US
Samuel Oakford writes about how America has been looking the other way when Saudis commit atrocities in Yemen:
Many in Washington see support for the Saudi-led coalition as necessary for maintaining American-Saudi relations after the nuclear deal with Iran last year. Saudi Arabia has used this leeway to carry out its Yemen campaign with abandon. Each fatal strike and subsequent implausible Saudi denial should test the limits of the Obama administration’s support. Instead, a spokesman for United States Central Command, which oversees American operations in the Middle East including support for the coalition, told me last week that the United States is not conducting a single investigation into civilian casualties in Yemen.
Charles Krauthammer discusses the effect of America’s retrenchment in the Middle East:
The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on Syria.
Israel
Mazal Mualem takes a look at Ehud Barak’s attempted comeback to the political scene:
Actually, Barak is now trying to return to center stage through direct contact with the public. When he calls for a popular protest he understands that there is a political leadership vacuum on the center-left and he is putting himself up for bidding. But so far, there do not appear to be any takers. Even after his harsh attacks against the prime minister, Netanyahu was elected to office once again. Barak, meanwhile, continues to travel around the world and occasionally sound his doomsday prophecies.
Ben Dror Yemini tries to see what can be learned from the George Soros anti-Zionist donation affair:
Strangely enough, the international plot helmed by billionaire George Soros, which recently came to light due to certain leaked documents, were not given much coverage by Israeli media, and certainly not when compared to US media. Soros himself is a known anti-Israeli, and the vast support systems he has set up is not only aimed at influencing the Arab-Israeli conflict, but goes way beyond it. He decided to call his endeavor the Open Society Foundations, a somewhat odd name; the secrecy surrounding its global strategy can be called many things, but “open” is not one of them.
Middle East
Aaron David Miller tries to explain why Syria is so intractable at the moment:
There’s a tendency to blame the United States in the main for failing to act more assertively. But there are any number of other participants — Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia — who instead of showing a willingness to work together, show little beyond narrow self-interest when it comes to addressing the two central questions that define the Syrian civil war: what to do about Bashar Assad, and how to deal with the Islamic State.
According to Robert Fisk, the Shia’s “are winning” in the struggle for the Middle East:
The Shias are winning. Two pictures prove it. The US-Iranian photo op that followed the signing of the nuclear deal with Iran last year and the footage just released – by the Russian defence ministry, no less – showing Moscow’s Tupolev Tu-22M3 bombers flying out of the Iranian air base at Hamadan and bombing the enemies of Shia Iran and of the Shia (Alawite) regime of Syria and of the Shia Hezbollah.
And what can the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia match against this? Only its wretched war to kill the miserable Shia Houthis of Yemen – with British arms.
Jewish World
Andrew Nagorski, with whom we recently had an exchange, writes about the plight of Polish hero Jan Karski, who tried to expose the crimes of the Holocaust in real time and was not believed by British and American leaders:
When I visited Karski in his apartment in Chevy Chase, Maryland, two years before his death in 2000, he was surrounded by the many awards he had collected from Israel, the United States and Poland. But he was not boastful in any way. In fact, his entire demeanor suggested that he felt that in one critical respect his mission had ended in failure. He had been clearly hurt by the refusal of British and American leaders to believe him all those years ago—and that fact still stung at the end of his life. Despite all the tributes that followed, he never claimed success.
Mat Lebovic takes a look at the Jewish Olympians murdered in the Holocaust, who often showed uncommon displays of heroism in the face of death:
Europe’s great inter-war Jewish athletes, many of whom became Olympians and world champions, embodied the fallaciousness of Nazi racial propaganda about Jewish bodies and cultural proclivities.
These Jewish sportsmen came from every corner of the continent, and participated in every sport available to them. In doing so, some became early targets for Hitler’s regime, and — during the genocide — targets for ruthless camp guards seeking to break their spirits.
