Daily Archives: December 30, 2011

Why do UNRWA & Reuters call munitions tunnels an “economic boom”?

*Noam Bedein is Director of Sderot Media Center, www.SderotMedia.org.il On December 7th, 2011, UNRWA issued an extensive report which lauded the vast amount of cement smuggled through the Gaza tunnels, attributing recent economic growth and...

Sderot residents celebrate rocket-free Hanukkah

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4167403,00.html It is a rainy day in the small, working-class city of Sderot, Israel, located less than two kilometers away from the Gaza Strip. The yellow-painted bomb shelters along with the brightly colored public shelters...

Human Wrongs: The Worst of Amnesty, HRW, and others in 2011

http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/human_wrongs_the_worst_of _amnesty_hrw_and_others_in _ JERUSALEM - With 2011 concluding, NGO Monitor today released a list of the most outrageous and absurd NGO actions from the past year, demonstrating the political nature of NGOs involved in the Arab-Israeli...

Arab Spring: the revolution has only just begun

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/8980784 /Arab-Spring-the-revolution-has-only-just-begun.html This year, the certitudes of the old Middle East dissolved with unseemly haste. A regional order frozen in place since the death of Egypt’s Colonel Nasser 40 years ago finally thawed. It produced a...

Obama administration secretly preparing options for aiding the Syrian opposition

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/12/28/obama_administration _secretly_preparing_options_for_aiding_the_syrian_opposition As the violence in Syria spirals out of control, top officials in President Barack Obama's administration are quietly preparing options for how to assist the Syrian opposition, including gaming out the unlikely option of...

What Would a Hamas-Fatah Agreement Mean?

http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2011/12/28/what-would-a-hamas-fatah-agreement-mean/ There are repeated efforts to forge a unity agreement of some sort between Hamas and Fatah, leading to a new “unity government” for the Palestinian Authority. Such a coalition was briefly in force in...

Israel and the European Union: A Change in Tone? INSS

http://www.inss.org.il/publications.php?cat=21&incat=&read=5873 As expected, the government of Israel’s decision to issue a tender for construction of 1,000 housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem elicited a response from Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative...

A Palestinian civil intifada

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1096 The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) published its December 2011 report on Monday, contending that in 2016 Jews will become a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. According to the...

The new nexus of narcoterrorism: Hezbollah and Venezuela

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2011/201112.neumann.narcoterrorism.html Press stories, as well as a television documentary, over the past two months have detailed the growing cooperation between South American drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists, proving that the United States continues to...