This was an unfortunate bit of he said/she said reporting in the Washington Post’s story on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rejecting the U.S.’s request that Israel halt building on Jerusalem land seized from Palestinians:

Palestinians argue that continued Israeli building in East Jerusalem is meant to change the demographics of the area and make it harder for them to establish a capital there.

[Israeli Ambassador Michael] Oren said that the neighborhood where the building would be located, Sheikh Jarrah, includes several Israeli government and diplomatic buildings and that the project “does not represent any attempt to alter the demographic balance” of the area overall.

Of course, it’s not just Palestinians who claim that continued Israeli building in East Jerusalem is meant to change the demographics of the area. Numerous Israeli organizations agree. Human rights group B’Tselem’s reports that “since East Jerusalem was annexed in 1967, the government of Israel’s primary goal in Jerusalem has been to create a demographic and geographic situation that will thwart any future attempt to challenge Israeli sovereignty over the city”:

To achieve this goal, the government has been taking actions to increase the number of Jews, and reduce the number of Palestinians, living in the city.

- Physically isolating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, in part by building the separation barrier;

- Discriminating in land expropriation, planning, and building, and demolition of houses;

- Revoking residency and social benefits of Palestinians who stay abroad for at least seven years, or who are unable to prove that their center of life is in Jerusalem;

- Unfairly dividing the budget between the two parts of the city, with harmful effects on infrastructure and services in East Jerusalem.

Israel’s Ir Amim, a group that supports equitable treatment in Jerusalem, said in a report on the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood that “These developments strengthen Israeli control of this area and thwart the feasibility of future agreed-upon borders for Jerusalem.”

Ambassador Oren’s claim is also belied by documents from the Israeli government itself. Last month, the New York Times reported that Israel was “carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.”

The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny. However, certain elements related to it — the threatened destruction of unauthorized Palestinian housing in the redevelopment areas, for example — have brought widespread condemnation.[...]

The government development plan was first agreed upon in 2005 “to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” as it states in its opening line, and became operational in the past year, with the prime minister’s office and the municipality jointly responsible.

I don’t expect the Washington Post to call the Israeli ambassador a liar, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask that the Post provide a remotely accurate rendering of the dispute. Such a rendering might note that Ambassador Oren said one thing, but that Palestinians, Israeli human rights groups, the United Nations’ human rights envoy for the Palestinian Territories, and internal Israeli government documents all say the opposite.

For the past few months, Newt Gingrich has been trying to sound the alarm that the United States is on the cusp of a monumental security threat far greater than the dangers posed by Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 40s — an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Gripped by this fear, Gingrich once argued that the U.S. should take out North Korean missiles, while on their launch pads, with lasers because he believes the reclusive communist state has the ability to carry out such an attack on the U.S.

This morning, during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich was at it again. He lamented how the world’s democracies “hid from reality” in the 1920s and 30s and failed to confront the emerging threat in Europe and East Asia. Citing what he had read in “novels,” he then linked that to his perceived EMP threat and deplored the “failure to translate the ability of the imagination into public policy.” “We are living at the edge of a catastrophe,” he said:

GINGRICH: [W]hat we are faced with is not simply a problem, it is potentially catastrophic. … [The] electro-magnetic pulse, from my co-author and good friend Bill Forstchen, has written a remarkable novel called One Second After, in which he takes a town in North Carolina and shows you what would happen with a successful electro-magnetic pulse attack. Electro-magnetic pulse is essentially a peculiarly-sized nuclear device that becomes a giant lightning strike. [...]

[E]xperts in nuclear weaponry, and they came back and said unanimously, “This is a catastrophic threat waiting to happen and North Korea, China and Russia all understand it and are all working on it.” Which is why I adopted the position towards North Korea that I would literally not allow them to fire any intercontinental range missile that we had not inspected. I would just take it out on the site.

And the reason is simple; one weapon of this kind that went off over Omaha would eliminate most of the electrical production in the United States. And we are not today hardened against this. It is an enormous catastrophic threat.

Watch it:

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss observed of Gingrich’s “suspense thriller-based” foreign policy:

It’s worth noting as well that the argumentum ad Chamberlinum that Gingrich predictably deploys throughout the speech always involves a sin of omission: Free nations failed to act in the face of a rising threat, resulting in disastrous consequences. I would suggest that, in the wake of the Iraq war, there now exists an effective counter to this heavily overworked rhetorical device. Rather than failing to act, the Bush administration acted — unwisely and incompetently, in response to a largely imaginary threat — resulting in disastrous consequences. Call it argumentum ad neoconservatum.

“As the conservative movement continues to melt down,” Duss adds, “conservatives will return to same issue that conservatives have exploited since before fire: Abject fear of our barbaric, unreasoning enemies, and the imputation of faithlessness on the part of those who don’t perceive the threat in the same way.”

Transcript: Read more