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Hang them, don’t trade them

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

News item:

Among the proposals that the committee is expected to discuss, and which are to be brought to Sunday’s cabinet meeting, measures to make the conditions in Israeli jails for Hamas prisoners more difficult, including restricting visitation rights, phone and telephone [sic] access, and newspaper and television privileges, and perhaps depriving them of electricity at night. The rationale behind this would be to make the conditions facing the Hamas prisoners somehow similar to Schalit’s. — Jerusalem Post

Keep in mind that some of these prisoners — whose release is demanded by Hamas for Gilad Schalit — include the terrorist masterminds of the Park Hotel Passover Seder massacre (30 dead), the Cafe Moment bombing (11 dead), the Sbarro Pizza bombing (15 dead) and more. Many more.

Two of the prisoners are Abdallah Barghouti and Ahlam Tamimi, arrested for the Sbarro atrocity:

Several Hamas members were subsequently captured by the authorities, tried, convicted and imprisoned. The suicide bomber…was escorted to the restaurant by Ahlam Tamimi, a 20-year-old female university student and part-time journalist, who had disguised herself as a Jewish tourist for the occasion. Ahlam Tamimi was sentenced to 16 life terms. She later commented that “I am not sorry for what I did” and does not recognize Israel’s existence. The person who constructed the explosives was a man named Abdallah Barghouti. For his part in this and a string of other attacks, in which 66 civilians were killed, he was handed down 67 life sentences in 30 November 2004. — Wikipedia

They are allowed to watch television? To receive visitors and talk on the telephone?

Any other country in the world would have put them to death; US domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh was executed (and quite speedily, by US standards — only five years after his offense).

I cannot understand why Israel does not charge these mass murderers with crimes against humanity and hang them. Objectively, they are only different from Adolf Eichmann in degree. Their goal, as Hamas members, is no less genocidal.

Is it because someone believes that they are actually political prisoners, that there is something to the Hamas point of view? Is it because someone believes that, while they are murderers, one can understand their need to murder?

Get over it. If the question of justice is not sufficient motivation, then maybe the practical considerations of holding these creatures so that they can be released in return for kidnapped Israelis should be taken into account. Here’s what Tamimi said about her prospects:

“Hamas has principles in connection with discussion with Israel,” she said. “Hamas wants to reach accomplishments without giving up on Palestine. I’m not sorry for what I did. I will get out of prison and I refuse to recognize Israel’s existence. Discussions will only take place after Israel recognizes that this is Islamic land. Despite the fact that I’m sentenced to 16 life sentences I know that we will become free from Israeli occupation and then I will also be free from the prison” — YNet

Hang them.

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UN hands explosives to terrorists

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Surreal:

Five tons of unexploded Israeli bombs stored in the Gaza Strip under Hamas police guard have been stolen, UN officials said Tuesday.

UN spokesman Richard Miron said the explosives were being stored in Gaza until a UN team of disposal experts could disarm them, but they disappeared.

The bombs were dropped on Gaza during Israel’s offensive there last month, according to another UN official. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said three one-ton bombs and eight quarter-ton bombs were taken from the warehouse.

Miron said, “It’s clearly extremely dangerous and needs to be disposed of in a safe manner.” He said the material was under Hamas guard between Feb. 4 and 14 “in a warehouse in Gaza City under guard by Hamas police when it was stolen.” — Jerusalem Post [my emphasis]

Let’s see, you are the UN and you have five tons of unexploded bombs. You want to keep them safe so that they can be disarmed and disposed of safely.  This is a huge amount of military-grade explosive. I estimate that it could be used to make about 500 suicide vests if the bombs could be safely disassembled; or, as is they could be used as truck bombs, buried as antitank mines, or used as massive roadside IEDs.

You really don’t want them to fall into the wrong hands. So who do you get to guard them?

Hamas police.

I’m speechless again.

Some one-ton bombs, to give you an idea of size:

One-ton bombs

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Mental disorders of the academic Left

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Prof. Shlomo ZandOne of the favorite themes of Neo-Nazis is that today’s Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Jews, that is, descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea, but rather descended from the Khazars, Caucasian nomads that converted to Judaism around the 7th century (some of them converted to Christianity and Islam too, but never mind).

Now an Israeli scholar, Shlomo Zand (or Sand) claims that Sephardic Jews aren’t Jews either, but descended from various North African tribes.

Zand is not a neo-Nazi, and he even admits that his ‘findings’ don’t reflect on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. However, since he believes that “the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way”, and also that “the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants”, one can see that he is happy to provide ammunition to those who want an ideological foundation for their hoped-for destruction of Israel.

Zand, a historian who has heretofore written about 20th-century France, based his work on modern “studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews” (I can imagine). For a taste of the absurdity of his argument, here’s how the Jewish People was ‘invented’:

At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people “retrospectively,” out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Of course the literature of the Jewish People goes back to long before this period. So Zand is apparently saying that at some point an influx of foreign DNA made the Jewish People not the the Jewish People, and therefore — knowing that they had been adulterated and therefore lost their birthright — they conspired to pretend that they were.

Even if we grant his genealogical point (which I don’t), certainly the ‘peoplehood’ of the Jews rests in culture and spirit and not physical DNA!

It’s argued that there is genetic evidence that links both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews to the Middle East. I’m not qualified to evaluate it, of course, but most importantly, even if many Jews were descended from converts, who cares?

I could similarly argue that many Palestinian Arabs are descended from Egyptians that came with Muhammad Ali in the early part of the 19th Century, or Syrians who migrated to Palestine when the end of Ottoman rule and Jewish development improved the regional economy. I could talk about how nobody ever heard of the ‘Palestinian people’ until 1967. But this, too, would be irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel is not dependent on the presence of converts in the genealogy of the Jews. It is not dependent on Jewish provenance in biblical times, just as it is not justified by the Holocaust.

The Early Zionists purchased land legally, often paying exorbitant prices for poor land which they then improved by draining swamps and so forth. The yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) built all the institutions that would become the state.

The Jewish state received international sanction in 1947 and was kept through a series of defensive wars, which in fact are still ongoing. Israel is no less ‘legitimate’ than Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia which were created at about the same time — and possibly more so, due to the UN Partition Resolution, and the fact that Israel is a democracy.

Although religious Jews (and many Christians) believe that the Jews were given the Land as described in the Torah, there is a solid secular foundation for the state as well.

Zand’s work appears to be another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel, similar to the completely insane thesis that the IDF’s failure to rape Arab women is a racist phenomenon.

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Brainwashing!

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Brainwashing!

Purim is over, and April Fool’s day has not yet arrived. So how do we explain this?

In a move to protest the IDF’s plan to send thousands of officers into the country’s schools on Wednesday, New Profile – a movement opposed to what they see as “brainwashing” by the army – plans to set up a demonstration in which members dressed as IDF officers will wash a large model of a human brain.

The organizers of the planned protest hope to draw attention to the IDF’s nationwide campaign for students and voice their opposition to the “militarization of Israeli society.”

“I think the fact that military officers have free access to schools exploits the status of soldiers and the status of schools,” said Lotahn Raz, a New Profile activist and organizer of Wednesday’s demonstration, which he called a “street performance.”

If this isn’t enough, Raz makes his satirical intent clear (to me, anyway):

“The army is a hierarchical organization,” Raz continued. “It doesn’t have respect for life, and they have no regard for the equality of women. It encourages following orders instead of individual thinking.” — Jerusalem Post

Although I’m sure it’s a put-on, let me point out a few obvious things just in case:

  • Lotahn, you live in Tel Aviv, Israel, The Middle East, and not Berkeley, California.
  • If you have a problem with the “militarization of Israeli society”, you will have to take it up with the Arabs, who are responsible for this.
  • It’s not true that the army has no respect for life, in general. Just the lives of the guys trying to kill you.
  • Yes, it’s hierarchical and they have to follow orders. Duh.

Update [26 Mar 2008 1858 PDT]: It’s not a joke! They actually held their demonstration. Here’s a picture of their ‘brain’:

New Profile's brain

I am struck dumb by the stupidity and self-delusion of these people.

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Academic: IDF dehumanizes Palestinians by not raping them

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

What I am about to discuss is simply unbelievable. So maybe it’s made up, intended as a satire on leftist academics. You decide.

(IsraelNN.com) A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers’ committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.

The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.”

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers’ eyes…

Nitzan’s paper did, however, give much space to the explanation that the Israeli soldiers refrained from rape out of demographic considerations. She explained at length how fearful the Jewish population is of the growing Arab population, and how in cases of wartime rape, the baby is generally assumed to be of the mother’s nationality.

Let me try to get my mind around this idea.

Arab propaganda for the past hundred years or so has accused Jews of raping Arab women, because of the inflammatory nature of such accusations. But despite the fact that rape in war, even mass rape as a military tactic, has characterized many recent conflicts throughout the world, there are almost zero known cases of IDF soldiers raping Palestinian women.

A normal person would think that this is a good thing which speaks well of our army. Explanations that can be offered might include Jewish religious traditions, which persist even in secular Jews, the IDF’s concept of tohar haneshek [purity of arms], etc.

But a normal person cannot understand the mind of a person so damaged by self-hatred, so infused with the viewpoint of her enemies, that she would conclude that the reason her country’s soldiers are not guilty of rape is…that they are racists!

And it doesn’t matter if IDF soldiers rape or not, because “the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”

So we might as well be rapists, because the goal of raping and not-raping is the same!

Even Dr. Chomsky didn’t think of this.

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