Condemning Israel in comfort

While the Christ at the Checkpoint delegates bivouacked in a comfortable Bethlehem hotel with a view to sedately condemning Israel for its ‘sin’ of ‘occupation and to blame the Jewish state for worldwide Islamic terror, almost a million people in southern Israel were sheltering from a hail of missiles that fell across the northern Negev and parts of the coastal plain.

It was no coincidence that the shelling began at the festival of Purim, the season when Jews celebrate their deliverance from genocide some 2,500 years ago.

When Israel fought back, the Egyptian parliament condemned Israel for not allowing its citizens to die like good Jews should and denouned the strikes on Gaza as ‘war crimes’. The Egyptian parliament voted unanimously to expel the Israeli ambassador and approved a motion stating: ‘Egypt will never be the friend, partner or ally of the Zionist entity which we consider as the first enemy of Egypt and the Arab nation.’

The organizers of the Christ at the Checkpoint conference blamed the plight of Palestinian Christians on the ‘occupation’ and at the opening session Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority addressed the conference, assuring delegates that the PA supports Christians.

Hardly had the vacated seats grown cold after the conference than Fayyad's government informed Naim Khoury, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Bethlehem, that the church lacked the authority to function as a religious institution.

The decision will have far-reaching implications because the PA will not recognise any of the fellowship’s legal documents, including certificates of births, marriages and deaths. Without legally recognised documents, marriages at the church will be null and void, and children of the congregation will be considered illegitimate.

Pastor Steven Khoury, the son of First Baptist's senior pastor, Naim Khoury, reported that a representative of the Palestinian authority showed up at his father’s church in Bethlehem and informed him of the clamp-down.

Although the officials did not specify why they are targeting the church, Steven believes it is because his family supports Israel and believes jews and Arabs in the region can co-exist in peace.

I’ll bet this example of Christian suffering in ‘Palestine’ isn’t posted on the blogs or websites of the CATC organizers. I am still trembling with anger at the hypocrisy, deception and dissimulation stamped all over Christ at the Checkpoint.

In 2009, Steven Khoury was interviewed by CBN about the true reason for the suffering of Bethlehem's Christians. The video can be viewed here.

For full coverage of CATC visit the Rosh Pina Project.

Christmas is cancelled in Gaza

While crowds of anti-Zionists protested at Israel's 'criminal siege of Gaza' outside the Israeli embassy in London yesterday, Gaza's few remaining Christians concluded a very sombre Christmas.

In a report from Gaza City, The Guardian's Pheobe Greenwood said she had been told that by local Christians that after seizing control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas effectively cancelled Christmas, and that any open celebration of the holiday is met with threats of arrest or worse.

The manager of Gaza City's Bible bookshop was brutally murdered soon after Hamas took power.

'People here do not celebrate Christmas anymore because they are nervous,' Imad Jelda, an Orthodox Christian, told Greenwood. Fewer than 1,400 Christians now live among Gaza's 1.5 million Muslims.

Two brothers from another Christian family explained that most of their family had been forced to flee Gaza under threat of Muslim violence.

One of the brothers told Greenwood, 'This is not a Christian environment. There are no good universities [for Christians], there is no opportunity to work, no apartments to rent and so no way we can get married. We have no future here.'

Meanwhile, Israel's enemies continue to blame Israel for the dwindling number of Christians in the Holy Land.

Expect Israel's antagonists to gloss over and dismiss The Guardian's rare truthful report regarding the true reasons behind the disappearance of Christian communities in the region.

As the Crow lies

On Radio 4’s Any Questions last night, the question of whether David Cameron should press for no-fly zones in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen to protect their citizens came up. Bob Crow (pictured), the General Secretary of the Rail and Maritime Union, thought Gaza should be a no-fly zone for Israel. Crow was, of course, likening Israel to Libya and when his egregious comparison was challenged on Any Answers today, Jonathan Dimbleby defended Crow by claiming that over a thousand civilians were killed by Israel during Operation Cast Lead.

The caller was a little flustered by Dimbleby’s figures, obviously unaware (like Dimbleby, presumably) that on 1 November 2010, the interior minister of Hamas, Fathi Hamad, had confirmed Israel’s claim that most of the casualties in its assault on Gaza were combatants rather than civilians.

In an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat, Hamad stated: “It has been said that the [Palestinian] people were harmed by the war, but is Hamas not part of the people? It is a fact that on the first day of the war Israel struck police headquarters and killed 250 members of Hamas and the various factions, in addition to the 200-300 operatives from the [Izz al-Din] al-Qassam Brigades. In addition, 150 security personnel [members of the internal security forces] were killed, and the rest were from the people [i.e., civilians].”

According to Israel, during Operation Cast Lead, 1,166 Palestinians were killed. Six hundred and nine were terrorist operatives who belonged to Hamas’ military wing and its security forces, while 100 more were operatives from other terrorist organizations involved in the fighting. The overall number of terrorist operatives killed in Gaza was 709 (about 60% of the total number of deaths). Of those 709 terrorists, 232 belonged to Hamas’ internal security forces. Of the 457 non-combatant casualties, most of them were harmed by mistake.

The data provided by Fathi Hamad was in accordance with Israel’s very precise figures.

Did you see those figures on BBC News or on the BBC website? Me neither.

The war on Israel's civilians

While the eyes of the world are fixed on Libya and other parts of the Arab world (and rightfully so), once again aggression against Israeli civilians is overlooked.

According to the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), In the last few days Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip have sharply escalated rocket and mortar attacks into Israel with fifty mortar shells being fired at Israel on Saturday alone. This has led to increased violence over the Gaza-Israel border. An Israeli shell fired at the source of a Palestinian rocket launch on Tuesday 22 March inadvertently killed four Palestinian civilians, whilst four Palestinian militants were reported killed in a separate strike.

Whilst Hamas is not believed to be seeking a full-scale escalation, its intentions remain unclear. The organisation faces grassroots pressure for the reunification of Palestinian factions, having rejected President Mahmoud Abbas's call for new elections in September.

Israel's policy is balanced between wanting to avoid escalation, whilst at the same time maintaining the deterrence which has kept the border relatively quiet and protected Israeli civilians since the end of Operation Cast Lead in January 2009.
For a full report, go to the BICOM web site.

Just a few minutes ago, I received the following message from a colleague in Israel:

"...scuds have been shot on Beersheva [pictured]and Ashdod, all the schools and kindergartens in Beersheva are closed today. A family in Gaza, including two children, was killed by an erring missile, which hit their house instead of the scud launching pad in a nearby grove. Things seem to be escalating.

"A newspaper article today reads "Israeli communities near the border are receiving a daily dose of mortars and rockets, and the Israel Air Force has been attacking Gaza. What began as a local escalation is steadily transforming into a broader conflict that the sides will apparently have difficulty stopping, though it's doubtful either side has an interest in reaching that point."

"Please pray for a restoration of peace in our area, and for the protection of innocents on both sides of the green line."

Israel Navy intercepts weapons ship bound for Gaza

The following news come from BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. It highlights the need for Israel's continued blockade on Gaza.

Yesterday morning the Israeli Navy found several anti-ship missiles on board the cargo ship Victoria that was intercepted off the coast of Gaza. The ship was seized by an Israeli navy commando unit who boarded the Gaza bound vessel after receiving permission from the ship's captain. The commandos checked the cargo's certificates which originated from the Syrian port of Latakia. The ship departed from Syria, via Turkey, and was heading to the port of Alexandria in Egypt. The weapons from there were then to be unloaded and smuggled into Gaza. Following the interception, The IDF emphasised that neither Turkey nor Egypt were involved in the smuggling process.

Israel Navy Deputy Commander Rani Ben-Yehuda confirmed that the Navy found two Chinese made C-704 missiles that have a range of 35 kilometres onboard the ship. They also found instruction manuals in Farsi, which added evidence to the assumption that the missiles came from Iran. The army estimates that the ammunition on board the ship could reach 50 tons worth of weapons.

The cargo ship docked early this morning in the Israeli port of Ashdod and the IDF searched all the ship's contents which will be displayed to the media later today.

Should the source of these weapons prove to be Iran, it will show how Tehran is using political unrest in the Middle East to further increase its influence and back extremists in the region.

In related news, Egyptian security officials seized five trucks carrying weapons that came from Sudan and were heading to Gaza. The vehicles were intercepted on Egyptian territory near the border with Sudan. The trucks were carrying mortars, rocket propelled grenades, rifles and explosives.

For more details on the story go to the BICOM Briefing.

If pigs become kosher

Hamas’s interior minister Fathi Hammad (above) has admitted that Israel was right about the casualties in its assault on Gaza two years ago, “Operation Cast Lead”.

Hamas has maintained that the vast majority of casualties were civilians but in interview with the London-based Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, Hammad admitted that the 250policemen Israel killed on the first day of the Gaza conflict were combatants, just as Israel had claimed. Human rights organizations have repeatedly dismissed Israel’s claim that the policemen functioned as an auxiliary Hamas army unit. Hamas’s interior minister now, admits: “On the first day of the war, Israel targeted police stations and 250 martyrs who were part of Hamas and the various factions fell.”

“Factions” is a standard Palestinian euphemism for their armed militias.

Fathi Hammad also revealed, “about 200 to 300 were killed from the Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s main fighting force), as well as 150 security personnel.”

Now do the sums: 300 Qassam Brigade members + 150 “security personnel” + 250 policemen = 700; a figure as near-as-makes-no-difference to Israel’s estimate of 709.
So why has Hamas lied about its casualties for almost two years? Because, for terror organisations, lying is standard practice. After all, if someone wants to kill you, it’s not outside the bounds of possibility that they’d lie about you.

Speaking at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federation of North America’s in New Orleans on Monday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report on the conduct of the conflict “a modern day blood libel.” The report accused Israel of targeting Palestinian civilians and also accepted at face value the inflated Palestinian casualty figures. The international community, said Prime Minister Netanyahu, owes Israel an apology for accepting without question Hamas' propaganda about the Gaza conflict and using it to accuse the Jewish state of war crimes.

Will Israel get the apology it deserves? I suspect pigs will become kosher first.

I criticise Israel, therefore I am not an anti-Semite

English MP Jeremy Corbyn has objected to an opinion piece by Leon de Winter in The Wall Street Journal. De Winter’s brief article, Anti-Semitism Is Acceptable Again, asked why people and organizations that present themselves as “progressive” team up with reactionary Muslims. The Free Gaza group, said de Winter, is just such a Leftist-Islamist alliance. Israel withdrew from Gaza five years ago, therefore Gaza is already free but that isn't enough for Hamas; it wants a Jew-free Israel too. The Gaza flotilla, he said, was “the perfect execution of a masterful piece of Islamist theatre”. It is acceptable once more to be an anti-Semite.

Corbyn, a political progressive who is not adverse to “teaming up” with radical Muslims, responded by saying that although “race hatred and discrimination of any description is wrong” de Winter should not “conflate criticisms of Israel with hatred of the Jewish people; they are NOT the same.”

I’m not saying Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite but the way Corbyn and other critics of Israel respond to the charge that some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic almost amounts to saying that being a critic of Israel is proof positive you are not an anti-Semite. Is there, one wonders, any form of condemnation of Israel that Corbyn and other progressives would acknowledge as clearly anti-semitic? For example, do false allegations of war crimes, the use of the term "apartheid" to describe the state of Israel and “Nazis” to describe Israel’s leaders and the denial of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination not qualify as anti-Semitism.

A few weeks ago, in an unprovoked attack, North Korea sunk a South Korean ship killing 47 people. Where was the world's outrage? In Pakistan, hundreds die in terrorist attacks every week and the Pakistani military kill hundreds of insurgents every month. Where are the expression of indignation from the rest of the world? The Turks killed hundreds of Kurds every year but where was the anger of the progressives? These, and many more conflicts around the world, cause far more deaths and injury than the justified Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara last week. Yet, according to world opinion, Israel is a pariah state, the world’s leading terrorist organisation and the scum of the earth.

Jeremy Corbyn has shared a platforms with Abou JahJah, a Hezbollah supporter and Holocaust denier who founded the Arab European League, which posted racist cartoons aimed at Jews, including a particularly crude and obnoxious scribble of Ann Frank in bed with Adolph Hitler. Corbyn also spoke alongside Hezbollah MP, Hussein el Haj Hassan who objected to Lebanese children being taught about the diary of Ann Frank.

If Jeremy Corbyn really does believe that “race hatred and discrimination of any description is wrong” why did he join these Islamic radicals to protest against Israel? Perhaps in Corbyn’s book even Holocaust denial and crude cartoons that target Jews don’t yet qualify as race hatred.

A Letter to Gaza

I saw this remarkable correspondence between a resident of Gaza and Nonie Darwish, author of They Call Me an Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror on FrontPage.

I recently received an email accusing me of hating Arabs and my father. This email is typical of Arab media accusations of my views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since most Arabs have no chance to read my book, Now They Call Me Infidel, Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror, which explains in detail my position, I will answer the email in this article. First, below is the translation of the Arabic language email which I received without a signature:

Salam to you,

With all of our pride in your father we pray that Allah will bless him with entering paradise, which is the wish of every person after this short prideful meaningless life. I want to ask you, has your father become your enemy after his death? We in the city of Gaza take pride in your father and I live on a street by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez which also has a school by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez. We never forgot his sacrifice, so how could you become an enemy to the tortured Palestinian people who are still suffering at the hands of Arab Zionists? I ask Allah to give you health and strength.

Awaiting your response and thank you in advance.

Here is my response:

Dear Gaza resident,

Your email touched me as sincere even though your accusations are wrong. I am not the enemy of Arabs and I assure you that I love my original culture and people. What makes me different is that I do not only love Arabs, but I also love the Jewish people. I am speaking my conscience. I respect their right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. I understand how that could be puzzling and unbelievable to many Arabs, to love both Jews and Arabs.

We Arabs have suffered from an unnatural and consistent indoctrination into Islamic supremacy and Jew hatred for over 1400 years. Thus it has become unfathomable to the Arab mind to comprehend loving both Arabs and Jews and wishing both well. Our culture has deprived us for many centuries from loving all of humanity as equals, through intense religious indoctrination resulting in self-imposed isolation and non-integration with other cultures. This isolation and jihad against non-Muslims has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Muslims everywhere are trying desperately to save face, reform Islam’s image and deny the undeniable. But they also want to have their cake and eat it too. While they are telling the world Islam is a religion of peace, they still want to continue with the jihad against non-Muslim countries.

While one leader says, let’s kill all the Jews and take over Rome, another says to Western media that Islam is a religion of peace and we are deeply offended by the anti-Islam rhetoric. To play this sick game, Muslim culture must live a dysfunctional double life where everyone is deceived, including Muslims.

Thus to do the kind of jihad that Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Assad, Nasser, Saudi jihadists etc, do and which is dictated by Sharia, Muslims find it hard to be honest. Thus, Muslims must claim victimhood in order to justify jihad. The entire Muslim world is using your people, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, to justify their jihad against not only Israel, but also all non-Muslim countries. That includes Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Your people in Gaza should have realized this game a long time ago, but you refuse to see and be open about who is your true oppressor. Arab and Muslim media is using and abusing your people in order to justify their Islamic jihad around the world. That is why they never want to resolve your problem and want you to suffer and live in constant terror against Israel.

Under Islamic law, non-Muslim countries are never equal to Muslim countries and actually their sovereignty as a non-Muslim nation must always be challenged by Islamic jihad. Islamic law codified jihad as a permanent war with non-Muslims to establish the religion. Muslims thus have to use Taquiyya, lies, to legitimize their aggression on Israel and the West. That is why Muslim countries can never abandon the constant hate propaganda, lies and misinformation about Israel and the West. If that ends, their jihad ends. The UN must be constantly bombarded by complaints from Arab countries against Israel. The Arab street must be constantly bombarded with ridiculous accusations and Zionist conspiracies. Lately on Syrian TV a Syrian intellectual accused Israel of stealing human organs in Haiti while they were helping them after the earthquake. This is not something new; it started in the 7th century, when the prophet Mohammed accused the Jews of treason to justify killing and expelling them and taking over their wealth. To explain this away, he stated that Jews are worthy of this treatment since they are the descendants of apes pigs and enemies of Allah. Muslims still use the same dynamic and the world still falls for it every time.

The Arab mind was trained to never venture outside of the box of Islamic superiority, and that prevented us from treating the rest of humanity as equals. It is alien to Muslim preachers today to preach love to all of humanity and wishing non-Muslims the same human rights as Muslims. I have never heard that from a Muslim preacher. Only after 9/11 and in the West today, do we see some Muslim preachers trying to preach some Western values and engage in interfaith dialogue, in order to rehabilitate the image of Islam in the West and attract more converts.

I often get mail from secular Muslims who ask me: I can understand that you chose to leave Islam, but how can you support the Jews? I get mail like this because, in the Muslim mindset, loving, accepting and feeling good about Jews or Christians and thinking of them as equals, is unthinkable and an act of treason to Islam itself and even worse. It is as though the whole religion of Islam is dedicated to hating and killing Jews.

After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam’s dilemma today.

What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don’t submit to Islam?

The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; you will be next.

To my email writer: in your letter to me, I have noticed that your outlook on life is pessimistic describing it as short and meaningless pride. Your views are prevalent in Muslim culture and I have heard it thousands of times when I lived in the Middle East. I remember even when we laughed and giggled as young girls, we were immediately silenced as being improper and that Allah somehow does not like us to laughing for no reason or in public. Even a heartfelt laugh to a Muslim was not going to get you friends, but critics. Your message to me and to Muslims is that life on earth will not get us happiness and the only escape from such misery is the everlasting happiness in the pleasures of Allah’s paradise after dying in jihad. But why take the Jews with us? They want to live and enjoy life and to make the earth, right here, a better place.

Our rejection of life is not a coincidence: since jihad does not value life, then it must value death. The first casualty of the jihad principle is peace and that is why I never learned peace as a value in Gaza. I have never heard a peaceful song in Arabic. To think of peace with the Jews is equal to treason to Islam. Rejection of peace has detrimental consequences to the healthy functioning of the Arab personality, family, society and the whole region. It is not a coincidence that Saudis reject under the law any celebration of Valentine’s Day, reject celebrating love between a man and a woman, teaching peace and compassion to their children towards the others. Just look at our Islamic law books and see the most cruel and unusual punishments ever created in any culture on earth. Only a culture that demands war and terror can promote such cruelty.

As to your question about hating my father, again I want to assure you that I adore and respect my father more than all of the people of Gaza. Actually I love him and wish him heaven not because he killed Jews, but because he was a good human being who was respected by many including the Israeli soldiers who killed him. He was known even to Israel as a cut above his peers and had integrity and honor. My father was the victim of the blood-thirsty culture of death all around him. He is one of the many thousands and even millions of victims of the jihad ideology, practiced over the last 1400 years.

Dear Gaza resident, yes, I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the ‘misery’ of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture which used and abused you and which you allowed. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel.

Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people. We as Muslims never respected other religions holy cites and always claimed them to Islam; even Spain and India are being claimed as Muslim land. It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. This is how Islam has treated the Jews. It is time for Muslims to seek redemption and forgiveness and to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people.

Nonie Darwish

Where’s the beef?

Israel has been harshly criticized by the international community for constructing a security fence to keep out suicide bombers. Since the wall was constructed attacks on Israeli citizens and subsequent deaths have declined. I find it interesting that no one is beefing about the wall the Egyptians are building to keep out their fellow Muslims.

Egypt Building Iron Wall on Gaza Border to Stop Smuggling

Egypt has begun the construction of a massive iron wall along its border with the Gaza Strip, in a bid to shut down smuggling tunnels into the territory. The wall will be nine to 10 kilometers long, and will go 20 to 30 meters into the ground, Egyptian sources said. It will be impossible to cut or melt.

The new plan is the latest move by Egypt to step up its counter-smuggling efforts. Although some progress had been made, the smuggling market in Gaza still flourishes. Egyptian forces demolish tunnels or fill them with gas almost every week, often with people still inside them, and Palestinian casualties in the tunnels have been steadily rising.

Read the full article by Avi Issacharoff.