Joe Kaufman writes in Front Page Magazine:

While many understand the Israeli need to protect its villagers from constant rocket and mortar attacks originating from Hamas-controlled Gaza, there are some who seek to castigate Israel, the victim, instead of their perpetrator. On December 29, 2008, CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] and a cadre of other radical Islamic organizations held a press conference to “demand” that the U.S. government “take immediate steps to end the immoral and illegal Israeli bombardment of Gaza and its population.” A copy of CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad’s speech, from which these words were taken, is located on CAIR’s YouTube page. What went unreported is the fact that CAIR maintains close ties to Hamas.

CAIR was established in June 1994 by three leaders of the now-defunct American propaganda wing of Hamas, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). CAIR was created as being a part of the American Palestine Committee, which at the time was headed by the global leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Some 14 years later, CAIR has not managed to shake its ties to Hamas, as it was named a party by the U.S. Justice Department to a federal trial dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. All of the defendants were found guilty on all charges. Indeed, currently on the YouTube page where Nihad Awad’s speech is found, in CAIR’s “Subscribers” section, logos are discovered for Hamas and Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, as well as Hezbollah. Furthermore, Awad has declared his support for Hamas.

Pro-Hamas sentiment is not just limited to CAIR’s national office. CAIR also has a number of local chapters around the U.S. that support Hamas. One of its more outspoken is in Los Angeles, sometimes called CAIR-California. The Executive Director of CAIR-California is Hussam Ayloush. Ayloush has held his position, dating back to at least 2001. In December 2001, the CAIR-California website donned a smiling photo of him posing with suicide bombing advocate and spiritual leader of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.In the past, Ayloush has praised Hamas-related cleric Wagdy Ghoneim, calling him a “highly regarded religious scholar.” He has referred to the creation of Israel as the “nakba” or “catastrophe.” He has labeled Israelis “Zionazis.” And he has stated that the intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising against Israel, really means “standing up against injustice.” Today, Ayloush’s blog, which he calls his “official website,” is covered with virulently anti-Israeli rhetoric.

CAIR-California’s Civil Rights Coordinator, Affad Shaikh, too suffers from an anti-Israel obsession. After Israel declared war on Hamas, Shaikh posted to different blogs a photo of an individual holding a sign with the words, “DEATH TO ALL JUICE.” Of course, by “Juice” he meant “Jews.” He added that Muslim groups should end their full participation in interfaith gatherings with Jews, calling such gatherings a “facade.”Shaikh, in May 2007, issued a warning to the United States stating, “If we in the West continue to feed into this idea and support a state that is not truly in line with Democratic principles then we are fooling ourselves and setting up for a catastrophe of great magnitude.”

Affad Shaikh’s “Nakba” for America will become real, if people don’t wake up and realize that Hamas is not just in Gaza: its supporters live here at home. Israel’s battle in Gaza today could very well be a battle fought within the United States in the near future. In fact, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zaharsaid as much, when he stated this week that Jews “have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.” 

All over the world could once again include Manhattan.

 

 ‘Green Helmet Guy’ is still – or yet again – lugging about that same little corpse he carried for ‘fauxtographs’ after the Israeli raid on Qana in July, 2006. 

The media, such as Reuters, who love the cold-blooded mass-murderers of Hamas – including the terrorists’ main TV propaganda outlet, the BBC – are showing those old pictures, claiming this time that the poor kid was killed in the present IDF ground assault on Gaza. 

Read the full report here.

 A European socialist party actually begins to resent dhimmitude!

This from Canada Free Press:

Two weeks ago, the Netherlands’ biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch "tolerance." …

If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was  exceptional.

The paper said: "The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance."

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of "loss and estrangement" felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

From Cee Gee, who reviewed Richard Dawkins’s bad book on atheism for us (The God Delusion), we have received the following. We post it with a sigh for what it proves – that atheists can be as silly as believers. 

Atheists in Britain have placed posters on 800 buses which read: THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.

What a silly, woolly-headed muddle. What a waste of space. Not thought-provoking, merely provoking. Why "probably"? Why should God’s probable non-existence be grounds to stop worrying? Why should one stop worrying? Why should worrying preclude enjoyment of life? Are atheists happy chappies? Is the selling point of atheism its worry-free aspect, like maid service? 

Perhaps British atheists chose vapidity because of fears of outrage from adherents of the religion of peace, among others.

 

We invite readers to present alternative two-liners to advertise atheism in Britain, or elsewhere. Here are a few to start the ball rolling:

 

THERE’ S NO GOD. BUT SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ARE WATCHING YOU. (Britain)

THERE’S NO GOD, SO THERE IS NO POINT IN BLOWING UP THIS BUS. (Britain)

NO GODS ALLOWED ON THIS BUS, EXCEPT FOR THE BLIND.

 Reuters reports:

By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq’s work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave’s ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s "engineering unit" – its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.

Qiq’s body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, "the chief leader of the engineering unit", would now find "paradise".

That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq’s activities.

No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq’s widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher’s surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter.

"We have a zero-tolerance policy towards politics and militant activities in our schools. Obviously, we are not the thought police and we cannot police people’s minds," he said.

To my certain personal knowledge it is a blatant lie that UNWRA does not ‘tolerate’ political activity in its schools. The last time I entered an UNRWA school evidence of its support for anti-Israel activity could not have been more evident, in text books, exercise books, posters, and other instruction materials. 

The Arabs have deliberately kept generations of their fellow Arabs, the ‘Palestinians’, in a condition of dependency, without ‘human rights’  or civil rights as a reproach to the conscience of Israelis and Westerners – having no conscience whatsoever themselves. And the United Nations has assisted them in this, with the creation and perpetuation of UNRWA, and so have the Western powers. Of course the Gazans  could have done more for themselves. When they were left functioning greenhouses worth billions of dollars by the departing Israelis, they preferred to smash them rather than use them. And it is not to be forgotten that they voted for Hamas to govern them. 

 From Power Line:

As Yaacov Lozowick notes, the IDF has called the neighbors of targeted sites to give them a ten-minute warning. Lozowick comments:

Alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they’ll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army wold have done.

But what about the IDF system which provides for the warnings? As a manager of complex IT systems, Lozowick reconstructs the efforts that have gone into its creation:

First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

Lozowick concludes that the IDF is the most moral army in the world: "This drives some people bonkers, and they often go ballistic. Alas for them, and fortunately for many Palestinians, it happens to be the simple truth."

The care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties complicates the achievements of its military objectives and increases the hazards to its soldiers, and it doesn’t do much to win Israel friends outside the United States. It is nevertheless an essential component of Israel’s strategy in dealing with its terrorist enemies.

From the Jerusalem Post:

"Hundreds of terrorists have been killed and weapons and ammunition stocks have been destroyed, along with tunnels and rocket manufacturing facilities," Military Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin told the cabinet.

"The Hamas government isn’t functioning, and the group’s leaders aren’t serving the citizens but themselves alone. There is much criticism of Hamas amongst Palestinians for bringing on this situation," Yadlin said.

The MI chief also noted that throughout the operation, Hamas has continued to use citizens as human shields.

Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), assessed that Hamas leaders were now less determined to continue fighting, and that there were senior leaders among them who support moving towards a cease-fire. 

This is part of a report from Israel by Ari Bussel (read the whole Canada Free Press article here):

Israel is at war simultaneously in several fronts:  Hamas in Gaza; the Home Front in the ever-expanding radius around Gaza (currently 26 miles); the Fifth Column of Israeli Arabs, now acting like the Islamists in Europe; and the world public opinion in the Public Diplomacy Front.  In all fronts, the enemies are aided and abetted by Jews and Israelis.  In all fronts – we lose.

Hamas needs to do nothing more than continue what it does now with little or no effort:

· leisurely launching up to 100 rockets a day from a well protected cache; 
· produce cartoons and other programs for children in which hatred is preached; 
· showcase pictures of body parts, people alive and seemingly dead soaking in what looks like blood, at times bodies exhumed from graves; 
· and keep bombarding the world with fallacies, accusations and allegations that are more reminiscent of a thousand and one Arabian nights.

The world is fighting unabashedly on behalf of Hamas, with fierce determination.  Israeli Arabs are holding violent demonstrations, trying to excuse the ever increasing violence as the youthful indiscretions.  Israelis – a fringe of the political left – are doing all they can to destroy Israel from within.

Early this morning I took the bus to Sderot where I spent the day.  The feeling was of a deserted city of its regular inhabitants.  Young volunteers wearing white shirts distributing presents to the residents, female soldiers from the Home Front Command distributing Israeli flags, Fire and Rescue Service personnel, police, military, numerous others – none from Sderot.

Foreign journalists came in hoards as well, one even asking with some disgust:  Are we in any imminent danger?  “No,” I replied, we came shopping for Chala-bread for Shabbat.

The picture is surreal.  On the bus to Beer Sheva, I was the one passenger who went off in Sderot.  Other than one soldier and two others, the bus was empty.  The bus station made of cement, also acts as a shelter.  You start looking at these things, the next COLOR RED siren can be announced any second.  You have exactly 15 seconds to take cover.  In the city of Ashkelon 30 seconds, in the port city of Ashdod 45 seconds, in Beer Sheva 60 seconds.  Mal functions are possible, so never take a chance – it is a life and death situation.

Interestingly, I realize in retrospect that I have seen no children in Sderot today, only adults.  The locals have lived through this hell for eight years.  We come, take a glimpse into their lives, say how horrible it must be, take some pictures and we rush to leave as soon as the purpose for which we came had been accomplished.  Many come for photo-ops, others to interview a family whose house was hit, yet others to see what is Israel doing, not so much interested in the ongoing plight of the residents but how can they twist anything they see to Hamas’s advantage.

Earlier today Hamas came out in a statement to the foreign press that Israel is preventing the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.  Over the last few days, Israel has transferred all aid sent by international organizations.  On Monday, 23 trucks with food, medicines and medical supplies were transferred via Kerem Shalom Crossing into Gaza.  On Tueday 63 trucks and five ambulances, on Wednesday 93 trucks and the same on Thursday. There is so much aid that the receiving organizations have declined any further aid at the moment – the warehouses are over flowing.

While we had to take cover, running to the nearest shelter, Gazans are given advance warning by the IDF.  Surrealism at its best.  The IDF gives ample opportunity to vacate buildings that are about to be hit.  A telephone call from the IDF is received telling one that the building will be hit in a few minutes since there is an explosive lab or an ammunition cache or a terrorist in hiding.  Sure enough, the building is bombarded and hit.  Where else does an army warn its enemy of an incoming strike to avoid any unnecessary innocent casualties?  Where else would human beings use hospitals and mosques as operation centers, hiding places, and warehouses for explosives, ammunition and advanced weaponry?

Many Gazans are indeed involuntary participants:  They do not agree with Hamas, yet if they object they will be shot as traitors and if they cooperate they become human shields.  Hamas wins either way – human life has no consequence to it – neither the lives of its enemy nor the lives of its own people.

The situation is reminiscent of a chess player playing solitarily.  All moves must be considered.  First one needs to take care of one’s own, then one needs to take care of the enemy, since the enemy does not care about its own (unless in their death, sorrow and misery they can be made to reflect badly on Israel).

Minister Avi Dichter stated: “All countries should open their eyes and see very carefully what is really happening.  If Israel will not block Hamas and Hizbollah who serve the interests of Iran, they will face a very tough problem in the years ahead.” He added, “Israel knows very well how to go forward with both air strikes and ground operations.”

Minister Dichter’s statement is not much different than Senator McCain’s:  Israel is the canary in the coal mine.

We went on a “hill” overlooking the area.  We saw the power plant in Ashkelon supplying some of the electricity to Gaza, a constant target of the racketeers (rocket-eers); the area that used to be green houses employing Arabs and exporting fruits, vegetables and flowers from the desert, now terrorist training camps and launching areas to rockets; a black and white kitten eating oblivious to anything happening around it; protection structures built around public schools now empty; houses which were once occupied and are now a mere shadow of yesteryears; and an inner strength of those of suffered for eight years but stayed and the urge to run away by those of us who only came to spend a few hours.

When one says “no sane country would have allowed it unto its citizens,” one must wonder how to make the world understand that Israel’s Operation Cast Lead is justified, is the only resort it was given, and must be continued to its conclusion. 

 Here is news worth  reporting because such understanding, and such plain speaking of the truth, is unusual among EU leaders.         

 The Czech foreign minister has taken over the presidency of the EU – not the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, as was expected.  Fortunately, Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg shares some vital principles with President Klaus.  

In reply to the out-going EU president, Sarkozy of France, who condemned Israel’s operation against Hamas, Schwarzenberg said: ‘Let us realize one thing. Hamas increased steeply the number of rockets fired at Israel since the cease-fire ended on December 19. That is not acceptable any more. Israel has the right to defend itself.’ 

He also blamed Hamas for the civilian death toll in Gaza, pointing out that the terrorist organization put its bases and gun warehouses in densely populated areas.

 From Debkafile:

Israeli bombers hit Hamas’ film center in southern Gaza Saturday night, Dec. 27, after massive air raids destroyed Hamas compounds across the enclave leaving 205 killed, 330 injured and thousands of shock victims. The operation followed a week in which Hamas fired 200 missiles at Israeli civilian targets.

The Israeli Air Force planes struck Hamas security headquarters in Gaza City and compounds, police stations and ports. Several Hamas commanders were killed in the bombardment of a Hamas military passing-out ceremony. Among them was Hamas police chief Tawfiq Jabber.

The Israeli military spokesman said the Gaza operation is "just beginning" and would be expanded and intensified as necessary.

Hamas and other Palestinian factions ordered its "fighters to avenge Israeli attacks." An Israeli was killed in Netivot in its first reprisal.

Egypt has condemned Israel for its military attack, but held Hamas responsible for refusing to heed warnings and failing to protect the Palestinian people. It has mobilized its rescue and medical services in Sinai, including hospitals for aid to casualties for the Israeli air bombardment of Gaza. Egyptian ambulances stood by at the Rafah crossing to transport wounded Hamas operatives.

The Israeli air attack launching some 40 missiles began 11.30 a.m. local time Saturday, eight days after Hamas terminated the informal Gaza ceasefire by showering missiles and mortar rounds on 250,000 Israeli civilians day after day.

Last week, the Israeli cabinet gave the Israeli military the green light for reprisals as Palestinian missile attacks escalated, 13 mortar rounds fired Friday, when Israel allowed 90 trucks of food and medicines to cross into the Gaza Strip.

Since Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Palestinians have fired 5,000 missiles.