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07 Jan 10

Matthew Yglesias » Israel and al-Qaeda

  • But Israel’s conduct, and America’s attitude toward that conduct, are an important lens through which Muslims see the United States. So time and again you tend to hear things like this about people who wind up working with al-Qaeda:


    H[is brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians.


    This reality makes a lot of American Jews uncomfortable to the point where they try to insist on denying that Israel has anything to do with anyone’s motives for doing anything, but that’s absurd.

04 Jan 10

Amb. Michael Oren’s credibility problem « Coteret

  • pulled off an amazing image makeover — the movement neoconservative became a pragmatic centrist. The Israeli media, however, is not playing ball.
  • On December 22 Haaretz revealed that he  had gone off the reservation as the American Jewish Committee’s representative in Jerusalem in the nineties — suggesting that the IDF Chief of Staff replace Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
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25 Dec 09

Reds Under Obama's Bed - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • fearlessly exposes that Barack Obama over a decade ago had interaction with and support from a group called the New Party, whose left-liberal views amounted to "full employment, a shorter
    work week and a guaranteed minimum income for all adults; a universal
    ’social wage’ to include such basic benefits as health care, child
    care, vacation time and lifelong access to education and training; a systematic
    phase-in of comparable worth and like programs to ensure gender equity.”
  • Obama has put in a
    major position of influence a person from the left-wing of the political
    spectrum, who as an official whose office monitors anti-Semitism, is using her position
    to support J-Street, on whose Board she previously sat.
  • 1 more annotations...
16 Dec 09

Calculated Terror, by Aaron Mannes and V.S. Subrahmanian | Foreign Policy

  • SOMA
    rules have also been extracted on the behavior of other Middle Eastern groups. Hamas,
    for example, is twice as likely to commit kidnappings during periods of
    conflict with other Palestinian organizations (the probability increases from
    approximately 33 percent to 67 percent). If another round of Fatah-Hamas fighting erupts in the
    West Bank, this may present a new challenge for Israeli security. While the
    rules had not been extracted in 2006, it is worth noting that the Israeli soldier
    Galid Shalit was kidnapped as the conflict between Hamas and Fatah expanded
    after the 2006 Palestinian elections.
  • Models
    require data, and limitations of that data can limit the accuracy of a system
    such as SOMA. For the analysis of Hezbollah (and several other groups) SOMA
    used the Minorities at Risk
    Organization Behavior (MAROB) data set     created at the University of
    Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management. MAROB
    identifies factors that motivate members of ethnic minorities to form activist
    organizations and move from conventional politics to terrorism. MAROB has
    systematically collected information on more than 150 variables from over 100
    organizations across the Middle East during the last several decades. Hezbollah
    is one of the organizations profiled; the data collected covers Hezbollah from
    its 1982 founding through 2004.
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14 Dec 09

Israeli ambassador: J Street "significantly out of the mainstream” | FP Passport

  • Ambassador
    Michael Oren described J Street as “a unique problem in that it not
    only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all
    policies of all Israeli governments. It’s significantly out of the
    mainstream.”
  • “This is not
    a matter of settlements here [or] there. We understand there are
    differences of opinion,” Oren said. “But when it comes to the survival
    of the Jewish state, there should be no differences of opinion. You are
    fooling around with the lives of 7 million people. This is no joke.”
  • 1 more annotations...
10 Dec 09

New poll finds Israelis more positive on Obama | The Cable

  • Israelis aren't nearly as
    unsupportive of President Obama and America's role in the Middle East peace
    process as most news reports would have you believe, according to a new survey
    being released today by the New America Foundation. (Raw poll results here, analysis here.)
  • 52 percent of the 1,000 Israelis
    surveyed thought Obama's election would be good for the problems facing
    the world and 42 percent responded that they think he supports Israel.
  • 1 more annotations...
08 Dec 09

How Americans See The World - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Only 16% of the public has a favorable
    view of Pakistan, our essential partner in the new AfPak strategy --
    barely more than have a favorable view of Iran (11%) -- and unfavorable
    views of Pakistan have gone from 39% to 68% since last year.  Yikes. 
    And the partisan gap on Israel is interesting, if not new:  in the
    general public, 68% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats say that they
    sympathize with Israel more than with the Palestinians. Among [Council on Foreign Relations]
    experts, a solid 41% plurality say that they sympathize with both
    Israel and the Palestinians equally.
05 Dec 09

Iran Is No Existential Threat | Foreign Policy

  • But the sanctions did not prove
    "crippling," as Bush had hoped: Iran
    continued to expand its nuclear infrastructure, and the risks of a military
    confrontation between the United States
    and Iran
    climbed.
  • Unfortunately, Barack Obama's administration has decided
    to repeat this sorry history.
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26 Nov 09

Running the Table | Foreign Policy

  • We need a surge in Afghanistan. It worked in Iraq!
  • Afghanistan is Obama's Vietnam!
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23 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Palin Getting Middle East Policy Advice from Billy and Franklin Graham

  • This story about Palin’s meeting with Billy and Franklin Graham tends to bolster the End-Times possibility:


    The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate told Billy Graham about how she came to faith in God as a girl in Bible camp.


    She quizzed him on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

  • Hence the Middle East peace plan suggested by Rev Franklin Graham, Billy’s son: Muslims and Jews alike should try “surrendering their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ and having their hearts changed by the Holy Spirit.”
20 Nov 09

With Friends Like Sarah Palin.... - Jeffrey Goldberg

  • "More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel"? Who, exactly? Is this her analysis of Jewish demography? Is there a sudden upsurge in Zionist sentiment among American Jews, the only sizable Jewish community left outside of Israel? Or is this an indication that Palin buys into creepy End-Times thinking, in which the ingathering of the Jews, and their mass death, presage the return of Christ? Inquiring minds want to know.
18 Nov 09

Sarah Palin is even crazier than I imagined | FP Passport

  • "I disagree with the Obama administration" on Israeli settlements, Palin told Barbara Walters. Fair enough. It sure seems like the administration's heavy focus on getting Benjamin Netanyahu to commit to a settlement freeze has backfired, making the Israeli prime minister more popular than ever and exposing the impotence of Palestinian leader Mamoud Abbas in the process.
  • "I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded
    upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow," she continued. "More and
    more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and
    months ahead. And I don't think that the Obama administration has any
    right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand."
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17 Nov 09

Informed Comment: 20-Year-Old Letterhead points to Israeli Forgery in Francop Affair

  • The Israelis have been maintaining that a ship, the Francop, that their forces boarded near Cyprus originated in Iran and was bringing arms to Hizbullah and Hamas.
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30 Oct 09

The J Street dinner | Michael Tomasky | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

  • In other words, ex-dir Jeremy Ben-Ami has succeeded in creating (despite many right-wing and neocon attacks and constant monitoring) a credible and safe place for people who want change and progress toward peace to congregate and make their case. Given the lock Aipac has been thought to have on this town, it's quite an accomplishment. As one group leader put it to me that night, the feeling could be summed up in one word – 1,500 people saying collectively, "finally."
29 Oct 09

Matthew Yglesias » Americans Favorably Disposed to Pro-Israel Lobbying, and Increasingly So

  • proisrael 1
  • More recently, however, support became pretty overwhelming reflecting, I would guess, the growing influence of Christian Zionist thinking.
26 Oct 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • "Please help us spread the message about Iran, its reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons and what that means for Israel with your most generous contribution of $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000, or even the maximum $5,000, today,"
20 Oct 09

RealClearWorld - The Compass Blog

  • As David Sanger reported, these were mostly blusterous and veiled threats of the things Iran could do should they find Western offers unacceptable.
  • “This was opening-day posturing,”
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16 Oct 09

New Ambassador Needed | Talking Points Memo

  • You may or may not have heard of J Street, a new pro-peace Zionist lobby recently established as a counterweight to AIPAC, which over the years has become more and more exclusively tied to the Israeli right.
  • Michael Oren is the recently installed Israeli Ambassador to the United States
  • 1 more annotations...
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