Robert Malley might be best known for promoting the revisionist view that shifted blame from Yasir Arafat after the Palestinian leader rejected compromise at the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in 2000. Judging by a column Malley wrote this month for the Boston Globe, he still may have an interest in revising history.

True, Malley was technically correct when noting in the Jan. 20 Op-Ed that “in the past few weeks, Palestinian militant groups have fired rockets and mortars into Israel.”

And yet, he was so far from conveying the full truth. Israelis living in Sderot and other towns near the Gaza Strip have endured incessant attacks not only for a “few weeks,” not for a few months, but rather for years. Since 2001, and especially after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, thousands of rockets and mortars fired from the Strip have traumatized and killed Israelis.

Malley questions why Israel has ramped up sanctions and counter-terror operations to pressure Hamas; perhaps a better question would be how that country has managed to act with such restraint until now. How many weeks, months or years would Americans tolerate rocket attacks on the United States before firmly responding?

Victor Davis Hanson has written an excellent essay reminding us of the world’s double standards and hypocrisy regarding Israel. Click here to read his January 29, 2008 essay: “A Modest Proposal for Middle East Peace.”

According to an interesting piece in yesterday’s Spiegel Online about Kassam rockets manufactured in Gaza and fired at Israel, “The raw materials for one large rocket cost up to €500.”

I can’t help but imagine, on those days when 40 rockets at 500 Euros a piece are fired out of Gaza, that in fact $30,000 worth of pitas, beef, and vegetables are being launched out of the territory instead of being on the plates of hungry Gazans. And that’s before you factor in the cost to Gaza of Israel’s attempts to stop those rockets.

It brings to mind Golda Meir’s quote about peace not being possible before those in the region love their kids more than they hate Jews.

The Jerusalem Post ( ‘UNHRC endorsed anti-Semitic charter’, Jan. 29, 2008)
reports that UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental agency that monitors the United Nations, “has urged UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to clarify a recent endorsement of the Arab Charter of Human Rights, which it said ‘contains several provisions that promote classically anti-Semitic themes.’ ” These provisions vilify, denigrate and demonize Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination and statehood, by equating it with racism, describing it as a threat to world peace and as an enemy of human rights and human dignity, and urging its elimination (an implicit call for the destruction of Israel).

Citing these provisions, UN Watch condemns the Arab charter as blatantly anti-Semitic, and adds that “nothing can justify any endorsement of a text with such hateful language.”

One could add that the charter is also at odds with a United Nations decision nearly two decades ago to repudiate the false, hateful and venomous equation of Zionism with racism.

To read UN Watch’s full letter to Arbour, click here.

– Stephen Silver

Leila Khaled, described by the LA Times as “a longtime PFLP activist,” highjacked TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and El Al Flight 219 in 1970

The Los Angeles Times ran a correction today:

Habash obituary: The obituary of George Habash, the founder of Arab nationalism, in Sunday’s California section referred to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock as Islam’s holiest shrine. In fact, Islam’s holiest site is considered to be the Kaaba, which is near the center of the great mosque in Mecca.

Unfortunately, the 1,236-word obit never once uses the “t” word that would best sum up Habash’s life — “terrorist.” Likewise, his colleague, the notorious Leila Khaled, is referred to only as “a longtime PFLP activist.”

This in from the Jerusalem bureau chief of what is widely considered America’s top newspaper:

But it will be very difficult now for Mr. Mubarak to reseal the border completely. More likely, he will work something out with Mr. Abbas and Israel to allow a regulated border crossing. But even that will resound as a Hamas victory, because both Egypt and Israel will have been forced to a concession that they could have negotiated freely with Mr. Abbas any time in the last six months.

Anyone home? Just over six months ago, Hamas routed Abbas’ forces from the Gaza Strip. So any negotiations about Gaza involving Abbas would be farcical.

(Hat tip: Richard B.)

In the BBC mindset, terrorists rocketing civilians in the southern Israeli city of Sderot are simply “militants targeting settlements.” That is how BBC explains the situation.

A Jan. 28th article on BBC’s Web site, “Fresh efforts to seal Gaza border” explained Israel’s blockade on Gaza as follows:

Israel began tightening its blockade of the Gaza Strip after an increase in rocket attacks by militants targeting its settlements near the border.

Israel withdrew its military and civilian settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Sderot–the prime target of Palestinian rocket and mortar fire–is a city in the western Negev, well within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Yet it is still a “settlement” to BBC journalists who consistently label Israeli settlements “illegal under international law”. Does this mean that BBC now considers all of Israel to be “illegal under international law”?

There’s going to be a new strongman in Gaza. That’s right. In the name of national unity, Hamas and Fatah have come together and agreed to bring in a third party — a giant gingerbread man modelled after the Muffin Man’s oversized creation in “Shrek II” (himself a close cousin of the towering Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in “Ghost Busters.”)

At least that’s the theory of some political scientists, speculating why Gazans require half a ton of flour per person, per day. Experts have been puzzling over Gaza’s unusually high demand for the baking necessity ever since Harvard University’s Sara Roy and co-author Eyad al-Sarraj published in Saturday’s Boston Globe the alarming tidbit that Gaza’s 1.5 million residents require 680,000 tons of flour daily.

Of course, the Israeli occupiers are once again thwarting this golden opportunity for a peaceful resolution to the conflict by blocking the Muffin Man’s passage from Drury Lane and by cutting the strip’s supply to just 90 tons a day — a reduction of 99 percent.

(A special thanks to Martin Kramer for bringing this possible realignment to our attention.)

In a satirical piece meant to mock the notion that Hamas is manipulating and staging a humanitarian crisis, Yossi Sarid argues in Ha’aretz:

In a place of permanent disaster it is difficult to cause a temporary one; it is difficult to bring about a dramatic change in the situation just as it difficult to change its definition: disaster.

How does Sarid define the “disaster”?

The Gaza Strip, as we know, is the most crowded place in the world: 1.5 million people on 300 square miles. Almost all of them have been living for decades in refugee camps, which are more suited for mice and sewer rats than humans.

First, Sarid may not know it, and Ha’aretz simply may not care, but Gaza (with 8,666 people per square mile) is not the most densely populated place in the world. Numerous places, include Monaco (41,608), Singapore (17,751), Gibraltar (11,990), Hong Kong (17,833), and especially Macau (71,466), surpass the Gaza Strip in that respect.

And do “almost all” of the 1.5 million Gazans live in refugee camps? Not according to UNRWA, the UN organization which administers the camps. According to UNRWA, as of December 2006, there are 478,272 registered refugees in camps.
(more…)

Gazans returning to the strip from Egypt carry a variety of goods — food, foam mattresses and fertiliser used to make explosives — among them. Don’t expect to see photos of the latter/AP photo by Nasser Nasser

It’s not only in the artificially darkened Hamas headquarters where Hamas is controlling the images. Even in the chaos of the Gaza-Egypt border, Hamas men decide what the Western world will and will not see. Thus Tim Butcher of the Telegraph reports:

Fertiliser, broken down into half bags for lugging through the many tunnels that arms smugglers normally use for delivery into Gaza, was to be seen as it was manhandled overland.

It was white, oily, crystalline and a dab on the tongue left a sharp, burning sensation.

In most countries fertiliser has a perfectly innocent function but in Gaza militants use it to make explosive.

“Hey, hey, hey,” shouted a man as I took a photograph of a pile of fertiliser half bags.

His aggressive tone jarred with the mood the crowd as he grabbed my camera lens firmly.