A report from Fox News today, citing the Times of London, has revealed that “Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah reportedly told President Obama not to humiliate Mubarak and warned that he would step in to bankroll Egypt if the U.S. withdrew its aid program, worth $1.5 billion annually.”

Besides the obvious question of what the hell are we doing sending one and a half billion of our tax dollars a year to a dictatorship in the Middle East, one cannot help but wonder why Obama did not call Abdullah’s bluff on the “threat”?

In fact, Obama’s response should have been: “You call that a threat?! Sure! Go ahead and bankroll Egypt. In fact, why haven’t you been doing it all along, you cheap, pompous big talker?”

On a separate note: seriously, if Abdullah has that kind of money to spare (which he clearly does), why isn’t he helping his impoverished Arab brethren in his region? Why is he simply content to sit his fat inconsiderate ass back and let the Americans pour money there instead?

This just takes paranoia to a whole new level.

Britain’s Daily Mail is reporting on a vulture that made its way to Saudi Arabia, apparently from Tel Aviv, and was arrested by the Saudis on suspicion of being an Israeli spy.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

A vulture tagged by scientists at Tel Aviv University has strayed into Saudi Arabian territory, where it was promptly arrested on suspicion of being a Mossad spy, Israeli and Saudi media reported Tuesday.

The bird was found in a rural area of the country wearing a transmitter and a leg bracelet bearing the words ‘Tel Aviv University’, according to the reports, which surfaced first in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv.

Although these tags indicate that the bird was part of a long-term research project into migration patters, residents and local reporters told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Weeam newspaper that the matter seemed to be a ‘Zionist plot.’

The accusations went viral, with hundreds of posts on Arabic-language websites and forums claiming that the ‘Zionists’ had trained these birds for espionage.

The Sinai regional governor last month suggested that a shark that killed and maimed tourists on its Red Sea port may have been intentionally released by Israeli agents in order to sabotage the country’s tourist industry.

‘What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark in the sea to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question. But it needs time to confirm,’ Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha said, according to the Sun.

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1344019/Vulture-tagged-Israeli-scientists-flies-Saudi-Arabia-arrested-spy.html#ixzz1A8JlndnP

The BBC, usually known for its notoriously biased programming against Israel, does occasionally run a rare honest piece deserving of praise. Recently, it did just that, with a program highlighting the fact that school children in Britain are being taught anti-Semitic and homophobic propaganda in the form of actual Saudi curriculum textbooks—delivered straight from the Saudi Ministry of Education.

The BBC program, called “Panorama”, found more than 40 Saudi-run schools and clubs in Britain teaching Muslim children aged 6 and over some of the following interesting lessons:

* how the hands and feet of thieves should be chopped off.

* children are asked in one lesson to list the “reprehensible” qualities of Jews.

* Jews are “cursed by God” and are compared to monkeys and pigs.

* how the punishment for gay sex is death, including further discussion of whether it should be carried out by stoning, burning with fire or throwing the homosexual off of a cliff.

* How non-believers (of Islam) are punished with “hellfire” after death.

* Zionists seek to establish world domination by sowing global conflicts.

You can watch the program in two parts here:

The Daily Mail is reporting that:

A 13-year-old girl has been sentenced to 90 lashes and two months’ prison in Saudi Arabia after she took a mobile phone to school.

A court ordered the girl to be flogged in front of her classmates following an assault on the school principal, according to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan.

After the assault she was discovered to have concealed a mobile phone, breaking strict Saudi regulations banning the use of camera-equipped phones in girls’ schools.

Al-Watan said a court in the northeastern Gulf port of Jubail had sentenced the girl to 90 lashes inside her school, followed by two months’ detention.

The punishment is harsher than tha dished out to some robbers and looters.

Saudi Arabia, a leading US ally in the Middle East, is an absolute monarchy controlled by  the Al-Saud ruling tribe, and lacks any legal code….

Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading country in the use of torture-by-flogging, public beheadings and publically crucifying condemned prisoners.

The country crucified two people in 2009, including one in the capital Riyadh during President Barak Obama’s visit last April.

So when can we expect the NY Times, Washington Post, and CNN to start decrying Saudi Arabia’s gross human rights violations with the same vigor they use for Israel’s supposed transgressions?

I just came across a great piece in the Jerusalem Post that Michael Freund wrote a couple of months ago, in which he illustrates how the Arab world is full of self-righteous, self-important babbling statesmen rushing to the cause of their Palestinian brethren… but when it comes to actually helping them financially, they’re nowhere to be found.

Here’s this eye-opening—but hardly surprising—piece (emphasis mine):

For all their talk of standing by the Palestinians, the Arab regimes sure have a strange way of showing it. Despite reaping an oil-driven windfall last year of unprecedented proportions, few Arab states seem willing to dig very deep into their own pockets to back up their concern with cash.

Indeed, the hollowness of their pro-Palestinian pronouncements was unambiguously on display last week in Amman, at a meeting of the Advisory Commission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, better known by its acronym of UNRWA.

Among the central topics discussed at the gathering was the growing financial crisis confronting the organization, which relies on voluntary contributions from governments to fund its activities on behalf of Palestinian refugees.

In her remarks, Karen Abu Zayd, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, bemoaned the group’s financial state, describing it as “my most worrying preoccupation.”

She told those assembled that the agency is facing a deficit of $84 million this year, and that it projects a budget shortfall of $140m. in 2010. “UNRWA’s weak financial situation,” Abu Zayd said, “hinders our ability to discharge our responsibilities to the standards Palestinian refugees deserve.”

FOR THE past several years, it seems, UNRWA has been in increasingly dire straits. Indeed, on Tuesday of last week, the group’s 16,000 employees in Judea, Samaria and Gaza held a one-day strike to demand better pay.

Why, you might be wondering, have the UN agency’s troubles been mounting of late? After all, fuel prices surged last year, with oil peaking in July 2008 at a high of $150 a barrel, so the coffers of Arab treasuries throughout the region were hardly lacking for funds with which to aid their Palestinian brethren.

I wondered too, so I did some research and discovered a few surprising facts about the colossal gap between Arab rhetoric and Palestinian reality.

Consider the following: In 2008, 19 of the top 20 donors to UNRWA’s general fund were from the West, with the EU contributing over $116m., and the US more than $94m. Others, such as Sweden and the UK, each gave over $35m.

Just one Arab country – Kuwait – appeared among UNRWA’s top 20 benefactors. The Kuwaitis came in last on the list, having coughed up just $2.5m.

Given that Kuwait’s oil revenues last year surged by 44 percent to nearly $78 billion, you would think that if they really, truly cared about the Palestinians, this would have been reflected in the size of their donation to UNRWA.

Nonetheless, when compared to the other five Arab states that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – the Kuwaitis come out looking generous.

In 2008, the combined revenues of the GCC states from oil production amounted to a whopping $575b. Yet their joint contribution to UNRWA’s regular budget was a little more than $3.6m., signifying less than one one-thousandth of a percent of their total petroleum income! Bahrain gave a miserly $50,000, Oman forked over just $25,000, while Saudi Arabia coughed up zero.

I’ve been to Hadassah dinners where more money was raised in an hour than the Arab states seem willing to part with in an entire year.

In fact, over the past two decades, Arab regimes have been providing a steadily decreasing percentage of UNRWA’s funding. In the 1980s, their contributions amounted to 8% of the group’s annual budget, whereas now they comprise barely 3%.

As a result, Western states are currently providing more than 95% of the funds behind UNRWA’s ongoing programs.

Now don’t get me wrong – I am not shedding any tears over UNRWA’s difficulties. The organization has long been a vehicle for perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem as a lever for pressuring Israel, and it has not shied away from working closely with Hamas in Gaza, or serving as a vehicle for anti-Israel and anti-Western indoctrination.

But UNRWA’s woes lay bare the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Arab states. They lambaste Israel at every opportunity over the condition of the Palestinians, even as they themselves do very little to alleviate the problem.

Sure, some Arab countries have kicked in funds to various UNRWA emergency appeals, while others provide aid to Palestinians via other channels.

But the numbers above lead one to wonder: do the Arab states really care about the Palestinians?

If UNRWA’s ledger is any guide, the answer is a clear and resounding “no.”

When it comes to Palestinians there is a monumental double standard in the world, such that Israel gets condemned right and left for their supposed “treatment” of the Palestinians, while Arab countries get a complete free pass for doing the exact same things (and often worse).

Squalid Palestinian refugee camps are not only found in Israel’s disputed territories. They are also found in the neighboring Arab countries, but you’d never know that from most of the mainstream media. And you’d also never know that they are often in even worse conditions there than in Israel, that they contain even more Palestinian refugees than those in Israel, and that they are often treated to persecution even worse than the supposed “persecution” in Israel.

Every once in a long while, a newspaper decides to do the rare report on this, and this time the honor goes to Britain’s The Independent. In a special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels, the Palestinians’ treatment by their brethren is laid bare for all to see. It’s a great article to read in full, but here are some excerpts (emphasis mine):

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

In other words, these people are used as pawns by their own brethren just to make Israel look bad. The more these Arab countries persecute their Palestinians brethren and keep them in the dirt, the more they could spotlight it and bizarrely blame Israel for their conditions!

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian “Nakba”, or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments. “Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines,” a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, “the refugee population constitutes a time bomb.”

The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous.

Just as bizarre, you have the Palestinian leadership themselves, based in Israel, not defending their own across the border and not calling attention to their plight, only because it would detract from the world’s hate that they are too busy directing at Israel. So, you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians getting kicked around Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, etc… and the Palestinian leaders apparently care only about the fewer numbers living in Israel. Again, because it’s not the plight of their own people that they primarily are concerned with, but rather the inverse: the vilification of Israel is all they really care about, their brethren be damned.

The report then provides some examples:

Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.

In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries – combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities – recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe.

The only difference is that Jews were bounced around Europe by the Christians. Here, it’s Palestinians getting bounced around the Middle East by their own Arab brethren.

The report then highlights the ridiculous new definition of a “refugee”, the redefinition coming about especially for the Palestinians:

The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948″.

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA’s mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA’s grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees,” and must “make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan.

So, what to do with all of these so-called “refugees” (most of whom actually never personally left any place to seek actual refuge someplace else)?

Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. “Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers,” he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. “What we need is a refugee summit,” he says. “I’m looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon.”

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children’s children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests – but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

The report then provides some more examples of their treatment by their Arab brethren:

Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by “any person not a citizen of a recognised state” – meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.

Right-wing Christians and Shi’ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country’s armed forces, reaffirmed “Lebanon’s categorical refusal of naturalisation”, a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: “The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen … at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist.” His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah’s spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. “The threat of tawtin is genuine,” Hodroj explained. “It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region.”

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed “catastrophic” by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon’s divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, “our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement“.

…While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa’ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them “the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”. More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.

While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.

These are all things you’d never know just from listening to most news reports. The double-standard applied to Israel and the hypocrisy and false piety of the world when it comes the the “plight” of the Palestinians is just sickening, and more people need to be aware of the truth.

Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and 23 other members of Congress have called upon Hillary Clinton to review Saudi Arabian textbooks, which are rife with hate indoctrination, teaching young students that Jews should be killed, that Muslims who convert, question, or doubt Islam must repent or be killed, and that parents have the right to force their children into marriages against their will.

Every year since 2003, Saudi Arabian officials have falsely assured the United States that these textbooks have been reviewed and no longer contain such hate speech, and apparently the United States seems to go along with “their word” which, these days, is about as good as as a check from Bernie Madoff.

I recently blogged about the trip Human Rights Watch took to Saudi Arabia to raise money for their crusade against Israel. I, of course, was only one of many writing and blogging about this and apparently the response got under the skin of HRW. So much so, in fact, that Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson went so far as to call the criticism “racist” and that “we report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception.”

Noah Pollak took the time to respond to Whitson’s offensively stupid comments in the Wall Street Journal:

The facts tell a different story. From 2006 to the present, Human Rights Watch’s reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict have been almost entirely devoted to condemning Israel, accusing it of human rights and international law violations, and demanding international investigations into its conduct. It has published some 87 criticisms of Israeli conduct against the Palestinians and Hezbollah, versus eight criticisms of Palestinian groups and four of Hezbollah for attacks on Israel. (It also published a small number of critiques of both Israel and Arab groups, and of intra-Palestinian fighting.)

It was during this period that more than 8,000 rockets and mortars were fired at Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. Human Rights Watch’s response? In November 2006 it said that the Palestinian Authority “should stop giving a wink and a nod to rocket attacks.” Two years later it urged the Hamas leadership “to speak out forcefully against such [rocket] attacks . . . and bring to justice those who are found to have participated in them.”

In response to the rocket war and Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Israel imposed a partial blockade of Gaza. Human Rights Watch then published some 28 statements and reports on the blockade, accusing Israel in highly charged language of an array of war crimes and human rights violations. One report headline declared that Israel was “choking Gaza.” Human Rights Watch has never recognized the difference between Hamas’s campaign of murder against Israeli civilians and Israel’s attempt to defend those civilians. The unwillingness to distinguish between aggression and self-defense blots out a fundamental moral fact—that Hamas’s refusal to stop its attacks makes it culpable for both Israeli and Palestinian casualties.

Meanwhile, Egypt has also maintained a blockade on Gaza, although it is not even under attack from Hamas. Human Rights Watch has never singled out Egypt for criticism over its participation in the blockade.

The organization regularly calls for arms embargoes against Israel and claims it commits war crimes for using drones, artillery and cluster bombs. Yet on Israel’s northern border sits Hezbollah, which is building an arsenal of rockets to terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, and has placed that arsenal in towns and villages in hopes that Lebanese civilians will be killed if Israel attempts to defend itself. The U.N. Security Council has passed resolutions demanding Hezbollah’s disarmament and the cessation of its arms smuggling. Yet while Human Rights Watch has criticized Israel’s weapons 15 times, it has criticized Hezbollah’s twice.

In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch does not actually function as a human-rights organization. If it did, it would draw attention to the plight of Palestinians in Arab countries. In Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are warehoused in impoverished refugee camps and denied citizenship, civil rights, and even the right to work. This has received zero coverage from the organization.

In 2007, the Lebanese Army laid siege to the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp for over three months, killing hundreds. Human Rights Watch produced two anemic press releases. At this very moment, Jordan is stripping its Palestinians of citizenship without the slightest protest from the organization. Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch seems only to care about Palestinians when they can be used to convince the world that the Jewish state is actually a criminal state.

As much as I don’t like Obama, I’m very shocked at how he’s being snubbed around the world. As shown in these two youtube videos, he is entirely ignored during “meet-and-greets” in both Russia and Saudi Arabia. In both places, a whole row of people completely ignore Obama outstretched hand and go straight to shake the hand of whomever he’s with at the time.

This is a slap in the face not just to Obama, but to the United States, and I’m surprised that this repeated embarrassment to our country has gone pretty much ignored so far.

See for yourself:

David Bernstein writes in the Wall Street Journal about Human Rights Watch’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia. No, not to investigate or denounce human rights violations there, but rather to raise money to ratchet up their propaganda war against Israel. Yes, they were actually there, cap in hand, to beg the slave-owning, anti-Semitic, Christian-persecuting misogynists there for money to fight Israel’s “human rights violations”.

As Bernstein puts it:

There is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country.

I wonder how many get-out-of-jail-free cards that buys the Saudis with HRW (and if those cards are honored also by Amnesty International… or should the Saudis buy similar credits separately with Amnesty International?).

UPDATE
Israel’s Prime Minister’s office had some choice words to say about this. “A human rights organization raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation,” said Mark Regev, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s spokesman. ”If you can fundraise in Saudi Arabia, why not move on to Somalia, Libya and North Korea? For an organization that claims to offer moral direction, it appears that Human Rights Watch has seriously lost its moral compass.”

Looks like Sunday has been a good day for some interesting developments regarding Israel’s potential strike on Iran’s nuclear targets. After seeing the outcome of Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s nuclear facilities in 1981 and their destruction of Syria’s nuclear facilities in 2007, I firmly believe that if they don’t do the same with Iran soon, it will be too late.

The first stunning news item is the report by the Times Online of London that Saudi Arabia has apparently given Israel the “unofficial” green light to use its airspace to carry out a raid. This is coming from a country that doesn’t officially even recognize Israel, so this is some very serious news, and is extremely useful to the Israelis who are I am sure already making several plans on how to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The second news item is the AP report that despite recent harsh rhetoric by the current administration towards Israel, Joe Biden has stated today that Israel is effectively free to set its own course on Iran, i.e., free to carry out a raid, if the Israeli government feels it necessary. This is also some pretty serious news, considering the Obama administration’s strong push for diplomacy all this time, as well as their strong efforts to keep an unusually firm grip on Israel’s activities. Now, of course, this is coming from Biden, so there’s no telling whether or not this was a gaffe to be retracted tomorrow or the day after. But, assuming this does really come from the top, that is also incredibly significant to Israel in terms of moving forward with their plans, which I strongly believe they should be doing before it’s too late.

UPDATE:
Peter Berkowitz writes an exceptionally detailed and informed article on Israel’s considerations for a raid on Iran in the latest Weekly Standard, including details of possible outcomes and how Israel might be preparing for them, and political and military costs. Read it!