Anne Frank’s diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the terror group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism.

The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank” were included in the textbook used by a private English-language school in western Beirut.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews.

“What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted,” said the report aired last week and also published on the station’s website.

It questioned how long Lebanon would “remain an open arena for the Zionist invasion of education.”

Got it? Anne Frank’s diary has something to do with Israel. Therefore, Anne Frank was a Zionist, and Lebanese children in a private school should not be learning about how she hid from the Nazis for years and then was murdered in a death camp.

I can only infer that Hezbollah is afraid that Lebanese students might start putting two and two together and figuring out that Jew-hatred is Jew-hatred, whether you call it anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism.

Time for the Yourish.com mantra: Jew haters of the world, just die already. Preferably soon.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Israeli scientists have identified a substance that can kill cancerous cells without harming healthy ones, paving the way for more effective cancer treatment.

The findings by researchers at Tel Aviv University and Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, were published in the current issue of the international peer-reviewed journal Breast Cancer Research.

“We actually found the Achilles heel of the cancer cell,” said Prof. Malka Cohen-Armon from Tel Aviv University, who headed the research team. “As soon as you can target cancerous cells without killing healthy ones, you can produce medications that would cause a lot less suffering to the patient. We can even give a much more aggressive treatment without worrying about harming healthy tissues.”

Feel free, Norway, to boycott the possible cure for cancer. Perhaps in turn, Israel will find it hard to ship this medicine to Norway, and to all of the other nations that boycott Israel.

Of course not. Because that’s not what Jews do. That’s what the enemies of Jews do. And I count among the enemies of Jews those nations, companies, and groups that take part in boycotting the Jewish state. It’s not anti-Zionism.

The letter claims that Israeli universities and other institutions of higher education “have played a key role in the policy of oppression” that the signatories claim exists in Israel. It goes on to say that “Israel goes against all the ideals of open universities and academic freedom.”

Really? In Saudi Arabia, men and women are unable to take classes together. In Iran and Egypt, students are arrested and imprisoned for speaking their minds about the current governments. In Israel, Arabs and Israelis work side by side in universities all over the country. It isn’t Israel that goes against the ideals of open universities and academic freedom.

But sure, Norwegians, go ahead—boycott Israeli universities. It’s not like they’re coming up with a cure for cancer or anything like that.

Oh. Wait.

He seems particularly unable to understand why everyone doesn’t just see that he changed the original mandate (the one that ordered only investigation into “Israeli war crimes,” and the one that was never officially adopted by the Human Rights Council), that the Goldstone Report is not biased against Israel, and that he implicated Hamas as much as he blamed Israel for the civilian deaths in Gaza. When confronted with facts that contradict this worldview, he insists that he did everything right, he is being slandered by people who don’t like the report, and all Israel had to do was take part in the Goldstone Commission’s investigation, and then everything would have been all right.

Last night he repeated the same allegations against Israel made in his report, because Goldstone reiterates the same major points at every stop: The report did condemn Hamas, the 36 incidents cited were proof of Israel deliberately targeting civilians, and the proof of that is the destruction that was wreaked, especially of infrastructure.

Point number one: The report never actually condemns Hamas. Not once. It does, however, keep mentioning “Palestinian armed groups” as responsible for some of the crimes (for example, the rocket launching). There is a reason, Dore Gold said, why Hamas accepted the report. Because it didn’t implicate them at all.

Point numbers two and three: Those 36 incidents were incidents that Goldstone said proved Israel was guilty of deliberately targeting civilians. But the report could find “no evidence” of Hamas booby-trapping buildings or using human shields. The report quoted Palestinian eyewitnesses, but did not interview anyone in the IDF. One of the student questioners asked Goldstone how the report could possibly be unbiased when it did not interview a single soldier. He insisted that it was unbiased. You know, when I was a child, the “Because it is” defense never really worked with my mother.

The IDF found plenty of evidence of Hamas war crimes. Dore Gold brought videos and evidence of booby-trapped houses to the debate, and Goldstone seemed flabbergasted. But that didn’t stop him from continuing with his usual points.

That’s a theme with Goldstone. All evidence brought to the contrary appears to astound him. But then he recovers and starts accusing Israel of war crimes again.

Why destroy the infrastructure if not to collectively punish? Etc., etc., yadda yadda, QED, there’s your proof. He did not interview the commanders who made the decisions to fire on those areas, but he knows they did it for collective punishment. His report found no evidence of human shields and booby-trapped houses, but he knows that the IDF destroyed all of those homes deliberately and for no military reason. He touched on the IDF’s military bulldozers destroying Palestinian farmland. That would be because the roads into Gaza were booby-trapped, so the IDF made its own roads into Gaza, destroying whatever was in its path to prevent the deaths of soldiers. That, according to Goldstone, was a war crime. According to the rules of war, it’s damned good strategy.

Goldstone utterly disregards charges of bias. But when asked by a student how the report could possibly be unbiased when Christine Chinkin, member of the Commission, signed a letter accusing Israel of war crimes in the first week of the Gaza operation, he insisted that was not relevant. He said that if it had been a judicial investigation, then yes, she should have recused herself, but that since the commission was not judicial, it didn’t effect the investigation. The fact that he sees absolutely no cognitive dissonance in admitting that she was biased enough to be thrown off a judiciary investigation, but not a UN investigation, seems astonishing—but not when you consider that Richard Goldstone will brook absolutely no criticism of his efforts. He is right, Israel is wrong, and we are wrong for not accepting uncritically the Goldstone Report.

The hubris of this man is unbelievable. And the damage his report has done is yet to be seen.

Goldstone also revealed a personal aspect. “I was afraid to enter Gaza. I had nightmares that Hamas would kidnap me and that the Israelis would rejoice,” he said.

Judge Goldstone has been maintaining that he saw no sign of pressure exerted by Hamas on any of his witnesses. And yet he felt menaced? Goldstone was in Gaza under UN auspices and presumably there temporarily. What of the people who wouldn’t have the freedom to leave? Wouldn’t they fear kidnapping or worse, especially if they didn’t give Goldstone the responses that Hamas wanted them to?

But the second part of the remark is telling too. If he thought he was being fair why would Israelis rejoice at his kidnapping? I think that he’s strongly suggesting that he knew the verdict before the investigation. My Right Word noticed the same thing.

The Boston Globe also covered the debate.

Goldstone said the forum allowed him a chance to explain the substance of his findings “and avoid the personal and ad hominem attacks that have marked the debate on the report to date.” Goldstone, a former South African constitutional court justice who is himself a Jew, said much of the criticism of the report was based on false premises.

For example, he pointed out that many complaints say the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate to Goldstone was biased because it called only for an investigation of illegal Israeli acts. But Goldstone said he had refused to accept that mandate precisely because of its bias, and he had agreed to take part only when he was given the chance to rewrite the terms of the investigation.

He said the revised language called for a probe into the conduct by both sides in the three-week war, which raged from late December last year to mid-January and took 13 Israeli lives and those of more than 1,300 Palestinians.

Yes, I know he was hurt by the ad hominem attacks, But in order to argue that his opponents failed to critique the substance of his report, starting off with a distortion like that, wasn’t a good idea. Yes, Goldstone purported to change the mandate of his mission. But as Rep. Howard Berman’s revised resolution condemning Goldstone points out, the changes Goldstone “insisted” upon had no legal force.

Whereas Justice Richard Goldstone, who chaired the `United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,’ told the then-President of the UNHRC, Nigerian Ambassador Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, that he intended to broaden the mandate of the Mission to include “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after,” a phrase that, according to Justice Goldstone, was intended to allow him to investigate Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians;

Whereas Ambassador Uhomoibhi issued a statement on April 3, 2009, that endorsed part of Justice Goldstone’s proposed broadened mandate but deleted the phrase “before, during, and after,” and added inflammatory anti-Israeli language;

Whereas a so-called broadened mandate was never officially endorsed by a plenary meeting of the UNHRC, neither in the form proposed by Justice Goldstone nor in the form proposed by Ambassador Uhomoibhi;

And then Goldstone got off into his “collective punishment” argument. Funny, but having 1 million Israelis in missile range didn’t qualify.

The Globe also synopsizes Dr. Gold’s repsonse:

Gold – who has three degrees from Columbia University, including a doctorate, and now runs the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs – answered that while the report did criticize Hamas, it concentrated more intensively on alleged Israeli wrongdoing, when it was Hamas units that hid among civilians and all but ensured they would end up in the crossfire.

“There’s no question there was enormous damage in Gaza,” he said. “But why doesn’t Hamas appear as a responsible party for what happened? Who booby-trapped the buildings in Gaza? Who launched an eight-year war against Israel? Who built tunnels under people’s homes? The Hamas political leadership, which seems to get off the hook.”

Israel Matzav was there and blogged the event. He notes that Dr. Gold rebutted the report’s finding that Israel didn’t make sufficient efforts to alert civilians of impending attacks.

They said that they would hit any house that stored rockets, but sent multiple warnings to the civilian population. They entered into radio transmissions, leaflets were dropped, and then there was an attempt to directly contact families through cell phones or home phones. He put up a message in Arabic with an English translation.

How do we know that they received those warnings? Here’s a Hamas TV clip and how Hamas tried to keep the civilians among the military. (I haven’t seen these before – this is impressive). He said that the Goldstone Report wanted proof that the Palestinians were forced to be human shields – that’s an impossible standard to meet. He shows the famous video that I have of Fathi Hamad telling a rally that they must act as human shields and how they desire death. There’s no separation between Hamas and the ‘armed elements’ that fight Israel. He talked about Israel redirecting missiles while putting up a slide about the Palestinian police station strike.

How did Judge Goldstone respond to such presentations? Elsewhere, Israel Matzav observes:

Overall, I really felt that Dore Gold won the debate. That assessment is based on the audience reaction and on the comprehensiveness of his presentation. Goldstone seemed dumbfounded at the slides and video that Gold produced.

That’s pretty incredible. In this day and age, to learn anything of what Dr. Gold presented would have required a computer, an internet connection and a browser. But Judge Goldstone and his confederates couldn’t be bothered. If it didn’t fit their conclusions, they wouldn’t seek it out.

Courtesy of One Jerusalem here is Goldstone:

and here is Gold

In the end it’s impossible to escape the impression that Goldstone relishes playing the put upon prophet who only tells the truth, no matter the cost. However looking at his commission’s work and his smug self-righteousness you can only conclude that he cynically cherry picked his information in order to support his belief in Israel’s guilt rather than attempting to determine the truth. Impartiality was not a quality that Goldstone’s commission possessed.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Hamas authorities on Thursday asked several educational institutions in southern Gaza Strip to segregate males and females in compliance with Islamic norms.

The call appeared on a notification signed by Police General-Directorate in Rafah town, ordering private social and educational centers to sign a form demanding their commitment of Islamic and Palestinian traditions and preventing smoking.

The police threatened to impose about 1,300 U.S. dollars in fine to those who do not commit to “inform the police about suspected students or infracting decency.”

It’s okay, they’re only going to fine violaters. There won’t be any floggings.

Yet.

Previous decision included forcing lawyers and high school female students to wear long, loose uniforms with head covers and preventing women from riding behind men on motorcycles.

Gee, I really can’t argue with those Muslims who tell me how liberating Islam is for women.

A U.S. Army major opened fire on fellow soldiers Thursday in the heart of the giant Fort Hood Army base in central Texas, killing 11 people and wounding at least 31 in one of the worst incidents of soldier-on-soldier violence in military history.

The officer, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, was later shot and killed by security personnel on the base, which is about 160 miles southwest of Dallas.

Two other soldiers were in custody, base officials said, amid indications that the attack may have been premeditated and well-organized.

Military officials said that Maj. Hasan was a psychiatrist who had been recently promoted to major and transferred to Fort Hood from Washington’s Walter Reed Medical Center. Maj. Hasan’s professional specialties included post-traumatic stress disorder, combat stress and other emotional issues common to the troops implicated in earlier incidents of military fratricide.

As usual, there’s a lot of dancing toward the “combat stress” reason, but it’s really looking a whole lot like jihad here. Gateway Pundit has more.

But this is all in a day’s work, so move on, there are better things to watch. Which is, to start with, the hilarious responses from our neighbors and cousins.

• First of all, there were no weapons on Francop, this is all a Zionist-staged provocation.
• Besides (the same source says) the act of interception of the non-existing weapons is piracy…
• The weapons are not related to Iran in any way (radio). Well, the fact that the goods were carried in containers from the Iranian merchant fleet and the accompanying cargo manifest shows their Iranian provenance is an accident, of couse.
• And of course, Hezbollah claim that they have nothing to do with the shipment that never was and blame the “pirates” as well. The fact that the ship was destined for Beirut is a pure coincidence. And them Jooz are doing this because of Goldstone anyhow…
• And so it goes.

Still, it is not the Arab press that takes the cake in this case. The honors go to the UN-believable dorks:

Two days before Israel’s capture of a ship that was apparently ferrying arms to Hezbollah, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon released a report to the UN Security Council in which he said the United Nations took the Israeli allegations about weapons smuggling to Hezbollah seriously, but lacked the ability to independently verify the information.

And how do we know this (pay attention, please):

In the report, Ban wrote that the Lebanese government had not informed the UN of a single incident of weapons smuggling to its territory, whether by land, sea or air.

Lebanese government hadn’t informed… I will be… how is it for a… what the…

To relax – here goes a related blooper courtesy of Ynet:

Our defense minister is getting so large lately that he already deserves a zip code of his own, not to mention perimeter patrols. Well, the Ynet folks meant “tours”, of course….

My power nap time is nigh anyhow.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Try to imagine what the world would be like if anyone trusted the important things to the United Nations.

But of course, it’s not just the UN that ignores proof. Consider Israel’s capture of the Karine A in 2002. Initially the New York Times reported:

The Israeli Army said today that it had seized a ship carrying 50 tons of rockets, mines, antitank missiles and other munitions meant for Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, even as the Bush administration’s envoy met with Mr. Arafat in the hope of strengthening his declared cease-fire with Israel.

Palestinian officials denied any link to the ship, the Karine A, and dismissed the announcement a day after the seizure as propaganda timed to undermine Mr. Arafat.

This was followed three days later with an admission from the captain of the ship.

The interviews with the captain were rationed to selected news organizations by Israeli military officials frustrated that the smuggling has not gotten more international attention. They bolstered the Israeli contention that the weapons were intended for Palestinians for use against Israel.

As Captain Akawi did not draw a direct line between the shipment and Mr. Arafat. He said he did not know if Palestinian officials senior to the man he called Awadallah had been aware of the operation.

The captain also did not directly implicate the Iranian government in the smuggling, as the Israelis have, but he did describe a link to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group backed by Iran.

Note how careful the reporter is not to implicate Yasser Arafat (or even) Iran explicitly. Also, note that this huge news was largely ignored “frustrating” Israeli officials.

A couple of months later this was reported:

American officials said that Israeli intelligence reports about the Moscow meeting were at the heart of secret briefings that Israel provided to the Bush administration after the arms shipment was intercepted.

”There’s plenty of evidence to show that it wasn’t a rogue operation,” a senior State Department official said of the ship that Israel seized in early January.

Palestinian Authority officials dismissed the charges of any Iranian involvement in their struggle against Israel and denied that Mr. Arafat knew of the arms shipment. They said the allegations were an attempt by Israel to discredit the Palestinians and to justify Israel’s military operations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

”This is a factory of lies,” Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information, said. ”Israel is like any colonial power. When they get in trouble, they try to blame outsiders. There has not been a single Iranian here since the 14th century.”

Iran also has denied any involvement with the Palestinians or the arms shipments. Ali Shamkhani, the Iranian minister of defense, told the state news agency, ”The Islamic Republic of Iran has had no military relations with Arafat, and no steps have been taken by any Iranian organization for the shipment of arms to the mentioned lands.”

And of course, note the denial. So let’s to this week’s capture of Iranian arm shipment to Hezbollah.

Here’s the Washington Post:

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, speaking from Tehran, denied that Iranian arms were bound for Syria and said “pirates” had disrupted legitimate trade between Syria and Iran, news services reported.

The incident comes as Israeli political officials defend their country in the U.N. General Assembly against allegations that Israeli forces committed war crimes during last winter’s three-week war with the Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.
…
Israeli officials offered no direct evidence that the supplies were bound for Hezbollah. They noted, however, that Iran is forbidden under a U.N. embargo to export arms. Iran is widely considered a major weapons supplier for Hezbollah and Hamas.

The New York Times:

News reports quoted the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, and other officials saying the ship had been carrying the arms from Iran to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, but officials released no evidence to support those claims.

The capture of the ship came hours before the United Nations General Assembly began deliberations on the Goldstone report on the Gaza war last January, which asserts that both Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters committed war crimes.

Note how both articles claim that Israel offered “no evidence” of the charges and that it came at the same time that Israel’s responsibility of “war crimes” is being discussed in the UN. Both articles are effectively suggesting that Israel’s making a claim to deflect attention from its (unproven) guilt. Just like Yaser Abad Rabbo did in 2002.

AP (via memeorandum) too:

But hours after the seizure, Israel had not provided proof that the arms were meant for the Lebanese guerrillas.

At least AP doesn’t mention the irrelevant (to this story) UN activity.

Media Backspin observes that there is proof that the ship is Iranian in origin.

But what more proof does Israel need?

The Syiran and Iranian foreign ministers issued denials:

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, in a joint press conference with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem on Wednesday, dismissed the allegations out of hand.

His remarks were backed by Muallem, who asserted that contrary to Israeli claims, “the ship was not carrying Iranian-made weaponry for Syria or Lebanon,” but was in fact carrying Syrian-made items for consumption in Iran.

“Unfortunately a number of pirates disrupt business activities and frequenting of the ships, these pirates sometimes act in the name of [Iranians],” said the Syrian Foreign Minister.

Well as far as consumer good being transported, Israel provided visual proof that it’s not Syrian made toasters on the ship.

As Noah Pollak observes:

Moallem says there were no arms on board. The IDF has released a video of the ship’s weapons being unloaded in the port of Ashdod. There are rows and rows of mortar shells, rockets, and crates filled with grenades

Power Line notes:

Our enemies don’t stop scheming against us when we’re not paying attention to them. Or when we’re negotiating with them, either.

But there will be plenty who will cover for them aren’t there?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.