WASHINGTON – From accolades like “compelling” to accusations like “Auschwitz borders” to radio silence, to label the Jewish response to President Obama’s speech on Middle East policy as diverse understates matters.
The very breadth of the Middle East policy speech — 5,600 words and covering the entire Middle East and decades of history — helps explain the wildly divergent responses from Jewish groups and opinion shapers, even among some who are otherwise often on the same page.
One could as easily pick out points for Israel — slamming the Palestinian Authority’s pact with Hamas as well as its bid for unilateral statehood — as one could the demerits — for many, the most explicit endorsement of the pre-1967 lines as the basis for future borders by any American president.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution calling on the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone report.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) initiated the resolution last week after Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, retracted a key conclusion of the U.N. report he helped author on the 2009 Gaza war -- that Israel had targeted civilians as a policy.
WASHINGTON – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would launch an international campaign to cancel the Goldstone Report after its author, ex-South African Judge Richard Goldstone, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post that Israel did not intentionally target civilians as a policy during the Gaza War, withdrawing a critical allegation in the report.
Netanyahu said he had asked his security adviser, Ya’akov Amidror, to establish a committee focused on “minimizing the damage caused” by the report.
WASHINGTON – The 8th District in southern Arizona represented by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords comprises liberal Tucson and its rural hinterlands, which means moderation is a must. But it also means that spirits and tensions run high.
Giffords’ office in Tucson was ransacked in March following her vote for health care reform — a vote the Democrat told reporters that she would cast even if it meant her career. She refused to be cowed, but she also took aim at the hyped rhetoric. She cast the back-and-forth as part of the democratic process.
WASHINGTON – The event was typical Gabrielle Giffords: no barriers, all comers — Democrats, Republicans and independents welcome to talk about what was on their minds and in their hearts.
While she was deep in a conversation with an older couple about health care — the issue for which she was willing to risk her career — a gunman strode up to the Arizona congresswoman and shot her point blank in the head.
The critical wounding Jan. 8 of Giffords and the slaughter of six people standing near her — including a federal judge, her chief of community outreach and a 9-year-old girl interested in politics — brought to a screeching halt the easy, open ambience that typified Giffords’ politics, friends and associates said.
WASHINGTON – Jewish leaders expressed outrage at an attack by Glenn Beck on George Soros’ World War II childhood.
Beck, the Fox News Channel provocateur, is running a series this week on his radio and TV shows portraying Soros, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist, as attempting to control the U.S. economy.
In his radio show Wednesday, Beck revived an unfounded claim that Soros as a child in Hungary helped ship Jews to death camps.
“And George Soros used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off,” Beck said. “And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening.
Israel and the U.S. close ranks on Iran as crucial meetings near
WASHINGTON – March 5 is shaping up to be a crucial day in the effort to rein in Iran’s nuclear program.
In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will convene to consider its inspectors’ latest report on Iran’s nuclear program. The last such report came closer than ever to indicting the Iranian regime for making weapons, and it helped spur stronger international sanctions against Tehran.
Several hours later, in Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will deliver a speech to an American Israel Public Affairs policy conference about what should happen next with Iran. Either before or after the AIPAC meeting, Netanyahu likely will meet with President Barack Obama to discuss Iran options.
WASHINGTON – When America’s top intelligence official said that Iran’s regime is considering attacks on U.S. soil, he cited a single incident and qualified the assessment with a “probably.”
Intelligence and law enforcement experts, however, say that the Jan. 31 warning by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, was likely based on more than the evidence he cited.
“I would be surprised to learn a statement like that was not backed up by intelligence,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
WASHINGTON – Birth control is rapidly gaining steam as an election-year wedge issue, with Jewish advocates lobbying out front and behind the scenes in what is shaping up as a clash between calls for individual freedom and religious liberty.
Several Jewish groups and lawmakers played a behind-the-scenes role in the latest flashpoint: last month’s order by the Obama administration requiring most religious institutions — other than houses of worship — to include contraceptives in health care coverage for their employees. The order has been strongly criticized by the Republican presidential front-runners, who portray it as proof that the Obama administration is hostile to religious communities.
WASHINGTON – In one corner was the Center for American Progress, or CAP, arguably Washington’s leading liberal think tank with reportedly considerable clout with President Barack Obama’s White House. In the other was Josh Block, a pugnacious former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who aggressively pushed the notion to reporters that CAP has an Israel problem.
Nearly two months after their dispute made headlines, both parties have been left bloodied — and some in the pro-Israel community say they wish the issue had never played out in so public a way.
