Archive for April, 2007

Clinton on Israel-Syria peace prospects

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

Bill Clinton, with all due respect, needs to think before he speaks:

Former US president Bill Clinton said that peace between Israel and Syria could be achieved within 35 minutes, if Iran would stay out of the matter.

In an interview with London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Clinton said that the two states were on the verge of reaching a peace agreement in 1998, adding that negotiations behind closed doors and without media intervention, such as those conducted in Oslo in 1993, were the only way to solve the conflict. — YNet

This may well be true in the sense that if there were no Iran, Israel and Syria could reach an agreement. But no matter what Iran does in the future, Hezbollah and the Syrian military buildup are facts that won’t go away quickly. Today it would be suicidal for Israel to give up the strategic advantages of the Golan.

The US is anxious to make this happen, hoping to gain influence with Syria so that she will tighten up her border with Iraq. I’m not sure that the leverage will work in that direction.

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The Pope and the Holocaust

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

The Vatican’s ambassador to Israel has reversed an earlier decision, and will visit Yad Vashem.

Monsignor Antonio Franco, announced last week that he would skip Sunday night’s event because of a caption at the [Yad Vashem Holocaust] museum describing the wartime conduct of Pope Pius XII.

The caption next to the picture of Pius in Yad Vashem’s museum reads, “Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest,” refusing to sign a 1942 allied condemnation of the massacre of Jews…

Officials from Yad Vashem, the Vatican’s Embassy and the Israeli Foreign Ministry confirmed that Sunday that Franco had reversed his decision and would attend Sunday’s ceremony.

Franco told Ynet he merely wanted to draw attention to the Catholic Church’s stance regarding the picture of Pius, saying it was “only diplomacy.”

According to him, there is evidence that the pope worked diligently to help save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. — YNet

Here is a story told to my wife by a survivor now living in Israel. This woman was not given to making things up and there’s no reason to doubt her story.

Molly’s parents managed to get her family from Germany to Italy by the beginning of the war when she was perhaps 10 or 11 years old. She was hidden in a convent in Rome near the Vatican with her sister and brother and several other children; only the Mother Superior knew that they were Jewish.

Molly remembers that the Mother Superior would take the children from time to time on “dry runs” through a long underground tunnel into another building; she was told that this was part of the Vatican and that this would be their escape route if their presence and identity were discovered by the Germans.

Did the Pope know? How many children were saved through similar arrangements? Who knows?

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Foxes and henhouses

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

My ability to employ irony is getting severely strained:

Abbas and his associates presented a deployment plan for Palestinian presidential guards along the Philadelphi Route, as part of the effort to prevent weapons’ smuggling to Gaza via Egypt.

The plan was derived as part of an effort to increase the strength of the presidential guards, using US support, in coordination with Israel, Jordan and Egypt. — YNet

Keep in mind that the EU and Egyptians had little success at this. I suppose the idea is that the Egyptians and EU had no interest in preventing smuggling which strengthened Israel’s enemies, while Abbas has a real interest in weakening his enemies in Hamas.

There is something profoundly disquieting in the idea of Israel being forced to put all its eggs in the Fatah basket, when this organization is no less hostile to the Jewish state than Hamas.

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Paul Wolfowitz wins coveted award

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

Wolfowitz and Shaha RizaThe FresnoZionism award for the ‘guy we most wish wasn’t Jewish’ was hotly contested this year. With nominees like Israeli President Moshe Katsav and Justice Minister Haim Ramon, we were sure the prize (a jar of oxidized horseradish from last Pesach) would find a home in the Jewish state. But Israel has enough trouble without that horseradish, and we’re happy to announce that it is on its way to (we hope soon to be former) World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.

Showing a combination of arrogance, greed, stupidity, and plain tackiness that even outdoes last year’s winner Jack Abramoff, Wolfowitz negotiated a contract that would make a sports star blush when he joined the World Bank in 2005. Now he’s been caught arranging a new job for his girlfriend with a salary of nearly $200,000/yr.

The irony of Wolfowitz telling borrower countries that they have to clean up corruption while he feathers his own nest is striking. The girlfriend is said to be a former ‘gender consultant’, and while I would be the last to make jokes about exactly what that entails, I wonder if it’s worth $200,000.

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Just when you thought the UN could not get worse

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

Everyone knows about the absurdity of the UN Human Rights Council, which since its formation has passed 8 resolutions condemning Israel and none against any other nation. But it’s not the only UN body that behaves, er, strangely. Take the UN Commission on Disarmament (please):

On April 9, 2007 there was a United Nations believe-it-or-not moment extraordinaire. At the same time that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad declared his country was now capable of industrial-scale uranium enrichment, the U.N. reelected Iran as a vice chairman of the U.N. Disarmament Commission…

So in Iran at the Natanz nuclear facility Ahmadinejad gloated: “With great pride, I announce as of today our dear country is among the countries of the world that produces nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.” And in New York, courtesy of his U.N. platform, Iranian Disarmament Vice-Chairman Seyed Mohammad Ali Robatjazi railed against “noncompliance with the NPT [nuclear nonproliferation treaty] by the United States” and “the Zionist lobby”…

Following the election on Monday of Iran as vice chairman, the U.N. Disarmament Commission elected Syria as its rapporteur. — Anne Bayefsky in NRO

Yes, of course, the real problem is the Zionist lobby.

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