Last month, the men who scaled the building housing the Israeli embassy in Cairo become national heroes in Egypt for tearing down the blue and white flag that flew over the site. Today, another mob stormed the site, tearing down the security wall erected to protect the diplomatic enclave. These demonstrations are indications not only of the hatred for any symbol of Israel in Egypt but the way in which the military government is allowing them to grow in scale.

While this may be defended as the regime merely allowing the mobs to vent their spleens in a harmless manner, the escalation of the violence may not be so easy to control.

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According to the Hurriyet Daily News, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will address the Arab League next week:

In his speech, Erdoğan will touch on the wave of popular unrest hitting the region in the “Arab Spring” and will also hit out against Israel, the Daily News has learned. His address to the Arab League will be part of Turkey’s ongoing campaign in the international arena against Israel, which has intensified since Tel Aviv refused to apologize for killing nine Turks last year aboard a Gaza-bound aid ship.

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We’ve been writing here all week about the stunning possibility that a conservative Republican named Bob Turner will upset a liberal Democrat named David Weprin in the special election Tuesday to fill Anthony Weiner’s Brooklyn/Queens district, which has a 3-to-1 Democratic registration advantage. It’s the most Jewish district in the country, and a great many of its Jews are religious Jews. In choosing Weprin to run for the seat, Democrats thought the fact that he sports a kippah would carry the day with his fellow Orthodox Jews.

It’s not happening that way, and even the notion that it would testifies to the ignorance of pols, including Jewish pols, who think religious Jews are like other ethnic voters.Weprin may be an Orthodox Jewish Democrat, but as such he is now actually in the minority among Orthodox Jews. And the commonality of their religious practice apparently does not provide sufficient cover for his being a representative of the Democratic party in the age of Obama.

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The controversy regarding the absence of religious leaders or public prayers at the annual commemoration of the 9/11 attacks at Ground Zero is being touted by some conservatives as a sign of a repellent secularism that is hostile to faith. They ask, not unreasonably, why can’t religion take its place at the ceremony? And they point to the absence of evangelicals from a planned interfaith prayer service as another sign of the willingness of some to expand the culture wars against religion even into something as sacred as the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

But anyone thinking of using the Ground Zero ceremony as fodder in a conservative counter-attack on behalf of faith is making a mistake. The existing format on every anniversary of the atrocity in New York is a reasonable compromise that not only reflects the need to avoid conflicts but also the wishes of the families of the victims. Those who have attempted to create a dispute on this point, especially those commenting from afar who are unaware or insensitive to the situation, need to lower their voices and listen to the families. They should also realize that if they get their wish it would reignite the simmering controversy regarding the plans for a Ground Zero mosque that convulsed New York last year.

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Presidencies can go through various stages in terms of their effect on the opposition – from eliciting respect and some amount of fear, to provoking anger, to becoming the object of ridicule.

Barack Obama has reached the third stage.

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The award for vilest politicization of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 goes to the AFL-CIO. The organization has chosen to hijack the moment and turn it into a plea for anti-austerity union activism.  Consider this message from AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka posted on its website.

His big metaphor is doors. On 9/11, first responders ran through “doors to danger and became America’s everyday heroes.” True enough.

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But will the people care? When the president spent the month of August attacking Congress on his pivot-to-jobs tour, his approval ratings nosedived to the lowest level of his presidency. Now Greg Sargent reports on Obama’s trip to the University of Richmond this morning, where he exhorted Congress once again to “pass the bill!” (a bill, it should be noted, that doesn’t exist yet):

Now the White House is trying a new tack. It is instead insisting that Republicans pass Obama’s whole jobs bill — not just parts of it, as the GOP says it’s open to — and is vowing to take its case to the American people, whether Republicans like it or not.

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Several days ago, I posted an entry regarding the Turkish government’s suggestion that it might soon become much more aggressive with regard to its naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Now, the possibility of a Turkey-Israel naval clash has increased exponentially: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told Al Jazeera the Turkish Navy would begin to escort ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip. If the always tempestuous Erdoğan goes through with the challenge, then Israel has two challenges: Allow unlimited Turkish (and Iranian and Syrian) aid to Hamas, or be willing to enforce the blockade (the legality of which the United Nation’s Palmer Commission affirmed) against the wishes of the Turkish navy.

It behooves the United States to diffuse tensions in the region. The best way to diffuse tension, however, is not to submit to the extortion of a fiercely anti-American prime minister, but rather to consider the status of a NATO member whose posture is not only questionable, but whose aggressive provocations ultimately could challenge the viability of NATO.

For the past two months, hundreds of thousands of Israeli “social justice” demonstrators have jammed the streets of the country’s cities to register largely inchoate demands for more government spending and an end to the free market economics that have over the course of the last two decades transformed an economic basket case into the “start-up nation” that is the envy of the world. While there are aspects of the protests that have merit, the argument for a return to the Jewish state’s socialist past took another hit today when Standard & Poor’s announced it was raising the State of Israel’s credit rating from A to A+.

The S&P boost was a tribute to the wise stewardship of Israel’s economy by the team of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer. At a time when other countries in the developed world are experiencing instability and a worsening debt crisis, the Jewish state has managed to maintain both fiscal discipline and economic stability. But if the social justice protesters have their way, that could all change.

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In an interview with NPR, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – in making the most robust case he could for the President’s American Jobs Act –issued this promise: “if Congress were to act on this bill, it would have a substantial, powerful effect on strengthening the economy that slowed quite a bit. And that would translate into jobs for hundreds of thousands of American workers at a time when we need that.”

That’s it.

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Supposedly, Obama’s been advocating his $450 million jobs plan “for months.” But based on last night’s speech, it sounds like the entire concept was copy-and-pasted together at the last minute from his 2009 stimulus and a couple of his August speeches.

Adding to this haphazard quality is the fact we have to “tune in next week” to see his big plan to pay for all of it. That seems like a sure sign he doesn’t have one yet. According to the AP, this so-called “debt-reduction plan” may actually just be a set of proposals he’ll pawn off on the super committee. After all, as the president suggested last night, what’s another $450 billion on top of the $1.4 trillion they’re already trying to cut out of the budget?

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In 2008, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave an emotional speech about American anti-terror efforts. When the topic turned to Mukasey’s prior experience as a federal judge in New York City overseeing terrorism cases and whether that prepared him for his new job, he was honest. There isn’t much that can prepare a person for confronting the sheer magnitude of threats against the United States.

“It is way beyond — way beyond anything that I knew or believed,” Mukasey said. “So, if I was picked for the level of my knowledge of what I actually see, that was a massive piece of false advertising. There’s a lot going on out there.” That comment gets to the heart of the dilemma evident in New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s press conference yesterday about what the FBI termed a “specific and credible, though not corroborated” threat to the city on Sunday, for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Here is part of what the mayor said:

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As Alana noted earlier today, Republican Bob Turner holds a six-point lead in next week’s special election to replace former Representative Anthony Weiner, according to a new Siena College poll that the National Journal says  “shows voters in the overwhelmingly Democratic district are poised to deliver a stinging rebuke to President Obama and his party.”

Turner leads Democratic Assemblyman David Weprin in the poll, 50 percent to 44 percent, with six percent of likely voters undecided – and Turner has all the momentum. (Four weeks ago, Weprin held a six-point lead). Democrats in the district, located in the Outer Boroughs, hold a three-to-one advantage on the voter rolls.

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President Obama is getting kudos from the left this morning if for no other reason than the fact he showed some life during his jobs speech to Congress. They liked that his $447 billion dollar plan was bigger than expected and approved of the partisan manner with which he challenged Republicans to pass his proposals. But for all of the hype about this speech, it’s clear the main motivation behind it was primarily political and not to save a sinking economy from the prospect of a double dip recession.

Despite the evidence of a nation that never fully recovered from the 2008 recession, liberal economists have claimed the president’s near trillion-dollar 2009 stimulus was a good idea, but it just wasn’t big enough. So even if we were to accept the flawed Keynesian logic behind the first stimulus, it’s difficult to see how this smaller package would do much to help now. Instead, we are left with a hodge-podge of proposals — some with merit but linked to other ideas that make them untenable and others that are flat out wrong-headed — whose only purpose will be to serve as cudgels with which to beat the Republicans in Congress after they rightly refuse to pass them.

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With the Palestinian Authority having formally launched its bid for UN recognition as a state yesterday, perhaps other countries ought to start thinking about what kind of state would come into being if they vote “yes.” Here’s a hint: It will be neither democratic nor peaceful.

With regard to democracy, consider just a few of the events of the last three months: The PA once again proved itself incapable of holding even local elections, canceling a scheduled vote for the fourth time in two years; on the national level, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 81^st month of a 48-month term. It banned journalists from reporting the human rights abuses documented by an official PA body, the Independent Commission for Human Rights, which found that both the PA and Hamas (which govern the West Bank and Gaza, respectively) were guilty of torture and arbitrary detentions. It arrested a Palestinian professor who publicly criticized his university for failure to comply with a court order. It pulled a popular satirical television show from its state-owned TV channel because the show lampooned the PA’s security forces and civil service. (Don’t satirical TV shows usually lampoon their own governments?) Its official media blacklisted Palestinian union leaders who accused the PA of refusing to clamp down on corruption. It’s not exactly a shining picture of freedom of expression, regular elections and other pillars of the democratic order, is it?

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To be fair to Democratic candidate David Weprin, some of the campaign blunders on his side have been out of his control. Take, for example, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s poorly-timed $500,000 ad buy that showed a cartoon of a “corporate jet” careening low across the New York City skyline, just days before Sept. 11. The DCCC has already been forced to pull that one, but now another pro-Democratic group is out with a six-figure ad buy tying Republican candidate Bob Turner to the Tea Party.

“If Republicans are going to play footsies with the Tea Party, the House Majority PAC is going to stomp on their toes,” said Ali Lapp, executive director, House Majority PAC, in a press release. “House Majority PAC will be educating voters in NY-09 of Robert Turner’s embrace of the Tea Party and his commitment to reducing taxes for the wealthiest, while making seniors pay more for Medicare.”

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The new generation of Turks who so many commentators and American diplomats have characterized as enlightened democrats have begun to show their ugly, anti-Semitic faces. Egemen Bağış, Turkey’s Minister for European Union affairs, suggested the reason why the Bulgarian Foreign Minister did not endorse Turkey’s position was because he had Jewish blood in him.

Gurcan Balik, an influential aide to Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and, according to fellow Turkish diplomats, also an acolyte of Islamist cult leader Fethullah Gulen, tweeted to his 2,500-plus followers an endorsement of “The Israel Lobby.”

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