Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the ultra-Orthodox leader of the Shas party, does not speak for the Israeli government. Nevertheless, since Yosef’s advice has been sought by Israel’s political leaders on the issue of a possible attack on Iran, the comments from Yosef and those coming from Tehran deserve to be compared.

Nima Shirazi notes:

The rhetoric used in recent speeches by top Iranian officials has garnered much attention in the mainstream media. In addition to the outrage expressed over the statement that the Israeli governmental system and guiding Zionist ideology is an “insult to humanity,” comments that the “Zionist regime” is a “cancerous tumor” have also met fierce condemnation.

Here, as is typically the case, the target of Iranian political venom is not the Jewish people or the state of Israel but instead the political system, Zionism, through which Israel is governed. Naturally, many Jews inside and outside Israel find such strident and hateful language threatening, yet such attacks on Zionism are no more a threat to annihilate the Israeli population than were calls for the end of the Soviet Union the expression of a desire to wipe out Russians.

In contrast, when Rabbi Yosef calls for Iran’s destruction, as he did yesterday, he appears to be advocating genocide. He might be calling on God to destroy Israel’s enemies but many a war maker claims as his inspiration, divine guidance.

Haaretz reports: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who was updated last week on the Iranian nuclear project, called on Jews to pray for the destruction of Iran, this past Saturday.

During his weekly sermon, the ultra-Orthodox leader of the Shas party stated that his followers should pray for the annihilation of the enemies of the Jewish people during Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year), with an emphasis on Iran and Hezbollah.

“When we say ‘may our enemies be struck down’ on Rosh Hashana, it shall be directed at Iran, the evil ones who threaten Israel. God shall strike them down and kill them,” said Yosef.”

The comments come in the wake of visits by senior defense officials, including National Security Council head Ya’akov Amidror and Interior Minister Eli Yishai, to Yosef to convince Yosef to support a possible Israeli attack on Iran.

It is not known whether Amidror or any of the others succeeded in persuading Yosef. However, during a sermon delivered the previous week, a day after his meeting with Amidror, Yosef said: “You know what situation we’re in, there are evil people, Iran, about to destroy us. … We must pray before [the almighty] with all our heart.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, which Israeli officials have said is divided over the question of launching a go-it-alone attack on Iran, includes a Shas minister as one of its eight members. Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes.

Yosef wields significant influence over Shas’s lawmakers, who seek his guidance on policy.

In the past, the Baghdad-born Yosef has stirred controversy by likening Palestinians to snakes, calling for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to “perish from this world” and describing non-Jews as “born only to serve us”.

But he has also spoken out in favour of Israel ceding occupied land for peace with the Palestinians in order to end conflict and save Jewish lives.

Journalists don’t quite maintain a code of silence when it comes to covering professional misconduct in their own business, but there’s clearly a general reluctance within the press to scrutinize itself. No one wants to look treacherous or close doors to their own career advancement. So, the following report from The Forward is unusual in shining a spotlight on willingness of American journalists to take guidance from the Israel lobby.

The report focuses on the operations of the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), an AIPAC offshoot which funds Congressional trips to Israel, but their propaganda efforts are not just directed at the so-called representatives of the American people; they also manipulate the so-called Fourth Estate:

AIEF takes more than just members of Congress on trips to Israel; it takes journalists, too, on a regular basis. Discussing the latest Sea of Galilee events, Chris Matthews host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” said on August 20: “I’ve been there a number of times, a trip sponsored by a pro-Israel group, Jewish group, very educational trips. They show you a lot about the geography of the land and the situation they’re facing with the Palestinians.”

MSNBC did not return several calls requesting comment on Matthews’ participation in these trips and the network’s policy on joining press junkets.

A spokesman for AIEF would not provide details on the number of reporters hosted by the group in Israel, but there are estimates based on reports of participants indicating that dozens of journalists have participated in pro-Israel junkets throughout the years.

“It’s a super-effective strategy,” said David Plotz, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Slate. Plotz attended an AIEF trip in 2007. He noted that while the junket was “incredible fun,” with business class travel and fancy hotels, organizers packed the agenda with informative tours and “amazing interesting people,” including Israeli President Shimon Peres, top officers of the Israel Defense Forces and a senior Palestinian representative. Participants were free to quiz their hosts and to pose tough questions, but still, Plotz said he left Israel with the impression that “Gaza is a mess, the [security] wall is serving its purpose and that — oh, my God — Iran is six months away from nuclear weapons.” Slate does not have a policy prohibiting participation in junkets as long as reporters clearly state where the funding came from.

Many other American publications do not prohibit trips paid for by businesses or interest groups, though it is common to require full disclosure when reporting on topics relating to the tour. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and all major TV networks insist on paying for their own expenses in all cases, as does the Forward.

“A responsible journalist has no business taking a free trip to Israel — or to any other country, or to a Hollywood film studio’s junket at a resort, or to any other destination that is involved in the subject matter that the journalist covers or is likely to cover in the future. Period,” said Samuel Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and an expert on media ethics. Freedman stressed that even if the free trips do not create actual bias in the reporting, “they absolutely create the perception of bias, and that perception is just as corrosive to a journalist’s credibility.” Larry Lorenz, professor emeritus of journalism at Loyola University New Orleans, agreed that receiving free trips is wrong regardless of whether reporters write about the issue. “Journalism organizations should be concerned about giving the appearance of being bought,” Lorenz said.

Fittingly, a Norwegian court today pronounced its conclusion that Anders Behring Breivik is sane and thus has been given the maximum sentence for his crimes. As The Guardian notes, Norway demonstrated that terrorism can be faced without suspending the legal rights of the accused through ‘an open trial in an open society.’

But to say that Breivik is sane — even if we understand that to be nothing more than a determination of his legal responsibility for his own actions — begs the question of what we really mean by sanity.

We live in societies where it is generally assumed that, with a relatively small number of exceptions, everyone is sane. Sanity is normality, but what form of sanity functioned in Breivik’s mind?

To be sane is to be of sound mind and soundness of mind is a determination of mental coherence — that the mind is not broken. Whatever is sound is not about to fall apart.

This image of mind as an internal structure that may or may not rest on solid foundations, misses the fluid and dynamic relationship between cognition, awareness and the flood of sensory input out of which we can construct a constantly evolving understanding of the world.

If we are to view sanity as something with intrinsic value and not assume it to be commonplace, it actually has less to do with the internal structure that we designate as a sound mind than it has to do with the manner in which that mind engages with the world.

You can’t think straight unless there is a corresponding clarity in the way you see, hear, feel, and connect with your surroundings.

So many of the nominally sane are nothing more than sleepwalkers satisfied to engage with a crude representation of the world (“the world as I see it”) which becomes a filter that narrows and eventually replaces perceptions.

And nowhere is this filtering mechanism applied more extremely than in the mind of the ideologue. There, an infatuation with a representation not only means that filters are constructed in order to shut out anything that might challenge the ideology, but the ideologue then goes one radical step further by attempting to propagate his own conceptual framework inside the minds of others.

Breivik’s mind was consumed by a particularly destructive ideology; the fixations of others tend to be more benign, but what all hold in common is this inclination to shut out the world — a world that cannot be reduced to a collection of ideas; a world in which perceptions constantly touch the unknown; a world in which everyone’s vision springs from a vantage point.

John Rosenthal writes: There has recently been a small stir in the American media, as media organizations from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Associated Press have finally gotten around to acknowledging a “presence” of al-Qaeda and like-minded jihadist groups among the Syrian rebel forces seeking to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

It is difficult to see what the cause of the excitement is. After all, such a presence has been blindingly obvious for many months: whether as a result of the dozens of suicide attacks that have plagued Syria or the numerous videos that have emerged showing rebel forces or supporters proudly displaying the distinctive black flag of al-Qaeda.

Dozens of suicide attacks? Is that an overstatement? The Long War Journal has compiled the statistics and the total currently stands at 25 such attacks. Two dozen is technically dozens because it’s more than one dozen but I think for most people the phrase “dozens” connotes a lot more.

For years, Bashar al Assad’s regime sponsored the flow of suicide bombers and foreign fighters into Iraq to fight Coalition forces. But suddenly, on Dec. 23, 2011, the regime’s own intelligence apparatus was struck by two suicide bombers in Damascus, leaving 44 dead and more than 160 wounded. The rebellion against Assad had begun nine months earlier, but no major suicide attacks, if any at all, were reported until that day in December.

The Syrian government blamed “terrorists.” The Syrian opposition blamed Assad, saying that the attacks were a false flag operation intended to undermine support for the rebels. But the opposition has clear incentives to write off the December 2011 suicide attacks as the work of the Assad regime. The rebellion had not been started by al Qaeda, and the group’s entry into the fight would only complicate international support for overthrowing the Syrian dictator.

There is a simple explanation for the suicide attacks in December and the others that would follow: blowback. Al Qaeda is staging a remarkable surge of its own in Syria.

Top US officials worried about just such a possibility well before the rebellion began. For example, a leaked State Department cable from July 2009 summarizes General David Petraeus’s view of the relationship between AQI and the Syrian regime. “In time,” the cable reads, “these fighters will turn on their Syrian hosts and begin conducting attacks against Bashar al Assad’s regime itself, Petraeus predicted.”

Relying on translations prepared by the SITE Intelligence Group and other publicly-available reports, The Long War Journal has found that approximately 25 suicide bombings have been executed in Syria since the end of last year. This includes the Dec. 23, 2011 attacks and 24 suicide bombings since the first of this year. That is, there have been about 25 suicide bombings in Syria in less than eight months.

A listing of these attacks, including links to sources when appropriate, is included below.

While this may not seem like an especially high number, it is a striking figure when compared to the global martyrdom campaign. For instance, according to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), there were 279 suicide attacks in the world in 2011. 259 of these attacks were carried out by “Sunni extremists,” or jihadists. Only one of the 259 occurred in Syria. This suggests that the prolific use of suicide bombers in Syria that began late last year now represents a significant percentage of all such attacks carried out around the globe.

Based on the available information about the number of casualties from suicide attacks in Syria, the average number of deaths per day may be as few as one and perhaps as high as two. Given that the average number of deaths overall is now well over 100 per day, deaths from suicide attacks make up a tiny fraction.

Meanwhile in neighboring Iraq during 2012, deaths from suicide attacks have averaged seven per day. In other words, the risk of being killed by a suicide bomber is far greater in Iraq than it is in Syria even though the overall level of violence in Syria is vastly more than in Iraq.

In the Western media suicide attacks often seem to be portrayed as random acts of violence by Jihadist extremists who have a hunger for martyrdom, but in reality they are simply one of many gruesome forms of violence employed in a variety of situations for a variety of purposes.

Contrary to the state-driven propaganda which portrays Assad’s forces arraigned against hordes of foreign terrorists, there is currently no reason to suppose that such attacks are likely to become much more prevalent in Syria than they already are — which is to say, they are likely to remain a peripheral feature of the conflict.

To virtually any eye, it is a bizarre spectacle to witness the visible self-satisfaction radiating from the face of a man as he hears his sentence for mass murder. But since Anders Behring Breivik’s trial hinged on the question of his sanity — something about which he seemed to be in no doubt — his conviction is for him a perverse kind of vindication. It represents the failure of the prosecution’s effort to de-politicize Breivik’s crime.

Had the Norwegian been declared insane then his own explanation of the meaning and motivations for his actions would have been rendered meaningless. His theories about the effect of multiculturalism would simply be viewed as the products of a psychotic mind. His connection to polemicists, political activists, and bloggers who promote similar ideas would be treated as somewhat tenuous and their own disavowals would have been lent some extra strength.

But Breivik had an explicit and fully articulated political agenda. And his acts of terrorism were a means to an end: the promotion of his political views.

Paradoxically, counter-terrorism feeds terrorism through its effort to drain the political content from acts of violence.

Bombings and bloodbaths are the most extreme demand to be heard, yet those to whom such demands are directed often think that if the political content of terrorism is acknowledged then this would be a kind of capitulation. It would offer, so the argument goes, an incentive to others who thought that violence is an effective tool for making political demands.

The alternative is to open political debate and instead of trying to treat terrorists as purely criminal or insane, to show that their violence is not an extreme reaction to being silenced; their marginality is a product of their weak minds and the deficiency in their own powers of persuasion.

Breivik was not the victim of political oppression. The journey he traveled from an enthusiastic internet commenter to ruthless bomb-maker was not the result of being muzzled. It was a wild escalation in overstatement.