Hamas on the Holocaust: "a lie invented by the Zionists"

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSTRE57T1JW20090830 Someone please tell me which is worse: Hamas complaining that the UN is teaching kids about the Holocaust, or the UN reassuring Hamas that it isn't teaching kids about the Holocaust after all?

Good news for once from the West Bank

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574348292035667088.html?mod=googlenews_wsj from the Wall Street Journal

The Arab Peace Initiative - fascinating article

The Crown Prince of Bahrain, in The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071602737.html?sid=ST2009071603564

Palestinian political developments

Two very big, but little-reported developments: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8203362.stm and http://www.thejc.com/articles/changes-fatah-boost-pragmatists

A sick joke in Cuba

The BBC reports that Cuban President Raul Castro told his "parliament" that: "he had not been elected to return Cuba to capitalism." And I'm inwardly shouting like Toby Ziegler: "Of course he wasn't elected to return Cuba to capitalism! That's because HE WASN'T ELECTED!" What really gets me is that if the Castro brothers were fascist dictators, we'd (rightly) never hear the end of their infamy. But because they're communists, people who would never have gone on holiday to Pinochet's Chile or apartheid-era South Africa think that there's something romantic about a Cuban regime that puts people in labour camps for the crime of saying: "Hmm, I've been thinking, how about maybe someone else should be allowed to stand for President?" Amnesty International tells it well here: http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/cuba

Obama's Middle East Chess Game

From the FT, an excellent analysis by Philip Stephens. Find the whole article here; this comes highly recommended.

In the heart of the EU: sickles, hacks and hatred

From Hungary comes news of a local councillor urging council colleagues to take up "sickles and hacks" and "cleanse" the local synagogue. And if I was blogging every time I saw a story like this, we'd all be here all day. The same newspaper that first alerted me to this story carried, on the same page, a story about a Jewish family having to flee Yemen after a grenade was thrown into its home. We live in interesting (if under-reported) times, and I'm not sure if everyone realises just how interesting they unfortunately are.