Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) today appealed to House members to unfreeze Palestinian aid and continue funding for Palestinian Sesame Street. Ellison, in remarks delivered on the House floor, spoke of the benefits of funding Palestinian Sesame Street and the dangerous television shows competing for children’s attention in the West Bank and Gaza.

Holding an Elmo doll, Ellison argued for continuing U.S. funding of the popular children’s show:

This guy taught us our 123’s, but he also taught us tolerance and understanding.

For the past several years, he’s been doing the same for children in the Palestinian Territories. Because of Sesame Street in Palestine, Palestinian kids grow up with the same positive role models that we did.

But with the freeze on Palestinian aid funds, Sesame Street went off the air and Hamas children’s programming faces less competition. Ellison warned:

Now, Palestinian kids are left watching Farfour – this mouse – who is the main character on a Hamas TV show for children. Instead of tolerance and understanding, Farfour promotes violence and anti-Semitism.

Watch it:

Since October, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) has held up $190 million in Palestinian aid. The decision to freeze aid came after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sought U.N. recognition for an independent Palestinian state. “By providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the last 5 years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

J Street, the “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” organization, supports unfreezing Palestinian aid, issued a statement last week calling on Ros-Lehtinen to “Lift the remaining holds on Palestinian aid — don’t punish Palestinian children with political posturing.”

The New York Times reports today on how the New York Police Department and the producers behind a controversial film are stonewalling on why the movie was screened to NYPD officers. The Times reports:

In January 2011, when news broke that the department had used the film in training, a top police official denied it, then said it had been mistakenly screened “a couple of times” for a few officers.

A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.

During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.

The film, the Third Jihad, was created by the shadowy Clarion Fund, which did not return the Times’ requests for comment.

Coupling today’s Times report, ThinkProgress is releasing a list of grants [PDF] directed to the Clarion Fund. The document, which discloses that Manhattan attorney Allen I. Gross contributed $100,000 to the Clarion Fund in 2007, is the most comprehensive mapping of Clarion’s donor base to date.

Clarion burst onto the scene in 2006 with the movie Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. In 2008, more than 20 million copies of the film were distributed to homes in presidential election swing states thanks to a $17 million donation, reportedly by right-wing and GOP donor Barre Seid. (Another U.S. group that aided the release later denied involvement but was found to be misleading reporters in order to cover up its role. The head of the group now sits on Clarion’s advisory board.)

But the Third Jihad is not Clarion’s latest project: its focus since shifted to Iran with the 2011 doc Iranium. Written and directed by Alex Traiman, “Iranium” prominently features hawkish experts from two right-wing Washington think tanks, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Just before the launch of Iranium, Clarion, which shares a “virtual office” with Aish Hatorah in New York, announced a new advisory board including Gaffney and other prominent Washington hawks.

Clarion’s ongoing production of Islamophobic films and nearly continuous screenings of Iranium no doubt requires constant fundraising efforts. As highlighted in the Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear, Inc.,” the Islamophobia network — including Clarion — raises large sums of money from a combination of high-profile and under-the-radar donors.

As Mother Jones’s Adam Serwer noted, the Times articles said Clarion’s “Obsession” film “attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.” But the Times didn’t delineate how Adelson supported the endeavor.

As the Europeans passed a de facto embargo on Iranian oil and U.S. ships defied threats (since walked back) to shut down the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, Iran faces heightened diplomatic and economic isolation as another rift became apparent this week when an Iranian presidential adviser complained of cooling relations with Brazil. The report comes only four days after China voiced opposition to a potential Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Brazil, a member of a bloc of emerging economies know and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), built a strong trade relationship with Iran and involved itself in Middle East diplomacy under its last president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, as he is widely known, attempted to broker a confidence-building deal between the West and Iran to diffuse tension over the latter’s nuclear program. But the 2010 deal came just as the Obama administration had rallied international support for another round of U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at the nuclear program. The U.S. objected to Iran’s condition that the sanctions — since shown to be effective in slowing Iran’s progress — be scuttled.

Now, the New York Times reports, a sometime media adviser to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed anger that Iran was also losing Brazil:

After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran took a four-country tour of Latin America this month, during which he met with several outspoken critics of the United States but was notably not invited to stop in Brazil, one of his top advisers took a public swipe at Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, saying she had “destroyed years of good relations” between the two nations.

“The Brazilian president has been striking against everything that Lula accomplished,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, who has worked as Mr. Ahmadinejad’s top media adviser, said in an interview published Monday by Folha de São Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper, in which he compared Ms. Rousseff to her predecessor and political mentor.

In a New Yorker profile of Brazilian president Rousseff late last year, Nicholas Lemann wrote:

After taking office, Rousseff began to distance herself from Lula’s more exotic foreign-policy initiatives. She declared that, as someone who had been tortured, she had special concerns about a government that tortures, and that would influence Brazil’s diplomatic partnership with Iran.

Indeed, quickly after coming to office, Rousseff supported the Obama administration initiative of a U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, whose eventual report condemned Iranian rights abuses.

In addition to diplomatic fallout, the Times also noted that Iran’s robust trade relations with Brazil have recently cooled.

The report about the Iranian adviser’s comments on Brazil came on the heels of a report last week that another BRICS country spoke out forcefully against suspected Iranian designs on nuclear weapons. China’s premier Wen Jiabao said that, while trade with Iran would be maintained for the meantime, China “adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.”

Our guest blogger is Ken Sofer, special assistant with the National Security and International Policy team at the Center for American Progress.

President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight will reportedly focus on the economy, jobs and what he calls a “return to American values.” But as the Council on Foreign Relations’ James Lindsay notes in a CNN column today, “What the president says about foreign policy, however, will be equally important.”

Indeed, the last year saw the end to two very different wars and two competing visions of American power. One war, in Iraq, finally came to end in December after a series of poor policy choices and overzealous neoconservative thinking cost the U.S. nearly a trillion dollars and 4,500 American lives over the course of eight and a half years.

The other war, in Libya, accomplished nearly the exact same objectives as the war in Iraq, but the selective application of American power and the diplomatic efforts to gain the support of both NATO and the U.N. Security Council allowed the U.S. to accomplish its goals for just over $1 billion and not one lost American life.

A new infographic from the Center for American Progress compares the costs of the two wars:

Libya may not be a model for every future American conflict, just as the lessons of Iraq do not preclude the use of American force in every scenario. But as the country looks back on 2011 and looks forward to the international challenges we face in 2012 and beyond, Iraq and Libya present us with two different visions of American power. As CAP’s Peter Juul writes, President Obama’s actions over the past three years have reaffirmed the credibility of American military power; credibility that President Bush put into question.

Looking at the comparative costs of war in Iraq and Libya, what do you want American power to look like in 2012 and beyond?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on the offense at last night’s NBC News Debate attacking Mitt Romney’s past at Bain Capital and President Obama’s economic and foreign policy record. But in an attack on Obama’s handling of rising tensions over the Strait of Hormuz, Gingrich dramatically misrepresented the White House’s handling of the postponement of a joint military exercise with Israel.

Gingrich — supposedly a historian in his own right — disregarded the well-reported facts of an event that occurred less than two weeks ago and brought swift condemnations from both the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) and the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler. Gingrich, responding to a question from debate moderator Brian Williams about a military escalation if Iran attempts to close the Strait, told the audience:

And I would say that the most dangerous thing, which by the way, Barack Obama just did, the — the Iranians are practicing closing the Strait of Hormuz, actively taunting us, so he cancels a military exercise with the Israelis so as not to be provocative?

Watch it:

Gingrich’s retelling of events from earlier this month is demonstrably inaccurate. Shortly after news broke of the postponed military exercise, Yahoo News’ Laura Rozen reported that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak requested the joint exercise be postponed.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency’s Ron Kampeas wrote that the exercise was being postponed because of “Israeli budget cuts.”

And Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post last Wednesday:

Such postponements are routine and do not reflect political or strategic concerns. The United States and Israel remain committed to holding the exercise – code-named Austere Challenge 12 – the largest and most robust in their historic alliance.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler called out Gingrich’s misrepresentation of the facts, writing, “Gingrich is repeating a rumor that was strongly denied by Israeli ambassador to the United States,” and the NJDC issued a statement:

Once again in tonight’s Florida GOP debate, former Speaker Newt Gingrich has simply fabricated recent events surrounding the U.S.-Israel relationship while discussing the postponement of a planned joint military exercise between our two countries—all in a deeply unfortunate ploy to smear President Barack Obama’s outstanding pro-Israel record.

Gingrich was seemingly trying to perpetuate the right wing’s false narrative that Obama has been a poor ally to Israel. But Gingrich’s complete disregard for the well established facts surrounding an event that happened less than two weeks ago illustrates the depths that his campaign will sink to smear Obama as hostile to the Jewish state.