At least eight civilians were killed and 20 wounded on Monday in Lebanese army shelling of a Palestinian refugee camp during fighting with Islamist militants, Palestinian sources inside the camp said.
NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (Reuters) - Lebanese tanks shelled Islamist militants in a Palestinian refugee camp on Monday and at least eight civilians were killed, raising the death toll in two days of fighting to 65, security sources said.
Israel aborted planned air attacks on the homes of two militants Sunday after hundreds of Palestinians formed a human shield around the buildings in the Gaza Strip. "This is a great stance by our people," said Nizar Ryan, a spokesman from the Islamicmilitant group Hamas, which won control of the Palestinian government in parliamentary elections this year. "Women and men will break the power of F16 planes."
A former spy who plays the drums to relax and once blamed “guy issues” for undermining Israel’s war effort in Lebanon, Tzipi Livni has emerged as perhaps the greatest threat to the tenuous grip on power of the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.
The scathing findings of the Winograd Commission, an Israeli Government inquiry that recently blamed Mr Olmert for the failings of last summer’s war, has set the stage for a struggle between the two leaders. And while Mr Olmert seems likely to cling to power for the time being, Ms Livni appears determined eventually to take his place.
Ms Livni’s closest friends, family and colleagues say that Israel’s popular Foreign Minister is convinced that she will be the next prime minister. “She knows she is the right person for this job,” said Dror Gal, a lawyer and confidant.
Displacement Analysis Workflow
Mabat CEO Arik Degani describes how his firm scanned the wall after the earthquake, then compared the resulting data with reference scans taken more than three years earlier. To begin, the survey team placed 15 targets on rocks lying in front of the wall and located these precisely with total station surveying. "We do this to eliminate as much error as possible," Degani explains. "You need targets to determine whether you have 5mm of displacement in the wall or 10mm. In displacement analysis, every 2mm counts." Then the team scanned the eastern wall using its Leica HDS2500 (Mabat has since upgraded to an HDS3000). Total field time was between five and six hours.
Post-processing and extraction of measurements were done in Cyclone. Deliverables were a TIN mesh showing the wall's geometry after the earthquake compared with before (Figures 2 and 3), and sections through the TIN mesh used to generate displacement maps (Figure 4). The TIN mesh and displacement maps were exported to AutoCAD at the client's request. For every hour of field time, 1.5 to 2 hours of office work were required, Degani reports.
Using this data, the Antiquities Authority determined that earthquake-induced displacement was not severe enough to threaten the wall's stability, Mabat reports, so immediate remediation was not needed.
Bulge in Southern Wall
Baseline data documenting the eastern wall's pre-earthquake position had been collected by Mabat in an earlier project. As part of an engagement to monitor the walls, in October 2000 the firm was called in to document a bulge in a different location -- in this case the mount's southern wall (Figure 5). This bulge probably resulted from lateral loads exacerbated by construction and excavation activity on the mount, according to Mabat. "At the same time as scanning this bulge," Degani notes, "we were asked to monitor the southern part of the eastern wall, from the south corner to about one hundred meters away." Thus the firm had reference data on the eastern wall when the earthquake hit.
Field time to scan the southern wall was likewise five to six hours, including total station-based location of targets. In post-processing, Cyclone was used to cut sections through the point cloud every 25cm and generate contour lines (Figure 6). Displacements of 9-15mm were identified. This was judged significant, and repairs were undertaken as a result.
If a humanitarian-medical organization would say that about Dr. Baruch Goldstein, don't you think they would immediatly lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the world (and media), yet they can say that about Mazab Bashir?
Also, this is just another reminder of how Palestinian terrorists use "medicine" as a cover, be it smuggling terrorists, bombs and weapons in ambualnces, or inflitrating Doctors without Borders...
May 18, 2007
MSF Reacts to Charges Issued Against Palestinian Staff Member
Jerusalem/Paris, May 18, 2007 — On May 17, Mr. Mossaab Bashir, a member of the staff of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the Gaza Strip, was charged by an Israeli court with "contact with a foreign agent" and "conspiracy to commit a crime." Mr. Bashir was arrested on April 19, 2007 in Jerusalem after attending an MSF work meeting. The charges handed down against Mr. Bashir are in no way related to either MSF or to its activities [as I write above, I thionk they certainly do relate].
The judicial proceedings against Mr. Bashir are just beginning, therefore he must be presumed innocent until a court of law declares otherwise. MSF will carefully monitor the developments of the case until a verdict is rendered.
MSF has been working in the Palestinian Territories (Gaza and the West Bank) since 1989 and has always scrupulously complied with the security rules and regulations of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) concerning movements of its staff. In this regard, Mr. Bashir had obtained all required authorizations by the IDF enabling him to travel to Jerusalem and pass through military checkpoints [ah, so it's our fault he got into to Israel? We should have used the GSS better or would DWB - pronounced dwab, rhymes with drab - have protested that?].
In a context of extreme politicization and radicalization of the violence, MSF pays meticulous attention to maintaining the neutrality and impartiality of its humanitarian intervention.
The Palestinian Territories are a particularly violent conflict zone [especially when Arabs start killing Arabs]. Needs are increasing. The suspension of the international assistance and the blockade on Gaza [what blockade? aren't arms, ammunition and explosives making their way in?] make humanitarian aid even more crucial. Following the charges against Mr. Bashir, MSF is concerned about confusion generated over the role of humanitarian action [you bet but the confusion is whether humanitarian organizations are humanitarian or political themselves and very anti-Israel]. This would contribute to further reducing access to the population, and correspondingly increase the insecurity for our teams in the Palestinian Territories and the whole Israeli territory [and what about the Kassams? they don't count?].
Middletown police right now are looking for a man who sexually assaulted a woman inside a local church. They got a good look at him thanks to surveillance video that was rolling during the entire attack.
The attack happened just after midnight on Wednesday. The victim, a volunteer at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Middletown, was volunteering during perpetual adoration when the church is kept open for paying respect over the Eucharist.
Hundreds of illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Bexar County in recent years and dozens of them have actually cast ballots, canceling out the votes of U.S. citizens, 1200 WOAI news will report Thursday morning. Bexar County
Elections Administrator Jackie Callanan confirmed the figures, but she says a new form of voter registration card, which requires people to swear they are citizens when they register, should help cut the problem, because people who vote illegally can be charged with perjury.
one of Israel’s major academic institutions of higher education that specializes in high-tech engineering, industrial management and life and health sciences. As one of Israel’s main accredited engineering schools recognized by Israel’s Council of Higher Education, JCT graduates approximately many of Israel’s high tech engineers and most of its electro - optic engineers. The fields of study in which our students earn their degrees are: Physics & Electro-Optics Engineering, Physics & Medical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Industrial Engineering & Management, Software Engineering, Computer Science, Managerial Accounting & Information Systems, and Technology Management and Marketing.
"And I will work for, esteem, feed and support you as is the custom of Jewish men who work for, esteem, feed and support their wives faithfully. And I will give you ________________ and I will provide you food and clothing and necessities..."
A spokesman for the military wing of Hamas threatened to renew suicide bombings in Israel, but his comments were not confirmed by more senior leaders...Israeli aircraft continued to take aim at Hamas — its military wing and members of the Hamas-dominated Executive Force, a parallel paramilitary police unit...Using more professional tactics and clearly better motivated, Hamas fighters control northern Gaza and much of Gaza City.
Huda, 60, a widow, lives near the presidential compound in Gaza City, where many clashes have occurred. “We feel imprisoned by the fighting,” she said. “In my apartment, many bullets have come through the windows” and the electricity and water have been cut off.
She did not want to give her surname, but said that she had moved to the apartment of a friend farther from the bullets. “When Palestinians fight each other, it’s very depressing,” she said. “But when the Israelis bomb our feelings are very different, we feel that this is the enemy that we must have the will to challenge.”
Meir Kahane and I started out as good friends. During our high school years we were classmates and joint performers in weekly skits that we often wrote together. We both sensed that Jewish history was undergoing one of its great transformations (although, I confess, I do not remember if we both had zeroed in on the significance of the Holocaust as fully as we were to do later). We debated frequently, often over the use of force by the Jewish underground in Palestine during the 1940s.
Even then, Kahane’s most striking characteristics were strongly apparent. As early as his teen years, he displayed a preference for extreme and “pure” solutions. He always had a strong ability to reach audiences and touch people, but he was overly influenced by their reactions, becoming more extreme in order to elicit an even more enthusiastic response.
Kahane always displayed a quick mind and nimble tongue, but lacked what in Yiddish we call sitzfleisch, namely, patient attention to detail to back up his words. In school, he cut corners on his homework; later on, he had no penchant for the detailed, laborious organizing necessary for success in organizational life. This explains why although he received a great deal of worldwide media attention — which he could have utilized to create the most powerful mass movement or organization in Jewish life — he piddled his public-relations gains away. When Kahane was killed in 1990, he left behind the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach Party, two organizations that had been the recipients of major news coverage, but lacked a stable residue of power or effectiveness.
Decades before his death, in college, our contacts first began to wane. I left to pursue a PhD in American history at Harvard, and he to pursue a somewhat-mysterious exploration of the CIA and the fringes of American politics. But catalyzed by our powerful encounters with the Holocaust, we both moved back to callings that were more Jewish and we each developed what would become opposing philosophies in reaction to the tragedy.
Our paths converged again during the Soviet Jewry movement in the late 1960s. We were both highly critical of the Jewish establishment for its complacency regarding the plight of Soviet Jews denied the right to emigrate. However, I was involved with Jacob Birnbaum and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. The young activists who did the hard work of organizing demonstrations and educating the public were angered that Kahane often snatched up the media attention by resorting to violence in ways which many felt undercut the moral standing of the movement. Kahane would come to rallies and grab the spotlight or the microphone, attracting media attention with calls for more extreme policies. But I believed that multiple tactics had a certain value, and Kahane and I renewed our old debates when he came to speak at a men’s club breakfast at Riverdale Jewish Center, where I served as rabbi.
The alienation between us began to grow, however, as his policies became more extreme. In 1972, when I was teaching at City College of New York, one of my students was arrested by the FBI for placing a bomb in mega-entertainment agent Sol Hurok’s office, to punish Hurok for sponsoring a Soviet artist’s concert tour in America. The bomb killed a secretary. In my conversations with the student he made clear that he believed he had acted under the inspiration of Meir Kahane and even hinted that my old friend had encouraged the bombing, though the FBI never proved anything. When, during an encounter with Kahane, I accused him of possible responsibility for the secretary’s death, he argued that “never again” meant “never again at all costs” — including the use of force and violence.
We met again years later, for yet another debate. Kahane had made inroads, particularly in the Yeshiva University student community, by cloaking his proposals for elimination of the Arabs with rabbinic sources. Rabbi Avi Weiss, who was a friend of both of ours, came to me and asked if I would debate Kahane. I felt that his ideology and incorrect use of rabbinic sources needed to be challenged — he was a bad influence on Y.U. students. So I agreed to debate him at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, the synagogue headed by Weiss.
The week before the debate, an interview with Kahane appeared in the Baltimore Jewish Times. The report was horrific. He called for the transfer of the Arab population of the West Bank. As I recall it, he spoke of bringing trucks and rounding up the population — men, women and children — and depositing them in Jordan. When asked by the reporter what would happen if they refused to go, Kahane replied: We will shoot them if they resist.
On the night of the debate, I opened by reading back to him his horrible words, adding that I hoped they were journalistic misrepresentations. He responded almost mockingly that he stood behind the words, and that only bleeding heart liberals would object. As he spoke, his young, emotionally childish supporters cheered and applauded wildly, arousing him to further excess.
Shocked and appalled, I reminded him that these words read like a script out of the Holocaust. He topped off with an invocation of his version of Jewish power in the light of the Holocaust to frenzied cheers from his claque. As I said at the time, I wanted to tear my clothes, like a mourner, upon hearing such an immoral, evil policy offered by a Jewish leader in the name of the Holocaust.
After the debate, I pledged never to appear with him again. The friendship was broken.
When I heard the news of Kahane’s assassination in 1990, I felt a deep pang — sorrow for his family, regret for the moral distortion and waste of his talents, and pain that a Muslim extremist had successfully committed the murder. I was upset and chagrined that the assassin, El-Sayyid Nosair, escaped the punishment he deserved and was troubled by the FBI’s poor handling of the case. Later I was stunned to learn of Nosair’s connection to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and the realization that the FBI had botched uncovering this terrorist cell years before it struck at the World Trade Center in 1993.
As I brooded over Kahane’s death years later, it dawned upon me that the Jewish Defense League founder had repeated the disabling error that he had committed often in his career. Confusing words with reality, as if brilliant or biting slogans turn into facts by themselves, he spoke hard, provocative and powerful words against Arabs — but organized no force or power behind his pronouncements.
At the same time that he was provoking anger and drawing the attention of Muslim extremists, he confused his own macho words with reality; he never developed the kind of security network that he needed for his protection. Certainly, his failures were not a capital crime and his assassination was a totally unjustified terrorist action. But the ending made his life and his death all the more heartbreaking.
Kahane tapped into the great truth of needing to learn from the Holocaust the lessons of Jewish particularism, self-interest and Jewish power. By pushing his insights far beyond their proper limits and by dismissing the dialectical truths of universalism, moral responsibility to the other and self-restraint, Kahane twisted the Holocaust into a force for abusing others. He underestimated the capacity of the Jewish people to endure frustration and suffering without losing its moral compass and its ability to persist with firm hope until it wins a true peace. This ethical steadfastness is apparent after 55 years of Israel living with intransigent Arab hostility.
2.
3.
the two major features that characterize Israeli politics:.
- The intellectual dishonesty of the Left - which renders it incapable of admitting error; and
- The intellectual disability of the Right - which renders it incapable of exposing and capitalizing on this dishonesty
So he then started spluttering — causing Bolton to make a remark about the extreme left-wing bias Humphrys was revealing by his questions. This was the one error Bolton made: he assumed that the visceral anti-war, anti-American bias he was correctly picking up from Humphrys’s ever-more self-revealing questions must be left-wing, whereas it is of course the default position of what passes for the British centre-ground...
...As a demonstration of the astounding prejudices of the BBC mindset, the loaded nature of its questioning and the assumptions it makes about its interviewees, and the circular fact that by definition such a mindset makes it simply impossible for it to acknowledge even the possibility that it might have descended from the summit of Mount Objectivity into the gutter of twisted journalism, the spat could hardly be bettered. The BBC is now a totally closed thought system...
Olmert: I'll meet with Arab leaders
PETRA, Jordan, May 15 (UPI) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in Jordan Tuesday he's ready to meet with Arab leaders to discuss a Middle East peace plan.
Gazan planned attack on PM
Palestinian man used humanitarian organization entry permit to enter Israel, collect information on Olmert in order to kill him
Palestinian Gaza resident, Massab Bashir, is suspected of planning the assassination of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other Knesset members, according to an indictment filed against him on Thursday.
After his arrest in Jerusalem, Bashir confessed to planning the attacks and taking advantage of the entry permit given him for his work with the “Doctors Without Borders” humanitarian organization.
Posts
