The US
Headline: U.S., Afghanistan reach agreement on outline of post-2014 security deal
To Read: Michael Young examines President Obama's foreign policy 'realism'-
So what are the lessons of the story? There are several. That being morally right but politically indecisive is worse than being morally wrong yet clear-minded about one’s objectives. That Barack Obama is a realist only in the imagination of his admirers. That America in two years has lost in Egypt much of what it spent more than three decades building up. And that nothing is more wretched than a president who wants to be a moral paragon and a cool calculator at the same time.
Above all, that a successful leader is the one who seizes the moment, not the one who has the hubris to believe that the world will somehow bend itself around his priorities and hesitations
Quote: “There is a saying among us that 'whoever is covered by the Americans is in fact naked'”, an Egyptian military official giving Reuters a glimpse into official Egypt's attitude toward the recent US policy shift.
Number: 904, the number of pages in the Pulitzer Prize winning Washington biography which Chuck Hagel gave Egyptian General Sisi to read.
Israel
Headline: IDF uncovers terror tunnel in Israel
To Read: David Horowitz discusses the Ovadia effect on the upcoming mayoral elections in the ultra-orthodox city of Jerusalem-
If non-ultra Orthodox Jerusalem were to actually bother to go and vote with a similar turnout to the ultra-Orthodox, the mayoral battlefield would look distinctly different. You’d think all Jerusalemites might want to make that effort, to determine the nature of the city they live in. Experience would suggest you’d be wrong.
Quote: “This is not only the best film of Busan, it is the best film of the year”, Quentin Tarantino praising the Israeli thriller 'Big Bad Wolves' at the Busan festival.
Number: 18, thousands of people gathered in Rabin square in Tel Aviv to mark 18 years to the assassination of Itzhak Rabin.
The Middle East
Headline: Syrian opposition group refuses to attend Geneva peace talks
To Read: Lee Smith takes a look at the growing nervousness and distrust of America's allies in the Middle East-
Despite the administration’s hype of President Obama’s “historic” 15-minute phone call with the ostensibly moderate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, the looming prospect of direct engagement with the regime in Tehran over its nuclear weapons program, and all the other symptoms of Rouhani fever gripping Washington, the White House says it won’t be suckered by the Iranians. American allies aren’t buying it.
Quote: “We will negotiate about the volume, levels and the methods of enrichment but shipping out the (enriched) material is a red line for Iran”, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister issuing a red line.
Number: 3, Iran says it has arrested 3 Israeli sies.
The Jewish World
Headline: Pope warns of anti-Semitism as Rome commemorates Holocaust
To Read: Princeton Professor Anthony Grafton offers a well-written piece on David Nirenberg's 'Anti-Judaism'-
From antiquity to more recent times, an endless series of writers and thinkers have crafted versions and visions of Jews and Judaism that are as ugly and frightening as they are effective. Some of them—for example, the Egyptian priest Manetho—probably drew on older traditions that can no longer be reliably reconstructed. Some of them—Paul, Spinoza, Marx—were Jews by birth. Most of them knew few real Jews and had little or no direct knowledge of Jewish life or thought. Yet working in sequence, each in his fashion and each for his time and place, they have created beings at once complex, labile, and astonishingly consequential: call them, for want of a better term, imaginary Jews. These animated figures rival vampires in their ability to survive for centuries and zombies in their refusal to be defeated by rational argument. And they are of far more than antiquarian interest. Over the centuries, imaginary Jews have found their places, sometimes vital ones, in some of the loftiest intellectual edifices ever raised. Surprisingly often they have been the caryatids: the pillars on which everything else rests.
Quote: 'It can’t be like this 70-year-old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day telling me what the clubs want to hear', one of the world's most talked about pop stars, Miley Cyrus, one of the most talked about pop stars in the word, utters an anti-Semitic slur (a condemnation from a 70 year old Jew- Abe Foxman- is soon to come)
Number: 66, the percentage of charitable contributions in Jewish people's wills that are dedicated to Jewish causes, according to a new study.
