Today’s Top Stories
1. Two Israeli soldiers have been wounded on the Lebanese border after a bomb reportedly exploded next to an Israeli tank. The army said the bomb was “activated against them during activity along the Israel-Lebanon border… Initial reports indicate that the explosive device was planted with the intent to attack soldiers.”
Hezbollah media reports that Israel responded by shelling. This latest event comes hot on the heels of another incident on Sunday as tensions mount on the northern border.
In early media coverage, check out this Reuters headline:
A familiar story as Israel is portrayed as the aggressor. Of course – it all started when Israel fired back!
2. Iranian opposition activists claim sabotage was responsible for a massive explosion at Iran’s Parchin military complex:
“I think Parchin is the most important military compound in Iran and the most guarded military compound. Therefore its a failure for the Revolutionary Guards and for the military establishment,” Nourizadeh said.
The Iranian dissident said that the explosion was so loud that people in east Tehran “thought it was a bombardment.”
Nourizadeh said that, while the state-controlled media was trying to portray the explosion as “something simple that happened during an experiment or something,” he believes, based on his sources, that they are covering up what really happened, as well as withholding the actual number of deaths that occurred in the blast.
Jennifer Rubin comments in the Washington Post:
Perhaps the reported explosion was simply an accident. But if it was an intentional reminder that Israel, even without additional U.S. military assistance, has the will and capacity to do real damage to Iran’s program, then maybe, just maybe the U.S. negotiators will use that to their advantage. You think so? Me neither, but one can hope.
Ron Ben Yishai says:
The Parchin area is under constant supervision of optic and electromagnetic visual spy satellites – including Israeli supervision. The Americans also have ways to collect air samples from the explosion area through nitrogenous and unmanned aerial vehicles, so the West will know within several days what caused the explosion and if any radioactive materials were used.
. . .
In any event, the explosion puts Iran in a very uncomfortable position in the negotiations it is holding with the West, which are scheduled to end on November 24. If indeed it turns out that this was a military nuclear experiment, it will cause the West to toughen its stand and help Israel demand that the sanctions against Iran will be stepped up.
3. Has Islamic State reached Israel? Police are investigating the discovery of dozens of IS flags hidden in a bag in Nazareth Illit in northern Israel.
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— ????? ????? (@IL_police) October 7, 2014
4. Video: What Palestinian Concessions?
Israel and the Palestinians
• In a refreshing change for the BBC, a feature article focuses on Israeli families scarred by the experiences of this summer’s Gaza war.
• A Church of England vicar known for his anti-Zionist activities has attended an anti-Semitic Iranian conference where delegates discussed claims of a Zionist 9/11 conspiracy.
• Another BDS fail as the SWIFT international banking network published a special announcement in which it rejected calls by pro-Palestinian organizations to disconnect Israeli banks from its networks.
• CNN focuses on Israeli plans to relocate Bedouins living in the area between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim. While the video does include comment from an Israeli spokesperson, it only touches on what is a far more complex issue. See this JCPA study for more on this issue.
• After the New York Times’ Gaza correspondent Fares Akram was exposed as a Yasser Arafat fan, can any of his reports be taken seriously? His latest “human interest” story looks at efforts to rehouse Gazans whose homes were destroyed in the recent conflict.
• Despite its outstanding success during the Gaza war, Israel is finding it difficult to sell abroad.
• The UK government is facing a legal challenge to its continuing military exports to Israel.
• Israel’s Tourism Ministry is considering opening a second entrance to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount for non-Muslims.
• George Deek is a Christian Israeli Arab from Jaffa. He also happens to be Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to Norway. Here he speaks on “My family’s story in 1948 – fleeing Jaffa, building a future in Israel.”
Commentary/Analysis
• Jennifer Rubin, in the Washington Post, expresses understanding and support for Israeli PM Netanyahu’s U.S. media statements on settlements, Islamic State and Iran.
• Rubin also focuses on the pro-Israel Evangelical community:
This is the largest and most politically active “Israel Lobby” in the country. (Attendees came from as far away as North Dakota.) If the theology is not quite comprehensible to all Americans, then the geopolitical arguments the speakers made may sound familiar. These Zionists understand Israel and the U.S. are up against the same Islamist fundamentalists who want to cleanse Christians, Jews and non-fundamentalist Muslims from their midst. Journalist Eric Stackelbeck, reviewing the persecution first of Jews in the Middle East and then of Christians, reminded the crowd of mindset of radical Islamists who first go after Jews and then Christians. (“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people,” he explained is their outlook.)
• Roger Cohen in the New York Times, laments that the rabbis he listened to over the High Holidays did not address the Gaza conflict in their sermons
• Steve Feldman argues that Hamas was ISIS before there was an ISIS:
Hamas declared war on the West in the name of Islam with its Covenant in 1988. Since then, it has put its threats into violent action.
While the brunt of their covenant focuses on the Jewish People (not merely those in Israel), Hamas makes clear that it is an “Islamic Resistance Movement,” motivated by the Koran and the will of Allah to carry out murder, terrorize, and seize territory. Further, according to the covenant, its agenda goes well beyond “Palestine,” extending to the entire Middle East and beyond.
So we have two violent, extremist Muslim organizations bent on conquering territory, imposing sharia on the populace, and with global ambitions.
• Following Sweden’s declared intention to recognize a Palestinian state, The Times of Israel asks why are the Nordic countries so cold to Israel?
Some pundits blame increasing Muslim immigration to the Nordic countries for their pro-Palestinian stance. But religiously or ethnically inspired hatred for Israel is just one part of the story, and by far not the dominant component, several observers said.
Rather, they point to the Nordic countries’ traditional support for the weak and downtrodden, for the underdog in any given global conflict. “There is a strong emphasis on who’s strong and who’s weak in the European left, and particularly in Scandinavia,” said Jonathan Rynhold, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University. Since the 1970s, this feeling is accompanied by a strong dislike for what is perceived as colonialism, he added. “Israel is perceived as strong and ‘white,’ therefore it is perceived as wrong.”
Media Angles
• Israel Channel 2 anchor Yonit Levi and senior correspondent Udi Seagal explain why the Gaza war looked different on Israeli TV than it did on CNN:
During the 50 days of the war in Gaza, Israelis, and the rest of the world were watching two completely different wars. In Israel, the country was under attack and it was all happening on live television: The camera leaped between different cities being targeted—showing the rocket’s trajectory from the Gazan border, the subsequent sirens, and civilians taking shelter in Israel and, often, the rocket’s interception by the Iron Dome anti-missile system several minutes later—moments of deep anxiety, followed by relief, over and over, throughout the day. Israeli networks co-operating with the IDF’s Home Front Command aired banners clearly stating which region was under attack, and in some areas where the sirens weren’t loud enough, this turned out to be life-saving information.
It might be difficult for an outsider to understand, but when your child is spending their summer vacation running to find shelter—with merely a 15-second warning in the south, 90 seconds in Tel Aviv—one has limited emotional capacity to see what is happening to the children on the other side. When you add to that the fact Hamas controlled all data and information coming from Gaza—and banned Israeli reporters—you see the juxtaposition emerging. The world showed the war in Gaza, and its effect on Gazans, while on Israeli television Gaza was a sidebar.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Islamic State continues to gain ground near the Syrian border with Turkey. Jeffrey Goldberg writes:
I just got off the phone with a desperate-sounding Kurdish intelligence official, Rooz Bahjat, who said he fears that Kobani could fall to ISIS within the next 24 hours. If it does, he predicts that ISIS will murder thousands in the city, which is crammed with refugees—Kurdish, Turkmen, Christian, and Arab—from other parts of the Syrian charnel house. As many as 50,000 civilians remain in the town, Bahjat said.
“A terrible slaughter is coming. If they take the city, we should expect to have 5,000 dead within 24 or 36 hours,” he told me. “It will be worse than Sinjar,” the site of a recent ISIS massacre that helped prompt President Obama to fight ISIS. There have been reports of airstrikes on ISIS vehicles, but so far, Bahjat said that these strikes have been modest in scope and notably ineffective.
[sc:graybox ]HonestReporting and the IDNS are taking a break for the Sukkot holiday. We’ll be back on Sunday October 19. Wishing all of our readers a happy holiday!
Image: CC BY-NC flickr/Jeremy Brooks/em>
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