Much is being made in the public prints about the two conditions set out by Netanyahu for Palestinian statehood in his recent speech at Bar Ilan University. One is a demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the other is that the future Palestinian state be demilitarized. I’ll leave the former for another day and say something about the question of what a demilitarized state might actually mean in practice.
Archive for June, 2009
This is a guest post by ganselmi.
The time for “analyzing” and “reassessing” the situation in Iran is over. The Obama Administration should speak up on behalf of the millions of embattled Iranians confronting the Islamic Republic to demand fairness and the rule of law.
Tyrants inavriably use the same line: “Calling the opposition protests ‘unimportant,’ Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that they were the work of foreign agitators and journalists.” Robert Worth and Nazila Fathi here.
Columbia Univerity Professor and Iran expert Gary Sick on the coup against the Iranian people:
In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round. The lesson seemed to be that the authorities might shift the results in a close election but they would not reverse a landslide vote.
This is a guest post by ganselmi.
“Did you vote for Dr. Ahmadinejad yesterday?” I jokingly asked a friend who lives in Tehran. “Yes, I did,” he responded without missing a beat or elaborating on his response. For a second, I started to get worried. I’ve known my friend to be a vehement and longtime critic of the recently re-elected Iranian President. “You’re kidding right?”
Continue reading ‘Iran’s Election: Magical Ballots and Martial Law’
You wouldn’t know from the website of Press TV that Tehran is convulsed with violent protests, following Ahmadinejad’s theft of the Iranian Presidential election. Their website currently features an image of a smiling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, and the headline “Leader hails record turnout in Presidential vote.”
Continue reading ‘Press TV: The Iranian Regime’s Mouthpiece’
My colleagues at the Washington, DC office of the American Jewish Committee have started a fund to help the family of Stephen T. Johns, the security guard murdered during Wednesday’s gun assault by white supremacist James Von Brunn on the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I’d urge all readers of this blog to make a donation. You can do so online here or by mailing a check payable to AJC with “Stephen T. Johns Memorial Fund” in the memo line to this address:
American Jewish Committee – Washington Chapter
Attn: Melanie Maron Pell 1156 15th Street, NW, Suite 1201 Washington, DC 20005
1.
We often hear that violence breeds violence, that if states use it against their enemies then they only succeed in radicalizing those enemies and storing up trouble for the future. This view is usually held to be self-evidently correct and not to require either supporting argumentation or consideration of alternative analyses. It is a thesis frequently resorted to by those commenting on the use of force by Israel.
The Israeli scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld, who has written widely and authoritatively on antisemitism in Nordic countries, has just published an important essay analyzing developments in Norway over the last year. He asks a pertinent question:
Continue reading ‘Another Year of Antisemitism and Anti-Israelism in Norway’
“But as for those sections of the Cairo speech which turned a gimlet eye on the American past, Obama did no more than speak the truth, or tread where others have to lesser fanfare. Condoleeza Rice first compared the situation in Palestine to the American civil rights movement, and Gershom Gorenberg’s recent cover story in The Weekly Standard implicitly did as well by asking why it was that there was no Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Had Obama really wanted to placate Iran, he would not have repudiated Holocaust denial or quoted from the Torah.”
Michael Weiss casts a critical eye upon conservative readings of Obama’s Cairo speech, in the new - and rather splendid-looking - online magazine Tablet.
Here’s André Aciman in the New York Times:
“The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.”
The anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian bloc has won around 70 of the 128 seats in Lebanon’s election. More here.
This is a cross-post by Mark Gardner from the new - and hugely welcome - blog of the Community Security Trust in the UK. While you’re there, see also Dave Rich’s inaugural post. “This blog will try to shed some light on the nature of contemporary antisemitism, but also on the good work being done to combat it,” he says.
An article in today’s Independent by the paper’s Washington correspondent, David Usborne, contains a stunning example of the conflation of Jews with Israel.
At 6:38 AM Eastern Standard Time, President Obama’s speech hit what the Wall Street Journal’s live bloggers called a “sensitive passage.” This one:
