It could be worse for Gaza Christians...

Headline: Gaza Christians fear 'those more extreme than Hamas'

 

Rami Ayyad, owner of a Christian bookstore was kidnapped and murdered. This was the latest in a series of incidents since the Hamas took power in Gaza, yet the news agency stories keep repeating the litany that there is "no tension" between Muslims and Christians in Gaza. This refrain is apparently not warranted by the facts. For example, an earlier news item about Christians in Gaza stated:

 

Christians living in Gaza City on Monday appealed to the international community to protect them against increased attacks by Muslim extremists. Many Christians said they were prepared to leave the Gaza Strip as soon as the border crossings are reopened.

The appeal came following a series of attacks on a Christian school and church in Gaza City over the past few days.

Father Manuel Musalam, leader of the small Latin community in the Gaza Strip, said masked gunmen torched and looted the Rosary Sisters School and the Latin Church.

"The masked gunmen used rocket-propelled grenades to storm the main entrances of the school and church," he said. "Then they destroyed almost everything inside, including the Cross, the Holy Book, computers and other equipment."

 

According to the story, following the murder of Rami Ayyad, owner of a Christian book store:

 

Spared by the summer's fierce factional clashes in which the Islamist Hamas movement seized power by routing their secular Fatah party rivals, Christians began to worry they too might be driven from the volatile coastal strip.

What scares them is a new generation of shadowy extremist movements that have crept from the rubble of a seven-year uprising, months of internal bloodletting and decades of conflict with Israel.

"We are not afraid of Hamas because as a government they are responsible for protecting people," Ayyad's brother Ramzi says. "We are afraid of
those who are more extreme than Hamas."

Palestinian Christians number around 75,000 but there are only 2,500 -- most of them Greek Orthodox -- living in the Gaza Strip among nearly 1.5 million Muslims, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Gaza has no history of tensions between the two communities and Christians say they are bound to their Muslim neighbours by shared suffering.

But fears peaked on October 6 when Ayyad was kidnapped, tortured and shot dead, his body dumped in a field outside Gaza City. No one has claimed responsibility for the murder.

Ayyad ran a bookshop affiliated with the United Bible Societies, a worldwide organisation that tries to help people "receive the Word of God and see the true light in Jesus Christ", according to its website.

The shop -- the only Christian bookstore in Gaza -- was firebombed in April, and Ayyad's family members said he was threatened several times.

"Three months before Rami was killed a man came into the office," Ayyad's mother told AFP. "He said to Rami, 'What do think about converting to Islam?'"

"Rami said, 'If you convert to Christianity, I'll become a Muslim.' Then the man said, 'I know how to make you a Muslim'. It was a threat."

The Hamas-run government has vowed to find and punish Ayyad's killers, and senior Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar and former prime minister Ismail Haniya attended his wake, along with several of the family's Muslim neighbours.

But many Christians, frightened of the new extremist groups and desperate to escape the worsening economic situation in the Gaza Strip, are seeking to emigrate, sparking fears for the future of the community.

The beleaguered coastal strip has been largely cut off from the rest of the world since March 2006, when Hamas -- which Israel and the West consider a terrorist group -- emerged victorious in Palestinian parliamentary elections.

,,,.

On a breezy Sunday morning around 50 people gathered in the Catholic Church of the Holy Family for a weekly mass.

In a rousing sermon, Musallam -- an ardent Palestinian nationalist from the West Bank who Israel has only allowed out of the Gaza Strip twice
since he assumed his post in 1995 -- called on his weary flock to remain strong.

"The Church has always been under threat, and it has always endured. Rami was not the first martyr and in the life of the Church he will not be the last," he said, his soaring baritone voice echoing off the stone walls.

"To those who are scared, to those who want to flee Gaza, we must open our hearts, our doors, and our pockets... And we must always remember the sacrifice of Christ on the cross."

Many Christians defend Gaza's record.

"I hate discrimination, and here there is no discrimination between Christians and Muslims," Musa Saba says as he sits in the quiet courtyard of the Gaza City Young Men's Christian Association, playing dominos with friends.

The spry 81-year-old Greek Orthodox was one of the founding members of the association in 1952, two years before the Egyptian government, which then controlled the Gaza Strip, granted the land on which it now stands.

Today the YMCA provides a rare recreational haven for the residents of Gaza City. In the 1980s and 1990s Hamas held party elections here, and the vast majority of the young people who play on the outdoor courts are Muslims.

"There are very few Christians in Gaza but they live right next to us on our streets. They live exactly as we do, with the same habits, the same customs," says Ban al-Hussein, a Muslim university student sitting nearby.

But if their small numbers have helped the Christians better blend in among their Muslim neighbours, it has also given rise to rivalries between different denominations.

Many in the Catholic and Orthodox communities believe Ayyad and his book store were targeted, not for being Christian, but because they were carrying out missionary activities aimed at Christians and Muslims alike.

"There are many different armed groups in the Gaza Strip, but they are not interested in fighting Christians. What happened (to Ayyad) was an exception, because of the silliness of the Baptists," Saba says.

But Hanna Massad, the pastor of Gaza City's main Baptist Church, insists the Bible Society in Gaza is primarily focused on charity, providing aid to Christians and Muslims, and offering free courses in computers and English.

"Here in Gaza, if someone wants to buy a Bible he can. If they ask for one we will provide it. But we don't force books on anyone and we don't try to convert people," Massad says.

Massad, like others, blames Ayyad's death on the rise of extremist groups bourne by the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region in recent years.

"The extremist groups have started to appear in the last six years because of the political atmosphere in the Middle East and because of the economic blockade of our country," he says.

As the situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate, with Israel declaring it a "hostile entity" last month and hinting at launching a major
operation, Christians and Muslims are, together, preparing for the worst.

"After (Rami's murder) 70 percent of Christians want to leave Gaza, because they are very afraid," Ramzi says. "But we love Gaza, it's our country, we have roots here, homes here. We will not know anyone if we go somewhere else."

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Seeing beyond the headlines

A New Kind of War?

In the current issue of Azure, the Israeli intellectual quarterly, Noah Pollak studies the campaign of hoaxes and falsehoods that have done so much damage to Israel's image abroad since 9/11:

On June 9, 2006, a beach in Gaza was rocked by an explosion that killed seven members of a Palestinian family. Shortly afterward, Palestinian Authority television released a horrific video showing a 10-year-old girl shrieking amidst the dead bodies on the beach, and Palestinian hospital workers and spokesmen angrily blamed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) artillery fire for the deaths—even though no investigation had been conducted, and the Palestinian accusers had no way of knowing what caused the explosion. The exultant declarations of an Israeli massacre were reported as fact in newspapers and television broadcasts around the world; human rights groups joined in the condemnations; and once again Israel found itself the object of international outrage over the issue of civilian casualties.

If this story and its origins fit a predictable pattern, so did Israel's reaction to the crisis: The IDF immediately ceased military activity in Gaza, and Israeli officials at the highest levels reflexively assented to the IDF's culpability and promised an investigation of the incident.

The last chapter of the story is equally familiar: It was ultimately determined that the Palestinians on the beach were not killed by the IDF. Rather, Hamas had mined the section of beach where the explosion occurred, hoping to defend their arsenal of Kassam rockets against Israeli commando missions. After the explosion, Hamas men combed the beach, removing shrapnel that could be used as evidence. The sensational video that captured the sympathies of credulous journalists and set off a wildfire of opprobrium turned out, upon objective evaluation, to be a mangled skein of spliced footage and puzzling anachronisms. It was, in other words, a fake. The explosion itself occurred some ten minutes after the last IDF artillery shell had been fired into the area, and the shrapnel found in the victims' bodies was not from Israeli munitions. Hamas, in a sloppy attempt at defending Gaza, had almost certainly killed its own citizens.

In the end, none of the exculpatory evidence mattered in the least: Israel had been tried and convicted in the court of world opinion in the first few days after the incident.

Pollak recapitulates other such incidents: the "fauxtography" of the Hezbollah war, the Muhammad al-Dura fabrication, and so on. Pollak does not enter into this discussion to belabor media bias, but rather to draw an extraordinarily important national security lesson:

Israeli strategists and spokespeople must come to understand the immense influence of symbolism, theater, and the repetition of defining anecdotes in modern warfare. This means that Israeli war planners must consider the role played by those NGOs and news organizations engaged in deliberate false reporting. These actors can no longer be conceptually grouped as third parties or neutral observers during conflicts; they are deeply implicated in the warfare itself, and as parties to a conflict their presence must be treated with the utmost seriousness.

The United States is failing equally badly in its own counterterrorism operations, as Andrew Garfield argues in a very important essay in the Middle East Quarterly.

In Iraq, while the coalition fumbles its information operations, the insurgents and militia groups are adept at releasing timely messages to undermine support for the Iraqi government and bolster their own perceived potency. They are quick to exploit coalition failures and excesses; they respond rapidly to defend their own actions, often by shifting blame to the authorities; and they hijack coalition successes to argue that change only occurs as a result of their violence. The slow speed of the U.S. military's clearance process—typically it takes three to five days to approve even a simple information operations product such as a leaflet or billboard—creates an information vacuum that Iraqis fill with conspiracy theories and gossip often reflecting the exaggerations or outright lies of insurgents and extremists.

One might almost say, to adapt von Clausewitz, that modern warfare is PR by other means. And war-winning strategies mean that modern armies most stop treating their communications operations as secondary assignments or (as still too often happens) dumping grounds for officers who have failed at everything else - but as missions absolutely essential to success.

David Frum is a senior foreign-policy adviser to the Rudy Giuliani presidential candidate.,

http://frum.nationalreview.com/

 

Self-hating Jews

The pathological nature of certain self-hating Jews is difficult to fathom. Of all people, Jews seem to take the lead in inventing falsehoods about Israel and the Jewish people. It is fair to say that a lot of the most vitriolic propaganda and outrageous falsehoods about the Middle East have been produced by Jews who are against the existence of the state of Israel.  A review of Jewish Israel hate by Carlos is a bit dated, but covers the ground. It doesn't answer the question of "why?" but it details some of the lesser and greater problems. Some of the most egregious examples - Jewish Holocaust deniers for example, seem to be missing. .

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

 

 

Another peace thug exposed

This little article about Mazin Qumsiyeh from CAMERA is actually pretty mild. Qumsiyeh is a professor of genetics at Yale university. He uses his academic standing for a variety of racist activities, including publishing a Hitlerite-type "genetic analysis" of the Jewish question. In the past, he also had pretensions to "dialogue." He is only interested in "dialog" with people who agree with him. Qumsiyeh is one of those who markets genocide under the guise of "peace and humanitarianism." The performance below is relatively mild.  

 

October 4, 2007 by Steven Stotsky

 

Exposing Mazin Qumsiyeh's Falsehoods

 

The following guest column was printed in the Brookline Tab on October 4, 2007.
 
Facts are the only path to peace.
 
The controversy over Palestinian activist Mazin Qumsiyeh's recent appearance at Brookline High School reinforces once more the importance of hewing to factual accuracy and avoiding propaganda in discussions about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many in the community were outraged that the town offered the use of its facilities to Qumsiyeh so that he could present his erroneous account of the conflict. He has all too often resorted to false claims in order to cast Israel in the most vicious terms while absolving the Palestinians of any responsibility for their current circumstances. The facts matter in any worthwhile exchange of views and they do not support his many extreme contentions. As Alan Dershowitz has stated, "Peace can't be built on a foundation of lies."
 
People listening to Qumsiyeh should remember that there could have been a Palestinian state today about to celebrate its 60th anniversary. But in 1947, the Palestinians rejected a two-state solution proposed by the UN in which they would live side-by-side in peace with Israel. In 2000, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat again rejected Israel's offer to hand over 95 percent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza to form a Palestinian state. Instead he unleashed the deadly second Intifada.
 
Regrettably, Palestinians have been taught such rejection of compromise by their schools, media, mosques and political leadership, which paint the Jewish people as interlopers in the region to be expelled. Nowhere has the Palestinian political leadership sought to convey to its constituency that the Jewish state is a legitimate nation with deep historical and religious roots in the region.
 
In characteristically loaded language, Qumsiyeh accuses Israel of "ethnically cleansing" the Palestinians to make room for Jews, but demographic realities reveal the absurdity of this charge. The Palestinian population growth rate has been among the highest in the world since Israel's founding. Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza have grown from 947,000 in 1967 when Israel took control to a current figure approaching four million.
 
One reason for the striking growth is the dramatic improvement in living standards since Israel began administering these territories. In 1967, few Palestinians had access to clean water. Today, 96 percent do. Since 1967, the average Palestinian life-span has increased from 48 to 72 years. According to the World Health Organization, Palestinians enjoy better health than their fellow Arabs in Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Infant and maternal mortality rates as well as childhood disease levels are among the lowest in the region. Literacy rates are the highest among Arab states.
 
Palestinians have repeatedly sacrificed positive economic developments in the battle against Israel, making choices that have brought hardship. This is evident in their resorting to violence in the second Intifada in September 2000. Just as the economy of the West Bank and Gaza appeared to be recovering once more from the effects of the second Intifada, in January 2006, Palestinians gave a plurality of votes to the Islamist terror group Hamas, again sacrificing prospects for improved living conditions to uncompromising ideological goals.
 
All too many Palestinians cling to absolutist demands that would place the survival of Israel in jeopardy. For instance, Qumsiyeh disingenuously insists that Israel shed Zionism and "become a country for people of all religions rather than a country for and by Jews." Yet, Israel allows all its citizens the most freedoms of any state in the region. Its Arab citizens are the only Arabs in the Middle East to participate in free elections unfettered by religious stipulations. He makes no similar demand on the 22 Arab nations, most of which elevate Islam above other religions and frequently discriminate against non-Muslims.
 
Qumsiyeh denies established historical facts. In an article published for the World Economic Forum in 2006, he claimed Israel "initiated the 1967 Six-Day War in order to acquire more land," a view at odds with the historical record of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian belligerence. He also accuses Israel of building its security barrier to cut-off Palestinian towns. In reality most of the barrier lies close to the line dividing Israel and the West Bank where it has served to block terrorist infiltration, reducing the number of Israelis killed by terrorists from 452 in 2002 to 27 in 2006.
 
So deceptive was Qumsiyeh's article that the Forum's executive director Klaus Schwab felt compelled to publicly repudiate it, stating: "This article is totally in contradiction to my own and the Forum's mission and values."
 
Those who deplore offering public facilities to Mazin Qumsiyeh and others who promote misinformation and propaganda are not, as he claims, simply refusing to engage in dialogue or seeking to silence opposing viewpoints. Rather they recognize that dialogue is futile if one side relies on falsehoods to advance its arguments.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

New US Sanctions on IRAN

 US sanctions on Iran

 

From the Jerusalm post...

 

The Bush administration slapped serious sanctions on Iran Thursday, designed to isolate it from the world economy, escalating the pressure to stop its nuclear defiance and on allies to comply with the US stance.

 

The new measures designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics proliferators of ballistic missile technology, and the Quds Force off-shoot of the IRGC a terrorist organization.

 

The classification means any US assets would be frozen and Americans would be barred from doing business with them. Most significantly, US officials said, foreign firms would be subject to American sanctions should they engage with the designated entities.

 

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the new steps as ways "to increase the costs to Iran of its irresponsible behavior." She cited Iran's ongoing pursuit of nuclear technology, missile buildup, support for terrorist groups in Iraq and the Palestinian territories and calls to wipe Israel off the map in explaining the administration's decision.

 

The Israeli Foreign Ministry welcomed the US decision, saying it represented "an important contribution through international means to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program."

 

A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office said, "We totally and absolutely back and support it, and hope other countries will take similar steps."

 

The move comes at a time when international diplomatic efforts to convince Iran to stop enriching uranium have been stalled. It has been seven months since the passage of the last UN Security Council resolution, which imposed limited sanctions on Iran and the IRGC. Efforts at a third such resolution have been hindered by Russia and China. The Europeans have also been less supportive of broad punitive financial measures.

 

Rice expressed some frustration at the pace of those efforts during testimony before Congress Wednesday.

 

"I have preferred a voluntary effort rather than secondary sanctions on foreign companies," she said. "But I've also been very clear to our allies that this is not something that can go on endlessly, that there is urgency to this issue."

 

Diplomacy, she said needs "teeth" to cut Iran off from the financial system and make it "difficult for Iran to do its business."

 

A former US government official said frustration with the Security Council process "definitely" was a factor in the decision to impose unilateral sanctions. "Not a lot has happened in a while," he said. "You have to do a lot more to move the ball forward."

 

At the same time, he said except for the Quds Force the IRGC was spared a blanket designation as a terrorist group, instead being labeled as a weapons proliferator. That reflected that there was greater international consensus on the proliferation charge, he said. When it comes to terrorism, the EU has been reluctant to take steps such as designating the Iran proxy Hizbullah as a terrorist group.

 

The test of success for these measures would be how successful they were in gaining traction from other governments and financial institutions, the former official said.

 

One sign of unease among other nations to go along with such designations is the reports that suggested the IRGC designation - first reported over the summer - was postponed, after it was first raised as a possibility, due in part to the objections of some European and other allies, as well arguments from some quarters of the administration.

 

But since then, little diplomatic progress with Iran has been made, and Europe has indicated willingness to go along with further action on Iran with steps such as the Financial Action Task Force, which counts Europeans among its member states and issued a warning on the risk of doing business with Iran.

 

"It's likely to get a mixed reaction," with countries like the UK and France supportive but others less enthusiastic, according to Michael Jacobson, a senior fellow of the Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence, and Policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Even if there are foreign governments that don't like it, you still hope the private sector, especially those companies that want to do business with the US, heeds it."

 

But Russia on Thursday already reacted negatively to the American announcement. Speaking in Lisbon, Portugal, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, "Why worsen the situation by threatening sanctions and bring it to a dead end? It's not the best way to resolve the situation by running around like a madman with a razor blade in his hand."

 

In Teheran, the Guards' leader, General Muhammad Ali Jafari, shrugged off increased US pressure on the force.

 

"Today, the enemy has concentrated the sharp point of its attacks on the Guards," Jafari told a military ceremony in Mashhad, east of Teheran, according to the state news agency IRNA. "They have applied all their efforts to reduce the efficiency of this revolutionary body. Now as always, the corps is ready to defend the ideals of the revolution more than ever before."

 

Some in America have questioned the efficacy of the sanctions.

 

Anthony H. Cordesman, the chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies's Arleigh A. Burke, questioned the move, saying the Bush administration "has not provided any analysis to show how the new sanctions are justified, how they would actually work, or what effect they should have."

 

"There has been no mention of how they relate to US efforts to work with Britain, France and Germany, or in the context of the UN," he said. "There has been no explanation of why and how these sanctions would be enforced when in so many previous cases the US has taken no action or made empty threats."

 

US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, however, defended the move.

 

"It is plain and simple: reputable institutions do not want to be bankers to this dangerous regime," he said. "We will continue to work with our international partners to prevent Iran from abusing the international financial system and to advance its illicit conduct."

 

Paulson also warned: "In dealing with Iran, it is nearly impossible to know one's customer and be assured that one is not unwittingly facilitating the regime's reckless behavior and conduct."

 

The Revolutionary Guards organization, formed to safeguard Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, has pushed well beyond its military roots, and now owns car factories and construction firms and operates newspaper groups and oil fields.

 

Current and former members now hold a growing role across the country's government and economy, sometimes openly and other times in shadows. The guards have gained a particularly big role in the country's oil and gas industry in recent years.

 

The small Quds Force wing is thought to operate overseas, having helped to create Hizbullah in 1982 in Lebanon and to arm Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan wars.

 

Rice repeated earlier offers of the opportunity for negotiations with Iran should it comply with international demands regarding its nuclear program.

 

Other officials echoed that sentiment, maintaining the announcement was not a prelude to armed conflict with Iran despite concerns from some allies that the administration is building a case for war.

 

"In no way, shape or form does it anticipate the use of force," said Nicholas Burns, the State Department's No. 3 diplomat.

 

Herb Keinon and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Rabin took responsibility for a failed mission

(Cross-posted from Israel: Like this, as if)

Israel's media are busy reminiscing about Yitzhak Rabin.

Today (Oct. 24) on our Hebrew lunar calendar is 12 Heshvan, the 12th anniversary of the assassinated Prime Minister's death. (On the Gregorian calendar, the assassination took place Nov. 4.)

One Rabin memory which stays with me is hearing the rumble of his deep voice in a television broadcast that echoed from open windows along the silent streets of Tel Aviv on Sabbath Eve, October 14, 1994.

Rabin had gone on the air to announce the failure of a rescue mission. A Sayeret Matcal commando force acting on precise intelligence had raided a house north of Jerusalem in an effort to free Nahshon Wachsman, a young Israeli soldier who was being held hostage by Hamas. The hostage died in the rescue attempt, which also took the life of the Israeli mission commander, Capt. Nir Poraz, 23.

Today in a radio interview one of his aides recalled that Rabin insisted that night on publicly taking responsibility for the failure of the mission. Ehud Barak, who was then the military chief of staff, was ready to go on the air with the announcement, the aide said, but Rabin emphasized, "I was responsible."

Rabin later said that approving this rescue operation was one of the most difficult decisions of his life.

Taking responsibility is a quality for which people remember Rabin. How many other heads of government can you recall going on national television to take responsibility for a mission that failed?

-- Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv, October 24, 2007

Annapolis prospects: Bad vibes for Israeli-Palestinian agreement

The future of the Middle East may reach a crucial junction at the Annapolis meeting planned for November. Looking at the different actions and statements of leaders, and at reactions of analysts  Eran Lerman, Oded Eran, Yossi Alpher, Daoud Kuttab and Ghassan Khattib, we are forced to conclude that prospects for success are dismal, and at the same time, nobody seems to realize the stakes

 

The Palestinians are still stuck on making making unrealistic demands and not even considering that they need to think about concessions. The Palestinian rhetoric of 2007 doesn't sound much different from the rhetoric of 2000.  Alone among the Israeli analysts,  Yossi Alpher seems to realize the consequences that may ensue if the negotiations fail. Eran Lerman and Oded Eran, like the Israeli government, seem to be counting on coming up with some meaningless bumph that will give the conference an artificial flavor of "success." The conduct of the negotiations is reminiscent of the Lebanon war, when Ehud Olmert and his cohorts continued to make bombastic statements about war aims up to the last minute, and then tried to sell the meaningless UN resolution as a successful solution. For Americans, failure of this meeting may seal the fate of their position in the Middle East. Since they could not mop the ocean of Iraq, the Americans proposed instead that they could dry it up by squaring the circle of Israeli-Palestinian peace. When they can't do that either, they will lose the confidence of every state in the region, except possibly Israel, which can't be choosy about allies. For Palestinians, failure of the Annapolis meeting will probably mean failure of the government of Mahmoud Abbas. That would leave them with two possibilities: utter chaos or rule by the Hamas. Failure of the Abbas government would be disastrous for Israel. The nightmare of missiles launched against aircraft at Ben Gurion airport, is forecast by those who don't want to make concessions, but it could well be braought about by failure of this meeting.

 

Israeli analysts are right that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seems to have had no clue what she was risking when she proposed this conference. Yossi Alpher's assessment that she is out of her depth is unfortunately correct. She made a mistake, and she has no clue now about how to fix it. Someone had better do some hard thinking, before it is too late.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis