Israel Matzav

Russia and its supporters argue that NATO misused the limited council resolution imposing a no-fly zone and authorizing the protection of civilians as a pretext to promote regime change in Libya. Libya’s longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi was ousted after 42 years, captured and killed in October.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said a council-mandated investigation is essential “given the fact that initially we were led to believe by NATO leaders there are zero civilian casualties of their bombing campaign.”
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, who stepped to the microphone after Churkin, said: “Oh, the bombast and bogus claims.”

“Is everyone sufficiently distracted from Syria now and the killing that is happening before our very eyes?” she said.

But human rights activists said there was still no final list of observers and no clear rules for the mission. Wissam Tarif, the Arab world campaigner for Avaaz, who said he was a candidate for an observer post, said the delegation was still working out details, including whether observers would travel with their own security.
Opposition groups have also criticized the decision to name a Sudanese general to lead the mission — Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, a former head of military intelligence who served as a coordinator among the Sudanese government, the United Nations and African Union peacekeepers in Darfur.
Ammar al-Wawi, a former colonel in the Syrian Army who defected to the rebels, said: “We are suspicious about these observers. Do you send a veterinarian to do a Caesarean section?”

I am an uncompromising advocate of precision technologies in warfare, including drones and other remotely controlled machines that, by removing the issue of soldiers defending themselves, allow for more careful targeting decisions. I’m also a strong advocate of the Obama administration’s targeting killing programs, both by the military and the CIA. That said, proponents of precision targeting through better technology have long risked raising expectations well beyond what technology supports at any given moment. Gains in civilian protection come incrementally, much of it through trial and error, a combination of technology and experience gained about operations using it in the field. Either over-promising too much, too soon or demands that any “improvement” meet a zero damage, strict liability standard has the effect of stopping improvement in its tracks because improvements come incrementally, one grinding step at a time. Magic bullets come after a long series of unmagic ones.

An adviser to Egypt’s military rulers said in a newspaper interview published on Thursday that a brutal attack on a female protester by Egyptian soldiers on Saturday was justified because the woman had insulted the army.
Thousands of Egyptian women took to the streets of Cairo this week to protest the beating of the woman, whose black abaya was stripped back to reveal her underwear during the attack.
Asked about video and photographs of soldiers hitting and kicking the woman, Gen. Abdel Moneim Kato, a retired officer who advises the ruling military council in Cairo, told the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that the female activist “had been insulting the army through a megaphone” before she was stripped and beaten.

A Nour party spokesman told a rally that protesters in Tahrir Square are not innocent, but a group of terrorists that the Military Council must address "with full force."

One notes incidentally that the folks who denounce Israel for any failure to abide by UN wishes or resolutions don’t feel any better about those policies when, as in the case of the Gaza blockade, UN bodies find them legal. For some people, the UN is a beacon of light and a call to the conscience of mankind when it takes an anti-Israel stand and an irrelevant nuisance when it doesn’t.
This is, no doubt, the response of a measured and careful anti-Zionism from which all tinctures of anti-Semitism have been carefully and thoroughly expunged.

The Eid and Hajj rituals are a reminder of the shared roots of the world’s Abrahamic faiths and the powerful role that faith plays in motivating communities to serve and stand with those in need. On behalf of the American people, we extend our best wishes during this Hajj season.

According to reports in the Arab media, Islamic fundamentalist groups have been smuggling weapons into Syria from Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.
Most of these weapons have fallen into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists, who are now waging a guerrilla warfare against Assad's security forces, the reports say.
Syria's fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood organization, which was banned by the Syrian dictator's father, Hafez Assad, decades ago, has come back to life thanks to the uprising that was initially launched by secular forces.

The institute presented its new report on the region, “Classifying Higher Education Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa: A Pilot Study,” at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar, which completed its third annual conference last week.
The WISE conference, as it is known, is an international initiative financed by the Qatar Foundation, a government-funded nonprofit organization for education, science and community development. This year, the forum brought together 1,200 academic leaders and policy makers for three days of discussions on educational reform.
The study, which lasted two years, includes research on 300 higher education institutions in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Issued in conjunction with the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies and with support from the Carnegie Corporation, the report was released at the summit meeting, its authors say, to underscore that countries in the region are trying to raise their educational profiles. “Many higher education systems in the region are still in transition phase — leaving old systems and coming to new systems,” said Adnan El Amine, co-author of the report, and founder of Lebanese Association for Education Studies. “Over all, Arab institutions’ involvement at the international level is relatively low.”

During the WISE conference, the issue of ensuring quality of education, and its link to employing young people, was at the forefront of discussions. “We cannot afford to produce graduates who don’t fit the needs of the market anymore,” said Sheika Mozah bint Nasser, chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation “We have to have an education system that prepares them for jobs and builds critical thinking in a dynamic environment.”