Israeli Army Social Media Director Poses in Blackface

http://www.yourblackworld.net/2012/11/black-news/israeli-armys-social-media-director-poses-as-obama-in-blackface/

Found on Jezebel. Follow the link to see the picture.

Israel Imprisoned Palestinian Soccer Player for 3 Years with No Charges

Israel just released Mahmoud Sarsak after holding him for three years with no charges, because Israel can do that.

Stories for the Weekend

1. Benighted wasteland Texas provides two stories, elected official Louie Gohmert, (R-Texas), reveals his understanding of a fiendish plot whereby terrorist pregnant ladies give birth in the US, then whisk their babies back to the Axis of Evil to rear them as Manchurian candidates…much like Barack Obama, himself.

…And it appeared they would have young women, who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby,” said Gohmert. “They wouldn’t even have to pay anything for the baby. And then they would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists. And then one day, twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.

“Coddled”? And by the way, why wouldn’t they have to pay anything for the baby? I mean, babies are free, in the sense that they just come right out of your body, but usually there are at least hospital bills involved.

Rep Gohmert is apparently climbing aboard the “ignore the 14th amendment” bandwagon that is gaining ground among Constitution-loving Americans.

2. Which reminds me to post a link a to this cool campaign by United Farm Workers. You think Mexicans are stealing your jobs? Apply for those jobs here.

3. Also in Texas news, taking a page from shariah law, the state GOP includes recriminalization of oral sex in its party platform.

I assume somewhere it also says it wants less government interference in people’s private lives.

4. Israel has seized seven oxygen machines that were donated to the Palestinian authority.

Israel confiscated seven oxygen machines en route to hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza based on the claim that there was a chance the generators attached to the machines would not be used for medical purposes, Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported Saturday.

5. Real Middle East expert Juan Cole is getting tired of dealing with fake Middle East experts. Also, this:

More recently I have provoked the ire of a burly former Israeli military prison guard at the notorious Ketziot detention camp during the first Intifada, who is among our foremost journalists of the Middle East and given a prominent perch at The Atlantic magazine–Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg has not only not exactly been at the forefront of the peace movement, he has argued and agitated against doing anything practical to achieve this increasingly unlikely goal. He is the Rottweiler of ideologues when it comes to making sure that no Israeli policy is ever criticized by anyone without his branding the critics bigots and even genocidal. Since, as noted, Goldberg is possibly still an Israeli army reservist and actively served in the Israeli Army as a prison guard during the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising, I can’t understand why anyone takes him seriously when he lashes out at critics of Israeli policy. I mean, what would you expect? If an Arab-American had served in the Palestine Authority police, would anyone give him a perch at The Atlantic and routinely bring him on CNN to denounce critics of Mahmoud Abbas?

Israel Fakes Weapons Photos

It’s hard to know what to believe these days, you can’t even trust your old, reliable eyes when it comes to footage and photos. So if you were skeptical about the footage Israel was posting on YouTube, your instincts were the right ones.
Here’s an article at The Arabist about Israel’s photos of purported weapons caches found aboard the Mavi Marmara. As you might have guessed, the pictures were actually taken several years earlier and, naturally, someplace else.

My friend Ibn Kafka has a wonderful post catching Israel in a propaganda f**k-up. The Israeli Ministry Foreign Affairs posted on its Flickr account pictures of the terrifying weapons they found on the IHH ship. You know, things like bulletproof vests for emergency services, pepper spray, kitchen knives, bits of wood and other weapons of mass destruction. Except that they did not realize that Flickr displays EXIF data, which is the information that cameras record when they take pictures: aperture, shutter speed, flash status… and the time the picture was taken.

Which, as Flickr commenters quickly pointed out, was sometime in 2006.

So the Israeli MFA quickly changed the EXIF date, but not before I was able to take snapshots of before and after:

In other news, an American citizen had her eye put out by a tear gas canister fired by Israeli soldiers. Story here at Salon.

A student at New York’s Cooper Union School of Art is recovering in an Israeli hospital after being shot in the face with a tear gas canister on Monday during a demonstration at a check point between Israel and the West Bank.

“They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face,” said Soren Johanssen, a Swedish ISM volunteer who was standing with Henochowicz at the protest.

In related news, the US strongly feels that only Israel can properly investigate this incident, as any other entity might be impartial might not have Israel’s best interests at heart is unncessary when Israel already has the politicians ready and able to tell us what happened. Guardian story here.

This is so shameful that it’s almost as if Cheney GWB were still president.

The Americans also blocked criticism of Israel for violating international law by assaulting a ship in international waters in the security council statement proposed by Turkey, the Palestinians and Arab nations.

Yeah! Why criticize Israel just because they violated international law in one more way, this time by assaulting a humanitarian ship in international waters, killing nine, whose names they haven’t even released yet? It’s not like they’re Somali pirates or anything.

And vice president Biden plays the absolute moron with these statements:

“They’ve said, ‘Here you go. You’re in the Mediterranean. This ship — if you divert slightly north you can unload it and we’ll get the stuff into Gaza,'”, he said. “So what’s the big deal here? What’s the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza? Well, it’s legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don’t know what’s on that ship. These guys are dropping… 3,000 rockets on my people.

“Look, you can argue whether Israel should have dropped people onto that ship or not — but the truth of the matter is, Israel has a right to know — they’re at war with Hamas — has a right to know whether or not arms are being smuggled in.”

Seriously, Israel?

AP story here.

JERUSALEM – Israeli commandos on Monday stormed six ships carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists on an aid mission to the blockaded Gaza Strip, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens

Twice in this story there’s a claim by the Israelis that the civilians on the ship used weapons seized from Israeli commandos. I’m trying to figure out how the civilians seized weapons from soldiers who hadn’t attacked them yet. I’m really trying to figure out how the civilians seized weapons from Israeli commandos at all.

Does this make sense to anyone? A little help here?

An Al-Jazeera reporter on one of the Turkish ships said the Israelis fired at the vessel before boarding it. The Israelis, who had declared they would not let the ships reach Gaza, said they only opened fire after being attacked by activists with sticks, knives and live fire from weapons seized from the Israeli commandos.

The Israeli military said troops only opened fire after encountering unexpected resistance from the activists. Activists attacked troops with knives and iron rods, and opened fire with two pistols seized from the forces.

Response so far:

The tough Israeli response drew condemnations from Turkey, France and the U.N.’s Mideast envoy, while Greece suspended a military exercise with Israel and postponed a visit by Israel’s air force chief.

About 10,000 Turks also marched from Israel’s Consulate in Istanbul toward the city’s main square, shouting slogans denouncing Israel. The protesters earlier Monday tried storm the Consulate building but were blocked by police.

The Israeli ambassadors in Sweden, Spain, Denmark and Greece were summoned for meetings, and the French foreign minister called for an investigation.

In neighboring Jordan, hundreds demonstrated in the capital Amman to protest the Israeli action and demand that their government breaks diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

The United Nations expressed “shock” and condemned the killings. “We are in contact with the Israeli authorities to express our deep concern and to seek a full explanation,” said a statement from the highest-ranking U.N. official in the region, Robert Serry.

Presumably the US response will be, “Israel has a right to defend its territory.” What do you think?

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UPDATE: the AP story at the link now is not the same story I linked to this morning. Additional information has been added and quotes have been removed. Sorry about that; I have no control over altering the news.
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UPDATE: Swedish novelist Henning Mankell was on board one of the ships and is reported to be fine.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is publishing some editorials highly critical of the raid. I wish we would publish such things here in the US. A couple of titles:

Seven Idiots in the Cabinet

and Gaza Flotilla Drives Israel into a Sea of Stupidity.

Organ Snatching; WSJ Thinks Arabs are Iranians

Here are a couple of stories to look into. The Arab News reports:

RAMALLAH: The chief Israeli pathologist and director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, professor Yehuda Hiss, has admitted harvesting organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians without the consent of their families.

You can read more at the link. And the other story, found at BoRev.net, is about a Wall Street Journal article conflating Iranians with Venezuelans of Arab descent. To make it more scary.

From the penultimate paragraph of the WSJ article:

What do Fadi Kabboul, Aref Richany Jimenez, Radwan Sabbagh and Tarek Zaidan El Aissami Maddah have in common? The answer is that they are, respectively, executive director for planning of Venezuelan oil company PdVSA; the president of Venezuela’s military-industrial complex; the president of a major state-owned mining concern; and, finally, the minister of interior. Latin Americans of Middle Eastern descent have long played prominent roles in national politics and business. But these are all fingertip positions in what gives the Iranian-Venezuelan relationship its worrying grip.

From BoRev:

Wow, was your mind just blown? Iran is infiltrating the highest levels of the Venezuelan oil sector using…Christian immigrants from Lebanon! I don’t mean to add fuel to the fire or anything, but I think I saw a Sikh cab driver in Caracas once too.

The commenters at BoRev are pretty sure that all those guys are of Lebanese Christian descent, but I can’t verify it. After all, most people don’t have to declare their ethnic descent and religion to the world. A google search on their names mostly brings up dozens of blog posts about this WSJ article. Plus the dismaying realization that attempts to link Iran to Venezuela through Arab Christians has been going on for a while.

There are several sites out there linking Venezuelan Minister of the Interior Tarek El Aissami to Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in the sense that his great uncle was a Baathist, and I can’t figure out if that’s true or not, but I can pretty much guarantee that a tie to the Iraqi Baathist party is pretty much the opposite of a tie to Iran.

Plus, why did the WSJ writer, Bret “They All Look Alike to Me” Stephens, include Tarek El Aissami’s middle name and maternal last name? He doesn’t go by them, and his name is plenty scary-Arab-sounding without them.

See more mocking of Bret here. I only regret that there isn’t a lot more mocking.

Heartening News

Mike Huckabee’s trip to Israel has led to some thoughtful blog posts at various blogs I read. Polls are showing Huckabee, Palin, and Romney as all leading contenders for the next Republican primary. I found this here:

Mike Huckabee just told CBN: “One of the things I find most interesting is that generally Evangelicals are so much more supportive of Israel than the American Jewish community.”

In case you were wondering, CBN is the Christian Broadcasting Network.

This is what I find heartening:

I don’t know that Huckabee’s assertion is true, and I think it would depend on how one defines being “supportive,” but I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong either. It’s clear from my own personal experience that during the last 25 or so years, the number of American Jews in my circle who think that Israel holds the moral high ground and is a vulnerable but righteous democratic state surrounded by a sea of bloodthirsty Arab barbarians has declined dramatically, even as the pro-Israeli right has actively courted the conservative Christian community with those very same claims.

Well thank goodness. I think it’s true, too. And I sure hope it is. To paraphrase a comment I saw on a blog somewhere a while ago,

They say Israel is America’s only friend in the middle east. Before the creation of Israel, America didn’t have an enemy in the middle east.

Uh-oh, just found this, and it’s not good:

HUCKABEE: Basically, there really is no such thing as — I have to be careful in saying this, because people will really — but there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.

As a former governor of Arkansas, does Mr Huckabee also think there is no such thing as a Cherokee, a Chickasaw, a Chocktaw, or an Osage, and if so, does he say it out loud?

Since formatting may prevent you from reading the whole thing, here’s the link to the comic.