Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad

Lies my fatah told me

Posted: 26 May 2010 04:10 AM PDT

The headline reads Abbas: Second intifada was one of our worst mistakes
The first paragraph reads:

"The second intifada was one of our worst mistakes," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told an Egyptian television station on Wednesday. "[Late Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat didn't want the intifada to erupt, but he couldn't stop it," he added.

Which is, of course, a lie.

As a spy, Mr. Yousef wasn't fully activated until the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas's support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat's compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef's account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat.

A few paragraphs later we read:

On Wednesday, Abbas said that "peace can be achieved in no more than one week, but only if Israel is willing." He added that the establishment of a Palestinian state has been delayed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. "They must understand that peace is in their interest," he declared.

Again, this is a lie.

"In November 2008... Let me finish... [Israeli prime minister Ehud] Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen, offered the 1967 borders, but said: 'We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.' Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: 'I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine - the June 4, 1967 borders - without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.' This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign..."

Shocker! The Palestinian leader is a serial liar. Unfortunately, lies have been a big part of the Palestinian narrative that is so accepted internationally, even in the West. That acceptances allows the Palestinians to lie with impunity. Abbas is so caught up in a fantasy world, he would not know the truth if it introduced itself by name and shook his hand.

These lies go back to the very beginning:

The disputed territories, together with the territories that are now Israel and Jordan, were originally (in Biblical and post-Biblical times) Jewish kingdoms, and for most of the last seven centuries part of the Ottoman Empire. After the defeat and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War, the League of Nations divided most of its former possessions in the 1922 peace conference. The Arabs were granted rights to most of the formerly Turkish-controlled lands, to an area that was 500 times larger in size than the small area reserved for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British received an international mandate over Palestine because they undertook to establish a Jewish national home there, which the League considered as an act of "restoration" of ancient Jewish rights to the land -- rights that outweighed any Arab claims based on later conquest and residence.

At first, the Arab representatives to the Versailles conference gladly accepted this division. It gave them control over vast areas lost centuries ago, without requiring them to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of soldiers, as the Allies had, to liberate these lands from Turkish dominion. They did not then consider the tiny sliver of South Syrian wasteland, known to Jews as Judea and Samaria and to the Europeans as the Holy Land, of any significance, politically or religiously, and were happy to give it up in exchange for what they so surprisingly gained. The Emir Faisal, who represented the Arabs, signed a draft agreement with the Zionist movement, welcoming the Jews back to their homeland and pledging cooperation.

So the disputed territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip were never "Palestinian lands" -- neither as national patrimony nor as private property. In fact, until the institution of the British mandate, the Holy Land never had a separate political identity or a distinct people inhabiting it. It was a neglected province of South Syria, whose few and destitute Arab inhabitants considered themselves South Syrians. As Bernard Lewis notes, "From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries... within a larger entity" of Syria.

Indeed, to date, 93 percent of the land in what was the British Mandate -- including the lands of the West Bank -- are still government-owned. They were so despoiled, malaria-infected, and sparsely populated that no private owners evinced any interest in owning them, so they were kept by the sultan and then inherited by the British mandate in safekeeping for the Jews.

Some are gross exaggerations:

Jibril Rajoub (March 30, on MAHAD TV, a local television station in Ramallah) accused Israel of carrying out a "massacre," executing 30 Palestinians in Ramallah. The announcement was also broadcast on Al Jazeera and other stations.

The reality, of course, is different: in battles which took place on that day in Ramallah, 9 Palestinians were killed - all of them armed.

and echoed even to this day in different contexts.

Some are used to undermine Israel's legitimacy.

The big, compelling reason people who claim to be 'friends' of Israel are pressuring them to give up the country's heartland to the Arabs is the so-called demographic bomb..the idea that the Arab birthrate is rapidly overtaking the Jewish one and that Israel had better do this now or face being a minority in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

It's a myth, as I've discussed before and anyone who looks at the actual numbers ought to realize it out of hand.

Barry Shaw is correct:

A fiction has been allowed to take hold. This fiction is known as the Palestinian narrative. It is the creation of a myth that has been told repeatedly so many times that it has been accepted as fact.

The falsehoods have been regurgitated endlessly in the media as to become the standard mantra. The message has become the rallying cry around which support groups are formed. Immense budgets are given to forward part of the agenda that is contained in the narrative. Activists take to the podium, the media, the unviersities, and to the streets. Any voice that challenges the veracity of the campaign is muted, ignored, suppressed, and even impeded with violence.

The accepted narrative is used to criticise, condemn, delegitimise, and even question the validity of the other side.

I represent the other side. I now say enough! Enough of the lies! It is time to fight back! It is time to expose the lies. It is time to expose the truth. Let's rip the narrative to pieces, bit by bit.

And rip it to pieces, is exactly what Mr. Shaw does. Read it.

Crossposted on Yourish.

Council speak 05/26/10

Posted: 26 May 2010 04:10 AM PDT

The Council has spoken.

Council Submissions

Non-Council Submissions

Younger brothers more likely to steal

Posted: 26 May 2010 03:36 AM PDT

...bases, that is.

A study of baseball playing brother's concluded (via Instapundit):

In the current issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review, Frank J. Sulloway and Richard L. Zweigenhaft went digging for evidence of siblings behaving differently in the vast database of baseball statistics. Given how younger siblings have been shown to take more risks than their older counterparts -- perhaps originally to fight for food, now for parental attention -- Drs. Sulloway and Zweigenhaft examined whether the phenomenon might persist to the point that baseball-playing brothers would try to steal bases at significantly different rates.

In fact they did: For more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball's long recorded history, including Joe and Dom DiMaggio and Cal and Billy Ripken, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother.

However that doesn't mean that they are (or were) better players:

But according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, that doesn't mean they're better. An analysis of over 300 sets of brothers who've played in the majors found that--by a fairly wide margin--older brothers were superior.

Nearly 58% of the elder brothers compiled better career statistics than their younger siblings, based on "wins above replacement," a statistic that measures how valuable a player is to his team. Among them were former home-run king Hank Aaron, who had 755 homers to Tommie Aaron's 13; Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, who had 150 wins to Paul Dean's 50; and Graig Nettles, who played in 2,700 career games (younger brother Jim played in 240). This trend continues, though some younger brothers such as Justin Upton and Yadier Molina could surpass their elders.

Juan Cole post title: "Israel offered Nukes to Racist South Africa for Use on Black Neighbors"

Posted: 25 May 2010 11:51 PM PDT

This story is all over the place, but this offering by Juan Cole has the most apocalyptic-sounding title I've seen so far. In the body of the post he refers to "potential use against Black African neighbors." Are "use" and "potential use" the same thing? They weren't going to just load and fire the minute they had those nukes?

He also refers to "Iran's peaceful nuclear enrichment program" and states that "Iran appears not to have a nuclear weapons program, according to US intelligence . . . " That appears to be a reference to the controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. According to a February CNN article, "A soon-to-be completed U.S. assessment of Iran's nuclear program is expected to conclude that the government has resumed limited work on a nuclear weapon, according to a U.S. official."

Juan also informs us that the argument that Iran might proliferate to terrorists has been "demolished," but I'm not so reassured. Terrorist groups continue to pursue innovative delivery systems, and we wouldn't want to face the prospect of a nuke-laden donkey.

Crossposted on Judeopundit

Posted by Soccer Dad at 10:08 PM

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