Former executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller states the obvious, “Syria is not Iraq.” In short, Keller argues that he trusts President Obama’s instincts. However since he offered a mea culpa for having once supported the Iraq war, his arguments leave some skeptics unconvinced.

Bill Keller apparently lacks a working irony detector, assures us “Syria Is Not Iraq” nytimes.com/2013/05/06/opi…

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 6, 2013

I wonder if @nytkeller has studied the lyrics of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” nytimes.com/2013/05/06/opi…

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) May 6, 2013

Keller begins:

IN the search for an American response to the civil war in Syria, the favorite guidebook seems to be our ill-fated adventure in Iraq. We have another brutal Middle East autocrat holding power on behalf of a sectarian minority. We have another dubious cast of opposition factions competing for foreign patronage. We hear some of the same hawks — John McCain, Paul Wolfowitz — exhorting us to intervene, countered by familiar warnings of “quagmire.” We even have murky intelligence claims that the regime has used weapons of mass destruction.

This time, though, we have a president who, having opposed the costly blunder of Iraq and been vindicated, is holding back. The theme song at the National Security Council is “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

As a rule, I admire President Obama’s cool calculation in foreign policy; it is certainly an improvement over the activist hubris of his predecessor. And frankly I’ve shared his hesitation about Syria, in part because, during an earlier column-writing interlude at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.

Keller’s column effectively endorses any increased involvement in Syria simply because he trusts President Obama. Obama (as a state senator) opposed the war in Iraq. But at that level did he have the knowledge to make an informed judgment on the issue, or did Obama simply adopt a position that conformed to his politics at the time? Furthermore. left unsaid by Keller, is that Senator Obama opposed the surge that restored order to Iraq and, as President, concluded a disadvantageous troop withdrawal agreement with Iraq, possibly giving away the gains achieved by the surge. (Nor does Keller give President Bush – or himself – enough credit, as Fouad Ajami recalls the beginning of the war.)

While Keller draws on the views of former administration officials who advocated early involvement in Syria and concedes that there may be no happy ending in Syria, he seems to be saying we should intervene (without troops) because we have to and because he trusts President Obama. But Obama’s record shouldn’t inspire trust. In the end, Keller, rather than appearing thoughtful, comes across as unconvincing.

The point Keller refuses to address is what if there are no good choices left in Syria?

Barry Rubin writes in Syria’s Civil War: The Empire Strikes Back:

This is the mess faced by the Obama administration. It could have been avoided if the president had understood from the start that he should have supported moderate, not Islamist forces, using covert operations and even helping local warlords and pious Syrian traditionalist forces. Instead, before the civil war broke out he first backed the radical regime in Syria — America’s enemy and Iran’s client state — and then only when the revolt made that stance impossible did he switch to the rebels, empowering the opposition Islamists every step of the way.

But then he didn’t want to do what his predecessors would have done. Curiously, Obama believed that Islamist rule is good because it would moderate the radicals, deter terrorists from attacking America, and make enemies into friends.

In Syria today there is no good choice. No matter which side wins — the Syrian regime as part of the Iranian bloc of Shia Islamists or the rebels as part of the Muslim Brotherhood bloc of Sunni Islamists — the winners will be radical Islamists. In fact, if Assad creates a fortress in the Alawite region of the northwest stretching down to Damascus, it will be both varieties of Islamists simultaneously.

Keller supports intervention in Syria because Barack Obama is president, even though the situation has deteriorated largely because of President Obama’s early inaction.

2) The Thomas Principle

As for Bibi, his Tahrir lesson is obvious: Sir, you are well on your way to becoming the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process. The time to make big decisions in life is when you have all the leverage on your side. For 30 years, Mubarak had all the leverage on his side to gradually move Egypt toward democracy — and he never used it. Then, when Mubarak’s people rose up, he tried to do it all in six days. But it was too late. No one believed him. So his tenure ended in ruin.
Thomas Friedman – Lessons from Tahrir Square – May 24, 2011

Radical regimes now exist in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey, though Obama doesn’t see this. Obama is going to be supportive for these governments except for Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Even there, Hamas benefits from U.S. help and tolerance for its allied regime in Egypt.
Barry Rubin – Israel’s situation and strategy in Obama’s second term – November 9, 2012

The Tower reports Leaked Phone Transcripts Allege Hamas Role in Triggering Egypt Violence:

Egyptian media outlets are again linking Hamas to violence in the country stretching back to the 2011 Egyptian Arab Spring. Earlier this week Egypt’s former interior minister floated the suggestion that Hamas had a hand in fomenting unrest during the revolution, which saw the overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the subsequent election of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked government. Mansour al-Essawy’s somewhat vague insinuations were met with skepticism, inasmuch as he had a motive to blame the increasingly-unpopular Iran-backed terror group for violence that he has since been criticized for seeking to put down.

Now what looked like a one-off conspiracy theory is beginning to seem like an initial shot across the bow. The daily Al-Masry Al-Youm has has published details of telephone transcripts between Muslim Brotherhood figures and Hamas officials, in which the two groups collaborated on pressuring security forces working to bolster the regime.

Friedman and others saw the Arab Spring as a great opportunity for Israel to do all it could to make peace with the Palestinians. Friedman also was appalled that Israel wasn’t more vocal in its support of Arab democracy. Two years later, all that hope seems distant. Non-democratic Islamists continue to gain power, Netanyahu was re-elected Prime Minister of Israel and Thomas Friedman is still writing columns. One of the latter two appears to be competent at his job.

3) You won’t have Salam Fayyad to kick around

Recently resigned Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad gave an interview to Roger Cohen of the New York Times last week. In his column, Fayyad Steps Down, Not Out, Cohen writes:

Fatah, the major political movement in the West Bank, is a revolutionary party that has exhausted itself; ossified and murky, lacking a popular mandate or a strategy to deliver statehood, headed by a 78-year-old man, Abbas, who did not have the courage to embrace the political program of an outsider, Fayyad, even though that program delivered growth, accountability and security.

Abbas, Moscow-educated, and Fayyad, Texas-educated, never overcame the cultural gulf those educations bequeathed. The can-do approach did not figure in the Soviet curriculum. Abbas declined to leverage Fayyad’s achievements. He refused to use Fayyad’s probity and work ethic as transformative examples. Theirs was a rocky marriage of convenience. Fayyad reckons the party spent more time worrying about what he was doing than solving anything.

“This party, Fatah, is going to break down, there is so much disenchantment,” Fayyad predicts. “Students have lost 35 days this year through strikes. We are broke. The status quo is not sustainable.” He looks at me with a fierce conviction: “In the end it did not matter what any foreign power told me about things changing for the better because I am living it. I have gone through hell before. But it’s enough. This much poison is bound to cause something catastrophic. The system is not taking, the country is suffering. They are not going to change their ways and therefore I must go.”

This isn’t about Fatah being “ossified” or Abbas lacking “courage.” The idea of a “cultural gap” has a certain literary appeal. The truth is a lot less romantic. Fatah was elevated to being essential for peace. Its leaders were promoted as moderates and funds flowed freely to those leaders as a reward for their feigned moderation. Naturally, Abbas, one of those lucky winners, wasn’t happy about having accountability imposed upon his efforts to ensure a fortune for himself and his family.

The tension between Abbas & Fayyad was arguably the closest thing to a system of checks and balances in the PA. foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/…

— Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) April 20, 2013

Of course the biggest problem according to Fayyad and Cohen is the “occupation,” but this was quite a brave thing for Fayyad to say.

So brave in fact, that he retracted.

Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad on Saturday denied statements attributed to him by The New York Times that criticized the Palestinian leadership and Fatah.

Fayyad said that he did not grant an interview to the Times or any other other newspaper or news agency since he submitted his resignation to PA President Mahmoud Abbas last month.

CAMERA observes:

…if Fayyad gave an interview which provoked Fatah’s wrath, resulting in the prime minister’s subsequent denial, then this is yet another reminder about sources and journalists self-censoring when it comes to unflattering information about the Palestinian Authority.

More generally, Evelyn Gordon writes in What the West Should Learn from the Fayyad-Cohen Spat:

But this incident ought to give pause to anyone who is quick to believe every Palestinian atrocity story about Israel. Fayyad has bodyguards; he enjoys the protection of being in the international spotlight; and international credibility is his essential stock-in-trade. Thus, if even he feels threatened enough to risk his credibility by telling bald-faced lies to protect himself, that’s all the more true of ordinary Palestinians, who lack Fayyad’s protections and don’t care about their overseas credibility.

For a Palestinian, it’s always safest to accuse Israel of brutality and abuse, even if the accusations are completely false, because Israeli soldiers won’t kill him for such libels–whereas Palestinian gunmen very well might murder him as a “collaborator” if he went on record as saying, for instance, that Israeli soldiers treated him decently.

So perhaps next time, Westerners should stop and think before uncritically accepting Palestinian atrocity tales as truth. For if Fayyad could so brazenly lie about Cohen, then other Palestinians could just as easily be lying about Israel.

Some time ago, Thomas Friedman coined the term “Fayyadism,” a concept that, according to Nathan Brown, never had a chance.

Why Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad never had a chance to meet the high expectations placed on him atfp.co/10hH6rY

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) April 18, 2013

(No I don’t agree with everything Brown argues, but the fourth and fifth paragraphs are good observations.)

In his most recent column, Goodbye to Fayyad Thomas Friedman boasts about his neologism:

Who is Salam Fayyad? A former economist at the International Monetary Fund, he first came to prominence when he was named finance minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2002, after donors got fed up seeing their contributions diverted for corruption. Shortly after he became prime minister in 2007, I coined the term “Fayyadism” — the all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or resistance to Israel and the West or on personality cults or security services, but on delivering decent, transparent, accountable governance.

Whether he used the term “Fayyadism” in other fora, I don’t know, but the earliest mention of it in a column was in a 2009 column, Greet Shoots in Palestine.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the wider Middle East what off-Broadway is to Broadway. It is where all good and bad ideas get tested out first. Well, the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a former I.M.F. economist, is testing out the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever. I call it “Fayyadism.”

Fayyadism is based on the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.
…
Things are truly getting better in the West Bank, thanks to a combination of Fayyadism, improved Palestinian security and a lifting of checkpoints by Israel. In all of 2008, about 1,200 new companies registered for licenses here. In the first six months of this year, almost 900 have registered. According to the I.M.F., the West Bank economy should grow by 7 percent this year.

While it’s possible that Friedman came up with “Fayyadism” in 2007, the context of the 2009 mention suggests that the term was based on the results of Fayyad’s governance, so I believe that Friedman is mistaken about his own record.

But what’s worse than this possible lapse is that Friedman demonstrated his absolute ignorance of Palestinian politics. Over the time that he sporadically advertised “Fayyadism” as the path to peace, Freidman wrote in a 2011 column, Bibi and Barack:

And it is equally silly for the Palestinians to be going to the United Nations for a state when they need to be persuading Israelis why a Hamas-Fatah rapprochement is in their security interest.

Hamas made it absolutely clear that it wanted Fayyad sidelined and yet Friedman told us that a Fatah-Hamas agreement would be to Israel’s benefit. This suggests that “Fayyadism” is one more empty Friedman phrase. “Fayyadism” was a handy rhetorical stick with which to beat Israel. Sure Fayyad is more honest and transparent that any other Palestinian leader, but he is also a leader without an internal constituency.

If Friedman could tout a peace killing alliance between Fatah and Hamas the same time he promoted “Fayyadism” as the only way to peace, it demonstrates that he is disingenuous, if not illogical and ignorant.

In today’s column, Friedman also asserts:

Fayyad also played the leading role in rebuilding the Palestinian security services in the West Bank, which even the Israeli military grew to respect, and in trying to build Palestinian institutions, on the argument that the more Palestinians built their institutions — finance, police, social services — the more Israel’s denial of them of a state will be unsustainable.

Lately there’s been a rise in attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers and rock attacks against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, suggesting that the Palestinian security forces are helpful, when they want to be, but can hardly be relied upon. Furthermore, even with the built up institutions, the PA is still way too dependent on foreign aid. (This is something that Friedman implicitly acknowledges later in the column, but he, of course, blames the shortfall on Israel for holding back tax monies, ignoring the ineffectiveness of Palestinian governance.)

Hamas hated Fayyad, and many Palestinian Authority officials were jealous of him, but success protected him until 2011. President Mahmoud Abbas, frustrated by the right-wing Israeli government’s refusal to strike a land-for-peace deal, decided to seek recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. The United States retaliated by cutting off aid, and Israel did so by withholding Palestinian tax receipts. I thought it foolish for Abbas to go to the U.N., but I thought it irresponsible for America’s Congress to cut off aid to the Palestinians for doing so — when we’ve never retaliated for the even more obstructionist building of settlements by Israel.

“Hamas hated Fayyad,” and yet Friedman wanted Fatah to join with Hamas for Israel’s “security!” Going to the UN wasn’t foolish, it was a violation of the premises of the peace process Friedman claims to support. Friedman and the PA may not like settlements but they were allowed by the Oslo Accords, even if Israel has largely restricted any building in them to existing communities. (Though Israel gets precious little credit for this.)

At the end of his column, Friedman presents 4 “takeways.” The second and third are ludicrous, but the first one makes a lot of sense:

For Palestinians, particularly Abbas and Fatah, who so easily turned their most effective executive into a scapegoat, if there is no place for a Salam Fayyad-type in your leadership, an independent state will forever elude you.

Fayyad’s failure isn’t a failure of Israel or of Israel’s settlers. It is a failure of Palestinian culture. (Though he’d be loath to admit it, Friedman’s making a similar argument to the one Mitt Romney made last year!)

The problem is that most of the rest of the column is at odds with this observation as Friedman blamed everyone else but the Palesitnians for Fayyad’s failure!

Friedman’s fourth “takeaway” is:

“There is nothing inevitable about a liberal order emerging from any of these Arab awakenings,” argues the pollster Craig Charney. Indeed, to produce that outcome takes someone like a Fayyad with the consistent help of external parties as well as a loyal base at home ready to see it through. In the end, Fayyad had neither. Add another nail in the coffin of the two-state solution.

Note that first Friedman suggested that the Palestinians bear the blame for their failure to achieve statehood, then he writes that he despairs of a two state solution. The evidence is before him but he is blind to what it means. The occupation (his obsession) is mostly over. What is left is for the Palestinians to achieve independence. That’s not something that is dependent on Israel, but on the Palestinians changing their political culture. Had Fayyad managed to win political support – either in the Palestinian leadership or in the street – maybe he’d be more than a footnote right now.

Jonathan Schanzer laments some in Congress are seeking to pressure Abbas to draft a new succession law.

Hamas’ anticipated rise to power in the PA could lead to a cut off in critical U.S. aid dollars and foster an even more fraught relationship with Israel and America, according to the Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), the House’s chief deputy whip.

“It’s one of the things Congress will have to monitor closely,” Roskam said in an interview.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, he said, are poised to “encourage the PA to deal with their succession plan. The notion of a default position of a Hamas official being the head of the PA is complete unacceptable and if the PA were to make that decision to have that leadership, the consequences are quite significant.”

The failure of Friedman’s fabled “Fayyadism” is unconnected to Israel. Until the Palestinian culture is about openness and opportunity rather than despotism and grievance, reform and self-governance will elude the Palestinians. As long as Thomas Friedman continues blaming his ill-informed and mendacious arguments he is covering for, not fighting Palestinian malfeasance and misrule.

2) Getting around with Hezbollah

Last month the National Post reported Hezbollah deliberately seeks Canadians because of internationally accepted passports: senior CSIS official:

The terrorist group Hezbollah has been seeking operatives with Canadian passports, a senior intelligence official told MPs reviewing a bill Thursday that could strip terrorists of their citizenship.

Appearing before the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service official said Canadian passport holders were being actively sought by terrorist groups.
…
The RCMP is also investigating allegations a Lebanese-Canadian Hezbollah member was behind last July’s bombing of a bus full of Israeli tourists at Sarafovo airport on the Black Sea coast. The suspect, who now lives in Lebanon, had used his Canadian passport to travel to Bulgaria.

Now it’s been reported that Iran agent monitoring Chabad arrested in Bulgaria:

Bulgarian police officers last summer arrested a Canadian citizen linked to the Iranian government who engaged in surveillance of the local Chabad center in the capital of Sofia, a well-placed and reliable local source told The Jerusalem Post last week, on condition of anonymity due to security reasons.

An Iranian-sponsored female agent in her 50s, holding a Canadian passport, traveled from Istanbul to Sofia several weeks after the bombing of the Israeli tour bus in the Black Sea resort town of Burgas in July 2012. She was arrested on her first day in Sofia after the Bulgarian police, on high alert, noticed she was monitoring the Chabad center.

While it isn’t certain that this agent was working for Hezbollah, the possibility certainly can’t be ruled out since Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran and Syria.

And how is Hezbollah funding its international operations? The Jerusalem Post reports:

Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says exchange houses have been used more frequently in recent years by the Islamic Republic in Iran to fund its nuclear program, as sanctions have increasingly restricted its access to resources.

“It’s not insignificant that Europe is identified as a place where Hezbollah is apparently selling drugs,” Schanzer said.
…

Experts say that Hezbollah’s asymmetric fund-raising campaign has kicked in to high gear as the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria has lost ground in its war against his fellow countrymen. The Assad regime, and the Ayatollah regime in Iran, are Hezbollah’s primary patrons.

With Iran and Syria limited in the resources it can provide Hezbollah, the terrorist organization is turning to drugs and money laundering to finance its operations.

An adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, condemned the two incidents.

“The Israeli escalation in the West Bank and Gaza and the return to the policy of assassinations and random killings in virtual excuses shows that the the Israeli government decided to destroy the independence and security of the Palestinian people and is pulling our people into a bloody circle of violence,” Rudeineh told CNN.

“The Israeli government should bear the responsibility for the killings and also bear the responsibility for the dead end in moving the peace process forward because of Israel’s refusal to stop the policy of settlement and to commit to the references of the peace process,” he said.

Of course this raises the question what the Palestinian police were doing. Now we apparently know the answer: they were preparing for a bonfire. Yesterday was a big event, where the Palestinians burned products that were produced in Judea and Samaria. Everyone, seemingly, got into the act, even “moderate” Palestinian President Salam Fayyad. (h/t Israelly Cool)

I’m not sure how this helps build a Palestinian state, but apparently it’s more important than fighting terror.

Meanwhile the moderate PA is also promoting a music video starring Wafa Idris.

Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian female suicide terrorist, was honored as a “Shahida” – holy Martyr – in a new Fatah promotional music video broadcast this week on Palestinian Authority TV. Idris killed one Israeli and wounded 150 in her suicide bombing in 2002.

This picture of Wafa Idris with the text “The Shahida (Martyr) Wafa Ali Idris” appears in the new PA TV music video, which blends scenes and pictures paying tribute to the PLO, Fatah, Yasser Arafat and PA and Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. PA TV is under the control of Abbas’s office.

Nice to know that Israel’s peace partners have this state building and confidence building stuff down to a science.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

“Those who donâ€t know can talk,” Dan Meridor, Israelâ€s intelligence minister, said Monday on state radio. “Those who know should keep silent.”

Now the NY Times reports that PM Netanyahu is playing down talks of an imminent deal.

Seeking to lower expectations of an imminent deal with the Islamic group Hamas to exchange a captured Israeli soldier for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Tuesday that no agreement had yet been reached.

“There is still no deal, and I do not know if there will be one,” Mr. Netanyahu said as he toured the national police headquarters here.

What’s very interesting about this article though are the statements of Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

Reflecting the awkwardness that a deal for Sergeant Shalit might pose for the Abbas government, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister and a political independent, made no direct mention of it in a speech on Tuesday at an international conference in the West Bank town of Jericho on the rights of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Yet he called for the “immediate release” of “pillars” of the prisoner population like Mr. Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat, a leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was convicted of ordering the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001. And repeating a point often made by Mr. Abbas, Mr. Fayyad said there would be no final agreement with Israel until all Palestinian prisoners were freed.

First of all the so-called sensitivity of the prisoner issue for the Palestinians (referenced elsewhere in the article) is bogus. Prisoner releases were part of Oslo as a way of acknowledging the changed nature of the PLO. People who were jailed for political activities in support of the PLO were to be released because since the PLO was presumed to have given up terrorism (not true, but the charade was maintained) Israel declared that it was no longer an illegal organization. How could Israel keep people working for a legal organization in jail?

But now most Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are there not merely for political activity, but terrorism or aiding and abetting terrorism. These are people who by their actions rejected the idea of coexistence with Israel. For the PA to make an issue of their release shows the official rejection of the basic elements of coexistence by even the “moderate” Palestinian leadership.

Fayyad made this worse in two ways. It’s one thing to tell his own constituents that all prisoners must be released, but he told this to an international conference. I doubt that anyone at the conference raised an objection.

Worse yet, is that he called Barghouti and Saadat “pillars.” These guys are murderers. And the moderate Western educated Prime Minister of the Palestinians lauds them. What a pillar of moderation.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

“Obviously, heâ€ll influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldnâ€t he? What is he, an Arab? Heâ€s not going to be mopping floors at the White House.”

Time Magazine:

But that does not mean that Rahm Emanuel, or Barack Obama for that matter, can easily ignore the fact that Benjamin Emanuel recently said a nasty thing about Arabs in the Israeli press. This is from the Jerusalem Post’s account of an interview Benjamin gave after news of his son’s appointment to the Obama administration was announced:

Samir Kuntar’s friend, Dion Nissenbaum:

Emanuel’s appointment upset some in the Middle East who fear that Obama’s new gatekeeper and White House alter-ego will be unquestioning in his support for questionable Israeli policies.

And his dad’s comments only aggravated things.

Worst of all, Helena Cobban’s Just World News, used the opportunity to accuse Rep. Emanuel, not so subtly, of dual loyalty.

But what I as a US citizen want to be assured of at this point is two things:

1. At any point that the interests of the US and the current government of Israel might diverge, can we be assured that all members of our president’s staff are acting 100% in the interests of the United States? and

2. Can we be assured that the president is getting the widest range of excellent, relevant, and fact-based advice from all his advisers in the tricky and very sensitive realms of Mideast policy?

The ensuing firestorm ended when Rep. Emanuel apologized for his father’s remarks.

While I was originally jarred by what he said, I’m in agreement with Daled Amos and In Context, I don’t think that Dr. Emanuel’s comments were intended the way the AADC and its apologists alleged. He wasn’t suggesting that Arabs ought to be washing floors, but that his son had influence (he wouldn’t be washing floors) and that he’d be pro-Israel (he’s not an Arab.) The two statements were conflated by the anti-Israel crowd who were already suspicious of Rep.Emanuel because he was born in Israel.

But what to make of these following incidents.
Meryl notes that at least week’s Saudi sponsored Interfaith conference Western educated, liberal Palestinian PM, Salam Fayyad was guilty of an omission.

The Palestinian Prime Minister, yet another so-called moderate, managed to speak at the UN interfaith conference about how holy Jerusalem is to the worldâ€s major religions—and utterly leave out Judaism.

In Context points out (not for the first time) that the Palestinians under the jurisdiction of “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, sentenced one of their own to death for helping Israel fight terror attacks.

And finally there’s the moderate, Abbas himself who took to threatening Israel this past weekend. But as Elder of Ziyon points out, this ought not to be so casually dismissed:

Which goes to show that the PLO letter to Israel at Oslo that solemnly promised to abandon violence was not worth the paper it was written on. And brings up the question that people are afraid to ask: what is to say that any “peace agreement” will not be torn up as well?

I’ll admit, that I’m happy that the Washington Post and New York Times, as far as I can tell ignored Dr. Emanuel’s remarks. They were, at worst, clumsy. But even if they were meant as (mis)construed, Dr. Emanuel is not a person of influence in the new administration. Absent compelling evidence, It should have had no bearing on his son’s ability to do his job. The outpouring of outrage is more a reflection of the sentiments that only Helena Cobban was honest (and vile) enough to express openly: that somehow support of Israel is de facto proof of dual loyalties.

This is especially apparent when those in authority in the PA continually express their support for conflict with Israel and deny Israel’s basic right to exist. That doesn’t upset the likes of Helena Cobban, Jake Tapper, Michael Scherer or Dion Nissenbaum at all. Denial of the very premises of a peace settlement by the Palestinians is a matter of course, not worthy of comment, but the slightest hint – no matter how specious – of pro-Israel leanings is a matter of overblown concern. This isn’t simply a matter of being critical of Israel, but of anti-Israel, if not antisemitic feelings.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Jerusalem car ‘attack’ hurts 15

Here’s how the story starts:

At least 15 people have been injured in an apparent attack in Jerusalem, Israeli police say.

They say a man drove his car into a group of people at a busy intersection, before being shot and killed by an armed bystander.

Rescue services took the injured to local hospitals. Police described the incident as a “terror attack”.

Here’s how Batya remembers a similar attack:

I remember noticing a badly driven car approaching, but I didnâ€t think heâ€d mount the sidewalk and run over us. I turned my back on it and planned on telling a neighbor that “Even if heâ€s going to Shiloh, weâ€re not getting in.” She looked up and then saw him ram into me and I was knocked down. She was unharmed, as he had turned sharp left on my foot and mowed down people the length of the sidewalk. I was still on the ground when I suddenly heard shooting.

Even then news reports tried to play down the terror angle. But the people at the receiving end of the attack knew what it was.

Here’s another classic of the genre:

Four hurt in ‘acid attack’ at West Bank checkpoint

Look, if the reporters were unconvinced of the substance, put “acid” in quotes, but it was a clear attack. But this was serious in that the soldier attacked has lost sight in one eye.

An IDF soldier has lost sight in one of his eyes after a Palestinian woman attacked him with acid at the Hawara checkpoint on Monday afternoon. The checkpoint is located south of the West Bank city of Nablus.

It’s also worth pointing out to those who wish Israel to remove checkpoints, that the assailant took advantage of the humanitarian lanes for quick passage through the checkpoint.

However this story remarkably had absolutely no scare quotes:

The cash-strapped Palestinian government on Monday received pledges of nearly $300 million in new aid on top of more than $7 billion promised last year, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said.

So let me rewrite that paragraph with some appropriate scare quotes:

The “cash-strapped” Palestinian “government” on Monday received “pledges” of nearly $300 million in new aid on top of more than $7 billion promised last year, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said.

The Palestinians likely have more cash than they admit. They receive the highest amount of foreign aid per capita in the world. They’ve received plenty and they’ve squandered it.

They ought to first turn to the estate of Yasser Arafat instead of to the international community. Then they ought to start turning to their top official who have been embezzling foreign aid for years. And the PA ought to stop paying the salaries of the Hamas thugs in Gaza.

Except for some limited areas there is no effective Palestinian government. About the only thing Fayyad does well is ask for handouts.

And finally, most of those pledges (often from Arab countries who care so much for their Palestinians brothers) are not fulfilled. The article later on notes:

At a Paris conference last December, donors pledged $7.7 billion in aid over the next three years, but the Palestinians say only a fraction of that money has been paid.

It’s remarkable the way the media will use scare quotes when dealing with terror against Israel, but when it comes to the phony (or at least self-inflicted) Palestinian financial crisis, they solemnly in pronouncing a crisis without the least bit of skepticism.

When will the media get serious about covering the Middle East instead of covering up for the Palestinians?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.