Almost certainly, says the reliable Michael Isikoff in Newsweek.com. His scoop (with Mark Hosenball) is getting picked up again and again in Iran’s state-controlled media where people care about such things.
For U.S. editors (and readers), the story is just too darn complicated. Who knows from Jundullah?
Al Jazeera’s panel highlights the unexpectedly good work by Dubai police.
Don’t believe the hype: Israel has survived such flaps “with very few repercussions” in the past.
Israel wants to know: What was Mabhouh doing in Dubai? Why not investigate that?
Australia provides ans answer: Because Hamas wasn’t systemically abusing the passport system on which the global security depends.
Meanwhile: Get your Mossad T-shirt now!
Violence is often tempting. Shirin Ebadi via roozonline.com on what the Green movement does now that the Iranian government’s repression seems to be working.
Resist reacting to tanks, bullets and shells. We must not pick up rocks. The path to justice, freedom, democracy and human rights requires flowers not blood.
The pleasant notion that the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will make “progress” has receded. PALESTINE CRY notes “newspapers from the region [outside of Israel] are in agreement that Israel is acting to escalate the conflict and foment a war in the region.”
Yossi Alpher sees “hypocrisy” all around the world in the Dubai hit story, a common enough sentiment in Israel. When Germany opened a “murder” investigation, Ynetnews put the word in quotes.
But the hawkish Alpher also notes a hard fact: Israel’s policy of extrajudicial assassination does very little to make Israelis more secure in the long run. Indeed, such tactics have reliably served to strengthen its most militant foes.
With assassination suspects possibly still on U.S. soil, the Dubai assassins have dragged America into row over fake passports, says Times Online in London.
With police investigations already underway in Australia, Ireland, and Germany, the Obama administration is going to deal with this. WashPost and NYT are still playing the story inside, appropriate in light of the fact that there has been no official U.S. reaction, but that’s not going to last long.
For the Obama administration, this is where the rhetoric of the president’s Cairo address meets the realities of Middle East decisionmaking. Of course, Israel has the right to defend itself, and of course the U.S. assassinates al-Qaeda leaders every day. But the leaders and the publics of Arab countries (like the United Arab Emirates, where the hit took place) that are open to peace with Israel (and some of whom want U.S. help to deter Iran) are not going to be satisfied by the talking points that go over well in Washington and on cable TV.
And NOW Lebanon feels sold out.
This Lebanese opposition commentator is right to sense that the combined interests of Sunnis and Christians in Lebanon (a fractious minority) do not rank high on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s regional agenda–at least not as high as seeking a front line ally in the campaign against nuclear Iran.
The orphan island nation–claimed but not governed by the Beijing communists–used to be a former favorite nation of the American right, a plucky capitalist redoubt resisting the tyrants of the mainland. Now that China has become a capitalist superpower, the right’s ardor for Taiwan has become dim and redundant The plucky capitalists must look elsewhere for other friends.
Now Taiwan is a channel for Tehran’s nuclear technology needs, says AP Enterprise.
Times Online says a couple of the suspects in the January assassination of a senior Hamas official came to the United States after the hit. What U.S. intelligence knew about their movements is an interesting question that the liberal U.S. media isn’t much interested in, at least not yet.
By contrast, the conservative British news organizations, like the Telegraph. This, of course, will be chalked up to British anti-semitism but such tired charges cannot explain the continuing interest of the impeccably Zionist Jerusalem Post.
The Brits and the Israelis grasp the implications of a tough question that easygoing American liberals prefer to think about next week: Is drugging and suffocating a Hamas leader in a Dubai hotel a demonstration of effective counterterror policy, as a lot Israelis think? Or, as a lot of Arabs think it is, a species of gangsterism.
