Eideard

 
Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

…There is no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes…

Not that fact has the slightest effect on the ideology of American chickenhawks.

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The U.S. Secret Service is looking into a controversial column by an Atlanta Jewish newspaper publisher that mulled the assassination of an American president.

Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote a January 13 column about the threat of Iran to Israel. He posed three options for the Jewish state to counter the Iranian regime.

One of them called for a “hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence.”

“Give the go-ahead for U.S. based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

U.S. Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie told CNN Saturday, “We are aware of it. We are taking the appropriate investigative steps…”

“The suggestion by anyone, in this case a Jewish newspaper publisher, that Israel should consider assassinating President Obama is shocking beyond belief,” said Dov Wilker, director of the American Jewish Committee in Atlanta.

“While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s [eventual] apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?” said Wilker. “Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”

The White House declined to comment Saturday on the column.

I guess this proves that fundamentalists needn’t be Christians to be nutballs.

To the dismay of Israeli ice cream lovers, Haagen-Dazs may soon be disappearing from Israeli supermarket shelves following an announcement from the Chief Rabbinate banning the product.

A notice issued last week by the kashrut, a rabbinical body that sets Jewish dietary law, states that because Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made with real milk it is not suitable for Jewish consumers.

According to Talmudic law, milk produced by non-Jews can only be consumed if it is produced under Jewish supervision to ensure it has not been contaminated with milk from non – kosher animals. There is thought to be less chance of contamination with powdered milk.

As long as Haagen Dazs continues to use real milk, it will be off the menu for Jewish consumers. Selling the ice cream in kosher stores and restaurants also constitutes “a severe infringement of kashrut procedures”…

Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal has already pulled the product off the shelves in all 270 of its stores. On Sunday a Shufersal representative confirmed they would not be selling the ice cream for the foreseeable future.

General Mills, which markets Haagen-Dazs in Israel, has hit back claiming its product has been sold in Israel and enjoyed by Jewish consumers across the world for years bearing kosher certification from the Orthodox Union in the US.

Why the ban has been issued now remains unclear. The rabbinate claim their notice about Haagen Dazs has been issued several times previously but gone unheeded, recommending Israelis turn to home-made kosher ice creams to fill the gap.

The crap regulation of public life by theocrats is as foolish and backwards in Israel as India, America as Afghanistan. Dedicating oversight of food purity to a religious circle-jerk is absurd. Bowing to so-called standards devised centuries ago and reinterpreted to satisfy a religion’s control rather than safety and nutrition based on science and reality – is absurd, inexcusable.

The historic meaning of “fool” is sanctified by a population that lets itself be led around by the nose by such foolishness.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators look at a boy (low L) wearing a cloth cap and a yellow Star of David inscribed with “Jude”, Jew, in German, sewn on his jacket as he raises his hands during a protest in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighbourhood December 31, 2011. The demonstrators caused outrage on Sunday by dressing children as Holocaust victims to protest against what they see as persecution of devout Jews seeking gender separation in Israel.

Not much different from priests equating gay rights parades as equivalent to KKK marches.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped up pledges to curb Jewish zealotry in Israel on Sunday after an 8-year-old girl complained of being menaced by ultra-Orthodox men who deemed her dress immodest.

While his conservative government insists such incidents are fringe phenomena in the mostly secular country, Netanyahu’s repeated announcements on the matter reflected concern about widening religious and political schisms…

Netanyahu said he had ordered law enforcement authorities to crack down on “whoever spits, whoever lifts a hand (in violence), whoever harasses” and to remove street signs segregating men from women in some ultra-Orthodox districts.

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Dangerous uppity woman, Tanya Rosenblit

When Tanya Rosenblit boarded an inter-city bus bound for Jerusalem from her native Ashdod Friday morning, she did not anticipate the storm it would spark within Israel. The public bus she boarded normally carries ultra-Orthodox passengers and travels to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem.

As a matter of custom women sit in the back portion of the bus, because the ultra-Orthodox avoid mingling of the sexes according to their beliefs. She was the first passenger that morning on the bus and took a seat behind the driver. As the bus took on more passengers along its route, an ultra-orthodox man demanded she should sit in the back of the bus as is the custom on that route.

“I heard him call me ‘Shikse,’” Rosenblit wrote on her Facebook page, referencing a Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman. “He demanded I sit in the back of the bus, because Jewish men couldn’t sit behind women (!!!). I refused…”

An argument ensued and ultimately the bus driver called the police to intervene…The responding police officer tried to talk to everyone and calm things down. Rosenblit said he asked if she was willing to show respect for the objectors and move to the back of the bus. She refused and, after a 30-minute delay, the bus moved on to Jerusalem with her sitting up front…

A spokesman for Egged, the transportation company that runs the bus line, told CNN in a statement that it “does not deal with seating arrangements” on its buses and that “even if there are population groups that prefer to sit separately due to their beliefs, it is a voluntary choice and does not bind the other passengers.”

Rosenblit describes herself as secular and said she did not ride the bus looking for a confrontation…

“It is wrong to use religion as an excuse to eliminate people’s basic rights: the right for freedom and the right for dignity.”

I couldn’t agree more. One more great reason to separate civil law and the operation of a state or nation from religion.

“Don’t eat the knishes!”
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

French President Nicolas Sarkozy branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a liar” in a private conversation with President Barack Obama that was accidentally broadcast to journalists during last week’s G20 summit in Cannes.

“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter…

The conversation was not initially reported by the small group of journalists who overheard it because it was considered private and off-the-record. But the comments have since emerged on French websites and can be confirmed by Reuters…

Obama and Netanyahu have had a rocky relationship as U.S. efforts to broker a Middle East peace deal have foundered, with the U.S. president openly criticizing Jewish settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories.

It was unclear why exactly Sarkozy had criticized Netanyahu. However, European diplomats have largely blamed Israel for the breakdown in peace talks and have expressed anger over Netanyahu’s approval of large-scale settlement building.

During their bilateral meeting on November 3, on the sidelines of the Cannes summit, Obama criticized Sarkozy’s surprise decision to vote in favor of a Palestinian request for membership of the U.N. cultural heritage agency UNESCO…

The October 31 UNESCO vote marked a success for the Palestinians in their broader thrust for recognition as a sovereign state in the U.N. system — a unilateral initiative fiercely opposed by Israel and the United States.

Don’t let democracy, sovereignty, history get in the way of the relationship between a global imperial power and a regional hitman. Power, greed, are still the signal deciders in American foreign power. Choosing to work closely with a liar like Netanyahu is not a new choice.

Leave it up to Fibber McGee and Molly
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

President Hu Jintao of China will arrive in Cannes, France, this week pondering a plea from Europe for tens of billions of dollars to help the continent get out of its debt crisis. And President Obama will arrive with a smile, some hearty handshakes, and his own plea: that Greece get its act together and that Europe fix its economic ills, which he has called one of the biggest drags on the United States’ own ailing economy…

The last few months may well end up being an inflection point, in which the United States, though easily still the world’s leading power, no longer has quite the responsibility or the burden it once did. The pattern has been evident in the Arab Spring, with the American military playing mostly a supporting role in Libya, and now in the European financial crisis, with Asian money coming to aid the Europeans…A significant difference in policy between Obama and traditional Cold Warriors in both of the TweedleDeeDum parties.

In many ways, the situation is a natural evolution of the campaign promises made by Mr. Obama in 2008, when he vowed to turn away from the Bush administration’s more unilateral approach.

As president, Mr. Obama is now overseeing the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and has emphasized multilateral diplomacy in all its messy forms. He refused to consider American intervention in Libya until the United Nations approved a resolution supporting it, and then he stepped back and allowed France and Britain to take the lead though American military help remained essential…We only have about 174 countries to go to withdraw from the rest of our foreign military bases.

Mr. Obama’s backers say that he is simply acknowledging reality and developing a clear-eyed strategy for what the United States can and cannot do and that he ultimately may prove right in diagnosing Europe’s economic problems and its need to take difficult steps to fix them…

Arriving in Cannes on Thursday, Mr. Obama will be trying to balance providing that leadership while not taking on any of the additional burden — particularly financial — that such leadership often requires…

But for all the acceptance that the United States will no longer be the world’s policeman and financier, the emerging strategy carries risks…

The American military remains the world’s most formidable, and the most likely to be called on to back American allies like Israel, Japan and South Korea.

Of course, no one expects South Korea or Japan to invade one of their neighbors – and start a war.

UNESCO delegates stand and cheer after approving Palestinian membership
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Palestine has become a full member of the UN cultural and educational agency in a move that the United States and other opponents say could harm renewed Middle East peace efforts.

The US had threatened to withhold roughly $80 million in annual funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) if it approved Palestinian membership. The United States provides about 22% of Unesco’s funding.

Which is about how the average mafia functions. Extortion doesn’t make for lasting politics.

Huge cheers went up in Unesco after delegates approved the membership by 107 votes to 14 with 52 abstentions. Eighty-one votes were needed for approval in a hall with 173 Unesco member delegations present.

“Long live Palestine!” shouted one delegate, in French, at the unusually tense and dramatic meeting of Unesco’s general conference.

While the vote has large symbolic meaning, the issues of borders of an eventual Palestinian state, security troubles and other disputes that have thwarted Middle East peace for decades remain unresolved.

Palestinian officials are seeking full membership in the United Nations, but that effort is still under examination and the US has said it will veto it unless there is a peace deal with Israel. Given that, the Palestinians separately sought membership at Paris-based Unesco and other UN bodies…

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, last week called Unesco’s deliberation “inexplicable”, saying discussion of Palestinian membership of international organisations could not replace negotiations with Israel as a fast track towards Palestinian independence.

There is no “fast track” towards Palestinian independence if you think that honorable and ethical negotiations will be forthcoming from Israel’s ruling politicians. They hold power from a commitment to manifest destiny and lebensraum.

History and historic decisions aren’t resolved in press releases from the State Department. Especially those offered in support of imperial occupying armies.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat…

What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley…“The copycatting is what I worry about most…”

Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic combat…

“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”

Radio-controlled model airplanes – nowadays – aren’t a whole boatload away from capabilities of our military drones. They may be limited to smaller, lighter payloads. That doesn’t limit the inventiveness of terrorists who design underwear bombs. And no more reliance on suicide volunteers who may get nervous when the time comes to go BOOM!

But, Uncle Sugar presumes that only American genius can design these death-goodies. Just as our government thinks we’re above international law on torture, financing breakaway provinces, freedom fighters headquartered in foreign yacht clubs – our arrogance usually comes back to bite us on the butt.