From the Times of London (h/t Backspin)
Some Israelis object to this program. They remember that Saddam Hussein fired Scuds into Israel during first Gulf War and find it offensive that Iraqis now seek their help but had no objection when the late Iraqi leader was trying to kill them.
Well no, that’s not how the article was written. It was written from a different troubling perspective.
Shatha’s friend, an Iraqi Kurd from Kirkuk who was too afraid to give her first name, also travelled to Jordan so that her son, Ahmed, could be assessed for a heart operation. She too turned down the free treatment offered by SACH.“Now I can sleep with a clear conscience. I’m able to hold my head up high and not be ashamed by having my son treated in Algeria,†she said.
Think about that, the hatred for Israel is so strong that some Iraqis would rather risk their children’s lives than seek treatment in Israel.
Save a Child’s Heart has a list of results from the organization. What’s interesting is that 2007 ( the last year that they have results from) the number of successful operations on Iraqi children was up – by a lot – in 2007. Twenty five Iraqi children were save by the organization last year. The previous high was 8. Maybe the reporters were finding a handful of parents whose hatred of Israel was so great that they’d risk their children’s lives. But SACH’s statistics show that more parents are agreeing to having the surgery done in Israel.
Egypt’s Culture Minister Faruq Hosni, a candidate to head UNESCO but under fire from the Jewish state, said on Tuesday he “dreams” of normal ties with Israel once it has made peace with the Palestinians.Hosni has drawn fire from Israel and the Wiesenthal Centre for saying he was prepared to burn Israeli books.
“I’d burn Israeli books myself if I found any in libraries in Egypt,” the minister said in parliament on May 10 in reply to questioning from an opposition MP.
Since UNESCO is a cultural institution that wouldn’t be good form for its leader. (Of course, it’s also an institution of the UN, so anti-Israel sentiment should be expected.) Mr. Hosni offered an explanation though.
Hosni says he only used “a popular expression to prove something does not exist”: Israeli books in Egyptian libraries.On Tuesday, he went a step further, telling AFP it was “a big mistake that Israeli books have not yet been translated (into Arabic). I have officially asked for it to be done. If people protest, I don’t give a damn.”
I’d like to think that’s sincere. More likely he’s weaseling out of responsibility, as he adds this.
But he opposed a normalisation of cultural ties with Israel before it has made peace with the Palestinians.”It is a dream. We must wait for the right moment to come when Israel will have signed peace with the Palestinians. If it happens tomorrow, I will be in the front row the next day for this normalisation,” he said.
If that’s his view, then there probably was no nuance to hs statement about burning Israeli books. His clever excuse was just an exercise in post-facto posterior covering.
And this week, we have another Nobel Laureate making nice with an organization devoted to Israel’s destruction. Jimmy Carter’s fellow addled “elder,” Bishop Tutu embraced Ismail Haniyeh, the man whose forces fire rockets at Israeli civilians and at the fuel depot that supplies Gaza.
Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Tuesday held talks with a senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip where he led a UN fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinian civilians in an 2006 Israeli artillery attack.Tutu met Palestinian former prime minister Ismail Haniya, who was dismissed by moderate president Mahmud Abbas last June when Hamas seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to the president.
The dispatch informs us:
The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel, but due to the technical problem the shells instead hit two homes.
Which, of course, is why it’s against international law to launch attacks from civilian areas. But I don’t suspect that either Tutu or the UN is interested in the law; they’re both interested in bashing Israel. Else maybe they’d be investigating who’s been attacking Nahal Oz.
And finally, when Israel deported Norman Finkelstein, Finkelstein was allowed to argue that Israel was violating his academic freedom by deporting him. But as HonestReporting UK points out, Finkelstein was deported for his actions not his ideas:
Israel, however, did not deport him for his political opinions. It deported him because his activities – which include meetings with Hezbollah leaders – make him a threat to Israel’s security.Any democracy, including the UK, US and Israel, has the right to refuse entry to foreign nationals whose presence may not be conducive to the public good. Israel has every right to consider Finkelstein’s presence to be a security threat and thus to prevent his entry into the country. The Guardian’s report minimises this to create a false context behind the incident.
In these various news stories we see the way Israel is still demonized fifteen years after Oslo. For all the talk of Israel freeing terrorists or otherwise sacrificing its security as confidence building measures, there’s precious little talk about how the international community might build Israel’s confidence by isolating those who seek its destruction.
If the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was simply about building a Palestinian state, it would have been done by now. Rather it is just as much about destroying the existing Jewish state. The propaganda war, actively joined by the media and international organizations, is one front in that war for Israel’s destruction.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
