From PressTV
Palestine under pressure to back down statehood bill: FM
The Palestinian government has faced growing pressure by the United States and some European and Arab countries to back down on a statehood bill at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), says the country’s foreign minister.
Despite all pressures, Palestinian officials “are determined to approach the UN Security Council,” Riyad al-Malki told Voice of Palestine Radio on Sunday, adding, “but we still have not set a date for this move.”
Malki added that Palestinian authorities have a plan to visit five countries that recently became members of the UNSC — New Zealand, Venezuela, Angola, Malaysia, and Spain — in a bid to win their support in case the draft resolution is submitted to the council.
In December last year, Palestinians presented a bid for statehood to the Security Council as Washington and Tel Aviv were formulating a joint opposition against the move.
The resolution needed to secure at least nine votes to be adopted by the 15-member council. However, it managed to garner only eight positive votes, as the US and Australia voted against the resolution and the UK, Rwanda, Nigeria, South Korea and Lithuania abstained.
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From PressTV
Israelis attack, stab Palestinian in al-Khalil
Israeli settlers have assaulted and stabbed a Palestinian man in the southern West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron).
Yousef Hantash, 38, was injured in the hand Saturday when the settlers attacked him while he was walking along a bypass road near Dora in al-Khalil, located about 30 kilometers (nearly 19 miles) south of al-Quds (Jerusalem).
The stabbing was not the only assault by Israelis on Palestinians.
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From Ynet News
Japan condemns IS execution, demands remaining hostage release
Japanese leader says saving second Japanese man is top priority, while reiterating Japan would not give in to act of ‘outrageous and impermissible’ terrorism.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday called the killing of a Japanese captive by Islamic State militants “outrageous” and again demanded the group release a second Japanese national they are holding.
Abe, speaking to public broadcaster NHK, said chances were high that a recording and an image of what appeared to be the decapitated body of captive Haruna Yukawa, which emerged late on Saturday, were authentic.
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Druze student beaten in Jerusalem
TEL AVIV (JTA) — A Druze student in Jerusalem was beaten with glass bottles by a gang.
Tommy Hasson, 21, told Israeli news website Ynet that he was leaving his job at a hotel Thursday night when a group of people approached him and began mocking him for speaking Arabic. One man spat on him, and after Hasson hit him back, they began beating him.
Hasson escaped to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, where an ambulance took him to a hospital. He was released soon afterward.
“They just hit me,” he told Ynet. “Glass and bottles. There were a lot of people there who screamed, couldn’t do anything and couldn’t stop it.”
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Netanyahu: ‘I will go anywhere’ to prevent nuclear Iran
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended his decision to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
“As Prime Minister of Israel, I am obligated to make every effort in order to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons that would be aimed at the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said Sunday at the start of his weekly Cabinet meeting. “This effort is worldwide and I will go anywhere I am invited in order to enunciate the State of Israel’s position and in order to defend its future and its existence.”
Officials from the Obama administration, as well as Netanyahu’s Israeli political rivals, have criticized the speech due to take place in March. John Boehner, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, invited Netanyahu without first notifying President Barack Obama in what the White House said broke established protocol.
Netanyahu supports increasing sanctions on Iran, which Obama opposes because he said it could endanger ongoing U.S.-led negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. The Israeli leader said at the Cabinet meeting that the agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would place Israel in danger by leaving Iran with the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.
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From the Jewish Daily Forward
Congress Seeks To Force White House Hand on Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital
Jewish Groups Are Lukewarm on GOP Push
By Nathan Guttman
With the start of the new, Republican-led Congress, the issue of Jerusalem will be converging on President Obama from two separate directions now, even as a viable peace process to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears more distant than ever.
The Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act of 2015, introduced in early January by Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Dean Heller of Nevada, seeks to deprive Obama of the discretion he and earlier presidents have enjoyed to kick the unresolved matter of Jerusalem’s status down the road. The bill, and companion legislation in the House, would force the administration to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate the U.S. Embassy there, in defiance of world consensus.
The bill’s introduction comes as the administration braces for a Supreme Court decision on a long-fought case that could also compel it to acknowledge Jerusalem as part of Israel. This would break with the U.S. stance under the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, signed by Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the United States and the Soviet Union, which calls for the city’s final status to be addressed through negotiation.
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Liberman orders party activists to distribute Charlie Hebdo for free
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman has told activists in his Yisrael Beiteinu party to buy up and distribute copies of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for free.
The directive came after Stiematzky, a leading Israeli bookstore chain, canceled plans to sell the magazine’s latest issue in stores. Following threats of violence, the chain said it would sell the magazine online only.
Arab-Israeli lawmaker Masoud Ganaim of the Ra’am-Ta’al faction told the Israeli news website Ynet that selling the issue could lead to tension within Israel’s Muslim community. The issue’s cover features a caricature of Muhammad, the Muslim prophet.
“If you draw the Prophet Muhammad in a degrading and hurtful way, Muslims won’t sit on their hands,” he said. “It’s my duty as a public official, an Arab and a Muslim to warn that if something like this is distributed, it will cause tension.”
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From Ynet News
Greek radical left wins election, threatening market turmoil
Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza party takes election on promises to demand debt forgiveness, renegotiate terms of $270 billion bailout.
ATHENS, Greece — A radical left-wing party vowing to end Greece’s painful austerity program won a historic victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, setting up a showdown with the country’s international creditors that could shake the eurozone.
Alexis Tsipras, leader of the communist-rooted Syriza party, immediately promised to end the “five years of humiliation and pain” that Greece has endured since an international bailout saved it from bankruptcy in 2010.
From the Jewish Daily Forward
Don’t Believe Hype of ‘Anti-Semitic’ France
By Richard H. Weisberg
(JTA) — Three weeks ago, my wife and I were shopping in a Parisian kosher butcher store several miles west of the supermarket where four Jews were murdered on Jan. 9. The shop in our neighborhood was well patronized, with lines stretching out to the sidewalk before Shabbat.
We were staying in an apartment in Paris’ 12th district while I promoted a new book about the treatment of Jews in France during World War II. During our stay, we spoke with dozens of our Parisian friends, including some who are Jewish, about whether the year 2015 evokes for them at least some of that dark anti-Semitic history. It was a time when a French government that became known as Vichy promulgated 200 anti-Semitic laws — with little German pressure — that eventually sent some 75,000 Jews “to the East” and almost certain death in the concentration camps.
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