Abbas has obviously been told… does he really believe that with this about-face, Palestine will forget his despicable behaviour?
Abbas seeks vote on Gaza report: BBC
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has called for a session of the UN Human Rights Council to vote on a report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza.
Mr Abbas has faced a week of angry criticism after the Palestinian Authority backed deferring the vote until March.
On Sunday he said there had not been enough support for the vote.
Hamas’s leader in Damascus called the issue a “scandal” that would harm Palestinian unity efforts.
Mr Abbas was speaking in a televised address, widely seen as an attempt to restore his standing in the wake of the withdrawal of Palestinian backing for the report by UN investigator Richard Goldstone.
The report accuses both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during Israel’s 22-day operation in Gaza which began in December 2008.
“Since we felt that we would not be able to gather enough support, we asked for the postponement of the draft resolution until the upcoming session of the Human Rights Council,” he said, by way of explanation.
Mr Abbas had already ordered an “investigation” into how his own government made the decision.
He said he had now instructed his officials to push for a special session of the UN Human Rights Council to bring forward the debate that the PA had earlier supported deferring until March.
‘Mistakes’
The council could choose to refer the report to the UN Security Council, which has the power to ask the International Criminal Court to open a war crimes prosecution.
Khaled Meshaal, the Syria-based leader of Hamas, said the decision to back deferring the vote was “a scandal” and “the final straw”, and Hamas could “not accept any more mistakes”.
“This is not a leadership which deserves our trust,” he said.
The group said it had delayed talks to end a bitter feud with Mr Abba’s Fatah faction.
The rival movements had been due to sign a deal paving the way for fresh elections in the first half of 2010 in late October.
Egypt’s foreign minister said on Sunday that the reconciliation might be postponed “for a few weeks”.
No agreement on talks
Israel has dismissed the Goldstone report as flawed and intrinsically biased.
It reacted angrily on Sunday to comments by the UK’s ambassador to the UN in support of elements of the report.
Israeli officials suggested that if the same legal arguments were applied to British conduct in Afghanistan and Iraq as in Gaza, the UK could find itself in the dock.
“London is waging its own war against terror, and they might find themselves with their hands tied if they back Goldstone’s recommendations,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted unnamed officials as saying.
Also on Sunday, US Middle East envoy George Mitchell ended a visit to the region without getting a commitment from Israeli and the Palestinian officials on the resumption of stalled peace negotiations.
Israel’s right-wing government has refused to meet the Palestinian demand that it comply with previous pledges to freeze all settlement activity before talks can resume.
According to comments reported in the Palestinian press, Mr Meshaal apparently also reversed previous statements suggesting Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
“After the Arabs offered all the possible initiatives and after the Israelis and the Americans rejected their initiatives, the Arabs and the Palestinians must go back to their original demands,” he said.
“We must say: Palestine from the sea to the river, from the west to the occupied east, and it must be liberated,” he said, referring to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and therefore the state of Israel.
UN rights body ready to debate Goldstone probe: Ha’aretz
The United Nations Human Rights Council will reopen a debate about
alleged war crimes in Gaza later this week, officials said Tuesday, after Palestinians succeeded in gathering enough support to call a special meeting. “The holding of the special session is at the request of Palestine,” the United Nations said in a statement circulated on Tuesday in Geneva, where the 47-member body is based. The debate will start Thursday, a day after the UN Security Council in New York discusses the Goldstone report, which accuses Israeli forces and Palestinian militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during their Dec. 27-Jan. 18 war. Israel has rejected the report, claiming the investigators led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone were biased and misled by Palestinian propaganda.
UN officials say 18 of the council’s 47 members have signed a motion calling for the debate. The backers are: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Senegal.
Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority’s UN ambassador in Geneva, said the two-day debate would examine the report as well as recent incidents of violence in Jerusalem. It will be the sixth time that Israel has been the subject of a special
session by the Geneva-based council. Each previous session has resulted in a resolution critical of Israel. “We’ll wait to take a stance on the debate itself once it begins,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said. “We still think that this report is very dangerous and is disconnected from reality. This report was based almost exclusively on Hamas propaganda.”
The 575-page report concluded that Israel used disproportionate force and failed to protect civilians during its incursion into Gaza to root out Palestinian rocket squads.
The report also accused Palestinian armed groups of possible war crimes, including firing rockets into civilian areas in Israel. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s main rival, controls Gaza. Thirteen Israelis and almost 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the conflict.
The decision to call for a special meeting of the council marks a turnaround for the Palestinians. Under heavy U.S. pressure, Palestinian diplomats two weeks ago had asked for debate on the report to be delayed until March, resulting in protests at home. Despite angry Israeli reaction and U.S. criticism, the Goldstone report has been widely praised by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and supported by countries in Europe and elsewhere.
Abbas: Hamas using probe as excuse to delay reconciliation
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday lashed out at the rival Hamas movement, accusing the group of using opposition to the Goldstone Commission’s report on the Gaza War as a pretense for pushing of a reconciliation deal.
The Palestinian president’s comments came after a week of further strife between the rival groups, over the Palestinian Authority’s decision to retract its proposal for a UN vote. After two weeks of criticism, Abbas ordered his envoy to resubmit the proposal for a vote. During his first visit in years to the West Bank city of Jenin, Abbas lambasted senior Hamas officials for fleeing to the Sinai Peninsula as Gaza civilians suffered under Israel’s offensive. “Are you for or against the Goldstone report?” asked Abbas, directing his question at Hamas. “Has anybody heard a clear stance from Hamas?” United Nations Chief Ban ki-Boom said Monday that he supported Abbas’ decision to bring the subject back to the Human Rights Council for debate.
According to Abbas, Hamas was using the Goldstone report as an “excuse to run away from reconciliation.”
“At first they called it a Zionist report, then they blamed us for deferring [the vote],” said Hamas. “What’s the connection?”
“We will do everything in our power to bring this coup in Gaza to an end,” said Abbas. “We won’t use force… we will not open fire on our citizens and relatives.” Egypt announced earlier this week that a deal to reconcile the bitterly divided factions, set to be signed on October 25, would now be delayed by several weeks due to the internal row. Abbas also accused Hamas fighters of fleeing during the fighting while they left their people to be killed in Gaza. Tuesday’s speech was Abbas’ harshest so far on his Hamas rivals. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum called the speech base and misguided.
Relations between Abbas’s Fatah government in the West Bank and Hamas collapsed when Hamas seized control of Gaza in a bloody 2007 coup.
And now the boycott touches areas one could hardly imagine:
U.S. faults Turkey for banning Israel from int’l drill: Ha’aretz
The United States gently criticized Turkey on Tuesday for canceling a NATO military exercise which was to include Israeli participation.
Israeli defense officials have said the international military exercise, which was supposed to be held this week in Turkey and to include the U.S. and NATO, were scrapped over Turkish opposition to Israel’s participation.
Initially, Turkey said the reason for scrapping the drill was not political. But Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu later linked the cancellation to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip last winter.
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday that “as to the question of whether there was a government that was invited to participate and then removed at the last minute, we think it’s inappropriate for any nation to be removed from an exercise like this at the last minute.”
He was asked whether that was what happened, and Israel was the spurned country. He confirmed both.
Syria, However, praised Turkey for canceling the exercise, saying it amounted to a reprimand for Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas also applauded the Turkish decision, saying other Muslim nations should take similar steps, including severing ties with Israel.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said Tuesday: “We encourage such cancellations as long as Israel is continuing its aggression and occupation.” He made the comment during a press conference with Turkey’s visiting foreign minister.
In Lebanon, a senior Hamas official, Ali Baraka, said Turkey’s actions underlined its responsibility toward the Palestinians.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday tried to play down the tension with Turkey.
“Turkey is an important and central country in our region. Israel has had strategic relations with it for dozens of years,” Barak said during a visit to the Czech Republic. “Despite the ups and downs of our relationship, the ties between both states are important to us and to the Turks and therefore the links between the states won’t be harmed.”
Turkey has long been the Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world. But ties have deteriorated since Israel’s offensive in Gaza
Syria’s own peace efforts with Israel, mediated by Turkey last year, have stalled.
It seems that someone in Fatah has been reading the papers recently…
Fatah memo: We lost hope in Obama for caving to Zionist pressure: Ha’aretz
Fatah has said that all hopes in the Obama administration have evaporated, accusing the White House of caving in to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby and backing off a demand to freeze Jewish settlement.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ party also accused the United States of failing to set a clear agenda for a new round of Mideast peace talks, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
“All hopes placed in the new U.S. administration and President Obama have evaporated,” the document said. “Obama couldn’t withstand the pressure of the Zionist lobby, which led to a retreat from his previous positions on halting settlement construction and defining an agenda for the negotiations and peace.”
The Palestinians initially greeted Obama’s election with enthusiasm, welcoming his outreach to the Muslim world and hoping he would depart from what they viewed as the pro-Israel bias of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama raised Palestinian hopes further with his repeated calls for Israel to halt all construction in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem – areas the Palestinians claim for a future state.
But in recent weeks, the U.S. appears to have softened its stance on settlements. Washington says it has not abandoned the objective of halting settlement construction, but U.S. officials have indicated they do not see this as a condition for resuming talks. The memo comes at a time of turmoil within Fatah after Abbas quickly reversed a decision to suspend efforts to bring Israel before a United Nations war crimes tribunal in connection with Israel’s winter offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
The document, dated Oct. 12, was issued by Fatah’s Office of Mobilization and Organization. The office is headed by the party’s No. 2, Mohammed Ghneim. It was not immediately clear whether the document reflects Abbas’ views or whether it was leaked to pressure Obama to bear down harder on Israel. Abbas’ aides had no comment and Ghneim could not immediately be reached for comment. The U.S. Embassy in Israel did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
The document reiterated Fatah’s demand for Israel to freeze settlement construction and agree to a clear agenda for peace talks before negotiations can resume. The Palestinians want talks to resume from the point they broke down last year under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert. Netanyahu says he is not bound by any concessions Olmert may have made. Obama personally intervened last month, when he summoned Abbas and Netanyahu to a three-way meeting in New York. But he failed to break the impasse.
The document echoes sentiments expressed by other Fatah officials. On Sunday, former Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan said the party feels very disappointed and worried by the U.S. administration’s retreat. The last round of Israel-Palestinian negotiations broke down late last year with no apparent breakthroughs on the main issues dividing the two sides: final borders, the status of Jerusalem and a solution for Palestinians who lost homes and other property in Israel after it achieved statehood in 1948.
The dispute over ongoing settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem has blocked all efforts to get the sides to talk, let alone solve the intractable conflict. Netanyahu says some settlement construction must continue to accommodate growth of existing settler populations. He also says all of Jerusalem will remain in Israeli hands, although Israel’s annexation of the eastern part of the city and its sensitive holy sites has never been internationally recognized.
And now it spreads to sports! Remember the crucial role sporting boycotts have played in South Africa:
FIFA urged to give the red card to Israel: The Elctronic Intifada
Press release, various undersigned, 13 October 2009
The following press release was issued on 7 October 2009:
FIFA’s declared mission to use football to bring about “a better world” requires that clear signals be given to the apartheid state, Israel. The undersigned organizations call on FIFA to tell Israel it is off-side and to show it a red card for the World Cup.
Three Palestinian football players from the national team were killed during the Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip earlier this year. Because of the Israeli blockade and travel restrictions, the Palestinian national team there cannot practice with their teammates in the West Bank in their native land. They can only rarely take part in international competitions.
Palestinian athletes suffer constant discrimination and violent assaults. This is part of Israel’s decades-long refusal to guarantee the Palestinians their rights, freedom, dignity and their physical and spiritual integrity. This policy should be called apartheid. It is not only a violation of international law, but also of FIFA’s regulations against discrimination, and of the Olympic Charter.
South Africa’s exclusion from the world sports community until 1991 helped to bring about the end of racial separation in that country. Now, almost 20 years later, the World Cup will be hosted by South Africa in 2010. Decency, dignity and sporting fair play towards the hosts and the participating teams demand that Israel be subjected to the same sanctions. Numerous organizations and personalities in Israel and world-wide hope that increased pressure on Israel will induce it to respect the rights of the Palestinians. This is a prerequisite for peace.
We challenge FIFA to live up to the letter and the spirit of its statutes and to seize this opportunity to prove to the world that it stands for a more just world by sending Israel an unmistakeable threat of exclusion. This would be an important victory for human rights — not only for the Palestinian people, but also for the international football community.
No to apartheid!
Undersigned organizations: Basler Frauenvereinigung fuer Frieden und Fortschritt (BFFF), Bewegung fuer den Sozialismus (BFS/MPS), Collectif Judeo Arabe et Citoyen pour la Paix de Strasbourg, Collectif Urgence Palestine Vaud, Collectif Urgence Palestine Neuchatel, Frauen fuer den Frieden Region Basel, Frauen fuer den Frieden Region Biel, Gerechtigkeit und Frieden in Palaestina (GFP) Bern, Gesellschaft Schweiz-Palaestina (GSP/ASP), International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) France, Juedische Stimme fuer gerechten Frieden in Nahost (EJJP Deutschland), Kampagne Olivenoel, Neue PdA Basel, Mahnwache Bern, Palaestina-Solidaritaet Basel, Palaestina-Solidaritaet Zuerich, Sozialistische Alternative (SoAL) Basel, Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix (UJFP)
Lucky pasta: Ha’aretz
By Amira Hass
Lucky pasta! When an American senator discovered Israel bans importing pasta into the Gaza Strip, a storm broke out. And ever since, senior Israeli defense officials have included noodles on their list of permitted products. And calves, how did we forget them? That was approved by the highest levels of the Defense Ministry. After all, the bureaucrat-officers would never have dared violate the siege directives.
But notebooks, textbooks, pens and pencils – whose lack is felt by Gaza’s children due to the Israeli ban on letting “luxuries” into the Strip – have no well-fed public relations agents like pasta and calves did. Do Gaza’s children need to draw or do their homework?
All right, forget about the pens. But what about the Gazan father whose Israeli son is being barred from visiting him by Israeli generals, after not seeing each other for seven years? What about the son being barred by those who carry out the orders from bidding his dying mother farewell in Jordan, or the engaged woman being barred from going to the West Bank to marry? Clearly, the wedding is a Palestinian plot to alter the demographic balance.
The cynical criteria set by successive Israeli governments (before the disengagement, before Gilad Shalit’s captivity, before Hamas took over the Gaza Strip), which dictate the reality of the siege under which 1.5 million people, half of them children, live, are translated by hundreds of obedient officers and soldiers into a long list of draconian prohibitions and paternalistic permissions. If the justices on the High Court of Justice continue to uphold the ban on students leaving the Strip to study in the West Bank or Belgium, and the jurists of the State Prosecutor’s Office are not bothered by the fact that farmers, tailors and carpenters are becoming beggars because of the Israeli ban on importing raw materials and exporting finished products, why should this bother a 20-year-old soldier serving at the Erez checkpoint? Why should Israeli society care about sick people who miss medical treatments because of arbitrary decisions by the defense establishment ?
There are three Israeli human rights organizations that do care: Hamoked – The Center for the Defense of the Individual; Physicians for Human Rights; and Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. Every year, hundreds of besieged Palestinians apply to them for help in obtaining exit permits. These Israeli organizations claim for themselves the right and duty of intervening on behalf of Gazans’ right to freedom of movement by representing them, monitoring their cases and appealing to the Israeli courts.
It is thus no wonder that a month ago, on September 13, they were told that henceforth, their applications to the army’s District Coordination Office on behalf of Gazans who need to leave the Strip (sick people, students, parents) would no longer be answered. Apply to the relevant Palestinian agency (the Palestinian Civilian Committee), they were told. As if that agency has any involvement whatsoever in issuing exit permits, other than the courier service it provides by handing over the Palestinians’ documents.
The Peres Center for Peace has made life easier for hundreds of Gazan families this year by financing their children’s medical treatment in Israel. The defense establishment did not tell it to arrange exit permits for these children and their escorts via the Civilian Committee – and rightly. Why complicate and sabotage the process?
But that is precisely what the defense establishment is trying to do to the work of these three human rights organizations, who have represented thousands of Palestinians over the years. And it is doing so precisely because these groups are neither charities nor part of the “peace” establishment. On the contrary: They talk about the occupation and its obligations, which the defense establishment is violating. And they thereby question the morality of its criteria and directives.
The following incisive and excellent article by Robert Fisk raises questions not just about Obamah as a person and as President, but about the kind of advice given by the most expensive Intelligence ‘community’ on the planet, as well as about the ‘international community’ and its grave responsibilities for the continued occupation, oppression and the blockading na starvation of Gaza, not to mention the massacre at the beginning of 2009:
Robert Fisk: Obama, man of peace? No, just a Nobel prize of a mistake: The Independent
The US president received an award in the faint hope that he will succeed in the future. That’s how desperate the Middle East situation has become
His Middle East policy is collapsing. The Israelis have taunted him by ignoring his demand for an end to settlement-building and by continuing to build their colonies on Arab land. His special envoy is bluntly told by the Israelis that an Arab-Israel peace will take “many years”. Now he wants the Palestinians to talk peace to Israel without conditions. He put pressure on the Palestinian leader to throw away the opportunity of international scrutiny of UN Judge Goldstone’s damning indictment of Israeli war crimes in Gaza while his Assistant Secretary of State said that the Goldstone report was “seriously flawed”. After breaking his pre-election promise to call the 1915 Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey a genocide, he has urged the Armenians to sign a treaty with Turkey, again “without pre-conditions”. His army is still facing an insurgency in Iraq. He cannot decide how to win “his” war in Afghanistan. I shall not mention Iran.
And now President Barack Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. After only eight months in office. Not bad. No wonder he said he was “humbled” when told the news. He should have felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shimon Peres won it, too, and he never won an Israeli election. Yasser Arafat won it. And look what happened to him. For the first time in history, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a man who has achieved nothing – in the faint hope that he will do something good in the future. That’s how bad things are. That’s how explosive the Middle East has become.
Isn’t there anyone in the White House to remind Mr Obama that the Israelis have never obliged a US president who asked for an end to the building of colonies for Jews – and Jews only – on Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this – it was written into the Oslo accords – and the Israelis ignored him. George W Bush demanded an end to the fighting in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis ignored him. Mr Obama demands a total end to all settlement construction. “They just don’t get it, do they?” an Israeli minister – apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – was reported to have said when the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her president’s words. That’s what Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s crackpot foreign minister – he’s not as much a crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he’s getting close – said again on Thursday. “Whoever says it’s possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement,” he announced before meeting Mr Obama’s benighted and elderly envoy George Mitchell, “… simply doesn’t understand the reality.”
Across Arabia, needless to say, the Arab potentates continue to shake with fear in their golden minarets. That great Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir – murdered in 2005, quite possibly by Mr Obama’s new-found Syrian chums – put it well in one of his last essays. “Undeterred by Egypt since Sadat’s peace,” he wrote, “convinced of America’s unfailing support, guaranteed moral impunity by Europe’s bad conscience, and backed by a nuclear arsenal that was acquired with the help of Western powers, and that keeps growing without exciting any comment from the international community, Israel can literally do anything it wants, or is prompted to do by its leaders’ fantasies of domination.”
So Israel is getting away with it as usual, abusing the distinguished (and Jewish) head of the UN inquiry into Gaza war crimes – which also blamed Hamas – while joining the Americans in further disgracing the craven Palestinian Authority “President” Mahmoud Abbas, who is more interested in maintaining his relations with Washington than with his own Palestinian people. He’s even gone back on his word to refuse peace talks until Israel’s colonial expansion comes to an end. In a single devastating sentence, that usually mild Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri noted last week that Mr Abbas is “a tragic shell of a man, hollow, politically impotent, backed and respected by nobody”. I put “President” Abbas into quotation marks since he now has Mr Ahmadinejad’s status in the eyes of his people. Hamas is delighted. Thanks to President Obama.
Oddly, Mr Obama is also humiliating the Armenian president, Serg Sarkisian, by insisting that he talks to his Turkish adversaries without conditions. In the West Bank, you have to forget the Jewish colonies. In Armenia, you have to forget the Turkish murder of one and a half million Armenians in 1915. Mr Obama refused to honour his pre-election promise to recognise the 20th century’s first holocaust as a genocide. But if he can’t handle the First World War, how can he handle World War Three?
Mr Obama advertised the Afghanistan conflict as the war America had to fight – not that anarchic land of Mesopotamia which Mr Bush rashly invaded. He’d forgotten that Afghanistan was another Bush war; and he even announced that Pakistan was now America’s war, too. The White House produced its “Afpak” soundbite. And the drones came in droves over the old Durand Line, to kill the Taliban and a host of innocent civilians. Should Mr Obama concentrate on al-Qa’ida? Or yield to General Stanley McChrystal’s Vietnam-style demand for 40,000 more troops? The White House shows the two of them sitting opposite each other, Mr Obama in the smoothie suite, McChrystal in his battledress. The rabbit and the hare.
No way are they going to win. The neocons say that “the graveyard of empire” is a cliché. It is. But it’s also true. The Afghan government is totally corrupted; its paid warlords – paid by Karzai and the Americans – ramp up the drugs trade and the fear of Afghan civilians. But it’s much bigger than this.
The Indian embassy was bombed again last week. Has Mr Obama any idea why? Does he realise that Washington’s decision to support India against Pakistan over Kashmir – symbolised by his appointment of Richard Holbrooke as envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan but with no remit to discuss divided Kashmir – enraged Pakistan. He may want India to balance the power of China (some hope!) but Pakistan’s military intelligence realises that the only way of persuading Mr Obama to act fairly over Kashmir – recognising Pakistan’s claims as well as India’s – is to increase their support for the Taliban. No justice in Kashmir, no security for US troops – or the Indian embassy – in Afghanistan.
Then, after stroking the Iranian pussycat at the Geneva nuclear talks, the US president discovered that the feline was showing its claws again at the end of last week. A Revolutionary Guard commander, an adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned that Iran would “blow up the heart” of Israel if Israel or the US attacked the Islamic Republic. I doubt it. Blow up Israel and you blow up “Palestine”. Iranians – who understand the West much better than we understand them – have another policy in the case of the apocalypse. If the Israelis attack, they may leave Israel alone. They have a plan, I’m told, to target instead only US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their bases in the Gulf and their warships cruising through Hormuz. They would leave Israel alone. Americans would then learn the price of kneeling before their Israeli masters.
For the Iranians know that the US has no stomach for a third war in the Middle East. Which is why Mr Obama has been sending his generals thick and fast to the defence ministry in Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis not to strike at Iran. And why Israel’s leaders – including Mr Netanyahu – were blowing the peace pipe all week about the need for international negotiations with Iran. But it raises an interesting question. Is Mr Obama more frightened of Iran’s retaliation? Or of its nuclear capabilities? Or more terrified of Israel’s possible aggression against Iran?
But, please, no attacks on 10 December. That’s when Barack Obama turns up in Oslo to pocket his peace prize – for achievements he has not yet achieved and for dreams that will turn into nightmares.