Today’s Top Stories
1. A terrible weekend for French Jewry: on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a terrorist stormed the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris, killing four hostages before being killed by police. World leaders converged on Paris to join a million-man march to show support for the victims.
The Times of Israel and Daily Telegraph, among others, are live blogging. See below for more on the aftershocks.
2. Der Spiegel got itself quite a scoop unearthing new evidence that Syria’s still working on a nuclear weapon.
3. Hamas and Fatah are at each other’s throats after the PA essentially said there’d be no Gaza reconstruction until it was in control of the strip. With thousands of homeless Palestinians struggling to stay high and dry and angry unpaid civil servants, Hamas called an emergency meeting of all the factions to figure out what to do.
4. IBT Apologizes for Plugging Charlie Hebdo/Mossad Conspiracy Theory: “The story was beneath our standards and we apologize for this basic lapse in judgement.”
5. Did a Time Article Justify French Terror? Bruce Crumley, you may not be Charlie… But the rest of us are.
French Terror: The Aftershocks
• The quick-thinking of a Muslim employee of Hyper Cacher saved several lives. Lassana Bathily, from Mali, hid six customers in a walk-in freezer.
• The four fatalities of Friday’s siege of a Paris kosher supermarket were released for publication. The Jerusalem Post writes:
According to witnesses, Yohan Cohen (22), Philip Braham (40), Francois-Michel Saada (60s) and Yoav Hattab (21), were were shot in the early stages of the seven-hour standoff at the HyperCacher kosher market, which ended when police stormed the shop and killed the hostage taker — a 32-year-old man identified as Amedi Coulibaly.
• A slain policeman becomes a symbol.
• Hamas makes me want to throw up:
Hamas condemns France attacks, says no justification for “killing innocents“
• Pro-Israel rally scrapped in Amsterdam over security concerns
• Jeffrey Goldberg got himself a real scoop with soul-searching comments by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls:
• Landmark Paris synagogue closed on Shabbat for the first time since World War II, reports the Jerusalem Post.
• Israel’s making clear to French Jewry that moving to Israel is an option. But in the process, Natan Sharansky cautions against “dancing on the blood” of terror victims or insulting France. See also Allison Kaplan-Sommer‘s take.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Douglas Murray (The siege in a kosher shop in Paris proves why Israel needs to exist), Nahum Barnea (Jews are marginal players in attack on “French values”), Stephen Pollard (Antisemitism in France: the exodus has begun), Natan Sharansky (European idea will die here and survive in Israel), Christie Blatchford (When push comes to shove, isn’t it curious how it’s always about the Jews?) and Eyal Zisser (Learning the hard way).
Charlie Hebdo Media Matters
• Syndicated cartoonist Bill Day nails it.
• Arson attack against a German newspaper that reprinted the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
• While plenty of papers aren’t publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (it’s an especially touchy subject for one New York Times editor), American editors who did publish them explained why in emails to Kristen Hare. Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Christopher Massie best summed up the case for publishing:
Telling the full story of a massacre, and striking a blow for free speech, should trump major news outlets’ concern about offending Muslims.
• If only people were as worked up by op-ed platforms given to Hamas personalities. USA Today’s taking a beating on social media for giving radical Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary op-ed space to write an inflammatory piece titled People know the consequences.
So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?
• New York Times Hit With Fresh Double Standards Accusation Over Prophet Muhammed Cartoons
• ‘I AM NOT CHARLIE’: Leaked Newsroom E-mails Reveal Al Jazeera Fury over Global Support for Charlie Hebdo.
• We’re not really Charlie, say David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg, Andrew Bolt, and Hanin Ghaddar. And if you weren’t Charlie Hebdo before, please don’t start pretending now.
• David Bernstein responds to Glenn Greenwald, who argues (egad) that pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. is at least as bad for freedom of speech as Islamist terrorists murdering cartoonists.
• I turn to Stephen Pollard to put to rest some UK rumors you might have heard . . .
Israel and the Palestinians
• According to a Knesset report, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (BDS) hasn’t impacted the Israeli economy. Haaretz reports:
The research center found that Israel’s merchandise exports to the European Union had nearly doubled since 2005. In the decade before, they averaged $7.8 billion annually, and in the nine years that followed they averaged $15.6 billion, despite a sharp drop in 2009 due to the world financial crisis.
“Foreign trade figures, mainly exports to Europe, show that the impact of efforts over the last decade to impose a boycott have not hurt the Israeli economy on the macroeconomic level,” concluded the study written by Eyal Kaufman.
• Israeli-Arab is The Face of Israel as First UN Youth Delegate
Commentary/Analysis
• Eugene Kontorovich is must read, explaining how the International Criminal Court’s founding statute contains a provision directly designed to target Israel.
• Memo to the Christian Science Monitor and Howard LaFranchi: Abbas drew out a waiting game — a strategy of doing nothing while waiting for the international community to give the Palestinians a state for nothing.
• Wanted – a new kingdom for Hamas:
For now, the Hamas leadership is trying to act as though business was as usual. But despite trying to conceal the loss of Qatar’s deep pockets and hospitality, the Middle East is too small a place to keep a secret. Whether Khaled Mashal ends up in Turkey (the better option for Hamas), Tehran or Khartoum (bad and even worse options), it’s clear that the stock of Arab and Islamic capitals that might welcome him is in decline.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Khaled Abu Toameh ((Hamas, PA Step Up Human Rights Violations), and Kenneth Lasson‘s tribute to lone soldiers in the Holy Land.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• American weapons sent to Iraq to fight ISIS are ending up in the hands of pro-Iranian militias. Now Washington’s in a “damned if you, damned if you don’t” situation. Bloomberg News writes:
One senior administration official told us that the U.S. government is aware of this, but is caught in a dilemma. The flawed Iraqi security forces are unable to fight Islamic State without the aid of the militias, who are often trained and sometimes commanded by officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. And yet, if the U.S. stopped sending arms to the Iraqi military, things would get even worse, with IS overrunning more of the country and committing human-rights horrors on a broader scale. The risk of not aiding them was greater than the risk of aiding them, the official said, adding that this didn’t mean the administration was unconcerned about the risks involved.
• The Washington Post reports emerging “cracks” in the monolithic Lebanese Shiite support for Hezbollah.
• ‘Evil’ Cleric Abu Hamza Sentenced To Life
Image: CC BY-NC flickr/Thom Sanders
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