Today’s Top Stories
1. Fleeing ISIS, the first Iraqi Christian refugee reached Israel for medical treatment. Maryam’s an 18-month-old Chaldean born with a hole in her heart.
Miles said he expects to see more Iraqi Christians receiving treatment in Israeli hospitals. He has already received requests from other families.
And other minorities may follow suit.
“Israel is more and more coming to be seen as the last refuge of sanity in the region, particularly by other embattled minorities,” said Miles.
2. “Jihadi John,” the masked man who beheaded hostages in several ISIS videos, has finally been identified. Everybody’s citing the Washington Post for the scoop.
But his real name, according to friends and others familiar with his case, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize.
3. Pass the popcorn: The Syria-Hezbollah offensive against Al-Qaida-affiliated goons in the Syrian Golan is gaining nothing.
A couple of thousand Syrian army soldiers along with a few hundred Hezbollah fighters indeed did take control of individual villages and several outposts, yet the Syrian opposition — both secular factions and members of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front — also managed to capture several villages and outposts.
The situation in the Syrian Golan Heights, in essence, has not changed at all following the operation.
4. More Irish Times Hate: ‘Zionism and Anti-Semitism Overlap’ Columnist Eamonn McCann demonstrates his deep and utterly pathological hatred of Israel and Zionism.
Israel and the Palestinians
• After Operation Protective Edge, Mahmoud Abbas rejected a Western push to restore PA rule over Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reports. What was he thinking?
Western governments sought to advance a United Nations Security Council resolution that would confer upon the Ramallah administration a mandate to rule Gaza, which is currently in the hands of Abbas’ arch rival, Hamas.
After they were presented with a draft of the resolution, the Palestinian Authority rejected the document out of hand.
• PLO: We don’t have the money to pay out the $655 million verdict.
• Al Jazeera retracted its flood libel coverage and replaced the entire article with an impressive editor’s note.
• YNet reporter Elior Levy followed a literal mob of PA boycott-enforcers visiting Ramallah shops to make sure banned Israeli products were removed from the shelves.
• Israel and Jordan signed a water-sharing deal:
According to Thursday’s agreement, Jordan and Israel will share the potable water produced by a future desalination plant in Aqaba, from which salty brines will be piped to the Dead Sea. In return for its portion of the desalinated water in the South, Israel will be doubling its sales of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) water to Jordan on the countries’ northern border.
• The Guardian and Al-Jazeera dish out the latest “accusations” against the Mossad, based on leaked South African intelligence cables. First, Al Jazeera dishes out that the Mossad threatened to launch cyber attacks on South Africa if the government didn’t crack down on BDS activity.
And The Guardian? Israel considered drying up the Nile River and even developed a plant capable of absorbing large amounts of water. At least The Guardian had the sensibility to add this disclaimer that applies to the entire collection of cables:
The reality is often bureaucratic and banal, the information unreliable, uncheckable or available in open sources and their judgments frequently politicised and self-serving. All of those elements can be found throughout the spy cables leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian.
In other words, there’s no way to verify if these cables reflect reality. So what the heck are we supposed to do with these so-called disclosures other than dutifully retweet them and feign interest?
On a related note, Emanuele Ottolenghi unpacks the thin evidence The Guardian presents in its “dodgy dossier on Iran’s bomb project.”
• Iran’s Press TV asked people to tweet questions to George Galloway under the hashtag, #AskGalloway. Oh, did he get an earful.
Around the World
• German Jewish leader: Don’t wear yarmulkes in certain areas.
“The question is whether it makes sense to be recognizable as Jews in certain areas . . . by wearing a yarmulka, or whether it’s better to wear a different head covering. This is indeed a development that I didn’t see five years ago and that is a little frightening.”
• UN experts say Yemen’s ousted president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, amassed a personal ill-gotten fortune of $30-$62 billion during his three decades in power. More at the BBC.
• ISIS holds 150 Assyrian Christians hostage.
• British MPs want to scale down the publicly-funded BBC. A House of Commons select committee issued a report on the Beeb’s future, and it proposes some drastic changes. We’re talking about reforming and decriminalizing the license fee system to follow Germany’s model, greater transparency in the way the Beeb spends public money, abolishing the BBC Trust, and more. See coverage at The Guardian and Daily Mail.
“At best [the BBC Trust] appeared a critical friend, but to many it has seemed to be an apologist for the BBC . . . too protective of the BBC as an institution, rather than acting as an effective and objective regulator.”
• French police arrested three Al Jazeera journalists for illegally flying a drone over Paris.
Commentary/Analysis
• Why is Israel fighting Obama’s Iran deal? Michael Crowley says it comes down to one word: Sunset.
One person who talks regularly with members of Congress about Iran says that until recently, many were unaware a nuclear deal would have any sunset clause at all.
But no one close to the talks has ever denied that a comprehensive agreement which extends a temporary deal now in effect will also be of finite duration . . .
Iran is “a system permeated by ideology, so Khamenei dying tomorrow is not likely to change the system dramatically.”
• Blame the Israel for Palestinian terror, are you, Nicholas Kristof? In the middle of a New York Times column smearing settlers, he writes:
The violence, of course, cuts both ways, and some Israeli settlers have been murdered by Palestinians. I just as easily could have talked to settler children traumatized by Palestinian violence. But that’s the point: As long as Israel maintains these settlements, illegal in the eyes of most of the world, both sides will suffer.
• The Wall St. Journal‘s Bret Stephens discusses the Iranian nuclear talks. Is the US caving in to Tehran?
• Eli Lake and Josh Rogin tag-teamed on a Los Angeles Times op-ed on President Obama lowering the bar on an Iranian nuclear deal.
• A Daily Telegraph staff-ed doesn’t like the idea of a nuclear deal with Iran coming at any price.
Fashionable Western opinion might revolt against the idea, but we should not discount the possibility that Mr Netanyahu might have a point this time. If the West lifts sanctions and allows Iran’s leaders to fill their coffers with oil revenues, in return for graciously agreeing to defer their ambition to be a nuclear threshold state until somewhere between 2025 and 2030, then that would not be good enough. The whole point of this immense diplomatic effort was to remove the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran for the foreseeable future. Simply deferring that possibility by a decade or so – and then leaving the future leaders of the West to deal with the consequences – would be cowardly and unconscionable.
• Worth reading: Julius Kairey, a junior at Cornell University, examines The 4 Causes of Anti-Israelism.
• Over at i24 News, Emmanuel Navon and Yakub Halabi duke out the likelihood of the Palestinian Authority financially collapsing.
• I don’t think apologists for Palestinian terror are going to like this Jimmy Margulies cartoon.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Jonathan Tobin (Why the fake story about the Mossad contradicting Netanyahu?), Professor Abraham Ben-Zvi (More than just centrifuges), Robert Einhorn (Deterring an Iranian nuclear breakout), and Alex Ryvchin (Can the Jews of Europe be saved?).
Featured image: CC BY-NC Steve Sawyer via flickr with additions by HonestReporting; Dead Sea CC BY-NC-SA flickr/Kraftwerck; atom via deejaywill
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