Iranian Atomic Urgency
• The Washington Post‘s Max Fisher wonders: Would direct US-Iran talks be bad for Israel?
• Iranian-funded firms in Turkey are sprouting like fact-checkers at a presidential debate. According to Today’s Zaman:
. . . 17 percent of the foreign companies that were established in Turkey in September were Iranian-funded. The report comes amidst growing concerns in Ankara that some of these Iranian businesses may be front companies set up to circumvent UN-sponsored sanctions on Iran.
Arab Spring Winter
• The Syrian regime’s seeding the black market with “spiked” weapons to ultimately maim and kill rebels. The NY Times describes the doctored bullets, grenades and mortars as one of war’s dirtiest tricks.
On a somewhat related note, AP looks at how the rebels are faring in their scramble for weapons. It also looks at the army’s choice of weapons and what that says about the civil war.
• Jordanian soldier killed in clash on border with Syria.
• Sam Kiley of Sky News ties together Israeli-Gaza violence, the assassination of Lebanon’s intelligence chief, and violence along the Syria-Jordan border. Is the Assad Regime Driving Mideast Violence? (Simon Tisdall of The Guardian asks the same question.)
Meanwhile, Turkey’s Hatay province is another friction flashpoint: Reuters reports rumblings as 100,000 Sunni Syrian refugees mix with 1.5 million Turkish Alawites.
• LA Times: Syrian refugees in Lebanon top 100,000
• Daily Star: Death toll from fighting in northern Lebanon rises to 9.
• Roger Cohen (NY Times) gives a thumbs up to Uncle Sam engaging the Muslim Brotherhood. What does this mean for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Why is this engagement with political Islam, even in Salafist form, confined to Egypt? If Washington has discovered by engaging that the long reviled Brotherhood, or at least large swathes of it, may have evolved into centrist pragmatists, what other such discoveries may be made through dialogue rather than confrontation?
It is foolish for the United States to oppose reconciliation between the main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, when the spectrum of opinion there may be no greater than Egypt’s Brotherhood-Salafist front with which the United States now talks.
In Egypt, where almost 25 percent of Arabs live, the United States has at last begun to deal with the Arab world as it really is. Such taboo-breaking offers the only way forward — for Egypt and for Israel-Palestine.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Haaretz Illustrates Its Own Bias: Had any other newspaper come up with this story/photo combo, the outrage would raise the roof.
• JTA on the Israeli newspaper wars: Hebrew media’s imploding, but country’s English-language press is booming.
• What goes around comes around: A few weeks ago, Gabriella La Breton wrote a nasty travel piece about Israel which the Times of London was forced to remove it from its web site. Well, well, well, La Breton tweeted a run-in with security at London’s Gatwick Airport. Poor thing.
• Will the Man of Steel start fighting media bias?
Clark Kent quits the Daily Planet
(Image of emir via YouTube/Volksburo)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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