Muslim Hate of Israel
BY STEVEN STALINSKY
October 25, 2006
It is disturbing when the entire leadership of one nation, along with hundreds of thousands of its citizens, comes out with celebrations and parades every year that call for the annihilation of another country.
It is more twisted that no world leaders or international bodies, including the United Nations, have denounced the activities surrounding Quds Day, an Iranian holiday introduced by Ayatollah Khomeini that is marked on the last Friday of Ramadan.
While the world was focusing on North Korea last week, Iran's mad scientists were hard at work preparing for the annual Quds Day celebrations.
Most of the Western press outlets that reported on the popular holiday simply downplayed it as just another "anti-Israel" day. However, this year's revelries focused both on calling for the annihilation of America and embracing Iran's nuclear program.
The celebrations included proclamations by the country's leaders and activities for university students and artists.
Isfahan University's Mechanical Energy College took first place in a Quds Day competition for its design of a pilotless plane that can be used for "suicide attacks." The director of the Iranian Broadcasting Organization of Music Production, Mohammad Mirzamani, composed a symphony dedicated to "the victory over the Zionist regime," and the country's religious Web logs were told to report on all the festivities.
Iranian press outlets featured hundreds of photographs from the celebrations in Tehran. Among the notable scenes captured were children in Condoleezza Rice costumes; effigies of President Bush, Prime Minister Olmert, and Prime Minister Blair being lit on fire and dragged through the streets; the burning of American and Israeli flags; and hundreds of posters of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah featuring the caption "I swear to Allah that Israel is weaker than [a] spider house." The posters called for a boycott of such "Israeli" goods as McDonald's, Kit Kat bars, Intel, L'Oreal, Nestlé, Disney, and Marlboro.
President Ahmadinejad gave a series of speeches leading up to and on Quds Day. At an Iftar address on October 14, he discussed his "connection with God" and said: "The president of America is like us. That is, he too is inspired ... but [his] inspiration is of the satanic kind. Satan gives inspiration to the president of America."
Mr. Ahmadinejad delivered his Quds Day speech under a banner that read, "Israel must be wiped off the face of the world." He described the holiday as "a day for confrontation between the Islamic faith with the global arrogance."
In another speech, he said Israel was "doomed" and promised that the Israeli "regime will be gone, definitely."
The words "the Zionist regime is a cancerous gland that needs to be uprooted" were written in a communiqué from the Iranian Foreign Ministry in honor of the holiday. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki held a meeting for other Islamic countries' ambassadors to Iran and told them that Israel's existence would be shattered and that death bells were tolling for the Zionists. At the meeting, the Palestinian Arab ambassador to Tehran, Salah Zawawi, said, "The day for the liberation of Quds Day is close at hand."
A who's who of the Iranian leadership marched in the main Quds Day parade before crowds chanting "death to Israel" and "death to America." The marchers included a former Iranian president, Mohammed Khatemi, and a spokesman for the parliament presidency board, Mohsen Kouhkan, who predicted a quick "final and total defeat of America and the Zionist regime."
The chief of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, praised "the fasting people taking part in the rally [who] are chanting slogans such as ‘death to America' and ‘death to Israel.'"
"The world arrogance and Zionism today are shivering from Muslim vigilance and are on the threshold of annihilation," he added.
Information Minister Hholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei explained that the holiday "is a proper occasion for people to declare their hatred of America and Israel," while a representative of the Islamic Consulate Assembly, Ahmad Pish-bin, promised that the "final defeat for world arrogance" is coming.
The chairman of the Expediency Council and a former Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who led Friday prayers, said Quds Day is an important factor "between Islam and unbelief and the stage for Muslims' jihad." He added, "The world's 1.5 billion Muslims back this jihad."
Mr. Rafsanjani also led Quds Day prayers on December 14, 2001. Then, he warned of a coming confrontation between the "pious and martyrdom-seeking forces" and the "highest forces of colonialism," which "might inflame a third World War."
Sadly, Mr. Rafsanjani is considered one of Iran's more moderate leaders.
Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
November 21, 2006
Ninety-two percent of respondents in a recent poll of one thousand Egyptians over 18 years of age called Israel an enemy state. In contrast, a meager 2% saw Israel as "a friend to Egypt."
These hostile sentiments express themselves in many ways, including a popular song titled " I Hate Israel," venomously antisemitic political cartoons, bizarre conspiracy theories, and terrorist attacks against visiting Israelis. Egypt's leading democracy movement, Kifaya, recently launched an initiative to collect a million signatures on a petition demanding the annulment of the March 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
Also, the Egyptian government has permitted large quantities of weapons to be smuggled into Gaza to use against Israeli border towns. Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli legislator specializing in Egypt-Israel relations, estimates that fully 90% of PLO and Hamas explosives come from Egypt.
Cairo may have no apparent enemies, but the impoverished Egyptian state sinks massive resources into a military build up. According to the Congressional Research Service, it purchased $6.5 billion worth of foreign weapons in the years 2001-04, more than any other state in the Middle East. In contrast, the Israeli government bought only $4.4 billion worth during that period and the Saudi one $3.8 billion.
Egypt ranked as the third largest purchaser of arms in the entire developing world, following only population giants China and India. It has the tenth largest standing army in the world, well over twice the size of Israel's.
This long, ugly record of hostility exists despite a peace treaty with Israel, hailed at the time by both Egypt's president Anwar El-Sadat and Israel's prime minister Menachem Begin as a "historic turning point." U.S. president Jimmy Carter hoped it would begin a new era when "violence no longer dominates the Middle East." I too shared in this enthusiasm.
With the benefit of retrospect, however, we see that the treaty did palpable harm in at least two ways. First, it opened the American arsenal and provided American funding to purchase the latest in weaponry. As a result, for the first time in the Arab-Israeli conflict, an Arab armed force may have reached parity with its Israeli counterpart.
Second, it spurred anti-Zionism. I lived for nearly three years in Egypt in the 1970s, before Sadat's dramatic trip to Jerusalem in late 1977, and I recall the relatively low interest in Israel at that time. Israel was plastered all over the news but it hardly figured in conversations. Egyptians seemed happy to delegate this issue to their government. Only after the treaty, which many Egyptians saw as a betrayal, did they themselves take direct interest. The result was the emergence of a more personal, intense, and bitter form of anti-Zionism.
The same pattern was replicated in Jordan, where the 1994 treaty with Israel soured popular attitudes. To a lesser extent, the 1993 Palestinian accords and even the aborted 1983 Lebanon treaty prompted similar responses. In all four of these cases, diplomatic agreements prompted a surge in hostility toward Israel.
Defenders of the "peace process" answer that, however hostile Egyptians' attitudes and however large their arsenal, the treaty has held; Cairo has in fact not made war on Israel since 1979. However frigid the peace, peace it has been.
To which I reply: if the mere absence of active warfare counts as peace, then peace has also prevailed between Syria and Israel for decades, despite their formal state of war. Damascus lacks a treaty with Jerusalem, but it also lacks modern American weaponry. Does an antique signature on a piece of paper offset Egypt's Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and Apache attack helicopters?
I think not. In retrospect, it becomes apparent that multiple fallacies and wishful predictions fueled Arab-Israeli diplomacy:
Once signed, agreements signed by unelected Arab leaders would convince the masses to give up their ambitions to eliminate Israel.
These agreements would be permanent, with no backsliding, much less duplicity.
Other Arab states would inevitably follow suit.
War can be concluded through negotiations rather than by one side giving up.
The time has come to recognize the Egypt-Israel treaty – usually portrayed as the glory and ornament of Arab-Israel diplomacy – as the failure it has been, and to draw the appropriate lessons in order not to repeat its mistakes.
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
December 19, 2006
After nearly sixty years on the sidelines, Israel's third and final enemy may be joining the battle.
Foreign states are Israel's enemy no. 1. With the declaration of Israeli independence in May 1948, five foreign armed forces invaded Israel. All the major wars that followed – 1956, 1967, 1970, 1973 – involved Israelis at war with neighboring armies, air forces, and navies. Today, the greatest threat comes from weapons of mass destruction in Iran and Syria. Egypt increasingly presents a conventional arms danger.
External Palestinians are enemy no. 2. Eclipsed for two decades after 1948, they moved to center-stage with Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The 1982 Lebanon war and the 1993 Oslo accords confirmed their centrality. External Palestinians remain active and menacing today, what with terrorism, missiles landing on Sderot, and a global public relations campaign of rejectionism.
The Muslim citizens of Israel, usually known in English as Israeli Arabs, constitute enemy no. 3. (But I focus on Muslims, not Arabs, because Arabic-speaking Christians and Druze are generally less hostile.)
Israeli Muslims began inconsequentially; in 1949, they constituted a population of 111,000 and 9 percent of Israel's population. They then multiplied ten-fold, to 1,141,000 in 2005, 16 percent of the population. Beyond numbers, they took full advantage of Israel's open, modern society to evolve from a small, docile, and leaderless population into a robust, assertive community whose leaders include a Supreme Court justice, Salim Joubran; an ambassador, Ali Yahya; members of parliament; academics; and entrepreneurs.
This ascent, along with other factors – enemies no. 1 and 2 at war with Israel, increased ties to the West Bank, the surge of radical Islam, the Lebanon war in mid-2006 – emboldened Muslims to reject the Israeli identity and turn against the state. Their blatantly celebrating Israel's worst enemies evidences this, as does growing Muslim-on-Jewish violence within Israel. This month alone, Muslims pillaged a Jewish religious school in Acre and nearly murdered a Jezreel Valley farmer. A teenage boy was arrested for planning a suicide attack on a Nazareth hotel.
This hostility has been codified in an impressively crafted document that was published in early December, The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel. Issued by the Mossawa Center in Haifa – which is partially funded by American Jews – and endorsed by many establishment figures, its extremism may well mark a turning point for Israeli Muslims. The paper rejects the Jewish nature of Israel, insisting that the country become a bi-national state in which Palestinian culture and power enjoy complete equality.
The document's notion of a "joint homeland" means Jewish and Arab sectors that run their own affairs and have the right of veto over certain of the other's decisions. Future Vision demands adjustments to the flag and anthem, canceling the 1950 Law of Return that automatically grants Israeli citizenship to any Jew, and elevating Arabic to be the equal of Hebrew. It seeks separate Arab representation in international fora. Most profoundly, the study would terminate the Zionist achievement of a sovereign Jewish state.
Unsurprisingly, Jewish Israelis reacted negatively. In Ma‘ariv, Dan Margalit dismissed Israeli Arabs as "impossible." In Ha'aretz, Avraham Tal interpreted the outrageous demands as intentionally continuing the conflict, even should Israel's external conflicts be settled. Israel's deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, implicitly rejects the document's very premises. "What is the logic," he is quoted in The New York Sun, of creating 1½ countries for Palestinians (an allusion to the Palestinian Authority becoming a full-fledged state) and "a half country for the Jewish people?"
Mr. Lieberman wants to restrict Israeli citizenship to those willing to sign a statement of loyalty to the Israeli flag and anthem, and prepared to do military service or its equivalent. Those who refuse to sign – whether Muslim, far-leftist, Haredi, or other – may remain in place as permanent residents, with all the benefits of Israeli residence, even voting and running for local office (a privilege non-citizen Arab residents of Jerusalem currently enjoy). But they would be excluded from voting in national elections or being elected to national office.
The diametrically opposed proposals of Future Vision and Mr. Lieberman are opening bids in a long negotiating process that usefully focus attention on a topic too long sidelined. Three brutally simple choices face Israelis: either Jewish Israelis give up Zionism; or Muslim Israelis accept Zionism; or Muslim Israelis don't remain Israeli for long. The sooner Israelis resolve this matter, the better.
8 Burials for Jerusalem Seminary’s Dead
By ISABEL KERSHNER and STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
March 8, 2008
KFAR ETZION, West Bank — They carried the body of Avraham David Moses, 16 years old, on a stretcher down the slope of the vibrant green cemetery here, shaded by tall pines, overlooking a valley, in utter silence.
The boy was wrapped in a black-and-white prayer shawl, and as the pallbearers slipped him into the grave on Friday, the long silence was broken by quiet weeping and occasional sobs.
Men recited psalms, and Naftali Moses, the boy’s father, his garments torn in grief, said the Hebrew prayer for the dead, his voice breaking, before moving back up the slope to the parking lot, through a somber line of mourners, men on one side, women on the other.
The boy’s stepmother, Leah, described Avraham David, as he was known, as “a really good kid — he would come home and unload the dishwasher without being asked.” If the adults started gossiping at the table, she said, he would recite mishnayot, or oral teachings. “He was just an incredible blessing,” she said.
Avraham David was one of eight seminary students killed Thursday night in an act of terrorism, shot by a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who sprayed them with hundreds of rounds of automatic weapons fire before being killed himself. Ten other students were wounded, three of them seriously.
It was unclear what group, if any, was responsible for the massacre. The radical Islamic Hamas movement praised the deed on Thursday but did not claim it.
On Friday an anonymous caller claiming to be from Hamas took responsibility in a phone call to Reuters and said that details would come later. But Fawzi Barhoum, a senior Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said that no claim was official unless made in a written statement signed by the military wing of Hamas. The family of the gunman, identified as Ala Abu Dhaim, 25, said he had been intensely religious, but did not belong to any militant group.
Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Israel would act after proper investigation and deliberation, and he condemned those, like Hamas, who celebrated the killings with parades in Gaza. “That Hamas calls this a heroic act, and praises it, this exposes them for what they are,” he said.
The young men died as they were studying in the library of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, a major center for the religious Zionist movement that supports Israeli settlement in the West Bank — settlements like this one, which Israel intends to keep in any future peace treaty.
The dead, most of them 15 or 16, with the oldest 26, were all buried Friday, in separate funerals drawing thousands of weeping and angry Israelis.
The funeral processions began together earlier on Friday at the yeshiva itself, where thousands of people, many of them in the traditional black clothing of the ultra-Orthodox or wearing knitted skullcaps, characteristic of more modern religious Zionists, lined the streets. In the large courtyard, where the blood had been washed away, eight benches were marked with the names of the dead, and one wall of the yeshiva was covered with large posters listing them.
As each body was brought forward to rest on its bench, the crowds outside the gates parted to let the pallbearers pass, with cries and screams from relatives and friends.
In every corner, students hugged and cried, and many went to see and touch the closed library door, shattered by bullets. In his eulogy, the yeshiva’s chief rabbi, Yaakov Shapira, said that the gunman had made targets of “everyone living in the holy city of Jerusalem” and criticized the Olmert government for its willingness to negotiate the return of some occupied land to the Palestinians.
“The time has come for all of us to understand that an external struggle is raging, and an internal struggle, and everyone believes the hour has come for us to have a good leadership, a stronger leadership, a more believing leadership,” he said.
Weeping, Rabbi Shapira said, “The murderers are the Amalek of our day, coming to remind us that Amalek has not disappeared, just changed its appearance.” The Amalekites were indigenous nomads who attacked the Israelites on their flight from Egypt, and were annihilated by King David. “God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son,” the rabbi said. “We had to sacrifice eight.”
The ceremony ended as it began, with the procession of bodies taken out of the gates, one by one, for their separate burials.
The Israeli government declared a high alert on Friday and barred Palestinians in the West Bank from traveling to Jerusalem over the weekend, deploying thousands of police officers and limiting the numbers of Muslims allowed to pray at the Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem.
The killer was a Palestinian with permanent residency in Jerusalem. His home in the Jebel Mukaber neighborhood of East Jerusalem was adorned Friday with the flags of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. According to his family, he was a driver for a private company that had made deliveries to the yeshiva, but the police would not confirm that.
His family said that although he had been intensely religious, he was not a member of any militant group, and he had planned on marrying this summer. But he had been transfixed by the bloodshed in Gaza, where 126 Palestinians died from Wednesday through Monday, his sister, Iman Abu Dhaim, told The Associated Press. Several of his relatives were detained for questioning.
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, condemned the killing of civilians by both sides, and Israel said it would continue peace talks with him. Mr. Abbas had suspended such talks after the Gaza deaths.
Mr. Regev urged Mr. Abbas to do more to stop terrorism. “They have clear obligations to act against terror cells,” he said. “While we understand that they have limitations on their capabilities today, we believe that they could be doing much more.”
A senior Israeli official who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the issue said many details about the killing were unclear and no major decisions had been made. Mr. Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni “understand that there is no quick fix for Hamas, that this will take time, and the goal is to continually apply pressure on the Hamas leadership — economic, military, diplomatic and political,” the official said.
Isabel Kershner reported from Kfar Etzion, West Bank, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem. Rina Castelnuovo contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza.