Israel/Olympic Angles
• Israeli and British officials are concerned that a suspect from the Bulgarian bus bombing is on his way to London attack the games. The Daily Mail writes:
MI5 and Scotland Yard are thought to have raised their threat assessment against the Israeli delegation as Britain prepares for the largest peacetime security operation ahead of the opening of the Olympics this Friday. . . .
Whitehall officials have dismissed the threat of a credible plot against the Israeli Olympic delegation and suggested Israel could be attempting to increase the pressure on British authorities to increase security around the Games.
• Sportswriter Stan Hochman relives Munich ’72.
The ’72 games resumed after 24 hours. The tyrant who ran the games, Avery Brundage, babbled about how the games must go on. Same guy who helped put the 1936 games in Berlin, in Nazi Germany. The games resumed before they’d scrubbed Moshe Weinberg’s blood from Building 31.
• London Mayor Boris Johnson supports a minute of silence.
Iranian Atomic Urgency
• A NY Post staff-ed “unpacks” the State Dept’s tit-for-tat moral equivalence:
“This was tit for tat,” a State Department official told The New York Times, implying that the bombing was retaliation for Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
It’s worth unpacking this idea.
Tit: Israel reportedly bumps off the Iranian engineers, men working on a device that could incinerate the entire Middle East — Israel first.
Tat: Terrorists operating under orders from Iran blow up a bus full of young civilians on vacation at a Black Sea resort.
To blithely accept that equation is to acquiesce in moral equivalence at its most cynical.
• Worth reading: With Iran, deterrence won’t work.
• In a Times of London op-ed (paywall), Sir Malcolm Rifkind says Assad’s fall will destroy Iranian schemes for hegemony:
While some radicals in Tehran would argue that Iran had an even greater need for nuclear weapons to compensate for its greater vulnerability following the loss of Syria, a more likely consequence would be a willingness to negotiate with the international community an honourable compromise.
• NPR picks up on the Israeli-Iranian shadow war.
Arab Spring Winter
• Hezbollah isn’t the only terror group backing the wrong horse. Asharq al-Awsat reports that Islamic Jihad is relocating from Syria to Iran. The paper notes even more bad news for the Axis of Evil:
Syria also constitutes an important passageway for the Islamic Jihad leaders and elements that travel from Gaza to Teheran for different political and logistical reasons.
According to the sources, dozens of civilians and military individuals from Gaza are currently stranded in Syria after participating in conferences in Iran.
• CNN: Arab League will offer Assad a safe exit if he resigns quickly. Wishful thinking — I highly doubt Assad will abandon his fellow Alawites.
• The LA Times updates the EU’s latest sanctions against Syria.
• In Syria, the powers play hardball. Welcome to the world of realpolitik.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed Syria’s chemical weapons, the Bulgarian bombing, and the Iranian nuclear threat, with Chris Wallace of Fox News.
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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