Israel in the News Sep/Oct 2002
Arabs offer advice on how to kill Americans
ARUTZ-7—Yasser Arafat’s Fatah terrorist organization is signed on posters throughout Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that threaten terrorism against Americans. The posters say attacks will take place if the United States continues to support Israel and to call for Arafat’s removal. Fatah has denied any connection with the posters, although it did call on the Palestinian leadership to “boycott” meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Hamas is more practical-minded in its anti-Americanism. The Israel Defense Forces spokesman reports that the official Hamas Web site recently hosted an electronic chat in which at least four participants offered a fifth user advice on how to murder Americans. Here are some excerpts:
“Once a week, a group of American ‘dogs’ come near us on the sea front. I have been following them for a long time and am interested in your suggestions for ways to get rid of them secretly.”
Reply: “If they arrive in a private car, put a large amount of sugar in the gas tank of the car. Then, you can ambush them on the way back because the car will get stuck in the way. You will have many options to get rid of them. You can run them over on the road after they abandon the broken down car. You can put a trap on the beach if they tend to do a lot of walking. If you have people with you and four cars, you can stop them at a certain point on the road, at a traffic light for example, block them from all directions and burn them in their cars using a Molotov cocktail.”
Official Palestinian Authority television is also inciting anti-Americanism. Palestinian Media Watch tells of clips showing American and Israeli flags being burned, as well as scenes of an anti-U.S. demonstration with the name of President Bush shown dripping with blood, next to a skull and crossbones.
Denenberg calls for boycott against Philadelphia Inquirer
Prominent Pennsylvania consumer advocate Herb Denenberg has had it with The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Known throughout the area for his television reporting on consumer fraud, Denenberg took out a full-page ad on the inside front cover of the July 11 edition of The Jewish Exponent to voice his outrage at what he feels is the Inquirer’s blatantly pro-Palestinian coverage of events in the Middle East.
“It would take an encyclopedia to capture a fraction of the Inquirer’s endless bias,” the ad said. “The Inquirer can’t bear to call homicide bombers who blow up babies and pregnant women terrorists.” The newspaper refers to them as militants.
Denenberg wrote, “The moral bankruptcy of the Inquirer is constantly demonstrated by its equating Israel’s self-defense with homicidal terrorist bombings of the innocent. . . . The Inquirer’s twisted perceptions blame homicidal terrorist bombings on the Israelis.”
Denenberg, who has served both as the Pennsylvania insurance commissioner and public utility commissioner, asked people to boycott the Inquirer and to purchase newspapers without an anti-Israel bias, naming The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, and Chicago Sun-Times.
“This is not just a Jewish issue, but impacts everyone,” he wrote. “As we learned from the Holocaust, when one group is persecuted, no group is safe—it’s just a matter of the order of persecution.”
The Inquirer is owned by Knight Ridder.
Murder by numbers
ARUTZ-7—The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson has released a series of graphs illustrating the extent of brutality of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Arabs against Israelis from the start of the Oslo War in September 2000 thru June 2002. There have been at least 13,494 incidents of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis during this period—an average of 21 attacks per day for the 21 months period.
One graph shows that 115 Israelis (including 58 civilians) were murdered in shooting attacks, while 216 civilians and 20 soldiers were felled by suicide killers. Two Israelis were killed in rock-throwing incidents, and 15 were lynched.
Another graph breaks down the attacks according to month and location. November 2000 was the most violent month on record, with 1,134 attacks, followed by August 2001, which logged 1,073. May of this year, the month following Operation Defensive Shield, had the least number of incidents—329. Arutz-7 records show that the bloodiest month was March of this year, in which Moslem terrorists murdered 136 Israelis.
Who says Israeli settlements are illegal?
ARUTZ-7—Author Hillel Halkin, writing in the June issue of Commentary, has this to say about the legality of the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria: “Not only has Israel ‘deported’ or ‘transferred’ no one to the settlements, whose inhabitants are there of their own free will, it is by no means clear that Israel was ever, legally, in the position of being an occupying power.
“This is because, in 1967, Israel had as good a claim as anyone to the West Bank, which in effect belonged to no government. The Jordanian annexation of the area, while acquiesced in by the same Palestinian leadership that had rejected the 1947 U.N. partition resolution, was unrecognized by most of the world, and Jordan itself had refused to make peace with Israel or to consider their joint border more than a temporary cease-fire line.
“The conventional wisdom is also wrong in asserting—a frequently made claim—that continued settlement activity on the part of Israel is a violation of the 1993 Oslo accords. The plain fact of the matter is that nowhere in that agreement was there any reference to the settlements, apart from a single paragraph stating that their fate was to be settled in final-status negotiations. This was hardly an oversight. The Palestinians wanted a settlement freeze and fought for one at Oslo; if they did not get it, this is only because in the end they accepted the Israeli refusal to agree to one. In repeatedly demanding one anyway over the ensuing years, it is they, not the Israelis, who have gone back on the document they signed.”
Israeli hope for heart problems
THE INTERNATIONAL JERUSALEM POST—An Israeli technique for injecting stem cells from the bone marrow of a heart patient into his own heart to stimulate the growth of tiny blood vessels has shown promise in Phase I trials in Israeli and American hospitals.
The technique is meant for patients who have had no relief from cardiac surgery, angioplasty, or medications and spend much of their time in hospitals.
The first Israeli patient to undergo the procedure, developed by Dr. Ran Kornowski, is a man around sixty who has undergone four bypass operations and 33 catheterizations—15 of them angioplasties (balloon therapy). Kornowski and his team removed some 30 million stem cells and processed them in the lab.
They underwent filtration, sterilization, a viability assay, and other processing and were injected via a special catheter into 12 different sites in his heart while the patient was wide awake. These sites, Kornowski said, were chosen using a unique three-dimensional, non-radiological imaging technique. Aside from the processing, the procedure took about 45 minutes.
“The patient feels great,” Kornowski said, but he added that it will take three months to know whether the stem cells’ growth factors have triggered the production of new blood vessels to bypass damaged muscle.
