March 29, 2012 | 6:19 am

March 29, 2012

Posted by Shmuel Rosner

Anti-Semitic graffiti on a monument dedicated to the victims of the Krakow ghetto in Poland. (Photo: Reuters)

Israel’s Secret Staging Ground

Israel’s relationship with Iran’s neighbor Azerbaijan is causing the US some ‎headaches, writes Mark Perry in Foreign Policy.‎

‎[F]our senior diplomats and military intelligence officers ‎say that the United States has concluded that Israel has ‎recently been granted access to airbases on Iran’s ‎northern border. To do what, exactly, is not clear. “The ‎Israelis have bought an airfield,” a senior administration ‎official told me in early February, “and the airfield is ‎called Azerbaijan.”‎

Israel’s plan to attack Iran put on hold

Amir Oren of Haaretz says war simulations showing ‎disastrous results for the Americans have led Israel to ‎shelve planes for a strike on Iran.‎

According to a war simulation conducted by the U.S. Central Command, the Iranians could kill 200 Americans with a single missile response to an Israeli attack. An investigative committee would not spare any admiral or general, minister or president. The meaning of this U.S. scenario is that the blood of these 200 would be on Israel’s head.

Hitting back, at Harvard

Israelis students at the Ivy League school have an answer ‎to the one-state conference hosted there last month, ‎writes David Shamah in the Times of Israel. ‎

The two-day conference, set for April 19-20, will focus on the contributions Israel has ‎made to technology, agriculture, energy management, medicine, and a plethora of ‎other areas. A star-studded list of personalities, including “Start-Up Nation” co-writer ‎Dan Senor, former US Ambassador to Israel Dennis Ross, and Bank of Israel Governor ‎Stanley Fischer, will speak on Israel’s contributions to modern life.‎

The New Anti-Semitism

Victor Davis Hanson of the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution explores the ‎newest incarnations of the world’s oldest hatred, and asks why Israel is so ‎internationally vilified. ‎

What then are the sources for widespread hatred of Israel? Such venom cannot be ‎explained just by political differences with its Arab and Islamic neighbors. After all, ‎take any major issue of contention—occupied land, refugees, a divided Jerusalem, ‎cross border incursions—and then ask why the world focuses disproportionately on ‎Israel when similar such disputes are commonplace throughout the globe.‎

History Repeats: In Europe, They Want Jewish Blood
‎
Anti-Semitism still thrives in Europe, as evinced by some of the responses to the ‎murder of four Jews in Toulouse, writes Walter Russell Mead of the American ‎Interest.‎
‎

It is as if the press commentary about an epic pogrom in Czarist Russia focused on ‎the danger that innocent Russians around the world might be subjected to ‎discrimination or worse as word of the atrocity spread. It is as if the news of anti-‎apartheid hero Steven Biko’s murder in a South African prison was greeted with ‎concern that perfectly innocent white South Africans would be made to feel ‎unwelcome at international gatherings. It is as if the primary response to the Irish ‎potato famine was to worry about the pain and sorrow that innocent members of the ‎English public would suffer as a result of the unfavorable publicity.‎

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