IRIS Blog

Here's a shock:

Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, announced Tuesday it would no longer honor understandings reached with Israel, and called on its members to carry weapons to defend themselves against the IDF.

We call on all our members who handed over their weapons to the Palestinian security forces to report to their commanders so that they can be issued new weapons, said a leaflet distributed in Ramallah. ...

The latest leaflet is seen as a challenge to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's efforts to dismantle the Aksa Martyrs Brigades and other Fatah-linked armed groups in the West Bank.

This is not true. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades continue to be on Abbas' payroll. The gun amnesty is an Alladin "new weapons for old" deal, with the promise of new "official" guns after they traded in their old ones. Additionally, the terrorists were to receive up to $12,000 per gun. Abbas has done nothing but support the terror group, which is an official part of Fatah.

According to the group, Israel on Monday night arrested Iyad Bisharat and Ahmed Abu Jalboush, two Fatah gunmen whose names had appeared on the first list of pardoned fugitives.

We call on all our members to display caution and not to be deceived by the so-called amnesty from Israel, the leaflet read. We will no longer honor the agreements that were reached with Israel over the issue of the wanted men. We won't hand over our guns. This is a lie designed to split the Palestinian resistance.

The group said it had previously warned against the "plot" aimed at confiscating the weapons of Aksa Martyrs Brigades members in the West Bank. The Israeli enemy does not respect any commitments or agreements, it said....

"Israel expects the Palestinian Authority to take proper steps to root out terrorism against Israel, and to work with Israel to chart a more promising future for both sides," an official in the Prime Minister's Office said. "Incitement such as this only serves to ratchet up the situation, and would only harm the chances for progress between both peoples."

You have to love Olmert's spokesmen. The Palestinians claim Israel violated the amnesty deal and there is no response, even though the IDF certainly acted in response to their continuing terror involvement. Rather than saying this, however, Olmert's plan is to spout generalities about how Israel wants peace, under the theory that "people are tired of hearing about the conflict." In real life, however, when someone makes an unanswered accusation, fair observers assume it is true. But that wouldn't bother Olmert much, given that the Left has matured beyond simplisted notions like nationalism and patriotism.

By the way, where does this leave the more than 200 recently-released al-Aqsa Fatah terrorists who signed a pledge renouncing terror?

Israeli textbooks now teach the view that the founding of Israel was a "disaster." This innovation of Education Minister Yuli Tamir was the tip of her Leftist iceberg:

Education Minister Yuli Tamir has been much in the news. Two weeks ago she went on a well-publicized visit to authoritarian Singapore to learn the secret of its school system's success.

Tamir summed up her visit in an interview with Yediot Aharonot, saying, "What most entranced me about [Singaporean schoolchildren] was that while there is discipline, it doesn't look like repression. I didn't see fear in the children's eyes."

It makes sense that this would be the aspect of Singapore's education system that most impressed Tamir. Her moves back home are all aimed at foisting her political agenda on schoolchildren while blocking all forms of dissent. Dissent, after all, could make her agenda appear repressive.

Tamir's political agenda has been alternately described as pro-peace, anti-Zionist, pro-democracy, anti-democracy, pluralistic and anti-Semitic.

To understand what her agenda actually holds in store for our future, we need to move beyond labels and assess her policies themselves.

Last December, Tamir ordered that from now on, all maps of the country in new textbooks must clearly demark the 1949 armistice lines. As Tamir sees it, the demarcation of the 1949 armistice lines is crucial for advancing peace. Speaking to Ha'aretz, she said, "We cannot demand that our Arab neighbors mark the borders from 4 June 1967, when our own Education Ministry has erased them from the textbooks and from the students' consciousness."

SINCE ISRAEL has applied its laws to the entirety of unified Jerusalem and to the Golan Heights, it is clear that the reason they don't appear in school textbooks is because they are irrelevant to the study of Israel's borders. Aside from that, when the cease-fire lines were drawn, neither Israel nor any of its neighbors accepted them as borders and, moreover, in the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, those lines did not serve as the basis for determining the borders between them. And so, not only does her move ignore Israel's own determination of its sovereignty, it also ignores historical fact.

As one of the founders of the EU-funded radical Peace Now movement, Tamir opposes all Israeli building beyond the 1949 lines. Her animus was given expression this month with the Council for Higher Education of Judea and Samaria's decision to upgrade Ariel College to the status of university center. Immediately after the institute, which confers bachelor's and master's degrees on its 8,500 students, changed its name to the Ariel University Center of Samaria, Tamir pledged to cut off its government funding and to ignore any correspondence with the institution if it referred to itself as a university center.

The Ariel University Center of Samaria's location is not Tamir's only beef with it. Its overt Zionism also sets her off. The school requires all its students to take one course per semester in either Jewish- or Zionist-related subjects. It also requires that the national flag be displayed in all classrooms.

THESE POLICIES fly in the face of Tamir's efforts to suppress Zionist and Jewish education.

Read the whole thing...

It is hard to read about Hezbollah without encountering the helpful tip that it is a resistance movement "formed in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon." (See here, here, here, here, here and here for examples). This mantra had an effect on Ehud Barak, who made the logical step of eliminating Hezbollah's raison d'etre. The only problem is that the mantra is wrong. Hezbollah is a movement of global jihad, which is why it is expanding internationally. Today we learn that American boys are dying as a consequence of years of American pressure on Israel to give Hezbollah a terror enclave:

Lebanon's Hizbullah has trained Shia fighters from Iraq in advanced guerrilla warfare tactics, according to Mehdi army militants who have been fighting British forces in southern Iraq.

Iraqi militiaman Abu Muhannad, 39, said he had spent a month in southern Lebanon. "I was one of the experienced fighters from the Mehdi army to go for training there," he said. "We learned how to take advantage of an armored vehicle's weakness, and how to wait and kill the soldiers who try to escape."

Another Mehdi Army fighter, Abu Nasser, 26, said he and 100 other group members traveled to Lebanon in December 2005. "They showed us real tactics and taught our snipers," he said.

Speaking in Tufa in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, the head of the Mehdi Army, admitted: "We have formal links with Hizbullah....We copy Hizbullah in the way they fight and their tactics, we teach each other and we are getting better through this."

"We go [to Lebanon] and discuss what Israel's future plans are in the Middle East because we are part of whatever will happen," he said.

The true raison d'etre of the global jihad was expressed by the representative of Tripoli to Thomas Jefferson:

that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Israel, America and the Europeans have placed huge bets on the corrupt Fatah organization, which is responsible for scenes like this:

The lawlessness that led Fatah to lose control of Gaza is repeating itself in the West Bank, a senior Palestinian official has claimed.

"This week a local gunman took a stolen car to the licensing authority and when the manager refused to give him a license, he shot the ceiling of the office and went outside still shooting,'' said Taysir Nasrallah in Nablus.

"This was about 20 meters from an official police checkpoint but they did nothing. "Eventually, another manager came, apologized and gave the gunman the license for the stolen car.''

It is common for donors to get their names on buildings. Israel donated $400 million to Fatah and a mass murderer of its citizens was honored:

A school in the West Bank town of Tulkarm this week organized a soccer tournament named after Ziyad Da?as, a Fatah terrorist, Palestinian Media Watch reported on Thursday.

Da?as planned a 2002 attack in Hadera in which a gunman opened fire with an M-16 rifle at a bat mitzva, killing six and wounding 30.

He was also behind the kidnapping and murder of two Israelis in Tulkarm in 2001. Da?as was killed in an IDF operation in August 2002.

Reporting on the tournament, Al Hayat hailed Da?as as ?one of the brave people of the Palestinian resistance, whom the Israeli occupation forces assassinated in cold blood.?

The Palestinian daily reported that the tournament took place in a Palestinian school and that the committee that organized the tournament thanked the school administration ?for providing the means for its success.?

This isn't anything new, however. During the middle of the fraudulent negotiations over "security arrangements" when Israel turned over the Rafah crossing, the Palestinians blew the cover on the charade by renaming it for a suicide bomber.

Here is a jaw-dropping summary of journalistic lies, obvious bias, doctored photos, plagiarism, etc.

The stunning part is that the list is actually an understatement, overlooking many of the greatest examples of anti-Israel libels, such as:

-Mohammed al-Dura, the Biggest News Scandal of All Time

-The front page picture in the New York Times showing a "Palestinian being beaten by an Israeli policeman," when really it was the rescue of a Jew from an Arab lynch mob.

-A federal court decision finding claims by TIME Magazine to be false and defamatory regarding Ariel Sharon's role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. One federal panel declared TIME employees to have behaved "negligently and carelessly" in the incident.

Admittedly, it is difficult to track Arab propaganda against Israel and America because it is the norm, rather than the exception. Here is a funny recent example.

We?ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we?re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

--Barack Obama

As I pointed out three months ago, Barack Obama is simply not presidential material. This is, of course, independent of his ideological positions.

Rudy Giuliani, the leading Republican contender for president, says almost all the right things in this article:

American Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has bucked the party line of successive US administrations and come out against the establishment of a Palestinian state.

"Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians ? negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again," the former New York City Mayor wrote in a paper published in Foreign Affairs magazine. "It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism."

Giuliani did not rule out the eventual establishment of such a state, but warned against the push by President George W. Bush and embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to quickly establish a state in Judea and Samaria ruled by Fatah. "Palestinian statehood will have to be earned through sustained good governance, a clear commitment to fighting terrorism, and a willingness to live in peace with Israel."

Giuliani also took a swipe at the United Nations, saying America should have "realistic" expectations about the effectiveness of an organization he says has made itself ?irrelevant? to the resolution of the past half-century?s conflicts. "The organization can be useful for some humanitarian and peacekeeping functions, but we should not expect much more of it.?

Saying the war with ?Islamic fascism? will be a lengthy one, Giuliani explained that: "The Terrorists' War on US was encouraged by unrealistic and inconsistent actions taken in response to terrorist attacks in the past. A realistic peace can only be achieved through strength.?

He needed to say none of this for political gain. If elected, he may be the first president ever to not put reality aside when it comes to the Palestinians.

Read the whole thing, but here is the relevant section regarding the Palestinians:

Holding serious talks may be advisable even with our adversaries, but not with those bent on our destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements....

The chief of "those who cannot deliver on their agreements" is obviously Abbas.

History demonstrates that democracy usually follows good governance, not the reverse.

This is precisely Natan Sharansky's criticism of Bush's approach to the Palestinians.

U.S. assistance can do much to set nations on the road to democracy, but we must be realistic about how much we can accomplish alone and how long it will take to achieve lasting progress.

The election of Hamas in the Palestinian-controlled territories is a case in point. The problem there is not the lack of statehood but corrupt and unaccountable governance. The Palestinian people need decent governance first, as a prerequisite for statehood. Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again. It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism. Palestinian statehood will have to be earned through sustained good governance, a clear commitment to fighting terrorism, and a willingness to live in peace with Israel. America's commitment to Israel's security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy.

Two years ago, I predicted the obvious regarding the consequences of the overwhelming leftist bias in mainstream news coverage:

My prediction is that the main result will be an acceleration of the mainstream media's erosion of credibility and therefore, its audience.

This prediction was easy, given that fifteen years ago, Michael Medved's Hollywood vs. America demonstrated that the effect of liberal elites' shameless propagandizing is to kill the institutions that they have obsessively seized control of. He focused on movies, but the pattern is consistent throughout media. The few exceptions such as Fox News, the New York Post, and the entire spectrum of openly conservative talk radio have thrived. See here for eye-opening documentation of the phenomenon in newspapers.

Now comes the most dramatic confirmation yet: the consistently left-leaning TIME Magazine is experiencing an astounding hemorrhage of subscribers. (See here for a sample of TIME's animosity toward Israel.)

Not only has there been no effort whatsoever to learn lessons from the consistent performance, but the news itself is typically buried. For example, consider this humdrum headline announcing the iceberg collision:

Time's Lead Over Newsweek Narrows

The opening sentence reassures readers that TIME is doing just fine, but Newsweek happens to be closing in:

Time magazine remains the nation's largest newsweekly, but its lead over archrival Newsweek has narrowed considerably, according to circulation figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Seven paragraphs into the article is this jaw-dropper:

Verified subscriptions at Time plunged 63.5% to 128,032 during the six months ended June 30, from 350,623 a year earlier.

Overall circulation has plummeted as well--17% in one year.

Usually, stories on liberal media debacles blame it all on the Internet, but this one couldn't. It turns out that many non-liberal magazines are skyrocketing. One sports magazine (Sports Illustrated) jumped 77%, while a financial periodical (Money) shot up more than 900% in a single year. Also up was a homemaking magazine, Good Housekeeping. The magazines aren't conservative per se, but the subjects certainly are.

But, you may ask, isn't Newsweek left-leaning and anti-Israel as well? Certainly, Newsweek has its moments. But unlike TIME, it is balanced by the inclusion of the philo-Semitic, arch-conservative George Will.

Here is an example of the obvious problems that are being neglected by the vast parasitic class that feeds off of Israel:

Hundreds of friends and relatives attended the funerals of Moshe Suleimani, 42, and his five-year-old daughter, Shani, at the Holon cemetery yesterday. The father and daughter were killed on Saturday when the Mitsubishi in which they were traveling was crushed by a truck whose driver had more than 190 prior traffic offenses on his record.

Suleimani's wife, Irit, 38, was seriously injured in the accident and was still hospitalized yesterday. The couple's six-year-old son, Idan, was released from the hospital yesterday. He was lightly hurt in the accident, which took place on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, near the Ben Shemen interchange.

"We will not forget the awful sight," said Suleimani's cousin David at the funeral, eliciting tears from the large crowd. "The entire nation of Israel will not forget this accident."

Yaniv Franco, another relative, said the family had just been discussing the problem of car accidents at Friday night dinner.

"There was a conversation about the topic of traffic accidents in the country, and Moshe said we have to eradicate the phenomenon and use a strong hand against traffic offenders," said Franco.

Irit Suleimani's brother, Alon Sagiv, told reporters yesterday that the accident that tore apart his sister's family shows that everybody is vulnerable.

"Anyone can be a statistic," he said. "Until yesterday, we were a healthy and happy family. A driver with 195 traffic offenses who gets a license to drive a semitrailer - that's a license to kill. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz is directly responsible for the accident, for leaving him with the license. The time has come to carry out a revolution, to make punishments more severe, to educate toward patience."

Shaul Mofaz is the Minister of Transportation and is the latest person with the authority to implement the simple, widespread point system that shuts down reckless drivers after a very small number of infractions. His utter negligence, however, will not affect his career at all, because it is not at all based on his competence; it is entirely due to his protexia.

The greatest achievement of the Kadima-Left coalition has been to convince Israelis that there is a trade-off between national security and personal quality-of-life, which the Right has foolishly reinforced by urging greater personal sacrifice on behalf of the nation. There is negligence on both fronts when protexia parasites are placed in power.

Because of a Y2K bug, the recent US temperature rise has been quite overstated. This is significant news because American weather stations are considered the most reliable. For example, thousands of Soviet weather stations (in cold areas) simply stopped functioning when the Soviet Union did.

It turns out that 5 of the 10 warmest years in America were prior to World War II, which is why Global Cooling was all the rage in the 1970's:

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

Islamists are fighting a war with ever-changing strategies, while the West is still paralyzed by the gridlock of politics as usual. It may take decades to simply close the wide-open door from Mexico.

Islamic extremists embedded in the U.S. - posing as Hispanic nationals - are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a DEA report. "Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function," said the confidential 2005 report. It outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the U.S. fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes. An El Paso, Texas, law enforcement report documents the influx of "approximately 20 Arab persons a week utilizing the Travis County Court in Austin to change their names and driver's licenses from Arabic to Hispanic surnames."

Nothing much has changed since the days of the Barbary pirates, from whence the Marine Corps anthem is derived ("From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli"):

Six Bulgarian medical workers imprisoned on charges of infecting children with the HIV virus were tortured by electric shock during their captivity, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi told al-Jazeera television.

The doctor and five nurses were released last month after eight years in prison, and several have described ordeals of electric shock, rape, attacks by dogs and other torture during their incarceration.

In Jefferson's day, the United States was unique in balking at routine ransom payments. Today's Bulgarians just happened to have waived $57 million in Libyan debt just after their release.

The attacker was killed by a security guard, but not before 10 people were injured by gunfire:

A security guard shot and killed an Arab attacker in the Old City of Jerusalem on Friday after the man shot and moderately wounded another security guard, police said.

Ten bystanders were lightly to moderately wounded in the shootout - apparently from the guard's gunfire - including six Jews, two Armenians and two Muslims.

Police and rescue officials were on the scene, and a police source told Israel Radio that the "situation was under control."

The late-morning incident occurred near the Latin
Patriarchate by the Jaffa Gate, when the assailant grabbed the guard's gun and shot him twice in the chest, Jerusalem Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said. The second guard killed the man as he tried to flee the scene.

Many months after Little Green Footballs began documenting the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism on two of the leading Democratic blogs (Daily Kos and Wonkette), the sites continue to receive nothing but puff pieces in the mainstream news media. Here is a good summary in one of the three American conservative-leaning newspapers:

Eyal Rosenberg resigned as a diarist for the powerful political blog DailyKos on May 9 after "all the Israel Hate spewing out of one too many diaries around here."

As he wrote in his last post: "Reading these past months on dkos has led me to believe that people here, under the 'progressive' banner, support views that end up in one place: Me dead."

Recently, a DailyKos diarist suggested "gassing Joe Lieberman like a dog."

Joe Lieberman has been a lifelong liberal Democrat.

Rosenberg notes that the anti-Semitic attacks are not "isolated." In his brief time as a diarist (several months), he counted 5,000 Israel or Jewish references in the DailyKos. That's about 23 posts on Jews or Israel a day, most negative.

This past spring, one of the site's diarists posted an image that morphs the face of Israel's minister of strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, with that of Adolf Hitler's shown holding a skull painted with a Star of David, under the caption "Zionism was and remains a racist ideology."

There are thousands of posts blaming Israel for all the terror and conflict in the Middle East.

Typically, 90% of American Jews vote for the Democratic party.