The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board apologized for its July 25 column responding to Anders Breivik’s attack on Oslo’s government headquarters and a youth camp. The editorial board observed that their column “inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process.”

The Post’s initial response to the massacre was perceived by many as a criticism of Norway’s immigration laws and a defense of Breivik’s far-right views on multiculturalism. The July 25 column read:

Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right.

The Jerusalem Post column brought a torrent of negative publicity on the paper, leading the paper to apologize for it’s kneejerk response which had come dangerously close to defending the ideologies held by Anders Breivik. The column today read:

The editorial squarely condemned the attack, saying that “as Israelis, a people that is sadly all too familiar with the horrors of indiscriminate, murderous terrorism, our hearts go out with empathy to the Norwegian people.”

However, it also, inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process. [...]

[We] hope that the Norwegian government and people will accept the Post’s apology and forgive us for any offense or hurt caused by our editorial and columnists at this sensitive time.

The paper’s apology noted that the Islamophobic views expressed in Breivik’s manifesto ran eerily close to the “Nazis’ attitude toward Jews.”

When President Barack Obama, in his May 19 address on the Middle East, reiterated the long-standing U.S. position that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” the U.S. and Israeli right went berserk. The facts have always been out there, but right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu howled about how the 1967 borders were “indefensible,” though they’d been successfully defended in 1967. This week, Netanyahu undermined his own attack on Obama by agreeing to talks based on the 1967 lines (albeit while adding other pre-conditions).

Despite the hollow argument, Netanyahu’s allies on the U.S. neoconservative right were happy to oblige his attack. The Bill Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel said Obama was “stepping away” from the U.S.-Israel relationship — though ECI’s “director” had found nothing wrong with Obama’s speech.

Then, it turned out, most Israelis and Palestinians actually supported a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines, as did Israel’s opposition leader. What’s more, Obama’s formulation was defended by AIPAC, the flagship pro-Israel lobby in the U.S.

And now yet another pillar of the farce that has been Israeli right wing and American neoconservative criticism of Obama’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Israel is collapsing. In an interview on Fox News, Israel’s foreign minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak laid to rest the myth that the Obama administration is casting aside the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel.

Baited by Fox host Greta Van Sustren on whether “Israelis [are] disenchanted a little bit with the Obama administration,” Barak responded:

BARAK: No. Our countries are good friends. And I’m the minister of defense, I can tell you that I can hardly remember — I was in uniform for decades — I can hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.

And it’s true that not all the Israelis are really happy with the positions of the administration, but I should tell you honestly that the president didn’t say that Israel should go back to the borders of ’67. He made it very clear that he thinks that Palestinians deserve a state of their own. We also believe in two states, Israel side by side — secure Israel side by side with a demilitarized Palestinian state that will basically have the same area that’s West Bank and Gaza Strip had before ’67 with certain swaps, with understanding of the transformation on the ground. [...] Some security consideration we take into account. I don’t think that contradicts what the president said.

Watch the video:

This, from the hawkish defense minister from Netanyahu’s own government, should finally make crystal clear that those in Congress and elsewhere who went after Obama’s comments were misled by a teeny cohort of politically motivated politicians from Netanyahu’s Likud Party and their allies in neoconservative punditry. Perhaps that’s why some of these pundits have been unable to answer questions about their stances. The whole thing was little more than politically-motivated spin, a public relations theater for far right audiences.

But with the Israeli prime minister taking a patently dishonest stand to lead the charge against a U.S. president that has, by almost all accounts, vowed nothing short of full diplomatic support for Israel and broadened the security relationship to heretofore unseen heights, maybe we should be asking who exactly is trying to drive a wedge in the U.S.-Israel relationship here.

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, research associate for national security at the Center for American progress.

The assassinations of Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer in January and Pakistani minister for minorities Shahbaz Bhatti in March have, in months since, been overshadowed in the American and Pakistani press by tensions in U.S.-Pakistani security cooperation and the efforts by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government to hang on to its tenuous coalition majority in parliament.

Both men were killed for their support for altering Pakistan’s “blasphemy law,” which imposes sentences up to and including death for those convicted on charges ranging from making derogatory remarks toward the Prophet Mohammad, to “uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings.” (The full set of laws and associated charges are laid out in Pakistan’s penal code, Section XV, Offenses Relating to Religion.)

This timeline published today in Pakistan’s Express Tribune should remind us that the blasphemy laws’ impact is ongoing in Pakistani society, where it continues to enable harassment and violence against both minorities and practicing Muslims. The piece also charts and maps the incidents, most of which are concentrated in Punjab:

Efforts by members of the PPP to alter the law have been shelved in the face of opposition by hardline parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, which mobilize their small wedge of followers around appeals to religious purity. Government pledges to review the law in consultation with religious authorities have yet to produce substantive results. The criminal trial of Taseer’s murderer, his own security guard, remains locked up in Pakistani courts. And Asia Bibi, whose pardon Taseer had championed before his death, has yet to receive a hearing in the Supreme Court on her appeal against her death sentence for violating blasphemy laws.

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is riven with complications and competing priorities, and American policymakers possess limited means through which to positively impact Pakistan’s internal political and legal processes. We nonetheless have a responsibility to bear witness to the abuses that continue under these laws and support efforts by reformers within Pakistani society to challenge them.

John Bolton and fellow war hawk Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) don’t want the Pentagon to have to sacrifice in order to rein in the nation’s debt and deficit. In fact, they actually want more military spending and they want to cut Social Security in order to pay for it.

Not surprisingly, the Defense Department doesn’t want to sacrifice much either. While Republicans and defense lobbyists are pushing back against significant cuts, in a letter yesterday to DOD personnel, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta warned of future “dangerous across-the-board defense cuts.”

But it also appears that the Pentagon is taking cues from Bolton and Lieberman. Speaking without attribution to reporters yesterday, a “senior defense official” said Congress should raise taxes, cut Social Security and other entitlements, and leave DOD’s budget alone:

“I would expect them to focus on entitlement and taxes,” the senior defense official said, talking to reporters about the Super Congress, as the 12 members of the budget cutting committee are sometimes known. The Budget Relief Act gives those 12 people the authority to make $1.5 trillion in additional federal budget cuts. “I would hope they would not make further cuts in defense,” the official added. Pressed by reporters at a Pentagon briefing on whether pursuing tax increases and cutting entitlements was the department’s policy, the official did not demure.

Panetta and the Defense Department are worried that the bipartisan committee tasked with deciding on further spending cuts beyond the $1 trillion Congress and the White House agreed to this week will put military spending on the chopping block.

However, there is no specific amount of military spending reductions laid out beyond the $350 billion that is part of the debt ceiling deal (the $350 billion is actually $50 billion less than what President Obama had called for back in April). As the Cable reports, Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), the two heads of the Armed Services Committee, say that “even they have no idea how much the debt ceiling deal will cut from national defense, because the specifics of the cuts are still unknown.” But it appears that defense officials, war hawks and their lobbyists are pre-empting further cuts by making noise about it now.

As AOL Defense notes, referring to the unnamed senior defense official, “It’s awfully clever of the Pentagon to hammer out its position now, before the members of the panel have been named. It’s hard for Congress to react when they don’t know who should be doing the talking.”