Tehran Outraged As Abbas Meets With Iranian Opposition

Today’s Top Stories

1. Tehran blasted Mahmoud Abbas for meeting an Iranian opposition leader in Paris over the weekend, saying the PA leader “has been a collaborator with the Central Intelligence Agency for a long time.”

2. Looks like the US and Israel came up with a compromise on a key sticking point of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) governing the next 10 years of American military aid. Previous MOUs allowed for a portion of the aid to be spent in Israel, but the White House wants to end that. Reuters explains:

A key disagreement has been over Washington’s insistence on ending a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend 26.3 percent of its U.S. defense aid on its own military industries rather than on American products.

 

Israeli officials argue that the provision, which is given to no other country receiving U.S. military assistance, was needed to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” against sometimes hostile neighbors such as Iran, and that its removal would mean the loss of thousands of Israeli defense jobs.

 

But a congressional source briefed by the Obama administration said Israel had signaled its willingness to phase out the provision. The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said the White House was prepared to let Israel keep the arrangement for the first five years of the new MOU but it would be gradually phased out in the second five years, except for joint U.S.-Israeli military projects.

3. Hezbollah dupes top Israeli brass into TV interview.

4. HonestReporting’s “Red Lines: The Eight Categories of Media Bias” is a video series based on our latest E-book (available on Amazon for a small fee). In the fifth video of the series, Haviv Rettig Gur of the Times of Israel, and Michelle Chabin of USA Today and other papers discussed how important information is omitted from news stories and headlines.

Israel and the Palestinians

• Israeli arrested a member of the Palestinian security services who was also a “major weapons dealer.” According to AP, weapons manufacturing equipment was confiscated in Monday’s Nablus raid. On Sunday, Israeli-Arab citizen was caught with six pipe bombs at a West Bank checkpoint.

• Egypt’s very unhappy with the burgeoning ties between Hamas and Islamic State in the Sinai. The Times of Israel explains:

This highly worrying development for the Egyptians began a few months ago, when prominent members of Hamas’s military wing crossed over from Gaza into Sinai to help IS set up its military infrastructure there. Several of them took their families with them, and were involved in training IS activists in the art of planting IEDs and firing missiles at tanks. Several even joined the IS-affiliated Sinai Province group . . .

 

Egyptian sources say that whenever Cairo brings up the issue with Hamas’s leadership, it receives the same evasive answer: the activists assisting IS are all former members of the Palestinian organization. But the dissembling doesn’t end there: Hamas military wing commanders in Rafah regularly host commanders of Sinai Province. One of the most prominent of these is Suleiman Al-Sawarka, whose Al-Sawarka tribe was among the founders of Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, which went on to pledge allegiance to IS and become Sinai Province.

• This photo caught Michael Horowitz‘s eye. MANPAD (which stands for man-portable air defense) is just a fancy acronym for what’s also known as shoulder-launched surface to air missiles. ‘Nuff said.

Mideast Matters

• Troubling sign for Israeli-Turkish rapprochement, Part 1: Israelis are not only avoiding vacationing in Turkey, nobody even takes connecting flights there to other destinations, YNet reports.

• Troubling sign for Israeli-Turkish rapprochement, Part 2: Knesset committee recognizes Armenian genocide.

• Troubling sign for Israeli-Turkish rapprochement, Part 3: Will the recent coup attempt scare Israelis from investing in Turkey’s energy industry, which is counting on a pipeline to transfer Israeli natural gas through Turkey to Europe?

• Can you imagine all the nastygrams this generated?

Virgin Megastore #Lebanon mistakenly uses photo of #Israeli soldier to celebrate Lebanese Army day! pic.twitter.com/NkJ9RL5kgn

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) August 1, 2016

The Lebanese mishap is deja vu all over again. In 2013, billboards honoring Russian soldiers in the city of Orel inexplicably featured an Israeli soldier flashing a thumbs up from a Merkava III tank. Russian bloggers easily traced the original photo to the IDF’s flickr stream.

Around the World

• Students on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian campus battles talked to the Jerusalem Post about the escalating rhetoric and more.

• Ouch. An appeal by Muslim personalities failed to mention Jewish victims of terror attacks in France. French Jewish leaders asked the authors of the petition to make necessary clarifications.

• Meet Siavosh Derakhti, a young Swedish Muslim single handedly fighting anti-Semitism.

• Israeli float at Stockholm‘s gay pride parade omits the word ‘Israel.’ What gives?

• Propaganda works. The Times of London picked up on the first controlled experiment on the effects of watching the Kremlin-backed television station, RT. Monica Richter of Oxford University involved more than 1,000 English-speaking people. The key takeaway? Don’t rely on only one news service:

Those exposed only to RT’s message became significantly more hostile to the western viewpoint — but the effect decreased when people were also shown BBC coverage . . .

 

The research comes as funding grows for the BBC World Service to boost audiences in countries including Russia. The money was assigned as part of last year’s strategic defence review.

 

On Capitol Hill, there is pressure for the government-owned Voice of America to be better aligned to US policy.

 

Anne Applebaum, director of the transitions forum at the Legatum Institute think tank based in London, said: “When people are exposed to more than one point of view they make better choices. But people nowadays can live in echo chambers where they hear only false information. They then become very easy to manipulate.”

• A few sporting developments caught my eye . . .

– After retirement, NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire to play in Israel
– Alon Day poised to make NASCAR history as first Israeli driver
– Israel’s largest-ever Olympic delegation is ready for Rio

Commentary/Analysis

• Worth reading: Australian columnist Nick Cater destroys BDS and the Palestinian movement against normalizing ties with Israel.

The disputed Palestinian territories should serve as an object lesson to Western victim-mongers; the politics of grievance achieves little apart from increasing stocks of righteous indignation. The suffering of those they pretend to protect is prolonged; oppression, real or imagined, becomes a lifetime sentence handed down at birth.

 

Four million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are condemned to a grotesque Groundhog Day. If Israel tries to help them, for example by supplying water, electricity or medical assistance, the move is condemned as a Zionist plot. To the anti-normalisation movement any improvement in the lives of the “oppressed subjects” is anathema. Why? Because it would destroy the argument that everything bad is the fault of the “occupation”. The huge gap in income — gross domestic product per capita is $36,000 in Israel compared with $1600 in the Palestinian territories — is evidence of what they call apartheid and they want to keep it that way.

• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .

– Khaled Abu Toameh: A guide to the Palestinian lexicon
– Benny Avni: Why Palestinians are on the verge of civil war
– Avi Issacharoff: Its pockets lined with Qatari-paid wages, Hamas is on the rise
– Zalman Shoval: Abbas and the strategy of falsehood
– Yossi Melman: Is Israel’s success against terror a model for the US Army against ISIS?
– David Collier: Facebook: A pipeline for funding Hamas terror?
– Dr. Reuven Berko: Reality dawns on Nasrallah
– Smadar Perry: Nasrallah’s voice, Iran’s words
– Stephen Pollard: Anti-Semitic hatred a daily part of life online – and no-one does anything to stop it
– MP Bob Blackman: It does no good to expect the best from Iran

Featured image: CC0 Thong Vo via Unsplash with additions by HonestReporting; crossed flags via crossed-flag-pins.com;

For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.

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