Friends of Israel

As a Muslim I say Hamas is harming Palestine

IAEA: Bibi's Red Line Warnings Were Right

Roger Cohen and the New York Times: Useful Idiots

Hamas Left Israel No Choice but to Strike

Hamas gunmen execute six 'Israeli spies'

Remember Shirley Temper, the blonde palestinian girl and Pallywood darling?

She’s back in the news, this time mourning her brother relative.

Via the JPost:

Palestinian activist Abir Kopty of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee reported Monday that a Palestinian died in a Ramallah hospital two days after he was shot by an IDF soldier.

The incident took place in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh during clashes at protests against Operation Pillar of Defence.

In a video released Monday, around a dozen youths can be seen throwing rocks at IDF soldiers from a hillside in the village, while the soldiers fire tear gas and what sounds like rubber bullets.

At one point, Rushdi Tamimi, 31, is seen sitting on the hillside, then shots are heard and he falls to his side. The video then cuts to footage shot by a cameraman running to help Tamimi, who is seen crouched with blood on his head. The soldiers tell the protesters to back away from the man, but after a few minutes they relent and allow the protesters to allow him to be taken to a hospital.

Kopty said that Tamimi was shot once in the lower back and the bullet lodged in his stomach. Although he was admitted to a hospital by Saturday evening, he died of his wounds, she said.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that “on Saturday there was an illegal violent protest where some 80 Palestinians threw rocks at IDF forces who used crowd dispersal methods against them.”

While the exact circumstances of his death are not yet clear, what seems to be clear is he was no boy scout.

On the Tamimi Press Facebook page, he is described as a “Palestinian national liberation movement martyr” and his photo is featured with the Fatah emblem, rifles and all.

There’s also this post, auto translated as follows:

Urgent: the martyrdom of the young Rushdie Mahmoud al-Tamimi of his wounds in the village of Nabi Saleh
Tamimi Press: trumpet Popular Resistance Movement Palestinian uprising in the village of Nabi Saleh hero martyr Rushdie Mahmoud Hassan al-Tamimi, 28, who died of his Bjarha that injured two days agofollowing a confrontation broke out in the village of Nabi Saleh in solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip was shot live in thigh and abdomen and was taken to the Palestine medical complex inRamallah and suffered internal bleeding before they rise to God as a martyr
Martyr al-Tamimi from the village of Nabi Saleh and works in a Palestinian police and invite you to participate in his funeral on Tuesday
I am God and to Him we return

His work in the palestinian police is confirmed by Maan News.

While it is not clear he was a terrorist, at the very least he was a member of the palestinian police, which makes it highly unlikely he was at the protests merely yelling out curses and picking daisies.

Update:

A Palestinian policeman bids farewell to 28-year-old Palestinian Rushdi Tamimi, a fellow officer, who died at a Ramallah hospital two days after Israeli forces shot him during a Gaza solidarity protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, 19 November. (Issam Rimawi / APA images)

From Ma'an:
Palestinian gunmen shot dead six alleged collaborators in the Gaza Strip who "were caught red-handed", according to a security source quoted by the Hamas Aqsa radio on Tuesday.

"They possessed hi-tech equipment and filming equipment to take footage of positions," it said.

The Hamas radio said the men, who were suspected of working for Israel, were shot. It did not elaborate.

Gunmen chained the body of one of the alleged collaborators to a motorcycle and dragged it throughout the main streets of Gaza City.
CNN's Anderson Cooper has a photo of the gruesome extrajudicial punishment.

By the way, this means that Hamas has killed twice as many Palestinian Arabs as they have killed Israelis during the current fighting.

AP adds:
Witnesses said the six men were pulled out of a van Tuesday, forced to lie face down on the street and then shot dead.

Five bodies lay in a pile as a mob stomped and spit on them. A sixth body was tied to a motorcycle and dragged through the streets as people screamed, "Spy! Spy!"

Hamas posted a sign on an electricity pole, naming the six alleged informers. UPDATE: A new photo (h/t EoL)


Let's negotiate! I'm sure they can be trusted!

One more: (h/t Sophie)

I don’t believe Hamas began its recent escalation with Israel on orders from Tehran (as I explain here). But I can see why many people do: Intentionally or not, Hamas has undeniably given its former Iranian paymasters and their Syrian client a great boon.

As Jonathan noted yesterday, the Hamas-Israel war has diverted attention from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear program. Even more shocking, however, is the way it has diverted attention from the ongoing–and far more massive–bloodletting in Syria.

On Monday, for instance, the lead headline in the New York Times’s overseas edition, the International Herald Tribune, screamed “Heavy civilian toll from Israeli strikes.” This “heavy toll” consisted of one airstrike on Sunday that killed 11 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and brought the total death toll since the fighting began to “more than 50 people, many of them civilians.”

That same day, the paper relegated Syria to the bottom of page 4. The headline read “Syria criticizes 3 countries for recognizing opposition”; civilian casualties weren’t mentioned at all. Yet according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, that weekend (the IHT doesn’t publish on Sunday) saw at least 129 Syrians killed, 47 on Saturday and 82 on Sunday, including 69 civilians. In other words, more civilians were killed in Syria that weekend alone than the total number of fatalities, both combatant and noncombatant, since the latest Hamas-Israel war began. But in the overseas edition of America’s self-proclaimed paper of record, they didn’t even rate a mention. Nor is the coverage less warped in other media outlets.

The total death toll in the Syrian conflict is nearing 40,000, the majority of them civilians. An eye-popping 400,000 refugees have fled into other countries. Anywhere from 1.2 million to 2.5 million Syrians have been internally displaced, most living in appalling conditions that will only worsen as winter progresses. By any standard, it’s a humanitarian crisis of vast proportions. Yet 11 Palestinians slain by Israel are enough to completely erase it from the media map. Syrian lives, it seems, are cheap in the eyes of the international media: Each Palestinian killed by Israel is worth more ink than 4,000 slain Syrians.

Syria’s erasure from the diplomatic map has been equally complete. A flood of high-level visitors, including the UN secretary general, the French foreign minister and the Turkish prime minister, has descended on Jerusalem and/or Cairo in recent days to demand that Israel on no account launch a ground operation. Has anyone noticed any senior diplomat trying to do anything about the Syrian slaughter lately?

Syrians, of course, aren’t the only ones victimized by the international obsession over Palestinian casualties. As Alan Dershowitz eloquently explained, the foremost victims may be Palestinians themselves: As long as Hamas knows that every dead Palestinian will result in international opprobrium for Israel and diplomatic gains for itself, it has every incentive both to continue lobbing rockets at Israel, thereby sparking the retaliation that causes these civilian casualties, and to maximize such casualties by using its own civilian population as human shields.

But the Palestinians made their own bed: They elected Hamas. Syrians just had the bad luck to be caught in the fallout.

I have noticed the following photo and caption being spread on social media (for example, here).

Today, a six month old Palestinian boy and his mother arrived from Gaza to the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon [Tel Aviv], just as the Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza toward the Tel Aviv metropolitan area and a vehicle outside the hospital was damaged by shrapnel.

[source]

But it is not entirely true. Using the same image tool I use to identify fake photos being disseminated by the anti-Israel crowd brought me to the photo source.

Sure, it is a photo of an Israeli doctor and palestinian mother and child (as part of the Save a Child’s Heart program), but it’s from September 2012.

Now don’t get me wrong. It does show how we are involved in humanitarian causes that transcend the conflict. It is just not accurate to depict it as a photo from this week.

And believe me, our enemies will pounce on us for mistakes like this.

We do not need to be careless with the truth, because it is on our side.

Once again Israel is scrupulous to avoid civilian casualties against an enemy that does all it can to make them a reality. "Israel army orders Gaza City residents to evacuate ‘immediately,’" from al Arabiya, November 20: The Israeli army gave Gaza City residents leaflets ordering them to evacuate “immediately,” heightening... Robert http://www.jihadwatch.org/

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia took the throne on August 1, 2005 upon the death of his older brother and predecessor, King Fahd. Abdullah was a sprightly 81 when he took the throne, or so it must seem in hindsight. Now 88 years old, King Abdullah just had “successful” back surgery, or so the strictly controlled Saudi press is reporting.

Twitter, however, is abuzz with reports that the King has Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. The reports, as the Open Source Center points out, are coming from @mujtahidd, who has more than 750,000 followers and whose previous tweets suggest close and informed access to the royal family. As in any autocratic, opaque society, rumors often substitute for news, though this one seems more solid than most.

Crown Prince Salman is in charge meanwhile back home, but at 76 years old he’s not a beacon of stability. When it comes to Middle Eastern stability, when it rains, it pours.

I got this video from the Islamic Jihad saraya.ps front page.

The caption brags that this mortar launcher is targeting the Kerem Shalom crossing, from which the majority of Gaza's food, medicine and other aid arrives.



Despite the barrage of rockets and mortars, Israel opened the crossing on Sunday to allow aid to get to Gazans. Since this is a new video, it appears that Islamic Jihad deliberately is trying to shut the crossing down, to cause a "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza.

Hamas leaves Israel no choice
Israel will not allow the lives of its citizens to be endangered. If only Gaza’s leaders felt the same.

By DFM Danny Ayalon, the Guardian

Hamas’s charter includes the aspiration that “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)”. While many concentrate on its death-cult worship, its bloodthirsty killing of adversaries, or its contempt for women, Christians and homosexuals, it is this aspiration for genocide that is at the root of Hamas activities. This is the primary reason why Hamas, the governing regime in Gaza, will never recognise or accept a peace accord with Israel in any form.

Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, thousands of rockets have rained down on Israeli cities and towns in deliberate contravention not just of international law, but all humanity and morality. While some might suggest the so-calledblockade is the cause of the attacks, it is actually a consequence. The restrictions were only implemented two years after Israel left Gaza, when it was clear that instead of building a “Singapore of the Middle East”, Hamas was interested in importing stockpiles of weapons from places like Iran. Instead of building a future for its people, Hamas built an open-air prison for the million and a half inhabitants who fell into its grasp.

However, Gaza was never enough for an organisation whose raison d’etre is the annihilation of Israel, and whose charter begins with the ominous warning that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”.

Every rocket from Gaza is a double war crime. First, the rockets are aimed at civilians; second, they are fired from built-up civilian areas, often close to schools, mosques and hospitals. And about 10% of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza don’t reach Israel, exploding in Gaza. Mohammed Sadallah – a four-year-old killed on Saturday, his body displayed in a press conference with Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader – was, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, most likely killed by an errant Hamas rocket.

Hamas leaders frequently declare that their people actively seek death. Fathi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas, stated in 2008 that “for the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women and children excel. Accordingly we created a human shield of women, children and elderly. We seek death as you [Israelis] desire life.”

Hamas seeks conflagration and war. Death and destruction is seen as a win-win calculation, as any Israeli death is considered a glorious achievement and every Palestinian death that of a “holy martyr”, providing badly needed propaganda locally and internationally. Seemingly there are not enough deaths for them, so Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, has been busy sending out pictures of massacres in Syria, claiming they were taken in Gaza.

Israel has been left with little choice but to root out this nest of hate and destruction. No nation on earth would allow a third of its population to live in constant fear of incessant fire emanating from a neighbouring territory. Our government exercised restraint. We gave the international community time to act. However, there was a deafening silence, demonstrating to Israelis that we had to take action to protect our citizens.

Those who refused to condemn the attacks on Israeli citizens have no right to condemn Israel’s response to establish peace and quiet for its citizens. This is the basic obligation of any sovereign nation, and we will continue taking any action necessary to achieve this aim.

In the face of this undeniable truth, the usual accusation is that Israel is responding with “disproportionate force” or carrying out “collective punishment”. I urge all who make this accusation to consider that Israel has successfully targeted in excess of 1,300 weapons caches, rocket launchers and other elements of Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure. Yet despite this, the number of Palestinian casualties remains around one for every 13 strikes, the majority killed being active members of Hamas and combatants.

Israel will not allow its citizens’ lives to be endangered. The international community must call on the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip to take the same approach with its own people.

This kind of thing is common, and yet witless mainstream media reporters still swallow uncritically what smoothly deceitful Islamic supremacist spokesmen tell them about jihad. More on this story. "California terrorist suspects talked of 'violent jihad,' FBI says," from the Los Angeles Times, November 20: California men charged with plotting... Robert http://www.jihadwatch.org/

They've known for months that a Muslim cleric planted evidence on her. Will that cleric be prosecuted for blasphemy for burning pages of the Qur'an? Not likely. "Pakistan drops Christian girl blasphemy case," from France24, November 20 (thanks to Blazing Cat Fur): A Pakistani court dismissed on Tuesday a blasphemy... Robert http://www.jihadwatch.org/

In FrontPage this morning I consider the inevitable question: The Jerusalem Post reported Monday that “Israel agreed to briefly hold off on sending ground forces into Gaza to allow time for cease-fire efforts to continue.” Meanwhile, Hamas top dog Khaled Mashaal demanded that Israel initiate a cease-fire if it... Robert http://www.jihadwatch.org/

At Atlas Shrugs I discuss the sad case of fascist "journalist" Mona Eltahawy: In the classic movie On the Waterfront, the failed boxer Terry Malloy complains in anguish to his brother: “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” Those... Robert http://www.jihadwatch.org/

On Nov. 20, 2012, the IDF targeted an underground rocket launching site in Gaza.



On Monday. November 19, 2012, the IDF targeted a munitions storage site within a residential suburb in the southern Gaza Strip. The abnormally large explosion indicates that the building was used as a weapons depot. This is yet another example of terrorists' use the civilian population in Gaza as human shields,



Home video of Iron Dome taking down a huge barrage of rockets aimed at Beersheva, I believe Monday:




(h/t Yoel)

The current bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum. Israel is exercising its legitimate right to self-defense in light of repeated rocket attacks coming from Gaza.

Since 1 January 2012, we were able to count 20 separate letters sent by Israel’s Mission to the UN in New York to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the President of the Security Council. In these letters, the Israeli diplomats inform the United Nations about repeated instances of rockets landing to Israel from Gaza. In addition, they ask the U.N. to condemn the rocket attacks and they add “inaction today could help ignite an escalation of conflict tomorrow.” Unfortunately, we were not able to locate a U.N. condemnation of these attacks.

Below is the full list:

• 3 January 2012
• 27 January 2012
• 31 January 2012
• 3 February 2012
• 17 February 2012
• 8 March 2012
• 11 March 2012
• 13 March 2012
• 4 May 2012
• 17 May 2012
• 21 June 2012
• 25 June 2012
• 18 July 2012
• 28 August 2012
• 29 August 2012
• 11 September 2012
• 10 October 2012
• 16 October 2012
• 24 October 2012
• 12 November 2012

This is another list of similar letters from the 2000-2008 period

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is not only a shameless and well-known anti-Semite, jihadist enabler, and apologist slash propagandist extraordinaire for Islam. He's also an unrepentant racist to boot. Among his more stunning recent 'insights' is the conviction that Arabs are apparently too stupid to be... The Anti-Jihadist http://pedestrianinfidel.blogspot.com