Today’s Top Stories
1. Iran and Hezbollah are expanding their presence in the Syrian Golan as Bashar Assad’s offensive rolls on.
2. According Arab reports, an Egyptian airstrike killed a Hamas commander in the Sinai. But the family of Abdallah Saeed Kashta maintains he was killed with fellow jihadis in Libya. Hamas denies Kashta was one of theirs and insists it’s not interfering in Egypt’s internal affairs.
3. The White House formally requested War Powers authorization from Congress to fight ISIS. CNN notes that the request strangely omits Jews as ISIS targets.
Freshman Lee Zeldin is the only Republican Jewish member of Congress, and says it immediately leapt off the page that the President’s proposed resolution specifically singles out several ethnic groups threatened by ISIS: Iraqi Christians, Yezidis and Turkmens, but says nothing about Jews.
4. Media Fairness and Israel: The Biggest Fails and How You Can Create Change: HonestReporting CEO Joe Hyams discusses media failures and how the public can become more involved to make a difference.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Israel intercepted a boat trying to smuggle materials for rocket production into Gaza. See Jerusalem Post and YNet coverage.
• Prime Minister Netanyahu sent condolences to the US on the death of ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller.
Among her many pursuits, the Arizona native once volunteered in Israeli with the Palestinian International Solidarity Movement a few years ago; Mueller was kidnapped by ISIS one day after arriving in Syria as a humanitarian volunteer smf reportedly given as a “bride” to an ISIS commander before being killed in a Jordanian airstrike on Raqqa. Nobody deserves a fate like that.
• Israeli food companies shrugged off a PA boycott of their products. Executives who talked to Haaretz explained their indifference:
“The products they sell in the PA are the most basic of the basic, and they sell them at low prices because they know consumers don’t have money to spend,” said the industry executive. “Profitability is much lower than in Israel.”
• The Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Rachel Corrie’s parents, who sought to have the state held responsible for her death. Corrie, a US citizen and volunteer with the Palestinian International Solidarity Campaign, was accidentally run over by an army bulldozer looking for smuggling tunnels in Rafah in 2003.
Around the World
• Never again? More like, here we go again — in Austria.
Facebook postings from a Turkish man showing Adolf Hitler, with a statement praising the death of Jews, are a legitimate expression of criticizing the Jewish state, the spokesman for the prosecutor office in the city of Linz, Philip Christl, said on Tuesday.
• The student representative council (SRC) of the Durban University of Technology called for Jews to be expelled from the school.
The newspaper quoted SRC secretary Mqondisi Duma as saying: “As the SRC we had a meeting and analysed international politics. We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.”
The university’s vice chancellor Prof Ahmed Bawa told the newspaper the demand was “totally unacceptable”.
To which Gerhard Jacobs responds:
Perhaps the SRC should place more focus on their members’ pass-rates, rather than busy themselves with matters they might not know all that much about.
• I assume Jean-Christophe Cambedelis meant well, but he could’ve said it better.
• George Galloway is (once again) going off the deep end.
• Greece to hold joint military exercises with Israel, Cyprus, and possibly Egypt.
• Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized vehicles from the US embassy in Yemen after embassy staff evacuated the country. Britain and France embassy personnel have also left the country. See Reuters, and Washington Post coverage.
• Tears of happiness as Egypt releases jailed Al Jazeera journalists.
• It’s only an outrage when Israel does this.
Police: Man killed after hit 2 officers with rocks
• 60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon was killed in a car crash. Simon was based in Tel Aviv for more than 20 years as CBS News’s chief Mideast correspondent.
In 1991, Simon was captured and tortured by Iraqi soldiers, and he later said he feared his Jewishness would be more likely to cost him life than the fact he worked in Tel Aviv. I’ll link to the CBS News obit and a remembrance by Allison Kaplan Sommer. She notes that Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai “predicted” Simon’s death in a 2012 interview. Plenty of Western ex-pats in Israel will relate to this conversation; given Simon’s demise, the irony is eerie.
Commentary/Analysis
• Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, is also the head of the PA committee tasked with collecting evidence that can be used in the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders. Alan Baker asks:
Clearly the question here, taking into consideration these two news items, is how can the Palestinians push for bringing Israeli leaders before the ICC on the one hand while on the other intimating to the world their desire to resume negotiations with those same leaders? That the person heading their ICC preparation committee is the chief Palestinian negotiator to both the US and the EU would alone seem to render this whole picture rather absurd. It begs the question: which Israelis does Erekat intend to negotiate with, if his aim is to have them all arrested for war crimes? It is perhaps high time that the international community faced the reality that the Palestinian leadership, in attempting to stem the rise of popular support for Hamas among its population, is resorting to this ICC gambit as a public relations exercise, blatantly deceiving themselves, their constituency and the international community.
• The Wall St. Journal‘s Bari Weiss raises the Chapel Hill shooting to make an interesting point about President Obama calling the Paris kosher market attack “random.”
• For more commentary/analysis, see Elliott Abrams (The president’s “papal infallibility:), Annika Hernroth-Rothstein (Sweden’s blank check to Abbas), Mort Zuckerman (Rolling back the Iranian threat), Jeff Neumann (Is Hezbollah going broke?), Hanin Ghaddar (Hezbollah is turning into an unreliable state),and Maurice Ostroff (B’tselem’s Gaza casualty figures based largely on phone interviews).
Featured image: CC BY-SA Estitxu Carton via flickr with additions by HonestReporting; Capitol CC BY-NC-SA flickr/The Q Speaks; Simon via YouTube/ca a
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
