More in ‘Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’

Foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead has joined Thomas Friedman and others in congratulating the Obama administration for condemning Israel over the announcement it was building 1600 apartment units in East Jerusalem.
“The Obama administration had no choice but to respond strongly,” Mead writes. “Otherwise the administration would have looked weak and irresolute and the ...

• Saying he’s “almost certain” the Mossad was behind the assassination of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Dubai police chief is seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mossad chief Meir Dagan. More on this story later in the day. [Reuters/Laura Rozen]
• The top U.N. official for humanitarian relief condemned the Gaza blockade, ...

• The New York Daily News editorializes against Brooklyn’s Mile End and its preference for Montreal bagels: “this is a crime against the culture of your city. One punishable by flogging with hard salamis.” Maybe this will be a central plank of News publisher Mort Zuckerman’s Senate campaign! [Daily News]
• Syria symbolically reaffirmed its membership ...

The is the second in a two-part series. Read the first part here.
Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council, wants to be the face of the Iranian-American lobby in Washington. The other pillar of Washington’s Iran lobby, Flynt Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, have accumulated power and influence by executing the ...

• James Hoge, the broadly respected editor of Foreign Affairs, will become the new head of Human Rights Watch. The group has been accused in the past of an anti-Israel bias. [Laura Rozen]
• Elie Wiesel says he “would not shed a tear” if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad died. [Haaretz]
• A dispatch describes the fledgling Jewish community of ...

First in a two-part series on the dueling Iran lobbies in Washington.
Flynt Leverett is fielding questions from an audience at the New American Foundation for a panel titled “What the Iranian People Really Think,” and the crowd—at least the Iranian part of it—is starting to get hostile. When Leverett cites poll numbers suggesting that Mahmoud ...

• President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly ordered further enrichment of uranium, ostensibly for a medical-research reactor. The move immediately heightened tensions over the country’s nuclear program. [WSJ]
• President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to the U.S. model of indirect talks, whereby envoy George Mitchell will present an offer to the Israelis and the Palestinians and then shuttle between ...

• Iran’s nuclear program has prompted the United States to increase the flow of arms, particularly anti-missile weapons and technology, to its nearby allies. It has also moved two cruisers to the Gulf. [WSJ]
• A top Hamas guy was found dead, mysteriously, in a Dubai hotel room; he was a crucial weapons middleman between Iran, ...

Regarding the Iranian physicist who was killed in a bomb blast in Tehran a few days ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a theory: the Jews did it. It’s not impossible, or even implausible, that Israel, or the United States, or some Western interest, launched the assassination in order to slow Iran’s nuclear program—a Haaretz columnist ...

The New York Post reports that a shady Iranian charity organization has been donating big bucks to Columbia University and Rutgers University to support the hiring of pro-Iran, anti-Israel faculty. The Alavi Foundation seems to have been under the thumb of Iran’s government and has also been found to have supplied money to Iranian spies ...