Human shields surround Iranian nuke plant

(EOZ) Hundreds of students on Tuesday formed a human chain around the uranium conversion plant in central Iran, in a demonstration staged by students to show that Iranians were ready to sacrifice their lives if the nuclear sites were attacked by Israel.

After holding a noon prayer session in front of the plant's main gate, students from Isfahan universities shouted "Death to Israel" and "Death to America." They vowed to resist in the event of an attack.

There is a small body of literature on the legal status of voluntary human shields. If they are protecting an unquestioned military installation or target, according to most (except HRW) they forfeit their status as civilians and become considered combatants under international law. If they are shielding a dual-use facility, which would include nuclear research and nuclear material refining, it appears that they would maintain their status as civilians.

Publisher of The Jewish Week Asks Jews "PLEASE Don't Piss off Obama"

(Yid With Lid) Sometimes it astounds me the extent to which a progressive "journalist" will go to spin stories in their direction, thus putting politics before serving the readers. Sometimes it astounds me the extent to which a progressive Jew will go to promote their favorite politicians thus putting politics before either their home country, America or the Jewish people.

In his latest column in the paper he publishes, Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week astounded me times two, as he talked about the disastrous ADL/Abe Foxman request for Jews to avoid criticizing the POTUS and warned that if American Jews upset President Obama, he might be really bad toward Israel in a second term.

Case in point: There are no more savvy experts on the mood and politics of the American Jewish community than Abe Foxman and David Harris, professional heads of the ADL and American Jewish Committee, respectively, our two leading mainstream national Jewish defense organizations.
But Foxman and Harris seem to have been caught off guard last month by the sharp criticism of their joint National Pledge for Unity on Israel, which they no doubt thought would be widely accepted in the Jewish community — a kind of motherhood-and-apple-pie affirmation of the ongoing power, and need, for bipartisan support in Washington for the Jewish state.
The outcries over the unity pledge, particularly on the right, have underscored just how fractured political activists in our community are over Israel. More specifically, the issue speaks to the debate over the wisdom of criticizing the Obama administration, and especially the president himself, as being Israel’s adversary as he seeks re-election.

Things need to be put in context. In this column a progressive publisher, is supporting a progressive advocate who is supporting a progressive president while not admitting to their political bias, which is a disservice to the readers, in the case of the Jewish Week and the donors in the case of the ADL.
As I pointed out when the "shut up pledge"  was first published, Abe Foxman has been running the ADL as  his own personal progressive activist group. Indeed the organization spends as much time promoting progressive social issues such as abortion and illegal immigration as it does Jewish issues.  So of course Abe will do just about anything he can to get his progressive prophet re-elected.
As for Gary Rosenblatt and his Jewish Week, the paper could be much more profitable if most of the reporters were fired and replaced with press releases from Media Matters, J Street, the DNC, and the Obama White House. And the best part of it all the readers wouldn't be able to detect anything different. In the interest of full disclosure, let me remind you that I am a columnist for a competitive paper, The Jewish Star.
In supposedly "pure news" articles, the Jewish Week shows its bias by only interviewing people with a progressive perspective, trashing the tea party as dangerous, white-washing the Antisemitism of the Occupy movement, criticizing Jews who disagree with Obama, calling people who fight jihad in America "McCarthyists," supporting the socialist "Jewish Funds for Justice" in its George Soros-directed attacks on Glenn Beck, and much,much,more. With the exception of one reporter by the name of Stewart Ain, every writer for the paper displays a very strong progressive/liberal bias in their writing, whether the story is about politics in the US or Israel.  And like most progressives, the paper always finds a way to criticize those who are most observant, which is strange because Rosenblatt is a graduate of Yeshiva University.

In his column Rosenblatt supports Foxman and threatens that if the Jews upset Obama, he might take his revenge out on Israel.

....Responding to widespread criticism from the right [Rosenblatt incorrectly assumes that only people on the right are displeased with Obama on Israel] , the AJC’s Harris posted a blog that made the distinction between “slash and burn” partisanship, where the goal is to attack one’s political enemy, and pro-Israel advocacy, which is grounded in “the here and now,” irrespective of which political party is in and which is out. And the ADL’s Foxman issued a follow-up statement saying that some had distorted the idea behind the pledge [I fact-check Foxman's defense of the pledge here}

He said the original premise was not to discourage debate but a plea “to avoid harsh and personal rhetoric or tactics in the form of attacks on political opponents’ positions on Israel.”
Too late.
Obama has already been described as the worst president ever for Israel, and an enemy of the Jewish state.

He is.

...What Harris and Foxman didn’t say, but what is surely on the mind of mainstream [liberal] pro-Israel groups, is that if Obama is re-elected next year, he will be free to carry out foreign policy initiatives in a second term, without political constraints. So it behooves the American Jewish community to be on good terms with him rather than burn its bridges in seeking his defeat.

Here also Rosenblatt is being political rather than honest. Before the 2008 election many Jews predicted that Obama would be awful to Israel, based on previous statements, actions and who his advisers were.  The progressive publisher is failing to acknowledge that Obama's anti-Israel presidency proceeded as many of us warned.
Rather than Rosenblatt's don't piss off the POTUS scenario allow me to offer a more logical one. Barack Obama has a long history of anti-Israel positions and advisers, except for a brief time in 2008 when it looked as though he might have problems with the Jewish vote.Ignoring the warnings  Jewish voter support was extremely high (78%) and he receive the bulk of Jewish presidential campaign donations.
Despite all of this support, Obama has been the worst president for Israel in American history, worse than Carter and worse than George H.W. Bush. All this time he knew he would need Jewish support in 2012. So does it really matter whether he gets the support or not?  If he was so lousy when he needed the supporters of Israel, if re-elected he will be even worse as he needs no one. That why supporters of Israel should be campaigning hard to make sure that Barack Obama is not re-elected, because whether he likes the Jews or not, he is bound to be worse than he was during the first four years.
I would invite Rosenblatt to take a look at the economy, and what has undoubtedly happened to the Jewish Week's ad pages. Part of the reason for the downturn may be that the Jewish Star hired a new political columnist eleven months ago, but  more likely reason is that Barack Obama has not been good to the economy.  This too may get even worse during a second term as the president will no longer have to make voters happy.
But none of this matters to people like Gary Rosenblatt. Honesty with readers may be part of Journalistic ethics, but as we have learned so many times with the progressive media, journalistic ethics are not very important.

PLO now saying no to "land swaps"

(EOZ) From Gulf News:

The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) announced on Monday that it will very soon drop the "land swap" formula, which the it branded as a grave mistake that was included in any agreement with Israel.
Speaking to Gulf News, Tayseer Khalid, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, said that the formula was only mere talk by Israelis and mediators. "We have never signed an agreement with Israel, which states any shape of land swap formula," he added. "Land swap formula is a heresay [sic] in the track of negotiations," he said.
The Palestinians should have reached agreements on the borders and arranged for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and handled the other core issues before the land swap formula is addressed, he said. "It is time for this mistake to get corrected," he stressed.

As Daled Amos points out, the official PLO position had indeed included land swaps - as recently as June:

The Palestinian Authority passed on four official demands to the Mideast Quartet for discussion in upcoming meetings, PLO official Saeb Erekat told Saudi newspaper Al-Watan on Friday.
Erekat said the demands included a complete halt to all Israeli settlement activity, 1967 borders as the basis for peace negotiations with mutually agreed land swaps, EU support for reconciliation talks "which will strengthen peace opportunities" and EU support for a Palestinian UN statehood bid in September.

How many lies must the PLO utter before the world realizes that they are nothing but a bunch of liars?
This looks like a trial balloon. Abbas and his cronies have been repeatedly emphasizing the 1949 armistice lines  lately without any mention of land swaps, pretending that international law supports the entire area seized by Jordan and Egypt at that time as somehow being inherently "Palestinian." The UN stunt can be interpreted minimally as the PLO claiming all of the territories, and plausibly as their claiming the 1947 partition lines.
It seems that the PLO, feeling that they are in a strong political position, is abandoning the pretense of being interested in negotiations and is pushing for the world community to award them everything without any penalty.
This means that the entire negotiations track documented in the Palestine Papers was nothing but a sham - a sop to the Americans and the EU as they pretended that they were interested in peace when in fact they just wanted not to get on the bad side of the West. The goal remains the same as it was in 1974: grab what you can in stages and then position yourself to grab more.
And if that means to pretend to be moderate for a couple of decades, no problem. As we've seen, lying comes easy for Palestinian Arab leaders. And Western leaders can still not wrap their heads around the idea that people would lie directly to their faces.
(h/t David G)

PaliLeaks, land swaps and desperate search of peace « Ari Rusila's BalkanBlog - Where to draw borders: The settlements are a known issue of contention between Israel and the United States; although America has not supported their construction, it has, on some occasions, recognized the realities that have developed over 40 years. Improbability for two-state approach is big without massive withdrawals from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where over 500,000 settlers now live. PaliLeaks are showing serious attemp to find a compromise between total withdrawal to the 1967 border and a redefined border through land swaps.

Latest proposal on 2009 included Israeli annexation of two percent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem adjacent to the 1967 line containing about 350,000 setters in big bloc settlements. In return, Israel would evacuate about 150,000 other settlers and transfer to Palestine two percent of its land, of equal quality, next to the southern West Bank and Gaza.

note the use of the West Bank... this is not a Pro Israel webiste.

Israel’s current leadership (which is dominated by the settler, religious and ideological right) as well as extreme Hamas elements would probably resist this, however leaked documents show that with current PA an agrement might be possible.

guess not!

The "napkin map" revealed - The Palestine Papers - Al Jazeera English:  The Palestinian Authority proposed an unprecedented land swap to the Israeli government, offering to annex virtually all of the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.

^^^^^^

illegal? by what law?