After years of successfully drawing attention away from Israel’s intensifying crimes against the Palestinian people by citing a supposedly growing “antisemitism crisis” in Britain’s Labour Party, Jewish community leaders in the UK are exasperated to find themselves unexpectedly on the defensive.
Tzipi Hotovely's appointment as Israel's new ambassador to the UK has put British Jews uncomfortably on the back foot. With Corbyn the bogeyman gone, they will finally have to face harsh truths about Israel they have deeply buried.
Giant avalanches sweeping all before them often start with just a few tiny pebbles tumbling down and no one at first pays any attention: The surprise victory of Ireland over Canada to be voted by the United Nations General Assembly on to the Security Council for the next year may well be such a fateful pebble to set off transformational avalanches on both sides of the Atlantic.
Diplomacy is in a crisis, re-emerging as something else more sinister and darker for its ambassadors. From Venezuela to Lebanon though, their time is up. Their dirty game is no longer a secret and it will be the starving Lebanese who will unseat them.
Diplomacy has been in the news quite a bit in late June. Yet it has still left many of us wondering if there is ever a real role for diplomats to play in this junk-news, social media-obsessed world which has reduced them to mere “waiters who are occasionally allowed to sit down” as Peter Ustinov once put it.
What started out as a promising relationship with China is now one struggling to find a direction
MK BHADRAKUMAR
The common perception among Indian analysts, widely articulated in the country’s media, is that the government’s options to “hit back” at China for whatever has happened in eastern Ladakh during the past two months are very limited.
The reported erasure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “official page” on the Chinese social media website Weibo can only reinforce that impression. It simply doesn’t add up.
He once apologized for donning Black Face make-up and giving racist offense. Canadian liberal premier Justin Trudeau now has the red-faced embarrassment of explaining why his country lost out to Ireland in obtaining a seat on the UN Security Council.
Rex Tillerson was the only secretary of state to be fired; James ‘mad dog’ Mattis wrote a strongly worded resignation letter rebuking Trump foreign policy behaviour, and became the first ever Secretary of Defence to resign in protest; Michael Flynn resigned after being embroiled in the Mueller Report, misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his links with Ambassador
A puerile propaganda stunt pulled by U.S. negotiators in Vienna this week ahead of talks with Russian counterparts was both at insult to China and a reprehensible distraction from credible bilateral business with Moscow on the vital issue of strategic security.
Ahead of talks with Russian delegates, the Americans took a stealthy photo of the venue contriving to show Chinese flags sitting atop vacant tables.
Strangely, Israel's large Palestinian minority has found itself treated both as much-abused, second-class citizens and as an unwilling shop-window dummy on which Israel can hang its pretensions of fairness and equality.
The timing of a Russia-India-China summit next week could not be more apt following a deadly skirmish in the disputed Himalayan region which resulted in dozens of military casualties.
