Samir Quntar: Was It Something I Said?
August 19, 2012 15:48 by Pesach Benson
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Today’s Top Stories
1. Everyone’s trying to decode the latest Israeli tea leaves. Take your pick of Dore Gold, Benny Morris, Yoram Ettinger, The Guardian, LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Telegraph, National Post, Washington Post, columnists like the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Paul McGeough, Time‘s Tony Karon, NY Times‘ Roger Cohen, Financial Times‘ Gideon Rachman, Reuters bureau chief Crispian Balmer, and a former British ambassador in the Irish Independent.
2. Only in the Mideast: A Hamas PR blitz aimed at Gaza combines resistance with environmental responsibility. Does this AFP dispatch sound like a humanitarian crisis?
”We have carried out 800 open-heart surgeries, regulated traffic, and built 44 schools,” billboards boldly proclaim in white letters on a vibrant magenta background . . .
“A clean environment for the people of the resistance,” proclaims one poster which shows a worker cleaning a beach.
“We continued to build, despite the siege,” says another which shows Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya wearing a construction worker’s hard hat, poring over plans with architects.
I wonder if the Hamas spin games had anything to do with a dispatch in The Economist on Gaza’s building boom.
3. A Tunisian bash-Israel fest got out of control when thug-in-residence Samir Quntar outraged his audience with a plug for Bashar Assad. Quntar spent almost 30 years in prison for a terror attack whose grisliness crossed all lines: smashing the skull of four year-old Einat Haran with a rifle butt.
Its disgraceful that Tunisia, the seemingly more enlightened cradle of the Arab Spring, hasn’t moved past honoring a baby killer. But Elliott Abrams notes that the Tunisians taught Quntar a lesson he soon won’t forget:
Accordingly, Salafi gangs using sticks and knives attacked the closing ceremony of the anti-Israel rally, shouting slogans that in essence accused Kuntar and the organizers of being pro-Shia. Several people were wounded badly enough to be hospitalized. The brave Kuntar fled out the back door of the hall.
I’m surprised the Tunisians didn’t have a lingering warm, fuzzy feeling from Al-Jazeera’s birthday bash for Quntar.
Iranian Atomic Urgency
• Iran planned to blow up the Israeli embassy in Washington alongside its attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US. So said ambassador Michael Oren to WTOP radio.
Buried in an amended complaint, an FBI special agent charges that Arbabsiar “discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of targets. These targets included government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with ‘another’ country and these targets were located within the United States.”
Oren says Israel was that “other” country.
• Amos Yadlin to the US: Show us you’ll really stop Iran, or we’ll have to.
The Israelis cannot ask the Americans to do the job for them. No American soldier has ever fought for Israel, never since the state was established. That’s a basic principle for us.
The former military intelligence chief further laid out his views in a Washington Post op-ed.
• A number of newspapers picked up on a pair of NY Times reports about banks helping Iran and other sanctioned countries launder money. One report focuses on Iraqi financial institutions, the other on foreign banks with US branches making transactions with Iran, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea.
• CNN talked to Ryan Duffy about his visit to Hezbollah’s “theme park.” Watch Duffy video, Hezbollah’s Propaganda War (parts one and two).
Carole63
5:37 pm
Aug 19, 2012
Arabs lie with impunity about Jews! I`ve never heard such lies and deceit and this has been going on throughout history! It is clear to see that the devil is behind it and the false religion of Islam!
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Jan
11:59 pm
Aug 19, 2012
Rightly liars from the Ancient Greek are called ‘slanderers’ – Diabolos – Anglicised to devils. One might call the effect of the lies diabolical. There is much false religion, and if you look closely the push in Western countries against Israel and the lies are not all from Islam…. there are many shades to human reason, and when it seems that lies work, some use them…but only those who stick always to the truth prosper, because when the lies do not stop they forget things like how the truths of science have helped the world prosper. When people lie they often begin to accept lies, and truth cannot help them.
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RiverFred
5:51 pm
Aug 19, 2012
Muslims are instructed to lie and deceive their enemies according to Shari’a Law based on Muhammad the perfect man (lol.) The act of lying and deceiving is called Al-taqiyya.
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Salim Varese
6:18 pm
Aug 19, 2012
The former comments are very insightful and correct. This is an example of the danger of Shariah and the Wahabis. Would the US be bowing to them if they had no oil?
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Frank Adam
7:08 pm
Aug 19, 2012
What Odeh forgets in his haste to damn Israel and all Jews with medieval and Moslem libels is that the Holocaust has been made sacred to prevent it re-occurring. If he breaks down this astonishment then the great fear of Moslem columnists that the European Moslem Diaspora are next for the chop might well come about.
As for Foreign Policy and US interests I wrote as follows:
Never forget that one reason the US supports Israel is to keep its alleged N-bombs, “in the basement.”
If indeed Israel took out from their bunkers their N-bombs in 1973 so as to let the US and Soviet satellite cameras see them – but how this is real is a bit beyond me because a bomb of any sort looks like a bomb to camera – so that Nixon upped to “defcon 3” and so deterred the SU from direct interference, then we have a real reason.
However dodgy the 1973 story a SU landing in the Middle East or N-attack would have set the cats among the Cold War pigeons anyway – Israeli nukes or not.
If projecting from the Vanunu leaks – which only accelerated the arms race contrary to his admirers’ obtuse misunderstanding – Israel does have 200 + N-bombs there are enough to plaster not only Iran’s N-facilities but also their Shi’ite“holy cities” (Qom, the Jamkaran Mosque, Kerbala, Najaf, and in for a penny in for a pound: Sunni M & M, “Al Ahzar University”) besides Arab capitals and dams. Now the Arab pike against Israel and even more so the Iranian quarrel is purely ideological and if they are out to make a solely ideological point of destroying the Zionist Jewish state – and it is unlikely Israeli command and political echelon do not understand this – then it is quite certain that if they are to dropped like the Czechs at Munich, they will take down the Moslem World’s identity idols with them; which will send the World Moslem communities into hyperinflating riots against everybody – a very big handful to manage.
Somebody once noted a US President’s first job is to prevent nuclear wars of any sort – and to that intent Eisenhower was abrupt with France Britain and Israel in 1956 – more abrupt than necessary it turned out, whence 1967.
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perplexed
7:29 pm
Aug 19, 2012
Frank brings up new food for thought I’d not heard before. Maybe what he says about the US mainly concerned with stopping Israel from using nukes answers the question. But in much news of the past, most of which is probably not true, it was said that most Arab countries are against Iran having nukes, and most of the rest of the world felt the same. Everyone used to say it would destabilize the Middle East. If that’s the case, why is the problem considered now to be only Israel’s, such that Israel is not willing to ask Americans to die for us? If the nuke in Iran is the world’s problem, why shouldn’t US soldiers, as well as UN & Arab forces, not participate in knocking out the nukes in Iran?
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Samir Quntar: Was It Something I Said? | Blogs about Israel aggregation
8:09 pm
Aug 19, 2012
[...] Continued on Page 2 [...]
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Frank Adam
8:38 pm
Aug 19, 2012
A lot of Arab Sunni states are against the Iranian Shi’ite nuke capacity and possibly could obtain their own accelerated bomb by buying from Sunni Pakistan.
Meanwhille it is easy to blame Israel because she is refusing aloud to be pushed into the corner first.
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Henry Federman
9:21 pm
Aug 19, 2012
Basically what he is saying is he is accusing Jews of what is written in the Koran, which says that Muslims are allowed to kill non Muslims. Nice switcheroo on his part! As for the matzo part, we would have to kill thousand of children to make all the matzos that we eat, all over the world!
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Reuven
4:46 am
Aug 20, 2012
I usually don’t believe in capital punishment. But I’ve evolved to believe in it for murderous terrorists. And Quntar (aka Kuntar) is the worst of the rotten lot. Just look at the bum, wearing camouflage. I guess he’s afraid of four-year-old little girls, like the one whose head he bashed in, after he made her watch him murdering her father. Find him and KILL HIM! Israel could use a morale booster right now!
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Robert Shore
7:55 pm
Aug 20, 2012
I do find it Ironic that Isreal and Jews are acused by arabs as murdering for religion when the Jewish religion would and could never condon conversion by force, isnt this an Islamic tool. The leaders of Islam always critisize Jews and Iarael of doing things they themselves are doing daily, murdering innocent people, acting like Natzies, forced conversion etc…As for the blood libel, first of all it wouldnt be Kosher secoundly and most importantly it would go against every thing Jews stand for. It showes how the arab leadership thinks their people are ignorant enough to buy into this s..t. Then again ethnic hatred is best fertilized in stupid ground.
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