Vice President Mike Pence accused “the murderous revolutionary regime” of Iran of calling for “another Holocaust” during a two-day summit in Warsaw yesterday where the Trump administration is rallying support for action against the Islamic Republic.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stole the show during a Trump administration summit in Warsaw, Poland focused on “peace and security” in the Middle East when he said the meeting would be helpful “to advance the common interest of war with Iran.”
Israel is already a big loser in the fallout from the Khashoggi murder, which has set back the effort to work with Saudi Arabia to confront Iran and impose a peace deal on the Palestinians. Trump negotiator Jared Kushner has been hurt by his association with the Saudis, and even rightwingers are supporting sanctions against Israel’s new ally.
The Times’s Max Fisher writes a long article rationalizing the indifference of Western elites to the Yemeni slaughter by Saudi Arabia by saying that it’s much easier to relate to the death of one person, Jamal Khashoggi. Yes except that the Times had no problem relating to faceless victims when it’s Putin and Assad. Thus is propaganda justified.
When it came out that an Israeli security company was digging up dirt on Obama officials in order to discredit the Iran deal, you’d think that fingers would be pointed at Netanyahu, who’s been meddling in our foreign policy for years. No, the press can’t connect the dots. It treats the tale as another instance of Trump being corrupted.
Dangerous rumblings of war continue in the Mideast, the day after Israeli warplanes and surface-to-surface…
There are ominous signs that Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi Crown Prince are pushing for a wider war in the Mideast. In a dangerous escalation, Israel last night attacked an Iranian military base near Syria’s capital, Damascus, using both warplanes and surface-to-surface missiles.
The Korean peninsula may not actually be the most dangerous place in the world. Take a 32-year-old Saudi prince, intoxicated by having more real power than possibly anyone else in the Kingdom’s history, add the opportunistic Benjamin Netanyahu, who is anxious to act decisively to ward off the growing political threat from the Israeli far right, mix in the volatile, ignorant Donald Trump — and you have the makings of a regional cataclysm.
Israel backed al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria in an effort to weaken Bashar al-Assad and Iran. The effort has failed and now Israel and Saudi Arabia are turning their attention to Lebanon where two mysterious events over the past week indicate that Hezbollah may be in Israel’s sights.
Ahmad Kabariti reports from Gaza on how the unfolding crisis in the Gulf around Qatar could move Hamas closer to Iran, or cripple the group in its power struggle with the Palestinian Authority.