Today’s Top Stories
1. Four worshippers were killed when a pair of Palestinians armed with guns, axes and knives stormed a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood. The two terrorists — both from eastern Jerusalem — were killed in a subsequent shootout with police. Orders were given to demolish the homes of the terrorists.
The four — identified as Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Kalman Levine, Aryeh Kopinsky, and Shmuel Goldberg — were, all immigrants from the US or UK and laid to rest this afternoon. YNet, Haaretz and the Times of Israel talked to eyewitnesses to the attack; the Daily Mail drew attention to celebrations in Gaza.
See below for related commentary/analysis.
2. Haaretz obtained a copy of the full EU document outlining possible sanctions against Israel.
Among the options under consideration are measures against European companies that work in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
If this measure should be carried out, it could harm quite a few Israeli businesses that work with European companies on projects in the settlements . . . .
[The section about relations with the Palestinians] also proposes “support, or non-opposition,” of unilateral Palestinian actions such as “applications to international organizations” or requests for recognition.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini denied any plans to impose sanctions and described the document as merely “hypothetical.”
3. After finding longer smuggling tunnels, Egypt is doubling the width of its buffer zone along the Gaza border, reports Reuters.
4. Hamas: Strike the Pigs and Monkeys, the Jews: Shame on the Guardian for publishing lies and serving as a propaganda tool for terrorists.
5. Synagogue Terror Attack: Top Headline Fails: As two Palestinian terrorists murder Jewish worshipers in a Jerusalem synagogue, what were the media’s first reactions?
6. CNN Gaffe: “Deadly Attack on Jerusalem Mosque”: Oops.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas official, posted this cartoon on Facebook. I’m not clear if it was posted before or after this morning’s terror attack, but he’s certainly inciting copycat attacks. (Is Facebook okay with that?) Avi Mayer got this screengrab.
• I’m impressed. CNN’s home page called it terror, front and center. No qualifiers either.
• Cabinet minister Naftali Bennett raised eyebrows. While talking to the BBC about today’s terror attack, Bennett held up a photo of one of the victims lying in a pool of blood. The Beeb interviewer told Bennett, “We don’t want to see that picture . . . take it down.”
Israelis, the foreign press corps, and government customarily don’t display gory photos of Israeli terror victims or use them as props to score paparazzi or P.R. points. It’s about giving the dead their dignity. When the BBC turns a dead Palestinian into an iconic image, that’s a different story (shout-out to like-minded Jake Wallis Simons and Tom Gross).
Feel free to disagree, but I think Bennett crossed a line here.
• According to a Dutch media report, the IDF was close to assassinating Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. The Times of Israel picks up on the buzz. Nothing’s confirmed, so take it with a grain of salt — or not.
. . . the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit planned to hit Nasrallah as he gave a public address during the Ashura religious celebrations earlier this month.
The plan was to fire a pinpoint accurate missile fitted with a small explosive charge at Nasrallah during his speech, given to a crowd in southern Beirut. According to the Iranian FARS News Agency, an unmanned drone was to launch the missile and the intention was to make the attack appear to be a suicide bombing rather than an airstrike.
• Israel’s Zim shipping company suspended services at the Port of Long Beach. The JTA explains:
The company has not offered a reason for the suspension, although the decision comes after months of picketing this summer against Zim vessels by anti-Israel protesters along the West Coast of the United States.
Mideast Matters
• UN experts recommend new sanctions on terrorists.
• According to Turkish media reports, the Free Syrian Army abandoned Aleppo, and its highest ranking commander in whatever’s left of the city fled to Turkey.
The source said some of the weaponry delivered to the FSA by the U.S.-led coalition in its fight against both Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria might have fallen into the hands of Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, the Syria branch of al-Qaeda.
Commentary/Analysis
• Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Eugene Kontorovich takes academia’s Israel-bashers to task for turning a blind eye to Turkish universities in occupied Northern Cyprus.
Another striking example of this incongruity occurred last year, when many European academics signed a letter to the European Union official Catherine Ashton supporting the European Commission’s restriction of funds to institutions across the Green Line (a common name for Israel’s 1949 armistice line with Jordan). Many of the signatories teach at universities that themselves have relationships across the other Green Line, as Cyprus’s de facto partition border is known.
• Hmmmm. Is Palestinian reconciliation a hostage to an internal Hamas rift? Analysts told The Media Line that Hamas to choose whether to follow a Palestinian nationalist agenda of unity or the Muslim Brotherhood’s power-seeking agenda. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; jettisoning ideology was never likely:
“This is a catastrophe for Abu Mazen (nickname for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) because the [Muslim] Brotherhood wants to end the Palestinian cause. My opinion is that the Muslim Brotherhood has no problem with Palestinians being like North and South Koreans,” said Sweilem . . .
• For more commentary/analysis of today’s terror, see Anshel Pfeffer (Synagogue attacks sets deadly precedent), Jeffrey Goldberg (Hamas endorses a massacre), David Horovitz (Palestinian terrorists should know: it’s not going to work), and Avi Issacharoff (The Gaza connection to terror in Jerusalem).
Image: CC BY-NC-SA flickr/Erio
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
