Links for October 10th

Links from my del.icio.us account for October 10th:

• Israeli town hit by third day of Jewish-Arab clashes - Yahoo! News - "Chanting "death to Arabs," the protesters were headed from a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood to the house of an Arab when police intervened."


• America the Banana Republic: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com - Hitchens finds out maybe he doesn't like Bush after all.


• LRB · Adam Shatz: Short Cuts - Adam Shatz on the latest Zio-con trick: "If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’."


• Team of rivals - The National Newspaper - Nathan Field: "For the first time, Salafi jihadists seem to be focusing their energies on Israel: Abu Sharif also told al Akhbar that “we are focusing on forming a military wing in Palestine. On September 2, the London-based al Hayat published a front-page story about the sudden appearance of an al Qa’eda linked group operating out of Gaza who emphasise a shared ideology with al Qa’eda but aim to fight Israelis. In 2006 the al Jazeera reporter Yousri Fouda produced a documentary on al Qa’eda in the Levant, in which Fuad Hussein, an expert on Islamist groups, maintained that al Qa’eda’s goal in Iraq was to build a base from which to weaken security in Lebanon and Syria – for the purposes of laying the groundwork to operate in those countries against Israel, their ultimate goal."


• In Egypt, End of Hostage Crisis Is a Mystery - NYTimes.com - "The Egyptian government says that the prisoners were freed as the result of an “operation,” and the state-controlled media here reported the release as a result of a heroic commando raid. It was a bit of good news for the authorities, who are often blamed for their inability to deal effectively with a crisis.
  But now the reports of the rescue have been called into question by the former prisoners themselves, like Mr. Abdel Wahab, and officially by an opposition member of Parliament, Hamdy Hassan, who has demanded an investigation. Mr. Hassan said in a complaint issued this week that there was a broader principle at stake, that the government needed to be called to task if it used its control of the news media to spread false information and that it must have some degree of accountability."