| 1 |
Israel’s foreign minister has met his Russian counterpart, and thanked him for working with the Jewish state “on preventing an Iranian entrenchment in Syria.”
Gabi Ashkenazi told Sergey Lavrov that “Israel appreciates the ties and the coordination with the Russian government on preventing an Iranian entrenchment in Syria.”
The statement comes amid concerns that Moscow may now be ready to sell Tehran an ultra-advanced air defense system after the expiry of the UN arms embargo on the Islamic Republic earlier this month.
In a remarkable turn of events, the Palestinian foreign minister has suddenly announced his government’s desire to enter into negotiations with Israel via an international peace conference.
Top diplomat Riad Malki said that an international conference is badly needed to bring the two sides to negotiate peace. In response, America’s ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, said the Trump Administration was skeptical that such a conference would lead to anything concrete, but had “no objection” to such attempts.
After years of obstinacy, it appears that recent developments in the Middle East have finally forced the Palestinians’ hand.
Claudine Aoun, the daughter of Lebanese President Michel Aoun and a well-known public figure in her own right, has sparked fierce condemnation in her country this week for floating the prospect of making peace with Israel.
“We all support the principle of peace and I hope to visit Jerusalem, but not before all problems are solved,” she tweeted on Sunday.
Despite talking about peace in terms that would be eminently favorable to Lebanon, and calling for a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue – a sensitive subject for many Lebanese – Aoun’s tweets and televised comments have drawn outraged responses on social media, with the word “traitor” being used repeatedly.
Antisemitism Watch: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has invoked the Holocaust to condemn a French crackdown on radical Islam. Responding to France’s latest measures to fight the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism, Erdogan said that “Relocations, inquisitions and genocides toward members of different religions is not a practice that is foreign to Europe. The crimes against humanity committed against Jews 80 years ago, the acts against our Bosnian siblings in Srebrenica just 25 years ago, are still in the memory.”
Erdogan described the moves as part of “rising Islamophobia in the West” that “has turned into a wholesale attack on our book, our prophet, and everything we consider holy.”
Erdogan has previously abused the memory of the Holocaust in political statements, with the Turkish leader last year comparing the situation in Gaza to that of the millions of Jews, Roma, and others murdered by the Nazi war machine.
The United States has held its first ever government-sponsored online conference on Internet antisemitism. Titled Ancient Hatred, Modern Medium: Conference on Internet Antisemitism, the confab saw Israeli and American officials join academics, religious leaders, representatives of social media sites, and NGOs to discuss how best to confront the spread of antisemitism in new mediums, such as social media platforms.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo kicked off the government-sponsored conference by noting that in the first eight months of 2020, 1.7 million messages on Twitter and YouTube were identified as promoting hatred toward Jews, with some 37,000 of these posts in some way related to the modern blood libel that Jews are ultimately responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
- The Israel-Sudan Agreement is Bad News for Hamas (Yoni Ben Menachem, Jewish News Syndicate)
- Days of Unconditional Saudi Support of PA Are Over (Hussein Aboubakr Mansou, Israel Hayom)
- Judge Refuses to Block ‘No Boycott of Israel’ Measure (Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press)
- Aleph Farms Looks to Take Its Lab-Grown Meat Production to Space (NoCamels)
- Hamas Releases Palestinian Peace Activists Arrested After Zoom Call With Israelis (Reuters)
