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US President Barack Obama said he was encouraged by progress in efforts to bring Israel and the palestinians back to the negotiating table.
“The Israeli government has taken discussions with us very seriously,” Obama said, adding that he was “encouraged by what I am seeing on the ground.”
“All parties,” he said, “have to take steps to restart serious negotiations.” That, he said, included Palestinians efforts to end the incitement of violence against Israel.
“We are moving in the right direction,” said visiting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, “and the Arab states are ready to help if the Israelis and the Palestinians returned to peace talks.”
Of course, what he “saw on the ground” was the Israeli government capitulating.
Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)
11:40PM: Vacuous rocker Roger Waters continues to show he’s just another prick in the world.
Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, an outspoken critic of Israel’s policy in the West Bank, is now the voice behind a United Nations film documenting Palestinian life behind Israel’s controversial separation fence, the AFP reported on Wednesday.
The UN premiered its 15-minute documentary “Walled Horizons” this week, to mark five years since the International Court of Justice ruled that the route of the fence through Palestinian land was illegal.
The film features Palestinians who had lost a part of their lives to the wall, said the AFP. Interviewees include a farmer whose land was severed in half and a family caught in the “seam line” between the wall and the Green Line.
Waters, who wrote Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit album “The Wall”, is featured in the opening shot of the film walking beside a concrete section of the barrier, on which is painted a giant laying on its back.
“The reason for walls is always fear, whether the personal walls that we build around ourselves or walls like this that frightened governments build around themselves,” Waters says. “They are always expressions of a deep-seated insecurity.”
Yeah, that and a way to keep out people with a propensity for boarding buses and blowing themselves up.
But I guess that’s not poetic enough.
7:08PM: Here is Shamekh Alawneh, a lecturer in modern history at Al-Quds Open University, saying the Jews invented the connection to the Wall for political purposes, to convince European Jews and Zionists to come to “Palestine.”
5:30PM: Lena Posner-Korosi, president of the official council of Jewish communities in Sweden, on Donald Boström’s blood libel:
“This article is written by one person who is well known as being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. It doesn’t create a lot of reaction in the Swedish public.”
5:13PM: Donald Boström has admitted to Israel Radio that he does not know whether a story concerning the IDF harvesting palestinians’ organs for transplant is true.
“I have a personal opinion, it concerns me that it’s true,” Donald Bostrom, who penned the story, told Israel Radio en route to an emergency meeting at the editorial offices Aftonbladet, presumably to discuss the aftermath of the report.
“I was [present] during the interview that night, I was a witness. It concerns me to the extent that I want it to be investigated,” Bostrom told the station. “But whether it’s true or not – I have no idea, I have no clue.”
He was referring to a Palestinian witness who recounted an incident where a Palestinian was allegedly taken by the Israeli military and his body returned several days later – lacking some internal organs.
Didn’t stop him from making the claims in his article, though.
4:35PM: Donald Boström, the Swedish journalist who accused IDF soldiers of killing palestinians to obtain their organs, has denied he is anti-Semitic.
“I’m very sad to hear people accuse me of anti-Semitism,” Boström told Haaretz on Tuesday.
Let me guess. Some of his best friends are Jewish? He’s not anti-Semitic, just critical of Israeli policies?
Meanwhile, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon is fuming over the article.
Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon filed a formal grievance with the Swedish government Wednesday following a Stockholm newspaper’s report accusing Israel of trading in the stolen organs of Palestinians.
“I demand the Swedish government condemn this groundless article,” said Ayalon.
The Foreign Ministry is reportedly considering summoning the Swedish ambassador and reproving him for his government policies, “Which allow such a hateful publication to go without censure.”
Stockholm, he added, “Cannot wash its hand of this. True, this is a private publication, be it an anti-Semitic one, but I can see a correlation between recent statements made in Sweden and this article. This is an outright blood libel,” he added.
NGO Monitor points out that one of the Swedish government’s policies that made this article likely was its funding of NGOs demonizing Israel.
In light of the article published by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet quoting Palestinians and accusing Israeli soldiers of stealing and selling Palestinian organs, NGO Monitor highlighted the demonizing role of NGOs funded by the Swedish government.
NGO Monitor’s June 2009 report detailing funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) examined over 20 recipient NGOs including:
- The Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS, run by Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi), received SEK 97,461 via the Swedish Mission Council in 2008. Barghouthi referred to the Gaza conflict as a “horrendous massacre,” and used terms like “ghetto,” and “apartheid” on a radio program. PMRS refers to the security barrier as the “apartheid wall,” and claimed that Israel employs a “racist ideology” and inflicts “collective punishment” on the Palestinians.
- The Swedish government dispersed (through Diakonia, Sweden’s largest humanitarian NGO) almost SEK 300,000 ($42,000) to Alternative Information Center (AIC) in 2008. AIC has compared Israeli military and political figures to Nazis and claims working with Peres Center for Peace is “morally disgusting” and that Shimon Peres is an “enemy” of “human rights and of peace”.
- Sabeel received SEK 540,000 (distributed via Diakonia) in 2008. Sabeel is a leader in the anti-Israel church divestment campaign. Its Director, Naim Ateek promotes the one-state solution and regularly employs anti-Semitic theological themes, referring to the “Israeli government crucifixion system” which places “Jesus…on the cross again, with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him.”
- In 2008, Sweden, with three other European governments, designated $6m for the NGO Development Center (NDC) in Ramallah. This money was distributed to 25 NGOs, including $400,000 to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) which often refers to terrorist attacks as “resistance”.
- Through 2008 NDC funds, $500,000 was directed to Al-Haq. In July 2008, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld a visa denial for Al-Haq’s General Director Shawan Jabarin, due to evidence that he is “among the senior activists of the Popular Front terrorist organization.”
Meanwhile, the Swedish Ambassador to Israel, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, has issued a statement denouncing the report on the embassy’s website:
“On 17 August the Swedish daily Aftonbladet published an article on alleged organ trafficking in Israel. It related, inter alia, claims from individual Palestinians that organs had been stolen from captured Palestinians. The given sources, and a photograph of a dead Palestinian man, pertain to an incident in 1992.
“The article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet is as shocking and appalling to us Swedes, as it is to Israeli citizens. We share the dismay expressed by Israeli government representatives, media and the Israeli public. This Embassy cannot but clearly distance itself from it.
“Just as in Israel, freedom of the press prevails in Sweden,” concluded the statement. “However, freedom of the press and freedom of expression are freedoms which carry a certain responsibility. It falls on the editor-in-chief of any given newspaper.”
1:28PM: Israeli President Shimon Peres has said that the Kremlin has promised to reconsider the planned delivery of S-300 defense missiles to Iran.
If he honestly believes Russia would do the right thing and reconsider, then he’s likely to believe the palestinians want peace and Gaza can be turned into a Club Med tourist resort.
1:06PM: According to senior Western diplomats and Israeli officials, the IAEA, under its (potato) head Mohamed ElBaradei, is hiding data on Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear arms.
The officials and diplomats said that the International Atomic Energy Agency under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was refraining from publishing evidence obtained by its inspectors over the past few months that indicate Iran was pursuing information about weaponization efforts and a military nuclear program.
ElBaradei, who will soon vacate his post, has said that the agency does not have any evidence that suggests Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.
But the sources told Haaretz that the new evidence was submitted to the IAEA in a classified annex written by its inspectors in the Islamic Republic. The report was said to have been signed by the head of the IAEA team in Iran.
The classified report, according to the sources, was not incorporated into the agency’s published reports. The details, they said, were censored by senior officials of the IAEA in the organization’s Vienna headquarters.
American, French, British and German senior officials have recently pressured ElBaradei to publish the information next month in a report due to be released at the organization’s general conference.
“We expect the details to appear in the new report and to be made public,” a senior Western diplomat told Haaretz.
The efforts to release the allegedly censored report is being handled in Israel by Dr. Shaul Horev, director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, and the Foreign Ministry. Asked about this sensitive subject, several Israeli diplomats declined to comment. The Prime Minister’s Bureau also declined to comment, but the report was not denied.
5:52AM: Here is President Barack Obama and President Mubarak of Egypt yesterday addressing the press after meetings at the White House on the prospects of peace in the Middle East.
