Yet there are a lot of unaddressed points that make me strongly suspect that this is a public relations stunt to convince America and Western opinion that the Arab states want peace with Israel when not all of them do so.Rubin finds the latest media coverage of the alleged acceptance of the Saudi Peace Plan by the Arab League to be problematic for a number of reasons -- among them:
#Syria chemical weapons found in blood samples nearly impossible to fake, US intel sources say. Updated story:wired.com/dangerroom/In today's editorial, the editors write:201…
— Noah Shachtman (@dangerroom) April 25, 2013
The failure to act now could be misread by Mr. Assad as well as leaders in Iran and North Korea, whose nuclear programs are on America’s radar. But Mr. Obama should only act if he has compelling documentation that the sarin gas was used in an attack by Syrian forces and was not the result of an accident or fertilizer. The Financial Times reported the evidence is based on two separate samples taken from victims of the attacks. With the civil war in Syria now in its third year and the death toll at more than 70,000, the situation has deteriorated. Mr. Assad remains in power, sectarian divisions have intensified and fleeing refugees are destabilizing neighboring countries.
It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen.
A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path, New York Times, April 27, 2013
The media felt no hesitation to label the Boston Marathon bombers as terrorists. They were correct to do so. Terrorist are those who use violence and threats to promote a political purpose.Here is the video:
So when Palestinians launch rockets at civilian targets in Israel, why does the media refuse to call them terrorists? Why do they use the word "militant" instead. These rocket attacks kill innocent civilians and are acts of terrorism.
The media should use the word "terrorism" when it is the most accurate description of an attack.
It would be alarming if Mr. Assad crossed a line few others have crossed. Within one minute, nerve agents like sarin can trigger eye pain, nausea and vomiting, loss of bowel function, difficulty breathing and muscle weakness. But the case against Mr. Assad, so far, is thin. Experts say the best way to prove that chemical weapons have been used is to collect soil samples promptly at the site and examine suspected victims. That’s hard to do in a war zone, and, so far, Israel, Britain and France have not offered physical proof (Israeli officials cited only photographs of Syrians “foaming at the mouth.”) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday that he “was not in a position to confirm” his own government’s intelligence assessment.
Given such mixed messages, Mr. Kerry and other administration officials have said, that while sharing some of the suspicions of America’s allies, they simply don’t have the facts to make a judgment, much less fashion a policy response.
I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca.
That is, Israel treats Palestinians, the way black South Africans were treated in the days of apartheid. But is the claim true? Are Arabs in Israel really treated as second-class citizens? Is Israel a racist nation? We hope you'll watch this video and judge for yourself.
The sober assumption that Middle Eastern instability is today endemic has found little favour either in Britain or in America. The prevalent fashion has been to proclaim the latest revolution as the herald of a new day, and the newest turbulence as the necessary and beneficent prelude to an epoch of orderliness and justice.
Elie Kedourie, “The Middle East and the Powers,” in The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies, 1970.
Consider this quotation:
“Israeli pessimism seems largely if not entirely unwarranted. It seems based on an extraordinary lack of understanding of what happened in the Arab world in the last year and a half. Rather than girding their loins for the fifth, sixth, seventh Israeli-Arab wars. The Israelis might examine more carefully than they seem to have done so far the alternative of a peaceful accommodation with the Arabs."
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Read: nyti.ms/12Ke82b on Assad's effort to sell his line to the US. Then this on why WH has already bought it: mme.cm/887R00The New York Times reports on Syrian efforts to influence American thinking.
— Tony Badran (@AcrossTheBay) April 25, 2013
As Islamists increasingly fill the ranks of Syrian rebels, President Bashar al-Assad is waging an energized campaign to persuade the United States that it is on the wrong side of the civil war.
| For Immediate Release: April 26, 2013 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
UN Official's Smear of Boston Victims Just Latest Attack On US, IsraelThis article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on Breitbart News. |
"The Iranian nuclear program continues to advance at the speed of an express train," Prosor said. "The international community's efforts to stop them are moving at the pace of the local train, pausing at every stop for some nations to get off and on."
| For Immediate Release: April 25, 2013 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
Secretary of State John Kerry seems to believe that Iranian elections are just like American ones. In fact, he would describe them as “normal.” At least, that’s what he told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last Thursday in his first Senate hearing since his confirmation. |
Police in Canada said Monday that two men suspected of plotting to derail a passenger train were guided by Al Qaeda elements in Iran, but the statement surprised many experts who study terrorism in the Middle East and Iran. “It frankly doesn’t compute for me,” said Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. "If there is any link, I would think it was extremely tangential."
"The ground breaking documentary on the rise of Jewish culture on the land at the cradle of Jewish civilization. That is the Land of the so called West Bank. Never has there been a chance for the Jewish people of these communities to tell their story to the world and also for the world to see these outstanding communities."
The Turkish insistence on going ahead with a gesture designed to prop up the Islamist dictators of Gaza shows that the entire premise of Kerry’s plan for a new bout of Middle East peace negotiations is based on false hopes and misperceptions. While Kerry already seemed to be setting himself up for failure with the Palestinians, the umbrage expressed by Ankara seems to indicate that more is wrong here than the new secretary’s faith in shuttle diplomacy. It’s not only that the administration seems blind to the realities of the Middle East. The former senator, who thinks of himself as a skilled and sophisticated envoy to the world, is handicapped by his blind faith in diplomacy and determination to ignore the power of Islamist ideology. And as this latest spat with Turkey illustrates, that failure may lead to Kerry making a bad situation even worse.
United We Stand postage stamp.
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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.
PRESS RELEASE
April 23, 2013
Contact:
Lenny Ben-DavidNGO Monitor
054-216-8155
lenny.bendavid@ngo-monitor.org
Human Rights Watch's Board Changes
Add to Bias and Lack of Credibility
Jerusalem - The announcement this week that Human Rights Watch (HRW) chairman of the board, James Hoge, Jr. is being replaced by co-chairs Joel Motley and Hassan Elmasry, effective October 2013, will further damage the NGO's credibility, said Jerusalem-based research institute NGO Monitor.
A Turkish official told the Hurriyet Daily News that the Sunday Times report was “a hypothesis” about the “step by step” process of the normalization of Turkish-Israeli relations. “Talking about the prospects of a military cooperation at this stage would be irrelevant,” he added. “We are not there yet. We haven’t even yet appointed a new ambassador to Israel.”
| For Immediate Release: April 22, 2013 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
UN Human Rights Official Says Boston Got What It DeservedThis article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared today on Breitbart.com. Richard Falk is the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” He has held the post since 2008, despite exposure as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. |
We have watched with increasing disappointment over the past five years the failure of the parties to start any kind of productive discussion, and of the international community under American and/or European leadership to promote such discussion. We have also noted with frustration and deep concern the deteriorating standards of humanitarian and human rights care of the population in the Occupied Territories.
It doesn’t matter whether Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ever took the usual American school trip to the United Nations. The poisonous ideology of Islamic countries that is continually broadcast unimpeded from the UN’s global stage is ubiquitous.
Anne Bayefsky
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.Bulgaria has already found Hezbollah to be responsible for last years terrorist attack in its country -- and as a puppet of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah does nothing without the approval of Iran.
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.
Dr. Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and a leading authority on Hezbollah’s global terror operations, told the Post that, “It would not surprise [us] if Iran or Hezbollah were found to be behind this plot [against the Chabad center] last year. Recall that five years earlier Western intelligence indicated that ‘Hezbollah chiefs and Iranian intelligence officials had put Bulgaria on a list of nations propitious for developing plots against Western targets.’ “Their first attempt at killing Israeli tourists failed when a suspicious package was noticed on a bus carrying Israeli tourists from Turkey to Bulgaria in January 2012. Six months later Hezbollah operatives struck again, this time with devastating success in Burgas.” [emphasis added]In light of Iran's continued interest in carrying out terrorist attacks in Europe -- and using Hezbollah to carry out those attacks -- Europe in general, and France and Germany in particular, should take Hezbollah terrorist attacks more seriously and put them on the list of known terrorist groups as soon as possible.
it below. Thanks! 
Syria prepared to use chemical weapons against own people; military awaits final orders, US officials tell @nbcnews nbcnews.to/RCH3CzLate last week the Washington Post reported Britain, France claim Syria used chemical weapons:
— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) December 5, 2012
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There are literally hundreds of Internet sites, videos, preachers, books, and everything else you can think of that promote revolutionary Islamism. They tell Muslims that they should and must be revolutionaries and terrorists; they cite holy works to do so.The problem then is the lack of anything to counteract this:
DIESEL: (As Judge) Right!
Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care!
It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He's psychologic'ly disturbed!
ACTION
I'm disturbed!
JETS
We're disturbed, we're disturbed,
We're the most disturbed,
Like we're psychologic'ly disturbed.
DIESEL: (As Judge) In the opinion on this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.
ACTION: (Spoken) Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.
"Gee, Officer Krupke," West Side Story
Pity the media - spoiled by Middle East reporting where not used to having to retract inaccurate stories after report first thing they hear.
— daledamos (@daledamos) April 17, 2013
Armenia is a country facing many problems. Its ceasefire with neighboring Azerbaijan is rocky, and its economy is struggling. Now Armenia is hoping chess could help improve its fortunes. Armenian schools are introducing chess as a compulsory subject. The idea comes from chess Grandmaster Smbat Lputian, who founded a chess academy in Yerevan. The game is said to hone analytical skills and improve memory and concentration. Lputian says that could help children in other subjects too. And he's convinced that a country of chess players is capable of many achievements.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is threatening to end relief operations for Syrian refugees, who currently number 1.3 million and counting, if it doesn’t receive the necessary funds soon. The agency says it has received only a third of the $1 billion it needs through June, and only $400 million of the $1.5 billion donors pledged earlier this year. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned explicitly that absent more funds, UNHCR will have to stop distributing food to refugees in Lebanon next month. And Jordan, which has the largest population of Syrian refugees, is threatening to close its borders to new entrants unless more aid is forthcoming urgently.
While Assad has survived so far, he has not been able to quell the rebellion, the economy is in shambles, and so are most of the areas hit by the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are either refugees in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, or are homeless in their own localities. Never in its history has Syria been so isolated, both in the Arab and international domains. Never has a Syrian regime been so widely condemned in international forums. Nevertheless, Assad has managed to survive, not only because of his power structures but also, and mainly, because of the support of Russia, China, and most especially Iran and Hizbullah.
The strategists around Assad chose deliberately to give up territory inessential to the regime’s survival, mainly in the periphery near the borders with Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan. As a result, the Kurdish minority found itself for the first time in Syria’s modern history in a vast autonomous territory bordering Turkey, geographically connected to their brethren in Iraq and Iran, with a potential of establishing the much-dreamed-of Kurdish homeland.
Don't get stuck on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight. And if you don't understand, maybe you'll confuse it to the people. That's why we like follow-up questions.
Lieutenant General Honore to journalists during Hurricane Katrina
The museum features different units of Hezbollah, including its missile unit. Hezbollah’s increasing rocket and missile capabilities were some of the defining features of the 2006 war and continues to attract attention. In 2010, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates accused Iran and Syria of equipping Hezbollah with advanced weaponry. “We are at a point now where Hezbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world and this is obviously destabilizing for the whole region,” he said.More recently, the Lebanese magazine, NOW featured an article about the museum.
“I came here to see what the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon did to free my land and my village,” visitor Kamel Mouradi said, referring to Hezbollah, which was founded by the Iranian establishment.
Up the hill from the Abyss is a walkway that leads tourists through a dense forest. Visitors walk past a hidden cove where former Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayyed Abbas Moussawi would pray and encourage fighters. Life-size replicas of Hezbollah militants are spread throughout the woods – some carrying missiles, others firing them and another, kneeling down to pray.Not to be left out, Hamas now plans to build a museum devoted to its resistance, with Iranian help.
Over half of Egypt's caloric consumption comes from abroad, leaving the country vulnerable to international staple prices.
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