Saturday, December 07, 2013
Caroline Glick: The politics of subversion
Facing these undeniable facts, Kerry and his supporters have two main challenges. First they need to present themselves as credible actors.Barry Rubin: Are Sunni Arabs More Afraid of Israel than Iran?
And second they have to give Israel reason to trust the Palestinians. If Israel trusts the US, then it can consider allowing the US to defend it from foreign aggression. If the Palestinians are real peace partners, then Israel can surrender its ability to defend itself more easily, because it will face a benign neighbor along its indefensible border.
Unfortunately, Israel cannot trust the US. Kerry and the Obama administration as a whole lost all credibility when they negotiated the deal with Iran last month.
I'm surprised that the following coincidence was not connected to Purim. Once again an Iranian tyrant is threatening countries in the region, and it isn't just Jews that are worried. In an absolutely remarkable historical event, President Shimon Peres delivered a speech to 29 representatives from Arab and Islamic states via satellite. Do not kid yourself; this would not have happened if the Egyptians, Saudis, and others hadn't thought that the U.S. had sold out the Sunni Arabs.Saudi Arabia – Israel’s New BFF?
What Israel and Saudi Arabia do share, however, is a strong convergence of interests at this moment in time around each country’s core national security issue. An often overlooked fact is that the Saudi leadership is generally pragmatic, and the Kingdom is essentially what could be called a “status quo power”. Yes, the Saudi Arabia is dominated by the fundamentalist Wahabi strain of Islam, but the overriding objective of the ruling House of Saud is the preservation of the House of Saud. And while the Saudis would never acknowledge this publicly, right now they (wisely) perceive the Israelis and themselves as simpatico when it comes to Iran.Iran Refuses to Recognize Israel at U.N.
The UNGA meeting was held to mark a procedural—and typically uneventful—vote in which nations meet to approve the credentials of various U.N. member states.HuffPo: Why I Am Opposed to an Academic Boycott of Israel
While Iran, like every other nation, voted in favor of the measure, its representative sought to explain that its support should not be interpreted as recognition of Israel.
“We would like to reiterate my government’s position that our support for this document should be in no way be considered as the recognition of the Israeli regime,” Iran’s representative said. “I wish my statement in this regard to be recorded and registered in the final recording of this meeting.”
Iran was the only member state to offer an on-the-record statement regarding the vote.
Finally, it is unclear just what conditions need to be met in order for the boycott to be lifted, as the ASA itself has noted. Perhaps the best clues to finding out the terms of boycott can be found on the BDS website.BBC’s Connolly exploits Mandela’s death for political campaigning
Or, perhaps not. The first stated goal of the BDS movement is the return of Arab lands. In the original boycott call issued in 2005, that goal was written as: "Ending [Israel's] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall." However, a different version of the BDS call reads: "Ending [Israel's] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall."
Those two versions of the boycott's primary goal are significantly different. The original call can be interpreted to mean that BDS wants to go back to conditions prior to the creation of the state of Israel.
Mark Rice Professor and chair of the Department of American Studies, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York
Likewise, Kevin Connolly revealingly refrains from making the accusation that Britain, France and Belgium “helped to prolong the apartheid regime’s rule”: BBC audiences are led to believe that only Israel belongs in that category.Syria's Assad calls Mandela's life a lesson to tyrants
Connolly’s suggestion that “the co-operation extended into Israel sharing nuclear weapons technology” is also apparently based on the Guardian’s speculative accusations dating back to 2010. Readers can learn more about the flimsy nature of that paper’s insinuations from work done on the subject by CiF Watch here and here and further information (including the BBC’s own questioning of the Guardian story at the time) is available here.
The Syrian presidency added its voice to the chorus with a statement on its Facebook page on Friday, calling the South African statesman "an inspiration in the values of love and human brotherhood."Comparing BBC coverage of Arafat ‘poisoned’ vs ‘not poisoned’ stories
"His history of struggle has become an inspiration to all the vulnerable peoples of the world, in the expectation that oppressors and aggressors will learn the lesson that in the end it is they who are the losers," the statement said.
As readers no doubt recall, in the forty-eight hours between November 6th and 8th the BBC News website featured thirteen different items on the subject of the publication of the Swiss report which was interpreted as supporting the theory that Yasser Arafat died as a result of poisoning.Explosion on Israeli-Syrian border was aimed at IDF patrol
A blast that took place on the Israeli-Syrian border on Friday evening was caused by explosives intended to target the IDF unit that was patrolling the border, the IDF said Saturday.Poll: Israeli-PA Conflict Talks Won’t Lead to Deal, 87.5% of Israelis Say
The explosives were placed on the eastern, or Syrian, side of the border fence.
The attack marked the first deliberate effort since the Syrian civil war began to target an Israeli patrol at the border with explosives.
A vast majority of Israeli Jews—87.5 percent—believe the current Israeli-Palestinian Authority conflict negotiations will not lead to a peace agreement, according to a new Israel Hayom poll that coincided with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest visit to the region.Palestinians fire three rockets at Israel
The poll, conducted by New Wave Research, found that only 6 percent of Israeli Jews think the negotiations will lead to a deal. The respondents were a random pool of 500 Jewish Hebrew-speaking Israelis over the age of 18.
Three Kassam rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli territory on Saturday afternoon, all landing in open Gazan territory, Army Radio reported.Jordan wins Saudi seat on UN Security Council
There were no reports of injuries or damage.
The UN General Assembly elected Jordan to the Security Council on Friday to replace Saudi Arabia, which had rejected the seat in an unprecedented act to protest the council’s failure to end the Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.Iranian students chant for release of political prisoners during Rouhani speech
Arab countries chose Jordan as a replacement, and Asian nations endorsed it to take the traditional Arab seat on the UN’s most powerful body. It received 178 “yes” votes in the election.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was greeted with calls for the release of jailed opposition leaders during an address to university students in Tehran on Saturday, AFP reported.All Syrian chemical weapons munitions destroyed
The so-called moderate Rouhani responded to the chants at Shahid Beheshti University by stating that his government "is committed to the promises it has made to the people, but we need to create internal consensus to achieve the objectives."
The international chemical weapons watchdog announced Friday it has verified the destruction of all of Syria’s unfilled munitions — another milestone along the road to eradicating President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons program by mid-2014.Austrian Mayor resigns over call for journalists to be hanged like Jews
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement that its experts in Syria also have verified the destruction of parts of buildings at weapons production facilities.
The latest destruction work was near the city of Homs. The OPCW said the sites had been inaccessible due to security reasons.
The resignation of conservative mayor Karl Simlinger on Friday ended an alleged racism and anti-Semitism scandal over crude statements targeting asylum seekers, Jews and journalists.OECD Lauds Israel’s Economic Growth
Simlinger, who has served as the mayor of the small town of Gföhl since 1997, said the last thing he wanted to do was to “injure people.” The mayor allegedly said during a city council meeting on Tuesday,“I don’t give a shit about asylum seekers, but the journalists are to be blamed. They should be hanged; they are like the Jews.”
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Thursday praised Israel’s economic growth in 2013 and predicted that its economy will continue to grow in 2014 and 2015 at a rate that exceeds growth projections for the OECD’s other 33 member nations, Israel Hayom reported.Israel’s Mobli Takes On Instagram in the Battle for Picture Posting
“Israel’s output growth remains relatively strong, unemployment is at historically low levels, its high-tech sector continues to attract international admiration, and new off-shore gas fields have come on stream,” the OECD said in the executive summary of its 2013 Israel Economic Survey.
Globes said that Instagram retaliated this week, moving to block access to its services by users of Mobli, the up-start Israeli competitor that received a major investment from Mexican telecoms billionaire Carlos Slim in November.‘Companies with Israel ties added $6.2 b. to Mass. economy’
“Although there is no real competition between the companies in terms of scale – Mobli has 12 million users compared with Instagram’s 150 million users – it seems that the latter feels threatened. It therefore decided to block Mobli users from downloading pictures from Instagram to Mobli at the press of a button, basically banning access to the applications programmable interface (API),” Globes wrote.
Companies with connections to Israel contributed $6.2 billion to the Massachusetts economy last year, a new study found.Israeli firm’s 4G chips find a home in Verizon tablet
The study, released on Thursday, was conducted by the consulting firm Stax and supported by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. It found that, when accounting for other business spending, the full economic impact of companies with Israel ties contribute $11.9 to the state economy. Revenues from this sector are growing three times as fast as the overall state economy.
US mobile service provider Verizon has chosen Israeli mobile technology company Altair Semiconductors to provide 4G chips for its new tablet, culminating a working relationship going back years and enabling Verizon to sell its device markedly more cheaply than competing products.Israel Daily Picture: The Search for New Sources of Vintage Pictures of the Holy Land
Altair’s FourGee-3100/6202 chipset is running in Verizon’s LTE-enabled Ellipsis 7 tablet, the first-ever device marketed under Verizon Wireless’s own brand.
The adjacent picture, although scratched and dark, is a beautiful landscape scene of the area between the Jerusalem train station and Jaffa Gate.
Below it is a slide of the same picture from the Library of Congress' mint collection of pictures from the Holy Land. The initials P.Z. on the bottom left of the picture indicates that it was produced by at the Photochrom and Photoglob company in Zurich in the mid-1890s. According to the Library of Congress, photochrom prints are "ink-based images produced through the direct photographic transfer of an original negative on litho and chromographic printing plates.
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