Today’s Top Stories
1. Will the Palestinian bid for statehood come to a vote in the UN Security Council as early as Wednesday? The diplomatic pressure continues to build.
Netanyahu has expressed his opposition:
“We will not accept attempts to dictate to us unilateral moves on a limited timetable.” He added, “We will rebuff any attempt that would put this terrorism inside our home, inside the state of Israel.”
US Secretary of State Kerry is due to meet with an Arab League delegation today to discuss the Palestinian statehood bid. While the story features in many world media outlets, comprehensive coverage of developments can be found in the New York Times.
2. A Lebanese news agency claims that Hezbollah has exposed a Mossad ‘mega-spy’ within its ranks:
According to the report, the collaborator had been working for Israel for years and succeeded in thwarting a number of Hezbollah operations planned to avenge the assassination of movement official Imad Mughniyeh in February 2008, ostensibly by Israel.
He also reportedly exposed other Hezbollah agents, including Mohammed Amadar, arrested in Peru in late October with TNT and detonators following a Mossad tip-off; Hossam Yaacoub, convicted in Cyprus for planning attacks against Israeli tourists in March 2013; and Daoud Farhat and Youssef Ayad, arrested in April 2014 in Bangkok for planning terror attacks against Israeli tourists in Thailand.
El-Nashra reported that the collaborator is also suspected of taking part in Mughniyeh’s assassination in Damascus, using an explosive device placed in his car seat, as well as the assassination of Hezbollah official Hassan al-Laqis in December 2013.
3. Yet more shocking jihadist terror as reports suggest that over 80 children have been slaughtered in a Taliban attack on a Pakistan school.
4. HonestReporting Says BBC Reporter Tweets Lies About Israel
5. HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker is interviewed on Australia’s J-Air radio along with other guests, Itamar Marcus, Jonathan Spyer and Isi Liebler. Simon’s interview begins at 8:34.
Israel and the Palestinians
• A Palestinian was killed in the early hours of the morning as IDF troops came under attack during an arrest operation in the Qalandiya refugee camp.
• Remember this photo of a burning Koran from an alleged arson attack on a mosque in November? The Israeli fire service has released its investigation which found that the most likely cause of the blaze was not radical Jewish settlers but… an electrical problem.
• Israel’s upgraded Arrow ballistic missile shield failed its first live interception test according to security sources, representing a setback in Israeli efforts to defend itself from an Iranian missile attack.
Commentary/Analysis
• Michael Totten says that the Sydney gunman failed to deliver his message:
The guman sent a message, but it wasn’t received. And we know he was monitoring the news in real time. He was directly across the street from an Australian news channel. He wanted attention, but he was not getting the attention he wanted. Reporters couldn’t even figure out who he was when he clearly identified himself and his ideology.
Hours into the standoff, he demanded an ISIS flag in return for the release of one of the hostages. CNN anchors wondered aloud why, if he wanted an ISIS flag, he didn’t just bring one with him in the first place. But he did bring a Salafist flag. He must assumed that at least somebody would recognize it and explain it to the audience. I recognize it because I’ve been working in the Middle East for ten years, but news anchors are generally not experts in anything in particular except presenting information on television. They’re generalists.
• A JCPA briefing examines a revival of Hamas relations with Iran.
• Carol Hunt conducts a wider-ranging interview with recent HonestReporting Mission speaker Dr. Einat Wilf in the Irish Independent:
Einat believes that, worldwide, people’s hearts and minds are being prepared for the destruction of Israel and that words like “occupation, racism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide” being used to describe Zionism is a way of stamping in people’s minds that Israel is evil and should be eradicated by means fair or foul.
“If historically, you look at the world’s greatest atrocities, they have been preceded by a preparation of people’s minds”, she says.
“Will there ever be peace?” She is dubious of any lasting settlement in the near future but says, “the moment the Arabs accept that the Jews are an integral, indigenous, equal part of the region with the right to self-determination, then we can lay down our arms in the knowledge that no one will try to drive us away…”
• Another regular HR Mission speaker Nitzana Darshan-Leitner of Shurat HaDin is interviewed in the Times of Israel about her work compiling legal cases against Palestinian Authority leaders, documenting their supposed involvement in terror activities in recent years.
• Joel Golovensky defends the controversial Jewish State bill in the Wall Street Journal (through Google News).
• Michael Curtis looks at the persecution of Christians in the Middle East:
In contrast, Nadaf states, as every objective analysis does, that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Christians can live safely, are free to practice their religion, and where they have increased in number. In Israel Christians are not killed, their churches are not burned, their female believers are not raped. Christians are seen as a distinct ethnicity. They constitute 2 per cent of the total population and 10 per cent of Israeli Arabs. …
The conclusion of Father Nadaf is compelling. It is time the world woke up to the fact that those who want to destroy the Jewish State of Israel are signing the death warrant on the last free Christians in the Holy Land.
• Kasim Hafeez calls out those anti-Israel activists who drew parallels between the situation in Ferguson and that in Gaza, and co-opted the tragedy, joining demonstrations to push their own agenda:
If you sincerely support the causes of others, if you are going to stand up against the suffering of others, then that is to be applauded. But if you have somehow fallen into a position of caring and demonstrating when Israel is declared at fault and are silent at human rights abuses perpetrated in every other country in the Middle East, then perhaps you are less a human rights activist and more an anti-Semite. The selective outrage, voices that remain silent in the face of the genocide of Yazidis and Christians in the Middle East, or that remain silent in the face of repeated human rights abuses of Hamas and Fatah, is not true human rights activism.
Here’s a suggestion: before you begin your “Gaza stands with Ferguson,” and you stand with your keffiyah chanting at the police, perhaps Gaza and the activists who support their cause should stand with the women murdered in the name of honour. Perhaps Gazans and the activists who support them should stand with the generations of children being given a hate education. Perhaps Gazans and the activists who support them should stand with the Christians of Gaza and the West Bank who have fled in fear of their lives. Perhaps then you will have earned the credibility to talk about justice.
Image: CC BY-NC flickr/Just Call Me Mo
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