A TERRIBLE BARGAIN

A TERRIBLE BARGAIN

Today's Australian nails it on the matter of "those people who are preoccupied with false arguments about moral equivalence in the long-running Middle East conflict." As much as some folks might claim otherwise, there is no moral equivalence between the barbarism of Hizbullah, Hamas and their Syrian and Iranian benefectors.

The declaration of a public holiday to honour the return of Samir Kuntar who murdered an Israeli man in front of his four-year-old daughter, then killed the little girl by smashing her skull with his rifle butt, is a blight on all of humanity.

But there are many bargains made in this part of the Middle East and those bargains made in the past by those in the public arena that gave succor to the thugs will come back to haunt many of the players in this conflict.

HIZBULLAH'S GREAT ACHIEVEMENT

"If Nasrallah's great achievement was to conceal the fate of our sons, then I pity him and the Lebanese people. If Hizbullah's great achievement is the release of Kuntar, who is nothing but a repulsive murderer, then I pity them."

Shlomo Goldwasser - father of murdered Israeli hostage Ehud Goldwasser.

LEBANON'S DAY OF SHAME

"Lebanon declared a national holiday to mark the return of its prisoners, who will be greeted by Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and President Michel Suleiman in Beirut." - Grief and joy as bodies, men returned home

How tragic and shameful for the Lebanese people that their government, strangled by the barbaric and psycopathic thugs of Hizbullah, could descend to such depraved celebrations for the return to their bosoms of mass-murderers like Kuntar.

This is a black day for the world and for those who made apologies and excuses for Hizbullah in the public domain and in particular those in the media who, in some cases, even went to great lengths to make them seem heroic.

The world now knows the nature of the beast with which the Jewish people have to contend on a daily basis.

PHOTOGRAPH: The pride of Lebanon (from Israellycool)

ONE MAN'S HERO IS ANOTHER'S DIRTBAG ...

For those who a sadistic bent who are celebrating the pending release of the terrorist Samir Kuntar, here is the previously unreleased file on this barbarian - The Kuntar File, Exposed - Yediot Aharonot - by Nir Gontarz.

LETTERS OF THE WEEK

From today's Melbourne Age:

Despite false Arab claims of its being a land-grab, Israel has long acknowledged that the fence is a security barrier rather than a political barrier, which, unlike the lives taken by Arab violence, is reversible. While making every reasonable effort to re-route the fence in order to accommodate Palestinian needs, Israel cannot be expected, in the absence of peace, to dismantle a barrier that has saved the lives of so many of its citizens.

The "impenetrable obstacle" to resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the fence, but the intractable Arab hatred of Israel that made its erection necessary. That hatred remains the real barrier to lasting peace and reconciliation between Israeli and Arab.

Merv Morris, East St Kilda

THE US has built an enormous wall to separate itself from Mexico. There are no security issues here, none of its citizens are in danger of being blown up by Mexican bombers, no one in Mexico is firing a daily dose of rockets across the border hoping to kill schoolchildren. It is purely an economic thing, to protect jobs.

No one is claiming that the US stole New Mexico, California, Arizona, Colorado, Florida or Texas from Mexico after winning a war that it waged against Mexico. But when Israel builds a wall to protect its citizens from actually being killed, the media and much of the world are enraged. I wonder why.

Peter Cohen, Bentleigh

These letters won't reverse some of the nonsense that is published from time to time in this newspaper about Israel's security barrier that has helped save hundreds if not thousands of lives - most of them Jewish (which perhaps explains why there is very little done to explain the other side in certain parts of the media).

NOT A SINGLE WORD!

Andrea Levin writes a powerful piece in the Jerusalem Post about the selectivity of the New York Times in its presentation of the news on the Israel/Palestine conflict -The silence of 'The Times'

Defamation of Israel and efforts to call the defamers to account have long been news the Times has deemed not fit to print. Its silence on recent developments concerning the al-Dura affair is just the latest iteration of a decades-long Times lie.

Levin echoes many of the complaints previously made in this blog about some of our local news outlets. There has of course, been a substantial improvement since the departure of Ed O'Loughlin from the Fairfax organisation but coverage of the "Pallywood" phenomenon remains thin on the ground in this country.

Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated by the attitude of some of our own Jewish academics - one recently was quoted as having objected to the use of the term "Pallywood" because it might offend Palestinian sensibilities.

I suppose that the time will come soon when we are forced to stop teaching and studying the Holocaust because it might offend some Germans.

EXCUSES

Honest Reporting's latest offering Humanizing the Murderer is a look at how the mainstream media has sought "motives" to explain last week's brutal bulldozer attack by a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. It covers the usual pandering to the cause of the Palestinians in which the Jews must be blamed for every imperfection on the other side.

I'm not always in full agreement with Caroline Glick but HR nails it with this quote from her Jerusalem Post article - The media and enduring narrative when she noted that the bulldozer attack was only the second Palestinian attack on Israelis to be preserved on film. The first was the bloody lynching of two IDF reservists in the early days of the Second Intifada in 2000. Glick pointed out that both cases drew apologies from the networks that showed them:

In this case, as in the case of the lynching eight years ago, the reason the BBC apologized is not because the film's images were too gruesome, but because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war against Israel. To maintain the narratives, "the right editorial balance between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience," is one that engenders the belief that Israel is either morally indistinguishable from the Palestinians, or that Israel is morally inferior to the Palestinians.

A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL

Bradley Burston writes a column in Haaretz entitled a Special Place in Hell. Today, he asks about Palestinian terrorism and whether it is a natural act.

What, exactly, is a decent person supposed to think?

On a quiet and clear morning in Jerusalem, a woman is driving toward the heart of the city, her infant with her in the car. There is nothing to fear.

It is not a military area, it is not a sector of occupation, it is not a settlement - Jews have lived and worked here for more than a century. Jewish doctors and nurses were treating Arab infants, women, the elderly and the infirm here as early as 1902, when Shaare Tzedek Hospital opened across the street.

There is nothing to fear.

Except for the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews.

I think the question must also be asked of all those apologists for terrorism in the media and elsewhere. What, exactly, is a decent person supposed to think about this or about the deeds of Sami Kuntar the psychotic butcher of innocent civilians who is about to be exchanged for the corpses of Israeli soldiers and some information from Hizbullah about the whereabouts of others taken captive? It's a rhetorical question so the Pilgers, the Fisks and the Loewensteins of this world needn't bother deigning to answer.

REPORTING LIES IS CRIMINAL

Jewish Jew basher Antony Loewenstein has been put in his place on his own blog by a correspondent Sol Salbe over his parroting of a report from the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information which recently condemned "the detention of Palestinian Journalist Mohammad Omer Mughir by Israeli Occupation Forces. Muhammad was detained, assaulted and interrogated on June 27th upon his return to Gaza after receiving the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism." - Reporting is a crime

Salbe points out that:

Does not it stuck you odd that Omer would have been attacked by the Israeli security forces upon his return to Gaza? There are no Israeli forces in Gaza and any incursion would have been such a mnajor violation of the ceasefire that even the Australian media would have reported it.

Omer was set upon at the Aleenby Bridge while crossing the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank from Jordan. With the Rafah crossing closed someone with a permit need to travel via the West Bank into Israel and from there in to Gaza. If bloggers would like to be treated as journalists then fact-checking of obviously impossible assertions is not an option but a necessity.

Like the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the area's geography is not Loewenstein's strong point. In the first edition of his book, My Israel Question, he placed Israel's Gallilee region in Lebanon. This would have surely been a highpoint in his career as an author as it was for Louise Adler (also apparently Jewish) as a book publisher.

OH ... AND INCIDENTALLY

Today's Melbourne Age carries a story from its new Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jason Koutsoukis about a deal between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Labour Party leader Ehud Barak that has effectively saved Olmert's political skin for the time being - Leadership deal saves Israeli PM.

Buried away at the very end of the article are these paragraphs:-

"Meanwhile, the fragile truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to be in danger of collapsing after rockets were fired yesterday from Gaza into the Israeli township of Sderot, injuring two people.

Just days after the truce was agreed to, the rocket attacks were launched after Israeli soldiers killed two Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank. Islamic Jihad had previously said before signing the truce that it would respond to assassinations carried out by Israel in the West Bank.

Following the rocket attacks, Mr Barak, who is Defence Minister, ordered all crossings to the Gaza Strip closed, with only humanitarian supplies allowed through the Erez crossing in Gaza's north-east.

Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that controls Gaza, said it was doing everything possible to preserve the truce."

Strange that such news finds itself situated at the very end of the article. No mention of what the Islamic Jihad people were doing when when killed by the IDF or the fact that Islamic Jihad often carries out operations in conjunction with Hamas and that it wouldn't dare do so without Hamas' consent. Still one wonders whether Koutsoukis' predecessor would have even deigned to mention the rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets at all.

One also wonders about the photograph accompanying this article about the Israeli political crisis. The picture is of a restaurant 'Buns and Guns', located in the security zone of Beirut. Lebanon isn't even mentioned or relevant to the article but someone at Fairfax doesn't mind associating Israeli leaders with this gruesome gun theme.

PEACE OFFENSIVE

Martin Peretz of The New Republic has written a great piece on recent peace efforts from Israel including negotiations with Syria and the truce with Hamas brokered by the Egyptians. Here are some excerpts from Peace Offensive:

In Middle Eastern wars, the United Nations is almost always hectoring Israel for being reluctant to seek peace. So it was a stunner when Terje Rød-Larsen--U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's "special coordinator" in the occupied territories, Kofi Annan's "personal representative" to Yasir Arafat, Ban Ki-moon's "special representative" for overseeing the cease-fire agreement ending the second Lebanon war, and in his next posting "envoy to the personal representative of the special coordinator for planetary salvation"--lambasted Israel for its recent negotiations with Syria: "Israel has given Syria a huge gift, without thus far receiving anything in return."

It used to be that Israel would move the heavens to rescue its kidnapped soldiers. This is one reason for the daring of so many of its fighting men. In recent years there has been an increase in kidnapping as a battle tactic by both the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Frankly, the Arabs play cruel games with these people (and their relatives), not saying whether they are dead or alive, even those who were captured decades ago. Are Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser still in this world? Nasrallah will not say. Gilad Shalit, it is believed, is still alive. Why was he not released in exchange for the last return of Palestinian prisoners? Liat Collins had a story, "Between life and the dead," in the Jerusalem Post some weeks ago detailing this manipulation of sorrow and fear. Dog tags and body parts are transmitted but not accurate information or men who are still breathing. Make peace with these people? This might be the only instance you hear me utter this: I wholeheartedly agree with the U.N. hack.

What amazes me is that these people have so much support among our intellectuals and within our media. Peretz has nailed it as usual but the world doesn't care. So two years down the track, captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit remains a prisoner who has none of the rights accorded to most captives in his situation. Yet, Age cartoonist Petty has sympathy for the supposedly democratically elected Hamas that holds him.

PETTY CASH

The Melbourne Age yesterday published a vile excuse for a cartoon by one of its resident scribblers who goes by the very appropriate name of "Petty". It makes little sense but it's clearly a pro Hamas piece and is typical of the uninformed and ignorant rubbish that could only emanate from a newspaper edited by someone who once published an opinion piece that suggested Israel and the Mossad were behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Hamas is in power by virtue of a democratic election in much the same way as Hitler and Mugabe were democratically elected but Petty would never dare to put together a comic little piece in support of the thuggery that has forced Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangarai out of Friday's Presidential poll, would he?

Quite apart from the historically incorrect and the odious nature of Petty's daubing, what makes the publication of his racist attack on the Jewish State and its people even more incrdible is its timing.

Now, in the early days of the truce between Israel and Hamas, when Israel is living up to the terms of its agreement and allowing in a promised 30 per cent increase of food and commercial goods into Gaza which it said it would do when the violence against its citizens stopped.

Now, when people of goodwill seek to bring about peace by negotiation in this troubled region.

Then again, his cartooning work leads one to to doubt whether Petty knows or understands the broader issues of the conflict and the difficulties involved in achieving a peaceful two state solution when you have a thug movement which advocates the destruction of one of those states and genocide against the Jews.

PORKY PIE OF THE DAY

The Australian Financial Review allowed this through onto its letters page:-

Palestinians miss out

The Palestinians were entitled to reject the United Nations partition plan. By 1947, despite massive Jewish immigration from Europe Jews formed only 33% of the population. However, the UN Partition plan gave the Jews 54% of Palestine, even though they owned only 6 % of Palestine’s land.

So the Palestinians were asked to give up more then half of their country for the benefit of a minority of recently arrived European settlers. Not surprisingly, they refused.

These European Jewish settlers had no intention of restricting their state to the borders envisaged by the UN partition plan. In November 1947 they attacked the Arab state proposed under the UN, destroyed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, and expelled their inhabitants. Only the intervention of the Arab armies in May 1948 prevented a Jewish takeover of all of Palestine in 1948

Paul Dixon,
Fraser,ACT

The flaw in Dixon's argument is that implication that because the Jews owned 6% of what remained Palestine in 1947 then the Arabs must have owned all of the remainder which is untrue - most of it was Crown Land and a large part of it was desert land. The big lie is that European Jews "attacked the Arab state proposed under the UN". This is a preposterous assertion that would make even the most bent of revisionist historians blush bright red. It is the sort of lie we can expect from unrepentant anti-Semites who have no qualms about distorting Jewish history for their own propaganda ends.

NOT FIT TO PRINT

According to Haaretz, "Hamas on Friday claimed responsibility for an explosion a day earlier in a house in northern Gaza that killed seven Palestinians, one of them an infant girl" - Hamas claims responsibility for deadly blast in Gaza house.

The news has met with stunnded silence from most of the international media as often happens when Palestinians kill Palestinians - and there's a lot of that going on lately.

We rarely, if ever, read of incidents like this one reported in the Palestinian Ma'an Newsagency - Two Palestinians killed in Rafah underground tunnel system.

Can't blame the Jews - then it's not news!

STANDING ON PRINCIPLES

Kudos to the Austrlian and its op ed writer, Canadian MP Irwin Cotler for this piece in support of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's principle stand on Iran's threats against Israel:

"THE enduring lesson of the Holocaust - and the genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda - is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hatred.

It is this teaching of contempt - this demonising of the other - this is where it all begins.

As the Supreme Court of Canada put it, "The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words." The court added - in words echoed by the International Criminal Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda - that these are "the catastrophic effects of racism", the chilling facts of history."

A stark contrast to the recent ranting and apologetics for the racist Iranian regime from Amin Saikal in the Fairfax media.

A BRITON SEES THINGS IN RAMALLAH

Honest Reporting has an interesting item on an alleged eye witness report given by the BBC's Aleem Maqbool which differs markedly from those of other news agencies.

It seems that objectivity among many in the British news media has been flushed down the gurgler these days and this is particularly so inside the BBC which has had a great deal to do with this disturbing development in a country that has some dark traditions of anti-Jewish behaviour in its history.

WHEN HUMAN RIGHTS MEANS SUPPORTING GENOCIDE

In the almost two years of its existence, the major beneficiary of the activities of the United Nations Human Rights Council has been Hamas - an Islamic movement whose stated aim is to destroy a member state of the United Nations and to commit genocide. That Hamas has sufficient support in the UN is a blight on the organisation that was established in the shadows of the Second World War and the atrocities committed between 1939 and 1945.

According to a Reuters Report, the "United States has quietly informed Western allies of its intention to walk away from the U.N. Human Rights Council."

The U.S. deserves congratulations for taking this honourable and ethical stand while those who remain on UNHRC are deserving of contempt.

The Fifth of June

Today is the 41st Anniversary of the commencement of the Six Day Way and the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert Kennedy at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian. The following has been released by the Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:

In April 1948, one month before Israel declared independence, Robert Kennedy, then 22, traveled to Palestine to report on the conflict for the Boston Post. His four dispatches from the scene were published in June 1948. The newspaper closed in 1956, and for decades the reports were virtually forgotten. The following are excerpts:

"Unfortunately for [the Jews, Jerusalem's water] reservoir is situated in the mountains and it and the whole pipeline are controlled by the Arabs. The British would not let them cut the water off until after May 15th but an Arab told me they would not even do it then. First they would poison it."

"The Arab responsible for the blowing up of the Jewish Agency on March 11, 1948, said that "after the explosion, upon reaching the British post which separated the Jewish section from a small neutral zone set up in the middle of Jerusalem, he was questioned by the British officers in charge. He quite freely admitted what he had done and was given immediate passage with the remark, 'Nice going.'"

"The Jews informed the British government that 600 Iraqi troops were going to cross into Palestine from Trans-Jordan by the Allenby Bridge on a certain date and requested the British to take appropriate action to prevent this passage. The troops crossed unmolested....I saw several thousand non-Palestinian Arab troops in Palestine, including many of the famed British-trained and equipped Arab legionnaires of King Abdullah [of Trans-Jordan]. There were also soldiers from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq."

"The Arabs in command believe that eventually victory must be theirs. It is against all law and nature that this Jewish state should exist. They...promise that if it does become a reality it will never have as neighbors anything but hostile countries, which will continue the fight militarily and economically until victory is achieved."

"The Jews on the other hand believe that in a few more years, if a Jewish state is formed, it will be the only stabilizing factor remaining in the Near and Middle East. The Arab world is made up of many disgruntled factions which would have been at each other's throats long ago if it had not been for the common war against Zionism."

A TALE OF TWO JUNTAS

"A flotilla of US navy ships off the coast of Burma are leaving after failing to get the junta's permission to unload aid supplies to "ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands" of cyclone survivors." - US ships sail away as Burma snubs cyclone aid.

In another part of the world, trucks carrying supplies of humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza and oil terminals from which much needed fuel is delivered to them, are under constant attack from Palestinian terrorist groups acting with the blessing of the Hamas junta.

The Burmese junta and the Hamas junta are reprehensible and are exercising collective punishment on the their own people and yet, throughout the world, there is a body of people who either cheer Hamas on and blame Israel for the crisis or refuse to even talk about it.

Clearly, those in power in Burma are disgusting and need to be overthrown for the sake of the Burmese people, but the stench of hypocrisy applies to those who turn their heads away and ignore the obsene behaviour of the Palestinian leadership in Gaza and in many instances, in the West Bank as well.

Modern Myths of Jewish Evil

This Jerusalem Post Editorial - Myth & Muhammad al-Dura - reminds us how the recent (and largely unreported) French Court of Appeals decision on the fraudulent al-Dura affair "calls much-needed attention to the ways in which world opinion is shaped by perceptions that are themselves shaped by a not infallible media and how such myths are "fervently seized by those who seek confirmation for their belief in Israeli culpability, that it is likely never to be erased from international consciousness."

The excellent blog "This Ongoing War" also succinctly put it as follows:-

"If the editors, photographers, cartoonists, reporters and analysts who shape the reports delivered into the conventional news channels were obliged to face critical analysis, had to justify their frequently agenda-driven spinning, had to give an accounting for their prejudicial distortions and lies, then most of the venom directed at Israel and Israelis wouldn't be there."

And it really is a case of frequent media spinning that is not confined to the single story of the Muhammed al-Dura video, filmed by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma and aired by France 2 with its explosive but misleading commentary from Charles Enderlin who was nowhere near the scene but blamed the Israelis for the child's death. The cameraman's film (at least the 18 minutes out of 27 that the court ordered to be released) showed what the Jerusalem Post called "apparently staged scenes and faked ambulance runs". The international news media has been infested over the past decade by an industry of lies.

Danny Seaman describes how far reaching and damaging this industry has become for Israel and the Jewish people:

"Often we see reports about some kind of harm done to the Palestinians by Israel that immediately make headlines worldwide. In many cases, the charges turn out to be false, yet the damage to Israel is already done. This stems from the fact that foreign networks do not do the minimum they should be doing – verifying sources and crosschecking information. After all, they always attribute reports to Palestinian reporters and always find 'credible' sources that would confirm the charges."

We've seen this here in one of our reputable news outlets where, for 5½ years we had to endure one man's reporting which relied heavily on so-called "credible sources" telling tall tales that often contained obvious flaws that remained unchallenged by the reporter. Despite the failure of our media to cover the French Appeals Court decision, such reporters are now well and truly on notice. As the Jerusalem Post editorial concludes:

"[T]he sordid affair teaches a valuable lesson about the dangerous enthusiasms, especially in Muslim societies, and especially among those who claim to speak for an awakened conscience, for modern myths of Jewish evil."