On Wednesday, John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, made a quick trip to Israel to discuss Hezbollah’s massacre of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria last week. Hopefully it was an instructive meeting for the senior US official, although his Israeli interlocutors were undoubtedly dumbstruck by how difficult it was to communicate with him.…
I am travelling now and so have been very much out of the loop for the past several days. But I have noticed a couple of things that I think need to be pointed out. First, there is Syria. Today it was reported that the Syrian regime is threatening Israel with chemical weapons. According to Reuters’ report: Foreign Ministry spokesman…
This week on Latma unplugged, our experimental pause before launching a new/improved Tribal Update, we bring you an example of Israeli news analysis at its best. And here’s another one we produced following the news that several anti-Israel groups are playing major behind-the-scenes roles in producing this summer’s anti-capitalist demonstrations. Over the next…
Two weeks ago, in an unofficial inauguration ceremony at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi took off his mask of moderation. Before a crowd of scores of thousands, Mursi pledged to work for the release from US federal prison of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. According to The New York Times’ account of his speech,…
I have not had the opportunity to read the court decision on Olmert. And so my thoughts on his acquittal have little to do with the merits of the prosecution in the three cases adjudicated by the Jerusalem District Court. I have a problem with corruption investigations against politicians generally and against Ehud Olmert specifically. In general, I find…
There was something about Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s seventh prime minister who passed away last Saturday, that made you feel shy, in awe when you stood in his presence. In his eulogy at Sunday morning’s cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted that Shamir “didn’t radiate charisma. He simply radiated inner strength.” Shamir, the diminutive, taciturn leader, was a strong…
As I mentioned last Friday, my team and I at Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, decided to take some time off from our flagship television-on-Internet satirical newscast The Tribal Update. We’re using our time now to develop and try out new concepts, actors, production techniques and basically let ‘er rip. This week we came up with several…
So it works out that Iran’s vice president really hates Jews. In fact, he hates Jews so much that even The New York Times reported it. On Tuesday, the Times published an account of Iranian Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi’s speech before a UN forum on fighting drug addiction in Tehran. Rahimi claimed that Jews control the illegal drug trade.…
Last week I participated in the President’s Conference, hosted by Shimon Peres at the Binyanei Hauma convention center in Jerusalem. I took part in a panel discussing Israel’s final borders. Yesterday the conference organizers posted the video of my panel on their website. It’s a bit hard to follow for non-Hebrew speakers because the panel was conducted in Hebrew and…