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Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Some headlines and summaries from JTA
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Republican chairman booed at AJCommittee event
The chairman of the Republican Party was booed at an American Jewish Committee event over comments on Iraq.
Ken Mehlman, who is Jewish, said Iraq posed less of a challenge now than under Saddam Hussein.
Mehlman was otherwise politely received when he spoke Tuesday at the AJCommittee’s 100th anniversary celebrations in Washington, and he got warm applause when he said the Bush administration would not tolerate an Iranian nuclear bomb and always would stand by Israel.
The room burst into applause, however, when AJCommittee board member Edith Everett asked Mehlman to “take a message” to President Bush to stop linking Israel and Iran.
“It does not help Israel and it does not help American Jews to appear to be stimulators of any action against Iran,” Everett said.
She added that “it’s easy to understand why Iran is not worried about us” because Iraq is consuming so many U.S. resources.
Mehlman replied by acknowledging that Iraq was a “challenge,” but claimed it’s “less of a challenge than when Saddam Hussein was in power.”
The room filled with boos and hisses.
U.S.: P.A. failed on counter-terror
Palestinian counter-terrorism efforts last year fell “far short” of U.S. expectations, a State Department report said.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ “public condemnation of terrorist acts was not matched by decisive security operations following attacks against Israelis,” said the chapter on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 2005 country report on terrorism issued last Friday.
The report did not cover this year, when Palestinians elected the Hamas terrorist group to power.
Palestinian security forces “did not take decisive actions to end the use of Palestinian territory for attacks on Israeli civilians” and the Palestinian Authority “did not make any sustained effort to dismantle terrorist infrastructure in territory under its control,” the report said.
Israeli restrictions on Palestinian security forces contributed to the failure, the report said, but the Palestinian Authority’s “lack of political will” to confront terrorists “was the primary cause.”
The attacks continued despite a truce in place since February 2005, but they diminished somewhat — partly because of the truce, but also because Israeli forces arrested or killed terrorist leaders, the report said.
UAE leads in Israel boycott
The United Arab Emirates is the overwhelming leader in requests for compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel, according to a report to Congress.
Of the 1,037 queries demanding boycott compliance that U.S. companies received in financial year 2005, 408 came from the UAE, the Congressional Research Service reported last month in a report made available on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists.
The requests were for compliance with the secondary and tertiary boycotts of companies that deal with Israel.
Second in requests was Lebanon, with 84. Some requests came from non-Arab countries, including India and Nigeria.
The report, based on Commerce Department information, also said six cases had been closed against participating U.S. companies, including a $500,000 fine imposed against Maine Biological Labs.
UAE participation in the boycott helped scuttle a deal this year to contract the management of six major U.S. ports to Dubai, one of the emirates.
http://www.jta.org/
posted by Somebody @ 11:35 PM Permanent Link
 
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