Today's blog notes from international media on events pertaining to the Middle East

Friday, 12 March

'They need to be liberated from their God'

These are all dangerous words. Of the threats issued to his life by Islamists, he says, "That's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm OK with it, I'm not afraid. . . . Palestinians have reason to kill me. Some Israelis may want to kill me. My goal is not to defeat my enemy. It is to win over my enemy."

Scion of Hamas

Meet Mosab Hassan Yousef, a genuine Palestinian freedom fighter. He was raised to become a leader of the terrorist group Hamas--strict Muslims dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But the horrors he saw them inflicting on their own people led him to become an informant within Hamas for the Israeli security service Shin Bet. Risking death had he been found out, he worked for years to save innocent lives, as he puts it--both Israeli and Palestinian.

Khaled Abu Toameh: PA puts off honoring Coastal Road Massacre leader

The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday that it has postponed the inauguration of a square named after Dalal Mughrabi, the Fatah woman who led the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 37 Israeli civilians and an American photographer were killed and 71 people were wounded.

Palestinians honor a figure reviled in Israel as a terrorist

Dozens of Palestinian students from the youth division of Fatah, the mainstream party led by President Mahmoud Abbas, gathered here on Thursday to dedicate a public square to the memory of a woman who in 1978 helped carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history.

Michael Young: Iraqis are better off today. Live with it!

It may be worth posing the question, days after the end of the Iraqi elections, whether anyone might be willing to admit that the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was, after all, a good idea. The question is loaded, the possible answers, for and against, manifold, and the caveats infinite. But I will dare an answer: Yes, Iraq is better off today than it was under Saddam, and you have George W. Bush to thank.

. . . So thank you Bush, but let’s move to the more interesting story: Iraq is emerging as a pluralistic country in its own right. Its democracy remains dysfunctional; its elections were marred by irregularities and more violence than was initially admitted; and there is no doubt that the specter of sectarian discord still hovers over Iraqi lives. Yet, those dynamics, for better or worse, are Iraqi dynamics, not American ones, with Washington discovering that it has limited latitude to shape outcomes in Baghdad.  

Maliki takes slender lead over rivals

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki took a slender lead over his rivals Friday, preliminary results from the country’s election showed, as oppositions blocs alleged blatant fraud.

Iraq election: Nuri al-Maliki in close fight with rival

Five days after the election, Mr Maliki and Mr Allawi, both Shias, have emerged nationally as the main candidates for the post of prime minister, with initial results from four of Iraq's 18 provinces putting their two blocs in the lead.

Britain says China won't risk isolation over Iran

"China has emphasised a need for engagement and diplomacy and wants to see the situation resolved soon. We have seen tactical differences in recent weeks but it's a fluid discussion. China has a lot to lose with nuclear proliferation in an unstable region," he said.

‘Post’ story leads to shake-up at German-Iran business group

A Jerusalem Post article in late January covering the German-Emirati Joint Council for Industry and Commerce as a conduit for legal and illegal trade with Iran played a role in an administrative shake-up at the business group, according to a report in the daily Die Welt.

Caroline Glick's Column One: The march of the Red-Green brigad

The Red-Green alliance is on the march. On Wednesday, the leftist-controlled European Parliament in Strasbourg passed a resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report. That report, it will be recalled, denies Israel’s right to self-defense by alleging that Israel’s actions to defend itself from illegal Palestinian aggression during the course of Operation Cast Lead were war crimes.

. . . Israel is not the only target of the Red-Green alliance. Its operations span the globe. Sometimes, as in the case of the Goldstone Report, the Left leads the charge. Sometimes, as with the Hamas-led missile offensive against Israel that preceded Cast Lead, the jihadists move first.

IAF bombs Gaza tunnel, arms factory

Following a Kassam rocket attack on southern Israel, the IAF bombed targets in the Gaza Strip overnight Thursday, hitting an arms smuggling tunnel in Rafah and a weapons factory in Khan Yunis.

MEMRI: Hamas sermon in Gaza on Al-Aqsa TV: Rome will be conquered by Islam

The following are excerpts from a Friday sermon delivered in the Gaza Strip, which aired on Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV on March 5, 2010

British journalist Paul Martin freed by Hamas

Hamas officials had accused Paul Martin of spying for Israel. He was the first Western journalist to be arrested by Hamas. “I was never accused of any crime, although I was interrogated for something which it was blatantly impossible for me to have done,” Mr Martin said upon his release. “I think eventually it was realised that there was no case against me, but it took a long time for extremely suspicious security people to absorb this message.”

Michael Young: What has Gaza gained since Hamas won four years ago?

As Israel and the Palestinian Authority prepare to resume indirect talks, through American mediation, some are insisting that the Islamist movement Hamas must be brought into the process. Hamas, the argument goes, is capable of obstructing progress in negotiations, so that only by engaging the group can the United States and the international community avoid such an outcome. The rationale is naive.

Bold new Gaza play skewers Fateh and Hamas

A new play has shocked audiences in the Gaza Strip by shouting out what many in the Hamas-ruled territory mutter behind closed doors - that Palestinian politicians are a bunch of crooks.

Not by force alone

The first thing one notices is the height: The scores of men in A-Sharta al Hasa, the elite Palestinian Special Police unit, are all exceptionally tall. Indeed, only young men over 1.75 meters in height are accepted to the unit.

There is a reason Israel doesn't roll over when Mahmoud Abbas bats his eyelashes

Almost everyone — Israeli and Palestinian alike — admits in private that with Hamas busy stock-piling Iranian weapons and tightening its law enforcement and Sharia noose on the citizens of the Gaza Strip, there was little chance either side’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas or Bibi Netanyahu, would commit to terms that change the status quo significantly.  Both, in their own way, are quite preoccupied with very large existential threats.  Whether a border is moved a few miles to the east or west seems quite trivial. A permanent status agreement is merely a trophy the Obama-ites would like to hang on their wall.  Both leaders, to a certain extent, will help their friends in the US keep the office walls looking perky, even though those ever-waffling American friends are increasingly less useful to either side.

Q+A: Settlement project weighs on Middle East peace efforts

The announcement, made at a particularly sensitive moment in Washington's efforts to revive negotiations suspended since December 2008, has raised questions about Israel's intentions and prospects for peace.

Repeating peace-process pablum

Why is it that “you’ve got to begin”? For what reason must “the process begin?” Well, George Mitchell would have nothing to do with it in his time and the entire apparatus devoted to ceaseless, fruitless negotiations would need to do be redeployed. But Biden never explains why we need to begin a process when there is no remote chance of its success and, furthermore, there is no unified Palestinian government prepared to make peace. He is reduced to pablum, repeated for emphasis but utterly not compelling to anyone whose job doesn’t depend on perpetuating the kabuki theater of negotiations. And he must acknowledge that in this incarnation — indirect talks — we are really engaged in unproductive busy work for diplomats.

'Abbas seeks U.S. pledge for East Jerusalem construction freeze'

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday sought guarantees from Washington that it would pressure Israel to cancel its plan for 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, Palestinian media outlets reported.

Stage 3 of settlement moratorium is all part of Biden effect

While it is difficult to quantify the long-term damage caused by the Interior Ministry’s decision earlier this week to approve a major construction project in east Jerusalem while US Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Israel, there is no question that it has caused Israel a great deal of short-term diplomatic harm.

PM rep must be at housing meetings

Following the hullabaloo caused by the announcement of an east Jerusalem construction plan during US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, a ministerial committee has moved to try and prevent the recurrence of such a diplomatic howler.

Analysis: Frozen by his own fiasco

All of a sudden the issue was not Elon Moreh and Ofra, but Ramat Shlomo and Ramat Eshkol. Up until Tuesday, Netanyahu had managed to keep Jerusalem construction – at least construction in the Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem – off the table. Now it was plop in the middle, which is exactly what the Palestinians want.

In the Holy Land, a rebuilding for the generations

In this city so crowded with religious symbols, where houses of worship vie with one another to render the religious past visible, no synagogue bears more symbolic weight than the one called the Hurva, in the heart of the Jewish Quarter.