March 30, 2012 | 5:27 am

March 30, 2012

Posted by Shmuel Rosner

Syrian President Bashar Assad meeting UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan in Damascus, March 2012. (Photo: Reuters)

Annan with a plan

The Economist believes the UN-Arab League envoy’s plan to end the violence in Syria is far from an ideal solution.

“A welcome bandage rather than a long-term solution,” is how a Syrian analyst describes the plan. Mr Assad, whose forces’ killing of 50 protesters overshadowed Mr Annan’s announcement, is unlikely to pay more than lip service to any binding calls for him to back off. If he did relinquish ground, Syria’s city squares would be quickly overrun by protesters chanting for his downfall.

Perry’s Azerbaijan-Israel Expose: Pure Speculation

Zachary Lichaa of the Algemeiner casts doubt on the accuracy of a report that Israel is planning to use Azerbaijan’s territory in any strike on Iran.

The founder of one of America’s leading think tanks on the Middle East, who requested anonymity, says there’s little reason to trust any information coming out publicly from Israel or the United State vis-a-vis Iran.

Bad timing for another “Jerusalem denial” from the State Department

Writing for Hot Air, J.E. Dyer takes the Obama administration to task over its policy on Jerusalem, even as Israel’s Arab neighbors and Palestinian supporters were planning a Global March to Jerusalem.

Sandwiched between last month’s International Conference on Jerusalem in Qatar – at which a cast of Islamists, Western sympathizers, and UN officials sought to “combat the Judaization” of Israel’s capital – and the upcoming Global March on Jerusalem, the US State Department has stumbled this week through another episode of “Jerusalem denial.”

Operation Defensive Shield, ten years on

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff of Haaretz look back at the pivotal military operation of the Second Intifada, on its tenth anniversary.

Some of the methods were brutal, but Operation Defensive Shield suppressed Palestinian terrorism, including Hamas and Fatah’s deadly suicide bombings. Though its impact was not fully apparent until three years later, the operation restored normalcy on both sides of the Green Line.

Pesach at the White House

White House staffers share their traditional family Passover recipes.

This recipe has been in my family for at least five generations. Esther Jacob, my grandmother, brought it with her when she arrived in Ellis Island from  Alba Iulia, Romania in 1932. She made her home and life in the Bronx, New York, and every year her family eats this kugel at our seder. Over the years, the size of the family and the seders have grown, but we take time to tell the stories of how our grandparents and great-grandparents made the difficult choice and hard journey to America in search of the very freedom that we celebrate on Passover.  

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