Senator Chuck Schumer had disparaging words for some of the mayor’s dogged efforts in pushing for gun control.

In a recent interview on his negotiating tactics, Schumer, who played a big role in the federal background-check legislation that eventually stalled in the Senate last year, told Time magazine he does not think Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control ads are effective in red states—in part, apparently, simply because the ads are coming from the mayor of New York City.

“I am trying to persuade—in whatever way I’m allowed to—the gun groups to put out different ads,” Schumer said.

According to Schumer, another senator told him that constituents dismiss Bloomberg’s ad because the speaker’s accent was reportedly inauthentic.  

Schumer reportedly read out a sample script for an ad he thinks is stronger, faking a “country twang.”

The ad’s narrator, a fictional gun-shop owner and NRA member in Nevada, announces he’s on board with background checks because “that background check ain’t gonna affect me.”

“I’m a law-abiding citizen,” the narrator says, after declaring his children are going to be NRA members just like he is. “It’ll just affect felons, spousal abusers, people [who are] mentally ill.”

“So on this one, I don’t agree with the NRA,” the narrator concludes.

Schumer reportedly is appreciative of the mayor’s efforts to counter the National Rife Association’s power, but does not believe money is truly the source of that power, suggesting Bloomberg’s efforts to block political donations to the Democrats who voted against background checks are, like the ads, ineffective.

“I’ve been trying to figure out the power of the NRA,” Schumer told TImes. “It’s not the money they give out… There are many groups that give much more.”

“It’s that they have a core group of active members who translate what’s going on to the average person—who are sympathetic to them because they’re part of their milieu,” he concluded.

Schumer suggested that taking such an understanding approach—”walk[ing] in the other guy’s moccasins”—could help as a strategy in the Israel-Palestine conflict as well.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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“They possessed hi-tech equipment and filming equipment to take footage of positions,” it said.

The Hamas radio said the men, who were suspected of working for Israel, were shot. It did not elaborate.

Gunmen chained the body of one of the alleged collaborators to a motorcycle and dragged it throughout the main streets of Gaza City.

(Photos via Twitter)

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Clinton left an Asian summit in Cambodia’s capital, which she was attending with Obama, and headed for Israel to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first round of a new U.S. diplomatic initiative.

“We want to … send a clear message that it’s in nobody’s interest to see an escalation of the military conflict,” U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in Phnom Penh.

Clinton’s mission appeared to signal growing U.S. alarm over the prospects of a threatened Israeli ground invasion of Gaza as Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli air strikes continued for a seventh day.

Washington has seemed powerless to affect unfolding events and has faced criticism of a hesitant response, and the Gaza crisis has dogged Obama on an Asia trip meant to show a “pivot” East as the United States winds down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rhodes said the onus remained on Hamas to halt its rocket barrages into Israel and stuck to the administration’s stance that Israel had a right to defend itself.

But he said, “We all agree that the best way to resolve this is through diplomacy, so that you have a peaceful settlement that ends that rocket fire and allows for a broader calm in the region.”

Clinton was due to meet Netanyahu on Wednesday and then go to Ramallah in the West Bank to meet with Palestinian Authority leaders, presumably President Mahmoud Abbas.

She was then to travel to Cairo, where Rhodes would say only that she would meet “Egyptian leaders.”

That would likely mean an encounter with Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, who has spoken by phone several times with Obama since the Gaza crisis erupted and is seen as a possible linchpin in getting Hamas to back down.

“Secretary Clinton will emphasize the United States’ interest in a peaceful outcome that protects and enhances Israel’s security and regional stability, an outcome that can lead to improved conditions for the civilian residents of Gaza, and that could re-open the path to fulfill the aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis for two states living side by side in peace and security,” Rhodes said.

Asked whether Obama was specifically asking Netanyahu to hold off on any ground assault to give more time for diplomacy, Rhodes said: “No. The president has been very clear that Israel is going to make decisions on its security.”

Obama, weighing in with his first comments on the crisis on Sunday, said t would be “preferable” to avoid an Israeli ground invasion but urged Egypt and Turkey to do more to rein in Hamas, which Washington considers a terrorist group.

Obama promised to make Israeli-Palestinian peace diplomacy a high priority when he took office in 2009, but his administration’s on-again-off-again efforts have done little if anything to bring the two sides any closer to the negotiating table.

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“My boss has already been mobilized, and now I am responsible for the lives of half of Israel, but calling him for consultation will be hard,” Faina Milman, security official in charge of maintaining the separation barriers between Israel and the Palestinian territories, told Metro. “If the call-up expands, my colleagues will also be taken away. After that, how are we going to be work then will be unclear.”

“But judging by how our military works from the air, the operation on Gaza will be accurate and well-thought-out,” Milman added.

The mood among those mobilized is one of war. Even those Israelis, who support a more peace-seeking, pro-Palestinian politics, are going off to defend their country.

“I am for peace; I continually have arguments with my friends because politically I am not right-wing, I’m not raring to kill Arabs as they are. But I don’t want Jerusalem to be divided and for our lands to be given to Palestinians,” Ilya, a student at Jerusalem University, tells Metro. “For this reason, I am returning to the army.” During his past mandatory army service, Ilya was a driver – he may not shoot but is nevertheless helping the cause.

Ultimately, it’s a personal choice for an Israeli to serve as a reservist or not. What’s more, the army consists of lot of different departments, many of which do not pose any danger. “On account of my wife I signed a paper that I can’t be conscripted into the armed forces,” Sergey, a security employee at the Israeli parliament house (Knesset), admits to Metro.

At the Jerusalem bus stations, there is a bit of chaos. The regular bus schedule is cancelled, many people are left stranded as buses are being used to transport reservists to the Gazan border. About a third of people in the stations are clad in army uniform.

For the time being, the exact date of the ground operation remains unknown, but people are in confident mood. “Now we have the support of America and Europe, and it won’t change until we make some sort of error,” Milman said.

(Photos via Metro World News)

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The latest threat – Palestinian rockets from the Gaza Strip – is something new, but in a sense familiar.

Some in the throbbing metropolis strung out along on Israel’s sandy Mediterranean shores kept their cool on Friday, after sirens wailed and another explosion was heard, the second in 24 hours. No one was hurt.

Israel was throttling back for the sleepy sabbath weekend, and the freeways were humming with homebound traffic. About 40 percent of Israelis, more than three million people, live and work in Tel Aviv and the urban sprawl around it.

A surfing initiation class was out, practicing paddling in slack water as girls in cutoffs and flip-flops got out of the way of muscled guys on mountain bikes on the crowded cycle path.

The distant high-altitude rumble of warplanes mixed with the breeze from the sea as the sun sank beneath the horizon.

“Israelis are very cool. We’re used to living with this sort of stuff,” said Federico Broedner of Freddy’s Havana cigar shop in the heart of the city not far from the U.S. embassy – the seashore five-star hotel belt.

“People are glad they (the military) are doing something about it (the rocket threat from Gaza),” he said.

“My local customers are cool but the foreigners are worried. One man had a panic attack and ran out of the shop when we heard the explosion.”

In fact, some residents on Thursday and Friday were either too laid-back to care or not awake yet to the fact that this was not a drill, that the Palestinian rocketeers of Gaza finally have the city in their range, if not their sights.

Palestinians, and even many Israelis, believe some Tel Aviv residents are blind to the realities of the conflict.

In Gaza, at least 14 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli strikes since the conflict escalated on Wednesday. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket attack on Thursday in a town well to the south of Tel Aviv, where rocketing has become commonplace.

“A WEEK OR TEN DAYS”

Thousands of rockets have been fired at southern Israel since Hamas took over the enclave in 2007. Israel invaded Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009 to stop the rocket fire, a war in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. Rocketing stopped for a few years but resumed again in 2012.

This is the first time that Islamist Hamas militants in Gaza have fired rockets with sufficient range to reach Tel Aviv and its outlying dormitory cities. None of the gleaming office towers that reflect the setting sun has been scratched.

Hamas, which also targeted Jerusalem on Friday, is gambling with a game-changing move.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the militants would be made to pay. A lethal strike on Tel Aviv would probably trigger an Israeli invasion.

Tel Aviv residents who remember the Gulf War 20 years ago say the rockets still seem less dangerous than Saddam’s Scuds, when Israelis wore gas masks in case the Iraqi leader topped his missiles with chemical warheads.

A nationwide early-warning system alerts Israelis to incoming rockets. Homes and offices have blast-proof rooms to retreat to within 30 seconds of the wail of sirens.

Those caught outside lie flat on the ground. Drivers get out of their cars and crouch or lie by the roadside until they hear an impact or an all-clear.

The new “Iron Dome” interceptor system is successfully tracking launches from Gaza and knocking out many of those rockets that look as if they might hit residential areas.

“Tel Aviv is on a normal footing. You can go to the beach, or to the movies,” a spokesman for the military’s civil defence command said on Israeli television after the latest rocket attack on the city. “After an explosion is heard, you can get back to normal 10 minutes later.”

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Israel’s leaders don’t want a Palestinian state, Jimmy Carter tells Metro in an exclusive interview. The former US President, who still conducts international negotiations and is now a member The Elders, won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. He just returned from the Middle East.

METRO: The chances of a Palestinian state are fading. Whose job is it to fix this situation?

CARTER: The first priority would be for the Israelis and Palestinians to take the initiative. But the Israelis have continued with their massive settlement program in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians say they won’t negotiate as long as Israel is continuing to take over their territory, so there’s deadlock. The United States is looked upon by the rest of the international community as the primary interlocutor, so the European Union members don’t take action. As a result, there’s no intermediary who can move things forward and initiate peace talks.

President Obama says he supports a Palestinian state, but even so there’s a deadlock. Does it take even more than the support of a US President to get a Palestinian state?

I think the big change is that the Israeli leaders have decided to abandon the two-state solution. Their policy now is to confiscate Palestinian territory, and they’ve announced publicly that it the Palestinians have to recognize not just Israel but Israel as a Jewish state, even though 20% of the Israeli community are non-Jews. [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has also decided that even the Jordan valley has to be under Israeli control. So, those factors indicate quite clearly that Netanyahu has decided that the two-state solution is not what he wants. He wants what is being called Greater Israel, Eretz Israel.

The Arab Spring had worldwide support. Now four diplomats have been killed and the region is considered less safe. Are dictators sometimes better than democracy?

I don’t think so at all. For example, the Egyptian people had a very safe series of elections. As the Carter Center, we’ve been here for several of these elections, and have also monitored the elections in Tunisia and Libya. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the termination of the dictators has been a major beneficial development. The outside world just tends to be too impatient. The United States declared our independence from Britain in 1776, and it wasn’t until 12 years later that we had a constitution. Egypt is going to have a constitution within a year of the President assuming power.

So we’re simply too worried about Islamists?

Look at the Muslim Brotherhood. I’ve known the Muslim Brotherhood leaders for 20 years. They were persecuted by the Mubarak government, imprisoned and so forth, and now they’ve gone to the people in an honest, fair and safe election. And, of course, they’ve prevailed because their candidate became President and they have a majority in Parliament. But they’re a very moderate group of Islamists, whereas salafists and others are much more radical, at least judging with Western criteria.

The YouTube video defaming Islam caused attacks and huge protests in the Arab world, including possibly the killing American diplomats in Libya. Who’s to blame? Is there too much freedom of speech in the US, or are Muslims too sensitive?

First of all, all the evidence now shows that the killings of the four American diplomats in Libya weren’t caused by the film but was instead a planned attack by al Qaeda. In the US, Britain, Norway, Sweden and other countries in the West we believe in the right of expression. Western leaders are often criticized in scandalous ways in paintings, words and sculptures, and that criticism is accepted as legitimate. But we deplore when there’s a scandalous statement like the ones made in that YouTube film. We regret that it has caused pain to believers in the Islamic faith, but it happens to our own faith as well. But freedom of speech includes freedom of blasphemy.

But isn’t it frightening in itself that a deranged YouTube video posted by an obscure individual can undo years of diplomacy?

Yes, it is frightening. I’m a Christian; I teach Bible school every Sunday. I’ve heard and seen statements made about my own faith that cause me pain. But I don’t want the blasphemous person who made the statements put in jail. Yes, it’s painful to see the reaction in the Arab world, but I think we have to anticipate it. People in the non-Muslim world who deliberately do this in order to cause Muslims pain underestimate the violence that can erupt from aggrieved Muslims. It’s painful and unfortunate, but when you have to choose between that kind of pain and the right of freedom to voice your opinions we come down on the side of freedom.

Carter facts

Family: Wife Rosalynn; four children
Background: Governor of Georgia. President of the United States 1976-1980. Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2002
In the news: Members of The Elders, peace negotiator. Heads the Carter Center, which monitors democracy and elections. Recently returned from the Middle East
Interesting fact: Devout Evangelical Christian; still teaches Sunday school every week.

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The ban would have ousted a handful of products sold at the grocery store that were imported from Israel, like hummus. A group opposing the ban, which calls itself “More Hummus, Please” fought to keep the products on the shelves in the weeks leading up to the vote. If the whole debate seems a little ridiculous to you, than you’re on the same wavelength as “The Daily Show,” which aired a special report about the hummus dilemma last night.

Reporter Samantha Bee sought to expose the truth in a hard-hitting investigation that brought us both sides of the issue.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raged for decades with countless casualties on both sides, but perhaps there is one victim of this war that might be the most tragic of all,” Bee said. “The Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York.”

While “The Daily Show” pokes fun at the food fight, supporters of the ban say they’re not giving up.

“Although we finished with a very significant level of support, almost 40 percent, the results of the vote show that there remains much work to do in our efforts to educate co-op members on the importance of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions),” said Park Slope food coop members who support the ban.

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In one of the biggest ever such exchanges between the two sides, a pale and gaunt Sgt. Shalit was flown to his parents’ home in northern Israel after more than five years held incommunicado by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, while a first 477 of over 1,000 Palestinians to be released under the bargain left Israeli jails for Gaza, the West Bank and abroad.

Flag-waving crowds greeted long unseen loved ones as heroes and uncompromising talk on either side left few illusions for world leaders who urged Israel and the divided Palestinian factions to build on the long-awaited bargain brokered by Germany and Egypt to reopen wider peace negotiations.
In an interview with Egyptian television as he passed through on his way from Gaza, a visibly weak and dazed Shalit, 25, said of 5,000 Palestinians who remain in Israeli jails: “I hope this deal will promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

But, while leaders made mildly conciliatory comments about each other’s role in achieving the deal, there was no sign of warmth across the frontline of the struggle for land and security between Palestinians and Israel.

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Geller, an Upper West Side resident, submitted a subway ad last week to the MTA in which she calls people opposed to Israel “savages.”

Her lawyers sent the MTA a warning yesterday: If they don’t approve the ad by Friday, she’ll sue the transit authority for denying her First Amendment rights.

“There’s nothing in the ad that is inaccurate or controversial,” Geller maintains.

Her ads are a response to a current ad campaign in 18 subway stations that calls for the end of U.S. military aid to Israel.

“These aren’t anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. They’re pro-peace ads,” said Mark Johnson, director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of the groups that paid for the current ads.

While he said he welcomed a conversation about U.S. military aid to Israel, he dismissed Geller’s rebuttal as “hate speech.”

On Sept. 26, Johnson’s ads will expire and another organization, Stand With Us, has paid to replace them with pro-Israel ads.

“We are not going to stand back and let people lie about Israel,” said Roz Rothstein, CEO of Stand With Us.

Follow Emily Anne Epstein on Twitter @EmilyatMetro.

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With U.S. credibility and influence in the Middle East at stake, Obama wants to dissuade the Palestinians from asking the U.N. Security Council for statehood in the teeth of Israeli anger and a U.S. threat to use its veto if it came to a vote.

But a senior Palestinian official, Nabil Shaath, said, “We will cordially and respectfully tell him ‘no.’”
The Palestinians, however, would give the Security Council “some time” to mull the statehood claim before they took it to the U.N. General Assembly, he told a news conference.

Flag-waving Palestinians filled the squares of West Bank cities to rally behind the initiative at the United Nations.

A year after telling the General Assembly he hoped to see a Palestinian state born by now, the U.S. president said creating such a state alongside Israel remained his goal.

“But the question isn’t the goal we seek — the question is how to reach it. And I am convinced that there is no short cut to the end of a conflict that has endured for decades,” he said.

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Palestinians swiftly dismissed the Israeli leader’s terms for a deal as placing more “obstacles” in diplomacy’s way, casting doubt as to whether frozen peace talks may actually resume.

Addressing a joint meeting of Congress after a testy exchange last week with President Barack Obama, Netanyahu reiterated his expectations ahead of further talks about the contours of a future Palestine.

They included Palestinian recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and the scrapping of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s unity accord with the Islamist movement Hamas.

“Tear up your pact with Hamas. Sit down and negotiate. Make peace with the Jewish state,” he said.

Netanyahu explicitly suggested for the first time that Israel would cede some Jewish settlements in the West Bank, though others would be annexed under any future agreement.

In Israel, settler leaders and members from Netanyahu’s own Likud party also voiced their objections. But with no diplomatic breakthrough in sight, his ruling coalition did not seem to be in any jeopardy.

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Obama, addressing Israel’s staunchest U.S. supporters, repeated his view that long-stalled peace talks should start on the basis of the Jewish state’s 1967 borders, an assertion that angered Israel, exposing a deep rift in its relations with Washington.

But Obama, in his speech to Washington’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, sought to ease tensions with the close U.S. ally, stressing that he expected the two sides to eventually negotiate an accord that includes land swaps accounting for the “new demographic realities,” signaling that Israel would be allowed to keep some settlements built on occupied land.

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The Lebanese army on the Lebanese frontier said 10 Palestinians died when Israeli forces shot at rock-throwing protesters to prevent them from entering the Jewish State. The Israel army said the Lebanese army had also used live ammunition in an attempt to hold back the crowds rushing the border fence.

Israel blamed the incidents on provocation inspired by Iran, intended to exploit Palestinian nationalist feeling.

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