The Saudis see Iranian power in more political than military terms. It is Iranian political influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine that worries them, not the prospect of the use of Iranian military force. They see the Iranian threat to the Gulf states as centered in Iran's power to mobilize support among Shi'a sympathizers in those states, not in the prospect of an Iranian missile attack or amphibious landing on the Arab shore of the Gulf. (The revelation by the Kuwaiti newpaper al-Qabas a few days ago of the arrest in Kuwait of an alleged Iranian ‘terrorist' cell is the kind of evidence Saudis point to of the nature of the Iranian threat.) They do not worry that much about a nuclear Iran as a military threat, but rather worry that nuclear acquisition will make Tehran more ambitious in terms of pushing for political influence in the region and that nuclear weapons will make Iran seem a more attractive and powerful ally for sub-state groups throughout the Arab world.
I think that the Saudi perspective on Iranian regional power is much more accurate than ours. It is not Iranian military power that gives Iran regional influence but rather Iran's political links to powerful actors in states where the central government is weak. Those links are based on a mixture of shared ideology, sectarian affiliation, common antipathy to the U.S. and Israel, and short-term self-interests, in different degrees in different cases. But none of those relations are based on Iranian military power. I doubt that nuclear weapons will make that much difference, one way or another, in Iran's regional influence, because nuclear weapons will not change the nature of Iran's relations with its sub-state allies in the Arab world.
The nascent Saudi debate on this question has not generated much in the way of answers to how to deal with Iranian power. There is something of a consensus that Riyadh has forfeited the chance to play a greater role in Iraq through passivity, and one can see the beginnings of a more active Saudi policy there now (backing Allawi, receiving an delegation from the Sadrist movement since the election). While King Abdallah has a real personal antipathy toward dealing with Nouri al-Maliki, it is possible that after that even that obstacle will be overcome as the current maneuverings over the creation of a new Iraqi government continue. But American policy-makers should be aware that, while Riyadh shares their perspective that Iran needs to be contained, the Saudis are taking a very different view of the nature of the Iranian challenge than is ascendant in Washington.
So, what does this mean for the American debate on Iran? First, it is not clear just what position the Saudi government would take on an American military attack on Iran. It is likely that Riyadh would want the benefits of such an attack -- setting back the Iranian nuclear program, however briefly -- without taking any public responsibility for the American action. Washington should not count on any Saudi cooperation on such a plan that might become public. And American policy-makers should know that a more active Saudi policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, if it were influenced by these Saudi "neo-conservatives," might not be completely supportive of American efforts to enlist Arab states in "confidence building measures" toward Israel. Saudi Arabia will judge those kinds of suggestions from a hard-headed "realist" perspective.
Even when sanctions are in place, parties can interpret them differently. Differing interpretations of sanctions currently in place against Iran have apparently caused France to release an Iranian national who is being sought by the United States. Majid Kakavand was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport in France in March 2009 on a U.S. extradition request on charges of having procured sensitive U.S. technology for the Iranian military via a Malaysian front company.
Kakavand, 37, served as the director of a company in Malaysia, Evertop Services, that procured U.S. and European goods for export to Iran. Evertop's main customers were two Iranian military entities, Iran Electronics Industry and Iran Communications Industries.
But a French prosecutor determined yesterday that Kakavand had not broken French law in the items he had sold to Iran, and ordered his release.
“What he was importing was dual use in the same sense that a switch or a cable can be dual use, but nothing more,” a French weapons expert Jean-Louis Barbier who reviewed the items for the defense told the New York Times. “If this is dual use, then everything else is.”
Israel Matzav: French court orders release of Iranian sought by USMeantime, French media reports suggested that the French prosecutor’s decision to release Kakavand could possibly make way for the release of a French teacher, Clotilde Reiss, 24, who had been teaching in the Iranian city of Isfahan before being detained at Tehran airport July 1 after Iran’s June disputed elections trying to return to France. Reiss has been held for several months under modified house arrest at the French embassy in Tehran.
A source familiar with the Kakavand folder who asked to speak anonymously disputed any linkage between the Kakavand and Reiss cases as “baseless.”
The French public prosecutor “who had already asked for the charges to be dropped [against Kakavand] did it on factual grounds,” the source said. “The point is that to extradite somebody, he needs to have committed a felony acoording to both the law of the country that asks for his extradition, and the country where that is asked to proceed with the extradition. And matter of fact, the judges have decided that there was no breach of French or EU laws.”
UN Watch has launched a campaign to prevent Libya from being seated on the United Nations 'Human Rights Council.' A bid to seat Iran failed recently. Pro-democracy group UN Watch launched a worldwide campaign to block Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi from winning a seat in next week's elections to the UN Human Rights Council, with a mass email petition, a YouTube video appeal, and the presentation this week of Libyan victim testimony at a special briefing for diplomats and reporters at UN Headquarters, co-organized by UN Watch and Freedom House.
The two human rights groups also presented a new report rating the qualifications of Libya and the other 13 country candidates.
The event was attended by journalists from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Radio Free Europe, and other major media organizations, and has already led to a dedicated editorial in today's New York Daily News.
...
“Freedom House and UN Watch urge all UN General Assembly members not to write in the name of Libya or other unqualified states when filling out the four African slots on their secret ballot,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch. “They should instead write in the names of African countries with far greater qualifications.”
According to the report, of the 14 candidates announced to date, only 5 are considered to be “qualified” to serve on the Council, including Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Guatemala and Maldives. Additionally, 4 candidates are identified as having “questionable” records, including Moldova, Ecuador, Uganda and Thailand.
This is from an AP report on the IAEA's efforts to pursue a 'nuclear free zone' in the Middle East. Egypt has proposed that a Nonproliferation Treaty conference now meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York back a plan calling for the start of negotiations next year on a Mideast free of nuclear arms.
The U.S. has cautiously supported the idea while saying that implementing it must wait for progress in the Middle East peace process. Israel also says a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement must come first.
"The question is, how do you do that in the absence of a peace plan?" Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher said Wednesday of the "nuke-free" zone idea.
Still, Washington and the four other nuclear weapons countries recognized as such under the NPT appear to be ready to move from passive support to a more active role.
In her speech to the U.N. nuclear conference on Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington would support "practical measures for moving toward that objective," while Tauscher said the U.S. has been working "for months" with Egypt on the issue.
Washington also has been discussing it with the Israelis, said another Western diplomatic source, who asked for anonymity since he was discussing other countries' contacts.
Russian arms negotiator Anatoly I. Antonov, speaking on behalf of the five NPT nuclear powers, said these nations were "committed to full implementation" of a Middle East nuclear free zone.
Amano's April 7 letter comes seven months after IAEA member states at their annual Vienna conference narrowly passed a resolution directly criticizing Israel and its atomic program, with 49 of the 110 nations present in support, 45 against and 16 abstaining.
The result was a setback not only for Israel but also for Washington and other backers of the Jewish state, which had lobbied for 18 years of past practice — debate on the issue without a vote.
Elder of Ziyon posts a Google translation of the interview (in Arabic - the only way these interviews matter) with Abu Mazen that I posted on Thursday, and comes up with this little addition that did not appear in the version I saw. When you talk about Hamas in Gaza, it is against the firing of rockets and other missiles, and when you talk about a state within the 1967 ... So, what's the difference between us and them? There is no difference. The question is no longer political or ideological or intellectual or anything else, the question is: Why do they not accept the reconciliation, in the face of the Gaza Strip deteriorating daily not monthly, socially and economically. We regret that they are smuggling weapons and explosives and assembled in the West Bank. Why punish those who fire rockets in Gaza, when we collect their weapons and explosives and equipment in the West Bank?!
There is no doubt that a Middle East free from nuclear weapons serves everyone's interests but how can you ask a country threatened by illegitimate Genocidal maniacs asking for its destruction openly to relinquish its nuclear weapons aimed at protecting its citizens and not seek to stop the same maniacs from acquiring nuclear weapons aimed at either destroying others or protecting their own perpetuity?
RPS [Reform Party of Syria] supports a nuclear free Middle East once violent and unaccountable authoritarian regimes are replaced by responsible democracies."
I'm going to post a small excerpt of a long article about a recent rabbi's sermon and then I'm going to go off on a tangent that the author never intended. Regardless, I urge you to read the whole thing, because the article has a message for you and you're not going to find it otherwise in this post. In a recent Shabbat sermon, the senior rabbi at one of Baltimore's largest congregations explained why, whether he liked it or not, he felt compelled to talk about Israel. He suggested that due to the voluminous number of e-mails he received discussing an article written by Ed Koch and a sermon delivered by local rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg, he felt compelled to discuss the topic on everyone's mind.
The opening remarks of the sermon reminded me of Obama's recent statement that "... whether we like it or not, America remains a military superpower." And while Americans have come to expect Obama's ridiculous apologies for America's exceptional nature, American Jews do not and should not accept this attitude from anyone -- least of all our rabbis. Our history and faith dictate, and our survival depends upon, our leaders -- our rabbis -- celebrating Israel's greatness and the success of the Jewish people.
The rabbi discussed a recent poll in which Israel joined Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea at the bottom of a list of 28 nations viewed favorably in the world. From there, rather than discuss what American Jews could do to help improve world perception of Israel, the rabbi politicized the two-state solution by characterizing it as an internal Israeli policy debate rather than what it is -- a fight for Israel's survival. Though there was no coherent message being conveyed, the rabbi used two words to describe Israel that said more than anything else in the speech -- "occupying state."
The clear message was that Israel is occupying land on which Jewish people are not entitled to live. After the service, I told the rabbi that I was offended by his description of Israel as an occupying entity -- a description reserved for use by anti-Semites. I suggested that, especially in light of recent rifts in U.S.-Israel relations and the virulent growth of anti-Semitism globally, rabbis need to choose their words wisely. He responded, "Oh, I see, you're from the far right."
The rabbi then stated that he would use another term if I could suggest something appropriate to describe what Israel was doing. I looked at him inquisitively and asked how Israel could be occupying land that God gave to the Jewish people thousands of years ago. And with his next question, the rabbi took the conversation to a new low for Jews and Christians the world over: "How do you know that? Just because the Bible says so?"
Michael Fenenbock explains why Israelis and American Jews who care about Israel ought to be rooting for change in this fall's US midterm election, and hints at how we can make it happen. It’s certainly no over-exaggeration to say President Obama and his administration have played the mainstream Jewish leaders like a violin.
The scion of a wealthy cosmetics manufacturing Jewish family recently published a full-page open letter of complaint to President Obama about the recent Biden brouhaha. He paid to have his letter appear in several major American newspapers.
In this letter he called for understanding... but also took time to reaffirm Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution and concluded by congratulating the president for his sincerity on issues concerning Israel and peace.
I think the two-state solution will have disastrous consequences and I believe that President Obama’s hostility is deep seated and ideological.
The emperor has no clothes.
Equally demoralizing, the Israeli prime minister is guilty of listening to these voices. Fearing to antagonize the Obama administration and offering bits and pieces of appeasement he has allowed himself to become a caricature… insisting on a recent American Sunday news broadcast that there had been no disagreement between the Obama Administration and Israel.
It is common knowledge in Washington DC that, at the bidding of the president and pressure from mainstream Jewish leadership, the prime minister quietly agreed to halt building in east Jerusalem.
He does this even as the Obama Administration makes no bones about desiring a more malleable government in Israel, encouraging his domestic political opponents to all but overthrow his government.
The emperor has no clothes.
Imposing a two-state solution is at the heart of the Obama foreign policy; for the president, there has been no downside to his assault on the Jewish State. Jewish voters have not abandoned him to any significant degree and the Administration has suffered no meaningful political damage as a consequence of their policy.
According to Yediot's findings, Goldstone confirmed the death sentences of at least 28 accused blacks, who had appealed their sentences, most of them for murder, and he expressed his support for death sentences in his decisions as well, as he wrote in the case of a young black man who was sentenced to death for killing the white owner of a restaurant after he fired him: "The death penalty needs to reflect the demands of society to take retribution for the crimes that people see, justifiably, as horrifying".
Goldstone, "declared that the gallows were the only punishment of deterrent in these cases", and wrote: "Fury is a relevant factor in the imposition of a suitable punishment".
Joseph Massad, the anti-gay and virtually anti-semitic Columbia University professor whose hatred of Israel is legendary, has written another screed for Al Ahram that exposes his faulty methods of reasoning.
Massad and those like him know all of this, of course - but they love misusing the words "colonialism" and "racism" to score points with the West. It is a libel that gains currency by dint of repetition, not by the merits of the argument. |
Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas has halved the salaries of many of its employees in an effort to stem its growing cash crisis. |
UNRWA has policies that apply to its staff, listed in their Area Staff Regulations publication. These policies include:
Previous UNRWA head Karen Abu-Zayd has said "UNRWA is not involved in the political sphere," and indeed politics is not part of its mandate.
Urging nations to send ships to Gaza is as political a statement as any. He is advocating doing something against Israeli (and Egyptian) policies. He is saying that shipments to Gaza require no oversight as to their contents, something that the EU has disagreed with in the past by setting up the EUBAM monitoring station in Rafah before the Hamas coup. He is also evidently advocating the ability of Iran or Syria to freely ship weapons to Gaza, as opposed to the clandestine shipments they are already doing. |
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Following (in italics) is an excerpt from a Jewish prayer that we say on special Holidays:
You have chosen us from among all the nations
(What about those two hundred and ten years of slavery in Egypt?)
You loved us
(The First Temple was destroyed)
and favored us.
(The Second Temple was also destroyed)
You have exalted us above all people
(Don’t forget about the Crusades)
You have sanctified us with Your commandments.
(And the Spanish Inquisition)
You drew us near to Your service
(We suffered through the pogroms of Europe and Russia)
and proclaimed Your Great and Holy Name upon us.
(And survived the Holocaust)
We have been reciting this prayer for over two thousand years. It was composed by the Men of the Great Assembly (those who formed the link between the last of the Jewish Prophets and the first of the Talmudic scholars) during the time of the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Admittedly, it is hard to understand in light of history, but then again, we have always been a nation of opposites.
Consider this: Several weeks ago on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemerated the destruction of 6,000,000 Jews at the hands of the Germans. This week, we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim (The Day of Jerusalem), commemorating our victory during the 1967 War when we took control over the Holy City of Jerusalem after 2,000 years of living in exile.
The most obvious “opposite” condition is that we are likely the smallest nation in the world, comprising less than 0.2% of the world’s population and yet we are regarded as the most powerful, influential nation on Earth.
We have been hated because we are communists and because we are capitalists. (Make sense?)
People don’t like us because we stay stubbornly by ourselves and when we have assimilated, we are accused of polluting their superior race (as in Germany).
We have a chosen people mentality and many of us have inferiority complexes.
We are members of a nation that has been persecuted and killed by nations that no longer exist. The mightiest empires have fallen and the Jewish nation has survived. (It should be the opposite).
There is a reason for all of this.
The Bible has charged us with the responsibility for Tikkun Olam - repairing the world. We haven’t completed our job thus the world is not quite perfect yet.
Today when we see the rest of the world falling into selfishness, violence and hatred, let’s do the opposite. Let’s bring the message of God into the world by living the way we have been told to. That is by loving our fellow man, seeking justice and doing kindness to others.
Now that’s an opposite we can ALL live with.
From Daylife/Reuters:  A kangaroo is released into an enclosure at the zoo in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, May 6, 2010, after it was transferred from a zoo in Jerusalem. Two kangaroos were transferred on Thursday from the Israeli zoo to the Qalqilya zoo as part of continued cooperation between the two, Palestinian veterinarian Sami Khader said.I hope that the zoo clearly notifies all visitors that this kangaroo is Zionist, so that innocent Palestinian Arab children aren't forced to accidentally support the zoo that allowed itself to become the recipient of an animal from the Zionist enemy. The kangaroo itself should be branded with a large Star of David, allowing Arab boycotters the choice not to go to that collaborator zoo. |
“For Jerusalem, Jews, Christians and Muslims are able to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem and that only under Israeli sovereignty has freedom of worship for all religions been assured in the city.”
“ You, my dear friend, evoke the Jews’ biblical deed to Jerusalem, thereby imbuing our current conflict with messianic hues. As if our diplomatic quarrels weren’t enough, the worst of our enemies would be glad to dress this epic conflict in the garb of a holy war. We had better not join ranks with them, even if unintentionally.”
“ Barack Obama appears well aware of his obligations to try to resolve the world’s ills, particularly ours here. Why then undercut him and tie his hands? On the contrary, let’s allow him to use his clout to save us from ourselves, to help both bruised and battered nations and free them from their prison. Then he can push both sides to divide the city into two capitals – to give Jewish areas to the Jews and Arab areas to the Arabs – and assign the Holy Basin to an agreed-on international authority.”
We are often told that the Al Aqsa Mosque is the "third holiest site in Islam." |
Published: 4 May 10 07:49 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/society/20100504-26955.html
A major new exhibition at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, argues it was no coincidence that the biggest superheroes including Superman, Spiderman, Batman and the Hulk were all created by Jewish comic artists.
If Superman had had his way, Hitler would have wound up begging for mercy before the League of Nations in Geneva in 1940, and there would never have been an Auschwitz.
“Heroes, Freaks and Superrabbis - the Jewish Colour of Comics” looks at 45 of the most successful comic creators, overwhelmingly children of European Jewish families who had immigrated to New York. As comic books entered their golden age in the 1930s and 1940s, the most iconic superheroes were products of those troubled times, even taking on Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen before the Americans did.
“The point of the exhibition isn’t to say comics are a Jewish speciality,” said Anne Helene Hoog, one of the curators. “Rather, it looks at the question why so many Jews became comic artists, and what issues preoccupied them.”
In February 1940, nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, “How Superman Would End the War” by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster has the Man of Steel making quick work of the diminutive Nazi leader.
“I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw, but there’s no time for that!” Superman tells a grovelling Hitler as he dispatches him to Switzerland to face justice, along with Stalin to boot. A month later, Captain America by Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon thwarts a Nazi plot to invade America with a wallop to the Führer’s nose in a legendary cover sketch.
Hoog said the superheroes were often depicted, like their artists, as outsiders who, with an immigrant’s deep patriotism, battle to save their adopted home country from an outside threat.
That image resonated powerfully at a time when the world appeared to be falling apart, Hoog said.
“In light of the failure of democracy in Europe, it was clear that young people -particularly the children of immigrants, poor people, refugees - confronted with misery, fear, violence, injustice and finally extermination, were alarmed by what was happening in the world,” she said. “In the 1930s, there was a deep need for superheroes,” she added, and Jewish artists were happy to oblige.
Although none of the major superheroes were overtly Jewish, their heroic journeys were often steeped in Old Testament imagery, noted Jewish Museum programme director Cilly Kugelmann.
“Like Moses, Superman was discovered as an apparently abandoned baby and raised by the people who found him,” she said, adding that the character also had roots in Greek mythology, Germanic tales and the story of Jesus Christ. Even “Shazam!”, the magic word that turns young Billy Batson into 1970s-era Captain Marvel, had quasi-Jewish roots. The word is an acronym for the legendary heroes who inspire him and the first letter, “S”, stands for wise King Solomon of Israel.
Many of the comic artists worked as paperboys when they were young in the 1920s, selling newspapers amid the tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, where their love for the “funnies” was born.
After the war, with time Jewish graphic novelists began confronting the Holocaust tentatively at first, culminating in the harrowing Pulitzer-prize-winning Maus series by Art Spiegelman. In the two volumes published in 1986 and 1991, Spiegelman tells the story of his Shoah-survivor father, a Polish-born Jew, and the author’s own feelings of guilt and rage toward him as he was growing up. With his literary ambition, Spiegelman revolutionised the genre.
Comics also accompanied the counterculture movement of the 1960s, with Mad magazine and subversive “comix” by Jewish women such as Trina Roberts and Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
Hoog said a current of irony runs through many of the works, highlighting Steve Sheinkin’s “The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey” and “Rabbi Harvey Rides Again” about a Jewish cleric superhero in the Wild West. Punctuating the point, a caped Superman statue outside the museum shows him crashed into the pavement, with Krypton blood trickling from his head. The sculpture is called “Even Superheroes Have Bad Days.”
The Berlin exhibition was conceived in cooperation with the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, each of which had previous shows that have been adapted and expanded here. It features more than 200 original comics, including rare sketches signed by the artists, and runs until August 8.
External link: The museum's official website »
AFP (news@thelocal.de)
