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Today’s Top Stories:
1. A big hissy-fit hit the German media, with prominent columnist Henryk Broder calling another publisher, Jakob Augstein, an anti-Semite. The Jerusalem Post explains:
In his Monday Spiegel Online blog article, titled “To whose advantage is the violence?,” Augstein wrote: “Fires are burning in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, all countries that are among the poorest in the world. But the arsonists are elsewhere. The furious young men burning American, and now also German, flags are just as much victims as the dead in Benghazi and Sanaa. Who profits from this violence? Only the crazies and the unscrupulous. And this time also – as if incidentally – the American Republicans and the Israeli government.”
To which Broder responded:
Writing in his own blog, Die Achse des Guten (The Axis of Good), Broder, regarded as Germany’s leading expert on contemporary anti-Semitism, said: “A few days ago, I wrote here that the editor of Freitag, Jakob Augstein, was a ‘salon anti- Semite.’ Now I have to correct myself. Jakob Augstein is not a salon anti-Semite, he’s a pure anti-Semite, an anti-Semitic piece of work, an offender by conviction who only missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born after the war. He certainly would have had what it takes.” . . .
In a telephone conversation with The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, Broder said commentaries in Der Freitag, Augstein’s weekly, were packed full of comments supporting anti- Semitism.
2. The top dog at Iran’s atomic energy program confirmed that Tehran has misled the IAEA about its capabilities. Writes YNet:
Head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency Fereydoun Abbasi said Thursday that Tehran “occasionally” gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “false information” to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In an interview with the London-based al-Hayat newspaper, Abbasi said, “There is no choice but to mislead other intelligence bodies. Sometimes we show weaknesses we don’t have. Sometimes we show strengths we don’t have. Later this is evident in talks with the IAEA.”
3. Maan News: A Palestinian prisoner released in the Gilad Shalit swap tried to burn herself in Ramallah’s Manara Square.Fortunately for Abbas, the anti-America riots have eclipsed the Palestine Spring, as a Washington Post staff-ed astutely notes.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Deliberate timing? The BBC scheduled its Mideast editor, Jeremy Bowen, to have a Q&A with readers on Twitter — during Rosh HaShanah. Blogger Daphne Anson doesn’t think the timing was accidental.
And nobody would be cynical enough to suggest that despite Al Beeb’s bend-over-backwards attempts at inclusiveness and accommodation of all sorts of minority groups a much-touted-by-the-BBC question and answer session on Twitter regarding the Middle East with the pally title “Ask Jeremy” took place on the first day of Rosh Hashana in order to evade pesky Jewish questioners.
There’s more to the story at BBC Wishes Jewish Viewers a Sour New Year.
• Mahmoud Abbas threatened to quit, reportedly giving the various factions 10 days to find a successor. We’ve seen that dance before. But will the Palestinian street call his bluff?
• AP: The UN Security Council threw its weight behind “naming and shaming” governments and armed groups that recruit, kill or sexually children in armed conflicts. Let’s talk about Hamas and Hezbollah-run summer camps.
