FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

UN Watch writes,

As Israel struggles to defend its civilians from deadly Hamas rocket attacks—200 in the past few days alone, averaging nearly one per hour—the Arab and Islamic states have called an emergency “Special Session” of the UN Human Rights Council [HRC] for this Wednesday. Their proposed resolution would invert the simple reality that Hamas and its terrorist allies are deliberately targeting civilians, whereas Israel in its defensive measures takes pains to avoid harming civilians…

The draft resolution circulated by the Palestinians is entirely one-sided. It accuses Israel of “grave breaches” of human rights, and of “incessant and repeated military attacks and incursions.”

Not a word, of course, about rockets, mortars, sniping, planting explosives at the border fence or digging under it, etc. The past few weeks have seen as many as 50 rockets a day hitting southern Israel.

The UN HRC, with a great majority of anti-Israel members, is likely to approve it. Recently, they passed a resolution commending the Sudan for its “cooperation” in solving the problem of human rights abuses in Darfur!

If you believe in the efficacy of such things, you can send an email here to the leaders of Western nations on the HRC.

Probably more effective is writing one’s own letter, as Maurice Ostroff has done, and he has sent it to the prime ministers of Canada, Britain, Germany, France and Slovenia:

January 22, 2008

Motion to be proposed on January 23, at UN Human Rights Council Special Session on Gaza blockade

May I respectfully suggest that your representative on the HRC take the following circumstances into account when participating in the above session.

If the proposers of the motion to end the blockade of Gaza are sincerely interested in the welfare of the Gazan citizens, they can achieve their goal speedily and effectively by addressing the party that really holds the key, namely Hamas. And as Hamas is well disposed to the majority of HRC member states, HRC is in a favorable position to influence that organization.

In the interests of moral integrity, the HRC dare not miss this opportunity to effectively release the Gazans from their nightmare by insisting and ensuring that Hamas put an end to the rocket attacks, whereupon electricity, fuel and other supplies will immediately start flowing into Gaza.

It is completely illogical to expect Israel to refrain from acting to counter the War Crime of rockets deliberately aimed from civilian areas in Gaza, at Israeli homes, schools and hospitals with the declared intention of killing and maiming as many as possible. More than 4,000 rockets have landed in Israel since the pullout from Gaza and it is not due to lack of intent, that none have yet landed on a crowded hospital or school.

The declared intention is to indiscriminately kill and maim as many civilians as possible. If any had had fallen on a school the number of casualties would have been disastrous. In the past few weeks alone, more than 450 rockets and mortars have been launched. If each missile fired had achieved the launcher’s intention, the results would have been a massacre of huge proportions. That this was and remains the intention cannot be ignored and it is only by the grace of the almighty that it has not happened.

Removing the cause of the blockade by ending the firing of rockets would obviously be of greater humanitarian value than cynically adding another vengeful one-sided resolution against Israel while completely ignoring the context in which events are taking place.

Sincerely
Maurice Ostroff

Technorati Tags: UNHRC, Gaza, Israel, Hamas

When one nation is supposedly at peace with another like Israel and Egypt, or when negotiations intended to achieve peace are taking place, then hateful expressions intended to demonize are, shall we say, inappropriate. But the prevalence of it in ‘friendly’ Arab media actually sends a message, to which we should pay attention.

For example, here’s a cartoon from Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official newspaper of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA — our ‘peace partner’) published in October 2007 (Palestinian Media Watch):

The text on the missiles reads, “Allah, scatter them!”

“And turn their wives into widows!”

“And turn their children into orphans!”

“And give us victory over them!”

This was published during the period immediately preceding the Annapolis “peace” conference. One would think it came from Hamas. Is there any wonder that several recent murders of Israelis in the West Bank have been carried out by members of the PA “security” forces?

But nobody comes close to Egypt, with whom Israel has supposedly been at peace since 1976, for anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic incitement. Here’s a sample from the official Al-Ahram newspaper from April 2001:

Nice, isn’t it? I can’t read Arabic, so maybe one of my readers will translate the captions — not that it’s necessary in order to understand it.

Of course, Jordan is different. Right?

This one is from the Jordanian government-owned Ad-Dustur newspaper. The sign says “Gaza Strip or the Israeli Annihilation Camp.”

Words and pictures can have great power. Sometimes people minimize the importance of hateful messages and incitement, as if to say “as long as nobody was hurt or killed, it’s no big deal”. Or they say “it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just internal politics”.

The fact is that every information tool at hand to the ‘friendly’ Arab regimes, not just newspapers but radio, television, schools and universities, mosque pulpits, children’s books and schoolbooks, etc. is turned to the tasks of creating hate, destroying credibility, preventing reconciliation, and above all preparing their citizens for war.

The first thing Yasser Arafat did when he returned from exile in 1994 to lead the PA after the signing of the Oslo accord was to establish a Palestinian educational system designed from the ground up to teach children that Israel is illegitimate, that ‘Palestine’ would be redeemed through armed struggle, and that they would be the ones to do it. Peace, which became part of Israeli schools’ curricula, was not mentioned. David Meir-Levi wrote,

After Hitler, Arafat is the first national leader in history to set up a school system whose purpose was to teach the nation’s children to hate another ethnic group and to instill in them the ambition to murder as many as they could.

So what’s the message that all this sends? That there is no real peace available, only various forms of hudna (temporary truce). Because the right to make war is reserved, and the necessary mindset nurtured.

Egypt, despite the peace treaty, continues to buy expensive, sophisticated weapons that it has absolutely no use for — unless there is another war with Israel. All of the plans for “normalized” cultural and economic ties between Israel and Egypt that were intended to break down the barriers between peoples have not come to fruition, because the Egyptians want it that way.

The PA and Arab nations have made it clear that they will not withdraw their hatred. Indeed, at this point — as a result of their own highly effective ‘educational’ activities — perhaps they cannot.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Israeli-Arab conflict

It should only happen:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is considering resigning from his post if Israel continues its military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a top PA official said Thursday.

The official said Abbas, in a series of phone conversations with Arab, American and EU leaders and government officials, strongly condemned Israel’s attacks as a “severe blow” to the peace process. — Jerusalem Post

Israel, of course, is fighting a war with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations in the south. It is illustrative of the contempt in which Israel is held by its “peace partner” that in his view Israel is not permitted to defend herself against the continuous rocket attacks — dozens each day — as well as murderous sniping, etc.

“The president has said that he will resign if the military escalation and daily killings continue,” the official said. “Israel’s actions undermine the Palestinian Authority and drive more Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas and Islamic Jihad”…

Several Fatah officials on Thursday visited Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar in Gaza City to offer their condolences over the death of his son, Husam, in Tuesday’s IDF operation. The delegation was headed by top Fatah operative Ibrahim Abu al-Naja. The visit came hours after Abbas phoned Zahar to also offer his condolences. It was the first time the two had talked since Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last June.

There is nothing in the slightest surprising about this because although Hamas and Fatah disagree on the nature of ‘Palestine’ (should it be a ‘normal’ secular dictatorship or an Islamist state governed according to Shaaria), and on tactics (should they even pretend that Palestinians will be satisfied with a state that does not extend to the Mediterranean) — both factions agree that Israel must eventually be replaced by an Arab state.

Possibly this was what Abbas had in mind last summer when he angered many Fatah partisans by responding to the Hamas coup in Gaza with inaction, pretty much allowing Hamas to seize the Palestinian Authority’s arsenal of US-supplied weapons without having to face any organized resistance.

Meanwhile Fatah’s own war against Israel continues, with yet another shooting in West Bank, this time not fatal.

It’s incredible to me that all this can be going on and the US administration does not realize that its plan to suppress Hamas with Fatah, armed and trained by the US, cannot possibly work and will only result in more dead Israelis.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Fatah, Hamas

This guy gets it from all sides. He’s Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, specialist in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology from Phoenix Az., former naval officer, critic of CAIR and the Flying Imams, and a real-life moderate Muslim. He’s Chairman of the Board and founding member of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), which supports

…the expression of Islam which is in synergy with American democracy, the U.S. Constitution, and the clear separation of religion and state. AIFD was formed on the basis that the development of this ideology at the core of the American and global Muslim consciousness is the central mission necessary in order to ultimately defeat the threat of Islamism and jihadism.

Dr. Jasser interprets the “Flying Imams” lawsuit — you will recall that several Imams behaved in ways calculated to draw attention to themselves on a US Airways flight, got themselves kicked off, and then sued the airline, the Minneapolis Airports Commission and even the anonymous passengers who complained about them — as part of a campaign by the Islamist, Saudi-funded Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to establish itself as the voice of American Muslims in opposition to moderate groups like his own. He writes,

While the press may focus on the flying imams case, for American Muslims, the battle is broader. On one side are the imams represented by CAIR, the Islamic Society for North America, and the North American Imams Federation, all of which lean toward an Islamist view supporting greater interplay between religion and politics and the primacy of sectarian identity. On the other side are Muslims embracing Western secular democracy. The two are mutually exclusive in their interpretation of religious hierarchy, the interplay between theology and contemporary politics, individuality, and tolerance.

Responsibility for the victory of traditional, tolerant, and pluralistic interpretations of Islam lies with Muslims and Muslims alone. The intellectual marginalization of Islamists is the duty of Muslims who value the principles upon which the United States was built and now stands. This requires recognizing the primacy of the Constitution in political life, even if Muslims turn to the Qur’an in their spiritual life. Islamists, though, insist that regardless of temporal government, the Qur’an should be the central guiding document for legislation and interpretation. Islamists believe the Qur’an is the only source of law while non-Islamists believe it is just one source.

Perhaps this was the reason why the Prophet Muhammad and his companions sought to avoid creation of the same religious intermediary class that today CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Imams Federation presume to fill. — M. Z. Jasser, Exposing the ‘Flying Imams’

Dr. Jasser has been attacked from the American Right for saying that the correct interpretation of the Quran is one of tolerance and peace, and by Islamists for…lots of things. Here’s one Islamist’s response to Dr. Jasser:

Arizona Muslim Voice cartoon showing Dr. Jasser as a dog

I’m certain that Dr. Jasser’s views on the Arab-Israeli conflict aren’t anything like mine. But I think that our basic approach to concepts like truth, fairness, and above all the proper roles for religion and state are probably pretty close. This is a guy I could talk to.

Which made me wonder why, when Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism decided to reach out to American Muslims, he chose the Saudi-connected, highly controversial Islamic Society for North America (ISNA) as a partner, rather than Dr. Jasser’s AIFD.

Technorati Tags: Jasser, American Muslims, moderate Islam, CAIR, ISNA, Yoffie