Daled Amos concludes why he doesn’t trust Sen. Biden on Israel:

Against this background of saying one thing but doing another–while I appreciate what Biden says about Israel, I am concerned that once he is in a different position, one where he will have input on policy and no longer need to score points with his constituency by associating himself with particular Senate bills, Biden will show a different agenda. Under those circumstances, I just don’t trust Biden to keep his promises to Israel.

And indeed a recent statement of his:

It is quite a swipe at the organized Jewish community that the Jerusalem Post is reporting Senator Biden has launched against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “I take a backseat to no one — including Aipac — when it comes to supporting Israel,” the Post quotes the Delaware Democrat just chosen as Senator Obama’s running mate as saying. “They don’t speak for the entire Jewish community. There are other organizations that are just as strong and consequential,” he said.
“Aipac does not speak for the State of Israel.”

… raised questions at the NY Sun:

Well, it is true that Aipac does not speak for the state of Israel; it is not a foreign agent. But Aipac is the formal voice of the pro-Israel lobby in America, and through its governance structure, represents the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that is the umbrella group for the Jewish community in this country. Aipac has not publicly criticized Mr. Biden, though it did take different stances than he did on some Iran-related legislation. Aipac has described Mr. Biden as pro-Israel, a description whose accuracy we do not dispute.

If Mr. Biden, though, really thinks there are other American Jewish organizations that are as strong or as consequential as Aipac when it comes to the America-Israel relationship it sure will be illuminating to see him name them. If he has in mind dovish groups such as the Israel Policy Forum or the J Street Project, Mr. Biden is only going to hurt the Obama ticket with that portion of the Jewish vote that is actually up for grabs in this election.

Jennifer Rubin characterizes Biden’s statement as

It is further evidence of poor temperament, something that no amount of study can solve. Putting aside the merits of his dispute with AIPAC, the tone and the fact that he is in a public spat with a key representative group from a key constituency says something about his fitness for high office. His mouth and penchant for verbosity are only part of the Biden problem. He is incapable of behaving with restraint, modesty and discretion — the very qualities you expect in a leader in high office.

But I think Rubin and the Sun are missing something here. I don’t believe that Biden’s statement is out of line with Sen. Obama’s views at all or reflective of a problem with his tempermant. Keep in mind that Sen. Obama said:

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” the Illinois senator and contender for the Democratic presidential nominee told a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Sunday. “If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”

Substitute AIPAC for Likud and the statements sound very similar. And indeed there’s a school of thought on the Middle East that AIPAC is representative of the Likud. (It’s actually, usually representative of whatever party is in power in Israel.)

Or consider that J-Street an organization that would seem to be in line with Biden’s statement, J-Street is funded by Alan Solomont, one of Sen. Obama’s main fundraisers.

Or consider that the group of Republicans for Obama have a record of being anti-Israel.

This morning, former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach, former Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee, and prominent lawyer and former White House intelligence advisor Rita E. Hauser will host a conference call to endorse Senator Barack Obama and announce the formation of Republicans for Obama.

The theme continues: these Republicans — with the exception of Jim Leach — also are very cool towards the American-Israel relationship.

I don’t think that Sen. Biden’s remarks about AIPAC can be construed as anything other than a sign that a President Obama, would take a more adversarial approach to Israel than the previous two administrations.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Time after time the Palestinians try to evade responsibility for terrorism. Now they’ve been nailed in court and they’re still trying to evade justice:

A federal judge awarded the family a default judgment of $192.7 million in damages after the P.L.O. and the Palestinian Authority refused to defend the suit on the merits.

But now the Palestinians, holding themselves out as a partner in the Middle East peace process, have changed lawyers, and asked the judge for a second chance. The judge, Victor Marrero of Federal District Court in Manhattan, has agreed to set aside the judgment and give them that chance.

But there’s a catch. He is requiring the Palestinians to post a bond of $192.7 million so that if they lose again, the damages would be paid.

So Abbas and Fayyad have sworn that they can’t afford to pay the judgment. But this leads to another problem:

Another expert, Beth Van Schaack, an associate law professor at Santa Clara University, said that the legal process, if the Palestinians do participate fully, could allow an inquiry into Palestinian finances, and whether money went to support terrorism.

“The Abbas administration has gotten themselves in a little bit of a bind,” Professor Van Schaack said. “If they are claiming, ‘We can’t put up the bond because we don’t have the money,’ ” she said, “that opens the door to do some level of discovery about money.”

As Elder of Ziyon who has done more reporting on the subject than the NYT notes, the PA has been spending most of its budget in Gaza, effectively using those funds to help Hamas. (And yes, unfortunately, this is going on with Israel’s acquiescence.)

No wonder, then, that the attorney for the plaintiffs, David Strachman says:

Mr. Strachman argued in court papers that the descriptions of Palestinian finances had been “woefully incomplete and frankly disingenuous.”

“The issue is: What assets do they have?” he told the court in July.

And where are they spending them?

UPDATE: I’d forgotten this item from two months ago:

The international community has paid out nearly a billion dollars in direct aid to the Palestinians in six months, officials of the International Donors’ Conference for the Palestinian State said here late Monday, while hitting out at Israeli restrictions on movement by Palestinians.

The Palestinians are receiving plenty of aid. The main question is what they’re doing with it.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Brian Carney writes in the WSJ:

Meanwhile, 51% of those surveyed thought the press was “trying to hurt” Mrs. Palin with its coverage.

Perhaps most troubling for the press corps, though, was this finding: “55% said media bias is a bigger problem for the electoral process than large campaign donations.”

No doubt that’ the reason the editors of the Washington Post keep on harping on campaign donations. They hope the the public won’t scrutinize them too closely.

(via memeorandum)

Read Ocean Guy’s devastating attack on the media “cocoon”

Journalists are stuck on stupid and almost completely unable to realize that alternative news sources are accessible to a much larger percentage of the general public. And another fact that journalists and editors are seemingly oblivious to, is that the percentage of the general public that is routinely well INFORMED, is informed because they are using a wide variety of news sources. No longer are we only reading the NYT and Washington Post and paying attention to the network news.

For at least a decade, the most informed segment of our population, the neighborhood and office opinion leaders, have been using that entire spectrum of news sources to inform ourselves. We still read the “old media” but… as news junkies and internauts, we have a vast array of additional news sources right at our fingertips. The distributed intelligence and collective experience of the blogosphere alone is awesome, but blogs are only a small portion of the total information available. Meanwhile, Journalists have responded to this change in news distribution by covering their ears and eyes and loudly singing, “LaLa Lalala, LaLa Lalala…” in a futile attempt to ignore their pesky critical audience.

And as if you need proof the Counterterrorism blog reports:

I see one after another of the mainstream media outlets which have made important contributions to the factual underpinnings of the counter-terrorism effort dropping off that beat. Editors in the print media are shifting terrorism experts on their staffs towards investigations of political candidates. At least three such reporters at three major papers are now chasing Sarah Palin stories (I haven’t had time to chase down everybody in “the business”).

The CT blog notes that it is especially unfortunate that these specialists are being moved away from the counterterrorism beat at the same time that the Bush administration is acting ever more aggressively against terror organizations as its term approaches the end.

This leads Instapundit to note wryly:

SHIFTING RESOURCES TO FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Three young Jewish men were hospitalized after being attacked by French “youths.”

Three Jewish youths on their way to the Paris branch of the Bnei Akiva movement were attacked by a group of teens on Saturday, a short while before the end of the Sabbath. The three youths were hospitalized for a day due to the facial fractions caused by stones that were thrown at them by the attackers.

The boys were walking through Paris’ 19th Arrondissement, home to 20,000 of the French capital’s Jews. Raphi Zeush, a Jewish Agency and Bnei Akiva envoy to the city told Ynet, “Five Muslim and African youths came and threw chestnuts and cobblestones at them.

“One of the Jewish boys asked them to stop, and the French teens started cursing at him. He responded with curses and they called their friends. Another 10 teens came, some of them wielding brass knuckles, and a fight broke out.”

Raphael Haddad, the student group’s president, said that one of the Jewish youths suffered a broken nose and another a fractured cheekbone, while all three had considerable contusions.

But it’s not anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Zionism.

And oh yeah, France doesn’t have an anti-Semitism problem.