• BDS fail: US governors Martin O’Malley (Maryland) and Gary Herbert (Utah) are leading upcoming trade delegations to Israel.
• Palestinians are making an issue of minors in the Israeli justice system. The trigger? A 14 year-old Palestinian-American boy was sentenced to two weeks in prison for throwing stones at soldiers. AP adds:
The military said the youth threw rocks at vehicles on a highway and at Israeli forces on several occasions. The military said there has been a spike in rock-throwing attacks on drivers, including an incident in early April, when rocks thrown at a civilian car next to an Israeli settlement injured seven, including an infant who was critically wounded.
• Palestinians compete to become “President” on new reality TV show.
• In an LA Times op-ed, Aaron David Miller sees rays of light in Salam Fayyad’s resignation:
Fayyad’s departure may help to dispel four dangerous myths that continue to distort the way different constituencies view the issues that divide the region. It’s time we lay them to rest.
See also Foreign Policy’s Requiem for Fayyadism.
• For more commentary on the state of the peace process, see a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff-ed.
Arab Spring Winter
• Reuters: Israel hopes reconciliation with Turkey will defuse risk of friendly fire in Syria.
• John Reed of the Financial Times (republished in the Washington Post) visited the Druze village of Majdal Shams to get a sense of Israel’s concerns about the Syrian civil war.
• Sinai Salafis released a video confirming responsibility for yesterday’s rocket fire on Eilat. YNet has background on the video, which was subsequently removed from YouTube.
• Egypt sentenced Israeli citizen Gavriel Avo to two years in prison for infiltration. YNet reports that Avo told interrogators he wanted to reach the tomb of Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira. Pilgrimages to the site have ground to a halt since the Egyptian revolution.
Boston Terror
• Big thumbs up to Chartgirl’s infographic “guide to the the clusterf$&k of misinformation during Wednesday afternoon’s Boston Marathon bombings news coverage.” Via Romenesko.
• Jonathan Kay wonders why terrorists no longer take responsibility for attacks with lengthy manifestos like the old days. The National Post columnist’s conclusion?
The effect of all this on the war against terrorism has been extraordinary. Forty years ago, terrorists spanned the gamut from die-hard mass murderers, to middle-class campus radicals who liked the sound of their own voice as much as a bomb’s blast. But the war on terrorism has priced these windy communiqué-peddlers out of the game, which is one of the reasons terrorism is now quite rare in Western nations: No one wants to risk spending the rest of their life in jail just to promote some hippy creed.
Instead, the field has been left to the mute exterminationists — men who don’t want to teach us anything, except how to die.
• Israeli runners in the Boston Marathon shared their experiences with Israel HaYom.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC) launched the Daniel Pearl International Journalism Institute. Pearl, a Wall St. Journal reporter, was killed in Pakistan in 2002 while working on a story about Islamic terrorists. The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel and AP were on hand for the opening.
• Yale students elected Israeli Daniel Avraham president of the student union. YNet says the 24 year-old Avraham is a former IDF intelligence officer.
(Image of Herodium via Flickr/Seetheholyland.net, Eilat via Flickr/israeltourism)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
