Various news outlets reported last November that Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, had lifted her hold on all U.S. aid going to the Palestinians. Ros-Lehtinen said she was blocking the funds until she received assurances from the Obama administration that they were in America’s national security interest. But last month the Florida congresswoman sent a letter Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying she would continue to hold $147 million because the Palestinian economy grew.

But the National Journal reports today that Clinton is bypassing Ros-Lehtinen’s hold and authorizing the aid anyway:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is allowing U.S. funds to flow to the West Bank and Gaza despite a hold by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a rare display of executive-branch authority sure to anger the key lawmaker concerned about protecting her congressional oversight role.

A State Department official said that the letter was delivered on Tuesday to key members of Congress informing them of Clinton’s decision to move forward with the $147 million package of the fiscal year 2011 economic support funds for the Palestinian people, despite Ros-Lehtinen’s hold. Administrations generally do not disburse funding over the objections of lawmakers on relevant committees.

The State Department official told the National Journal that said that withholding the funding could “undermine the progress that has been made in recent years in building Palestinian institutions and improving stability, security, and economic prospects, which benefits Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

The National Review has been cleaning house over the past week. Last week the conservative publication fired John Derbyshire for a racist rant and today the magazine terminated its relationship with Robert Weissberg for his ties to a white nationalist group.

But while the National Review has decided to very publicly purge itself of white supremacists and racists, bigotry toward Muslims appears to go unchallenged in the pages of the magazine and on its blog, National Review Online (NRO). NRO contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, who accused President Obama of standing with the Muslim Brotherhood against 9/11 families in his post “The President Stands With Sharia,” told Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims:

What “radicalizes” Muslims is Islam — the mainstream interpretation of it. The “radicals” propagating it do not need the “captive audience” provided by the prison environment. The “radicalization” is happening in plain sight.

The denigration of Islam and Muslim Americans isn’t limited to McCarthy’s screeds. A number of noted Islamophobes are regularly given free rein to guest post on NRO’s site or write in the magazine, including:

Robert Spencer, who just last month concluded that “Islamic supremacists” may have subverted the “U.S. defense against jihad terror,” because the man who heads the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center — and is credited with crippling Al Qaeda and other militant networks in Pakistan — was identified as a Muslim in a Washington Post profile.

David Horowitz, who, in an interview last year, stated, “What has the Arab world contributed except terror?…The theocratic, repressive Arabic states do no significant science, no significant arts and culture.”

Daniel Pipes, who, in the pages of The National Review in 1990, wrote, “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

The National Review has been notified of the Islamophobic statements made by a number of their contributors in the past. To date, they appear to have decided to do nothing. Perhaps now is the time for The National Review to take a hard stance against all bigotry, intolerance and racism.

By Laura Heaton

The Famine Early Warning Network warned last week that the current rainy season in the eastern Horn of Africa will not be adequate to prevent food insecurity in the region still recovering for last year’s devastating famine. Learning lessons from what did and did not work in the 2011 famine relief efforts in Somalia is thus a matter of urgent and immediate concern. A new field dispatch by the Enough Project illustrates how, on the most local level, deficiencies of the relief effort played out, based on research conducted in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

Communities across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya suffered severely from the 2011 drought and famine; tens of thousands of people died. Somalia was the epicenter of this human tragedy, largely because conflict and the severe policies of the militant group al-Shabaab undercut the traditional coping strategies Somalis use to deal with extreme weather and also cut off these vulnerable communities from humanitarian aid.

The relief effort in Mogadishu suffered from lack of access and ongoing insecurity, but unlike in most other parts of the country, Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, or TFG, had unparalleled control there. And yet the city was mired in some of the most acute suffering, and famine was persistent, even as the United Nations rolled back the famine classification for other Somali regions.

Through interviews conducted primarily in settlements of displaced people who fled to Mogadishu from the surrounding regions at the height of the famine, Enough found:

“[I]nsecurity, inadequate oversight for distribution of humanitarian assistance, and wholesale criminality combined to create a situation where beneficiaries often didn’t see the relief intended for them, security services involved in distribution committed abuses with impunity, and aid flowed instead into the pockets of corrupt Somali officials—all issues that primarily fall to the TFG to address.”

The field dispatch, “Somalia Famine Relief: A View from Mogadishu,” presents individual testimonies from displaced people, highlights some important details about the scope of the suffering in Mogadishu, and features the Somali prime minister’s startling denial of famine in the city, just a day before the U.N. announced a massive new appeal for funds.

“Recent attention to Somalia generated by the high-level conference in London in February and by the reported successes of joint military operations targeting al-Shabaab leaves the impression that important changes are afoot. There are,” the field dispatch states. “But without some dramatic changes in the way the country is governed and humanitarian issues are handled, Somalia remains prone to the next iteration of al-Shabaab, coming in to fill the void, and donors’ contributions to assist Somalis most in need continue to risk falling into the hands of those who benefit from Somalia’s chaos.”

Cross-posted from the Enough Project.

A new poll from Reason-Rupe released late last month asked respondents what they thought of using military force against Iran over its nuclear program. A plurality, 48 percent, said they either strongly or somewhat favored the U.S. military “attacking Iran to destroy or delay its nuclear program,” while 45 percent strongly or somewhat opposed. One problem with this particular question is that, as top U.S. and Israeli officials have said, it’s unlikely that military force will “destroy” Iran’s program.

However, when the poll also asked respondents if they would support war with Iran “that is similar in length and costs to the war in Iraq,” support dropped significantly, with only 37 percent strongly or somewhat favoring and 56 percent strongly or somewhat opposed:

Concerns that starting a war in Iran could yield similar results to the Iraq war aren’t unreasonable. Former Israeli intelligence chief Meir Dagan told CBS’s 60 Minutes last month that an attack on Iran would “ignite, at least from my point of view, a regional war.” And as retired Gen. Anthony Zinni said in 2009 of possible military action against the Islamic Republic: “[I]f you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”

Meanwhile, recent polling shows that Americans overwhelmingly support diplomacy over war in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. A Washington Post/ABC News poll out this week found that 81 percent support direct diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran and 53 percent opposed taking military action. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released in March found that more Americans favor diplomacy and sanctions over military action. Another poll released by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the University of Maryland last month found strong support for the U.S. and its partners “continuing to pursue negotiations with Iran.”

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime — though U.S. and Israeli intelligence has not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon. The Obama administration vows to keep “all options on the table” to deal with the possibility, but the efficacy and consequences of a strike raise serious questions, leading the U.S. to pursue, for the meantime, a pressure track aimed at a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis.