UPDATE: Thanks to Elder of Ziyon for figuring out a way to copy the above map. Some of you have said that the link below isn’t working, so if you want to see the above online, go here.
As David Axelrod might put it, this is an insult and an affront. Visit the online route map of EgyptAir, the airline owned by the same state which signed an historic peace agreement with Israel in 1979, and you will see, once you click on the “Middle East & Gulf” section, that Israel has, well, disappeared.
Norway FM Jonas Gahr Støre toured the Middle East between January 16th-20th, visiting Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Egypt and UAE. The topics of Støre’s meetings in the different countries as well as the manner in which he was received shows us a Norwegian foreign policy bathed in the gold sheen of hypocrisy. The manner in which the Norwegian media reports on Støre’s tour reveals how this hypocrisy is rooted in a bedrock of popular denial.
On Thursday, December 10, President Obama will deliver the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture in Oslo. Prominent among the issues that the president may want to bring up is the failed quest for peace that began in Oslo back in 1993, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held a series of meetings in the Norwegian capital to formulate the accords that launched the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The feeling that it is time to give up on this process - and perhaps even on peace - is widespread, but claims that everything has been tried are not quite true.
When cultural historians look back at this week’s J-Street conference in Washington, DC, they will observe that many of the participants invested its proceedings with an almost mystical significance: a Woodstock moment for Jewish politics in America which poked a finger into the flabby bellies of the establishment organizations by declaring, “change has come, move aside.”
This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner of the CST blog.
It is plain that if the Jewish state is regarded as a pariah, a compulsive serial abuser of human rights, then Jews everywhere will suffer by (real or imaginary) association.
So, it matters when Robert Bernstein, founder and emeritus chair of Human Rights Watch (HRW), and its chairman for 20 years, writes in the New York Times to regretfully inform HRW that its scrutiny and attitude to Israel “are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state”. As with HRW’s recent Marc Garlasco controversy, however, what matters even more is HRW’s public response to Bernstein:
We fundamentally disagree with Mr Bernstein’s views.
“The next time the terms apartheid or oppression are used with reference to the Middle East, one must remember the intolerable conditions of Palestinians in most of the Arab countries,” writes Khaled Abu Toameh. He says:
Here’s an interesting tidbit from Stratfor: “Iran will build a 435 mile-long cement wall topped with barbwire along 100 percent of the border between Iran and Afghanistan to prevent the entry of narcotics from Afghanistan, Farsi News Agency reported July 30. The proposed wall is scheduled to be completed by March 2010.”
Here is a new film which I’ve made for AJC. Since I posted it 3 weeks ago, it’s had over 17,000 views on youtube - we’ve also done Russian and Spanish versions. So it feels appropriate to urge you all to watch it and - if you like it - pass on the link.
The Quilliam Foundation in London prides itself for being “the world’s first counter-extremism think tank.” The organization’s expertise in this field is clearly unique given that it was founded by “former leading ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organizations.” When it comes to Zionism, however, Quilliam’s former Islamists find it hard to really leave behind the ideology they now oppose.
“It is quite preposterous that Abbas can go to Washington, tell everybody that Olmert’s offer wasn’t good enough and that he wants to ‘wait’ until somebody delivers something better on a silver platter, while theSaudi foreign minister all but acknowledges that the Arabs don’t really want to negotiate with Israel, because for decades they have whipped up popular hostility against the ‘Zionist entity’ and it would now be rather inconvenient to explain negotiations with the despised and hated Jewish state.”
Petra Marquardt-Bigman, always indispensable, here.
It was always a safe bet that after months of preparation and hype that President Barack Obama’s ‘New Beginning’ speech to Muslims around the globe was going to make a splash. Unfortunately for America’s telegenic and hyperactively ambitious chief executive, most of the reaction from the pro-Israel advocacy sector and commentariat was less than enthusiastic.
“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.”
“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.”
Here is the Palestinian writer and literary critic Hassan Khader on the “Nakba Narrative.”
Despite the fact that the signed agreements shook the foundations of accepted Palestinian norms and expectations, the PLO did not fail to develop rhetoric that emphasized the extent of its continued commitment to, and perhaps even conformity with, the traditional Narrative, despite obvious contradictions.
