Hamas’ lies about respecting Gaza’s Christians continue to be exposed, and ignored by the world.

A Palestinian human rights group says assailants have beaten up guards and stolen a bus from a Christian school in Gaza.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights says the incident took place early Saturday morning at a school run by the Baptist Church.

A Palestinian Christian who worked at the school was killed in October, and a nearby Christian bookshop was firebombed months earlier. Last month assailants detonated a bomb outside another Christian school. No arrests were made in any of the incidents.

Since Hamas came to power a year ago, attacks on Gaza’s 3,000 Christians have increased. The Muslim group denies involvement and says it’s trying to protect the dwindling community.

Remember, first they came for the Jews. But if there are no Jews around, apparently, Christians will do just fine.

Countdown to the “It’s all Israel’s fault” chorus in 3, 2, 1….

The magnanimity and generosity of Sheik Nasrallah (PBUH) doesn’t know borders.

Red Cross confirms receiving box which Shiite organization claims contains body parts of Israeli soldiers killed in Second Lebanon War, following release of convicted Lebanese spy Nissim Nasser from Israeli jail.
…
According to reports in Lebanon, the deal to deliver the remains in exchange for Nasser was finalized in advance and made public only upon its implementation at the border crossing. It appears that even Hizbullah’s al-Manar network was surprised by the news.

According to repeated assurances by IDF and its religious arm (that is quite careful when taking care of the bodies), there were no missing bodies of our soldiers who fell during the Second Lebanon War. So what the box contains are at best assorted body parts that were not found by the burial commands.

Buzzard (to take one example of a carrion eater) goes about its unappetizing business of feeding on cadavers. Such is its nature, revolting as it may look to some people.

But even the buzzard wouldn’t engage in a trade of the kind Hizballah indulges in.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

I’ve been reluctant to write about this, because it simply enrages me. The murderer who comitted one of the most heinous crimes in Israel’s history is about to be set free.

Israel needs the death penalty to prevent more trades like this in the future. If Samir Kuntar had been executed 29 years ago, Israel would not be exchanging him for Israeli prisoners (who may not even be alive) Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped specifically for this cause. Once again, the Arab world learns that terrorism pays. And Kuntar is going to be released to commit more murder, which he has already promised he will do. The process has begun, and is probably winding to its inevitable end.

Hizbullah terrorists have returned Israeli body parts that they’ve held since 2006 for this very purpose.

Hizbullah on Sunday handed over to Israel remains of an unidentified number of Israeli soldiers killed in the Second Lebanon War, al-Manar television reported.

The body parts’ transfer was completed shortly after 3 pm, and the remains were taken for identification to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in a Magen David Adom ambulance along with representatives of the Army Chaplaincy.

[...] A Hizbullah official, Wafik Safa, reported of the remains’ transfer at the Lebanese coastal border town of Naqoura minutes after Lebanese-Israeli citizen Nissim Nasser was released by Israel after serving a six-year jail term for spying for Hizbullah.

It’s step two in the future transfer. This was step one:

Nasser is believed to have been released as part of a future prisoner swap deal with Hizbullah, which would include the return of kidnapped Israeli soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and the release of six Lebanese prisoners, including murdered Samir Kuntar.

If Samir Kuntar’s name is familiar to you, it’s because he and his fellow terrorists murdered two police officers and the Haran family.

On the night of April 22, 1979, a terrorist cell of four operatives landed on Nahariya’s shore from Lebanon. They surrounded Amnon Sela’s villa on the water front and pressed the interphone buzzer.

Sela and his wife noticed the suspicious figures carrying backpacks and assumed they were burglars. Police forces quickly arrived at the scene.

Eliyahu Shachar, a 25-year-old officer who was also the shift commander arrived at the scene first. He was hoping to red-handedly catch the burglars, but a bullet shot through his neck when he exited his vehicle. The terrorist cell headed by Kuntar moved on to the Haran residence, where they murdered the father Danny Haran and his daughters Einat, 4, and Yael, 2.

What the article does not tell you is that Samir Kuntar killed Danny Haran in front of his daughter Einat, and then he smashed Einat’s skull on a rock. Smadar Haran’s first-person account was published in the Washington Post.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

Yael died. She was inadvertently smothered by her mother to keep her from giving away their hiding place.

More than one family was ripped apart by Kuntar. The brother of one of the police officers they shot was interviewed by Ynet last week.

“After my brother’s murder, my mother would visit the cemetery every single day and sleep near his grave,” said Haim. “She died of grief eight months later at the age of 44. My father became an alcoholic who would sit at home drinking constantly. Four years later, the alcohol beat him and he passed away at 51.”

[...] A year after his brother’s murder, Kuntar was transferred to Beersheba Prison and placed on kitchen duty. Their meeting was inevitable.

“The first time a saw him I could hardly believe my eyes. I wanted to kill him and it was simply unbearable,” said Haim. “I repeatedly asked to have him transferred from there because I couldn’t deal with seeing him around, but he stayed on. He knew exactly who I was and remembered me from his trial. Every time he saw me in the kitchen he would stare at me and smile.”

This is the subhuman scum that will be released soon. I can only pray that the Mossad sends an assassination squad after him to do what should have been done in 1979. If Kuntar is freed, may his life be short, and his death quick. And as painful as possible.

In a hypothetical column written in 1999, Thomas Friedman described how PM Binyamin Netanyahu would be re-elected.

Now that Israeli troops are out of Lebanon, noted Mr. Netanyahu, everything is reversed: Politically, if the Iranian-directed Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas try to come across the border, they will be invading Israel, and Israel will be justified in massively retaliating against Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian troops that abet such an invasion. And if Israel does retaliate, it won’t be with guerrilla warfare, but with the Israeli Air Force massively striking Lebanese, Iranian and Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and maybe inside Syria.The Israeli move has totally unnerved the Syrians, the Hezbollah guerrillas and Iran. ”They are all now in a quandary,” said the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen. ”The Hezbollah guerrillas are saying to themselves: ‘Now that we have liberated Lebanon, do we want to use that as leverage to rule Lebanon? Or do we want to use that as a springboard to move on to Jerusalem?’ If they want to do the latter, now they’re really going to have to pay for it.”

After Hezbollah used six years of preparing for and launching a war against Israel he wrote:

On the morning after the morning after, Lebanese war refugees, who had real jobs and homes, will start streaming back by the hundreds of thousands, many of them Shiites. Tragically, they will find their homes or businesses badly damaged or obliterated. Yes, they will curse Israel. But they and other Arabs will also start asking Nasrallah publicly what many are already asking privately:“What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in ‘Arab honor?’ So that Iran could distract the world’s attention from its nuclear program? You did all this to us for another country?”

. . .

Moreover, if and when a French-led international force is placed along the Israel-Lebanon border, it will be a big loss for Hezbollah. The Shiite militia will no longer be able to directly touch Israel and start a war for Iran or Syria whenever it chooses. And, if Hezbollah tried to lob missiles over the peacekeeping zone, or penetrate it, it would clash with forces from France, Italy and Turkey, the likely peacekeepers. That means Hezbollah, Iran and Syria would not be able to hurt Israel without also hurting their own relations with the European Union.

Now the consequences of following Friedman’s advice - his reassurance in shreds too - are clear. As JoshuaPundit put it

Hezbollah and Iran realize that it’s no longer necessary to overthrow the Siniora government. They can just control, and take over in their own good time.What we’re seeing now is simply negotiations over the terms of surrender.

To be sure there are plenty of reasons for the state of affairs in Lebanon, but surely Israel’s withdrawal and failure to battle the Hezbollah buildup in southern Lebanon played a major role in the fall of Lebanon’s March 14 coalition.

Now Friedman tells us that when you negotiate with your enemies you need leverage.

There has been some promising moderate push back against extremists in Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank lately. It’s definitely worth watching, but is still very frail. America’s leverage will be limited as long our key allies do not have a strategy, with weight, to counter the hard-liners. Here’s hoping that once the primary silly season is over, the McCain and Obama camps will stop jousting over whether to talk with our enemies — which we must — and will start focusing instead about how we and our friends get more chips to bargain with — which we lack.

In Lebanon, Israel’s withdrawal precipitated the events that led to the loss of any leverage. In fact I would argue that Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon was one of the main factors in encouraging Iran’s adventurism.

The turnaround in Iraq that he so vaguely acknowledges had been due to the effective use of military force combined with a skillful co-opting of local forces.

I’m not sure what push back has been going on in the West Bank. (I notice he doesn’t mention Gaza where Israel’s withdrawal has similarly emboldened Iran’s allies.)

For the most part, though, leverage is achieved through the use of force of some sort. It’s a lesson that Friedman still hasn’t absorbed.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Clark Hoyt still hasn’t addressed my question about how the NYT reports news, however he’s dug up a several weeks old column to question whether the Times was correct in running a specific opinion piece.

At issue is an op-ed by Edward Luttwak, President Apostate?, in which Luttwak wrote:

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

and

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.

Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the NYT saw fit to second guess the paper’s decision to run this op-ed. This is the short version of the points Luttwak made that Hoyt sought to address:

Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father’s religion always determines a child’s, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama’s “conversion” to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

Hoyt talked to five Islamic scholars who objected to the generalizations in Luttwak’s article. Here’s on objection:

Luttwak wrote that given those facts, Obama was a Muslim and his mother’s Christian background was irrelevant. But Sherman A. Jackson, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Michigan, cited an ancient Islamic jurist, Ibn al-Qasim, who said, “If you divorce a Christian woman and ignore your child from her to the point that the child grows up to be a Christian, the child is to be left,” meaning left to make his own choice. Jackson said that there was not total agreement among Islamic jurists on the point, but Luttwak’s assertion to the contrary was wrong.

Maybe, but I wonder if, in this case, “not total agreement” means something like a 50-50 split or if the consensus by a wide margin favors Luttwak’s interpretation. If the former I can accept the criticism; if the latter is true, then Luttwak was not too far off in generalizing.

Another objection was:

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a professor of law at Emory University, said that Sharia, or Islamic law, including the law of apostasy, does not apply to an American or anyone outside the Muslim world. Of the more than 40 countries where Muslims are the majority, he said, Sharia is the official legal system only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and even there apostasy is unevenly prosecuted, and apostates often wind up in prison, not executed.

Nearly every Islamic state has a clause in its constitution declaring that it follows Islamic law. How closely they follow Sharia may vary in practice, but Islamic law is codified as the law of the land. As far as Prof. An-Na’im’s second assertion, that’s exactly what Luttwak said. So this particular objection actually confirms parts of Luttwak’s case.

Anyway, regardless of how substantive the criticisms of Luttwak were, Hoyt concludes:

Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

I don’t think that Hoyt made the case that Luttwak’s was “…a single, extreme point of view” and, in fact, he even acknowledges that a paragraph somewhat softening the tone of the article was edited out to the displeasure of Luttwak.

But then there’s the larger problem here. In this case Hoyt objects to “…a single, extreme point of view” but he hasn’t always. In fact once upon time he wrote:

Op-ed pages should be open especially to controversial ideas, because that’s the way a free society decides what’s right and what’s wrong for itself. Good ideas prosper in the sunshine of healthy debate, and the bad ones wither. Left hidden out of sight and unchallenged, the bad ones can grow like poisonous mushrooms.Rosenthal and Shipley said that, over time, they try to publish a variety of voices on the most important issues. Regular op-ed readers have seen a wide range of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have a lot of other information to help judge Yousef’s statements.

Yes, I know the second paragraph mitigates the sentiments in the first one. Still Hoyt’s principle is that controversial ideas are an important part of an op-ed page. Luttwak’s op-ed was clearly controversial and perhaps it would have been reasonable to publish a critical op-ed that disputed Luttwak.

But even at that Ahmed Yousef’s op-ed wasn’t so much “controversial” as it was propaganda from a terrorist organization. (Hoyt also didn’t find that propaganda as disturbing as he found a column by Henry Blodget that wasn’t even show to be false!)

What’s clear is that an opinion that is worthwhile because it’s controversial is in the eye of public editor, not a set principle.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.