Last night Chris Matthews kept saying that WikiLeaks shows that the Arab leaders want us to “take out” the Iranian menace. And Jim Zogby was on, along with a docile Richard Engel, and he patiently but forcefully said, No, an Israeli strike on Iran or an American strike on Iran would be “devastating” across the region. Then holding the air, Zogby said that what the Arab leaders care about is the Israel/Palestine issue. Matthews had nothing to say. But twas to his credit that Zogby was on there. From Jeff Morley:
Thomas Joscelyn of the Weekly Standard successfully undermines President’ Obama’s claim that Guantanamo is Al Qaeda’s ‘Number One Recruitment Tool.’…
Joscelyn notes that Guantanamo has been rarely mentioned 34 messages and interviews delivered by top al Qaeda leaders since January 2009. The translations were published online by the NEFA Foundation, a non-profit that does research on global jihadists….
Joscelyn’s keyword analysis finds that Al-Qaeda’s ‘Number One Recruitment Tool’ is the Zionist Occupation of Palestinian. Keywords associated with the issue (”Israel,” “Zionist,” “Gaza,” “Jews,” “Palestinian” etc) far outnumber references to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iraq is a distant fourth, and Guantanamo is rarely talked about. So Obama’s claim is exaggerated at best, and perhaps not true at all.
Joscelyn is so busy thumbing his nose at the president that he fails to notice his study usefully refutes The Lobby’s talking point, honed by convicted deceiver Elliot Abrams of the decadent Council on Foreign Relations, that the U.S. diplomats should not focus on Palestine settlements, because the issue really isn’t that important. To the contrary, the Weekly Standard has confirmed that al- Qaeda thinks the best way to recruit suicide bombers to kill Americans (like Elliot Abrams and myself) is to call Muslim attention to the Zionist siege of the Palestinians.
