• Haaretz notes today’s bad news for the BDS movement. South Sudan says it signed oil deal with several Israeli oil companies.
• Richard Humphreys was appalled by a twisted online educational resource about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was put together by Trocaire, a non-governmental organization associated with the Irish Catholic Church. Humphreys writes at the Irish Independent:
The more I read of the Trocaire pack, the more it seemed to be a case of four legs good, two legs bad. Palestinian victims and Israeli oppressors.
Rather puzzled by this, I contacted Trocaire. They told me that this online resource has now been taken off their website in order to review it. They have now decided not to put a revised version up and have decided to focus on the issue of boycotting produce from Israeli settlements.
• For more commentary, see NY Times columnist Roger Cohen, The Economist, and Andrew Sullivan.
Arab Spring Winter
• According to French media reports, Syrian soldiers used non-lethal chemical weapons. According to the Jerusalem Post, the incident took place in Homs:
The weapons were used in four rockets fired on December 23, according to unnamed sources in Western intelligence services cited by the newspaper. Le Monde suggested Western powers played down an isolated event in the hope it would not be repeated.
• Haaretz: A Syrian pilot ordered to attack civilian areas instead bombed a regime military base, then defected with his MIG.
• Pro-Assad snipers killed two journalists in Syria. Mohammed Hourani (free lance working for Al Jazeera) and Yves Debay (of Assaut) in separate incidents. Hourani’s death was caught on video. By the way, Al-Jazeera says of Hourani:
Before joining Al Jazeera, al-Horani was an activist in the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.
For more, see Thursday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
