28-Dec-08: On standing firm

Haaretz columnist Amos Harel says:

"This is the harshest IDF assault on Gaza since the territory was captured during the Six-Day War in 1967. Palestinian sources in Gaza report that 40 targets were destroyed in a span of three to five minutes. This was a massive attack... Simultaneous, heavy bombardment of a number of targets on which Israel spent months gathering intelligence. The military "target bank" includes dozens of additional targets linked to Hamas, some of which will certainly come under attack in the coming days... Little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians. From Israel's standpoint, Hamas, which persistently fires rockets while using the civilian population as cover, had plenty of opportunities to save face and lower their demands. In stubbornly continuing to launch rockets during the course of recent weeks, it brought this assault on itself."

But as Lenny Ben-David points out: "The blood libels against Israel have already begun", quoting as an illustration a Sean Rayment article in yesterday's Telegraph (UK): "The attack on the Gaza strip is proof that Israel is addicted to violence. Slaughtering 155 civilians, many of whom are women and children, can not be justified."

Lenny calls this

"An absolute blood libel. No military force in the world is as careful as the Israeli Defense Forces in differentiating combatants from the civilians surrounding them. Note this report from Bloomberg: "Most of the Palestinian dead were members of the Hamas security forces, including police chief Tawfiq Jaber and the head of the organization’s Security and Protection Service, Ismail al-Jabary, said Taher Noono, a spokesman for Hamas." Pictures from Gaza indicate this fact. Note these photos of Palestinian security forces hit in their bases. These are uniformed combatants of a force that declared war on Israel, and they are very legitimate targets according to international law."

His blog has the pictures.

Our guess is the blood-libel allegations against Israel will continue. The Hamas war effort demands it, and past experience shows they have little difficulty tapping into a pre-existing reservoir of knee-jerk commitment to the "weak" (Hamas) in their battle against the "strong" (Israel). The trouble, as we keep pointing out here in our blog entries, is the lack of awareness of how much trouble Israel absorbs with little or no reporting: the thousands of rocket strikes that no other country would ever take sitting down; the steady and deliberate escalation by the Hamas terror regime of threats and hostile actions, up to and including Friday of this week; the relentless indoctrination of Palestinian Arab children to hate and demonize Jews, Israelis, Christians and other non-adherents of the jihad-tainted religion to which Hamas subscribes.

When Sean Raiment, writing about Israel's action, says "this attack is both disgraceful and disproportionate", it's a fair bet he has very little concept of what it means to live next door to a full-blown jihadist regime. In fact two of them, since Hizbullah-land to the north is bristling with weapons and missiles that no one here thinks will remain in their wrapping for long.

Raiment is not alone, and we're not singling him out. He's simply an example of the superficial and ill-informed pap that characterizes a good deal of the analysis and reporting (typically, from a great distance) on events in our neighbourhood. Looking through the comments on his blog page and seeing Israel accused on carrying out a Holocaust, we're left with a feeling that, at very difficult times like this, it's our obligation to simply stand firm, head down, focused on doing what needs to be done to keep our society and children as safe as possible, and leave the critics and their agendas for another day.

27-Dec-08: Quiet and not-so-quiet deaths

As Israeli forces take decisive action today against the terrorist regime of Hamas-ruled Gaza, it's worth pausing for a moment to notice a pair of deaths that will go mostly unmarked. This is one small example of what it means to live in a terrorist-controlled area.

"A projectile fired by Palestinians fell short of its target in Israel on Friday, striking a house in northern Gaza and killing two schoolgirls... A rocket apparently fired by Palestinians on Friday killed the two Palestinians aged five and 13, Palestinian medics said. None of Gaza's militant factions claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on the house in Beit Lahiya. Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moiaya Hassanain identified the two victims as 5-year-old Hanin Abu Khoussa and her 12-year-old cousin, Sabah Abu Khoussa. Three other young people were wounded, Hassanain said. Hamas police said they were investigating the cause of the blast in Beit Lahiya village in northern Gaza, which medics said seemed to be due to a rocket aimed at Israel that had misfired. Gaza militants frequently fire rockets at Israel from the same area."

A longer report is here.

The deaths-by-Qassam losses are not limited to innocent Gazan Palestinian Arab children. An Israeli home in the town of Netivot, southern Israel, was struck earlier today by a "grad" missile fired by the Gaza-based terrorists. An Israeli civilian, 58-year-old Beber Vaknin, was killed inside the home, and four other innocents suffered moderate to serious injuries. JPost reports that "over 80 rockets and mortar shells struck areas throughout the western Negev... a rocket hit a house in the community of Mivtahim, seriously wounding one person and lightly wounding another. A Magen David Adom team treated the wounded at the scene."

Israel, as most people know by know, mounted a lightning strike on multiple Hamas installations earlier today, causing colossal damage to property and life, and neutralizing a considerable part of what the terrorist regime is able to do. JTA, quoting Gazan sources, says "most of the dead were affiliated with the security forces, including Gaza City's police chief, although a number of the casualties were civilians. Hamas officials said at least 140 of the dead belonged to the terrorist group's militias."

There is no reason to think the terrorist regime and its powerful and capable backers are surrendering. They know the dark art of terror better than almost anyone anywhere. We can expect turbulent times. The price exacted by terrorism's practitioners is bound to continue to rise, with victims on all sides.

26-Dec-08: If you were a Gazan Palestinian Arab...

If you were a Gazan Palestinian Arab, what would you make of these unfolding events today?

• You're living in a tiny miserable space that your political masters and their friends misleadingly call "the most densely populated place on earth". (In fact, it's nothing of the sort. Tel-Aviv and dozens of other cities have a higher population density, but no matter.) In your tiny, not-quite-state-of-Hamastan, you have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Despite this, the regime that governs you makes blood-curdling threats they have little ability to carry out. Its spokesman Fawzi Barhoum is quoted saying "There is no chance of extending the calm". His colleagues are making sure this turns out to be true.
• In case the Israeli authorities were in any doubt about whether to finally taper off their policy of forebearance and patience under fire, and intervene violently in your life, the Gaza-based terrorists that operate according to Hamas-regime dictates in your cities - meaning right inside your buildings and in your densely-populated living areas, "intensified their attacks, firing at least 25 mortar shells at the South overnight Thursday and early Friday" according to this source. Hamas is leaving very little doubt that it wants a shooting war as soon as possible, and you and your family - among hundreds of thousands of other hostages who live in the very buildings where the massive Hamas terror arsenals are located - are going to be in the direct line of fire. Evidently Hamas wouldn't have it any other way.
  
• The Hamas regime chooses now, this week, to push (according to the London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat) for the enforced introduction of sharia law: "Courts will be able to condemn offenders to... violent punitive measures [that] include whipping, severing hands, crucifixion and hanging. The bill reserves death sentences to people who negotiate with a foreign government against Palestinian interests and engage in any activity that can hurt Palestinian morale. According to the report, any Palestinian caught drinking or selling wine would suffer 40 lashes at the whipping post if the bill passes. Thieves caught red-handed would lose their right hand." It's been reported that Hamas issued some denials. But this report will probably help you understand - if you need help - that sadly it's true.
• Your devoted cousins, the Egyptians, are concerned that Hamas escalation is going to provoke a full-scale shooting war. So they decided today to reinforce the boundary that runs between them and your Gaza Strip, and to step up security along that boundary. According to this report, "Egyptian security forces are concerned that an IDF operation will lead to an attempt by Gazans to break through the Rafah border crossing." Out of concern for Egypt's interests and against yours, Egypt is redoubling the security that protects its territory - from you.
• Notwithstanding the unprecedented levels of mortar shell and rocket fire from your place into ours, the government of Israel opened its gates this morning (Friday) to allow trucks laden with humanitarian aid into Gaza. (Reminder: Egypt has a border with you too. But the trucks always come into Gaza from our territory, not from theirs.) If there are fresh stocks of supplies in your local Seven-Eleven this afternoon, you can thank Israel. A report decribes the aid: "90 trucks will deliver medicine, fuel, cooking gas and other vital goods into Gaza. The shipment includes a large donation of goods from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's wife as well as more than 400,000 liters of fuel and 200 tons of natural gas."
• Your hated enemy, our government, says via one of its veteran ministers that the humanitarian shipment was meant to be a message to the people of Gaza that they were not Israel's enemy. We don't know how hard it is to read the following lines, but we want you to have this opportunity to read them: "We are sending them a message that the Hamas leadership has turned them into a punching bag for everyone. It is a leadership that has turned school yards in rocket launching pads. This a leadership that does not care that the blood of its people will run in the streets."

Since they're living under a terrorist regime prepared to sacrifice everything it has on the altar of jihad, this is not a time to envy the Gazans, who make a great deal of the fact that this is the government they democratically brought upon themselves. But it is a time for picking sides. You need to figure out which side wants to live in peaceful neighbourliness and which side doesn't even know how to contemplate that idea.

25-Dec-08: Tit for Tat?

With hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians now under active day-and-night missile attack by the Hamas regime's Gazan thugs and their rockets, it's an especially irksome experience to read how this is being portrayed by some of the big-name news agencies.

An AFP report, put out this afternoon to thousands of media channel subscribers around the world, is a depressing example. In the wake of yesterday's massive bombardment of southern Israel from Hamas-ruled Gaza, AFP says "escalating violence has dimmed prospects of a new truce... after a day of tit-for-tat attacks between the Israeli army and Hamas". Read the entire piece carefully and you will get no sense at all that the Gazans did all the rocket firing, and that Israel has been patiently holding back from launching its far-superior weaponry at the terrorists. A person unfortunate enough to be raised exclusively on a diet of Agence France Press reports on the Jihadists-versus-Israel conflict would have not a clue of the degree of Israeli restraint and of Hamas provocation. Tit-for-tat? We call it classic agenda-driven reporting.

The Times of London, in an article this afternoon entitled "Pope appeals for peace in Middle East against backdrop of violence", manages to use the same puerile analogy: "His appeal came against a backdrop of tit-for-tat strikes between Hamas militants in Gaza and Israel after the breakdown of a truce." Their article, at least, did include details of the Hamas missiles raining down on Israeli civilian settlements and quotes an un-named person speaking in the name of the Israeli foreign ministry who says what the overwhelming majority of ordinary Israelis are saying: "The main objective is to reach a durable truce. If that proves impossible, all other options will be examined."

Al Arabiyeh describes yesterday as "a day of tit-for-tat strikes around the Gaza Strip, an impoverished territory of 1.5 million sandwiched between Israel and Egypt." This is a recurring theme: earlier Al Arabiyeh reports have characterized the steady escalation of terrorist actions on Israel's southern border as a "series of tit-for-tat attacks involving Israeli raids against Islamist militants and showers of largely ineffective rockets fired into Israel from Gaza".

That's really the heart of the problem: the deaths of innocents under the hail of rocket-powered explosives, flung into the air daily by Gazan thugs who don't care where they land is nothing more than a minor issue for people like Al-Arabiyeh's reporters and editors. This is true even when those rockets hit Palestinian pilgrims en route to Bethlehem as one of them did today (described here).

Al Arabiyeh, AFP and many media channels like them are so intent on purveying a strong-versus-weak narrative to advance the Palestinian Arab cause that they have crossed a morally-indefensible line, becoming apologists for terrorism and its perpetrators.

24-Dec-08: In southern Israel, it's raining rockets

For its own good reasons, the Hamas regime is fully engaged in a strategy of steady terrorist escalation against Israeli civilians. The result is that today, the first really cold and rainy winter day of the season, has been violent and deeply worrying.

The New York Times version of today's turbulence along the southern border of Israel with Gaza says that the terrorists of Gaza "...increased the range and intensity of their rocket fire against Israel Wednesday as the Israeli security cabinet weighed options that include broader military action or efforts to renew a truce that recently expired. More than 60 rockets and mortars were fired at southern Israel by the afternoon... [They] slammed into the Israeli border town of Sderot, the yard of a house and a water park in the coastal city of Ashkelon, an Israeli factory at Nir Oz near the Gaza border, and hit a house outside the Western Negev town of Netivot. The strikes caused extensive damage and widespread panic among the residents... Scores of adults and children were treated for shock, the emergency medical service said."

Tonight's television news programs are reporting that, while Israel's military is primed and ready to intervene and silence the rocket launchers, and now has a green light to go ahead from the Israeli cabinet, efforts are still underway to try to avoid the bloodshed that will inevitably follow once the IDF is unleashed.

UPDATE Thursday 25-Dec-08 8:00am: The Jerusalem Post summary of yesterdays Hamas mayhem says: "The IDF received the green light Wednesday for a series of operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, after more than 60 mortar shells and Katyusha and Kassam rockets pounded the Negev. The barrage hit communities throughout the south, reaching as far north as Ashkelon and as far south as Kerem Shalom. At least two Grad-model Katyusha rockets were fired into Ashkelon on Wednesday, and a Kassam with extended range hit Netivot.... The terrorists hit close to educational facilities and homes. Nearly 60 people, almost half of them children or teenagers, were treated for emotional trauma and anxiety. And Haaretz now says Wednesday's toll was "more than 80 rockets and mortar shells into Israel".

23-Dec-08: On truces and hope

As winter sets in, things have been getting uncomfortably hot. Here's a taste of what it can mean to live in the same neighborhood as thuggish barbarians.

Sunday, 15 rockets and mortars were lobbed into Israel from Gaza. Those who do the firing don't give a moment's thought to what they might hit. It matters to them not at all. For them, any target of any sort is legitimate so long as it's located inside Jewish territory: schools, power stations (and especially the Ashkelon power station that feeds electricity into Gaza), buses, shopping centers, car parks, farming villages, old-age homes, kindergartens. They don't deny it.

Sunday's tally: a greenhouse at Moshav Netiv Ha'asara was hit early Sunday morning, shrapnel-wounding one of the workers. A private dwelling in Sderot was almost completely destroyed in a direct hit by a Gazan Qassam - the sole resident, a single woman, was inside and shaken but not seriously hurt. (You can see here in the picture above.) A Qassam rocket landed next to a factory in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. And a Qassam rocket crashed into Ashkelon's southern industrial area.

Monday, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor, "Although the Islamist militants called for a 24-hour halt in attacks on Monday for mediation, the region seems once again to be at the brink of another escalation over Gaza." Reuters reported that "Palestinians in Gaza observed a 24-hour halt to rocket fire against Israel at the request of Egyptian mediators..." and then helpfully explained that it was not exactly a complete halt; in fact (if you skip to the bottom of the long article) "The hold on firing seemed to be observed, with only two rockets and a mortar reported to have been fired on Monday from Gaza, and a rocket and four mortars shot on Sunday night."

You're in the vicinity of Hamas, friends. It's called a truce when "only two rockets and a mortar" are fired into your home - in the Reuters lexicon, at any rate.

Today, Tuesday, 6 Gazan Qassam rockets were fired into Israel. Two crashed into undisclosed parts of the Eshkol region. Two more exploded in the Shaar Hanegev region. One exploded right on the security barrier separating Israel from Gaza. And one was fired into a kibbutz, also in the Shaar Hanegev region just after dark this evening.

Then this evening, three Gazans were detected rigging explosives near the fence the runs between Israel and the Gaza Strip, right next to Netiv Ha'asarah, an agricultural settlement. The Israeli soldiers who spotted them exchanged fire with the well-armed terrorists who managed to hurl a grenade in their general direction before being permanently and irrevokably removed from the conflict by the Israelis.

This being the Middle East, the elimination of three murderous thugs, hiding explosives next to an agricultural community's fence characteristically gets reported this way by AFP: "Israel fires on Gaza militants denting truce hopes". Just like those Israelis to go denting people's hopes all over again.

In Lebanon, by contrast, the Daily Star is running a clear-eyed editorial in tomorrow's edition, headlined "Palestine's own leaders aren't doing its people any good". Extract:

"Fatah and Hamas, are... more concerned about prevailing in their internal power struggle than they are about the welfare of the people they claim to represent. Anyone can operate a militia, chant empty slogans, and compete with other militias to see who can do more damage... Kicking this self-defeating habit is a prerequisite for any meaningful progress on the road to Palestinian liberation. Should the current leaders be unable or unwilling to make the necessary changes, they should give way to a new generation..."

Now that's something worth hoping for.

21-Dec-08: "Confront the depths of evil"

One of this blog's two authors has an op-ed piece on Yediot Aharonot/YNet's website today.

Confront the depths of evil
Despite critics’ advice, media coverage must not downplay horrors of terror
Frimet Roth
Published: 12.21.08, 11:07 / Israel Opinion

"Ignore them dear, and they will stop bothering you."

Haven't we all trotted out that line when our children have come sobbing about school-yard bullies?

But is it sage advice for us – the targets of terror?

Some Israeli pundits seem to think so. Columnist Guy Bechor wrote recently on Ynetnews: "The more the media covers terror attacks, the more we encourage them…we must restrain the coverage, its sensationalism and its horrors."

He was responding to Hamas' 21st anniversary rally. With characteristic sadism, the event included a skit performed by a terrorist pretending to be Gilad Shalit in an IDF uniform. Kneeling on stage before some 300,000 celebrating Gazans he moaned twice in Hebrew: "I miss my Mom and my Dad."

The call for self-censorship was echoed that evening by former Mossad chief, Ephraim Halevi, who accused Israeli television news producers of impropriety by broadcasting the Hamas anniversary performance. He insisted that Israel plays into the hands of its enemies by disseminating such attempts at emotional blackmail. They know how bound every Israeli is not only to his own, but to all Jewish children, especially those in uniform who risk their lives to defend the nation.

Not long ago, the Israeli reporters Ben Caspit and Yigal Ravid expressed related, though far more superficial sentiments. They lamented all the precious media time that was spent on terrorism reportage during the second Intifada. Yet they didn't voice any concern about its impact on terrorists. Presumably, it was just the tiresome repetition of it all - terror attack after terror attack - that irked them.

Bechor maintains that self-censorship was exercised in the 1990s in the wake of suicide bombings. "This neutralized some of the horror and achievements of terror," he asserts.

He provides no sources for this brash claim and it doesn't ring terribly true. For one thing, in the ‘90s, the threat from terrorism was only a distant cousin of the tentacled monster that we now call Islamist Terror. There were simply fewer such attacks then. Media attention or not.

Second, it is a fact of life that terrorism, by its very nature, instills horror, regardless of whether or not that is the terrorists' aim.

Nevertheless, nobody can accuse Israelis of letting that horror paralyze them. On the contrary, we are consistently praised for our determined adherence to normality even under extreme conditions. Bechor's absurd call to "establish an international media convention… to minimize the achievements of Islamic terror…" sounds pointless.

Not only haven't Israelis succumbed to fear, on the contrary, many have grown worryingly apathetic. A sizable portion of the public and its leaders are eager to engage with our most threatening neighbors in unconditional dialogue, to grant them concessions and to refrain from logical military responses to their actions.

Finally, the depraved Hamas performance last week is nothing new. It is reminiscent of earlier theatrics designed at once to "entertain," to emotionally torment and to incite Palestinians to fresh murders. Here is just one example:

In August 2001, a Hamas terrorist massacred 15 Jewish men, women and children in Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant. My fifteen-year old daughter, Malki was among the victims.

In September 2001, Hamas set out to commemorate one year since the start of the Second Intifada. Toward that end, students at al-Najah University in Nablus erected a tent-replica of a Sbarro restaurant. Inside they displayed a grisly re-enactment of the August bombing, including fake body parts and pizza slices strewn on the floor. An Associated Press photograph of Palestinian students walking under the mock Sbarro shop-sign appeared in most international media services. Nobody argued then that the students' hateful handiwork ought to be concealed.

Confronting the depths of Hamas' evil can be painful. And burying your head in the sand can be awfully tempting.

But we are all grown up now. If the terrorism of our neighbors is downplayed, widespread complaisance will set in. How can any government garner support for crucial deterrent and responsive strategies from a tranquilized public?

Journalists and editors, do your job. Report all current events, however heart-wrenching they may be.

...

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer in Jerusalem. She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation in their daughter's memory, which provides support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

20-Dec-08: Now we're officially into the post-calm period...

The Palestinian terrorists in Gaza fired two Qassam rockets into Israel's western Negev area last night (Friday). Earlier on Friday, Palestinian gunmen took pot-shots at farmers working the fields of Kibbutz Nir Oz in Israel's Eshkol region. A number of vehicles sustained bullet damage but fortunately no one was injured. As we repeatedly point out, this is never the intention of the terrorist thugs. It's simply the most they are able to manage, and they don't lack for opportunity or freedom to keep trying.

During Saturday, 8 Gazan Qassam rockets struck open areas along Israel's border with Gaza including two that landed near Ashkelon. In addition, a dozen mortar shells were fired by the Gazan terrorists into Israel during the afternoon, landing in Israeli towns and communities around the central and northern parts of the Gaza Strip.

One struck a youth clubhouse at a kibbutz close to the Gaza Strip. Had it been filled with teenagers, the attack might have gotten some news coverage. But it's nothing more than the latest in a multi-thousand-attack list of rockets, mortars, sniper-fire and bomb-plantings perpetrated by the Islamicists of Gaza in their ongoing struggle to kill Jews. (We're open to other ways of looking at this. But be prepared to substantiate any alternative viewpoints.)

Names of towns and specific locations are rarely included in our reports or in the Israeli media as a security measure. Why give the barbarians any help with their targeting?

Israelis are not expecting the steady escalation of Gazan demonization, racist rhetoric, bullets, mortars and rockets to end anytime soon. A pity the process is getting so little media coverage outside our country. How are people going to make sense of the inevitable robust Israeli response if and when it comes?



Above: From this evening's home page at the Haaretz website.

Update: The day's tally of missiles fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza into Israel for Saturday: 13 Qassams, 23 mortars. And it's still only 11:15pm. How much of this was reported where you live?

19-Dec-08: Hints of what to expect post-Tahadiyeh

Keep in mind when looking at the newsagency pictures below that the strictly authoritarian Hamas regime controls the images that go out to the newsagencies, and via these images and the heavy hand it imposes on journalists and photographers controls and spins the propaganda message it considers best for its interests. And today's message is..?

19-Dec-08: Post-Tahadiyeh

This morning, 75 minutes after the Hamas terrorists publicized what they called the "official end" of the half-year tahadiyeh (calm, quiet, truce) with Israel, 3 Qassam rockets were fired from northern Gaza into southern Israel. All 3 landed in the Eshkol and Sha'ar Hanegev regions. YNet says there are no reports of injuries or damage, which is of course not the intention of the terrorists. The Gazans say the launching cell returned to its base unharmed.

18-Dec-08: Neighbourhood thuggery

Tuesday of this week: 11 Qassam rocket attacks on Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza.

24 Qassam rocket attacks on Wednesday.

Now it's Thursday morning: five rockets have already crashed into civilian parts of Israel - the terrorists have clearly gotten a green light to escalate from their jihadist masters in the Hamas regime. And it's not even 9:00 o'clock in the morning.

Reminder: this is not warfare directed at some military presence. The Gazan Palestinian Arabs are concerned to fire their explosives anywhere they can, just so long as it is over their fence into the homes and streets of Israelis. This is why they are correctly called terrorists.

17-Dec-08: Qassam strikes all day

It's Wednesday evening here, and so far today the thuggish terrorists (sorry, militants) operating from Gaza under the protection, leadership and inspiration of the Hamas regime have sent at least 20 Qassam rockets into southern Israel.

Without in any sense being aimed at the target (something the Palestinian Arab terrorists cannot do, and do not do since any strike on anything Israeli fulfills their goals) one of them exploded in the parking lot of a large, crowded shopping center in Sderot. Two people were injured by shrapnel; another suffered ear damage. Medical teams also treated numerous shock victims at the site of the explosion.

YNet says Israeli air force teams located and fired at a ready-for-use rocket launcher in northern Gaza very shortly after the shopping center attack, evidently neutralizing it, but no word about the terrorists who were getting ready to fire it. Both CNN (constitionally incapable of describing the people who fire rockets into supermarket car-parks as terrorists) and BBC, among others, describe the IAF actions as being "in response".

We disagree. It's not "in response" when you spot a criminal thug fresh from carrying out a deliberately life-threatening action getting ready to do the same again. That's called preventing an attack; protecting your life, property and community; taking pre-emptive action against terrorists; or plain self-defence.

17-Dec-08: How exactly is it worse when there's no truce?

Eight Qassam rockets were fired into civilian areas of Israel this morning already, and it's not even 10:00am. The tally yesterday was 11 rockets plus one mortar shell.

16-Dec-08: There's still a truce?

The terrorists of Gaza, not content with massive soviet-style rallies earlier this week (see the picture at right) and highly-public warnings about an imminent end to their "commitment" to a "truce", busied themselves today with steady bombardment. As usual, their target was any part of Israel within reach.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror organization claimed responsibility for firing four Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel at 8:45 this morning (Tuesday). All four landed in open fields in the Eshkol region, near the Israeli border with Gaza.

Three more rockets (and unconfirmed reports say six) were fired into Israel from Gaza later today. One of them landed next on a school sports field near Sderot where a group of youngsters were playing soccer. One boy, suffering from shock, was evacuated by Magen David Adom ambulance medics for hospitalization.

The IDF later found, bombed and destroyed the rocket launcher near Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

Meantime, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak is continuing to call for an extension of a cease-fire with Hamas in the Gaza area: "We are not deterred from an operation in Gaza but we are also not rushing into one. Calm will be met by calm. But if there is no choice we will act when and where we see fit."

It's highly likely, given what we know about terrorism in general and the Hamas regime in particular, that no one is listening.

YNet points out that in all of 2007, more than 1,200 rockets and 600 mortar shells were fired into Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. 2008 is not yet over, and the total for this year is close to 2,900 rockets.

14-Dec-08: On it goes

A Qassam rocket exploded Saturday morning in an open area near the southern Israeli town of Sderot (source). Later two mortar shells landed in open spaces in the Negev. A day earlier (Friday morning), two Qassams fired from northern Gaza landed in Israel's western Negev region.

Living under constant bombardment like this must be nearly as unbearable as knowing that practically no-one knows about it or understands your reaction since these stories are too frequent and too 'minor' to be reported by most media channels.

12-Dec-08: CNN's Gaza crisis

Everybody knows that Gaza is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. The news media don't allow us to forget it for a moment.

Whether the focus is on petrol shortages, blackouts or the dearth of Israeli shekels in Gazan banks, as was the case last week, the public is constantly reminded that Israel is "strangling" the innocent Gazans.

But last week, CNN's Ben Wedeman chose to report on the shekel crisis in Gaza from the market-place. Normally a popular site with Middle East correspondents for its photogenicity, it was a poor choice in this context.

Behind Wedeman were stalls overflowing with a cornucopia of attractive and colorful fruit, vegetables and other fresh produce. Close-ups of wads of US dollars being doled out to employees or counted by satisfied owners were featured as well. Wedeman's claims that the Gazan economy was on the verge of collapse and that people were in dire straits wasn't very convincing.

That same day, viewers were shown heart-wrenching images of Zimbabweans in the throes of starvation and a cholera epidemic - a truly horrific humanitarian crisis. So the Gazan footage was just a tad confusing.

Somebody at CNN must have noticed the blunder: unlike most other reports, this one was never aired again and there is no transcript of it or reference to it anywhere on the CNN website.

12-Dec-08: Same old same old

Here we go again. The same boring old reports. So boring that no one, other than a tiny handful of Israeli sources, bothers to publish anything about them.

Two days ago, on Wednesday, a deadly Qassam rocket launched from Gaza landed in an open field near a kibbutz in Israel's Sha'ar Hanegev area. No injuries or damage were reported in the attack, which occurred as the area's children were making their way to local schools and kindergartens.

It's continuing this morning (Friday). A rocket was fired by Gazan terrorists, landing in Israel a few hours ago near a kibbutz in the south of the country. Another rocket from the same source crashed into a location near the security fence separating Israel from the Hamas-controlled enclave.

Earlier this week, Yediot Aharonot (an Israeli daily paper) calculated that 215 rockets - and possibly more than that number - have been fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel since November 4.

Israel's response so far? There are two.

AFP says: "In a goodwill gesture to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose effective control extends only to the West Bank, an Israeli cabinet committee gave its approval to a list of 230 Palestinian prisoners to be freed this week."

And yesterday trucks carrying 100 million shekels ($25 million) were allowed into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip "to ease a shortage of banknotes in the Israeli-blockaded territory, Palestinian bank officials said... Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak approved the transfer of the 100 million shekels following a request from Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer. The Israeli central bank said in a statement it did not want to be responsible for the possible collapse of the Palestinian banking system. Barak had also come under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Middle East envoy Tony Blair to transfer the money. Western officials said the cash was needed to protect Abbas's standing in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas Islamists seized in June 2007 after routing secular Fatah forces loyal to the Western-backed president."

Protect Abbas's standing, they write? So how about this: Most Palestinians believe Mahmoud Abbas's term as prime minister should end right now. A poll released yesterday (Thursday) by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows 64 percent believe he should leave office and go home.

And as for the overall benefits of trucking Israeli currency into a neighbourhood controlled by terrorist thug gangs, Haaretz quotes senior Palestinian Arabs officials including PA Prime Minister Fayyad saying "in private conversations" that "there is no way to check whether the entire sum really reached the employees for whom it was earmarked. Some of the banks' branch managers and tellers cooperate with Hamas" and the Israeli cash can easily (read: certainly was) snatched by Hamas.

So just to summarize:

• Most consumers of news around the world do not even know (since the reports do not get published) that Israel continues to be under steady bombardment from terrorists operating with the active support of the government of their region (Hamas).
  
• These attacks are exclusively directed at civilians. Terrorism, by any definition.
• Israeli losses are not heavier than they already are only because of the incompetence of the terrorists. In any event, the terrorists do not aim at specific targets since any target inside Israel meets their needs.
• Israel for its part continues to make gestures of conciliation, this time allowing Israeli banknotes to be trucked in to Gaza's banks. Financial corruption being endemic and endless in their world, and Israeli being principal victims of its effects, this gesture is puzzling in the extreme.
  
• Israel continues to provide a deeply unpopular lame-duck political hack (Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust-denying head of the Palestinian Authority) with unparalleled support through shortening the prison sentences of, and releasing, convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. His voters, for their part, tell him he needs to quit now.

As we said: same old same old, all over again.

7-Dec-08: A surfeit of "moderation"

A timely, polite reminder to everyone out there still laboring under the misguided perception of a "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas (a noted Holocaust denier) leading a "moderate" Fatah regime, aka the Palestinian Authority.

Khaled Abu Toameh, the Jerusalem Post's well-connected and extraordinarily courageous (and therefore largely ignored outside Israel) writer, and himself a Palestinian Arab, describes today how Al-Jazeera has recently been banned from reporting inside the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority. And the media manipulation certainly does not end with Al-Jazeera.

The outrage if the Israeli authorities ever decided to impose an anti-democratic ban like this can only be imagined.

PA bars Al-Jazeera journalists from Mukata
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
The Palestinian Authority has decided to ban a number of journalists from entering the presidential Mukata compound in Ramallah. The decision is aimed at punishing the journalists because of their criticism of the PA leadership or for reporting about the activities of Hamas leaders. Al-Jazeera reporters and TV crews are among those who now appear on the PA's blacklist. They have been denied access to the Mukata for the past two weeks. Other journalists working for Arab and Western media outlets have also been told that they are no longer welcome to visit the compound... The decision to ban Al-Jazeera came after the popular TV station failed to carry a live broadcast of a speech given by PA President Mahmoud Abbas in front of the PLO Central Council in Ramallah... Al-Jazeera has thus far refrained from reporting about the PA's decision to boycott the station. A source in the station said that the decision not to report about the ban was taken after the PA warned Al-Jazeera that publicizing the issue would only cause more damage to its reporters.
Earlier this week, the largest Palestinian news agency, Ramattan, decided to suspend its work in the West Bank after the PA leadership also banned its reporters from entering the Mukata. The agency also accused the PA security forces of raiding its Ramallah offices, arresting its workers and confiscating a mobile broadcast truck...
The PA has, over the past few years, become less tolerant toward "unfriendly" journalists, especially Palestinian newsmen who report about financial corruption and abuse of human rights in PA-controlled areas. Seven Palestinian reporters have been arrested by Abbas's security forces in the past few months for allegedly expressing sympathy with Hamas. Most were released after being warned against publishing material that reflects negatively on Abbas and the PA leadership.

Googling the term "moderate Palestinian leader" brings up many hundreds of hits. So sad.

6-Dec-08: Rocket assault on Israel continues... unobserved and ignored

Almost entirely unreported by the media (how much of what we write below was reported in anything that circulates in your community?), another barrage of rockets was fired from Gaza into Israel this evening (Saturday night).

The city of Ashkelon was hit, along with other towns and communities in southern Israel, all of them located close to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Haaretz says 4 Qassam rockets and at least ten mortar shells were fired into Israel today. In addition, a mortar shell exploded at Kerem Shalom, close to Israel's Gaza border. Another landed short in the Gaza Strip itself.

Hamas sources in Gaza today said a member of the so-called Popular Resistance Committees was killed while trying to plant an explosive device near the Israel-Gaza fence. The IDF denies the man was killed by IDF fire, leaving open the very common "work accident" explanation. Whatever, another "martyr" for the Palestinian school-books.

On Friday, 6 Qassams pelted the south of Israel. And as happened this evening, one of those hit Ashkelon, this time in the city's industrial zone. A mortar shell was also fired. One of Friday's rockets exploded in a residential area of Sderot. Another landed in the grounds of the Sha'ar Hanegev regional council. Two rockets exploded near the Eshkol regional council offices.

Credit for these attacks was claimed by Fatah - and not Hamas, as we might have expected. That's the "moderate" Fatah, headed by the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas. Their "moderate" rockets, strangely, achieve as much damage as those of the acknowledged terrorists of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and of Hamas.

Also Friday, Palestinians threw two Molotov cocktails on Friday afternoon at Israeli motorists driving near the West Bank village of Azun east of Qalqilyah. No injuries were reported, although one car was damaged.

On Thursday, the defense ministery of Israel authorized the entry into Hamas-controlled Gaza of 40 trucks carrying basic foodstuffs, 30 trucks filled with cereal, and industrial fuel for the power station.

So what would you do if the people on the other side of the fence near where your family lives engaged in murderous activities like these? Day after day? No matter - practically no one knows about them since they're almost entirely unreported outside Israel.

UPDATE Saturday night 11:00pm - YNet is reporting that IDF aircraft fired a missile at a ready-to-launch Qassam rocket in the northern Gaza Strip Saturday (tonight) and struck the target. At 9:30 this evening, Palestinian sources reported that a loud blast had been heard from the direction of Beit Hanoun, and that an IAF Apache chopper was seen near the town. "The strike was carried out Saturday evening following a rocket and mortar shell offensive directed at southern Israel by the Palestinians. In response to the ongoing fire from Gaza, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ruled that Gaza Strip crossings to would remain closed Sunday. "

2-Dec-08: Mumbai questions

How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as such?

It's the question of all questions. And it's asked very effectively by Tom Gross who used to be the Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph and now produces incisive columns on a freelance basis. He has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "If this Isn't Terrorism, What Is?"

Please read the whole thing. A few more of Tom Gross' questions about Mumbai and the media's coverage follow:

Why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists?
Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain's most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors?
Why did Britain's highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the "militants" showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed" when exactly the opposite was true: targets and victims were very carefully selected.
Why did the "experts" invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?
What is the motivation of journalists in trying to mangle language - such as going out of their way to refer to terrorists as "militants," as one Mumbai story on yesterday's Times of London Web site seemed to do? Do they somehow wish to express sympathy for these murderers, or perhaps make their crimes seem almost acceptable?
How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as such?

Additional painfully sharp questions are posed by Dennis Prager, another incisive observer, in an article he calls "The Rabbi and the Terrorist".

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India’s major city devote so much of its efforts -- 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?
The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied?
Why did Hitler - as documented by the late historian Lucy Dawidowicz in her aptly named book “The War against the Jews” - weaken the Nazi war effort by diverting money, troops, and military vehicles from fighting the Allies to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps?

Prager's article, which is certainly worth reading through in its entirety, ends with these two final points:

One is that it is exquisitely fitting that the same week the murders in Mumbai were taking place, the United Nations General Assembly passed six more anti-Israel resolutions. As it has for decades, the U.N. has again sanctioned hatred for a good and decent country as small on the map of the world as the Chabad House is on the map of Mumbai.
Two: Statements from Chabad in reaction to the torture-murders of a 28-year-old Chabad rabbi and his wife called on humanity to react to this evil “with random acts of kindness.” Evil hates goodness. That’s why the terrorists targeted a Chabad Rabbi and his wife.

At almost every opportunity, we (the authors of this blog) personally try to explain to whoever will listen that the war against the terrorists is going badly, and it's going to get much worse. Most people don't really understand how dangerous terrorism is to every last one of us. Nor are they likely to understand how on-the-ball the questions we have mentioned here are.

Failing to understand these things, whether you are a journalist or a politician or the person in charge of security for a major railway station, is a life-and-death matter, and mostly the understanding is just not happening.

1-Dec-08: A dangerous obsession

The op-ed article below, written by one of this blog's two authors, appears today on the YNet website and is also published by Front Page Magazine.

Olmert's Obsession
By Frimet Roth
FrontPageMagazine.com | 12/1/2008

The world is reeling from the Islamist terror attacks that struck India last week. But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will not let that interfere with his plans to beef up the ranks of Palestinian terrorists with another of his prisoner releases.

Trying to fathom Olmert's conduct – in particular, his preference for freeing jailed Palestinian terrorists with a track record of returning to their bloody business – has become a favorite pastime of pundits. Some say he is drafting his page in future history books. Others suggest that, having lost favor on the Right, he is simply wooing the Left. Still others swear that he aims to be the next Israeli come-back kid and is preparing for a future term as prime minister.

Whatever the merit of such conjecture, no theory fully explicates his irrational obsession with Palestinian prisoner releases. Consider that in August, Olmert granted a prisoner release just in time for Ramadan as a gift to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Now he will hand Abbas 250 more prisoners ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival on December 8.

Olmert is apparently unfazed by the thankless reaction to his last release.

"We will not rest until all the prisoners are freed and the jails are empty, "Abbas told a cheering crowd in August on the day those 198 prisoners were welcomed home.

The day before Olmert announced the upcoming release, Abbas said of his "partner for peace:” "I would like to draw the attention of the international community to the tragedy that our people are enduring in Gaza and I call on them to intervene to end the unfair siege... which constitutes a war crime."

At the same time, Abbas found no time to explain the reasons behind the Israeli siege: Hamas' renewed and intensive Qassam attacks that week on Israeli civilians.

Nor is the Palestinian leader gracious in the face of concessions. Abbas responded to the announcement of a fresh release with fresh demands. He instructed Olmert to include convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti along with Popular Front Secretary General Ahmad Sadat and Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker and Hamas member Aziz al-Dweik.

Such demands are in keeping with the Palestinian leadership’s rhetoric, which has never softened towards Israel. In September, for instance, during a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Abbas was still adamant that "Palestinian refugees must have the right to return to their homeland," calling it one of the "inalienable Palestinian rights."

This demand for the return of the tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees is a thinly-veiled call for the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet Olmert's office recently dubbed Abbas' party "the pragmatist Palestinian camp."

Equally immaterial to Olmert is that Abbas is politically crippled. Indeed, he is unlikely to survive as President past January 9, 2009, the date of the upcoming PA elections. As such, he would be unable to aid Israel even if he had any desire to do so.

Nor does it matter to Olmert that Hamas, against whom Olmert claims to be propping up the PA, is never weakened by these releases of its Fatah rivals. As recently as November, Haaretz warned: "Gaza is a stockpile of weapons, explosives and, particularly, of motivation to carry out attacks against Israel."

Israeli victims of terror are always incensed by these releases. After all, we, the bereaved live with the dread that one day our own child's murderer will return home to a hero's welcome. A terror victims’ organization, Almagor, has reminded Israelis that no less than one third of released terrorists return to terrorism and that they have murdered 180 Israelis, directly contradicting an Israeli spokesman’s recent assurance that "the prisoners slated for release would not be aligned with Islamist movements." Once the new list of prisoners is published, Almagor can be expected to appeal to the Israel’s High Court – and to lose its case, as it has consistently.

Even so, there is considerable evidence of recidivism among the released. This August, for instance, Israel freed Mohammed Abu Ali, a lawmaker from Abbas' Fatah party. Abu Ali was jailed in 1980 for murdering a 20 year old Israeli. He was later convicted of killing a jailed Palestinian whom he accused of collaborating with Israel. So much for the claim that these prisoners have all been rehabilitated.

What about the Palestinian man-on-the-street? Surely he appreciates Olmert's largess. Not quite. In August, prior to the Ramadan release, the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh reported: "It's hard these days to find one Palestinian who regards Israel's decision to release some 200 Palestinian prisoners as a ‘goodwill gesture.’” Of the hundreds of prisoners released after the Oslo Accord, Abu Toameh wrote, many soon became involved "in various criminal activities ranging from armed robberies, extortion, theft and arms trafficking…Others later joined Hamas and other radical groups and became actively involved in armed attacks on Israel during the second intifada." He added: "The argument that [releases] strengthen the 'moderates' has never proven to be correct."

Orit Adato is another prominent skeptic of the wisdom behind prisoner releases. A former head of the Israel Prisons Service and the first international vice president of the International Correction and Prison Association, Adato has issued clear and reasoned recommendations regarding prisoner releases. Adato believes that they can bolster Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. However, she maintains that such releases should be made only after specific preparatory steps have been carried out by Israelis, Palestinians and the international community. She condemns capricious releases, of the kind favored by Olmert, which are made in the context of stalled and aimless negotiations between Israel and the PA.

But even if they could be otherwise condoned, Olmert's prisoner releases are objectionable in his circumstances. As he contends with a looming indictment and strident calls for his resignation and with general elections scheduled for February, Olmert is no longer an empowered leader.

Nevertheless, a passive cabinet has voted to give Olmert the green light. True, several ministers were opposed. Minister Jacob Edery of Kadimah decried the move, saying that Israel "has made enough gestures to the Palestinians without having received anything in return. You don't have to free terrorists so long as there is no progress in the effort to free Gilad Shalit or the peace talks." And last week Likud MK Reuven Rivlin expressed those sentiments even more bluntly: "Olmert is not relevant to the political process and he does not need to make promises in Israel's name," adding: "We're tired of him and his political mischief."

But last week’s vote proved that even this wide spectrum of protesters is impotent. Olmert's immense and indomitable ego is just too formidable a foe. Several days ago it reared its ugly head in these telling comments: "I talk with Abbas nearly every week. Never has any Israeli prime minister held such extensive negotiations with a Palestinian leader like this…This is a time for decisions. I am ready to make that decision…You don't need months to make a decision," said Olmert.

On the last score Olmert is right. He can and must make one crucial decision: to cancel an ill-conceived release of Palestinian terrorists that rewards the Palestinian leadership for its past failures and promises bloodshed in Israel’s future.

Frimet Roth, a freelance writer, lives in Jerusalem. She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation in their daughter's memory. Malki Roth was murdered at the age of fifteen in the Sbarro Jerusalem restaurant massacre in 2001. The foundation in her name provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

1-Dec-08: Terrorism versus Human Rights

Here's the text of a speech delivered to an international conference arranged by MPCT (Mouvement Pour la Paix et Contre le Terrorisme) in Paris, 23-Nov-08. The speaker is one of this blog's authors.

On Terrorism and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Arnold Roth – The Malki Foundation

As our presence here in this place attests, today's subject, Terrorism Versus Human Rights, is surely important enough for us to leave our warm homes and come to this public place and engage in discussion.

The subject has the greatest significance for every person who cares about democracy, humanity and freedom.

For some of us, it is more than simply important. The tension between terrorism on one hand and human rights on the other speaks directly to our personal experience.

For me, the public discussion of this important theme has personal ramifications which compel me to raise my voice. I feel the need to do this even in places where there is little desire for a voice like mine to be heard.

In preparing myself for this conference, I reviewed legal documents, political essays, speeches, declarations, blogs and academic journal articles. From these, it can be seen that, sixty years after its creation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is under sustained attack and from several quarters.

1. The secular and universal nature of the Declaration is being undermined and delegitimized. For this we must lay the credit at the feet of the largest club of nations in the world, the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
   
2. The UN Human Rights Council, the very organization charged with carrying the Declaration's message into practical application is in fact smothering it. It does this by failing to adhere to the first, and arguably the paramount, principle embodied in the declaration. I shall return to this a little later.
3. The dark hand of global terrorism, along with the powerful political, ideological and religious forces that sustain it, are endeavoring to strangle it to death. And they are winning.
   

In my personal life, each of these two trends – (one) the principles of the UDHR and (two) the forces that may bring its life to an end, has played important roles.

I was born in Australia to Jewish parents who arrived as refugees from Germany after being caught up in the extermination which wiped out one-thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, the country of their birth. Surviving the Nazi death camps, my parents began rebuilding their lives in friendly, welcoming Australia at almost exactly the same time as the UDHR was adopted.

Australia was a place which, for all its blessings, had scarcely begun to comprehend the meaning of human rights. In the decade or two after UDHR, the land of my birth abandoned an immigration policy that, while unofficial, was universally known as the "White Australia Policy". I was a high school student when Australian law changed for the first time to include its native population, the Australian Aborigines, in the national census. Their right to vote in elections was granted only in 1948, the same year as the UDHR was born.

The evolution of sensitivity to human rights in Australia took place even while religion and politics remained, for the most part, subjects that were rarely discussed in public. Australian society then and now treats these as matters of personal choice and conscience. The notion that the state or a non-state entity might impose them on a reluctant population was foreign and unacceptable.

The adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations of the UDHR on December 10, 1948 occurred, as I have mentioned, in the shadow of events that dramatically marked world history and also the chronicle of my own family.

Though traditions and religious background are different, and cultural backgrounds and expressions are varied, human nature is universal and the same. The UDHR came to affirm this universal human identity.

I was raised in a system characterized by gentle tolerance, and a respect for the humanity and individuality of the other... though as I have said - not for every other. Fundamental human rights needed to be won. And they were. The laws and sensitivities engendered by UDHR undoubtedly played and play a role in that process.

Beginning in 1981, soon after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran which emerged from the rubble of the empire of the Shah, that country's representatives began a systematic and fundamental attack on UDHR. They did this, and continue to do it, in the United Nations and in many other international forums.

The Iranian ambassador to the UN put his country's agenda on the official record [2] in addressing the General Assembly in 1984.

"The concept of human rights is not limited to the UDHR. Man's divine origin and human dignity cannot be reduced to a series of secular norms. Certain concepts (therefore) contained in the UDHR need to be revised… Iran respects no power or authority but that of A-mighty G-d and no legal tradition other than Islamic law. UDHR represents a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This does not accord with the values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran… Iran therefore would not hesitate to violate its provisions since it has to choose between violating divine law (on one hand) and violating secular conventions (on the other).

This straight-forward analysis leaves little room for doubting where UDHR fits in the hierarchy of values of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and of those who hold to its views.

A little later, the OIC's Conference of Foreign Ministers then gave legal and practical effect to the Iranian rejection of UDHR adopting the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam [3] in August 1990. Two of its articles are of astonishing power and significance:

Article 24: All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to Islamic Shariah.
Article 25: Islamic Shariah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles in this Declaration.

The Cairo Declaration therefore claims supremacy over UDHR based on divine revelation.

Its sponsors, the OIC, succeeded in persuading the leadership of the Human Rights Council that "only religious scholars are allowed to discuss matters of faith." In effect the issue is, by consent, off limits to discussion. This is utterly extraordinary.

---

Shortly before he was murdered in Baghdad in 2003, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Iraq, put it this way,

"Human rights law has sought to strike a fair balance between legitimate national security concerns and the protection of fundamental freedom. It acknowledges that states must address serious and genuine security concerns such as terrorism."

The notion of human rights norms has been tested and tempered by the surge of terrorist violence in the past decade, and by the ongoing debate in civil societies throughout the world on how to deal with terrorism and with terrorists - with their human rights, and with the human rights of people suspected of taking part.

---

My wife and I brought our family to the historical Jewish homeland, Israel, in 1988. This was the fulfillment on not only our own dreams but those of our parents and grand-parents.

In Jerusalem, in 2001, our oldest daughter Malki, who was then only 15, was murdered along with many other Israelis in a massacre in the centre of Jerusalem.

A few years later, also in Israel, I met John Dugard – a man whose job title at the time is a sad reflection of the fundamentally flawed way human rights are viewed in certain international circles. He was the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. Dugard confessed to me, at the end of an hour-long private meeting in my office in Jerusalem, that until that day he had never met a victim of Palestinian Arab terrorism. I have never managed to understand how such an individual can be so influential at the highest levels of international discourse, and at the same time be so poorly informed - and so highly partisan.

Sometimes the unfairness and distortions that characterize the global community's work in human rights produces a change. Such a change happened when the UN's Commission on Human Rights was replaced in 2006 by the Human Rights Council. This came after years of complaints about some of the absurd aspects of the Council's work – too many to recount here. But since its replacement by the HRC, the bad old scenarios repeat themselves:

• By January 2008, barely two years into its life, HRC had already managed to condemn one country - Israel - eight separate times.
• About sixty percent of its decisions have been directed at criticizing one country - Israel.
• The monumental and highly publicized abuses of human rights in such places as Zimbabwe, China, Saudi Arabia have produced zero response.
• Cuba and Belarus were on a special HRC list of countries under close investigation for human rights infringements. But after a recent vote, their names were removed from that list.
• Both Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon felt it necessary to point out to the members and leadership of HRC that there are human rights problems in the world in which Israel is not the major player. But they have not succeeded.

---

The tension between human rights and security in a time of terror seems to be best appreciated in states where terrorism has already made an impact.

Thus in 2005, the British Home Secretary announced tough new measures after the underground trains were blown up by British-born terrorists, acting in the name of their pathological definition of Islam, and said this [5]:

"The human rights of the people who were blown up on the tube on 7th July (2005) are, to be quite frank, more important than the human rights of the people who committed those acts."

His statement brings me to certain insights about this issue which stem from my being the father of a child who was murdered by religious terrorists.

I mentioned earlier the first of the rights honoured and protected by the UDHR - the first, and arguably the paramount, principle embodied in the Declaration: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person" (Article 3).

This is the right to live, the right to stay alive. No right is more important than this one. It is the right that was stolen from my fifteen year-old daughter, and from the many people who loved her.

Prof. Harry Reicher, professor of international law at University of Pennsylvania and Scholar-in-Residence at Touro Law Center in New York is a man personally engaged in human rights-based litigation and other legal actions that respect and defend human rights. He has written this:

"If, in the context of measures aimed at preventing repetitions, strains are placed on individual rights, the unique character of the right to live suggests an a priori rationale for erring on the side of caution. To do so is not, in any sense, to trivialize other human rights. It is rather to underscore the ultimate nature of the right to live… Although it does not formally enunciate a hierarchy of rights, or spell out any mechanism for resolving potential tensions between different rights, the fact that the right to live is the first of the specific rights listed in the document suggests a certain primacy… It is a right that is qualitatively different from all other rights…[6]"

The abuse of this right is a deep wrong, the deepest of all wrongs. Here is why:

• When a person is imprisoned unjustly, there is a remedy: Release him or her. Restore the right that has been taken away. When a person is deprived of the right to live, then neither this right nor any other can ever be restored.
• A victim deprived of the right to live can not be compensated. No compensation exists. None can be imagined. But compensation for forms of abuse can be created, and are meaningful.
• Losing the right to live means the loss of every other right.

---

Though it is not so fashionable to say so, I believe there is such a thing as the war against terrorism – and it is not going well. Its victims are not only the children blown up in restaurants, and their parents, but also civil society in every country. For this reason, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to Huguette Chomski Magnis and her MPCT colleagues for pushing this on to the agenda of thoughtful people in a constructive and effective way.

Notes

[2] Extracted from "Universal Human Rights and Human Rights in Islam" - David Littman – Originally published in Midstream (New York), February/March 1999

[3] Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, Aug. 5, 1990, U.N. GAOR, World Conf. on Hum. Rts., 4th Sess., Agenda Item 5, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.157/PC/62/Add.18 (1993) [English translation]

[5] The Guardian: "Expulsions illegal, UN tells Clarke", 25-Aug-05

[6] "Right to live trumps", Prof. Harry Reicher, The National Law Journal (September 26, 2005)