The US and Europe’s message to Israel: 

We’ll let you save us from a nuclear-armed Iran if you’ll promise to let yourself be put in existential jeopardy. 

Apparently, Israel may accept the offer!!!

From the Jerusalem Post:

A deal taking shape between Israel and Western leaders will facilitate international support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in exchange for concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors,The Times reported Thursday.

According to one British official quoted by the paper, such an understanding could allow an Israeli attack “within the year.”

The report in the UK paper quoted unnamed diplomats as saying Israel was prepared to offer concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state as well as on its settlement policy and “issues” with Arab neighbors, in exchange for international backing for an Israeli operation in Iran.

John Ellis writes in Front page Magazine of the effect Obama had on the incipient Iranian revolution (read it all here):

In a situation like this, Barak Obama was not powerless to affect the outcome, as his defenders suggest.  As spokesman for the most powerful nation on earth, he was in a position to make a real difference to the all-important psychology on both sides—and that is exactly what he did.  But instead of building up the confidence of the protesters (and simultaneously undermining that of the security apparatus) with encouragement and a ringing endorsement of what they were doing, what he actually did was to give comfort to the forces of repression and undermine the confidence of the Iranian people. 

Was this factor important enough to affect the outcome?  We can never know for sure, but we can say two things with certainty.  First, that this was evidently a close call for the regime, and that, to judge from the visible uncertainty of the security forces in the early going, the tipping point was nearly reached.  And second, that Obama’s words discouraged the protesters in the street, and gave aid and comfort to the Ahmadinejad regime.  We can only conclude that it is quite possible, though not certain, that in a closely balanced situation Obama’s words retarded momentum that had neared the tipping point and thus saved the day for the regime. 

What about his later self-correction?  There can be no doubt that it was completely irrelevant.  The crisis of confidence had already passed.  Obama spoke up only after the security forces had begun to seriously crack down—in other words, only after they knew what the outcome would be, as did the protesters.  By the time he changed his tune, what he said no longer had any power to affect the outcome.  

The stakes in this potential Iranian revolution were enormous.  Iranian mischief-making throughout the Middle East could have been ended, and a force for the good in the region could have replaced its most persistent source of evil.  Obama had claimed that his diplomatic skill could solve the Iranian nuclear threat where George W. Bush had failed, but when an opportunity was presented to him to do much more than this, he squandered it in one of the worst foreign policy blunders since Jimmy Carter.

We aren’t so sure about ‘a force for the good’ replacing the present Iranian regime if the incipient revolution had succeeded. We aren’t sure that any likely or possible change in Iran would be all that great. But some change might have brought some relief. Anyway, we agree that Obama once again betrayed the better side.   

… but not for the gander. 

We hope that Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by force. We have noticed that talking to Iran  accomplishes nothing.

Obama’s anti-Israel administration is plainly trying to make it hard for Israel to take action against Iran.  

But Israel is a sovereign state and will make its own defense decisions.   

When Sarah Palin said so, her media critics called it ‘stupid’.

When Joe Biden says it  … 

James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don’t think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

Gibson: So if we wouldn’t second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

Palin: I don’t think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS’s Katie Couric.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled “Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That’s Okay With Me”:

Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances.

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it “absurd” and “stupid”? Well, is the pope Italian? Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

This is being read by some . . . as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Then there’s M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as “robotic” and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

In other words, under the Palin administration, we won’t second guess Israel. I think I’ve got it.

Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president’s words didn’t really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

The President said today that he has “absolutely not” given Israel a “green light” to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

Gibson: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

Well, the two British embassy staff arrested by the Iranian government are to be put on trial.

Guardians Council chief Ahmad Jannati said: “Naturally they will be put on trial, they have made confessions.”

…

“In these incidents, their embassy had a presence, some people were arrested,” Ayatollah Jannati told the thousands of worshippers at Friday prayers, according to news agencies.

…

Ayatollah Jannati added: “After the election, the enemy could not stand people’s joy. The enemy made an effort to poison the people. They had planned a velvet revolution before the election.”

He said the UK foreign office had warned of possible “street riots” around the 12 June election and had advised its nationals to avoid public places.

This is a shrewd move by the Guardian council. The implication of British involvement in the riots seems to us to be an attempt to excuse the riots as the wicked interfering hand of foreign powers, rather than the protests being at the whim of the Iranian people.

One excerpt from the article caused us amusement:

Historians says the distrust between the UK and Iran stems from the 1800s, when Iran – then Persia – was forced to concede territory to Russia in a treaty drafted by a British diplomat.

Thank God (sic) for the BBC’s official historians. I now feel enlightened.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Mousavi supporters are being hanged by the regime.

Hard to tell accuracy of this.

The ayatollah was quoted as saying: “Is it a case of justice to see that an honorable and modest Seyyed [a descendant of the household of the prophet Muhammad], who until the last moments of Khomeini’s life was a dear and close companion of that grand leader, is now considered to be a rioter and an agent of arrogance who must be punished?”

Iran has arrested eight British embassy staff in Tehran

The UK has demanded the immediate release of Iranian staff at its Tehran embassy who were arrested on Saturday. Iranian media earlier reported that eight local staff at the mission had been detained for their “considerable role” in post-election riots.

A piece in the Jerusalem Post about the death of Neda Soltan, a young woman murdered in the protests this week.

THIS WHOLE situation is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan. For years before 9/11, women’s groups were circulating articles, e-mails and any kind of visible validation demonstrating the horror that women lived with under the Taliban. Stories of women professors being arrested if they left their homes, videos of women being shot in public stadiums for daring to have a job, petitions, statistics, testimonials – they all got around. Well, at least among women. Yet, despite the extreme suffering of women throughout Taliban rule, the United States did not intervene, nor did anyone else – that is, until 9/11 happened. When the Taliban attacked the United States, suddenly America woke up and unanimously said, “Hey, those Taliban! They’re really bad! We should stop them!”

I would suggest to the author that the United States government is going to be – indeed, is obliged to be – more concerned about the murder of 3000 of its own citizens than the horrific internal autocratic oppression in the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

A Bahrainian newspaper has been taken out of print after an article criticising the Iranian government was published.

You can’t escape anti-semitism in the Middle East, it’s enshrined in societal thinking, even when criticising each other.  And so my favourite part of the article was this:

The writer, who like Iran’s leaders is a Shia Muslim, also referred to speculation that Mr Ahmadinejad may have Jewish ancestors.

Those sneaky Jews.

The infamous Guardian Council has admitted there were voting irregularities.

“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100% of those eligible cast their ballot in 80-170 cities are not accurate – the incident happened in only 50 cities,” Kadkhodaei was quoted on the Iranian state-funded Website Press TV.

This channel is full of videos from the demonstrations. If you’re a YouTube member, become a subscriber to his channel to show support.