IRIS' Israel Blog

Pinch me — now even the U.S. State Department has criticized the Goldstone Report as well as rhetoric by the Palestinian media:

The Goldstone report was widely criticized for methodological failings, legal and factual errors, falsehoods, and for devoting insufficient attention to the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the fact that Hamas and other Palestinian militants were deliberately operating in heavily populated urban areas of Gaza. The government of Israel also sharply rejected the charge that it had a policy of deliberately targeting civilians.

In addition, the report said:

In both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank… Palestinian media frequently published and broadcast material that included anti-Israeli content. Rhetoric by Palestinian terrorist groups included expressions of anti-Semitism, as did sermons by some Muslim religious leaders. Some Palestinian religious leaders rejected the right of Israel to exist. Hamas’ al-Aqsa television station carried shows for preschoolers extolling hatred of Jews and suicide bombings.

We have to agree with Likud member of Knesset Yariv Levin who questions why is Israel apologizing for building construction in Jerusalem?

MK Yariv Levin (Likud)… expressed confusion over Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s apology regarding construction in Jerusalem. “We have the absolute right to build anywhere in the land of Israel and especially in Jerusalem,” he said.

Netanyahu apologized to United States Vice President Joe Biden over the approval of a construction project in the Jewish neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo in Jerusalem. Biden had condemned the project, saying it could undermine talks with the Palestinian Authority, which claims the land on which Ramat Shlomo is built as Arab territory.

Foreign attempts to dictate Israeli policy in Jerusalem are “blatant interference,” Levin said. “This is an internal matter, not an international matter,” he explained.

“How can it be that we need permission from the Americans every time we want to build a neighborhood or a house in Jerusalem?” Levin said. The American condemnation of Israeli plans to build in Jerusalem exposed the real problem, the problem of Israel’s willingness to accept foreign meddling in domestic affairs, he stated.

“The time has come for us to stand up for ourselves. I have no doubt that if we do so, the world will see us differently,” he said.

Finally, the appropriate response to the mindless “Israel Apartheid Week” events being held by the Arabs and their “useful idiots” this week in cities around the world. Instead of explaining for the thousandth time that Israeli Arabs have full rights, unlike blacks in the Apartheid years of South Africa, columnist (and former IRIS co-chairman) Michael Freund suggests that we should turn the tables and launch a yearly “Arab Aparthied Week”.

Well, I say the time has come to stop playing defense and to bring the offense out onto the field. We need to turn the tables and fight back against our opponents by taking the struggle toward their end-zone.

A good place to be start would be to organize an annual “Arab Apartheid Week,” which would highlight the decrepit state of human and political rights throughout the Arab world.

There is a solid case to be made that the Arab states remain the last great outpost of despotism and tyranny on earth, and people need to be reminded as much. Indeed, the Arab world today is a living encyclopedia of outmoded forms of government, from sultanates such as Oman and emirates such as Qatar, to thuggish dictatorships such as Syria and dynastic monarchies along the lines of Jordan. It may be a political scientist’s dream, but it is a nightmare for the hundreds of millions of Arabs chafing under oppression and tyranny.

Basic and fundamental freedoms such as personal autonomy and individual rights are routinely trampled upon, and ethnic and religious minority groups suffer extreme discrimination and intolerance. Just ask Coptic Christians in Egypt, Baha’is in Iran or Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia for starters.

Or Jews anywhere in the Middle East…

This was borne out most recently by a report issued by Freedom House, the independent Washington-based group that advocates for freedom worldwide. Its annual survey, “Freedom in the World 2010,” would make for eye-opening reading for all those who cry “apartheid” whenever they see a flag with a Star of David.

Consider the following findings:

Of the 18 countries in the Middle East that Freedom House surveyed, only one is considered to be “free.”

And just who might that be? Yep, you guessed it: Israel.

Not a single Arab country – not one! – did Freedom House consider “free”…

In effect, then, this means that of the approximately 370 million human beings currently residing in the Middle East, only 2 percent enjoy true freedom – namely those who live in the Jewish state.

So much for “Israeli apartheid”…

An annual Arab Apartheid Week, held on campuses and at community centers, could be an effective vehicle for driving home this fundamental truth.

This blog previously posted a piece by Khaled Abu Toameh concerning PA theft of hundreds of millions in foreign financial aid. Many such cases of corruption were exposed by intelligence official Fahmi Shabaneh, previously designated by Abbas as the Palestinian Authority’s “chief corruption-buster”. Shabaneh was later discredited and sacked when he collected evidence which apparently got too close to incriminating dozens of senior officials, as well as Abbas’ two sons. Shabaneh, as Abu Toameh reported, “is now ‘wanted’ by the Palestinian Authority on charges of ‘collaboration with the Israeli enemy.’”

Khaled Abu Toameh reports for the Jerusalem Post that now president Abbas has appointed a new commission of inquiry regarding corruption in the PA. The question must be asked — Is Abbas’ new anti-corruption panel simply an act of covering his and his sons’ tracks?:

A special commission of inquiry established by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to investigate a series of corruption cases in the PA…

The commission was set up after former PA intelligence official Fahmi Shabaneh… exposed several cases implicating top officials in sexual, financial and administrative corruption…

Shabaneh, a resident of east Jerusalem, said he has little faith in the commission of inquiry, which is headed by Saleh Ra’fat, secretary-general of the Palestinian People’s Party, formerly the Palestinian Communist Party.

The other two members of the commission are Ali Muhana, chairman of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, and Natsheh, the PA official who was recently appointed as Abbas’s “personal representative.”

All three members of the commission are known for their close ties with Abbas and the PA leadership in the West Bank – a fact that has left many Palestinians to believe that the panel’s main goal is to exonerate all of Abbas’s men of any wrongdoing.

The word “whitewash” comes to mind.

Theater of the absurd: Israel has stopped hunting some terrorists as a reward for (allegedly) getting help stopping terror:

Correspondent Khalid Abu Toameh reports in The Jerusalem Post that 77 Fatah men were taken off Israel’s wanted list as reward to the PA. [This is not a parody.]

Israel has decided to stop pursuing dozens of… members of Fatah’s armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, Palestinian sources said on Tuesday.

Israeli security officials recently handed the Palestinian Authority a list that included the names of 77 Fatah operatives who were no longer wanted by Israel, the sources said.

Most of the men are members of the armed group of Fatah, which was responsible for a series of attacks on Israelis during the second intifada, the sources said.

They said that 10 of them had been fully pardoned, which means they would be able to move around freely and even travel abroad.

Some of the Fatah men were told that they would have to remain inside their homes during the night, while others were instructed to sleep at PA security installations.

A list with the names of all the pardoned Fatah operatives was posted by the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency. Most of the men are from Ramallah and Nablus.

The decision to stop chasing the Fatah men was not the first of its kind. In recent years, dozens of Fatah gunmen who agreed to hand over their weapons to the PA and renounce violence were also granted clemency. Some of them later resumed their activities and were either killed or arrested by the IDF.

The latest Israeli move is seen as a reward for the PA leadership for its increased security coordination with Israel…

What is so absurd about this is that those 77 terrorists were almost surely worth much more than whatever alleged cooperation was given by the Palestinian Authority to Israel. Should the PA have turned them over to Israel if they were really cooperating? And shouldn’t they have turned down this “reward” if they were really interested in helping stop terror against Israel?

Anyone who may still think that the United States is secure and invulnerable to infiltration by Islamic Jihadists should read and consider this. The Los Angeles Times reports that a self-proclaimed American “JihadJane” has been nabbed for recruiting Muslim terrorists through various online platforms:

Using e-mail, YouTube videos, phony travel documents and a burning desire to kill “or die trying,” an American woman from Pennsylvania helped recruit a network for suicide attacks and other terrorist strikes in Europe and Asia, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed Tuesday.

Colleen R. LaRose, who dubbed herself “JihadJane,” was so intent on waging jihad, authorities said, that she traveled to Sweden to kill an artist in a way that would frighten “the whole Kufar [nonbeliever] world”…

The 46-year-old woman bragged that she could go anywhere undetected…

Authorities said LaRose solicited funds for terrorist organizations, helped arrange phony passports and other travel records, and used the Internet to recruit women to kill in Europe and men in Asia. LaRose was arrested Oct. 15 in Philadelphia.

David Kris, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division… emphasized, “[this] underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face.”

Michael L. Levy, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, said the case shows “the use terrorists can and do make” of communicating through e-mails and videos around the world. He called LaRose “yet another very real danger lurking on the Internet.”

The other danger, authorities said, is that radical jihadists are turning to home-grown U.S. citizens to carry out their plots. “Terrorists are looking for Americans to join them in their cause,” Levy said, adding that LaRose “shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance.”

A Washington Post piece on the alleged American terrorist adds:

As an American citizen whose appearance and passport allowed her to blend into Western society, LaRose represents one of the worst fears of intelligence and FBI analysts focused on identifying terrorist threats.

She looked for recruits whose physical appearance would “blend in with many people” and go undetected in Europe and the United States.

The AP reports that a California man has been nabbed assisting Arab students in U.S. visa fraud:

A California man was charged Monday with operating a ring of illegal test-takers who helped dozens of Middle Eastern nationals obtain U.S. student visas by passing various proficiency and college-placement exams for them, federal authorities said.

The allegations reveal a potentially dangerous security breach in the country’s student visa system and underscored the vulnerability of a tracking process that relies on schools and testing centers to verify the identities of people taking the mandated exams.

Eamonn Daniel Higgins, 46, of Laguna Niguel made an appearance in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud as federal immigration agents arrested 16 of his suspected clients who remained in Southern California…

Over a seven-year period, Higgins collected tens of thousands of dollars from foreign students from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Kuwait, Turkey and Qatar before he or his accomplices took their exams at ten southern California community colleges and universities using doctored IDs.

Higgins may have worked with hundreds of foreign students, although authorities have only been able to definitively identify 119.

They believe 48 students remain in the U.S., and authorities are seeking all of them…

A search of Higgins’ home turned up 60 fake IDs, college testing materials and completed exams and payment information from foreign students, court papers said.

Most of those students were presumably just interested in the exceptional educational and economic opportunities available in the US, but certainly if it was this easy to get them in it would be easy to get terrorists in the same way.

The Jerusalem Post has published this piece by Dore Gold providing insight into the hidden agenda behind “Israel Apartheid Week”:

To begin with, in apartheid South Africa (1948-1994), blacks were not allowed to vote or to be candidates in the general elections, they could not attend white universities or be treated in white hospitals, and they were forcibly removed from white cities. Anyone who is the least bit familiar with Israel knows that Israeli Arabs vote for the Knesset and that there are Israeli Arab Knesset members, who also serve as deputy speakers of Israel’s parliament; an Israeli Arab judge sits on Israel’s Supreme Court; Israeli Arabs study in all Israeli universities and there are mixed Arab-Jewish cities, like Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle and Jerusalem.

Can you imagine the opposite happening in Jordan, where it is a capital crime to sell land to a Jew? Or any of the many Arab countries that won’t let someone visit if the person previously visited Israel?

What underlies the Israel Apartheid Week campaign… is a highly politicized interpretation of Israel’s history in which the Jewish people are viewed as a colonialist movement that recently came from Europe to usurp lands from the indigenous Palestinian population, rather than the authentic claimants to sovereignty in their historical homeland.

Prof. Moshe Gil of Tel Aviv University wrote in his 900-page monumental work, A History of Palestine: 634-1099, that as late as the seventh century, Jews still had a massive presence in most parts of what had been their sovereign territory up until the Roman invasion. Some suggest that the Jews were still the majority. According to Gil, on the eve of the Muslim conquests, the Jewish presence in the land was nearly 2,000 years old.

Moreover, there was a constant effort of Jews to return to their land in the centuries that followed, despite the dangers. By the 1860s the Jews, in fact, reestablished their majority in Jerusalem, well before the arrival of the British Empire. When the League of Nations decided to recognize the Jewish claim to a national home in 1922, it specifically recognized the pre-existing right of the Jewish people to what was to become British Mandatory Palestine.

Israel Apartheid Week is not about respect for human rights; it is an incredibly hypocritical initiative that ignores the apartheid practiced by the Palestinians themselves, who make the sale of land to Jews punishable by death.

If it is Israel that wants Apartheid, why is it that the Arabs (and their Apartheid Week supporters) insist that all Jews be removed from the territories in order for there to be peace?

This Associated Press report describes a case study in how nuclear equipment reaches Iran:

Early last year, a Chinese company placed an order with a Taiwanese agent for 108 nuclear-related pressure gauges. But something happened along the way. Paperwork was backdated. Plans were rerouted, orders reconfigured, shipping redirected.

And the gauges ended up in a very different place: Iran.

The story behind the gauges shows how Iran is finding its way around international sanctions meant to prevent it from getting equipment that can be used to make a nuclear bomb. At least half a dozen times in recent years, the Persian Gulf nation has tried to use third countries as transshipment points for obtaining controlled, nuclear-related equipment.

In the case of the pressure gauges, it succeeded. In the process, the Swiss manufacturer and the Swiss government were duped, a Chinese company went around its own government’s prohibition on moving nuclear-related equipment to Iran, and Taiwanese authorities showed themselves unwilling or unable to get into step with the international community.

The deal was a huge victory for Tehran, which had been seeking the gauges for months, said nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. It also reflected the uneven enforcement of international sanctions against Iran, at a time when the U.S. and other Western countries are pushing hard to expand them.

“The (Iranian) government looked everywhere — Russia, Europe, the U.S., and they were being thwarted by the international community,” Albright said. “It’s really unfortunate they succeeded in using this Taiwan-China connection. …This case is a wake up call of the importance of universal and timely application of sanctions on Iran.”

….The gauges, also known as pressure transducers or capacitance diaphragm gauges, …have numerous commercial applications in machines that employ pneumatic or hydraulic pressure. But experts say the large size of the order suggests very strongly that they are for centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium…

In Shanghai, Roc-Master official Liu Xiaofeng initially said he didn’t recall the transaction. But when pressed, he replied, “It’s our company’s secret information, so I don’t think we need to tell the media anything about it.”

I know we have all been reading these stories for years, but Iran keeps getting closer to a nuclear bomb and sooner or later, it is going to get there:

…the US and Europe said they share UN fears that Teheran may be secretly working on developing nuclear missiles, expressing support for new sanctions if Teheran continues to defy Security Council demands.

Their comments reflected the change in tone of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under new director-general Yukiya Amano in its assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Amano… expressed the possibility that Iran may be working on making a nuclear warhead, with the IAEA suggesting for the first time that Teheran had either resumed such work or never stopped it three years ago, as thought by US intelligence agencies.

Iran denies any interest in developing nuclear arms. But the report said Iran’s resistance to agency attempts to investigate for signs of a nuclear cover-up “give rise to concerns about possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

An unusually strongly worded statement delivered by Spain on behalf of the EU to the IAEA’s 35-nation board criticized Teheran…

“The EU shares the agency’s concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,” according to the statement.

Beyond making the same point, US chief delegate Glyn Davies said the IAEA is justified in being concerned that Teheran — accused of repeatedly concealing suspicious nuclear activities or revealing them only to pre-empt being found out — “about the possible construction in secret of other new nuclear facilities in Iran.”

An Op-Ed column in The Jerusalem Post reports about Israeli soldiers who are speaking out against media slander of the IDF during a tour of North America:

Conspicuously missing in the narrative of Israel’s recent battles against terrorists is the story of those who actually fought in them; the everyday soldier, with no political agenda, just a conviction in the morality of his army and the personal experience to back that up. But that is no longer the case. Groups of Israeli soldiers, young combat reservists are currently touring North America as part of the “Israeli Soldiers Speak Out’” campaign.

Those who have recently served see that the picture the media presents is skewed from the reality they know. They feel a deep sense of injustice when this happens, given that they have risked their own lives and lost friends while doing their utmost to protect Palestinian civilians….

Their personal battlefield experience challenges members of the audience to put themselves in their shoes and to question what they would do in similar scenarios.

Audiences will meet Inon, an officer who was fighting Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 when his unit came across an elderly Lebanese woman in an area where the IDF had warned citizens to leave while they carried out their operation. Seeing the lady was crying out, apparently in pain, they approached her with an army medic. As they got closer, they realized she was wired with explosives… a human bomb.

Also taking part in the tour is Avi, who cut his honeymoon short to rejoin his paratroopers brigade in the military operation against Hamas in Gaza last year. As he fought intense, pitched battles against Hamas gunmen, he saw the streets covered with leaflets. The terrorists had been warned by the IDF that they were coming, thus denying Avi and his colleagues the element of surprise. But a prerequisite for a moral army is wanting to give civilians a chance to flee the battle zone.

THESE STORIES are not documented in the many recent anti-Israel reports, which have ranged from the libelous to the ludicrous. Israel was being bombarded by rockets for the better part of a decade before acting against the Hamas rocket-launchers in Gaza. Yet, before the dust had cleared from the battlefield, the frenzied media – fuelled by politically motivated NGOs – was full of reports and allegations: of reckless bombardment by the IDF, misuse of weapons, organ harvesting.. the list goes on.

And these slanders have been re-reported as fact in much of the Arab (and Western) media…. Web-based technology gives hideous anti-Israel lies a platform that has no borders. Israel’s enemies know this, as Spanish politician Pilar Rahola recently commented… “they [Islamic terrorists] seek to kill us with cellphones connected to the Middle Ages”.

These reports mention Israel in the same breath as Hamas, who fight in civilian clothing, take their own people as human shields and have used every trick in the book to blur and subvert the rules of war. Radical sympathizers are quick to turn a blind eye to this and explain away their rockets as “crude”, when in reality these terrorist forces are better armed than the majority of the armies of… the UN.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has issued a review showing that Hamas targeted Israeli population centers:

Hamas has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove that it did not attack civilian targets in Israel during the December 2008 to January 2009 Gaza conflict. But a review of the organization’s own media… shows that Hamas knowingly and repeatedly fired on Israeli population centers in southern Israel.

They [Hamas' targeting of Israeli civilians] are approved and applauded within Hamas’ internal publications and its propaganda aimed at Arab audiences. For example, in one Arabic article on the Kassam Brigades website, the group discusses rocket operations during the al-Furqan battle and cites the heroism of the Kassam Brigades personnel who conducted the attacks…

During the Gaza conflict, Hamas launched some 600 rockets against… a broad swath of southern Israel. Targets included the major cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Beersheba (combined population 850,000), as well as numerous smaller towns and settlements.

In addition, an estimated 400 Kassam-type rockets were fired at Israeli targets closer to Gaza, including “usurped” Sderot. On the same page on its website, Hamas claims to have fired a total of 213 Grads during the conflict; in other words, nearly 70 percent were aimed at civilian population centers… The highest number of Grad strikes claimed against a military target was 26 at the “Ofakim military base.”

Hamas boasted that more than one million Israelis live within range of its rockets.

The IRIS blog has posted several reports recently concerning New Israel Fund, J Street and efforts to compel registration of foreign funded NGO’s. An investigative report in The Jerusalem Post adds further fuel to the necessity for laws which act against foreign funded NGO’s by begging the question, European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights: Funding Humanitarian Needs, or Europe’s Trojan Horse Lobby in Israel?:

Between 2002 and 2008, the European Parliament’s European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) granted a total of $14 million to various Israeli NGOs. $5.5 million was directed specifically to causes for Palestinians such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s project “Building a Better Future: Empowering the Palestinian Residents of East Jerusalem to access their planning and house [sic] rights” which received $135,000. A further $7 million went specifically to programs that benefit Israeli Arabs such as the al-Awna fund’s “Master Plan for the Unrecognized Beduin Villages: Securing minority rights for housing and social services” which received $263,000. Even when the EIDHR funded programs for women it did so only for programs for Beduin or Israeli Arab women, except for a token $100,000 it gave to an organization called Isha le Isha (Woman to Woman) which helps fight women trafficking.

There was not one cent directed specifically towards any of the numerous and diverse Jewish communities in Israel: Ethiopians, Russians, Yemenites, Persians or Jews from the Caucasus. The only mention of Jewish citizens as potential recipients was in a grant to the Mossawa Center, the advocacy center for Arab citizens in Israel. It received $402,000 for a project that “aims to combat racism and transform inter-communal relations between target groups who include the Jewish majority, Arab minority and ethnic groups including the Russian, Ethiopian, Mizrahi and Reform Jewish communities.”

Around $73,000 was directed towards former IDF soldiers. It wasn’t to help them with trauma or reward them for a “shared citizenship.” It was to get them to “break the silence” about what they witnessed while in the army, to provide testimony that might lead to a process whereby European courts might put the soldiers or their officers on trial for war crimes. Of course that is not what Breaking the Silence stated for the public. They described their project as “personal encounters with former Israeli combat soldiers.”

THE EIDHR’s “instrument” to affect Israeli policy is merely the tip of the iceberg. In its November 2009 report “Trojan Horse: The impact of European government funding for Israeli NGOs” NGO Monitor illustrated that individual European embassies in Israel and other EU projects give lavishly to Israeli NGOs, sometimes even making up the majority of their budgets. In fact “foreign-funded local NGOs are responsible for a significant portion of the petitions brought before the Israeli High Court of Justice,” says the report.

The EU, realizing it could not get Israel to change its laws through diplomatic means, has resorted to creating an internal lobby within Israel to get Israel to bend to the will of Europe.

An important question not answered in this investigative report is to what extent the money trail covered in Im Tirzu’s report on New Israel Fund leads back to the European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights. Presumably this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This blog previously reported that Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi plead guilty to charges connected to a New York subway bombing plot. The Associated Press now reports that 2 more Afghans have been indicted in the New York City bomb plot:

Two high school classmates of admitted terrorist plotter Najibullah Zazi were indicted Thursday in a foiled scheme to bomb New York City subways that a prosecutor said was directed by “al-Qaida leadership.”

Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, both 25, pleaded not guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

The three men were planning an attack on city subway lines last September under the direction of leaders of the al-Qaida terrorist network that would have been similar to the 2005 London subway bombings that killed more than 50 people, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Knox said.

“The facts alleged in this indictment shed further light on the scope of this attempted attack…,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “This attack would have been deadly”…

Medunjanin and Ahmedzay — who authorities say traveled to Pakistan with Zazi in 2008… faced charges in the alleged plot.

Medunjanin has pleaded not guilty to charges he conspired to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. His lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb, said this week he didn’t know whether Zazi told prosecutors anything about his client but Zazi’s decision to plead guilty “obviously affects the overall prosecution.”

Ahmedzay has pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied to the FBI during the probe about places he visited during the 2008 trip.

Zazi’s uncle, father and a Queens imam face lesser charges in the case.

It is well known that the Palestinian Authority has been a kleptocracy from the very beginning. And Hamas is no different; see, for example, Hamas Stealing Aid Supplies to Sell to Gazans. But still it helps to keep bringing to light the ongoing examples, as columnist and commentator Khaled Abu Toameh does when reporting that the PA is still stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid:

Donor countries have yet to respond to revelations by former Palestinian intelligence official Fahmi Shabaneh that some of Mahmoud Abbas’ close aides had siphoned off to private bank accounts hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for financial aid to the Palestinians.

Shabaneh expressed frustration over the way the international media has been handling his exposures: “Don’t the Americans, Europeans and Arabs care about their money that is being stolen?”

A former PA minister convinced Abbas and Arafat to give him about $5 million of international aid so that he could purchase land in Jerusalem “before Jews lay their hands on them.” Shabaneh’s investigations showed that the minister deposited most of the money in his private bank account and built a huge, luxurious villa on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Shabaneh also discovered that a former PA finance minister had deposited $8 million in his private bank account.

These are only a few… of the hundreds of cases Shabaneh dealt with when he was in his job, according to the former Palestinian intelligence official, who is now “wanted” by the Palestinian Authority on charges of “collaboration with the Israeli enemy.”

Shabaneh says that since Abbas appointed him as the chief corruption-buster in the Palestinian Authority six years ago, he has collected incriminating evidence against dozens of senior officials, in addition to the president’s two sons, Yasser and Tarek.

Abbas, meanwhile, has cut off Shabaneh’s salary to punish him for speaking out against corruption…

Actually, there is a bit of cosmic justice here. Many nations who helped foist the PA on Israel, all in the name of a very dubious peace. It therefore gives some pleasure to see those nations’ billions in financial aid to the PA being flushed down the drain.

A large part of Israel’s spectacular success in war and counter-terrorism is HUMINT — the Human Intelligence provided by people on the ground, as opposed to by technical means such as spy satellites. Only HUMINT can make possible an operation like the recent one where Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was eliminated. The West, which has recently found itself in serious trouble for over-reliance on technical sources of intelligence and failing to develop HUMINT resources in Muslim lands would be well-advised to follow Israel’s example.

Here is a breaking example of Israel’s almost unbelievable penetration into the very heart of the enemy camp: Haaretz reports that the son of a Hamas founder worked for Israel’s Shin Bet security service for over a decade.

The report notes:

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder and one of its leaders in the West Bank. The intelligence he supplied Israel led to the exposure of a number of terrorist cells, and to the prevention of dozens of suicide bombings and assassination attempts on Israeli figures.

Yousef, 32, became a devout Christian 10 years ago and now lives in California after fleeing the West Bank in 2007 and going public with his conversion.

Yousef was considered the Shin Bet’s most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname “the Green Prince” – using the color of the Islamist group’s flag, and “prince” because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement’s founders.

… Intelligence Yousef supplied led to the arrests of a number of high-ranking Palestinian figures responsible for planning deadly suicide bombings. These included Ibrahim Hamid (a Hamas military commander in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti (founder of the Fatah-linked Tanzim militia) and Abdullah Barghouti (a Hamas bomb-maker).

His memoir, Son of Hamas, will be released next week in the U.S.

His former handler, who no longer serves with the security service, says Yousef collaborated with Israel because he wanted to save lives.

“So many people owe him their life and don’t even know it,” said the handler, named in Yousef’s book as Captain Loai…

“Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis,” he said. “Palestinians! They do not hesitate to massacre people in a mosque or to throw people from the 15th or 17th floor of a building, as they did during the coup in Gaza. The Israelis would never do such things. I tell you with certainty that the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does.”

Analyst David Bedein of Israel Resource Review writes that a January, 2010 “United Nations’ Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict” clears allied coalition forces of culpability for civilian casualties in their war with Taliban in Afghanistan. Bedein notes that the UN report reveals its dual standards in assigning military culpability to Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War and in Operation Cast Lead in 2009:

The UN report explained that the Taliban frequently attacked coalition forces in densely populated areas and did not blame the United States army or its allies for deaths of civilians who were non combatants who live near the areas from where Taliban launched its attacks, using the civilian areas as a collective human shield.

The UN Afghanistan report stands in stark contrast to a recent report issued by a United Nations’ Human Rights Council’s investigative team, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, …which conducted an inquiry into Israel’s January 2009… military incursion into the Hamas- ruled Gaza Strip.

[Instead of blaming Hamas for its systematic use of civilians as human shields when attacking Israel, the Goldstone report instead blamed Israel for the deaths of non-combatants when defending itself.]

In direct contrast to the Goldstone Report from the same United Nations, the UN holds the Taliban terrorists directly responsible for collateral deaths in Afghanistan, at the same time that the UN alleges that Israel engages in “intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects,” even though Hamas terrorists openly use homes, schools, hospitals and mosques as their protective place of operation…

Significantly, more non-combatants have been injured or killed in Afghanistan by allied troops than by IDF forces in Gaza.

Former British commander in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp, told the BBC that he did “not think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more effort to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the [Israel Defense Forces] is doing… in Gaza.”

Using human shields and fighting from structures with non-combatant status such as mosques, schools and hospitals are both clear war crimes. Hamas does that for 2 reasons: 1) to make it harder for Israel (who apparently cares more for Arab civilians than the Hamas fighters hiding behind them) to fight Hamas, and 2) to get Israel blamed for causing the inevitable civilian deaths. As long as the UN, the media, and others continue to reward Hamas by playing along and blaming Israel for Hamas’ despicable behavior it is certain to continue.

Israel National News is reporting that recent statements concerning a “demographic threat” by defense minister Ehud Barak amount to “a dramatic error of a two million person gap.”

The IRIS blog has placed numerous posts through the years pointing to the glaring gaps between independent demographics studies and Israeli/PA census statistics. See: Jewish Demographic Momentum, Palestinian Demographic Dud Decelerates and Israel’s Demographic Situation Continues to Improve.

The key point behind all the numbers is that the Arab birthrate in the land of Israel and elsewhere has plummeted since 1967 due to the introduction of western sanitation and health care; it is now almost the same as the Jewish birthrate.

The Israel National News report states:

Labor party chairman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak earlier this month stated inflated figures on the number of Arabs in Israel in order to reach a conclusion that failure to reach a two-state solution would create “Apartheid,” according to defense industry official Chaim Rosenberg.

Rosenberg said that Barak’s figures of six million Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea artificially add two milion Arabs to the population figures.

Rosenberg is the head of Long-Term Planning at RAFAEL (Israel Defense Ministry’s Armament Development Authority). He wrote that a study published as recently as last year by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies concluded that there are only four million Arabs, distributed almost equally between Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and the rest of Israel…

The “demographic threat” is actually non-existent when compared with the census in 1948, when the Jewish State was re-established, the defense industry official stated. Rosenberg pointed out that Jews comprised only one-third of the population between the Jordan and the Mediterranean at that time. The “defiance of odds was responsible for the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State,” Rosenberg reminded readers.

“In 2010, there is a solid 67 percent Jewish majority in the combined area of pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria” he added. “However, some Israeli politicians employ toxic demographic assets. They inflate the number of Arabs in Judea and Samaria in order to scare the Jewish State into a retreat from a most critical area, historically and security-wise.

“Current demographics bode well for the Jewish majority, which is expected to grow during the next 20 years…, while Arab/Muslim fertility throughout the Middle East has declined sharply. In addition, the Arab minority has experienced an accelerated net-emigration of 580,000 from Judea and Samaria since 1967.

Rosenberg and IRIS are not the first to cite huge gaps in census data used by the Israeli government in demographics analysis. Other similar reports appear here, here and here. News commentator Caroline Glick also provided this jaw-dropping piece on the delusion of Israeli government census data in January, 2007:

The American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG) presented a plan for Israel’s future called “The Fourth Way.”…

Since 1997, Israel’s leaders have based their policies towards the Palestinians on what was perceived as a madly ticking Palestinian demographic time bomb. The public was told that the Palestinian population in Jerusalem, Gaza, Judea and Samaria was rapidly expanding and that by 2015, Jews would lose our majority west of the Jordan River. If we didn’t hurry up and hand over Judea, Samaria and Gaza and partition Jerusalem, we would find ourselves forced to choose between a Jewish state and a democratic one.

The AIDRG took it upon itself to do what no Israeli governmental body had considered doing: It… started counting heads. It worked out that the doomsday scenario was based on a massive fabrication. In 1997, the PA published census figures that exaggerated its population figures in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem by nearly 50 percent. The PA double counted Arab Jerusalemites, included hundreds of thousands of emigrants to its population rolls, asserted mass immigration when in fact there has been net emigration from the PA since 1995. It exaggerated fertility rates and underplayed mortality rates. In all, the PA added approximately 1.4 million people who did not exist to its population rolls.

Rather than 3.8 million Palestinians, the team found there were likely no more, and perhaps less than 2.4 million Palestinians. Jews, who make up an 80 percent majority within sovereign Israel, make up a 59% majority of the population of Israel with Gaza and Judea and Samaria and a 67% majority of the population with Judea and Samaria without Gaza.

To read Glick’s complete report on the gap in Israeli/Pa demographics statistics, click here.

The bottom line: the demographic argument used by the Left to push Israel towards territorial concessions is false. The policy implications of this fact are clear.

The New York Times reports that an Afghan immigrant plead guilty to charges concerning a bombing plot in the New York subway:

The Afghan immigrant at the center of what the authorities described as one of the most serious threats to the United States since 9/11 pleaded guilty Monday to terrorism charges in what he said was a Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb in the New York subway.

Najibullah Zazi admitted that he came to New York last year… to kill himself and others on the subway using a homemade bomb.

He characterized the plot as a “martyrdom operation” that he was just days away from executing when he realized he was under government surveillance.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said… : “This attempted attack on our homeland was real, it was in motion and it would have been deadly.”

Zazi told the court he went with friends to Pakistan in August 2008 to join the Taliban in fighting the U.S. in Afghanistan.

While in Pakistan, he received training in making bombs, and was persuaded by Qaeda operatives to return to America to be a suicide bomber. They discussed possible targets, including the New York subway system.

The BBC reports that Colonel Richard Kemp, a top British military officer, noted that the ‘UK combat doctrine has been Influenced by IDF.’ The BBC report stated:

Col. Kemp said the advice he received from the Israeli armed forces on how to tackle Afghan suicide bombers had been invaluable, and formed the basis of official army guidelines used by soldiers on the ground there.

He added that UK soldiers did not have to deal with the same amount of criticism from the international community as does the IDF.

“When we go into battle we do not get the same knee-jerk, almost Pavlovian response from many, many elements of the international media and international groups, humanitarian groups and other international groups such as the United Nations which should know better… of utter automatic condemnation. We don’t have to put up with that.”

Col. Kemp, previously cited on the IRIS blog here and here, was reported to have spoken the above comments cited by the BBC while speaking out yet again for the Israel Defense Forces, this time at a UK Zionist Federation dinner on Sunday in London according to this report from The Jerusalem Post:

“I was a professional soldier for 30 years in the British army and it was my honor and privilege to work alongside the IDF on a number of occasions during that time,” he said.

“I found in my time that the British forces and British government had no stronger ally than Israel and the IDF.”

The former commander… said he wrote the British army’s doctrine on suicide bombing based on help he received from an Israeli army expert on the issue.

“I went to Afghanistan to take over the British forces in 2003 and it was the first time I found myself in a situation where we faced suicide bomb attacks.

“I found that no one in the British forces had worked out a means to try to tackle suicide bomb attacks and how to train our soldiers to handle that situation,” Kemp said.

“…I spoke to a friend at the Israeli embassy and asked if he could help. I thought he would have me meet the defense attache’ at the embassy, but within days a brigadier-general, the top expert the IDF had on suicide bombing, came from his base in the Golan to London specifically to spend about four hours giving me a full briefing on the subject.

“As a result I devised a policy that subsequently became the British forces’ doctrine for dealing with suicide bombing,” he said…

The colonel said that some of the challenges British forces face in Iraq and Afghanistan are comparable to the challenges Israel faces in Gaza and Lebanon…

Comparing the predicament of British forces currently fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan to what Israel is up against, he said, “They fight among the people, they use their own population as weapons of war and that was certainly true of Hamas in the Gaza conflict. They deliberately sacrificed their own people, deliberately did their best to lure Israeli forces to attack their civilian population, and the same thing happens in Afghanistan.

“Taliban forces use the same tactics of trying to draw our forces onto their civilian population that they pretend to protect.”

The colonel repeated his opinion that the IDF went to considerable lengths to protect human life during Operation Cast Lead.

During the Gaza conflict Kemp said… that the IDF was going out of its way to save Palestinian lives, while Hamas were deliberately using civilians as human shields. He also said the IDF was a world leader in humane warfare that seeks to protect civilian lives as much as possible.

“Israeli forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare,” Kemp told the UN Human Rights Council last year.