Everything you need to know about today’s coverage of Israel and the Mideast. Join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Today’s Top Stories
1. Palestinians buried their newest “martyr,” Arafat Jaradat. This Washington Post snippet brings back memories of the previous intifada, when Big Media danced around the implausible deniability of Arafat/Fatah/Al-Aqsa Brigades ties:
Thousands joined the funeral procession, which was punctuated by shots fired by masked gunmen of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. A statement by the group distributed to the crowd vowed to avenge Jaradat’s death. “We promise the Zionist occupation that we will respond to this crime,” it said.
But Abbas sounded a different note in remarks at his headquarters in Ramallah, urging Palestinians not to be swept up in a cycle of deadly confrontation with the Israelis.
2. According to Israeli media reports, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have set up shop in Gaza
These representatives are expert missile builders who moved to the coastal territory to help Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants develop long-range missiles.
Israel security and diplomatic sources have confirmed the Iranian presence, but would not release any more information.
3. Iran and the world powers are meeting in Kazakhstan for another round of nuclear talks. Judging from Reuters, you can already write this one off.
But with the Islamic Republic’s political elite pre-occupied with worsening internal infighting ahead of a June presidential election, few believe the meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in the Kazakh city of Almaty will yield an immediate breakthrough.
4. The NY Daily News Disinfects BDS. Newspaper staff-ed slams Omar Barghouti after giving him a platform to explain the BDS movement.
5. Gaza Rocket Strikes Israel . . . But What’s the Photo? Great headline, lousy image.
Israel and the Palestinians
• First Gaza rocket since November truce hit Ashkelon. Jerusalem Post coverage.
• Fatah: Palestinian Authority supports escalating popular resistance
• Palestinian groups are putting pressure on a British security firm, G4S, for providing services to the Israeli Prisons Authority. More at Sky News.
• For more commentary/analysis on the violence, see Martin Fletcher of NBC News, Dan Margalit, American Thinker, a Jerusalem Post staff-ed, Ron Ben-Yishai, Christian Science Monitor, Richard Baehr. Last but not least, there’s The Commentator.
• Elliott Abrams on John Kerry’s obsession with the peace process. It’s based on this Haaretz report.
• A commentary in the Washington Times raises a new issue with this month’s controversial study of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks:
. . . the researchers decided not to examine religious passages found in textbooks, claiming that one cannot criticize the Koran or the Bible. This methodological decision meant that the report excluded texts such as the following: “God’s Messenger said: ‘The Hour of Resurrection will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims will kill them, and when a Jew would hide behind a rock or a tree the rock or the tree would say: “O Muslim, O worshipper of God! There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”’” (“Noble Hadith and Its Studies,” Grade 11, 1996, p. 200).
Excluding religious verses from research led to the misleading notion that the Palestinian textbooks are devoid of outright incitement. Unfortunately, these types of omissions cause the authors to distort the problematic picture that the study supposedly attempted to fix.
• Academic freedom, hate speech, Israel-bashing, gay rights, and pinkwashing (what’s pinkwashing?) are colliding at City University of New York. If you thought Brooklyn College’s BDS event was noxious, CUNY’s event may be even more so. Alan Dershowitz took it on in a NY Post op-ed.
• An Open Letter to George Galloway (from the humiliated debate organizer). See also Vivian Bercovici’s BDS take down in the Toronto Star.
- For Israel’s last military attache in Tehran, “Argo” is kids stuff
- Canadian peacekeeper disappears on Israeli-Syrian border
- Is Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah being treated for cancer
