richards1052

Tweet Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy MSNBC finally confirms possibly one of the worst kept secrets of the war between Israel and Iran: that the Mossad has recruited, trained, equipped and directed a domestic terror campaign against Iran’s nuclear program using the personnel of the Mujahadeen al-Khalq (MEK): Two senior   U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News  the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All... Read Full Story

Tweet Paul Auster and David Grossman at 2010 Jerusalem Writers Festival (Yoav Ari Dudkevitch)id In light of the argument between Tayyip Erdogan and Paul Auster about the relative freedoms of Turkey and Israel, I thought it would be instructive to quote from a Hebrew language profile of Auster published (of all places) in Yisrael HaYom .  Unfortunately, the original interview was in English but the article was published in Hebrew.  A request to the reporter for the original English... Read Full Story

Tweet This past week, Penn students held a three day conference on the BDS movement. The conference had been preceded by coverage from the local Jewish community pro-Israel newspaper and the Penn student newspaper which was not only antagonistic and unbalanced, but specifically, a professor penned an op Ed accusing BDS supporters of being “kapos.” Not surprisingly, the BDS event organizers were a tad sensitive about who would be reporting from these media outlets. They ultimately... Read Full Story

Tweet Thanks to Paul Mutter for suggesting to the editors of Foreign Policy in Focus that they invite me to submit a piece on Iran.   An Alternative to War With Iran was published earlier today.  It argues that western policy toward Iran has only an appearance of a diplomatic track.  Both the diplomatic and military track must perforce end with failure.  That if Iran is pushed to the brink it will attain nuclear weapons capacity, and there is little that can be done to stop it short of... Read Full Story

Tweet Newt Gingrich and pal Sheldon Adelson hate 'radical alien' Jews like Saul Alinsky Newt Gingrich’s South Carolina victory speech , and ones he’s been giving for the past 20 years, offered a pointed reference to famed community organizer, Saul Alinsky.  Alinsky, who was Jewish, was the model who inspired the young Barack Obama when he first moved to Chicago and trained there as a community organizer.  Note the racism and implied anti-Semitism in the following passage from... Read Full Story

Tweet It’s hard to know how much to credit anything published in the Wall Street Journal.  But in an article that raises the temperature a few degrees higher than it already is, the reporters say that U.S. officials are growning more worried about an Israeli attack on Iran.  They have put a full court press on Israel to stop them from striking.  But they really have very little control, if you can believe the WSJ, over what Israel does.  Further, the U.S. government is simply flying... Read Full Story

I’ll be giving a short talk on Sunday morning at 9AM at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle’s University District (43rd Street and 15th Avenue).  I plan to talk about the latest developments regarding Iran, Israel’s specific role in them, and the potential for war in the region.  There will also be Q&A after the presentation.  The talk is hosted by the Church and the United Nations Association of Seattle.  My thanks to Dick Blakney for organizing the event and inviting me... Read Full Story

Tweet Last summer, at the prompting of several human rights activists, among them Motty Fogel , whose brother was murdered in a terror attack in Itamar , Yossi Gurvitz, author of the Friends of George blog, began to reconsider some of the moral issues regarding legitimate resistance to Occupation. Though I have had no direct contact with either Gurvitz or Fogel, I imagine that at least some of the reconsideration sprang from the particularly gruesome death suffered by Fogel’s brother’s... Read Full Story

Tweet Here’s the latest installment on the estimable “Rabbi” Yeshayahu Rotter, impressario of the Rotter media empire.  Here I wanted to disseminate some new information I’ve discovered about him and respond to a few of his attempts to defend or support his claims about his own record and background. I mentioned in an earlier post that the Rotter web portal which he started over a decade ago got its start as a site specializing in illegal download of music and video files.  I’ve... Read Full Story

Tweet I was struck by the hypocrisy of a recent Haaretz expose , which in itself was very good journalism, finding that five of ten Israeli cultural institutions which by law were required to offer Arabic-language captioning for exhibits and public events, did not do so.  It also noted that only ten of forty-nine institutions receiving state funding were required by law to have Arabic captioning.  The only museum fully out of compliance of the ten was the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (others... Read Full Story