Today’s Top Stories
1. Santa take note: The IDF busted a massive shipment of tasers and other weapons en route to eastern Jerusalem. The shipping containers were labeled as Christmas decorations but the goodies didn’t reflect peace on earth. The Jerusalem Post writes:
Inside the containers police said they found 18,000 fireworks of the restricted 20mm variety, as well as 5,200 commando knives, 4,300 flashlights that can be modified into improvised Tasers, 5,500 Tasers, and 1,000 swords.
That’s a lot of stocking stuffers for the “spontaneous lone wolf terrorists” I’ve been reading about.
2. When the Harvard Arab Weekend included a panel discussion on BDS (in which Noam Chomsky was the pro-Israel voice), Sara Greenberg contacted the event’s corporate sponsors. She writes in the Harvard Crimson:
I sent inquiries to senior executives at every sponsor company before the conference, but the panel went on. After the conference, a senior McKinsey spokesman wrote to me to apologize for the firm’s involvement with the conference: “The firm does not knowingly associate its name with political issues and debates.” I believe it is likely that the other corporate sponsors also did not intend to have their funds used to promote the BDS movement.
Corporations and universities should not lend mainstream legitimacy to such a radical and odious movement, nor should they provide funding or resources to events that demonize Israel as this one did.
Greenberg’s piece got a shout out from Harvard’s president emeritus, Lawrence Summers.
3. Jerusalem agreed to cooperate with the UN’s inquiry into atacks on UN facilities in Gaza and the discovery of rockets on their premises. This investigation is separate from the UN Human Rights Council’s probe led by William Schabas, which Israel refuses to cooperate with.
4. Confusion Over Temple Mount Visits in The Scotsman: Israeli visits to the Temple Mount don’t break the holy site’s delicate status quo.
5. CNN and BBC Exposed: Unpacking the Hidden Media Agenda: HR’s Simon Plosker is interviewed on Voice of Israel about the media’s faulty coverage of the Jerusalem synagogue attack.
6. CBS News Fails, Fox News Shows Palestinian Joy at Terror: Fox News got the story right while CBS News botched it.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Israel detected four Gaza rocket launch tests into the sea.
The army said that the launches suggest that “Gaza terrorists are experimenting in order to increase rocket launching capabilities.”
• The UN Security Council unanimously condemned the Har Nof murders.
• Haaretz: The IDF brass is opposed to deploying military forces in eastern Jerusalem.
• Due credit to Adam Chandler of The Atlantic for a level-headed look at Israeli renewing a policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinian terrorists.
• Yesterday, Haaretz‘s Barak Ravid quoted a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman that Israeli missions abroad were “instructed to work with the media worldwide to fix incorrect or distorted reports regarding the attack in Jerusalem.”
Feeling burnt, the Foreign Press Association in Israel issued a statement in response; but Ravid’s criticism of the government only mitigates the egg dripping from the press corps’ face so much. We’re talking about headline fails, and gaffes at CNN and CBS, among other things.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman rightly claimed that these reports did not distinguish between the victims and their murderers, but he also blamed these media outlets and many others with no less than abetting terrorism. “From our perspective, tendentious and false reports are designed to distort reality, to blacken the State of Israel and practically – though not always intentionally – they provide support to terror,” Nahshon wrote.
It is not clear what caused Nahshon, a career diplomat who usually keeps his cool, to make such an inflammatory statement. It is difficult to understand how he confused poor journalism or outrageous, stupid, and disgusting headlines with support for terrorism. Such statements might be appropriate for government spokesmen in other countries in our region, but they do not suit the foreign ministry of a democratic country.
• Jordan’s parliament held a moment of silence for the Har Nof terrorists.
• India cancelled a boycott of Israeli Military Industries as ties between the countries come out of the closet. See also Reuters.
Mideast Matters
• Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are mulling an offer of Iranian military aid. More on the story at the Jerusalem Post and Daily Star.
• AP describes John Kerry as in a “frenzy of high stakes diplomacy” trying to prevent the Iranian nuclear talks from collapsing. Deadline for a deal is on Monday. According to the Los Angeles Times, Kerry will have a hard time selling Congress on extending the talks.
Commentary/Analysis
• Israeli Druze personality Naif Alian: Jews and Druze are one family.
The blood pact between Druze and Jews in the land of Israel began in the 1930s, and it will never be broken.
• Israeli diplomat Yiftah Curiel got a right of reply to Hamas honcho Ahmed Yousef‘s recent op-ed in The Guardian.
Hamas is a representative of a jihadi ideology that is the main obstacle to peace in our region, its rule of Gaza an ongoing tragedy for both Palestinians and Israelis. Imagining away its extremist, violent ethos will not advance the cause of peace.
• In separate CNN interviews with Christiane Amanpour and Wolf Blitzer, Cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz and Ambassador Ron Dermer discussed Palestinian terror and incitement.
• Your daily dose of moral equivalence, courtesy a Baltimore Sun staff-ed:
At this point all signs indicate the two sides are hurtling toward a third intifada on the order of the Arab uprisings of 1987 and 2000, which together claimed more than 4,000 Palestinian and Israeli lives. Neither the Islamic militants‘ boasts of reconquering Palestinian lands nor Mr. Netanyahu‘s promise to secure Israel’s right to exist by bulldozing Arab homes will calm the situation because what they both are seeking at bottom is retribution and revenge, not justice. If past experience is any guide, that’s just a recipe for speeding up, not stopping, the region’s descent into a chaos of neighbors slaughtering neighbors.
• Is New York Times columnist Roger Cohen so fatigued by the latest violence and spin that he has lost all capacity to denounce terror?
• Ilene Prusher‘s disturbed by the proliferation of graphic images from the Har Nof attack and wonders what’s acceptable for the media to publish.
• Alan Dershowitz discussed the Har Nof attack and its fallout with the Wall St. Journal.
• Israeli diplomat Yehuda Yaakov got op-ed space in the Boston Globe to warn against a rushing into a nuclear deal with Iran.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Paul Sheehan (Jews bear the brunt for naive hatred of Israel), Tarek Fatah (Murdered because they were Jews), Emmanuel Navon (Two-state solution dogmas), Dennis Ross (A path for defusing Jerusalem tensions) and Smadar Bat Adam (Biased media, no coincidence). See also staff-eds in the Washington Post, Boston Herald, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Augusta Chronicle.
Image: CC BY flickr/Robert Couse-Baker
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