The February 17 issue of Daily Alert is now live.

Mohammed Morsi, the leader of the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest party, on Thursday rejected U.S. threats to cut aid over a dispute about nonprofit groups operating in the country, saying they are out of line and could imperil the peace deal with Israel. Morsi said the annual U.S. aid is part of its commitment to Egypt’s 1979 treaty with Israel and should not be at risk because of the dispute over the nonprofit groups. “Brandishing threats to stop this aid is out of place. Otherwise, the peace deal would be reconsidered or it could flounder,” he said.
The Brotherhood’s deputy chairman, Khairat el-Shater, told Al-Jazeera that U.S. aid should not be conditional and should continue to flow as “compensation” for years of supporting Mubarak’s autocratic regime. (AP-Washington Post)

Uniting in response to a string of aggressive gestures from Iran, a bipartisan group of 32 U.S. senators introduced a resolution Thursday endorsing continued economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran as it seeks to gain nuclear capability. “You have only two choices: peacefully negotiate to end your nuclear weapons program, or expect a military strike to disable that program,” said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The senators said that President Obama would receive bipartisan support should he decide that a military strike was necessary. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, “The best way for Iran to survive is to abandon nuclear weapon ambitions and become a productive member of the family of nations.”  (Emmarie Huetteman – New York Times)

The Obama administration formally announced its intention to ask Congress to waive a ban on funding UNESCO over its recognition of Palestinian statehood. “The Department of State intends to work with Congress to seek legislation that would provide authority to waive restrictions on paying the U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO,” says a footnote in the budget that the White House submitted to Congress this month. On Wednesday, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said she plans to oppose such a waiver.
U.S. funding for UNESCO was stopped late last year because of laws banning U.S. funding of any international organization that recognizes Palestinian statehood in the absence of a peace agreement with Israel. “Any effort to walk back this funding cutoff will pave the way for the Palestinian leadership’s unilateral statehood scheme to drive on, and sends a disastrous message that the U.S. will fund UN bodies no matter what irresponsible decisions they make,” she said. (Ron Kampeas - JTA)

Israel’s leaders, reflecting Israeli public opinion, take very seriously Iran’s oft-repeated threat to create a second Holocaust, to wipe the Jewish state – “the Zionist entity” or “Zionist regime,” as the Iranians call it – off the map. They take equally seriously Iran’s nuclear program, which the international community, after years of denial or at least skepticism, now accepts is geared to the production of nuclear weaponry. Israelis, at least those who don’t bury their heads in the sand, believe that if the Iranians get nuclear weapons they will, in the end, use them – or at a minimum, cannot be relied on not to use them – and that Israel’s very existence is at stake.
The choice is clear and stark. Either Iran, led by fanatical, brutal and millenarian leaders, will get the bomb, or it will be prevented from doing so by military assault on its nuclear installations, by America or Israel. If the Americans, who have the capability to do a thorough job, don’t do it – and they don’t seem to have the stomach for it after Iraq and Afghanistan – then the Israelis, with their more limited capabilities, will have to.
How Washington, which has repeatedly and more or less publicly vetoed the idea, would react to an Israeli strike deeply worries policymakers in Jerusalem. But it worries them far less than a nuclear-weaponized Iran. An Israeli or American attack on Iran would likely rile much of the Muslim world, causing wide-ranging political fallout. But the consequences of nuclear bombs hitting Tel Aviv and Haifa – effectively destroying Israel, a very small country – are even more dire. (Benny Morris – Los Angeles Times)