From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
At odds over Iran stance, Netanyahu tried to nix Mossad briefing for U.S. senators
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly tried to cancel a Mossad briefing for visiting U.S. senators because of the Israeli security agency’s warnings on an Iran sanctions bill.
Netanyahu removed the Jan. 19 briefing from the itinerary of six senators visiting Israel, led by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Time magazine reported Saturday.
Corker reportedly threatened to abort the trip to Israel to protest the move, Time reported, citing unnamed sources it said were familiar with the incident. The briefing went forward after Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, became involved.
Mossad chief Tamir Pardo warned that the Kirk-Menendez bill, which would have imposed new sanctions on Iran if it did not agree by June 30 to a long-term deal to regulate its nuclear program, would be like “throwing a grenade” into the diplomatic process with Iran.
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From PressTV
Israeli forces target Palestinian boats off Gaza coast
Israeli naval forces have once again opened fire on Palestinian fishermen off the northwest coast of the Gaza Strip in their latest act of aggression against the residents of the besieged sliver.
According to eyewitnesses, the fishermen were targeted four miles away from the coast of the al-Sudaniya area in Gaza City on Saturday morning.
The attack caused damage to one of the vessels, but no one was injured.
Israel had imposed a limit of three nautical miles on fishing in waters off the Gaza shore until last August. Israeli forces have frequently targeted Palestinian boats, well inside the radius.
In the latest incident, a 32-year-old Palestinian fisherman was shot dead and two others were arrested last week.
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From Russia Today
Putin in film on Crimea: US masterminds behind Ukraine coup, helped train radicals
“The trick of the situation was that outwardly the [Ukrainian] opposition was supported mostly by the Europeans. But we knew for sure that the real masterminds were our American friends,”Putin said in a documentary, ‘Crimea – The Way Home,’ aired by Rossiya 1 news channel.
“They helped training the nationalists, their armed groups, in Western Ukraine, in Poland and to some extent in Lithuania,” he added. “They facilitated the armed coup.”
The West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with Russia, “by any means, in any format and under any scheme,” he noted.
Putin said this approach was far from being the best dealing with any country, and a post-Soviet country like Ukraine specifically. Such countries have a short record of living under a new political system and remain fragile. Violating constitutional order in such a country inevitably deal a lot of damage to its statehood, the president said.
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From Russia Today
Kerry says US wants to negotiate with Assad… State Dept denies
“But to get the Assad regime to negotiate, we’re going to have to make it clear to him that there is a determination by everybody to seek that political outcome and change his calculation about negotiating,” Kerry said on Sunday.
Kerry added that the US and some other countries were trying to restart talks on the resolution of the conflict in Syria, which has now entered its fifth year.
“Because everybody agrees there is no military solution. There is only a political solution….and I am convinced that with the efforts of our allies and others, there will be increased pressure on Assad,” Kerry said.
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From The Times of Israel
Epigenetics explains how ‘Jewish guilt’ may be inherited
Researchers studying the offspring of Holocaust survivors find they have higher rates of post-traumatic stress, possibly due to genetic modifications in their stress hormone system
Washington Jewish Week via JTA — In designing and testing theories on how the body programs its 19,000 genes, Moshe Szyf, a geneticist and molecular biologist at McGill University in Montreal, has expanded the notion of Jewish guilt.
Sure, we might feel bad about passing along hereditary genes that raise our baby’s future risk of breast cancer, obesity or depression. But now, thanks to Szyf’s research, we must contend with the possibility that our experiences early in life could shift how those genes are expressed for generations to come.
Thus young stockbrokers who escaped from the tumbling towers of 9/11 might be raising preschoolers a decade later who are prone to panic when they smell burnt paper or fireplace ash. Those who crash dieted during teenage years might wind up with grandchildren with slower metabolisms designed to better handle starvation.
Researchers studying the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have found that they have higher rates of post-traumatic stress after enduring car accidents, possibly due to modifications in their stress hormone system inherited from their survivor parents.
Szyf, however, prefers to take an optimistic view of his field, called behavioral epigenetics.
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Tens of thousands rally for right in Tel Aviv
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Tens of thousands of right-wing Israelis at a Tel Aviv rally heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vow not to withdraw from the West Bank.
The rally Sunday in Rabin Square, two days before Election Day, came one week after a 40,000-person rally in the same location advocated the right wing’s defeat. Much of the crowd on Sunday appeared to be religious Zionist.
Polls last week — the last ones before the balloting — showed Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party trailing the center-left Zionist Union.
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
U.S. anti-Semitism envoy: Security costs threaten European Jewish communities
(JTA) — Jewish communities in Europe are “being bankrupted” by the need to provide security for their institutions, the U.S. special envoy on anti-Semitism said.
“Every Jewish community in Western Europe certainly needs security support,” said Ira Forman, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, said Friday in Stockholm, the French news agency AFP reported. “Many of them are being bankrupted by the money they have to spend to protect their institutions.
“If current trends continue, and they’re not good … we have to worry about small Jewish communities in Europe and their very viability.”
Last week, Forman launched a tour of western Europe to meet with Jewish leaders, nongovernmental organizations and government officials. From Stockholm he traveled to Malmo, a Swedish city that has been hit with a number of hate crimes against Jews.
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From PressTV
Israel FM’s visit to Ibrahimi Mosque prompts outrage
A visit by hardline Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to a mosque in the occupied West Bank has stirred outage among the Palestinian community.
On Sunday, Lieberman entered the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Cave of the Patriarchs, in the southern West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron), located 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of al-Quds (Jerusalem) amid tight security measures.
“The incursion was limited to the side of the mosque that is under Israeli control and lasted for about a half hour,” Ismael Halaweh, the head of al-Khalil’s religious endowment office, said.
“During the incursion, the gates separating the mosque from the Palestinian market of the Old City were sealed, amid strong presence from Israeli security forces. Lieberman is trying to use al-Ibrahimi Mosque incursion as a campaign ploy,” Halaweh added.
The visit by the 56-year-old leader of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) right-wing party comes just two days before general elections in Israel, and followed an earlier one on Thursday night.
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From PressTV
West government seek my overthrow: Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the West, particularly the Scandinavian governments, of plotting to remove him from power.
“Scandinavian governments have spent millions of dollars on a campaign to remove me from power,” Netanyahu told Israel’s Kol radio station on Sunday.
The Israeli premier further said Western governments, mostly Scandinavians, prefer his opponents to win the regime’s upcoming parliamentary election.
The relations between Israel and Scandinavian governments have recently soured. In October 2014, Sweden became the first EU country to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state.
Following Sweden’s decision, Israel’s Ambassador to Stockholm Isaac Bachman was recalled.
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From Ynet News
Jamaica hopes Jewish tourism can help fading community
Island’s tourist board cultivating ‘Jewish Jamaica’ travel package in hopes of preserving country’s Jewish history after community shrunk due to tides of migration and assimilation.
It’s Saturday morning at Sha’are Shalom, but there aren’t enough Jews gathered in the dim light of Jamaica’s only synagogue to conduct a formal prayer service.
An American tourist watches near the entrance of the historic temple as a half dozen members of Jamaica’s dwindling Jewish community instead perform informal Sabbath prayers led by a congregant. Without the 10 Jewish adults needed for a quorum known as a minyan, men and women gather around a mahogany platform raised above a sand-covered floor to pray and sing to the swelling chords of a pipe organ.
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From The Times of Israel
France plays role of hawk in nuclear talks with Iran
Historical distrust with Tehran makes Paris a hard-liner, but it’s unlikely to scupper a deal
PARIS, France (AFP) — As the drive to reach an accord with Iran on its nuclear program heads towards a March 31 deadline, France is digging into its role as chief hawk — a position inclined to annoy US allies, but not likely to scuttle an eventual accord, diplomats say.
The French hard-line among its US, British, Chinese, Russian and German partners to hammer out a nuclear agreement with Tehran is rooted in ideological, historical, and even personal concerns that tend to stiffen as Paris recognizes Washington’s increasing pragmatism in seeking to conclude a deal swiftly.
“France has taken the opposite path to that of the United States, which changed strategies with the arrival of Barack Obama,” said Bernard Hourcade, an Iran specialist at the National Centre of Scientific Research, who says France’s current Socialist-led government adopted and defends the wary, intransigent stance towards Iran set down by previous conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy.
“Paris has clearly made the choice of going with Gulf oil monarchies and with a conservative stability” in the region, and frontally opposing Iranian interests and influences that Paris blames for violence and turmoil in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, Hourcade said.
It was that skepticism vis-a-vis Tehran that led France to initially block the November 2013 accord between Iranian and US diplomats — one that French officials rejected at the 11th hour for granting Iran too many concessions in the zeal to come away with an interim agreement sooner.
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