‘- The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting report on the war against terrorist money:
Nations, police detectives, bankers, and accountants are striving to expose and trim back the shadowy networks that fund militant groups around the world.
The international coalition built to attack the sources of terrorist financing has frozen and seized approximately $200 million in terror-related funds, says Juan Zarate, head of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department.
– At The Atlantic, Jonathon Rauch says that Israel’s war against Hamas is America’s, too:
Like al-Qaeda, Hamas is a radical Islamist organization that swears it will not rest until it has brought Muslim territory under Islamic rule. For al-Qaeda, the territory at issue is the whole of the Arab world, plus the Spanish peninsula and other parts of Europe, plus ideally North America; for Hamas, the relevant territory is all of Palestine, meaning all of today’s Israel plus the territories. The theaters are different, but the battles – America’s against al-Qaeda, Israel’s against Hamas – are of a piece.
What America is doing against al-Qaeda and what Israel is doing against Hamas are the same kind of thing, and that thing is not “extrajudicial killing” or “terrorism,” but war. Wars are won by many means (many of them nonmilitary), but killing the other guy before he kills you is one of them.
– At Haaretz, a defense of historical Jewish claims to the Silwan valley in eastern Jerusalem, which was the focus of a great deal of critical attention last week when Jews moved into homes there:
When the Yemenites arrived in Jerusalem 122 years ago and sought to settle inside its walls, the veteran residents doubted they were really Jews. So they settled in caves on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, near Silwan. In 1885, the first three houses were dedicated. Six years later there were 65 houses. Over the years, more land was bought and the neighborhood grew. Simha Hazi, 75, whose parents were born in the Yemenite Village in Silwan, remembers the neighborhood and its alleyways, and the house built by her grandfather.
– Watch out for this – US-Syria Clashes Reported on Iraqi Border (via UPI):
U.S. forces in Iraq and Syrian troops engaged in several border skirmishes last month in which one Marine and one Syrian soldier were wounded, reports said. Beirut’s daily As-Safir quoted U.S. political and military sources in Washington as saying Tuesday that Syrian troops fired at a U.S. helicopter in one of the border incidents, causing the casualties. The State Department summoned the Syrian ambassador in Washington, Imad Mustafa, to complain about the incidents.
