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.

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.

What a difference a day made

US President Barak Obama has withdrwan his support for plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero (see The House Barak wants to build)after families who lost loved ones on 9/11 labelled him “insensitive and uncaring”.

On Friday, he said: “As a citizen and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right ... to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in Lower Manhattan.”

On Saturday the President modified his comments: “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque [at Ground Zero]. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to [America’s] founding … my intention was simply to let people know what I thought. Which was that in this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion.”

Hamas co-founder leader its chief on the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud al-Zahar, speaking on Sunday on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on WABC-AM in the US, said that Muslims “have to build everywhere so that followers can pray, just like Christians and Jews build their places of worship.”

Fair enough. But if Moslems must have freedom to build places of worship wherever they choose in the West, regardless of whether the places they choose to erect their mosques offends the sensitivities of bereft families, why don't Christians and Jews have the same freedoms accorded them in Islamic lands?

I hate to say this but...

... I told you so.

When Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of its Jewish population five years ago, I said it was a mistake. Some of my colleagues and friends disagreed with me and thought the gesture would help the peace process.

But instead of congratulating Israel on its herculean effort for peace, commentators like the Independent's Robert Fisk were asking when Israel was going to give up the West Bank ... and Jerusalem. Within days, missiles from Gaza were raining down on the southern towns of Israel such as Sderot, turning that little town into the most bombed area in the world.

Now, even the LA Times agrees that the Gaza pullout was a mistake.

Israel Today carries the following article today:

Even the most liberal of commentators on the Middle East peace process are waking up to the fact that it was a mistake for Israel to unilaterally uproot the 10,000 Jews living in the Gaza Strip in 2005.

In a piece carried in the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, columnist Edmund Sanders opined that the withdrawal implemented by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon under heavy American pressure was an error in judgment by all parties involved.

Sanders noted that while "disengagement enjoyed broad support at the time" both in Israel and abroad, "almost no one calls it a success today."

Among the negative results of the withdrawal, Sanders recognizes that it "helped put Hamas in power... Security for Israelis didn't improve - and even worsened... It contributed to increased isolation for Israel internationally... It raised doubts as to whether the Palestinians are actually ready for statehood... [and] it made Israelis more cynical about the chances for future land-for-peace deals."

Just before the so-called "disengagement," Sharon and the Bush Administration promised Israelis that wholly surrendering Gaza to the Palestinians would create an atmosphere conducive to final state peace negotiations and give Israel a more free hand to defend itself, which in turn would create a deterrent against continued Palestinian attacks from Gaza.

In reality, Hamas painted the withdrawal as an Israeli retreat created by its "resistance" and road that image to an impressive electoral victory and eventual military take-over of Gaza. Hamas then proceeded to fire thousands of rockets into southern Israel over a six-month period in 2008 that precipitated an Israeli invasion of the coastal strip. Rather than keep its word that Israel would have a more free hand in dealing with Gaza-based terror after the withdrawal, the international community blamed Israel for starting the "Gaza war" and accused the Jewish state of war crimes.

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.

Israel saves life of top Hamas official's daughter

Matzav.com reports that Israel at the weekend saved the life of the three-year-old daughter of a top Gaza-based Hamas leader, though the act of kindness was completely ignored by the terrorist group and regional Arab media.

The girl, daughter of Hamas Interior Minister Elham Fathi Hammad, was the victim of a unsuccessful heart operation in Gaza. She was in critical condition when Jordan's King Abdullah II requested that Israel allow her immediate transport to Amman for emergency surgery.

Israel agreed to the transfer, but the girl was in no condition to travel such a distance, so was first rushed to Barzilai Hospital in the nearby Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, where doctors worked for hours to repair the damage of her earlier surgery and stabilize her.

A Jordanian helicopter was later escorted through Israeli airspace to pick up the girl and move her to Amman.

Jordanian media later reported on the incident, but completely cut out the portion where the girl's life was saved by Israeli doctors or that Israel has not hesitated to allow the unfettered transport through its territory of a family member of one of its most dedicated enemies.

Hammad later issued a public statement thanking Jordan and King Abdullah. He did not mention Israel at all.