We’d only like to add that it’s about time…

And for all you fluent in Farsi here’s a link to the website just launched today.

From YNET:

Foreign Ministry to launch website for readers in Iran

Ministry to launch Persian-language version website for Iranian Internet surfers to counterbalance Iranian regime’s anti-Semitic, anti-Israel propaganda

Itamar Eichner Published: 07.31.06, 18:05 / Israel News

The Foreign Ministry will soon launch a Persian-language version of its website, which will give Iranian Internet surfers direct access to the official position of the State of Israel.

The site’s editor-in-chief will be Menache Amir, an advisor on Iranian affairs who managed Israel Radio broadcasts in Persian for years.

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This article, as recently published in the Wall Street Journal, addresses a central point to the current state of affairs amongst the various Palestinian factions, clans and tribes: if a people truly want a state they must build it from the ground-up through hard work and compromise. As Mr. Stephens states in the article, “…the experience of an unoccupied Gaza Strip has shown is the Palestinians’ unfitness for political sovereignty.” President Abbas is now receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to hopefully begin to build the semblance of a state. Let us all keep our fingers crossed.

From the WSJ:

Who Killed Palestine?
By: Bret Stephens
June 26, 2007; Page A14

Bill Clinton did it. Yasser Arafat did it. So did George W. Bush, Yitzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, Ariel Sharon, Al-Jazeera and the BBC. The list of culprits in the whodunit called “Who Killed Palestine?” is neither short nor mutually exclusive. But since future historians are bound to ask the question, let’s get a head start by suggesting some answers.

And make no mistake: No matter how much diplomatic, military and financial oxygen is pumped into Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, it’s oxygen flowing to a corpse. Palestine has always been a notional place, a field of dreams belonging only to those who know how to keep it. Israelis have held on to their state because they were able to develop the political, military and economic institutions that a state requires to survive, beginning with its monopoly on the use of legitimate force. In its nearly 14 years as an autonomous entity, the PA has succeeded in none of that, despite being on the receiving end of unprecedented international good will and largesse.

Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip this month — and the consequent division of the PA into two hostile, geographically distinct camps — is only the latest in a chain of events set in motion when Israel agreed, in September 1993, to accept Arafat and the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. An early indicator of what lay ahead took place on July 1, 1994, when Arafat made his triumphal entry into Gaza while carrying, in the trunk of his Mercedes, four of the Palestinian cause’s most violent partisans. Among them were the organizers of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the 1974 Ma’alot school massacre. If ever there was an apt metaphor for what Arafat’s rule would bring, this was it.

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As Published in the New York Times
June 19, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Brothers to the Bitter End By FOUAD AJAMI

SO the masked men of Fatah have the run of the West Bank while the masked men of Hamas have their dominion in Gaza. Some see this as a tolerable situation, maybe even an improvement, envisioning a secularist Fatah-run state living peacefully alongside Israel and a small, radical Gaza hemmed in by Israeli troops. It’s always tempting to look for salvation in disaster, but in this case it’s sheer fantasy.

The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.

The life of a Palestinian is one of squalor and misery, yet his leaders play the international game as though they were powers. An accommodation with Israel is imperative — if only out of economic self-interest and political necessity — but the Palestinians, in a democratic experiment some 18 months ago, tipped power to a Hamas movement whose very charter is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state and the imposition of Islamist rule.

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Today we’d like to feature an editorial by Amir Hanifes a member of the Druze community in Israel.

As published on Judeoscope:

Exposing the bigotry of UK anti-Israel boycotters
Amir Hanifes
As a holder of two degrees from the University of Haifa and a PhD student at the University of London, I traveled to Bournemouth for the meeting of the British University and College Union (UCU) as an Israeli delegate on behalf of the Israeli Council for Academic Freedom.

The discussions at the meeting regarding the imposition of a boycott on Israeli academia took place in a hostile environment while ignoring all the facts we presented regarding freedom of expression and academic freedom at Israeli institutions of higher learning.

Evidence that Israeli lecturers who hold pro-Palestinian views are able to express their positions uninterrupted both in their research work and lectures, as well as in the media, had no effect whatsoever on the discussions.

Even when we presented a list of organizations and research centers that operate in the framework of Israeli universities and boast Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab cooperation, with the promotion of ties between the peoples their top agenda, it did not make a difference.

The same was true when it came to calls by Palestinian lecturers and figures, including al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibah and Minister Raleb Majadele urging the UCU to refrain from boycotting their Israeli colleagues.

Boycott leaders in Bournemouth ignored the figures I presented to them regarding the University of Haifa and the fact that close to 20 percent of students there are members of minority groups in Israel – apparently, we will also be subjected to the boycott.

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As per our post yesterday about the role of the media when covering asymmetric conflicts between democracies and terror organizations we’d like to highlight some recent research and reporting on these issues, namely, the recent report, The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media As A Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict by Marvin Kalb, Senior Fellow, Shorenstein Center, and Carol Saivetz, at Harvard University. Here’s the abstract:

“Based on content analysis of global media and interviews with many diplomats and journalists, this paper describes the trajectory of the media from objective observer to fiery advocate, becoming in fact a weapon of modern warfare. The paper also shows how an open society, Israel, is victimized by its own openness and how a closed sect, Hezbollah, can retain almost total control of the daily message of journalism and propaganda.” Full Report here.

This is not only an Israeli/Arab conflict issue. As the US led global War on Terror has illustrated over the last 6 years, many democratic countries are confronted by these same issues. Terror groups are able to set the media agenda by perpetrating spectacular acts of terrorism which play well for TV, as well as post their gruesome exploits on the internet for all to see, and the media unwittingly provides them a global platform. Meanwhile, these same groups restrict all access to their inner dysfunctions and coercive ideological controls, as illustrated in Kalb’s report.

In our case, the media is able to scrutinize Israel because we value and uphold freedom of the press. They deconstruct our every failing and debate because they can, and at the same time treat our autocratic neighbors and terror utilizing enemies with a different standard because they must. This is not an accusation, to be fair the media tries to get the story right, but it is foolish to believe that the media can remain objective when covering asymmetric conflicts and conflicts between open and closed societies. The media either provides an invaluable platform for terror groups without any of the uncomfortable scrutiny, as they work under the threat of violence or even worse for journalists, denial of access, or they create a perception of the open society as being weak and confused because it speaks with multiple voices and cannot hide its warts.

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This issue has been a topic of constant debate. How do journalists cover the Israeli/Arab conflict, or for that matter any conflict, in a fair and balanced way when journalists are threatened with kidnapping and death? Alan Johnston is still missing, and as the report below highlights, others have been killed and many are now avoiding the Gaza Strip altogether. There are also persistent reports of journalists being threatened by terror groups if their reports reflect those groups’ actions in a negative way.

Ultimately, this raises the point that open societies struggling against terror groups sometimes become media victims of their own openness. When a journalist is free to cover every aspect, political debate and flaw of one society, but is unable to move and report freely about the other society engaged in the conflict the news will surely be skewed.

How can this be addressed?

From Haaretz:
For Gaza journalists, kidnap is no longer the biggest fear

By Avi Issacharoff

What happened last Friday to Abd a-Salem Abu Askar, the head of Abu Dhabi television in the territories, is the nightmare of every journalist in the Gaza Strip.

At about 7:30 P.M. that day, Abu Askar left his house in Gaza City. Some 200 meters away, he ran into a roadblock manned by masked gunmen, who demanded his identification card. Then one radioed: “We’ve detained Abu Askar.” Abu Askar managed to call his office and say that he had been kidnapped; a few minutes later, a van carrying 10 gunmen arrived, removed him from his car, beat him up and took him to an unknown location.

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