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Prepared for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
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In-Depth Issues:
Explosives Haul Missing in Gaza - Tim Franks (BBC News)
Egyptian Army, Air Force Conduct Sinai War Games (AP/International Herald Tribune)
Sponsors Dump Dubai Open Over Treatment of Israeli Player (AFP/Fox Sports)
Dalai Lama: Non-Violence Cannot Tackle Terrorism (Press Trust of India)
Layoffs in Israel Hit Record High in January - Vered Lee (Ha'aretz)
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
At a weekend meeting in Istanbul, 200 religious scholars and clerics met with senior Hamas officials to plot a new jihad against Israel centered on Gaza. The choice of Turkey was significant. As one organizer put it: "During the past 100 years relations have been strained but Palestine has brought us together." Many delegates spoke appreciatively of the protest by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the conference, dubbed the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, Saudi religious scholar Mohsen al-Awajy and other delegates repeatedly referred to the Gaza war as "a victory." "Gaza gives us power, it solves our differences. We are all now in a unified front against Zionism," he said. (BBC News) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday in Tokyo that the Obama administration will make "a concerted effort" to restore the image of the U.S. in the Islamic world and will seek to "enlist the help of Muslims around the world against the extremists." Clinton's remarks came in response to a question about terrorism causing people in the U.S. to have anti-Muslim "prejudice," a term she rejected forcefully. Clinton on Wednesday will travel to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country. (Washington Post) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Syria is building a chemical weapons production facility in the country's northwest, satellite images obtained by the defense analyst group Jane's reveal. The Al-Safir facility is located at a missile base that holds a significant part of Syria's long-range Scud D ballistic missiles. (Jerusalem Post) Senior White House and State Department officials held a conference call with American Jewish leaders Monday to reassure them over the administration's decision to participate in preliminary discussions about the UN's World Conference Against Racism conference in Geneva this April. Jewish leaders were told that Washington's decision to participate in the conference was being coordinated with the Israeli government, and that the U.S. presence was an effort to change the direction of the conference. The U.S. officials said that they were "under no illusions" about the nature of the gathering, which featured anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic material in its first incarnation held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. (Jerusalem Post) Jordan has decided to postpone its mission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi reported Wednesday. Earlier this week, the chairman of the Jordanian Parliament's Legal Committee, Mubarak Abu Yameen al-Abadi, announced his country would pursue legal action against Israeli officials for alleged war crimes committed during Israel's military operation in Gaza. Israeli Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter said Tuesday: "There is no greater hypocrisy than a country that just 39 years ago, during 1970s Black September, murdered 10,000 of its Palestinian residents, dealing with international crimes today....Jordan will not be the one to teach Israel about the ethics of warfare." (Ynet News) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):
The hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, campuses, newspapers, radios and televisions is a discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in - the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, modernity of outlook, tolerance, and truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue. But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians, England has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. What do we think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps. Don't mistake me: every Palestinian killed in Gaza is a Palestinian too many, but there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed, between Gaza and Warsaw. Berating Jews with their own history is the latest species of Holocaust denial. Anyone with scant knowledge of the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations would assume that Jews descended on the country as from a clear blue sky; that they had no prior association with the land other than in religious fantasy and through some scarce remembered genealogical affiliation. They make little or nothing of the Jews' unbroken connection with the country going back to the Arab conquest more than a thousand years before, the piety felt for the land, or the waves of idealistic immigration which long predated the post-Holocaust influx. (Independent-UK) See also UK Pledges to Combat Anti-Semitism - Jonny Paul With the opening of a London conference on combating anti-Semitism organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA), the British government has reaffirmed its determination to confront anti-Semitism and commitment toward stamping it out as a global threat. (Jerusalem Post) See also Anti-Semitism at Highest Level Since WWII, Conference Hears (Reuters) The nine Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 - India's 9/11 - gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews - are still in the morgue because the leadership of India's Muslim community is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai. "People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim," said Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the Muslim Jama Masjid Trust which runs the cemetery. M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal, explained: "Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is 'fasad.' Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis." The in-your-face defiance of Islamist terrorists by Mumbai's Muslims stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan, but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise. The only effective way to stop this trend is for "the village" - the Muslim community itself - to say "no more"; for the culture and faith community to delegitimize this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently. India's Muslims, the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers. (New York Times) Observations: The Future of the Two-State Solution - Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland (Institute for Contemporary Affairs-Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
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