Now I hate to rain on anyone’s parade following the excellent news of the vote taking Palestine from being classified as a “non-member observer entity” to a “non-member observer state”. It’s very good news as it means that Palestine can sign treaties and join such bodies as the International Criminal Court (ICC). But perhaps some parade ground raining is in order before people make unwarranted assumptions and statements about what the court is and what it can and cannot do.

In the US press, a big story on the Middle East today is another ignorant comment by the President of Iran, who holds very little power in the Islamic Republic relative to the Supreme Leader. But the really big story comes out of Israel, where Defense Minister Ehud Barak called for a settlement pullout from the West Bank, another dramatic development in his evolution away from the Likudnik faction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches/videos on current issues that may be of interest.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current issues that may be of interest.

But Mitt being Mitt, he couldn’t just grab his check from orange-haired grotesque Sheldon Adelson (the Jewish Trump) and skip town without stopping to point out that Jews are good with money while people held prisoner in enormous open air concentration camps are not. I mean, what’s up with that?

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current issues that may be of interest.

In midsummer 2006, while my wife and kids were on our yearly trip down to Seattle, to be with our extended Norwegian-Jewish-Cambodian-Icelandic-Swedish-Texan family, the so-called Israel-Hezbollah War was in full rage. My brother-in-law and I were watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN, as he interviewed one pro-Israel talking head expert after another, describing the war not just from the Israeli point of view, but from a right-wing Israeli standpoint.

After the program, he lamented that the voice for Israel in the American media, in public affairs and in politics is almost always from a perspective much further from the right than it should be to reflect the views of the average Israeli, or those of the American Jewish community. He longed for a new organization, based from the positions of moderates, to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish pro-Israel groups.

“But,” Lee lamented, “that’ll never happen.”

Some say it has now happened.