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Daybreak: Obama Pulls Military Ties Closer

Plus Parker favors Park51, and more in the news

by
Marc Tracy
August 18, 2010
The two countries’ defense secretaries meeting last month.(Robert D. Ward/DoD via Getty Images)
The two countries’ defense secretaries meeting last month.(Robert D. Ward/DoD via Getty Images)

• In terms of both aid and cooperation, the Obama administration has significantly bulked up the military relationship between the United States and Israel. [WSJ]

• Lebanon passed a law that will see the 400,000 Palestinian refugees in its borders treated like other foreigners (they previously were discriminated against), including allowing them to work non-menial jobs. [NYT]

• The former soldier who posed pictures of herself with bound Palestinian prisoners on Facebook said she did not “understand what’s wrong” with what she did; the IDF itself has condemened her. [NYT]

• Yesterday’s siege at the Turkish Embassy ended with no incident. [JTA]

• Hamas accused the Palestinian Authority of “waging war against Islam.” [JPost]

• Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Kathleen Parker says Park51 must be built:

We teach tolerance by being tolerant. We can’t insist that our freedom of speech allows us to draw cartoons or produce plays that Muslims find offensive and then demand that they be more sensitive to our feelings.



More to the point, the tolerance we urge the Muslim world to embrace as we exercise our right to free expression, and revel in the glory and the gift of irreverence, is the same we must embrace when Muslims seek to express themselves peacefully.



Nobody ever said freedom would be easy.

[WP]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.