You may vote once every 24 hours in each poll. After voting in an individual poll you will be locked out from voting again in that poll (on the computer you voted from) for 24 hours. Each poll has its own separate 24 hour lockout control. Voting in, for example, Best Blog will not lock you out of voting in other categories. Vote totals are not final until It was shocking to hear on Radio 4 at about 7:15am a Muslim woman called Fatima supposedly representing some 'moderate' Muslim organisation who basically said that the threat of Muslim radicalisation should force Britain to shift its foreign policy direction in the Middle East. This was followed by a poor rabbi in Paris speaking about the awful situation with attacks on Jews and their property. What shocks me most is that the BBC is prepared
In The Face Of This Madness, Some Facts
Here are some facts that the western media might just possibly by some strange and uncharacteristic oversight fail to report. The Israel Defence Force blog shows what it says is a captured Hamas map showing how Hamas are using the inhabitants of an entire neighbourhood as human shields by lacing it with a web of explosive devices. The Israel Foreign ministry says:The map shows that snipers are positioned at the entrance of the A-Tawil mosque and in the mosques next to it and describes the directions the snipers are aiming. It indicates that explosives are planted in the entrances of civilian homes.
Israel also says this shows Hamas preparing to fire a rocket from a rocket launcher in a Gaza school yard; it also says another sequence in the video shows Hamas rockets being fired during the ‘humanitarian pause’. Here an embedded Israeli journalist describes what he found when he was allowed into Gaza a few days ago:We come across a local family in one of the buildings. Grandparents, a few young parents, some children and a few toddlers. Sitting on a rug, their legs are covered in blankets and two soldiers are standing guard nearby. ‘What about them?’ I ask. ‘They're free to go if they want to, but they don't want to,’ said Eilon Perry, Givati's operations officer. ‘They informed us they would be staying in the house and we have no choice but to accept that.’ The family suddenly notices the cameras, and immediately, the expression on their faces changes. ‘We have no food,’ they say in Arabic, as one of the youngsters suggests we interview him in English about their plight. Givati troops are extremely concerned about being portrayed as abusing innocent civilians. Perry points to a stack of canned goods, water bottles and other provisions. ‘We provided some of that and they cook and eat quite well,’ he said. The Palestinians seem to understand him and one of them smiles. It's a war – they had to try.
Here is another insight into the manipulation of media images in Gaza: A Palestinian journalist in Gaza said members of the Palestinian media are ‘directing’ civilians to cry and telling them what to say in interviews:‘A mother of one of the martyrs stood by the door of the intensive care unit while crying... relatives and those around her were telling her what she should say to the television cameras: “Say your son [before he died] prayed and went out.” Another tells her: “Curse the Arab leaders”.. The journalists [in the hospitals] are going overboard in their insensitivity and taking advantage of the [difficult] moments, with the explanation that they are showing this to the world. One cameraman told a mourning mother: “Hit your face, cry, do some action.”’
And here is a Gazan voice that is almost never heard:A Palestinian girl in Gaza whose family members died in Gaza Dec. 28 in an Israeli air attack held Hamas responsible. ‘I say Hamas is the cause, in the first place, of all wars,’ the girl told Palestinian TV.
Other Arabs agree. The Jerusalem Post reports: The Egyptian movie star Adel Imam expressed understanding for Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip and blamed Hamas for the violence. He is quoted in The Jerusalem Post saying: ‘Hamas ignored our warnings and chose to lead an asymmetrical war. It's preferable for Hamas to stop [the rocket attacks]. They should have known that Israel wasn't going to receive the attacks with roses.'
Meanwhile, in the midst of the vicious western jihad against Israel one British Muslim voice has been heard most bravely speaking the truth. Shiraz Maher writes in the Telegraph that Muslims should condemn not Israel but Hamas:Israel is responding to a barrage of Hamas rockets which threaten its citizens who live in the south. Indeed, around 10 per cent of the Israeli population now lives within striking distance of katyusha rockets. All this follows the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005, after which Hamas swept to power and turned ‘the Strip’ into its own paramilitary playground, using it as a springboard to launch a campaign of sustained and indiscriminate attacks into southern Israel. ...Since the start of the conflict Hamas has carried out extra-judicial killings of – or, put bluntly, murdered – more than 30 of its citizens who it suspects of ‘colluding’ with Israel. And how has it responded to the death of Palestinian children? In a televised broadcast the Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, declared that Israel has ‘legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine. They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.’ British Islamists have proved themselves only too willing to oblige. Reports this week suggest that some participants on Islamist chat forums have been drawing up "hit lists" of prominent British Jews. One contributor writing on the discussion board of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) said, ‘lets hope that an unfortunate event happens and they end up being killed someway [sic]’. The group later removed those comments, but such views are indicative of the hatred that is out there.
As Shiraz says, British Muslims have to make a choice – between supporting Hamas terrorism and supporting Israeli democracy. Unfortunately, such moral integrity and scruple for the truth is currently being swamped by the frenzied hatred and demonisation of Israel, not just amongst British Muslims but the media and intelligentsia. Finally Colonel Richard Kemp, former Commander of British forces in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland and a former intelligence adviser to the Cabinet Office, has commented thus on the war in Gaza: ...only international pressure on Hamas can see an end to this conflict, together with a long-term commitment for an international force to control Gaza. The only real reason for hope in the whole desperate situation is that Israel now enjoys the warmest relations with most of its neighbouring Arab states. And fearful of encouraging Islamist extremists in their own countries, the last thing these governments can afford is any kind of success for Hamas... Despite Israel's extraordinary measures a tragically high number of innocent civilians have been killed and wounded. That is the inevitability of Hamas's way of fighting. Avoiding civilian casualties when fighting among the people is always difficult. When combating an enemy that uses human shields it is impossible.
In tomorrow’s Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson quotes Col Kemp further:Kemp told me that ‘Hamas deploys suicide attackers including women and children, and rigs up schools and houses with booby-trap explosives. Its leaders knew as a matter of certainty this would lead to civilian casualties if there was a ground battle. Virtually every aspect of its operations is illegal under international humanitarian law – ‘war crimes’ in the emotive language usually reserved for the Israelis’. Colonel Kemp points out that if the IDF had no regard for civilian lives it would never have leafleted and telephoned residents in Gaza, warning them when it was about to attack their area: after all, that also gives Hamas notice – hardly the act of an army devoted to military victory at all costs. Similarly, the IDF’s unilateral commitment to a daily three-hour ceasefire to permit the evacuation (to Israel) of casualties, and for the passage of ‘humanitarian aid’, also allows Hamas time to regroup and redeploy for future attacks.
Indeed. So much is blindingly obvious. The fact that such demonstrable truths are not being acknowledged but wickedly ignored and Israel accused instead of behaving like Nazis demonstrates that a large section of Britain’s ruling class has simply repudiated reason itself.Weblog awards
9:28pm
Amazingly, I am currently running a close second in the Best UK Blog category in the 2008 Weblog Awards. Thisblog is the one that's just in front of me. Voting finishes in three days' time. The rules for voting are as follows:
...Friday, 9th January 2009
Believe it
11:20am
Those who refuse to believe that Hamas are using the population of Gaza as human shields/bomb fodder should watch this video. In it Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, on Al Aqsa TV in February last year, declares that ‘death has become an industry’;...the women exceed at this, and so too do the mujahideen and the children. That’s why they have formed human shields of the women the children the elderly and the mujahideen in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine.
What people in the west find almost impossible to believe is that Hamas exult in and glorify the death of Palestinians as the highest form of spiritual attainment. The more Palestinians die, the greater they believe their achievement to be. That is why this man gloats that ‘death has become an industry’. This fact was noted recently...The experience this week of a London Jew
9:01am
I wrote below about the frightening thuggery on display at the anti-Israel demonstrations in London. Here is what a reader tells me of his recent experiences as a British Jew, including what happened to him after attending the pro-Israel counter demonstration, and how he feels therefore about the way in which the Gaza conflict and its implications are being reported in Britain:
...
Sunday, 11 January 2009
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