Today’s Top Stories
1. Images of Iran’s hospitalized supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are sparking speculation over his successor as well as an unprecedented Iranian media blitz. The 75-year-old Khamenei recently underwent prostate surgery. Reuters explains:
“The clergy are looking for somebody to guarantee the interests of the clergy. The Revolutionary Guards are looking for someone to guarantee the interests of the Revolutionary Guards,” said Khalaji. “Neither of them wants somebody who can come in and control them.”
2. Emboldened ISIS seeks Iran’s nuclear secrets.
The Islamic State is preparing to wage war on Iran in order to obtain the secrets of its nuclear program, according to a manifesto attributed to a member of the Islamic State war cabinet uncovered by the Sunday Times . . .
Western security officials believe the document to be authentic.
According to the document uncovered by the British newspaper, ISIS intends to obtain Iran’s nuclear secrets through Russia. The organization will offer Russia access to Iraqi gas fields it seized in the Anbar area in return for Moscow cutting its ties with Tehran and pass on Iran’s nuclear knowhow to ISIS.
Interesting ISIS aspirations. But I can’t imagine Russia playing along with the jihadis.
3. The Israeli-Lebanese border heated up. According to the IDF, soldiers opened fire on a group of infiltrators. One was apparently injured and the group turned back. Jerusalem Post coverage.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet certainly said all the right things while visiting Israel. Let’s wait and see whether this leads to any real change in the pages of UK-based medical journal. More on the story at the JTA and Daily Telegraph.
• Israel intercepted attempts to smuggle weapons material to Gaza.
• A Jerusalem court ruled that the Palestinian Authority must compensate the victims of a 2001 terror attack. The Jerusalem Post writes:
“The weapons and the funding were transferred from the Palestinian Authority to the commanders in the terrorist organizations, and the PA knew and understood the purpose for these transfers,” Drori stated in his decision that spanned some 1000 pages.
Yaniv and Sharon Ben-Shalom, and her brother, Doron Sviri, were killed when Palestinians opened fire on their car on Highway 443 in August, 2001.
• I don’t understand how this article passed muster with editors. According to The Guardian, Israel, the PA and the UN have agreed on a Gaza reconstruction plan, but Peter Beaumont’s dispatch stretches credibility.
On one hand, the agreement is so secret, nobody has seen it. And yet the headline/subhead combination says everybody’s panning it (ostensibly because Israel’s outsourcing the blockade to the UN). Only one detractor is quoted — an unidentified source from an undisclosed major non-governmental organization “who has seen the text of the document.”
As I’ve explained before when Reuters and the Wall St. Journal abused anonymity, readers have to be wary. While those cases were about unidentified sources providing info, Beaumont’s source is only giving commentary. If you want low-brow anonymous mudslinging, the unidentified trolls posting comments below Beaumont’s report will suffice.
• A London academic conference descended into ugly politics. Israeli researchers from Ariel University due to present a paper were told not to mention their affiliation with the West Bank university. The researchers refused and withdrew from the conference instead. The European Association of Israeli Studies’ web site claims the organization is “politically neutral.” More on the story at the Times Higher Education Magazine.
• The New York Times visited the Golan, where an Israeli drill tested peoples’ response to an imaginary scenario of Islamic terrorists infiltrating from Syria.
• Sweden will become first European country to recognize a Palestinian state.
• Swedish politician: ISIS is a Mossad pawn.
Media Angles
• Forbes journalist Richard Behar called AP onto the carpet over the wire service’s assertions that the majority of Palestinians killed during the Gaza crisis were civilian. For clarity and brevity, I added the links Behar refers to:
Associated Press is simply hopeless when it comes to its coverage of the Middle East. Even today, they continue to parrot the UN, which parrots Hamas, on the claim that “the vast majority” of Gazan casualties in the Israel-Hamas war were civilians. They report it without any caveats, or any skepticism, or any competing sources of data—such as the independent Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which says it is painstakingly going through the names, one by one.
To date, the center has found a 50:50 ratio between terrorist operatives and civilians among the dead—but the trend is moving towards fewer civilians as the counting and analyzing is being done. It’s highly likely that the final figure will be that 60%-or-more of the dead were terrorist operatives. And yet media outlets like AP continue to ignore this, doing a disservice to readers and to the media outlets that pay the wire service. Note how the reporters (there are four of them on this particular story) simply HAD to slip in that “vast majority” claim in its piece about Netanyahu’s speech before the UN. And that seems to be just fine with John Daniszewski, AP’s senior managing editor for international news. Knock, knock, AP, anybody home?
Behar further discussed the issue with Algemeiner.
Makes me wonder why AFP couldn’t find a better dead civilian for this heart-tugging Eid al-Adha story:
Nine-year-old Majd Dahduh clutched a bouquet of flowers as he knelt by the grave of his father at the Sheikh Radwan Martyrs Cemetery and said softly: “Happy Eid, father.”
“He used to bring us presents for the Eid and we used to go with him to the mosque to pray. Now he is in heaven,” he said, sobbing.
His father, Shaaban Dahduh, was a top commander of the Islamic Jihad group who was killed in an Israeli attack that targeted an eight-storey apartment bloc.
• Yiftah Curiel, the spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London, weighed in on British media coverage of the Gaza war. I wish this had been published in a British paper — the Europeans need to hear this point more than Israelis:
For at the end of the day, a narrow, often demonizing international portrayal of Israel has little bearing on most Israelis. Those who support living in peace alongside a neighboring Palestinian state, and polls place them in the majority, are doing so for themselves and for their children, not to placate left-wing Europeans.
But the message that they are receiving is that Israel is not seen as legitimate, that it will continue to be picked upon no matter what, and that it will always have to fend for itself, by itself.
• While in the US, Prime Minister Netanyahu made a whirlwind media blitz, discussing the peace process, Iran and ISIS with appearances on NPR‘s Steve Inskeep, Univision‘s Jorge Ramos, MSNBC‘s Andrea Mitchell, and CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria. The latter interview is due to released in full later today. The Prime Minister is also scheduled for appearances on Fox News and Face the Nation.
• See also Irish Times columnist Denis Staunton’s take on the Israeli-Palestinian battle for hearts and minds.
Commentary/Analysis
• Khaled Abu Toameh notes the irony of the Palestinian anti-normalization movement attacking people like Haaretz journalist Amira Hass and a delegation of US consular officials in recent days.
The two incidents once again prove that peace is impossible unless Palestinians stop inciting their people against Israel and Jews. Ironically, the Palestinian Authority, which is engaged in daily contacts with Israel, publicly supports anti-Israeli boycott campaigns.
If those who support the Palestinians no longer feel safe visiting Palestinian universities and cities, the Palestinians need to realize that the incitement is making them lose even their closest friends and allies.
While we’re on the subject of the Amira Hass incident, Seth Frantzman says Israelis are drawing the wrong conclusions. AP picked up on the story too.
• A New York Times staff-ed blames Israeli building plans in Givat HaMatos.
• Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the UK, weighed in on European anti-Semitism in the Wall St. Journal.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Melanie Phillips (Iran’s a bigger threat than ISIS), Eugene Kontorovich (The peace camp’s recycled outrage), Yonah Jeremy Bob (Will the ICC investigate Israel?), and a staff-ed in The Spectator Australia (We are all Israelis now).
Image:CC BY flickr/Markus Spiske
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