IRIS Blog

Here is a demographic bombshell, and the trend is accelerating:

An Israel Democratic Institute (IDI) demographic survey finds religious growth and secular decline - but most significant is that the proportion of religious in the public is highest among the youth.

The percentage of Jews describing themselves as secular has dropped sharply over the past 30 years, while the religious and traditional proportions have risen. The annual survey finds that the secular public comprises only 20% of the Israeli population - compared to 41%, more than twice as much, in 1974.

Nearly half the population, 47%, describes itself as traditional, while the hareidi-religious and religious-Zionist together comprise 33% of the public.

The numbers were compiled based on a survey of representative sampling of 1,016 Israelis Jews.

Over the past seven years, according to IDI statistics, the proportion of secular Jews has dropped sharply from 32% to 20% today. The "traditionalists" have traditionally had the lead in polls of this nature - except for one year in 1974, when they trailed the seculars, 41% to 38%.

Other findings show that the Sephardic population is much more traditional and religious than the Ashkenazic sector. Ashkenazic Jews are those originating from European (Christian) countries, whereas Sephardic Jews lived in the Iberian Peninsula (now Spain and Portugal), African and Middle Eastern (Moslem) countries. Only 7% of the Sephardim describe themselves as secular, compared to 36% of the Ashkenazim. At the same time, 56% of the Sephardim are religious or hareidi, compared to only 17% of the Ashkenazim.

39% of those under age 40 are religious - more than those in their 40's and 50's (32%), and much more than those aged 60 and over (20%).

It can be inferred from the numbers that Israel is a traditional society, and that it will become even more so as the years go by.

Politically, the religious are more right-wing, but so are the others. Among the religious, many more identify with the right than with the left, by a 71-8 margin; among the traditional, it's 49-21, and among the secular, it's 43-27. In total, 55% of the population view themselves as right-wing, and only 18% are to the left.

If those identifying themselves as 'right-wing' so predominate, how is it possible that the Left won such a resounding victory in the past election?

1. Arabs were not included in this survey, approximately 20% of the electorate.

2. It is possible that the disastrous governance of the Left has caused a shift in self-identification.

Here's a stunning quote from an 'internationally acclaimed geostrategist', contained in an unrelated story:

The Beduin actually buy Palestinian women to marry, he said, and a large percentage of Bedouin children are mixed Bedouin and Palestinian....

The Bedouin actually make a business of having children, said Soffer, adding that even with the cuts in child allowances instituted by Binyamin Netanyahu when he was finance minister, a Bedouin with 30 children would receive about NIS 24,000 per month.

24,000 per month equals over $72,000 annually. One Bedouin man, however, currently has eight wives and 67 children. Over twice as many children translates into $164,000 per year. He is currently seeking a ninth wife:

Every night I decide which wife to go to. I really feel like an effendi in my home. My wives do whatever I want....

There are many women who wish to marry me and there is no lack of women, I never had a problem with such things.

If there was a Israeli government that cared a whit about quality of life, it would simply cap child subsidies at ten children. Particularly given that the Left claims to be motivated to cede Israeli territory because of demographic concerns.

You won't hear much in the news about this, because it conflicts with the Democratic party's talking point that Saddam didn't have any WMDs. What is interesting is that part of Saddam's nuclear program apparently was shipped to Deir az Zour province in Syria, and Israel just shocked the world by bombing what is now widely believed to have been a Syrian nuclear installation in Deir az Zour province:

Former federal prosecutor and the head of the non-governmental International Intelligence Summit, John Loftus, has released a report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, based on a private study of captured Iraqi documents.

As Loftus summarized, "Roughly one-quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid-1990s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid-to-late-1990s. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war."

"The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam's entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses."

Loftus then cites Israeli sources who claim that the Iraqi nuclear program was transferred to Deir az Zour province in Syria. Israel reportedly destroyed a Syrian nuclear installation at Deir az Zour.

Read the whole thing...

Ehud Olmert has sanctimoniously insisted that he is not releasing terrorists with 'blood on their hands.' The actual list of crimes they committed was released today, and a large percentage were captured after missing their targets. Here, for example, are the highlights of a single rap sheet:

endangering people by placing something on a roadway, placement of explosive device with intent to cause death, shooting at people.

Is there a single person who believes that this terrorist will remain long without "blood on his hands"? (Even if he signs a pledge to be good from now on.)

Israel's intelligence services have estimated a 50% recidivism rate among previously released terrorists.

Olmert will apparently be judged by the Winograd Commission with causing the deaths of 33 soldiers in Lebanon for no purpose. How many Jews (and Arabs) has he just consigned to be murdered?

In other news, Israel has just approved the supply of another weapons shipment to the Palestinians: 25 armored vehicles and 2 million bullets.

This horrific story (which will be ignored by the mainstream media) should remind us that our Islamist enemy is evil:

Meanwhile, horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month.

Investigators from Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father.

They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto’s vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi.

“At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant,” investigators were reported as saying. “But someone came in between and a guard felt that the man with the child was not behaving normally. So the child was not allowed to come aboard Benazir’s vehicle.”

Ms Bhutto is said to have told investigators she recalls the face of the man who was carrying the infant. She has asked to see recordings made by television news channels to try to identify the man.

Finally, an American foreign policy heavyweight articulates IRIS' long-time cri de coeur:

Staticidal Zealotry, by Frank Gaffney

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is behaving like a zealot. In her ever-more-rash pursuit of a Palestinian state, she is exhibiting the syndrome defined by the philosopher George Santana, as one who redoubles her efforts upon losing sight of the objective.

Let’s recall: The objective laid out by President Bush, when he decided in June 2002 to support the creation of a homeland for the Palestinian people, was to provide a stable, secure neighbor for Israel, committed to leaving peaceably with the Jewish State.

Mr. Bush explicitly preconditioned such support on: an end to Palestinian terror; a Palestinian leadership that was not tainted by ties to terrorism; and the elimination of the infrastructure in Palestinian areas that enables such behavior. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States was in the business of eliminating terrorist-sponsoring regimes, not creating them.

Now, however, it is crystal clear that the only outcome from Condi Rice’s idée fixe – namely that she will convene a Middle East peace conference at the U.S. Naval Academy for the purpose of extracting from Israel the territorial concessions needed rapidly to establish a Palestinian state – has nothing to do with the original Bush vision. Under present and foreseeable circumstances, the best that can be hoped for from such a meeting is failure. For success will result in a new safe-haven for terror that is a mortal threat not only for Israel, but for the United States, as well.

My only quibble with Gaffney's assessment is that he charitably ascribes her motivation to blindness caused by overwork. It has been long-standing US practice to mollify both of the constituencies on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arabs are to be given the land they seek in order to destroy Israel, while the Jews are offered palliative words. Not surprisingly, the technique of sweet-talking Israel to "give it up" was perfected by Bill Clinton.

Gaffney is only the latest to notice that the words do not match the reality.

Exactly as conservative science writer Tom Bethell has been explaining for years:

The United Nations' top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement....

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year's estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV -- estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising -- now will be reported as 33 million.

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

"There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda," said Helen Epstein, author of "The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS." "I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way."

Here is how Bethell described this in 2000 (still a must-read):

Here is an "African AIDS" primer. Over the years AIDS American-style was redefined more and more expansively. In 1993, for example, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta added cervical cancer to the list of AIDS-defining diseases, with the unacknowledged goal of increasing the numbers of women. The overwhelming preponderance of males was an embarrassment to infectious-disease epidemiology, given that the viral agent was supposed to be sexually transmitted. AIDS is a name for 30-odd diseases found in conjunction with a positive test for antibodies to the human immunodeficiency virus. Being "HIV positive," then, is the unifying requirement for an AIDS case. Here is the key point that the newspapers won't tell you. To diagnose AIDS in Africa, no HIV test is needed. The presence of the unifying agent that supposedly causes the immune deficiency, the ID of AIDS, does not have to be established....

Here are the major components of the definition: "prolonged fevers (for a month or more), weight loss of 10 percent or greater, and prolonged diarrhea." No HIV test, of course. What this meant was that many traditional African diseases, pandemic in poverty stricken areas with tropical climate, open latrines and contaminated drinking water, could now be called something else with no fear of contradiction: AIDS.

Read the whole thing and then buy Tom Bethell's jaw-dropping primer on the other massive liberal science hoaxes being foisted on us (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science).

What Africa desperately needs is for a modicum of human decency in government, so that the fundamentals of health can be handed to them for free by the generous West, namely clean water, basic sewage and functional hospitals. Not AIDS cocktail drugs in the service of a liberal agenda.

Recently judges declared about a horrific murder-rape of a teenage Jewish teenager:

The barbaric act of the accused… is astonishing, particularly due to the inconceivable ease with which a shepherd from a law-abiding family, with no prior criminal offenses, had carried out this crime.

There is a very simple explanation. Palestinians have been fed a diet from birth of non-stop anti-Semitism, unanimously endorsed by the Palestinian leadership:

Coarse anti-Semitic cartoons drawn by Palestinian cartoonist Alaa' Allaqta appear regularly in Hamas' newspaper, Felesteen, on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad website, and in Saudi Arabian and Qatari newspapers.

His cartoons, which recycle anti-Semitic motifs, have recently been part of a propaganda campaign against the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and the upcoming Annapolis meeting.

This continuing farce would be comical if it wasn't actually an indictment of the Israeli public in its duty to remove this scoundrel:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is facing yet another corruption accusation, this time by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss.

In a report released Monday, Lindenstrauss charged that Olmert used his influence when he was Minister of Labor, Industry and Trade to obtain NIS 7.67 million of government aid for an associate's businesses between 2000 and 2005. Rahamim Ben-Shushan, an activist in the Likud party's Central Committee, was given Ministry financial assistance for four factories operated by his Marina Group.

In Fatah-controlled Samaria:

A 29-year-old Israeli was murdered in a shooting attack in Samaria around 11:00 pm Monday night. Palestinian Authority terrorists fired on the man as he drove past the village of Funduk, near Kedumim.

Paramedics who arrived at the scene were unable to save the man's life. The victim's identity has not yet been released, but one paramedic said he was from Kedumim. Soldiers closed off nearby roads and began searching for the attackers.

According to initial information, a terrorist cell was waiting in ambush in the area for Israeli vehicles. When the victim, who was riding alone, came into range, the enemy attackers sprayed the vehicle with gunfire. The driver was critically injured, with multiple gunshot wounds, and he apparently died within minutes.

Fatah immediately took credit for the murder.

Meanwhile, the cabinet has approved the release of 441 more terrorists, recycling the old spin that terrorist murders of Jews are really attacks aiming to prevent Israel's ceding of more territory that the terrorists demand.

The numbers quoted in this report are shocking, but only to those without first-hand experience of Muslim societies. The nonchalant public violence against wives and children by Palestinian men is unnerving to witness:

Ahead of International Children's Day, New Family - an organization that promotes family rights - reported unnerving statistics on Sunday in its annual 2007 report on domestic violence in Palestinian families.

According to statistics gathered from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), 93.3 percent of Palestinian children have experienced domestic violence, amounting to 1,950,739 children - 953,950 of whom are girls.

Further surveys reported that only 52.2% of Palestinian families feel they can provide a safe environment for their children.

If Palestinian society had any concern for its social dysfunctions, it would see Israel as a white knight. The legacy of Yassir Arafat and his leftist enablers, however, has been the immiseration of a people through an endless diet of hatred.

No, not two hours to wait for the ambulance to arrive. Two hours to wait inside the ambulance upon reaching a hospital. Welcome to the wonderful world of socialized medicine, where cost is saved in the short-term by slashing quality. And where the long-term prescription is hell precisely at the moment where a person is most in need of help:

Irish Patients Suffer Health Service 'Without a Heart'

'A department without a heart,' is what advocacy group Patients Together calls Ireland's health department, which has presided over a cancer misdiagnosis fiasco that has galvanized the country in recent weeks.

In the latest scandal to hit the health services, it has emerged that after 3,000 mammograms were taken at the midlands Portlaoise Hospital, seven women were erroneously given the all-clear.

'Initially, we heard how human error caused the problem. This gave people a sense of relief. Then as the situation further evolved, we learned how there were problems with dirt, with 16-year-old machines' says Janette Byrne who founded the patients advocacy organization in response to how she and her mother were treated at Dublin hospitals....

Ironically, the cancer misdiagnosis scandal unfolded after the director of nursing at Portlaoise raised concerns about 10 'false positive' mammograms in August....

'Any sniff of cover-up in relation to cancer makes people angry,' says Byrne. 'People are angry that HSE officials are willing to sit on information that can cause death. The whole fact that women were waiting for results and they got the wrong results which delayed treatment makes people very angry.'

Byrne, who when she was a cancer patient in Dublin's Mater hospital ended up taking the service to court, is keen to emphasize that the latest furore is just one symptom of the well-advanced health service malaise....

'I was told I would be having chemotherapy after being treated for cancer of the lymph system. But while I was visualizing the cancer returning, I sometimes had a wait of three days and once nine days for chemotherapy. Although I was booked in for chemotherapy on a particular day, I had to ring up on the day and see if there was a bed available.'

Byrne's negative experience was revisited when she watched her mother spend three-and-a-half days on a trolley because of a bed shortage, which she considers is the worst problem in the health service....

'Sometimes, in Dublin even plastic chairs in Accident and Emergency departments are full and ambulances can't get people in hospital, so they have to wait too. God forbid there is ever a train crash or an emergency situation,' she says.

John Kidd, an ambulance driver, employed by Dublin Fire Brigade which operate 12 of 15 ambulances in the Dublin area for the HSE, also pinpoints the lack of beds in the system.

'If we arrive at a hospital where there are no beds, we can wait up to two hours to move a patient into the hospital while calls are coming in,' Kidd says.

Since the last mass pardon of Fatah terrorists, Fatah has been quite active in all aspects of terrorism. Olmert is therefore planning another large release of jailed Fatah terrorists.

It is possible to create some good out of this travesty. The long-term counterreaction to Jimmy Carter's "misery index" was an adoption of Ronald Reagan's radical conservative policies. This essentially resulted in the banishment of inflation from all developed nations since.

Perhaps voters would now be willing to endorse a healthy counterreaction to Israel's revolving door system, in the form of a death penalty for terrorists:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will ask the cabinet to approve the release of some 500 Palestinian Authority terrorists in the Sunday cabinet meeting. The move comes in advance of the Middle East summit to be hosted by the U.S. in Annapolis later in November.

The number of terrorists to be freed is higher by 100 prisoners than figures quoted last week, but falls short of the 2,000 names handed to Israel by the "Palestinian Authority." However, Israeli diplomatic correspondents are hinting that this release is only a "first installment," and that another group of terrorist convicts will be released during the Annapolis summit.

Meanwhile, the terror war against Israel from Gaza is proceeding apace, and the rate of attacks on Jews in Judea and Samaria os intensifying.

More reminders that the low point of Israeli history has been the Olmert administration. The question is how much ruin this parasite has left to inflict on the nation:

The final report of the official inquiry into the 2006 Second Lebanon War is expected to accuse PM Ehud Olmert of having caused 33 pointless IDF deaths in the last 60 hours of warfare.

The Winograd Commission was appointed a month after the end of the war, as a result of heavy public pressure and criticism of the war's poor results. The commission's mandate was to investigate the errors in running the war. It had been announced of late that the commission would not call for Olmert's resignation - but the Sunday Times of London now reports that it is likely to come close: The commission will sharply censor the Prime Minister for the battles of the war's last three days, in which 28 soldiers were killed in battle and another five were killed when their helicopter was shot down.

In the final 60 hours of fighting, Israel launched a major ground offensive which began while the United Nations was nearing a ceasefire resolution. Though some would say that Olmert wished to seize a victory from the jaws of defeat, or at least end the war with Israel in its best possible position, the Winograd Commission sees the situation differently.

Over two years ago, I called the Muhammed al-Dura blood libel this way: The Biggest News Scandal of All Time is Being Ignored

The moment we have been waiting for has arrived. The video was shown in French court today, but in a breathtaking display of chutzpa, the smoking guns were edited out:

The al Durah Blood Libel

I am in Paris where I have attended the Court of Appeal special session called to witness the 27 minutes of hitherto unseen footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah which the court had required France 2 to produce. For readers who are unfamiliar with this scandal, I wrote about it here, here and here.

Suffice it to say here that the iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.

After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.

Well, sort of. What it actually produced was 18 minutes out of the 27 it was required to bring forward. From this footage, which according to France 2’s Palestinian cameraman was filmed during an implausible 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli soldiers, there is no evidence that anyone at all was killed or injured -- including Mohammed al Durah who by the end of the frames in which he figured seemed to be still very much alive and unmarked by any wound whatsoever.

The drama of today’s hearing was enhanced by the appearance of Enderlin himself, who until today had not graced this case with his presence. As the film was shown to a packed and overheated (in every sense) courtroom, Enderlin and Karsenty offered rival interpretations of the images on the screen. If Enderlin thought he would thus demonstrate the inadequacy of Karsenty’s case, he was very much mistaken. On the contrary, parts of his commentary were so absurd that the courtroom several times burst into incredulous laughter.

Here's more:

HonestReporting together with Take-A-Pen covered this afternoon's hearing in France where raw footage of the Mohammed Dura was publicly screened for the first time. HonestReporting/Take-A-Pen's Alain Benjamin, who saw the video in court, discussed by phone the proceedings with MediaBackspin editor Pesach Benson.

What did the raw footage show?

We can definitely say that nobody can say who was shooting at who. Charles Enderlin said in court that the Palestinians started shooting first, but in the end, there's no way we can say what happened that day. You can't tell who did what. The assertion from Charles Enderlin, that the Israeli army killed the boy, is totally wrong. The least he could've said was that the boy was killed--but we don't know by who.

There was a dispute over how much footage was to be screened. Was the full video shown?

Charles Enderlin submitted 18 minutes of footage. The judge, without any prompting from Philippe's lawyers, asked what happened to the 27 minutes. Enderlin said on record in court that he had to manipulate some footage that was not relevant to that day. He said he transferred the footage onto DVD for the court. That was amazing.

So she asked if anyone in attendance had seen the full footage. Luc Rosenzweig was there, stood up , and said he saw a tape that was more than 20 minutes long. Richard Landes also stood up. He saw the footage at Enderlin's office. He said the timer he saw was at least 21 minutes long. The judge basically let that issue rest, but there was serious doubt hanging over the room that the footage was tampered or doctored.

Here is another report, testifying to the edited-out footage.