Conflicting Priorities Imperil Effort to Gather Up Gaddafi’s Discarded Arms
More than three weeks after Libya’s rebels killed Muammar Gaddafi, arms experts say the task of finding and securing the mountain of weaponry abandoned by Gaddafi’s forces in their final rout has been complicated by a lack of international funding and coordination, as well as conflicting priorities among Western and African governments about which weapons pose the biggest threat. While U.S. and European officials have sounded the alarm about the threat posted to airliners by looted surface-to-air missiles, arms experts say other kinds of weaponry that may prove far more damaging are receiving much less attention. “I don’t think anybody genuinely has any idea of full scale of the problem, because nobody has had a chance to... For Israel policy, the absurd becomes routineInto the Fray: A nation betrayed? The list of the Left’s blunders is depressingly lengthy. It has been hopelessly wrong about… well, everything. This is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
The preceding citation, from arguably Israel’s most consummate diplomat, encapsulates the glaring irrationality and the inverted logic that has become the accepted hallmark of the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both at the level of theoretical analysis and of practical policy-making. The abandonment of any coherent, reasonable criteria has not been confined to the attitude of the Arabs towards Israel, but sadly has become a characteristic of Israeli policy towards the Arabs – and of a host of domestic issues that impinge directly and indirectly on that policy. The absurd becomes routine Eyeing militants, Israel extends hand to Africa
To Israel, eastern Africa is a potential hinterland where al-Qaida could forge ties with similar groups in Egypt and Gaza • The U.S. is playing a growing role in African conflicts • Israel has military ties with Nigeria, Tanzania and Ivory Coast. Israel has identified eastern Africa as an important strategic interest and is stepping up ties with nations in the region in a joint effort to control the spread of Islamic extremists, officials say. In effect, Israel would become a player siding with Christian-led African nations in conflicts... Is Catholicism intrinsically anti-Semitic?Melanie Phillips says that Islam is intrinsically anti-Semitic; Daniel Goldhagen tries the same argument with Catholicism By Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, The Catholic Herald [Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest and a doctor of moral theology. The author of several books, he was born in West Sussex, educated at Oxford and in Rome, and has lived in Malta, Italy, and Kenya] Melanie Phillips has got a typically forthright and thought-provoking piece on her blog, commenting on Baroness Warsi’s recent speech about antisemitism. As I am neither Muslim nor Jewish, I should probably not comment on the question raised, which is essentially this: is Islam intrinsically anti-Semitic? Melanie Phillips says it is, and marshals some compelling evidence,whereas Lady Warsi takes the opposing view, seeing anti-Semitism as hijacking Islam for its own purposes. The only thing I would say about this is that when it comes to the interpretation of religious texts, those texts have to be... More Recent Articles |
Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
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