Ending days of uncertainty, the White House announced Sunday that President Barack Obama would be meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israeli prime minister's trip to Washington. An Obama administration official confirmed the two leaders would meet but had no immediate information about what would be on their agenda.
...Haaretz report said that the relations between Washington and Tel Aviv are in crisis. This is the conclusion that stems from the difficulty in arranging a meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama. The White House wanted Netanyahu to sweat before being granted an audience with the president, and wanted everyone to see him perspire.
The delays in finding a time to meet, and pushing it to a late hour - after the news programs on Israeli television - make Netanyahu look as if Obama threw him a bone. In such circumstances, it is no longer important what will be said at the meeting, and the extent to which there will be an attempt to present it as an achievement. The Israeli prime minister was humiliated before all.
read more @ al manar tv
2. Israeli envoy tells US Jews: push for Iran sanctions
Israel's Ambassador to the United States on Sunday told American Jewish groups that they must press for sanctions on Iran, and condemned the findings of a United Nations commission on the Gaza war, which he said helped to "cast widespread doubts about Israel's legitimacy."
Speaking at the opening ceremony for the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, Michael Oren said that while Israel “is in better geopolitical situation than ever before, it still faces threats, from members of the Palestinian leadership who do not want peace, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and their patron, Iran.”
“While Israel recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to a state”, he said, "we are hard pressed to find Palestinian leaders who say the same thing about us, that there is the Jewish people who have a historical right, an inalienable right to a state in the homeland." "Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza that were reciprocated not with peace but with thousands and thousands of rockets," he said.
"In addition to the terrorists who hide behind their own civilians while firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages, there is a radical Iranian regime that backs those terrorists and vows to wipe Israel off the map; an Iranian regime that is assiduously working to acquire the wherewithal for nuclear weapons."
read more @ al manar tv
3. Michael Oren and the Mossad
"By way of deception, thou shalt do war."
God gave certain commandments to Moses, among them numbers six and nine, specifically against the killing and the lying. The Mossad motto flies in the face of those commandments, but it's rude to notice tsk tsk.
Anyway, this handsome fellow here is Michael Oren, and Bibi just selected him (with Avigdor's help) to be Israel's new ambassador to Washington. Such a nice face. He looks intelligent and kind, no?, and he supports Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank. How very reasonable. I bet with a face like that and such a reasonable position to work with, he's going to be the talk of the town.
read more @ twelfth bough
4. and oh by the way, Israelis feel their immigration laws are too lax
Intense diplomatic efforts aimed at resurrecting peace talks notwithstanding, the issue currently transfixing Israelis is how to come to grips with a series of high-profile, deeply violent crimes committed by immigrants.
In the past week, the arrests of two émigrés accused of multiple murders have pressed Israelis to rethink national priorities and relatively lax immigration laws. In both cases, the alleged perpetrators had previous records in their countries of origin – Russia and the United States – one of them the subject of an open extradition request that Israel never fulfilled.
First came the news late last week of the arrest of Yaacov (Jack) Teitel, an immigrant from Florida who'd been investigated for murder in the past in the US. Mr. Teitel is accused of the murders of two Palestinians, two Israeli policemen, and a string of other hate crimes, including letter-bomb attacks that targeted left-wing intellectuals and Messianic Jews.
This week, police said Russian immigrant Damian Karlik had confessed to the massacre last month of six members of the same family, including two grandparents, two parents, and two children under the age of 3. But Karlik's lawyer now says he was forced into the confession after being tortured.
Is the door open too wide?The murders have not only shocked the nation, but also prompted Israelis to ask whether the seemingly wide-open doors to Israeli citizenship – available to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent – has made it too easy for those with a deviant past to find refuge here.
"I don't want Israel to be a shelter for criminals," says Meir Sheetrit, a member of Knesset from Kadima, the leading opposition party in Israel's parliament. "In principle, today the Law of Return states that every Jew has the right to come to Israel, without any checks of any sort." Applicants are asked to sign an affidavit affirming to a clean record, but in reality, he says, no checks are made.
pfft. too late. read more @ yahoo news
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