Israel Strikes Syria After Border Blast

• Interesting. But why now?

“Bomb-maker” brags about El Al blast, posts Lockerbie photos

• For more commentary/analysis, see Giora Eiland (Israel should recognize the Hamas government), Itamar Marcus (the PA recognizes that Israel exists, not its right to exist), and Daniel Greenfield (are colleges finally getting tired of anti-Israel antics?).

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Iranian Atomic Urgency

• Amir Taheri wonders why nobody has ever seen a widely-cited anti-nuclear fatwa allegedly written by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In a bizarre twist, some mullahs even quote Obama as the source that confirms the existence of the fatwa . . .

Obama would do well to consider three points before beating the drums for the mullahs. The first is that the famous fatwa either does not exist or is couched in the style of obfuscation that would open it to countless interpretations. The least that Obama should do is demand to see the fatwa that he is defending as a text that trumps even international law. The second point is that Khamenei, though a major political figure in Tehran, is not generally regarded as a theological heavyweight. In religious terms, any of the 10 or 12 grand ayatollahs and hundreds of lower-ranked clerics could overrule Khamenei’s fatwas.

Finally, Obama should know that the Iran nuclear project is a political issue and not a religious issue to be settled with a fatwa, which is, in any case, just an opinion and in no way legally binding on any individual, let alone the Islamic Republic as a nation-state.

Arab Spring Winter

• Israel to the US: Don’t cancel the sale of Apache helicopters to Egypt. Haaretz coverage.

• McClatchy News puts the strain of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in a different perspective:

“This is equivalent to 80 million Mexicans arriving in the U.S. in 18 months,” he added.

• In Aleppo, the Daily Telegraph‘s Richard Spencer marks the third anniversary of the Syrian uprising with a very sobering outlook on the carnage:

We cannot claim ignorance, as we have in the past. For all the allegations of videos being faked or information exaggerated, no one doubts the generality of what is reported by the endless video updates from “inside”, almost live from the scene of battle or bombing. This is the best documented war of all time, but curiously that has only made it the more unstoppable.

(Image of Khamenei via YouTube/PressTVGlobalNews, Apaches via Flickr/The US Army)

For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.

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