Islamist rioters storm multinational peacekeeping force base in Sinai
(JNS.org) Amid the recent wave of riots and angry protests across the Muslim world over a film portraying the Prophet Muhammad in a negative light, dozens of Salafist Islamist gunmen stormed a Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) base in Al-Jora in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, leaving four officers wounded in an exchange of gunfire, as well as causing heavy damage to the base, Israel Hayom reported.
Some 1,500 MFO personnel, among them Americans and Canadians charged with implementing the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt serve at the base, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Israeli border.
The attackers tore down the international peacekeeping force’s flags from the guard posts, raising black flags that symbolize the militant Islamic groups operating in Sinai, while yelling “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is great”) and “Where are all the Muslims to avenge the humiliation of our sacred prophet?”
According to reports from Egypt on Saturday, at least four MFO officers were wounded in the attack. Two of the wounded were evacuated to a hospital in the nearby town of Sheikh Zuweid. Dozens of Egyptian army tanks and armored personnel carriers stationed in northern Sinai were called to the base to disperse Bedouin protesters who had gathered there following the attack. The Egyptian military forces were expected to remain near the base to ensure its security.
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El Al may stop flying to Cairo as Egypt ties deteriorate
(JNS.org) Israel’s largest airliner, El Al, is considering canceling its Tel Aviv-Cairo route to cut costs, Israel Hayom reported Sunday, citing Israel Radio.
According to the Israel Radio report, company CEO Eliezer Shkedi recently wrote to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman informing him that the company, which is privately owned but is considered Israel’s national carrier, considers the route unprofitable, in part because of the high security guidelines that must be followed when flying in and out of an Arab capital. By law, El Al must abide by the Israel Security Agency’s directives even on foreign soil, forcing it to manage its own airport screening apparatus and baggage handling system.
A Foreign Ministry official told Israel Radio that if El Al removed Cairo from its list of destinations, the move could imperil the already fragile peace accord between Israel and the most populous Arab state, which has governed bilateral relations since 1979.
“Any time you roll back something, you deal an irreversible blow to the normalized relations between the two countries,” one diplomat told the online news portal NRG on Sunday.
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Panetta: Israel uses red lines ‘to put people in a corner’
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Against the backdrop of mounting tensions between Israel and the U.S. over Iran’s controversial nuclear program, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls to set “clear red lines,” telling Foreign Policy magazine that red lines were “the kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.’
Earlier this month, Netanyahu urged the American administration to set clear red lines beyond which the U.S. would commit to take military action to stop Iran’s nuclear progress. Netanyahu called the Iranian leadership “a cruel regime that is barreling ahead with its nuclear program because it doesn’t see any clear red lines from the international community.”
“The fact is that presidents of the United States, prime ministers of Israel or any other country—leaders of these countries don’t have a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions,” Panetta told Foreign Policy. “What they have are facts that are presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind of action is needed to be taken in order to deal with that situation. That’s the real world.”
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Obama tells rabbis: ‘No leader wants to tie his hands’ by setting red lines, deadlines
(JNS.org) Speaking on a pre-Rosh Hashanah conference call with 1,200 rabbis on Sept. 14, U.S. President Barack Obama echoed what other administration officials have been saying of late: America will not set deadlines or red lines for taking military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
Obama told rabbis from across the denominational spectrum that “no leader wants to tie his hands” by setting such conditions. His statement comes after both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland made similar comments earlier the same week.
“No leader,” however, does not seem to include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently chided the U.S. and other countries for having an attitude of “wait, there’s still time” when it comes to Iran.
“Wait until when?” Netanyahu asked. “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”
Additionally, Netanyahu emphasized his differences with Obama on the Iran issue by saying “leadership is tested when it keeps to its goals even when friends disagree and even when they are the best of friends.”
But Obama—again echoing the recent comments of other administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden—told the rabbis that there is “no daylight between Israel and U.S. positions” on Iran.
There may come a time for military action against Iran, the president said, but that time will not come “until we have exhausted all options.” There remains “time and space for diplomacy” to solve the Iranian threat, he added.
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Israel’s team finalizes roster for World Baseball Classic
(JNS.org) Israel has finalized its 28-man roster for the upcoming World Baseball Classic (WBC), headlined by former Major League Baseball (MLB) outfielders Shawn Green and Gabe Kapler.
Second baseman Josh Satin, currently part of the New York Mets’ minor league system, is the team’s only other player with MLB experience, “Team Israel” said in a Sept. 14 press release. Green and Kapler are both player/coaches, and former MLB catcher Brad Ausmus will manage the squad.
Israel—whose first game is against South Africa on Sept. 19—is among 16 countries participating in the qualifying stage of the international tournament, with the top four advancing to the WBC in March 2013.
“[Israel’s Word Baseball Classic team] impacts the North American and Israeli Jewish communities more than the athletes themselves,” Kapler told JNS.org last year. “Those people are going to be psyched. It’s worth dreaming about what could happen because this creates momentum and excitement, which in turn gets more people who want to participate [in the Israeli team’s efforts].”
This is Israel’s first WBC qualifier. The team is mainly comprised of American-born Jewish players who are allowed to compete because they can claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Three of the team’s 28 players were born in Israel—Shlomo Lipetz, Alon Leichman and Dan Rothem—and 10 are from the Los Angeles area.
While baseball was introduced to Israel in 1927, it has been slow to catch on. Currently, between 1,000 and 3,000 Israelis play in organized baseball or softball leagues, according to the Times of Israel. A number of attempts have been made to grow the sport in the Jewish state, including the Israel Baseball League (IBL), an experiment that ended after one year in 2007.
If Israel advances past the qualifying round, several current Jewish MLB stars may join the team, including Chicago White Sox third baseman Kevin Youkilis, Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun, and Texas Rangers second baseman Ian Kinsler. Besides South Africa, France and Spain are in Israel’s qualifying round bracket.
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Palestinians have launched 9,000 rockets at Israel since Gaza pullout
(JNS.org) In the August 2005 Gaza disengagement, nearly 10,000 Jews were forced to vacate their Gaza homes. However, in the years since that major political move by the Israeli government, Palestinian terror organizations have launched more than 9,000 rockets at nearby Israeli cities.
“Seven years ago today we disengaged from the Gaza Strip,” an IDF Spokesperson said on Sept. 13 in a Facebook post, according to Israel National News. The post included a poster depicting two Gaza terrorists planning to launch a missile at Israel.
“Share to show the world Israel’s true neighbors. Share this, because mainstream media won’t,” he also posted.
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UK chief rabbi says Dawkins’s atheist philosophy is anti-Jewish
(JNS.org) Atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins denied making an anti-Semitic remark in his book The God Delusion after he was accused of that by Lord Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the British Orthodox synagogues, during an hour-long debate at a BBC religion and ethics festival at Salford’s MediaCityUK.
Sacks’s complaint was about a passage in Dawkins’s book in which he states that the God of the Old Testament is the “most unpleasant character in all fiction.”
“There are Christian atheists and Jewish atheists, you read the Bible in a Christian way. Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament—it has to because it says ‘we’ve gone one better, we have a New Testament,” Sacks said on the program, according to the Telegraph. “So you come prejudiced against what you call the Old Testament and that’s why I did not read the opening to chapter two in your book as a joke, I read it as a profoundly anti-Semitic passage,” he added.
Dawkins refuted the claim as “ridiculous,” but also stated that the moral values presented by the God of the Old Testament were “very deplorable indeed – all that stuff about slaughtering the Amalekites,” according to the Jewish Chronicle. Later in the debate, Lord Sacks conceded that Dawkins was a “really nice guy” and that he “was not concerned that Richard is anti-Semitic at all, but using an anti-Semitic stereotype, which has been a strand through Christian reading of the Bible through the Middle Ages. [It] really terrifies me to see the power of these stereotypes into atheism today.”
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Preceding provided by JNS.org and reprinted with permission