All the focus on whether the United States and Iran will resume talks over resurrecting the 2015 global nuclear deal obscures an issue of equal importance: escalating skirmishes between Washington and Jerusalem on the one hand and Tehran on the other that raise the risk of miscalculation and, in turn, war. In recent days, the …
Continue reading “Iran’s not feeling the pressure to change”
The Biden administration’s announcement that it will limit economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy could prove significant, since it follows two decades in which policymakers of both parties dramatically increased the use of sanctions against governments, individuals, and entities that they considered bad actors. “After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” the Treasury Department …
The teenage boys of Gaza, some of whom are still in junior high, are learning how to shoot guns, launch anti-tank missiles and protect themselves while peering around walls. The boys are attending summer camp, but it’s not the swimming and softball, hiking and cookouts that many of us fondly recall. It’s camp as run …
Continue reading “Western Silence as Gaza Summer Camps Train Future Terrorists”
“Israeli authorities do face legitimate security challenges,” Human Rights Watch acknowledged after accusing Israel of committing two “crimes against humanity” – apartheid and persecution – against Palestinians. It was a grudging, and altogether disingenuous, admission in a new 217-page report about Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem that ignores history and …
Continue reading “Human Rights Watch did a one-sided takedown of Israel”
No one knows for sure how Israel’s assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist will shape prospects for U.S. relations with Tehran under President Joe Biden—whether a cowed regime will seek accommodation or a defiant one will double-down on its nuclear pursuits and regional mischief. America’s presumptive president, however, has made clear that he plans to …
Continue reading “Iran Trap: Why Biden Must Avoid Tehran’s Tried and True Tricks”
The news that Bahrain’s foreign minister is meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week highlights the predicament that president elect Joe Biden faces in the Middle East: he wants to restore a U.S. approach to the region that relies on increasingly out-of-date assumptions. For starters, Biden promises to rejoin the U.S.-led global …
Fifty years ago, a quick-thinking El Al pilot refused the demands of two hijackers to open his cockpit and, instead, sent his plane into a sudden nosedive to knock the hijackers off their feet. After he leveled out the plane, a sky marshal on board fatally shot the male hijacker and arrested the female, who …
Continue reading “Why San Francisco State University Embraced a Failed Hijacker”