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Today’s Top Stories
1. According to an academic study (pdf) funded by the US State Dept., Israeli and Palestinian school textbooks both present “one-sided narratives” and maps with blind-spots, but little demonization of “the other.” Israel issued a detailed 21-page response (pdf) saying the report was flawed and misleading. Take your pick of AP, Washington Post, The Guardian, or NY Times coverage. The latter suggests a certain moral equivalence at play:
The new study avoids harsh language and couches the bad news in a kind of symmetry.
Related reading: Incitment, Bias: A Textbook Case
2. After describing Irish anti-Semitism in her Jerusalem Post column, Sarah Honig has been on the receiving end of ugly emails from the Emerald Isle. The Irish Independent and Irish Central picked up on the story.
3. After reading a NY Times profile of spy novelist Gerard de Villiers, it’s worth asking — as the Daily Mail did — Was Iran really responsible for the Lockerbie bombing?
Syrian Air Strike
• American intelligence sources told the NY Times that last week’s air strike damaged Syria’s main R&D facility for chemical and biological weapons, though the primary target was the convoy of anti-aircraft missiles apparently being moved to Hezbollah.
A senior United States military official, asked about reports that the research center had been targeted, said that any damage was likely “due to the bombs which targeted the vehicles” carrying the antiaircraft weapons, and from “the secondary explosions from the missiles.”
• Did Israel also hit a Hezbollah in the Lebanese city of Tyre? It depends: Who do you want to believe?
• For more commentary/analysis, see Bret Stephens (Wall St. Journal video), NBC News, and the Financial Times (click via Google News).
Israel and the Palestinians
• Deja vu all over again? Saeb Erekat to reporters: We’ll return to the negotiating table if Israel freezes settlements and releases prisoners.
• The Guardian‘s Steve Bell weighs in on the Sunday Times toon tempest and apology. Strikes me as trite, but feel free to disagree.
• A NY Daily News staff-ed slams Brooklyn College’s upcoming BDS event. (But Glenn Greenwald disagrees.)
• A NY Daily News staff-ed lauds Israel for “refusing to be stomped by the kangaroo in the kangaroo court” better known as the UN Human Rights Council.
• The IDF arrested a number of senior West Bank Hamasniks. YNet coverage.
• Worth reading: Armin Rosen of The Atlantic visited Sderot, where the city’s rocket alarms have been quiet for two months:
The lull in rocket fire only emphasizes the town’s arresting normality — it’s a place that’s interchangeable with much of the rest of the country, and clearly factored into its future plans and development. It isn’t a fringe frontier community, but an integrated part of the cramped coastal plane where the vast majority of the Israeli population lives.
• I don’t expect much from Russia Today, but Abby Martin really froths about “the occupation.” Her facial contortions, swagger and tone of voice are so over the top as to be entertaining in a twisted way. The “Hitler methodology” line is just icing on the cake.
