Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, September 18, 2014

"I'm in love with an ISIS jihadist"

This is not a joke.

A tale of love and loss more suited to the pages of a novel is being bared on social media by the self-claimed Malaysian wife of an ISIS fighter in Syria.

The 26-year-old Malaysian doctor, who calls herself “Shams,” traveled to the war-torn country and entered into an arranged marriage with a fighter, according to her social media accounts and her blog “Diary of a Muhajirah.”

She said that she joined the organization, which has orchestrated beheadings and has overrun parts of Iraq and Syria in recent months, in February and adds that she was “excited” but also sad to leave her family behind.

Her social media posts indicate that she traveled to Syria via Turkey. She states that her parents were upset at first but then “supportive and happy.”

After two months in Syria, Shams was betrothed to an ISIS fighter, in a marriage arranged by her housemate, she said. According to her posts, she met and married her husband on the same day, declaring that she was “nervous [and] scared” before flipping her face covering to greet her spouse-to-be.

“He smiled. And he asked a question that I shall never forget for the rest of my life.

“Can we get married today? After Asr?

“Deep inside my heart shouted, noooo. But I have no idea why I answered ‘Yes,’” Shams reported on social media.

Shams then obtained permission from her father over the phone.

“I spoke about this issue to him and I can hear my mother was shouting in joy at the back,” she stated.

According to Shams, it is not uncommon that newly-introduced married couples in ISIS do not share the same language.

Shams later wrote that she and her husband downloaded dictionary apps to be able to communicate with each other in the initial stages of their marriage.

Overcome with emotion, Shams details the moment she realized her love for her new husband. After praying together the morning after their nuptials “he turned back and smiled at me. And I can feel something. Yes, I guess I just fell in love with someone — my husband!”

Four days after their wedding ceremony, Shams confronted the reality of being wed to an ISIS fighter upon visiting the home of a woman whose husband had been killed in battle.

“We entered the house, I saw there was almost 20 sisters. No body cried,” she said.

She carried on: “I went back home. My husband was quiet; perhaps he understood I need some time. I looked at his face, I’m married to him for 4 days and I felt so much pain.

“Abu al-Baraa,” she wrote, referring to her husband, “just don’t leave me too soon. Please.”

Eleven days after they got married, Shams says her husband went off for an operation.

“It was the most heart breaking thing I have ever heard since I came to Syria. I can’t deny that my heart bleeds and I can’t hold my tears,” she wrote.

“After our breakfast, I prepared his bag and handed his kalash to him. I couldn’t even look at his face, the pain was killing me. He noticed my gloomy face and said this to me: "Habibty, I’m married to Jihad before I’m married to you. Jihad is my first wife, and you’re my second. I hope you understand."

I went through a couple of months of her Tumblr. I don't think that this is a spoof.

It might be a legitimate diary of a mentally ill woman, or it might be a recruiting tool to attract young, idealistic Muslim women to the "Islamic State." We already know they have a sophisticated understanding of social media.

Either way, it is truly disturbing. ISIS has managed to use social media in ways that most corporations only dream of. Things like this blog, whether real or not, can easily influence naive young Muslim women to throw their lives away.

In Haaretz, Peter Beinart is upset over a proposed resolution by the CUNY Doctoral Students Council to boycott Israel.

Being a leftist Zionist critic of Israel, Beinart (who supports boycotting products made by Jews across the Green Line) sympathizes with their criticism but thinks that they went a bit too far. For example, here is his argument against boycotting Israeli universities:

Paragraph three declares that “Israeli institutions of higher learning are a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights.” That’s true. They also incubate some of the most passionate opposition to those policies. “Israeli professors and students at Israeli universities who speak out against discriminatory or criminal policies against Palestinians are ostracized and ridiculed.” Yes, sometimes. Yet many Israeli professors and students do speak out against their government’s policies, because compared to most students and faculty in the world, they enjoy considerable freedom of speech. Does isolating them from their counterparts overseas really strengthen their efforts to defend liberal, cosmopolitan ideas against the hyper-nationalism of the Israeli right?

Beinart takes pains to distinguish the "good" Israeli Jews from the "bad" Israeli Jews who should be ostracized, sounding much like John Mearsheimer if not drawing the line in quite the same place.

But it is Beinart's attempt to draw another line that shows how absurd his position is:

I appreciate the fact that the BDS movement - unlike Hamas - practices nonviolence.

But I disagree with the movement’s goals. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people. But it’s also the story of rival, equally legitimate, nationalisms. In the BDS movement’s call to action, that second story is simply absent. The BDS call to action speaks of the “Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination” without any reference to a similar Jewish right. The proposed CUNY boycott resolution mentions the Palestinians killed in the recent Gaza War without acknowledging that Israeli Jews died too.

If Jewish nationalism is no more legitimate than Palestinian nationalism, then the converse is also true. The BDS movement, sadly, does not recognize that. I hope CUNY will.

If Beinart's main problem with BDS is their inability to accept the Jewish right to a homeland, then - if he wants to be consistent - he must be just as critical of the entire PLO, Palestinian Authority and Fatah.

The current "moderate" Palestinian leadership - the people that we are told over and over again from the likes of Beinart are the most moderate, peace-loving leaders that Palestinian Arabs will ever have - have the identical position as the BDS movement. If anything, they go beyond the BDS movement in that they have been explicit in their denial of Jewish nationalism.

As I reported here, the official position of the PLO is that they must not ever recognize that Jews have the right to a state, or even that the Jewish People exist! In the words of an official PLO Negotiations Unit position paper:

Recognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination. Those who assert this right also assert that the territory historically associated with this right of self-determination (i.e., the self-determination unit) is all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.

The reason that they won't accept a Jewish state is because it implies that the Jewish people exist, not the other way around.

I don't think that the BDS movement ever said something that extreme.

And these are Beinart's "moderate," peace-loving pals. This is Mahmoud Abbas' official position. These people who are so hateful and deceitful that they cannot admit the existence of a Jewish people.

If the BDS movement is illegitimate because it refuses to recognize Jewish national rights, then so is virtually the entire Palestinian Arab nationalist movement.

But Beinart can't admit that, or else his entire career as a left-wing Zionist critic of Israel is in jeopardy.

Relative of Dutch "righteous gentile" was a Hamas terrorist

Last month there was a major news story about a Yad Vashem Righteous Gentile who returned his award to Israel after the IDF bombed a house with his innocent relatives inside.

As a front-page New York Times story said then:

On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91, whose father died in a Nazi camp, went to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague and returned a medal he received honoring him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations — non-Jews honored by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust. In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, he described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.

...Dr. [Hassan al-] Zeyada (older brother) said last month that none of his family members were militants.

al-Maqadama

I reported here that one of the people in the house, a "guest" named Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma, was actually an Al Qassam Brigades terrorist - a fact noticed by B'Tselem. This is something that the New York Times reporters should have checked out, but didn't.

PCHR reported, without qualification, that the entire family (as well as Mohammed al-Maqadamah) were innocent civilians. the NYT reported, without question, that none of the family members themselves were militants. An earlier story also quoted Hassan al-Zeyada as saying that none of them were militants:

He said two of his brothers were in Palestinian police forces — one a municipal officer employed by the Hamas administration and the other under Fatah, the rival faction that was sidelined when Hamas took over in 2007. Police forces have often been Israeli targets, but his brothers were not militants, he said — and anyway, “I am not looking for justifications.”

And neither did the New York Times.

It turns out that Maqadama was not the only member of Hamas in that house.

Meet one of Hassan's "not militant" brothers. Omar Ziyada was a field commander of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades.

Here's a screen shot from a 19-minute Qassam martyr's video that was just released in memory of Omar Ziyada.

Here's a shorter version of the video.

Both the poster and the video were posted on the Facebook page of Omar's older brother, Saad. He obviously knew Omar was a terrorist - but he didn't write anything about that during the war, following Hamas' social media guidelines. Only now, weeks later, is the truth revealed.

Omar's sister Salma happily posted the martyr video as well.

If Omar's brother and sister knew he was a terrorist, so did his brother Hassan - happily lying to the New York Times about how supposedly innocent Omar was.

Now we know that there were at least two terrorists in the Ziyada house. During a war, this strongly indicates that the house was in fact a command and control center of some sort, if not a weapons cache. The IDF actions appear to be more and more justified.

No doubt the surviving relatives know exactly what the house was being used for - and they are keeping mum. The New York Times' Anne Barnard didn't bother to research that, because their reporters are credulous enough - and reflexively anti-Israel enough - to accept the words of Gazans without skepticism.

No matter how many times they lie.

The Economist and others used this story as more proof that Israel was monstrously murdering Gazans for no reason.

And because the New York Times and Haaretz were so keen on reporting on the apparent irony of a "righteous gentile" turning against Israel, they didn't do basic fact checks that might ruin such a good story. They missed the real irony:a person who saved Jews from Nazis ended up being related to modern Nazis who want to finish Hitler's job.

When will we see this reported in the NYT?

(h/t Bob Knot)

Syria says UN proves Israel-Al Qaeda connection

The Syrian SANA "news" agency is always good for a laugh.

Syrian patient in Israel

Here's a story they ran that got picked up by the crazy conspiracy site Global Research:

The United Nations (UN) has stressed that there are strong links and contacts between the armed terrorist organizations in Syria and the Zionist entity.

The UN remarks came in a report by its Secretary General on the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) during the period from May 29th to September 3rd 2014.

The report said that members of the so-called “armed opposition” transported 47 of its wounded members through “the ceasefire line” and handed them to the “Israeli army”, indicating that the “Israeli army” handed 43 of the wounded who were treated at the Israeli hospitals to the armed terrorist organizations.

The report talked about the attack of the terrorist organizations including Jabhat al-Nusra against the positions of the UNDOF personnel and how they seized a number of their vehicles and equipment and how they used the UN uniform.

It added that the UNDOF Commander was in constant and regular contact with the Syrian Arab army in the area as the army provided all types of support to guarantee the evacuation of the UNDOF personnel.

The report affirms what Syria has always mentioned about the close relations between the armed terrorist organizations and the Israeli occupation authorities which shows how much the Israeli occupation is participating in the sinister conspiracy hatched against Syria.

The cooperation between the terrorist organization of Jabhat al-Nusra which has been designated as a terrorist group by the UN and the Israeli occupation authorities shows that Israel supports a terrorist organization which requires a response from the international community.

OK, so what did this smoking gun UN report say? Actually, it is quite interesting:

Throughout the reporting period, UNDOF frequently observed armed members of the opposition interacting with IDF across the ceasefire line in the vicinity of United Nations position 85. UNDOF observed armed members of the opposition transferring 47 wounded persons from the Bravo side across the ceasefire line to IDF, and IDF on the Alpha side handing over 43 treated individuals to the armed members of the opposition on the Bravo side.

The reporting period is May 29-September 3. Al Nusra is supposed to have taken over the Quneitra area (the crossing between Israel and Syria) on August 28. So whatever the UNDOF observed, it was not between Israel and Al Nusra.

So what's going on?

The answer can be seen from this Times of Israel article this week, an interview with a Free Syrian Army official.

Since the capture of FSA commander Sharif as-Safouri by the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front in July, Israel has reduced the number of injured Syrian opposition fighters received for medical treatment, the commander said. Safouri, the commander of Al-Haramein Brigade, was the main coordinator of medical treatment with Israeli authorities.

So Israel did have a contact from the rebels for coordinating patient transfers - a commander for the Free Syrian Army, not the jihadist Al Nusra group.

Syria, of course, tries to conflate the two.

That article also says:

No more than 150 fighters belonging to al-Nusra Front are present along the Syrian border with Israel, the commander asserted, claiming that more Islamists are based further east, in the Daraa province. The border area, including the Quneitra crossing, is being held by moderate opposition groups, he asserted.

I have no idea if that is true - there is a video of a black Al Nusra flag flying over Quneitra - but it seems fairly clear that any coordination between Israel and the Syrian opposition has been with the Free Syrian Army, not the jihadists who want to destroy Israel.

09/17 Links Pt2: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Met With Standing Ovation At Yale; Germany’s New Anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Met With Standing Ovation At Yale University

Despite a dishonest attempt by Yale's Muslim Students Association to sabotage a scheduled lecture by women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the event took place Monday evening absent of conflict. On the contrary, Hirsi Ali was met with a standing round of applause at the end of the evening.
The Somali-born Hirsi Ali, who fled after undergoing forced genital mutilation and was arranged to be married, delivered the talk on the "Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West" in which she touched on the Muslim world, which she deemed "on fire."
She thanked Yale University for standing for academic freedom as opposed to Brandeis University which revoked the offer of an honorary degree in April.
Hirsi Ali stated that she understood United States president Barack Obama's hesitancy to enter war but warned that "a world not led by America is going to be really, really a bad place to live in and we can see that."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Urges Yale MSA To Refocus Energies

Despite more than 30 student organizations petitioning her appearance, Somali-American women’s rights activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke at the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program’s “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West” event, during which she said the current state of Islam is in need of reform.
“You live in a time when Muslims are at a crossroads,” Ali said. “Every single day there is a headline that forces the Muslim individual to choose between his conscience and his creed.”
Ali spoke directly to the Muslim Students Association (MSA), whose representatives approached Buckley Program President Richard Lizardo and requested that Ali be disinvited. Lizardo said that was a “nonstarter.” The MSA now denies that such a request was made.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Speaks to Yale MSA

What’s Behind Germany’s New Anti-Semitism

Until recently, Germany has been unwilling to discuss this trend. Germans have always seen Muslim anti-Semitism as a less problematic version of the “original” version, and therefore a distraction from the well-known problem of anti-Jewish sentiment within a majority of society.
And yet the German police have noted a disturbing rise in the number of people of Arabic and Turkish descent arrested on suspicion of anti-Semitic acts in recent years, especially over the last several months. After noticing an alarming uptick in anti-Semitic sentiment among immigrant students, the German government is considering a special fund for Holocaust education.
Of course, anti-Semitism didn’t originate with Europe’s Muslims, nor are they its only proponents today. The traditional anti-Semitism of Europe’s far right persists. So, too, does that of the far left, as a negative byproduct of sympathy for the Palestinian liberation struggle. There’s also an anti-Semitism of the center, a subcategory of the sort of casual anti-Americanism and anticapitalism that many otherwise moderate Europeans espouse.

Chris Gunness' opening sentences describing the new UNRWA school year in Gaza prove a lot more than he intends.

The opening of the school year in Gaza this week was the most harrowing in living memory. Hundreds of psychologists were on hand at all 252 UNRWA schools to lead a week of counseling for 241,000 students. We began with a roll call to see who was alive or dead.

Really? A roll call to see how many students in each class died?

The names of the children killed are no mystery. They were widely published. The school administration and teachers knew, before entering the classroom, whether there were any victims in their classes.

If UNRWA has hundreds of psychologists, and if they cared about the welfare of the traumatized kids, they would have done preparation ahead of time to talk to the classmates of the ones who were killed.

If there really were roll-calls throughout UNRWA's hundreds of schools, there can only be one purpose. They were done to teach the kids to hate.

There is no other explanation.

Let's look at some numbers. If 500 kids were killed, then perhaps 350 of them were school-aged. If UNRWA schools teach 241,000 students, then that is perhaps 1/3 of the school-age kids in Gaza. (About half of 1.7 million Gazans are children.)

Which means that about 100 of the children and teens killed in Gaza attended UNRWA schools, out of the 241,000.

If we assume 50 students per classroom, that is about 4800 classrooms, so the likelihood of a child having been killed in a random UNRWA classroom is about one out of a fifty.

Would you want to put your kids through a roll-call to see how many of their classmates were killed if the chances are that low? You would if you want to teach the next generation to hate.

Is that in UNRWA's mandate?

If UNRWA has hundreds of psychologists, they could have dispatched them to the specific schools that were affected, and they could deploy multiple therapists per classroom to help the healing process.

On the other hand, if there were really roll-calls in UNRWA schools, then UNRWA is not trying to heal traumatized kids - they are trying to traumatize them more!

If you believe Gunness' account here, then he has unwittingly proven how thoroughly sick the UNRWA mentality really is.

UPDATE: Another part of the article I had missed:

Behind these statistics are real lives each with a dignity and a destiny that must be nurtured and respected. Allow me to tell you about one of them – the nephew of my colleague, Kamal. A missile struck the house where he lived with his extended family. Four of his brother’s children were severely injured as they slept. Kamal’s eight-year-old nephew was wounded by shrapnel to the face. He was taken to hospital unconscious. The child awoke from his coma blind. We found a hospital in Amman to take the boy. But his mother was denied passage out and eventually his aunt accompanied the sightless boy from Gaza. Ten days later, his father was in the mosque about to pray. It was hit. The child found himself both sightless and fatherless.

Chris Gunness isn't mentioning the apparent reason why the IDF attacked that house. Kamal's brother and the child's father was Nidal Badran, an Al Qassam Brigades battalion commander, who was meeting with two other Hamas terrorists in the mosque - not getting ready to pray.

Everyone knows he was a terrorist - even PCHR admitted it at the time.

Gunness implies that Israel was randomly shooting rockets at houses. All the research I've done is showing quite the opposite. Gunness must know that the brother of his colleague was a Hamas terrorist, but to mention that takes away some of the pathos and therefore reduces the hate that Gunness wants to incite against Israelis.

(h/t Akiva Cohen)

More from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Geneva, September 17 - The United Nations body tasked with monitoring and addressing human rights violations around the world voted today to remove beheading and other brutal forms of murder from its purview, saying that the member nations did not consider those acts in and of themselves worthy of attention.

Human Rights Council Resolution 4411, adopted by majority vote, calls on the various organs of the Council to exclude reports of beheading, Nazi-style mass shootings, and the starvation of besieged civilians from reports, as those acts are no longer categorized as violations. Thirty nations voted in favor of the measure, twelve opposed, and one, Britain, abstained. The United States representative was not present.

Council representatives expect the measure to make their work more efficient, as they can focus more intensely on the issues that really matter, such as Israel. The resolution, introduced by Council member Sudan, explicitly calls for the establishment of several investigative commissions into Israeli crimes, in addition to the Schabas Commission, using personnel now made available through the new limitation of the Council's mandate. Recommended areas of investigation include blatant Israeli disregard for the Palestinian political and civil right of killing as many Israelis as possible, and the illegal use of deadly force in combating Palestinian use of deadly force.

Diplomacy experts note that the language of the resolution does not comprehensively define beheading, mass shooting, and starvation as acceptable. Instead, the resolution instructs investigators to take into account certain specific circumstances surrounding those acts. Under most circumstances, says Dutch commentator Kan Garouwkort, those brutal acts would not be counted as violations of human rights, but certain situations might render them so nevertheless. "For example, if anyone accused Israel of such actions, that would automatically qualify," he explained.

The move will also smooth the way for the Council to accept members whose presence might otherwise be precluded, such as the Islamic State.

09/17 Links Pt1: What Does Hamas Really Want? Peace Negotiator Martin Indyk paid $14.8M by Qatar

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: UNDOF fled

After 40 years, the U.N. forces meant to separate Israel and Syria have fled their posts -- fled into Israel, for safety.
International forces in the West Bank are an old nostrum, but the failure of UNDOF is a reminder that it won't work. Until the region is at peace and all terrorist groups defeated, or the Palestinian Authority is clearly able to defeat terrorism and assure law and order, the only thing that prevents a powerful terrorist presence in the West Bank is the Israeli military.
What ought to be better appreciated is that not only Israelis, but also Palestinians and Jordanians, depend on the IDF to prevent groups like Hamas, al-Qaida, and even Islamic State from gaining ground in the West Bank. U.N. forces in southern Lebanon have been unable to control Hezbollah and unwilling to challenge it, and UNDOF has fled in the face of terrorists; the same outcome is entirely predictable in the West Bank today and tomorrow should Israeli forces leave. To admit this is not to hope for permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, but surely any hopes or plans for peace must be based in reality.
As Yossi Klein Halevi said in the article quoted above, Israelis' views of these questions are based in a tough assessment of their situation: "Israelis watch the fate of the Yazidi and Christian minorities in the Middle East and tell each other: Imagine what would happen to us if we ever lowered our guard." That guard, essential for their safety and for that of Palestinians and Jordanians, cannot be replaced by an amorphous international or U.N. force that, judging by experience, will shrink from confrontations and flee in the face of real danger.

Alan Dershowitz: National Lawyers Guild seeks to indict Obama for helping Israel build Iron Dome

The National Lawyers Guild—a hard left assortment of radical lawyers and "legal workers"—is seeking to have President Obama, Secretary of Defense Hagel and members of Congress indicted by the International Criminal Court for "aiding and abetting" genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. Among the bases for these extraordinarily serious accusations, is that "the United States Congress overwhelmingly passed, and President Obama signed, an appropriation of $225 million for Israel's Iron Dome missile system"—a purely defensive shield that destroys missiles heading for Israeli population centers.
Yes, you read that correctly. According to these irresponsible bigots, it is genocide to help the nation-state of the Jewish people protect its Jewish and Arab citizens against thousands of rockets being fired at its cities, towns and airport. Imagine the implication for the rule of law if defending one's citizens becomes a war crime. But don't worry. These professional Israel-bashers won't try to apply this Orwellian theory to any countries other than Israel and its supporters.

What Does Hamas Really Want?

Now, Hamas will focus on its next goal -- trying to strengthen its presence in the West Bank, and eventually, toppling the Palestinian Authority from power there, just as it did in Gaza.
As a recent Shin Bet investigation found, a large-scale Hamas formation, uncovered recently in the West Bank, was planning a violent coup to topple the Palestinian Authority and take over the West Bank.
From there, Hamas would create a second rocket and mortar base, targeting central Israel with thousands of rockets in an attempt to paralyze the greater Tel Aviv metropolis.
If the Israeli military were to withdraw from the West Bank, Hamas would find such a coup easier to accomplish.
Israel's military presence in the West Bank secures the very existence of the Palestinian Authority, which is calling for an Israel's withdrawal -- just the thing that would endanger the PA most.
In the meantime, sadly, Hamas, like ISIS, can still cause much cause much suffering -- especially to its own Palestinian people.

Another day, another Arab blood libel

From MEMRI:

Following are excerpts from an interview with former Jordanian MP Sheik Abd Al-Mun'im Abu Zant, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on September 7, 2014:

Abd Al-Muni'm Abu Zant: We have to understand the true nature of the Jews, because the entire world is deceived and tormented by them. The Holy Koran has revealed their true nature, as expressed by our masters, the prophets.

[…]

One could go on forever about the deceptiveness of the Jews. They are liars. They allow cannibalism, and the eating of human flesh. Check their Talmud and religious sources. On their religious holidays, if they cannot find a Muslim to slaughter, and use drops of his blood to knead the matzos they eat, they slaughter a Christian in order to take drops of his blood, and mix it into the matzos that they eat on that holiday.

I have yet to see an Arabic-language news article that denies the classic blood libel.

Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas gets a cut from the Gazans who are desperate to flee Gaza to try to migrate to Europe.

According to their sources (which is in all likelihood Fatah) Hamas takes a cut of the money being paid to smugglers - about $750 for every person being smuggled out of Gaza through either the Rafah crossing or the remaining tunnels that Egypt has not yet destroyed.

The article says that the Rafah crossing is a "mafia" run by Hamas.

This would help explain Hamas' reluctance to give up control of the Rafah crossing to the PA.

Fatah officials are blaming Hamas for the deaths of many Gazans who drowned in their attempts to sail to Europe with these smugglers.

In addition, Fatah spokesman Ahmed Assaf said that that the Hamas leadership in Gaza has received $700 million so far from "charities" that collected money for Gazans throughout the world.

There had been many appeals for funds during the war, both within the Arab world and throughout Europe.

The fundraising was supposedly for families of "martyrs," children, women and elderly or for rebuilding what was destroyed, but Hamas is collecting this cash and there is no accountability on how they are actually using it.

Matti Friedman, who wrote a hugely important expose of how AP and the rest of the mainstream media reports from the Middle East, has written a followup article in Tablet. He discusses the positive reaction the article received - even from fellow journalists - and he rebuts a critique from one of his former bosses:

There has been no serious public response to the piece, however, from inside the system I’m criticizing—no denials of the examples I gave, no explanations for the numbers I cite, no alternative reasons for the problems I describe. This uncomfortable silence is an admission.

Here I would like to reply briefly to the closest thing to an official explanation that has emerged so far. This is a short essay published by Steven Gutkin, the AP’s former bureau chief in Jerusalem, in the paper he currently runs in Goa, India, and highlighted here at Tablet last week. The article is important for reasons I believe its author did not intend.

...Most strikingly, Steve is happy not only to confirm the media’s obsession with Jews but to endorse it. If he thinks there’s any journalistic problem in a news organization covering Israel more than China or the Congo, he doesn’t say so. He thinks, in fact, that Jews—the “people of the Bible,” or perhaps the “persecuted who became persecutors”—are really, really interesting. His piece is, in other words, a confirmation of my argument mistaking itself for a rebuttal.

As for two of the most serious incidents I mentioned, a careful reader will note that Steve concedes them. Both have ramifications beyond the specifics of this story.

1. To the best of my knowledge, no major news organization has publicly admitted censoring its own coverage under pressure from Hamas. A New York Times correspondent recently said this idea was “nonsense.” Responding to an Israeli reporter asking about my essay, the AP said my “assertions challenging the independence of AP’s Mideast news report in recent years are without merit.” But the AP’s former Jerusalem bureau chief just explicitly admitted it. He confirms my report of a key detail removed from a story during the 2008-2009 fighting—that Hamas men were indistinguishable from civilians—because of a threat to our reporter, a Gaza Palestinian.

He goes even further than I did, saying printing the reporter’s original information would have meant “jeopardizing his life.” The censored information in this case is no minor matter, but the explanation behind many of the civilian fatalities for which much of the world (including the AP) blamed Israel. Steve writes that such incidents actually happened “two or three times” during his tenure. It should be clear to a reader that even once is quite enough in order for a reporter living under Hamas rule to fall permanently in line. This means that AP’s Gaza coverage is shaped in large part by Hamas, which is something important that insiders know but readers don’t.

I’m not saying the decision to strike the information was wrong—no information is worth the life of a reporter. But I am saying that the failure to get it out some other way, or to warn readers that their news is being dictated by Hamas, is a major ethical shortcoming with obvious ramifications for the credibility of everyone involved. The AP should address this publicly, and all news organizations working here need to be open about this now.

2. I wrote that in early 2009 the bureau wouldn’t touch an important news story, a report of a peace proposal from the Israeli prime minister to the Palestinian president. This decision was indefensible on journalistic grounds. A careful reader will notice that Steve does not deny this. He can’t, because too many people saw it happen, and a journalist as experienced as Steve might assume, correctly, that at least some of them vetted my account before it was published. He merely quibbles with a marginal detail—the nature of a map that one of the reporters saw. I repeat what I wrote: Two experienced AP reporters had information adding up to a major news story, one with the power to throw the Israeli-Palestinian relationship into a different light. Israelis confirmed it, and Palestinians confirmed it. The information was solid, and indeed later appeared in Newsweek and elsewhere. The AP did not touch this story, and others, in order to maintain its narrative of Israeli extremism and Palestinian moderation.

Failing to report bad things that Hamas does, and good things that Israel does, which is what these examples show, creates the villainous “Israel” of the international press. That these failures mislead news consumers is clear. But they also have a role in generating recent events like a mob attack on a Paris synagogue, for example, or the current 30-year-high in anti-Jewish incidents in Britain. There are several causes behind such phenomena, and editorial decisions like these are among them. But this is one subject about which the AP bureau chief, for all of his Jewish ruminations, has nothing to say. The press corps is obviously not “teeming with anti-Semitism.” But neither is it teeming with responsibility or introspection, and the kind of thinking that has taken hold there should have all of us deeply concerned.

Friedman also links to a piece I hadn't seen, from Richard Miron, former BBC correspondent, who confirms his experiences of anti-Israel bias from within media organizations:

Israel must be held to account not in comparison to elsewhere in the Middle East, but rather to other Western armies operating under similar conditions. And yet in reading and watching the coverage out of Gaza, it seems the media held Israel to an altogether different standard. Civilian casualties were often portrayed as the consequence of deliberate Israeli vengefulness and bloodletting.

I have seen for myself how Western armies operate during conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere, and tragically there is no such thing as a clean conflict.

I still have the photos I took in an Afghan village of what remained after a U.S. air strike destroyed a family compound killing about 50 civilians in pursuit of one Al-Qaida operative. While there has been some questioning by the media over the extent of civilian casualties (numbering in their tens of thousands) in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, it has been muted by comparison to Gaza.

Where Matti Friedman is entirely correct is in the failure of news organizations and their correspondents to point out the controls and "pressures" both implicit and explicit exerted upon them in Gaza by the all-pervasive and tightly-run Hamas media operation. This inaction can only be seen as – at best – moral cowardice by media organizations.

It was also notable in what remain unobserved. One senior BBC correspondent wrote after a week of reporting in Gaza that “he saw no evidence ... of Israel’s accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.” This is a very strange statement. Firstly, just because the journalist didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t occur, particularly when missiles aimed at Israel were emerging from built-up areas inside Gaza. Secondly, knowing Gaza’s physical geography, it’s safe to conclude that if Hamas operatives did come out from the territory’s packed urban confines, they would have been quickly struck by an Israeli drone or aircraft fire. If they weren’t in the open, they were by definition sheltering in civilian neighbourhoods – thus they were using human shields (similar to the way other guerilla forces – such as the Taliban – operate).

...[T]he (Western) media must also account for itself and for its own conduct, including apparent omissions and failures in the reporting of the conflict. It must question where reporting may have ended and emoting began; if it held Israel to a standard apart from all others; and why it allowed Hamas a free pass in controlling the flow of information.

Its coverage had consequences in fuelling the passions (and hatred) of many on the streets of Paris , London and elsewhere toward Israel, and, by extension, toward Jews.

The media is instinctively averse from turning the lens of scrutiny upon itself, and will – in all likelihood – veer away from any self-examination. It is better at calling out the wrongdoing of others than admitting to its own faults. But whatever it chooses to do or not, the picture the media painted of Gaza 2014 and its consequences are already etched in the consciousness of many around the world, and will serve as a further chapter in this never-ending story.

Unfortunately, he is right. The institutions that are charged with discovering and publicizing abuses - the media and NGOs - are the very ones who are the least likely to take a long, hard look at their own internal bias and corruption.

In this case, both Friedman and Miron point out that this significant bias against Israel has a serious effect in promoting today's antisemitism. Casual readers of the media's coverage of the Middle East simply do not have the tools to know that they are being fed a narrative, and not the truth. This has already led to a generation of ill-informed people and this manifests itself in politics and education.

It is a big deal, and nothing significant is being done to address it.

No details on deal to allow building materials into Gaza

A deal was signed, but how exactly it would work is not being divulged.

Probably because it is nearly impossible to stop Hamas from diverting cement to build tunnels.

From the NYT:

Momentum for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip advanced on Tuesday, with a senior United Nations diplomat briefing the Security Council on a temporary deal between Israeli and Palestinian officials to import cement and other building materials.

The diplomat, Robert H. Serry, the special envoy for the Middle East peace process, told the Council that he hoped the deal would lead to a broader agreement on opening border crossings to Gaza and on ending severe restrictions on imports to the Palestinian territory, where the economy was stagnating before the 50-day war this summer.

The Palestinian Authority, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, will have “a lead role in the reconstruction effort,” while United Nations monitors will ensure that reconstruction materials are not “diverted from their entirely civilian purpose,” Mr. Serry said.

Israel has long insisted that its restrictions on a range of goods, including cement, are necessary to prevent Hamas from using them to build underground tunnels into Israel. The limitations are a source of intense frustration for Gazans.

“Arriving at this agreement has not been without its challenges,” Mr. Serry said, according to a prepared statement. “We consider this temporary mechanism, which must get up and running without delay, as an important step toward the objective of lifting all remaining closures, and a signal of hope to the people of Gaza.”

The three-way agreement on reconstruction is between Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations. Mr. Abbas announced the agreement last Thursday in a televised meeting of the Palestinian leadership. The estimated reconstruction cost is about $7 billion, Palestinian leaders have said. An international donor conference is scheduled for next month.

Donors, however, are likely to be wary of committing money without assurances of a more enduring peace deal.

A further complication is the deteriorating relationship between Hamas and Mr. Abbas’s Fatah faction, which signed a reconciliation deal in April after a seven-year schism. It is unclear whether Hamas will continue to participate in a unified Palestinian delegation for the Cairo talks, which are supposed to resume soon to address unresolved issues in the cease-fire pact.

The reconstruction arrangement would give Mr. Abbas a foothold in Gaza. Hamas, buoyed in public opinion by the fighting, would have difficulty blocking any reconstruction effort, but may limit Mr. Abbas’s operations.

...But it was unclear exactly how the new mechanism would work, when it would begin, or how much material would be allowed through. Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defense minister, told Israeli military reporters earlier on Tuesday that the number of trucks allowed through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing would increase to 380 a day from an average of 250, but that includes commercial goods and food.

But there never was a limitation on the number of trucks going through Kerem Shalom.

Which UN group would monitor the cement deliveries? Are they already Hamas apparatchiks, like UNRWA employees are?

And is Egypt obligated to supply anything to Gaza?

The devil is in the details, and in this case, there is no way that Hamas will not get access to the cement as long as it controls Gaza.