A TIME TO SPEAK
Vol. II:9 (No. 21)
September 2002 - Tishri 5763
DIGGING PITS
"See, he hatches evil, conceives mischief and gives birth to fraud.
He has dug a pit and deepened it, and will fall into the trap he made."
-- Psalm
7:15-16
An AP [Associated Press] item on the approach of Rosh HaShanah ran under a headline: "Israelis Unapologetic This New Year".
ALSO UNAPOLOGETIC ARE:
1] Governments, international organizations, officials and pundits who were in spasms of rage back in 1981, when Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin sent aircraft to carry out the precise pin-point destruction of Saddam Hussein's atom bomb factory.
Now, even those most apprehensive about Saddam Hussein's acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and most supportive of military action to forestall it, scarcely recall much less retract those condemnations of Israel.
Even the argument "Suppose Saddam had nuclear weapons during the Gulf War of 1991" do not recall or acknowledge the reason why he did not have them.
2] Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian functionary who carries the ponderous United Nations titles of "Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Secretary-General's Personal Representative to the PLO" -- a title with the built-in conflict of interest between managing a dispute between two parties and being an emissary to one of the parties.
Larsen has in effect been a public advocate for the PLO, advising the international community to regard its mass murders as "resistance" and not as "terrorism". Whatever the issue, he puts the blame on Israel. The only solutions he can imagine are those incompatible with the survival of Israel. He has declared that the Oslo Accords -- which he helped to perpetrate -- "brought violence to an unprecedented low" when in fact they brought an unprecedented sustained upsurge in violence.
The Israeli action against the PLO terror-base sheltered by the UN in Jenin gave Larsen a chance to announce that Israel had committed atrocities that stripped it of all moral standing. Even his own employer eventually concluded that the atrocities never took place, but did not find Larsen's rush to slander as grounds to dismiss him from his post.
Larsen and his wife Mona Juul, Norway's ambassador to Israel, have incurred no consequences for violating Norwegian law when they accepted but did not report tips of $100,000 from the EU-funded Peres Center for Peace.
3] The United Nations, its Commission on Human Rights, and its High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson are diligently enshrining and promoting the resolutions of the Hate-the-Jews Jamboree they held at Durban, South Africa, in September 2001
Those resolutions are now incorporated into all human rights doctrines and projects. (In this context, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are not counted as violations of human rights.)
4] Amnesty International, long adept at promoting false accusations against Israel, is advancing the programs of the NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) at Durban, who put on one of the most massive and rawest public displays of Judeophobia since the fall of the Third Reich.
Among the programs: The United Nations must re-instate its old "Zionism is Racism" passed in the 1970s but repealed in the 1990s. Also, a call to the international community to impose a policy of "complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state".
5] Sir Christopher Patten, the knightly overseer of EU disbursements to Arafat and the PLO, who insists that there is "no credible evidence" that this humanitarian largesse of European taxpayers contributes to the expenses of terrorism.
6] Pope John Paul II, who on the anniversary of the attacks on the United States prayed for Divine mercy and forgiveness for the terrorists who murdered 3000 innocent people.
* * * * * * *
"The impious man destroys his neighbor through speech."
-- Proverbs 11:9
ON CAMERA -- OFF CAMERA:
An most egregious example of partnership in mendacity is the international frenzy over photographs of a 12-year-old Arab boy named Muhammad al-Dura. They were taken by Talal Abu-Rahma, a Palestinian-Arab photographer working for the French TV station France 2. The place and time were a junction in Gaza, where PLO gunmen for firing from three sides at an Israeli guardpost, and the Israeli soldiers under attack were firing back.
The first picture snapped by Mr. Abu-Rahma showed an Arab man and his son crouching in the angle of a low wall, apparently taking shelter from cross-fire. The second picture shows the boy reportedly fatally hit by a bullet.
The news media flashed these pictures around the world for days and weeks, with the implication or outright assertion that they illustrated how the Jews murdered Arab children. It was not noted that the man and boy could not have been seen from the Israeli guardpost, and so could not have been a target.
The Israeli military made an ill-advised statement that it was possible that Muhammad was inadvertently struck by Israeli fire aimed at the PLO gunmen near him. An investigation soon proved that was in fact not possible.
The bulk of the news media with the world in tow considered no alternative to the conclusion that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed an Arab child. Muhammad al-Dura became the quintessential victim of Jewish brutality -- a present-day revision of the medieval myth of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln.
The PLO continually rebroadcasts a film in which a boy actor portraying Muhammad urges other Arab children to follow him to martyrdom and paradise.
The French television channel France 2, for which Abu-Rahma took the photographs, aired a special program "The Death of Little Muhammad," placing guilt on Israel.
Belgium announced that it would issue a postage stamp bearing the picture -- a commemoration never granted to the many Jewish babies and children deliberately and calculatedly murdered by PLO terrorists.
The media and the world in tow did not wait for investigations of the facts before plunging into this orgy of slander. The media and the world in tow largely ignored the subsequent and to them inconvenient investigations. Rigidly thorough and scientific analysis of the photographs, of other photographs and video film taken at the same time, calculations of lines-of-sight and trajectories, and reports of witnesses on both sides led to the conclusion that if Muhammad al-Dura was indeed shot it could only have been by PLO gunmen close to him.
It can also be concluded from these studies that the false accusations could not have been sustained without the cooperation of members of the news media and others on the spot.
Truth, even when published, can never quite overtake a widely disseminated lie. In this instance, truth has not been a concern of those who first disseminated the lie. The calculated deception of some and the hasty misjudgment of others have written a new entry into the long log of the Blood Libel,
Nahum Shahaf, a scientist who investigated the event, wrote on some of the
consequences, in a report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
[. . . . ] At the beginning of the second millennium, a blood libel was born that claimed Jews slaughtered a Christian child for the ritual of baking the Passover matza. This libel, which evolved in Europe for almost a thousand years, became the main source of Christian hatred of Jews, and the main motive for pogroms over hundreds of years of painful Jewish history. [. . . .]
At the beginning of the third millennium, the libel has returned as a recurring motif in a Muslim-Arab version. "Again the Jew is murdering children"- the same old evidence of the "Jewish character."
Half a week before the terror events in the United States, almost a year after the chilling incident at Netzarim Junction was broadcast to the world, antisemitic hatred was celebrated in Durban, South Africa under UN sponsorship in the "World Conference against Racism". This took the form of demonstrations, mass meetings, and virtual burial processions in which the picture of the Palestinian boy from Gaza, hiding behind his father from "Israeli soldiers", took center stage.
According to the Kol Yisrael [Voice of Israel] news, Yasir Arafat took the father, Jamal al-Dura, with him to South Africa as a propaganda weapon . . . . According to the Palestinians the Israeli soldiers sniped at the child nonstop for forty-five minutes until they succeeded in killing him.
[. . . .] This worldwide antisemitic hatred, which at present is openly celebrated, now brandishes "photographic evidence" of the "Jewish character." Indeed, one picture of a Palestinian boy is worth more than a thousand words. The event was staged with chilling ingenuity, as is evident from the raw, unedited television images that have been withheld from television viewers by a hostile world media.
When the graphic truth was exposed to some of the participants in the staged production, some of them admitted that the event had indeed been quite different from how it is portrayed in the world. Among these participants are the father Jamal, the photographer Talal, and the head of the Red Cross in Gaza at that time.
The PLO and its media organs are not so eager to show other pictures of Arab children. There has not been as much propaganda value in photographs of children and even toddlers in the costumes of jihad-terrorists, cuddling real or fake guns and bomb-belts the way Israeli children cuddle teddy bears.
Military indoctrination and training of children continues, but filming has
now been banned. PMA (Palestinian Media Watch) 1 September 2002, reports:
The Palestinian Authority's [PA] sending different messages to the world and to their own people was seen again last week after the Palestinian journalists union 'banned journalists from photographing Palestinian children carrying weapons ... saying that the pictures harm the Palestinian cause.'
However, at the same time that they are preventing the world from seeing their children with guns, Palestinian Authority TV interviewed a child in his home - and for the purpose of the interview - placed a Kalatchnikov automatic rifle with the bullet clip over his shoulder.
Clearly, while they don't want the world to see them manipulating their children to violence, the message of child violence is precisely what they want to give Palestinian children watching PA TV.
Reuters report on Palestinian Journalists' Association action of 26 August,
2002:
[T]he Palestinian Journalists' Association has warned its members that it will punish any journalist or photographer who takes photographs of armed or masked Palestinian children.
The message faxed to journalists and news agencies, stated that Palestinian journalists working in foreign news agencies are responsible for making sure their colleagues act according to the decision.
The Palestinian Journalists' Association announced that it would not defend journalists who do not implement the new policy, should the Palestinian Authority decide to punish them.
According to the message, the reason for this new policy is that these photographs will damage the Palestinian image [. . . .]
[Comment: The PLO confiscated film of its subjects joyously celebrating the terrorist attacks on the United States and the destruction of the World Trade Center. It threatened the life of the Italian cameraman who took pictures of the ghastly mob lynching of two Israeli men who accidently took a wrong turn into Arab Ramallah.]
* * * * * * * *
"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the
majority. What it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."
-- Eric Hoffer
Dr. Shlomo Ben-Ami was briefly Foreign Minister in the government of Ehud Barak. The Israeli voters rejected the policies of that government by the largest margin in any election in any democratic country. Now, Ben-Ami is badgering President Bush to impose those rejected policies on the citizens of Israel.
Dr. Juli Tamir, another former minister in the late Barak government, approves of this. She finds it suitable to something-or-other that she calls "global democracy". It is a new concept of democracy, global or not, for the losers in an election to try to induce outside powers to overturn the will of a free electorate.
Polls of popular opinion now indicate that at least 80 percent of Israelis consider the Oslo Accords to be defunct. Those Accords, that inflicted so much death, suffering, loss and peril on Israel, were sired by Shimon Peres, the repeatedly recycled Foreign Minister. He is still assuring the world that Oslo was "the right path" to which Israel will one day return.
* * * * * * *
THE TOURNAMENT OF THE PAMPHLETS:
1] MEMRI (Middle East Media Review Institute) reports that:
[R]egardless of the information accumulated about the identities of the perpetrators - officials, journalists, and religious leaders throughout the Arab and Muslim world have continued to claim that the perpetrators of the attacks were not Arabs or Muslims. The claim that American and or Jewish/Israeli elements carried out the attacks has become an accepted, albeit false, and common myth in the Arab world, to the point that U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have been accused of masterminding the attacks.
This same conviction was apparent in a television mass interview with educated professional men in Pakistan. They believe without doubt that the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by Israel. As proof, they point out that 4,000 New York Jews worked in the World Trade Center but none of them showed up that day because they were warned by Israel to stay away. This story, disseminated in Arab news media and through the Internet, has acquired the status of truth beyond question.
To counteract these misperceptions, the U.S. State Department recruited a successful advertising agency executive and produced a pamphlet full of facts. It is hoped that distribution of this nice pamphlet will be a cure for mass delusion.
2] Another new pamphlet has been issued and became an instant best-seller.
As reported by Khaled Abu-Toameh in the
Jerusalem Post:
A booklet that anticipates the destruction of the US by 2004 has become a best seller in [East] Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. The author of the 32-page publication is Salah Eddin Abu Arafeh, a young Muslim preacher from Jerusalem.
[. . . .] Abu Arafeh says his study was conducted following the attacks in Washington and New York. The booklet, which sells for only NIS 2 [42 cents], is entitled The Koran Anticipates the Destruction of the US and the Sinking of the American Army.
[. . . .] Abu Arafeh says he reached this conclusion based on the thorough analysis of the Koran and that he will publish the details later."
* * * * * * *
In PLO-land, a shipment of souvenir gadgets was imported for distribution: Cigarette lighters decorated with pictures of Osama bin-Laden and the collapsing Twin Towers.
* * * * * * *
ACADEMIA NUTS:
1] Concordia College in Montreal, Canada, invited former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to give an address there. The hall where the address was to take place was mobbed by PLO and pro-PLO protestors. They smashed windows, hurled rocks at the police, and attacked people trying to enter the auditorium.
A gentleman of 73, a survivor of the Holocaust, was beaten and spat upon. A local rabbi and his wife, a member of the faculty, were kicked and punched.
The AP reported all this under the headline "Cops, Israel Protestors Clash", easily taken to mean that Israelis rather than anti-Israelis clashed with the cops.
The college administration cancelled the event and announced a ban on any activity related to the Middle East -- whether a speech, a rally, an exhibit, or a table for printed material.
2] Colorado College scheduled a symposium to honor the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Its choice of a speaker for such an occasion was -- Hanan Ashwari, official spokeslady for the PLO and those who danced in the streets to celebrate the event.
This honor to an advocate of terrorism and serial liar was criticized by, among others, the Governor of Colorado, both of its Senators, and RudyGuiliani. The college administration bowed to the extent of permitting -- though not actually inviting -- Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes to speak as well.
There were protestors on this occasion also. At points in Madame Ashrawi's address they held up slips of paper with the words "We Disagree". She sneered at them for so demeaning themselves.
* * * * * * *
Finley Park Mosque in London was the venue for a celebration of the achievements of the September 11th attack. The title of the event was "A Towering Day in History". Masked guards prevented any news reporters from entering.
* * * * * * *
The U.S. State Department assigns to its consulates abroad the responsibility for issuing visas to foreigners who wish to enter the United States. The Consulate in Saudi Arabia sometimes sub-contracted this responsibility to the Saudi travel agents who sold airplane tickets to the would-be visitors.
This habit did not seem to be affected when it chanced that 14 of the 19 terrorists of 911 had come to the United States from Saudi Arabia. A consular official opined that the mere possibility that someone might commit an act of terror was not grounds to refuse a visa.
An American journalist reported that "most" Saudis who receive visas are never interviewed at the Consulate. The State Department denied this, asserting that "45 percent of them are interviewed at the Consulate" -- apparently practitioners of a newer New Math.
A Consulate can be cautious indeed when so inclined. Dr. Avshalom Elitzur,
a scientist at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, organized a major international
seminar on quantum mechanics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and was
supposed to serve as its chairman.
Dr. Elitzur has visited the United States a number of times with no untoward
consequences, but the Consulate in Tel-Aviv refused to renew his visa because
he was born in Iran -- from which his family emigrated to Israel when he
was three years old.
* * * * * * *
Israel never interrupts the medical care it provides to Arabs, even when it is under attack by them. For Arab patients who refuse even emergency transfusions of "Jewish blood", Israel supplies plasma from Jordan.
Arab patients in Israeli hospitals have been known to cheer at the wounds of Jewish victims of PLO terror. One doctor who gives those Arab patients her best professional care does admit "It gets hard when they cheer".
END