Yediot Aharonot discusses Education Minister Gideon Saar’s plan to bus pupils to see Hebron and maintains that "There is no place that better demonstrates the insanity of the settlement movement. They should race there on segregated highways in armored buses, see the closed Arab market …visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs and hear about the Baruch Goldstein massacre. On the way they should be exposed to the fact that Yitzhak and Ishmael were both sons of the patriarch Abraham. I’m not sure how many of them are aware of that these days."
Ma’ariv notes that "The ‘Independence’ party would receive zero seats according to the polls. The Likud, it seems, will not let him [Independence faction leader Ehud Barak] in. The Defense Minister is reaching the end of his political road."
Yisrael Hayom says that "Even as his regime disintegrates, Moammar Gadhafi remains true to his path. Just like Hitler in his final days, who did not hesitate while in his bunker to sacrifice his countrymen for the sake of his own survival, so too Gadhafi, in his violent speech, called for a civil war."
The Jerusalem Post discusses recent events in Libya, and censures the UN and especially the UN’s Human Rights Council for permitting the election of Libya as a member of the HRC in May 2010, despite its abysmal human rights record. The editor states that “Perhaps if more pressure had been brought to bear against Gaddafi when he just might have been ready to listen, Libya’s citizens would not now be getting shot down in the streets by a ‘mad dog’ regime,” and adds:”At the very least, the UN would have retained a modicum of moral legitimacy.”
Haaretz welcomes PM Netanyahu’s decision this week that will effectively halt the initiative to create investigative committees to probe human-rights organizations identified with the left, and states: “We hope the prime minister’s last-minute decision to prevent such disgraceful investigative committees marks the start of the renunciation of Lieberman’s distorted perception of the democratic system.”
[Uri Misgav, Avraham Tirosh and Boaz Bismuth wrote today’s articles in Yediot Aharonot, Ma’ariv and Yisrael Hayom, respectively.]