UPDATES 10:30 am Israel time, Friday, September 6 2013:
Thus far the morning has seen jihadists firing RPGs at ships passing in the Suez Canal, a large unexplained explosion in El-Arish in the northern Egyptian Sinai, more threats from Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to attack Israel if the U.S. attacks Syria, electronic intercepts of Iranian communications to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy there should a U.S. strike go forward, reports that the U.S. will use Stealth bombers in the possible Syrian attack, and, and, and.
In other words, it’s a normal day here in the Middle East.
TODAY’S BLOG:
We live in a warped world beset by absurdities. Many of those absurdities emanate from a darkly delusional parallel universe inhabited by such creatures as the international media, “human rights” NGOs, and the Israeli Left. Theirs is a universe with no history and no critical thought and into which the light of knowledge has never entered. It is a universe which is continually attempting to impinge on reality.
Two manifestations of this universe intruded into our world yesterday.
The first was the supposed Rosh Hashana blessing tweeted by the new “moderate” President of Iran, Hassan Rohani:
“As the sun is about to set here in Tehran, I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah.”
Note the nice touch with the photograph.
As quickly as this appeared online, the dark clouds of the parallel universe parted, the sun shone, and doves of peace carrying olive branches began to fly out from Iran to the world. Here we were told was proof incarnate that Hassan Rohani really is someone we can believe it, someone we can trust, and someone who is a voice of peace.
The unquestioning media were seized by paroxysms of peace.
One commentator for MSNBC News in the United States gushed: “President Rohani has made clear from the beginning of his campaign that he believes in equal rights for all minorities, and that would of course include the Jewish minority. I think it’s in keeping with his character, his personality, and the way he wants his administration to be seen by the Iranians who voted him in.”
Concomitantly, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Zvi Barel, penned a column nominating Rohani for “Person of the Year” for the coming year. In that article, Barel praised Rohani for not issuing bellicose statements about the Syrian situation and came to this conclusion: “If there is anyone who gives hope that the coming year in Iran will be different from the previous eight . . . it is Hassan Rohani.”
Champion of minorities, “moderate” force for change, blesser of the Jews–these, we are to believe, are Hassan Rohani.
Well that’s the way it seemed until yesterday afternoon when one of Rohani’s closest advisors angrily declared that Rohani had not tweeted about Rosh Hashana after all. Shortly thereafter “The President’s Office Responsible for Official Publications” issued a statement asserting that Rohani has no Twitter account from which to tweet. More than this, it noted, Twitter is illegal and blocked in Iran.
One would have thought that someone in the media would have checked with Rohani before running with this absurd story, but no, the idea of critical assessment never crossed the media’s mind. Doesn’t the media know that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could set up a false twitter account this morning and call himself North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and apologize for having his singer-cum-mistress Hyon Song-wol shot by a firing squad last week? Apparently not.
Let’s move on to example two.
As your humble servant is sure his well-read readers already know, Egypt’s Interior Minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, was the target of an assassination attempt yesterday when a bomb blew up as his vehicle passed through a neighborhood near his home.
The site of the blast. Apparently a bomb was thrown out a window of one of the nearby buildings.
Ibrahim, who has been waging war against the Muslim Brotherhood, responded to the attack and claims by the Brotherhood that it was not involved by saying: “What happened today is not the end but the beginning.”
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And Ibrahim, who happens to inhabit our world and not that delusional parallel universe, immediately acted to clamp down even more on the Brotherhood and its spawn, Hamas. The work on establishing a buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza has been accelerated today; the Rafah crossing has become more of a blockade than a crossing; and smuggling into Gaza–which was netting Hamas more than $1,000,000 a day–has been reportedly reduced to a trickle.
This morning we had the poor Hamasniks in Gaza crying that one of their two power stations will soon have to go off line because it has almost run out of fuel–unless someone intervenes.
But wait, out of the parallel universe gallops a white knight to save Hamas, a white knight dressed in the khakis of the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF COGAT unit is stepping up its efforts to save Hamas from the Egyptian efforts to strangle it.
From an article in the Economist yesterday entitled “Lonely Hamas”:
“If it is to survive as Gaza’s ruler, Hamas will have to rely on its old foe, Israel. While Egypt has choked off access to Gaza, Israel has loosened it, with 400 lorries recently entering the strip from Israel via the Kerem Shalom crossing in a single day, the liveliest such traffic for many years. ‘If they increase demand, we’re ready to step up,’ says an Israeli military spokeswoman.”
And more:
“’Egypt’s closures make us insist more on keeping things quiet with Israel,’ says the editor of a Hamas newspaper. Israeli security officials seem to reciprocate. ‘We’re not doing anything to cause instability to the [Hamas] regime right now,’ says an Israeli army man on the border.”
Can you even believe this? It was just nine months ago that Hamas fired more than 2000 rockets at southern Israel. It was just nine months ago that we engaged in a campaign to stop the rocket fire–a campaign that has not been successful (note in the right hand part of this page the 131 Palestinian mortars and rockets that have hit Israel since that campaign came to an abrupt halt).
Of course considering the fact that in that parallel universe Israel was laundering Hamas terrorist money throughout that November conflict last year, and the fact that Israel was permitting metal to be trucked from Ashdod to Gaza during that conflict from which more rockets could be made to be shot at Israel, the attempt now to save Hamas should come as no surprise whatsoever.
We live in a warped world beset by absurdities.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.