Lion of Zion for Gaza

Of course it is Israel's fault! By closing off the Gaza strip they completely prevented essential humanitarian supplies such as a lion cub and a monkey from entering the Strip!

I hope that this is what they are referring to when the Shin Bet tells us that Hamas now has advanced weapons that they smuggled in from Egypt. (Why couldn't the Egyptians have also checked some of those big pointy boxes with the missiles in them - they could have been confiscated at the check point too!

From www.stuff.com

While thousands of Palestinians flooded into Egypt to stock up on food, fuel and other staples after Islamist militants breached the border, one man bought a lion cub and a monkey to smuggle back home.

The man managed to reach Cairo and buy the animals despite a heavy security cordon, but police caught him at a checkpoint as he tried to sneak them back into Gaza in a small truck carrying furniture, security officials told Reuters on Saturday.

They said the man, whom they did not identify, confessed to wanting to sell the cub and monkey in Gaza.

Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, blew holes in the border wall in Egypt on January 23 in defiance of an Israeli-led blockade.

The group agreed on Saturday to Egyptian calls to control the flow of Palestinians through the border and said it expected Cairo to seal the remaining gaps in the frontier wall.

Perhaps this is what Bob Marley meant when he sang 'Iron, Lion, Zion'?

I am on the rock and then I check a stock
I have to run like a fugitive to save the life I live
Im gonna be iron like a lion in zion (repeat)
Iron lion zion
Im on the run but I aint got no gun
See they want to be the star
So they fighting tribal war
And they saying iron like a lion in zion
Iron like a lion in zion,
Iron lion zion

Im on the rock, (running and you running)
I take a stock, (running like a fugitive)
I had to run like a fugitive just to save the life I live
Im gonna be iron like a lion in zion (repeat)
Iron lion zion, iron lion zion, iron lion zion
Iron like a lion in zion, iron like a lion in zion
Iron like a lion in zion

Gaza is Israel's fault cartoons

I should really have titled this post 'proud to be a New Zealander', but some of you may have thought I was being serious.

Let me re-phrase that. I am proud to be a New Zealander (or kiwi as we like to call ourselves) but when I see how anti-Semitic - oops! I mean anti-Israel the media there is, I'm not sure any more.

Look at these cartoons from different Arab countries:







The first one is from Qatar, the second from Bahrain and the third from New Zealand.

Whoops! New Zealand isn't an Arab country. How did that one get in the list. Yet it seems that Mike Moreu is inspired by the Arab media for his ideas and cartoons.
It is the cartoon of the day on Stuff (which is NZs online newspaper). It is not a particularly funny or witty idea, but all three papers seem to view what is going on in Gaza as some sporting event set up by the Israelis to kill Palestinians. Clearly it cannot be the fault of the Palestinians!

Thanks to YID With LID for finding the cartoons from the Arab media.

have a nice day (I love how Americans say that even when they mean 'I have a migraine and an ingrown toenail. Your breath smells and you are driving me crazy for no good reason, and if I had a gun I would seriously consider shooting you right not, but since I don't - 'Have a nice day!')

Blame Israel for everything

It never takes long for the world to blame Israel for whatever is wrong in the world. This time, of course, it is Gaza. Clearly Israel is responsible for the situation (actually, bizarrely, the critics of the world are right, but not in the way they had intended. If Israel had not negotiated with the PLO and given them control, or withdrawn from Gush Katif, or armed Fatah, Hamas would never have come to power and the situation in Gaza would be very different today - but even Olmert hasn't realised that yet). Abbas was probably the first to accuse Israel without even blaming them for anything when he said that "‘Hamas is drunk with power, acting like Israel!"

Jeopundit found an article in the Guardian that is more explicit in blaming both Israel and the USA for what is going on now.

But cudos to him for also finding an article on the Wall Street Journal which presents a much more (in my opinion) honest assesment. It includes the following information, showing why the world has encouraged the use of terror amongst the Palestinian leadership and rank and file:

In 1972 Palestinian terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Yet only two years later Yasser Arafat addressed the U.N.'s General Assembly--the first non-government official so honored. In 1970 Arafat attempted to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein and tried to do the same a few years later in Lebanon. Yet in 1980, the European Community, in its Venice Declaration, recognized Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization as a legitimate negotiating partner.

In 1973, the National Security Agency recorded Arafat's telephoned instructions to PLO terrorists to murder Cleo Noel, the U.S. ambassador in Sudan, and his deputy George Curtis Moore. Yet in 1993, Arafat was welcomed in the White House for the signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel. That same year, the British National Criminal Intelligence Service reported that the PLO made its money from "extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud." Yet over the next several years, the Palestinian Authority would become the largest single recipient of foreign aid on a per capita basis.

In 1996, after he had formally renounced terrorism in the Oslo Accords, Arafat told a rally in Gaza that "we are committed to all martyrs who died for the cause of Jerusalem starting with Ahmed Musa until the last martyr Yihye Ayyash"--Musa being the first PLO terrorist to be killed in 1965, and Ayyash, who was killed in 1996, being the Hamas mastermind of a series of suicide bombings in which scores of Israeli civilians were killed. Yet the Clinton Administration continued to pretend that Arafat was an ally in the fight against Hamas. In 2000, Arafat rejected an Israeli offer of statehood midwifed by President Clinton and instead initiated the bloody intifada that left 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians dead.

In 2005, only months after Arafat's death, Israel dismantled its settlements and withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip. Palestinians have used the opportunity to intensify their rocket fire at civilian targets within Israel. Last month, Israeli security services arrested two Gazan women, one of them pregnant, who were planning to enter Israel on medical pretexts in order to carry out suicide attacks. Yet the same month, the World Bank issued a report faulting Israel for restricting Palestinian freedom of movement.

Now it appears Hamas has taken control of the Gaza Strip's main road and its border with Egypt, as well as the offices of the so-called Preventive Security Services, traditionally a Fatah stronghold. "They are executing them one by one," a witness told the Associated Press of Hamas's reprisals against the Preventive Security personnel.

We need as many prayers as we can get to work our way out of this hole that we have dug ourselves.

Usually people stop digging at some point, but Olmert would not be one of those kinds of people. The headline today says it all:

PM: New situation an opportunity

Bless!!!