US
Aaron David Miller thinks President Obama might be “sweet on Iran”:
It’s probably too early to be thinking about Valentine’s Day. But here’s a half-serious romantic musing for you: Is U.S. President Barack Obama sweet on Tehran? Listening to his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, during which the president staunchly declared that he would veto any new sanctions, defended his diplomacy, rightly welcomed home Alan Gross from Cuba, but did not say one negative thing about Iran’s imprisonment of U.S. citizens, you might think so. Is the president pursuing an Iran-centric strategy as the key to stabilizing and bringing order to a confused and muddled Middle East? And are the Iranians the prospective U.S. darlings of the region?
In his in-depth analysis of the current state of Iraq, Michael Knight argues that the US must heed Iran’s plans for Iraq:
The challenge posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has created some strange dynamics, among them the shared interest of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran in “degrading and defeating” the Sunni jihadist group. But this shared interest should not be viewed as an opportunity for fuller cooperation and warmer ties; rather, it presents a grave risk. Iran and its Shiite proxies have been seeking to exploit the chaos next door to effectively take over Iraq's government and security sector. A country of some 36 million inhabitants could thus fall under Iran's sway.
Israel
According to Jacob Baime, there are far more pro-Israel events than anti-Israel ones in US college campuses:
During the Fall 2014 semester, ICC tracked 759 anti-Israel events at colleges and universities nationwide and 1,531 pro-Israel events. The number of pro-Israel student groups also rose from 362 in 2012 to 484 in 2014. These students are disciplined, coordinated, and act strategically thanks to the leadership of a wide coalition of impressive national organizations. These groups have risen to the occasion and are enlarging the pro-Israel movement’s campus footprint.
Israel Factor panelist Eytan Gilboa believes that Israel might end up paying a price for Netanyahu’s congressional speech:
The important consensus between the two parties has been broken. Israel should have made a special effort to restore the Democrats' support to the high level of the past and bring it closer to the Republican support. The Congress invitation and Obama's refusal to meet with Netanyahu are operating in the opposite direction and could intensify the polarity between the two parties towards Israel even more.
Middle East
Christopher Dickey discusses the recently deceased King Abdullah, whom he dubs as a “the Middle East’s failed peacemaker”:
In recent years Abdullah’s traditional values and attitudes became a source of huge frustration for him. People close to the ninety-something king say events seemed to overwhelm him, baffle him, infuriate him. He believed he had made a peace offer to Israel that it could not refuse, and yet it had. He could not accept the news that those who carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the “miscreants” as he called them, were sons of Saudi Arabia. But they were. He had wanted to bring stability to the Middle East, and all he saw was growing chaos.
Bilal Saab believes that Saudi Arabia’s new King Salman is “the past, not the future”:
He is already 79 and not in the best condition (rumors of dementia are unproven but he does have other health issues), so he should use what could be a relatively short stint in office to lay the groundwork for the next generation of Saudi leadership. Even though Salman has barely spent 48 hours in his new position, he is indeed Saudi Arabia’s past, not its future.
Jewish World
Yiddish scholar Ruth Weiss writes about a new film that follows Isaac Bashevis Singer’s many affairs with his female translators:
Interviewed for the film, some of the now-mature women who once worked with him express puzzlement at the suggestion that their younger selves would have agreed to sexual relations with this elderly man. Others insist on discretion, or are frankly amused, as if to say, “Me, exploited? By this pixie?” The film owes much of its buoyancy and humor to these interviewees, who are as idiosyncratic as many a character in Singer’s fiction; some of them inspired it.
David Schraub points out an interesting fact – UK Jews have never won a discrimination case against non-Jews:
Indeed, the only time that a Jewish claimant has succeeded in a discrimination case was in a suit brought against a Jewish day school whose admissions policy used the traditional matrilineal descent test to define who was Jewish. This, the court found, was a form of racial discrimination against Jews—the court concluded that Jewish schools were obligated to use a “religious” test (by which it meant some inquiry into a family’s religious practice; obviously from a traditional Jewish standpoint matrilineal heritage is a “religious” test) to define who was and was not Jewish. So, as far as the English courts are concerned, the only people who have ever discriminated against Jews are other Jews.
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