FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Ali Abunimah is a dedicated anti-Israel activist. His website, Electronic Intifada, is widely read (US traffic rank around 106,000) and linked to (more than 2000 sites). Abunimah gives speeches, appears on panels and is often quoted on the radio. He claims to have met Barack Obama numerous times, and is responsible for this notable quote:

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat [Chicago, 2004], I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, “Keep up the good work!” — Ali Abunimah

By the “3D test” of Natan Sharansky — Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization — or by the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism, Abunimah’s website and many of his remarks are antisemitic. Here is what NGO Monitor wrote about Electronic Intifada:

…the organization known as Electronic Intifada is very active in BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] efforts, routinely abusing terms like “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.” Nigel Parry, a cofounder of EI, conflates victims of terror with terror leaders, and justifies Palestinian mortars fired into Israeli settlements by stating: “The dilemma in which the Palestinians find themselves is like that of a man who, falsely imprisoned for most of his life and demonized by society, finds himself in a dark room being raped by a highly decorated prison guard, when… he suddenly notices a rocket launcher lying within reach.” Parry also compared Israel’s targeted killing of Hamas head Ahmed Yassin to a “bus bombing.”

EI’s other founder, Ali Abunimah, who appears on many campuses to promote BDS, calls for a one-state solution, meaning the elimination of Israel. Abunimah also compares Israel to Nazi Germany, referring to the Israeli press as “Der Sturmer.”

All this activity is expensive. Where does the money come from? Surprisingly (or not), a great deal of it comes from a Western liberal democracy:

BERLIN – The Dutch government has been funding the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation [ICCO], a Dutch aid organization that finances the Electronic Intifada website that, NGO Monitor told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, is anti-Semitic and frequently compares Israeli policies with those of the Nazi regime…

That government funding amounted to €124 million in 2008. The European Commission also funds ICCO…

The ICCO website devotes a page to Electronic Intifada, praising its work as “an internationally recognized daily news source” that provides a counterweight to “positive reporting” about Israel. ICCO’s website notes its three-year funding pledge for Electronic Intifada… — Jerusalem Post

This is not the first time European states and the EU have been caught paying for the demonization of the Jewish state. In fact, they are apparently the largest source of funding for left-wing Israeli NGOs which are such big contributors to the the international hate-Israel movement.

The Dutch seem to prefer that their nation remain a liberal democracy, and have reacted quite strongly to attempts by radical Islamists to change that. It’s ironic that their government seems to support the same kind of aggression against someone else’s democracy.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Electronic Intifada, Netherlands, ICCO

A Dutch filmmaker, George Sluizer, recently claimed to have seen Ariel Sharon shoot two ‘toddlers’ in Lebanon during the Sabra/Shatila massacres. His story was published in the third-largest newspaper in the Netherlands, the Volksrant. The story is impossible for numerous reasons, not to mention the fact that Sharon would never have done such a thing.

When Hizballah was implicated in the murder of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, they immediately denied it and claimed that Israel had killed Hariri. There is no possible way that Israel could have benefited by Hariri’s death, and most objective observers believed (and still believe) that the plan was hatched in Syria.

In August 2009, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published a story by one Donald Bostrom which accused the IDF of deliberately killing young Palestinians in order to steal their organs. Despite the fact that it is impossible to harvest organs from dead bodies and despite the fact that Bostrom himself admitted that his story was entirely based on “what Palestinian families told [him],” the story has persisted and is widely believed today.

The UN’s Goldstone report claimed that one of the official objectives of Operation Cast Lead was to kill or injure as many Palestinian noncombatants as possible. Goldstone’s commission came to this conclusion despite Israel’s very visible efforts to protect civilians, and despite the fact that Israel’s interests were clearly harmed by the perception that it wanted to hurt civilians.

In November 2002, Prince Nayef of Saudi Arabia, said “It is impossible that 19 youths carried out the operation of September 11, or that bin Laden or Al Qaeda did that alone. … I think [the Zionists] are behind these events.” This, and many similar statements by other important Arabs and Muslims are quoted here.

Do you see where I’m going? There are many, many more examples, some trivial and some vicious.

It is possible to say absolutely anything about Israel, its leaders, its people and its army. It may be published in ‘legitimate’ media, and it will be believed in the worldwide community of Israel-haters. There are numerous internet sites and blogs that exist only to be repositories for this kind of story.

Most Americans think the slanders above are false. How could anyone believe them? And yet, in some places in the world almost everyone believes them. Here in the US it’s the less theatrical ones that tend to be believed, like the one that says that most of the casualties of Cast Lead were civilians (especially children), that ‘settlers’ run wild in Judea and Samaria uprooting olive trees and burning mosques, that there are starving people in Gaza, that “Israel is not interested in peace,” etc. But these are equally false.

Some of the US and Soviet propaganda of the Cold War era was equally vicious, at least if we ignore the echoes of ancient antisemitic blood libels in the attacks on Israel. What is unprecedented is the way these attacks are aimed in only one direction and emanate from so many sources: the Arab world, Iran, Europe, the UK, the international Left, etc.

It’s like schoolyard bullying, the way it’s focused on a particular target. A misfit nation, a Jewish nation in a place where Jews are despised, Israel is singled out in a historically unique way.  But it’s not simple sadism.  It has a purpose, which is to crush any sympathetic feelings toward Israel, both to stymie her political initiatives in peacetime and to justify actions to prevent her from making any gains or even defending herself in the event of war.

I don’t know what the solution is. It takes zero effort to make up a story like the one about Sharon, but it’s harder to prove that something didn’t happen. Anyway, the people that believe these tales are not persuaded by logic or evidence. Ultimately, the stories make it into the ‘conventional wisdom’, the things everyone accepts without question.

I’m sure the President of the US doesn’t believe that Sharon shoots toddlers or that Zionists perpetrated 9/11. But I wonder what stories he does believe?

Technorati Tags: Israel

Pirkei Avot (Chap. 5, Mishna 8 — h/t Lise):

Ten things were created at twilight on the eve of the first Sabbath:
the mouth of the earth (Numbers 16:32);
the mouth of the well (Numbers 21:16);
the mouth of the ass (Numbers 22:28);
the rainbow;
the manna;
Aaron’s staff;
the Shamir, writing;
the inscription on the tablets of the Ten Commandments;
and the tablets themselves.
Some also include the evil spirits, the grave of Moses, the ram of Abraham; and others add the original tongs, for tongs must be made with tongs.

So what is the Shamir? Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld explains,

The shamir was a type of worm which produced a highly corrosive substance. The Talmud writes that it was used to hew stones for the Temple’s construction or engrave inscriptions on the stones of the High Priest’s garments (Sotah 48b). It used a force which emanated directly from G-d, and was used in the construction of the Temple — the structure which enabled G-d’s Divine Presence to dwell in the physical world.

Wikipedia provides this additional speculation:

For storage, the Shamir was always wrapped in wool and stored in a container made of lead; any other vessel would burst and disintegrate under the Shamir’s gaze.

The Shamir was either lost or had lost its potency (along with the “dripping of the honeycomb”) by the time of the destruction of the First Temple at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.

Noting the conditions under which the Shamir was stored when not in use, controversial theorist Immanuel Velikovsky posited that the Shamir’s true nature was radioactive. Velikovsky hypothesized that the Shamir was a small sample of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope, possibly radium, though he fails to explain how this would cut material.

Worms are in the news today

Iran’s nuclear project is suffering serious technical problems, evidenced by the recent shutdown of hundreds or even thousands of its uranium-enrichment centrifuges. Analysts suggest that the Stuxnet computer worm is the cause. Stuxnet has turned out to be far more sophisticated and targeted than heretofore thought:

Technical analysis shows that Stuxnet contains two different digital warheads that are obviously unrelated. The warheads are considerably different in structure and run on different platforms…

It appears that warhead one and warhead two were deployed in combination as an all-out cyber strike against the Iranian nuclear program. None of the targets, which are detailed below, can be categorized as critical infrastructure; both are dedicated military targets.

Warhead one is running on Siemens S7-315 controllers. It contains the much-quoted DEADFOOT sequence, first discovered by us on Sep 16 2010, where control is temporarily taken away from the legitimate program. Code analysis shows that warhead one manipulates an array of up to 186 high-speed drives attached to up to six Profibus segments. In essence, the manipulation is cycling drive speeds (RPM) between low values and high values. For a gas centrifuge, this will sooner or later result in cracking the rotor, thereby destroying the centrifuge…

Warhead two is running on a Siemens S7-417 controller. It has no obvious relation to warhead one in structure, configuration and timing. The configuration that warhead two is looking for matches that of a steam turbine controller as it is used in power plants, such as the Bushehr nuclear power plant. — Ralph Langner, German software engineer (h/t,Yochanan Visser)

Technorati Tags: Stuxnet, Iranian nuclear program, cyberwar