinian figures and the Palestinian and Arab media issued exaggerated and false descriptionsof attacks on civilians, using pictures of civilians who had been killed and houses which had been destroyed. The tactical propaganda ploys are intended to defame Israel, garner support in the Arab world and the international community, and to tie Israel 's hands and prevent it from continuing its activities on the ground against terrorist elements. Examples of propaganda manipulation were also found in descriptions of the fighting during Operation Defensive Shield (April 2002).
4) One of the children who was said to be a casualty of the Israel air strikes, a baby, was actually killed by the Arabs when one of their rockets aimed at killing Israelis misfired:
Hamas said the baby, Malak Karfaneh, was killed and three other civilians were wounded in an Israeli strike on Beit Hanun, a northern town where Palestinians often launch rockets at Israel. But local residents said one of those rockets fell short and landed in the area of the baby's house.
Meanwhile, in the supposedly civilised world, a Paris court heard last week from an independent expert -- who has given advice on ballistic and forensic evidence in French courts for 20 years -- that the ‘death’ of the Arab child Mohammed al Durah, the iconic image of whose alleged killing by Israeli soldiers in 2000 transmitted by France 2 has directly fuelled countless terrorist attacks, could not have been the result of Israeli gunfire and may well have been a staged fabrication. (See my earlier posts on this scandal
here, here, here, here and
here.)
Ha’aretz reported:
The ballistics expert, Jean-Claude Schlinger, presented his conclusions after reviewing the footage, which shows Dura and his father cowering by a wall after being caught in the crossfire between Palestinian gunmen and Israel Defense Forces soldiers at the Netzarim junction.
The case revolves around a libel suit brought by the France 2 television channel and its Middle East correspondent, Charles Enderlin, against Phillipe Karsenty. On November 22, 2004 Karsenty wrote on his Web site, Media Ratings, that Dura's death had been staged and that France 2's conduct ‘disgraces France and its public broadcasting system.’ A few weeks later France 2 and Enderlin sued him for libel. In October 2006 Karsenty was found guilty and was required to pay symbolic damages of 1 euro (and 3,000 euros in court costs).
Karsenty appealed. The judge asked to examine all of the film footage in the report of the shooting before rendering a verdict. On Saturday, Enderlin rejected Schlinger's findings, arguing that ‘only partial evidence was given to him for evaluation.’
In his report, Schlinger wrote, ‘If Jamal [the boy's father] and Mohammed al-Dura were indeed struck by shots, then they could not have come from the Israeli position, from a technical point of view, but only from the direction of the Palestinian position.’
He also wrote, ‘In view of the general context, and in light of many instances of staged incidents, there is no objective evidence that the child was killed and his father injured. It is very possible, therefore, that it is a case [in which the incident was] staged.’
War is always terrible; undoubtedly, some innocents are being killed in Gaza. But who should be blamed — the Israelis who are merely trying to stop the genocidal attacks on their own people (Katyushas have been
hitting Ashkelon again today), or the Arabs who, carrying out those attacks, deliberately line up their own civilians as targets for Israeli counter-attack and then cynically and systematically use lies, deception and distortion to inflate their casualty figures?
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11:34am
Since there is clearly precious little chance of any objectivity or balance about the situation in Gaza from the British media, which has decided that Israel’s actions were ‘disproportionate’ and is filtering its reporting through that prism, here is an account on Israel’s Foreign Ministry website of a briefing given by security sources to the world’s media on Saturday — which as far as I can see, with the exception of one brief paragraph buried in the Times story this morning, has not been reported at all:
The IDF operation began on Wednesday morning (27 February), when word was received of the intention of a special team of Hamas terrorists that had arrived from Syria and Iran to enter Israel and to cause damage and to perhaps abduct soldiers or civilians. Under cover of bad weather, they intended either to enter Israel through a tunnel or to use ropes to cross over the security wall and then penetrate an army outpost or civilian settlement in attempt to abduct civilians.
The orders for the operation came directly from Damascus and Teheran. Israeli forces managed to locate and kill the five members of the team, and in response, Hamas attempted to create a new equation in the region, whereby Hamas would fire rockets in retaliation to every Israeli attack. Hamas has been following a policy of brinkmanship since June 2007, in an attempt to retain its power.
Iranian-made 122 mm. GRAD missiles, which were smuggled into Gaza, were launched at Ashkelon during the events in Rafiah. The rockets were employed as a means of increasing the range of Hamas missiles, placing more Israelis into the line of fire. The current supply of rockets held by the Hamas is adequate for the launching of a few dozen daily, for many days. This, however, is also dependant on Israeli actions.
On Saturday (1 March 2008), Israel hit one of the rocket sites, destroying several hundred mortars. The IDF strategy is to try to hit rocket storage and launching facilities. Some of the rockets have a range of 20 kilometers; they originated with the Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Syria and Iran managed to smuggle them into Gaza when the border to Rafah was breached. The exact quantity of rockets that were smuggled in is unknown.
A large Israeli force, formed by the Givati Brigade stationed near Jabaliya, entered the Gaza Strip on Friday (29 March) and engaged the terrorists. The number of Palestinian casualties is not clear, as media reports differ from actual fact. While there are definitely civilian casualties, it is a recognized Hamas tactic to use civilians as shields and to launch rockets from population centers. When civilians protest these actions, Hamas transfers them elsewhere.
Current Israeli estimations predict that rocket fire will continue. Some of the Hamas leadership has fled, while all the living quarters of the leadership are empty. It seems apparent that the Israeli government has decided to show the Hamas leadership that it was a mistake to launch extended range missiles.
The length and extent of the operation will be decided by the government. At this stage it seems that the extent of the operation will be greater than previous operations, as it is necessary to contend not only with Hamas capabilities, but also with their intentions, and to show them that they cannot keep shooting at Sderot and Ashkelon with impunity. This is not the broad operation into Gaza spoken of previously. If Hamas, supported by Iran and Syria, increases its activities, the Israeli government has additional options. The Hamas leadership is not currently targeted but this may change in the future as it is a question of policy.
While no limited operation can stop all the rockets, the current operation has two aims:
- The operation was initiated in Jabaliya, the area from which most of the launchings take place.
- To demonstrate to Hamas that they will suffer additional casualties if the rocket launchings continue. If Hamas continues its rocket launching policy, it will bring the broad military operation upon itself.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad instructors who were trained in Iran and Syria and who entered Gaza via Egypt, are now training the Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip.
While it was problematic for Hamas to smuggle certain types of weapons through the dozens of tunnels beneath the border, during the period the border was open they managed to bring in heavy trucks filled with armaments and ammunition. The Syrians and Iranians were able to arrange the supply of new weapons, which is why Israel must now contend with previously unknown weapon types.
In the Telegraph, the normally sound
Con Coughlin wildly misreported the already mistranslated remark by deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai (see earlier posts). Coughlin wrote:
The unfortunate, and unworthy, comments made last week by the Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, who said the Palestinians faced a ‘bigger holocaust’ than those suffered by the Jews in Europe during the Second World War if they did not desist from their rocket attacks, provoked widespread protests from Israelis, and Mr Vilnai has been obliged to apologise.
Vilnai said no such thing. This is what he actually said:
The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘shoah’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.
The word ‘shoah’ (as extensively discussed in earlier posts) was translated by Reuters as ‘holocaust’, whereas in Hebrew it is not used to mean that without the definite article which was absent here. Vilnai subsequently clarified accordingly that he had not meant ‘holocaust’ but ‘disaster’. He certainly did not say anything about the Jews in Europe, and he did not apologise.
Meanwhile,
here is further evidence of Israel’s ‘disproportionate behaviour in Gaza:
Humanitarian aid in the form of medical supplies and food were transported into Gaza from Israel on Sunday despite ongoing rocket attacks on western Negev communities emanating from the region. Thousands of units of blood and other medical supplies, as well as basic food items were brought through the Sufa crossing in 62 trucks from Israel.
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7:26pm
Here is part of the item about the Gaza escalation broadcast by Jeremy Bowen on yesterday’s Today programme at 0840 am to which I referred in my entry below.
There isn’t much point trying to work out who started it; both sides blame each other.
On the contrary: there is every point in doing so, because the side that started it — the Arabs — is the aggressor and its victim, Israel, only uses military force in defence. The moral equivalence routinely used by the media to assert that what’s going on is merely ‘tit-for-tat’ violence ignores this crucial moral distinction and results in Israel being blamed for defending itself. The facts are plain: Israel disengaged from Gaza; the response of the Gazans was to increase the rocketing of southern Israel many times over. If anyone really has difficulty working out which side started this conflagration, all they have to do is ask themselves a simple question: if the Arabs stopped the bombs and the missiles and the rockets and announced: ‘The war is over for ever and we only want a state of our own to live peacefully alongside Jewish Israel’, does anyone (apart from pathological Israel haters) seriously think Israel would be bombing Gaza? Better perhaps to see the violence that's washing back and forth between Gaza and Israel as the latest episode in a conflict that has lasted around a century. It started because two different peoples wanted one piece of land. They're still working their way through the consequences of that single fact.
No, it wasn’t ‘two different peoples’ because at that time there was no such thing as ‘a Palestinian people’, merely Arab people who lived in Palestine. The conflict did not start because they and the Jews ‘wanted one piece of land’. It started because the Arabs refused to accept the decision by first Britain and then the League of Nations to re-establish the Jewish national home in Palestine, to which they were deemed to be entitled as of right on account of their unbroken title to and unrivalled claim upon that land (which included what is now the West Bank and Gaza). When you take the long view you realise how hard it will be to stop the killing. Here are some of the reasons behind what the two sides are doing now. The Israelis say that no country in the world would tolerate repeated attacks on its sovereign territory and that it must protect its citizens. That's why, once again, it's threatening a big military operation in Gaza. Never leaving an attack unanswered is a basic instinct in a state whose founders believed they'd abandoned centuries of Jewish weakness when they left Europe to build something new and strong in what they called the Land of Israel.
‘Never leaving an attack unanswered…’? What planet is this man living on? There have been more than 2000 rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza since disengagement in 2005. Until now, the Israel government has more or less sat on its hands. The inhabitants of Sderot have been crying out for action to be taken but until now, apart from some small-scale raids, the government has refused to do so. As for the ‘basic instinct in a state whose founders believed they'd abandoned centuries of Jewish weakness’, in what other state would it not be a basic instinct to defend its citizens against such a bombardment? What other state would have ebdured bombardment by 2000+ rockets before acting? Here’s how America once responded to something that was only fractionally similar (from a WSJ article by Bret Stephens): On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson ordered Gen. John J. Pershing and 10,000 soldiers into Mexico for nearly a year to hunt Villa down, in what was explicitly called a 'punitive expedition.' Pershing never found Villa, making the effort something of a failure. Then again, Villa's raid would be the last significant foreign attack on continental U.S. soil for 85 years, six months and two days.
The implication that defending one’s people against murderous attack is something peculiar to the Jews is demonstrably preposterous. The Palestinians of Hamas, who run things inside the Gaza strip, say that their right to resist, to defend their people is absolute. They believe that their Palestinian rivals in Fatah, the other main faction, were ready to sell their birthright in negotiations with Israel that amounted to surrender. They say they will not make the same mistake. What's going on between the Palestinian rocket squads in Gaza and the Israeli army is a classic fight between the strong and the weak, which is known these days as asymmetric warfare. The thing about it is that the weakest side can exert leverage far beyond the power of its weapons. That accounts for some of the rage and frustration in Israel's defence establishment. They're big, they're strong and they have some of the most sophisticated weapon systems in the world and they're struggling to stop rockets that are the lowest of the low tech.
Leverage? Leverage?? The inhabitants of Sderot are too terrified to go to the lavatory or take their children to school because dozens of rockets are falling on them every single day. This is not 'leverage'. It's attempted mass murder. Why are Israelis not seen as victims like anyone else?
Israel is not finally responding because it is in a 'rage' that ‘the weak’ are succeeding against ‘the strong’. It’s because it is under attack and people are being killed and maimed. The fact that these rockets are crude and often miss their target is neither here nor there. So too were the fertiliser bombs strapped to the British Islamist bombers who attacked London in July 2005. Are countries supposed to ignore a potentially lethal daily bombardment unless the rockets are of a superior design and efficacy? And what about the ‘Grad’ Katyushas that have been hitting Ashkelon, which Israel says are supplied by Iran? Is Iran also ‘weak’ and ‘asymmetric’?
That's probably why the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai used the word ‘holocaust’ to describe what will happen to the Palestinians if the rocket fire intensifies. His spin doctor moved fast to sat that the deputy minister, a retired major-general, did not mean genocide.
See posts below. Ye gods.
The
Bret Stephens article, by the way, is well worth reading. He takes the argument that Israel’s response is ‘disproportionate’ and eviscerates it:
Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams — to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams — an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?
Surely this isn't what advocates of proportion have in mind. What they really mean is that Israel ought to respond with moderation. But the criteria for moderation are subjective. Should Israel pick off Hamas leaders who are ordering the rocket attacks? The European Parliament last week passed a resolution denouncing the practice of targeted assassinations. Should Israel adopt purely economic measures to punish Hamas for the Kassams? The same resolution denounced what it called Israel's "collective punishment" of Palestinians. Should Israel seek to dismantle the Kassams through limited military incursions? This, too, has the unpardonable effect of resulting in too many Palestinian casualties, which are said to be "disproportionate" to the number of Israelis injured by the Kassams.
By these lights, Israel's presumptive right to self-defense has no practical application as far as Gaza is concerned.
Yup; that’s about the long and the short of it.
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1:28am
So which British media outlets used the erroneous Reuters' translation of Matan Vilnai’s speech (see post below) to produce the latest version of the blood libel, that Israel is planning a ‘holocaust’ of the Palestinians? Many of them, including all the broadsheets.
As I said in my post below, the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ is never used in Israel to mean 'holocaust' -- a term which in modern Hebrew is translated as 'hashoah' which includes the all-important definite article and is only used to denote the genocide of the Jews -- but means instead, and was used by Vilnai to mean, ‘disaster’. The readers’ comments on my post below which claim the opposite are (other than those which are simply malevolent) confusing the ill-informed and sloppy English use of the word ‘shoah’ with its use in Hebrew as spoken in Israel. While the original story was based on the Reuters' mistranslation, there was simply no excuse for any outlet continuing to make this false statement once it was pointed out that this was not the meaning of the Hebrew term. At that point, a mistake turned into a blood libel.
The BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen repeated it on the
Today programme, dismissing the explanation that Vilnai had not said this as the work of an Israel government spin-doctor. (His entire item, which purported to put the current escalation in Gaza into context, was disgraceful, and I will deal with it in more detail later)
As predicted, the Arabs are making hay with this shocking abuse of language to whip up an incendiary hysteria towards Israel as it steps up its raids against Gaza’s terrorists in an attempt to halt their rocket bombardment of southern Israel. BBC News online reported:
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas described the Israeli raids as ‘more than a holocaust’. Mr Abbas was apparently alluding to controversial remarks made on Friday by Israel's Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, who said Palestinians risked a ‘shoah’ - the Hebrew word for a big disaster as well as for the Nazi Holocaust. Mr Vilnai's colleagues insisted he had not meant ‘genocide’.
But Mr Abbas told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah: ‘It's very regrettable that what is happening is more than a holocaust. We tell the world to see with its own eyes and judge for itself what is happening.’ Hamas's exiled leader Khaled Meshaal went further. ‘Israeli actions in Gaza since Wednesday is the real Holocaust,’ he said in the Syrian capital, Damascus. He said Israel was ‘exaggerating the Holocaust and using it to blackmail the world’.
The basic fault lies of course with Reuters which put out the false translation. But those media outlets which continue to repeat the libel are actively fomenting hysteria and hated and providing a grotesque alibi and even further incitement for the would-be perpetrators of an actual second Holocaust — who also of course deny the first — as they go about their infernal business.
The Times ran a second piece by
James Hider which was also breathtakingly twisted. His story ran:
Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem's Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal, anti-settlement campaigners have told The Times. One group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said that settler tunnels could one day extend under the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, and claimed that extremists could use the access route to attack the structure in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler groups flatly deny such allegations.
The tunnels are largely based on historical water wells or buried pilgrim routes, stretching from the Pool of Siloam in the Palestinian district of Silwan, where Jesus Christ is said to have cured a blind man, to the south and joining up with the Western Wall, the Jewish holy site. Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and member of the anti-settlement group Ir Amin, believes that the underground system will then extend from the Western Wall tunnel, which is already open, via settler-owned properties in the Muslim quarter and eventually link up with an ancient quarry, run by a right-wing Jewish group and known as Solomon's Stables, on the north side of the Old City, near the Damascus gate.
The selectivity and distortion in this piece are jaw-dropping. These ‘historical water wells’ are historic because they were created by the Jews. In the 8th century BCE the Jewish King Hezekiah, who anticipated the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem, secured the city’s water supply by diverting the waters of the Gihon spring in the Kidron valley outside Jerusalem through an ingenious network of underground tunnels to an inner-city reservoir called the Pool of Siloam. This is referred to in the Hebrew Bible (Kings 20: 20) which states that Hezekiah ‘made a pool and a conduit and brought water into the city’.
The ‘ancient quarry’ known as Solomon’s Stables was part of the Temple built by King Solomon, the very heart of Judaism. A guidebook published by the Supreme Muslim Council in 1924 says of the Temple Mount: ‘This site is amongst the oldest in the world. It is beyond any doubt where Solomon’s Temple once stood’ and described the site of Solomon’s Stables as part of the Temple. Today, however, Solomon’s Stables has been turned in the last few years into a mosque, during the construction of which the Arabs consigned the priceless archaeological evidence of the existence of Solomon's Stables to the Jerusalem municipal garbage dump.
The vandalism of the Temple Mount is a deliberate attempt to erase the historical proof of the Temple and with it the truth about the origins of Israel as a Jewish state long before the Arabs ever got there. In 2000, the Arab Waqf -- which administers the Muslim holy sites on top of Temple Mount, which were only built in the first place in order to assert supremacy over the Jews of whose ancient nation and religion the Temple was the focal point -- dumped 13,000 tons of rubble from the First and Second Temple periods in various waste sites around Jerusalem where they were mixed with local garbage to hide any historically significant objects. Archaeologists forced to scrabble frantically in this rubble to rescue what they could found a clay seal bearing the name Immer, the last name of Pashur ben Immer described in the book of Jeremiah as an important priest in the First Temple, and other artefacts including stone plaques with Greek inscriptions from the time of King Herod warning non-Jews not to enter certain areas of the Temple.
This is the real story about the Temple Mount — the appalling desecration and vandalism of the Jewish foundations of the Temple by the Arab Waqf. It is an act of cultural and religious destruction beside which the destruction by the Taleban of the Buddhist statues in Banyan pales into insignificance. It is a systematic attempt by the Arabs to rewrite history by destroying the archeological evidence of the ancient Jewish claim to Jerusalem. It is an outrage of global proportions. Yet the Times makes no reference to this whatsoever, regurgitating instead the pilgeresque claims of Israeli ideological activists which put Israel in the dock instead.
Obscene, and murderous. All of it.
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