Today’s Top Stories
1. The Foreign Desk reports that pro-Al Qaeda jihadis are being urged on social media forums to attack athletes and spectators at the upcoming Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro — especially Israelis.
“Your chance to take part in the global Jihad is here! Your chance to be a martyr is here!” the jihadis said, citing the easy process of obtaining visas for travel to Brazil as well as the wide availability of guns in “crime-ridden slums.”
By the way, Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev announced she’ll be boycotting skipping the opening ceremony because it conflicts with the Jewish Sabbath.
2. I don’t know anything about the individual candidates, but Egypt and Qatar are competing for UNESCO leadership with their nominees.
While it’s hard to be enthusiastic about either country running the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, on the bright side, the outgoing chief and rare voice of common sense, Irina Bokova, is being considered as the next UN Secretary General.
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3. Dore Gold, the Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and essentially Benjamin Netanyahu’s top diplomat, visited Chad, an African nation that is predominately Muslim, to meet with President Idriss Deby.
Recently, Deby was even heard praising Israel and its security services in conversations with visiting foreign diplomats. Diplomatic sources in Chad said that if the two countries were to re-establish ties, Deby would like Netanyahu to visit the country.
Chad is a Muslim African country surrounded by neighbors mired in armed conflicts. The prevailing anarchy in neighboring Libya is particularly troubling to Chadian officials, especially because Libya today is divided into three areas, with one of the areas controlled by the Islamic State group. Chad even sends its forces to areas where armed conflicts are taking place. For example, an intervention force it dispatched to Darfur — a war zone where the international community says Sudan has perpetrated genocide — was able to reduce the level of violence there. Chad also sent an intervention force to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country also mired in ongoing armed conflict.
In the near future, the president of Togo, Faure Gnassingbe, will visit Israel, ahead of another planned trip to Africa for Netanyahu in the coming months, this time in West Africa.
Of the African outreach, the Jerusalem Post adds:
In addition, one senior official said, Israel’s close security ties with Egypt and Jordan – as well as well-known but under the-radar contacts with Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf countries – have convinced many African countries that they no longer have to be worried about Arab pressure against developing ties with Israel, since the Arab states themselves have ties with Israel.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Dore Gold also hosted delegation of Saudi academics and businessmen, led by retired general and diplomat, Anwar Eshki. Haaretz explains the significance:
While this wasn’t an official visit, it was a highly unusual one, as Eshki couldn’t have traveled to Israel without approval from the Saudi government.
Gold and Eshki had been meeting secretly for some time, and went public with their relationship at a gathering in Washington last year.
PFLP, Islamic Jihad denounce 'normalization' between Israel and Saudi Arabia following visit by former Saudi Gen.
— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) July 24, 2016
• Last but not least, Gold talked to the Times of Israel about building relations with Arab countries, French plans for a peace summit later this year, and his relationship with Mahmoud Abbas.
• Haaretz: Hamas announces its participation in West Bank municipal elections scheduled for October.
• I’ve been wondering what’s the best age to let my son start diving through flaming hoops . . .
Gaza summer camps train teens for jihad
• Despite including Sabra hummus in a list of “morally squishy” foods, New York Magazine denied to The Algemeiner that it supports BDS.
• British lawmaker Jenny Tonge blamed Israel for rising jihadism. The House of Lords member from the Liberal Democrat party, was quoted saying:
Tonge said “the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel is a major cause of the rise of extreme Islamism and Daesh,” using the Arab-language acronym of the Islamic State terrorist organization. She said Israel was provoking a generation of violent extremists who would have “a justified grudge” against Israel and Britain . . .
Tonge resigned in 2012 from the position of party whip, a task equivalent in the United States to speaker, after she spoke about Israel’s demise at an event promoting the boycott of the Jewish state.
• I see Reuters discovered the word terror . . .
Commentary/Analysis
• An Arab Christian who grew up in Baathist Iraq argues that Israel is the only country that can stop jihadists from annihilating Mideast Christians. Luma Simms argues that this would require Arab Christians to overcome their own anti-Semitism,
But all Arab indoctrination—no matter the sect—instills animus for Jews and the state of Israel. Anyone who claims that the Arab world—Muslim and Christian—is not pathologically anti-Semitic is delusional. This is the elephant in the room in the Arab Christian subculture; the secret sin no one wants to bring to the light.
Because for Arab countries to acknowledge a Jewish state would require that they acknowledge Jewish people as people, as human persons. Their anti-Semitism does not allow them to do this. Anti-Semitism in the Arab bosom sets the relationship between the Arab and the Jew in what Austrian-German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called the “I-It” relationship, rather than the “I-You.” They cannot recognize the state because they cannot recognize the people; they cannot recognize the people because they have established a relationship with them not as human persons but as an “It,” as object rather than subject. (This is a natural outcome of the dhimmis culture, where laws ensured Jews and Christians knew their place as second-class citizens.) . . .
Israel is the last hope for Arab Christians; it’s as simple as that. America is not leading on the refugee issue, especially for Iraqi Christians. Yet helping them, doing good to the Christians in the Arab world, would require Israel overcoming her neighbors’ anti-Semitism, even of those Christians who will not ask for help because of their prejudices.
• Over at the National Post, Robert Fulford asks why democracies should take a “balanced” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some things, after all, just don’t balance out.
“Balance” implies that the opinions of two antagonists should be regarded as morally equivalent. It would mean that our ambassador would consider that Israel and the Palestinian Authority are similar entities, with similar goals and similar methods, to be taken seriously in a similar way . . .
Should a Canadian treat with balance a community that teaches young people to revere terrorist martyrs? Sympathy, perhaps, or some level of understanding. But balance? No.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Zalman Shoval: The spring of Israel’s foreign relations
– Melanie Phillips: The invisible Jewish victims
– Yossi Beilin: Terror of the depressed
– Gershon Baskin: BDS harms Palestinian interests
– William Jacobson: Will anti-Israel academic boycotters now boycott Turkish universities?
– Benjamin Weinthal: Is the BDS movement facing economic warfare?
– Yoram Ettinger: Palestinian demographic manipulation
– Whaleoil: Anti-Semitism in New Zealand
– Wall St. Journal: Israel 1, OECD 0 (staff-ed, click via Google News)
Featured image: CC BY john Wright with additions by HonestReporting;
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