Also on today’s menu:
China Offers A Role In Mideast Negotiations
Cornell Student Charged With Threats To Jews
US Couple Fined For Inhumane Treatment Of Foster Child
Director Christopher Wray said that, although the FBI has no evidence of an imminent threat from a foreign terrorist group, the war between Israel and Hamas has led to a spike in threats against the United States, with al-Qaida issuing its most specific call for violence against the U.S. in years. The Islamic State has urged its followers to target Jewish communities in the United States and Europe.
“The reality is that the terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023, but the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level,” Wray said in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on October 31. He said that Hamas’ attack, which killed some 1,400 people in Israel, “will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate years ago.”
The US is keenly aware of the danger of the Israel-Hamas war spreading to other Middle East countries and President Joe Biden Jr. has combined his support of Israel’s right to respond with demands that Israel follow the rules of war. While the US has condemned the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians as “an act of sheer evil,” Biden advised Israelis not to be consumed by their rage, admitting that, “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States, and while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” He said that responding to the October 7 massacre “requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.”
The policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have inflamed tensions and caused many Israelis to protest his extreme positions. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross say Israel’s pursuit of Hamas militants has led it to commit war crimes of its own, punishing the civilians of Gaza by denying food, water, and displacing more than a million people. The US says there have been “many thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza thus far in the conflict. ... Way too many.”
“The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a tale of competing narratives, not only between competing nations but within those peoples to see whose definition of nationhood, whose command of theology, should prevail,” writes Robert Azzi in his column. The column is a good primer for Americans who are confused by or unclear about the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
China Offers A Role In Mideast Negotiations
The People’s Republic of China has offered to help broker a peace agreement in the Israel-Hamas war and sent its top diplomat, Wang Yi, to discuss the conflict with officials in Washington over the weekend. The US has pledged to work with China on trying to find a resolution.
China has been one of the most vocal proponents of a ceasefire in United Nations meetings, offering to take advantage of its close relationship with Iran to de-escalate the situation. China is Iran’s biggest trade partner, and Beijing brokered a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia earlier this year. Tehran, which backs Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, has said it “stands ready to strengthen communication with China" to resolve the situation in Gaza.
While the Chinese government could be perceived as an honest broker, having positive relationships with the Palestinians, Arabs, Turkey, and Iran, it did not initially condemn Hamas nor mention Israel’s right to defend itself. Wang later said, “all countries have the right to self-defense” but that Israel’s actions went “beyond the scope of self-defense”.
Columnist Noah Smith, meanwhile, has warned that the United States should regard China as a greater threat than the conflict in the Middle East and said the United States no longer has the power or the money to handle everything at once. “We are no longer a hyperpower or a global hegemon. But retreating into a shell of isolationism and letting the world burn, as the MAGA faction of the Republican Party would have us do, is also not an option. The US economy depends critically on other nations’ products, and this will always be true; but even if it weren’t the case, abandoning the world to a bloc of totalitarian powers would ultimately put the US itself in grave danger.”
Smith argues,
Right now, the two regions with active conflicts are Europe and the Middle East, and so our resources are going there instead of to Asia. In fact, Biden has been taking a softer approach toward China in 2023 than in the first two years of his presidency; part of this is probably because China’s economic woes make it seem like less of an imminent threat, but part of it is must be due to the fact that the wars in Ukraine and now Israel are absorbing U.S. attention and effort.
But whether or not that tentative detente is a good idea or a mistake, an overall shift in focus away from Asia would definitely be a miscalculation. Regardless of how hawkish the U.S. wants to be toward China, it makes sense to be investing more diplomatic energy and military preparation into the region. In particular, the urge to plunge back into Middle Eastern conflict should be strongly resisted. This is both because Asia is a more strategically important region, and because American power is more suited to producing a more positive outcome in Asia than in the Middle East.
Cornell Student Charged With Threats To Jews
Patrick Dai, 21, a third-year student at Cornell University, has been charged with posting violent threats to Jewish classmates over the weekend. Using the screen name “hamas”, Dai allegedly threatened to shoot Jewish students, rape Jewish women, and “behead any Jewish babies”. Officials say he posted that he planned to attack a university building that housed a kosher cafeteria that is next to the Cornell Jewish Center.
The FBI charged Dai with posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications, a crime that is punishable by as many as five years in prison.
The college newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, first reported a series of antisemitic comments left on the website Greekrank, a platform about fraternity and sorority life that is used by many Cornell students. One of the posts from “hamas” was titled, “if i see another jew”.
US Couple Fined For Inhumane Treatment Of Foster Child
Nicholas and Mackenzie Spencer, a couple from the United States, has been ordered to pay 100 million Ugandan shillings, or $26,000, to their 10-year-old foster son after reaching a plea agreement in a Ugandan court that found them guilty of child cruelty and inhumane treatment of the special-needs child, rather than the more serious charges of child trafficking and torture that had originally been brought against them.
The pair’s nanny had reported “repeated unbecoming inhumane treatment” of the child to local police last December, saying they made the boy sleep on a wooden platform and fed him cold food. Under the plea agreement, the couple also pleaded guilty to degrading treatment, working illegally, and unlawfully staying in Uganda without permits, for which they were sentenced to two months in prison with credit for the time they have served since their arrest last year.
David Mpanga, the couple’s lawyer, told Reuters that the boy had psychiatric problems and that the pair had no parenting experience and failed to look after him properly.
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