Levitt Letter Extra News

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

By Caroline B. Glick www.JewishWorldReview.com

This past August, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced, “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new cold war.”

Medvedev make this declaration after signing an order recognizing the sovereignty of Georgia’s two pro-Russian provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Some observers warn that Russian annexation of the two territories is just a matter of time.

While less attractive than a competitive alliance, Russia’ violent, bullying behavior makes it impossible to imagine its leaders returning to their pre-invasion cooperative posture with the West. As a consequence, like Medvedev, many Western officials have been noting the possibility that a new cold war will transpire between Russia and the West.

Yet the nature of Russia’s regime which propelled its decision to launch its war in Georgia raises doubts about the viability of reaching an equilibrium of hostility with the West comparable to that which existed during the Cold War. It is true that similarities between Russia’s current behavior and that of the Soviet Union before it abound. As was the case with the Soviet Union, it is fairly clear that Russia’s current regime has expansionist aspirations far beyond its immediate borders. Moscow’s threat to attack Poland with nuclear bombs, its aggressive naval deployment in the Mediterranean Sea, its hosting of Syrian President Bashar Assad and its renewed talk of supplying Syria and Iran with advanced weapons systems all make its Soviet-like expansionist aims clear.

Moreover, as Pavel Felgenhauer noted on the Jamestown Foundation’s *Eurasia Daily Monitor*, Russia’s government controlled media is engaged in Soviet-like frenzied, demonization of US leaders. In one prominent example this week, the government-mouthpiece *Izvestia* launched an obscene broadside against US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The newspaper referred to her as “insane,” and then crudely demeaned her as “a skinny old single lady who likes to display her underwear during talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ivanov.”

As the West scrambles to build a strategy for contending with Russia, many writers and policymakers have pointed out that Russia is fundamentally weak.

As my former Jerusalem Post colleague Bret Stephens noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, Russia’s demographic forecast like its oil and gas production forecasts are dim. The CIA has pointed out through demographic attrition, Russia’s population will decline more than twenty percent over the next forty years. And due to “underinvestment, incompetence, corruption, political interference, and crude profiteering,” Russia’s oil production will decline this year for the first time. Its production rates are expected to drop precipitously next year and in the coming years as well.

Cognizant of these negative trends, US and European leaders are hoping that Russia’s bleak prospects will convince its leaders to step back from the precipice of war to which they are now hurtling the West. On Wednesday, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried warned, “Russia is going to have to come to terms with the reality that it can either integrate with the world or it can be a self-isolated bully. But it can’t have both.”

While it remains to be seen if the West will agree to isolate the Russian bully, it is certainly the case that Russia’s leaders are not blind to their country’s weaknesses. This is so because to a large degree, Russia’s dim long-term prognosis has been caused by the domestic policies of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his cronies. And in light of this, it can be safely assumed that far from causing them to avoid confrontation with the West, their cognizance of Russia’s problems is what caused them to adopt their belligerent posture.

In December, Russian political insider Stanislav Belkovsky told the German media that during his two terms as Russia’s president, Putin amassed a fortune in excess of $40 billion making him the wealthiest man in Europe. Putin’s wealth has been built through his ownership of vast holdings in three Russian oil and gas companies.

Were Putin invested in the long-term prosperity and strength of his country, he would have invested that money in Russia. Instead he has squirreled it away in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. And of course, Putin is not alone in betting his wealth against his country’s future. Like him, his cronies in the Kremlin and the FSB have accrued their wealth through their ownership in Russian companies that Putin has nationalized. And like him, they have taken their loot out of the country.

The behavior of Russia’s rulers makes clear that they do not concern themselves with the long-term health of their country as they construct their policies. And their concentration on short-term gains makes their decision to confront the US and Europe inevitable. It is now, when Russia’s oil wealth is at its peak that they are most powerful. And with their current power they seek to maximize their personal gains while justifying their actions in the name of Russian glory.

By doing this, they are working to ensure that in spite of their despoiling of Russia’s natural resources and fostering of social pathologies which guarantee that Russia will be unable to stem its decline, Putin and his men will go out in a blaze of fire and light. Through his fascist cultivation of a cult of personality and his jingoistic aggression and incitement against the US, Putin, like Peter the Great and Josef Stalin will enter the pantheon of Russia’s great heroes after he abandons his devastated country to be reunited with his money. He cares not for the consequences of his actions on his fellow Russians. His loyalties are to immortality, and his bank accounts.

It is due to Putin’s non-domestic considerations that it is virtually impossible to reach a stable equilibrium of hostility with Russia today like that which existed with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is the case for two reasons. First, because it is impossible to know how long he will stay around. And second, Putin’s motivations block any chance of reaching a raison d’etre with Russia because his motivations are not shared by his countrymen.

The fact of the matter is that in its indifference toward Russia’s long-term wellbeing, Putin’s regime is far more similar to Iran and North Korea than it is to the Soviet Union which preceded it. As Iran invests hundreds of billions of dollars in its nuclear program and still more billions in its terror proxies, client states and offensive military systems in the name of its quest for Islamic domination and salvation, its domestic economy is falling apart.

For the first time since 1982, this year Iran was forced to import wheat from the US. Parliament member Sayed Delkhosh announced Tuesday that thirty percent of Iran’s annual $280 billion budget has gone towards preventing failed government owned companies from going bankrupt. Then too, Iran’s oil distribution company just announced that it intends to cut the public’s gasoline rations ahead of the winter.

As to North Korea, its principle exports are missiles, weapons of mass destruction, forged currency, and narcotics. North Korea is a slave state replete will full regimentation of the entire starving population, abandoned, ruined villages, and an archipelago of concentration camps. It is country dedicated completely to the perpetuation of the pathological regime of absolute dictator Kim Jong-Il and his family.

It is due to the fact that they base their national policies on considerations unrelated to their national wellbeing that Russia, Iran and North Korea have chosen a posture of war and confrontation with the West. For it is through confrontation and aggression that they coerce the West to pay attention to them. The identification of the West as the enemy enables them to divert their peoples’ attention away from their domestic policy failures. Through their manipulation of public opinion Russia, Iran, and North Korea have convinced their people to blame the outside enemy for their impoverishment and their suffering. And in light of the supposed enemies at their gates, the Russians, Iranians and North Koreans feel free, indeed compelled to repress all opponents of their regimes.

It is true that each of these regimes is motivated by different governing rationales. But whether their governing rationales are apocalyptic messianism, megalomania, or greed, the result is the same. Guided by short-term goals, the leaders of Iran, Russia and North Korea seek out confrontation and war with the West.

To understand the acuteness of the challenges that Russia, Iran and North Korea constitute for the West, it is useful to compare them to the ascendant People’s Republic of China. It is absolutely clear that like the Soviet Union before it, the PRC is currently engaged in a long-term strategy of expanding its military and economic power. Like the USSR, the PRC is emerging as a major power in competition and conflict with the US.

While the emergence of the PRC as a competitor of America’s presents the US with major strategic challenges, the US has many options short of overt confrontation for contending with the rise of China. It can expand its naval forces and modernize its nuclear arsenal. It can strengthen its alliances with Japan, South Korea and other Asian democracies. It can expand and develop manufacturing markets in Thailand and India to compete with Chinese factories. At the same time, it can diversify its energy consumption to lower tensions over oil supplies with China.

The fact that Russia, Iran, and North Korea are unstable does not simply bar the prospect of reaching accords with them that will enable a stable equilibrium of terror and deterrence to emerge. Their inherent instability, evidenced by their otherworldly and so necessarily short-term policy horizons make clear that the lifespan of any deal is unknowable at best and most likely extremely limited. Moreover, even in the absence of a deal, it is impossible to reach a stable balance of terror.

In contrast, during Cold War, even when explicit agreements were impossible to accomplish there was still a basic framework of deterrence that limited the nature of the threat and the magnitude of possible conflagrations. Both the US and the Soviets based their strategies for contending with one another on a balance of terror predicated on mutually assured destruction. This understanding was founded on the American and Soviet presumption of the stability of the other side. In contrast, when forging policies to contend with the Russian, Iranian, and North Korean regimes it is impossible to presume their stability because they are by their very natures unstable.

The lesson of all of this is that while all enemies present dangers, not all enemies are alike. The same strategies cannot be employed against unstable enemies as can be employed against stable ones. Rather than forging policies towards Russia as well as Iran and North Korea based on false analogies of the Cold War, it is vital to recognize that regimes that do not concern themselves with the welfare of their own people are not regimes that will be credible negotiating partners or stable antagonists in cold wars based upon an assumption of mutual assured destruction.

JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, www.IsraelNN.com

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert now is officially a lame duck head of government after he resigned on September 21, but he remains in power until newly-elected Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni forms a coalition or is forced to go to the polls. His legal position has changed in that he cannot be suspended from office, but he still can fire Cabinet ministers.

President Shimon Peres received his resignation by stating he appreciated “the respectful way in which he is handing over his power.” The president added that several actions that Prime Minister Olmert made for the “safety of the state of Israel and the welfare of its citizens…will remain unknown.”

President Peres invited all of the heads of the 13 Knesset factions for consultations, a formal act before asking Livni, as head of the largest party, to form a new coalition.

She already has gone into action to attempt to win over opposition parties although she has not yet received the formal go-ahead from the President, after which she will have 42 days in which to accomplish her task. If she does not, President Peres can ask another party to form a coalition, which would be highly unlikely, or call for new elections within 90 days.

Livni has made it clear she does not intend to drag out the process. “If it soon becomes clear that a coalition cannot be formed, we will go to elections and we will win,” Foreign Minister Livni said. She stated her hope for a national unity government but faces an apparent rocky road.

Likud chairman and Opposition leader Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu has said he will not join a coalition led by Kadima, which he said would be like joining the bankrupt Lehman Brothers financial firm.

The keys to a coalition government remain in the hands of Labor party chairman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Industry Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai, chairman of Shas. The Labor party chairman favors a unity government, but senior party members fear that Livni will establish a power base with a new government and call spot elections.

Shas chairman Yishai has two cards in his hands–the demand for an increase in child welfare payments, or some other alternative way to help lower income families, and the status of Jerusalem. He and Foreign Minister Livni have been verbally sparring back and forth for weeks on the issue of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) over the capital. He has threatened to pull his party out of the government if the Olmert proposal to divide Jerusalem reaches the discussion stage with the PA.

For its part, the PA has repeatedly claimed the issue has been discussed numerous times, but Foreign Minister Livni, the senior Israeli negotiator, has denied the charges. However, the last time the PA repeated the claim was when Prime Minister Olmert, and not Foreign Minister Livni, was present at the talks.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni greets supporters as she arrives to cast her vote in Tel Aviv in the Kadima Party primary.

By Leslie Susser, www.jta.org

With her narrow victory in the Kadima Party primary, Tzipi Livni’s next major task will be assembling a coalition government so she can become prime minister.

Then all she’ll have on her plate is figuring out how to arrest the threat to Israel from Iran, resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a historic peace deal, neutralize the threat on Israel’s northern border from Hezbollah, and run the country.

If she ever gets to it.

The immediate challenge Livni faces is demonstrating — both to the Israeli people and to Kadima’s prospective coalition partners — that her 431-vote margin of victory in Wednesday’s primary is enough for her to assert her leadership and bring partners into a coalition government.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Judge Dan Arbel announced that Livni beat the runner-up in the race, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, by a mere 431 votes — 43.1 percent to Mofaz’s 42 percent, according to Israeli media reports.

Lawyers for Mofaz initially announced he might challenge the results, but Mofaz later called Livni to congratulate her and conceded defeat.

Early exit polling had given Livni a double-digit margin of victory, as reported initially by JTA. But as the votes were counted late into the night, Livni’s margin dwindled to about 1 percent.

The two other contenders in the primary finished far behind, with Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit winning 8.5 percent of the vote and Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter garnering 6.5 percent.

In the vote at 114 polling stations throughout the country, fewer than 33,000 people, or about 54 percent of Kadima members, voted for a party leader to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — a relatively low turnout by Israeli standards.

Even so, Livni complained of “congestion” at polling stations and argued for an extension of voting time by an hour. In a compromise, Kadima decided to extend voting by 30 minutes.

Livni’s victory is historic in several respects. She won the first-ever primary held by Kadima, the 3-year-old political party founded by Ariel Sharon. Her election also brings an end to the Olmert era, though he will stay on as caretaker prime minister until a coalition is assembled.

And if she succeeds in cobbling together a coalition, Livni would become Israel’s second female prime minister, following Golda Meir.

Livni will have 42 days to form a government. If she fails, Israel will be headed for new general elections.

She has made it clear that she wants to base her new government on the existing coalition — Kadima, Labor, Shas and the Pensioners parties — with the possible addition of other parties such as Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu on the right, Meretz on the left and the fervently Orthodox Torah Judaism Party.

Livni wants to limit the current transition period, which she sees as a potentially unhealthy period of a two-headed government.

Kadima leaders argue that there already is a functioning government and there is no reason it shouldn’t continue its work. They maintain that all the Labor Party asked Kadima to do was change its leader, and now that the party has done that, continuing with the present coalition shouldn’t be a problem.

But Livni’s main coalition partners have no intention of giving her an easy ride. Labor argues that a prime minister effectively elected by only 17,000 or so Israelis has no legitimacy and that the Israeli people as a whole should be allowed to have their say in new elections.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu agrees. Polls show Likud would win many more than its current share of 12 Knesset seats if new general elections were held, possibly even winning the plurality and catapulting Netanyahu back into the office of prime minister.

Shas is also threatening new elections unless Livni meets its demands for more generous child allowances and a pledge to keep Jerusalem off the negotiating agenda with the Palestinians.

If Livni fails to form a coalition, an election could be held as early as next spring. If she succeeds, she could govern for a year or two before going into a new election with the incumbency advantage.

During the campaign, Livni gave a slew of interviews in which she spelled out her priorities:

* Moving ahead on the Palestinian track: Over the past few months, she and the former Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, have been drafting a full-fledged Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Both sides say that although they have made progress, closing the wide gaps that still exist will take time.
Once Livni is installed as prime minister, one key issue will become more difficult to resolve: refugees. Livni repeatedly has said that she will not agree to any resettlement in Israel proper of Palestinian refugees because allowing in just one Palestinian refugee would chip away at Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
Livni might ease conditions on the ground for Palestinians by dismantling illegal settler outposts in the West Bank, something that successive Israeli prime ministers have failed to do. She argues that any government she heads will assert the rule of law.
As for Gaza, Livni warns that she will consider a large-scale ground offensive if Hamas uses the current truce to smuggle in huge quantities of arms.

* Ascertaining the seriousness of the Syrian track: Ever since Israel and Syria started conducting new peace feelers under Turkish auspices in January 2007, Livni has not been in the loop. She has argued that by going public with the talks, Israel has provided Syria a degree of international legitimacy without getting very much in return.

Livni will want to see for herself whether Syrian President Bashar Assad is ready for a peace with Israel that entails a significant downgrading of his relations with Iran.

* Dealing quietly with the Iranian nuclear threat: Livni says as far as Israel is concerned, “all options are on the table” and that to say more would be irresponsible. But she has intimated in the past that Israel could live with a nuclear Iran by establishing a very clear deterrent balance.

* Introducing a new style of cleaner government: Livni, who won the leadership race at least partly because of her squeaky clean image, will want to signal early on that she intends to introduce a new style of governing. Livni will want to clean up party politics by breaking the power of the Kadima vote contractors, who drafted people en masse to vote for a particular candidate. One idea is to set a minimum membership period — perhaps 18 months — before party members get voting rights.

By electing Livni, Kadima voters seemed to be saying enough of the generals at the top and enough of wheeler-dealer politics. Livni, dubbed Mrs. Clean, is seen as a straight-thinking, scandal-free civilian clearly out to promote Israel’s best interests.

She has a full agenda, a chance to change the tenor of Israel politics and to make historic moves vis-a-vis the Palestinians and Syria.

But first she will have to put together a viable coalition.

Jewish groups again are mobilizing to protest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations, as they did last year.

By Ben Harris, www.jta.org

Sarah Palin is being disinvited from the Jewish-sponsored Iran rally, sources told JTA.

The move follows two days of controversy for organizers of Monday’s rally to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations.

The controversy erupted after JTA reported that Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had accepted an invitation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to speak at the event. The news of Palin’s participation prompted Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who had pledged several weeks earlier to speak at the rally, to announce she was withdrawing from the event.

Spokespeople for both Palin and Clinton proceeded to trade barbs over who was responsible for tainting the rally with politics.

A Clinton spokesperson said the senator withdrew because the rally had become “a partisan political event.”

Palin spokeswoman Tracy Schmitt took a shot at Clinton, saying the Republican nominee “believes that the danger of a nuclear Iran is greater than party or politics.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council defended Clinton’s decision not to attend and called for Palin to be disinvited so as to preserve the nonpartisan nature of the effort to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

On Thursday, the Conference of Presidents held a conference call for rally organizers in which the decision was made to limit participation in the rally to unelected officials, participants on the call told JTA.

Shortly afterward, organizers put out a statement saying, “In order to keep the focus on Iranian threats and to ensure that this critical message not be obscured, the organizers of the rally have decided not to have any American political personalities appear.”

The statement said Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Israeli Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik would address the demonstration.

The controversy has sparked concern that the issue of stopping Iran has been politicized, undermining efforts to cast opposition to Ahmadinejad’s belligerence and nuclear ambitions as a broad bipartisan issue in the United States. Jewish organizers have labored to present the Iranian regime as a threat not only to Israel but to the United States and the world.

In an effort to avoid the taint of imbalance and partisanship, the Presidents Conference issued a late invitation to the Obama campaign Wednesday morning. But reportedly irked by the conference’s slight, the Obama camp did not commit to sending a representative.

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, told JTA earlier this week that the invitation to speak at the rally was extended to Clinton several weeks ago. He also told The New York Jewish Week that once Clinton accepted, organizers did not want to supersede her by bringing in someone from the Obama campaign.

Fred Zeidman, a leading Jewish backer of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, told JTA he was approached about helping secure a speaker around the time of the Republican National Convention at the beginning of September in Minnesota. Zeidman said he forwarded the request to the campaign last week with a recommendation that it cooperate.

“I remember saying to our guys, Hillary Clinton is representing the other side,” Zeidman said. “We’ve got to really take this seriously.”

In a statement this week, the McCain campaign noted its participation in the rally and derided Obama’s stated willingness to negotiate with the man being protested.

“Instead of pressuring Senator Clinton to withdraw and pressuring the event’s organizers to disinvite Governor Palin, we hope Senator Obama will consider lending his own voice to this cause,” McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement published on a Washington Post’s campaign blog, The Trail. “And if [the] Senator subsequently wishes to clarify any remarks that might be misconstrued, he will have the opportunity to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions after he speaks at the U.N. the following day.”

Clinton advisers said the senator dropped out of her own accord, not due to any pressure from the Obama campaign, according to the Washington Post.

The rally “is not and will not be a partisan event,” Hoenlein told The Jewish Week before his group decided to cancel the invitation to Palin. “The organizers reached out to a wide spectrum of people. Hillary accepted early in August. We also asked numerous Republicans. Some we approached couldn’t make it, and since Governor Palin was coming to the United Nations to meet world leaders, her staff agreed to have her speak.”

Ira Forman, the National Jewish Democratic Council’s executive director, said it is the McCain campaign that was guilty of politicizing the rally with its partisan statements.

Along with other Jews involved in organizing the event, Forman also laid blame with the Presidents Conference, saying it bungled matters either by inviting Palin at all or by failing to notify the Clinton camp promptly that it had secured Palin’s participation. Forman praised the decision Thursday to cancel Palin’s appearance.

“It was a wise decision to make,” he said. “It depoliticizes an event that fundamentally needs support from everybody and shouldn’t be part of the political circus this year.”

Jewish Republicans agreed that the organizers blundered — but said the mistake was withdrawing the invitation to Palin.

“This is one of the biggest black marks on our community that I can remember in more than 20 years of working in the Jewish community,” Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. “I think it is absolutely outrageous that we allow people with a partisan political agenda to hijack an event that is designed to send a message to Iran and the rest of the world of the U.S.’s commitment to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. The fact that we can’t put partisan differences aside to come together on something like this, it’s sad and it’s disappointing.”

As the campaigns sparred over who was guilty of placing partisanship above principle, some Jewish leaders worried that an event intended to display unity in the face of the Iranian threat was crumbling.

“I do think that’s unfortunate,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “The point here obviously is to show broad bipartisan support for the need to stop a nuclear Iran. We don’t want the message to be diverted by internal political considerations.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me as an American Jewish policy matter, and as an American matter, to let one party or the other off the hook over what is going to be, objectively in our view, the most serious foreign policy issue of the next administration,” said David Twersky, a senior advisor on policy, international affairs and communications at the American Jewish Congress. “It’s not a good policy for the Jews.”

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, www.IsraelNN.com

Academics and the “man on the street” in the Arab world still blame the Jews and Israel for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that devastated the US and punctured the American image of being impossible to penetrate. Arab media have widely claimed that Arabs are the biggest victims of the attacks.

A New York Times man-on-the-street survey revealed disbelief that Arab terrorists were behind the attacks, and many still outright accuse Israel and the United States of planning the aerial crashes that leveled the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just cannot be true,” The Times quoted Ahmed Issab, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “I think the US organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

Pakistani native Mohammed Jamil, writing in the Pakistan Observer, justified the terrorists’ motives, citing American-Israeli collusion. “There is a widespread perception that the US leadership used 9/11 events to implement its program of controlling the world resource,” he wrote.

“American president George W. Bush always turned a blind eye towards Israeli repression, state terrorism, and killings of thousands of Palestinians…. On examining the initial statements of Osama bin Laden, one could infer that al-Qaeda had twin objectives vis-à-vis the liberation of Palestine and exit of US forces from Saudi Arabia.

“Even the date al-Qaeda terrorists chose for their attack showed their true motivation, as September 11 is the anniversary of the League of Nations’ proclaiming in Palestine the British Mandate in 1922. The date represents the first physical step toward the implementation of the Balfour Declaration and establishment of Israel. This fact was never revealed because the world media is under the control of Jews… It was a calculated lie to divert the Americans from associating the disaster with the United States support for Israel.”

Jamil added that “any country that bombs another country creates millions of angry enemies against it.”

The Times’s street survey also showed that Arabs blame American foreign policy for the 9/11 attacks. “Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” Mohammed Ibrahim, a clothing-store owner Cairo, told the newspaper. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.”

Many Arabs still spread the rumor that Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center the morning of the attack, although there were indeed many Jews who died in the resulting blaze and collapse of the skyscraper.

Another Egyptian claimed that the real reason Americans have not captured al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden is that he was not behind the attacks. “What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or al-Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why,” he claimed.

Dr. Ahmad Mustafa wrote in GulfNews.com that Arabs are the real victims of 9/11. He said the attacks have intensified a negative image of Muslims, which has reinforced violence.

Dr. Azzam Tamimi, director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought, stated, “9/11 has become the biggest blackmail in modern history after the Holocaust. Zionists continue to blackmail Europeans because of the Holocaust, while the Americans now blackmail the Arabs and the Muslims because of what happened on 11 September 2001.”

www.IsraelToday.co.il

Egyptian soldiers shot and killed two Sudanese refugees as they tried to cross the border into southern Israel this week. A third refugee was wounded in the shooting.

Dozens of Sudanese and other African refugees have been killed by Egyptian troops while trying to seek asylum in the Jewish state over the past year.

The ongoing violence in Sudan’s western Darfur region has produced an influx of refugees into Egypt over the past several years. But many of those refugees, upon finding their Egyptian hosts less-than-welcoming, have made the torturous journey across the Sinai Peninsula in hopes of better treatment at the hands of the Jews.

There has been very little media coverage of and virtually no international outcry against Egypt’s brutal treatment of the refugees.

By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
www.IsraelNationalNews.com

Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan, who commanded the 1960 Mossad operation to capture fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, says the kidnapping of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a distinct possibility.

In an interview with Christoph Schult of this week’s edition of the respected German magazine Der Spiegel, the former Israeli intelligence agent said that while there are no more covert Israeli missions targeting old Nazis, “that’s not to say that such operations are completely a thing of the past.”

Schult: “What do you mean by that?”

Eitan: “It could very well be that a leader such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly finds himself before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

Schult: “Do you mean that seriously?”

Eitan: “Absolutely. Those who spread poison and want to eradicate another people [have] to expect such consequences.”

Eitan’s statement is all the more provocative as it was offered without prodding at the end of an interview focusing on the Minister’s recent revelation that his team in Argentina in 1960 decided against abducting notorious Auschwitz sadist, Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death”. His agents discovered that Mengele was also in Beunos Aires after they had already apprehended Eichmann and were preparing to bundle him off to Israel for trial.

Eichmann was subsequently tried and sentenced to death by an Israeli court for crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership in an outlawed organization. He was executed in May 1962 and his ashes were scattered in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

‘It Wasn’t About Revenge’
Israel had Mengele in its sites one more time before the man’s death from a stroke in 1979, according to Eitan, but the Mossad determined that capturing him was not a possibility at the time. It was further decided not to assassinate him, even though it would have been feasible, Eitan said, adding, “It wasn’t about revenge.”

When asked why he chose not to nab Mengele after the capture of Eichmann, Eitan replied, “There were just 11 of us and we had our hands full dealing with Eichmann.” Then-Mossad chief Isser Harel wanted Mengele, too, Eitan added. “I refused because I didn’t want to endanger the success of the Eichmann operation.”

The Mossad commander said that his team wanted to return to Buenos Aires after bringing Eichmann to Jerusalem in order to capture Mengele, as well. “But due to a leak, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had to make an official announcement about our success. When our agents returned to Argentina, Mengele had moved out of his apartment and gone underground,” Eitan revealed.

The Der Spiegel interview also shed some light on the policy decision that ended with the apprehending of Adolf Eichmann. “In 1958, we resolved to capture a former Nazi and bring him to justice in Israel,” Eitan explained. “Possible targets included Mengele, Eichmann, the former head of the Gestapo Heinrich Muller, and Hitler’s right-hand man Martin Bormann. The first one we could find was Eichmann, so we concentrated on him.”

When the interviewer noted that Israel has in fact carried out assassinations of fugitive Nazis, Eitan said, “There were such operations, but I was against them. Criminals have to answer for their crimes before a court of law.”

Following his service in the Mossad, Rafi Eitan served as an advisor on terrorism to Prime Minister Menachem Begin and later headed the now-defunct Bureau of Scientific Relations, an intelligence agency focused on obtaining secret technologies. Eitan resigned his post following the capture of Jonathan Pollard, a former US Navy Intelligence Research Specialist who has been behind bars in the United States since 1986 for passing classified information to Israel.

www.jta.org

Legal proceedings began against a French cartoonist facing charges of inciting “racial hatred” with drawings some consider anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic.

Maurice Sinet, the cartoonist for the far-left weekly, Charlie Hebdo, was at the center of a heated, free-speech debate in France this summer, which some in the French media even likened to the Dreyfus affair.

Sinet, better known as Siné, was fired by his editor, Philippe Val, for refusing to apologize for a July cartoon in which he said Jean Sarkozy, 22, the politically ambitious son of the French president, would “go far” for converting to Judaism before marrying his Jewish fiancé, Jessica Sebaoun-Darty.

To date, there is no evidence that the young Sarkozy, a city councilor and center-right UMP party leader in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly, plans to convert to Judaism.

The French human rights group, The International League Against Racismand Anti-Semitism, LICRA, filed suit against Siné for inciting racial hatred for both the July cartoon and a June drawing that mocks Muslim women who wear head scarves. The proceedings opened in Lyon on Tuesday, with both sides presenting their list of witnesses.

Major French political and intellectual figures are divided overwhether Siné’s firing was deserved, with petitions signed and circulated over the Internet by both camps.

www.jta.org

Jewish groups will hold a “Stop Iran” rally to coincide with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York.

The rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across from the United Nations will be held Sept. 22, when the Iranian president is in town to attend the U.N. General Assembly.

The idea is to send a message to Ahmadinejad and world leaders, said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The Presidents Conference is helping to organize the rally with a host of other national Jewish groups and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

“We’re not going to be silent when someone threatens to destroy the United States and Israel,” Hoenlein said.

Jewish organizations held a similar demonstration last year during Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York for the opening of the General Assembly. Ahmadinejad also spoke then at a forum at Columbia University.

On Sept. 23, Jewish groups will hold a conference in Washington on genocide to highlight the Iranian president’s threats against the Jewish state.

By Rami Tal, www.aish.com

Descendants of centuries-old Jewish community in China’s Kaifeng rediscover Jewish heritage after near complete assimilation in local community.

In Chinese terms, the city of Kaifeng, about 500 miles southwest of Beijing, is reminiscent of the Israeli city of Hadera: The number of its residents is 700,000 - as opposed to Beijing’s 15 million or Shanghai’s 20 million - and it doesn’t even have its own airport.

However, a thousand years ago, Kaifeng was the capital of the Chinese empire, the largest, richest and most advanced in the world at the time, with 600,000 residents that made it the most populated city on earth.

Ancient Kaifeng had a Jewish community - a small but thriving one, whose story is unique in the history of the Jewish people. For the 800 years of its existence, Kaifeng’s Jews never suffered from persecution or discrimination. The Chinese authorities, as well as the general population, welcomed their Jewish neighbors, viewed them as citizens in every respect and allowed them to observe their religion with complete freedom.

In spite, or perhaps because of these freedoms, the community dwindled until about 150 years ago, when the assimilation and integration proved complete. It is only in the past 20 years that the descendents of Kaifeng Jewry, who now number about 1,000 people, have rediscovered their Jewish tradition. Some of them have considered undergoing proper conversion and making aliyah, and a few of them have done so already.

Thirty-year-old Shi Lei does not try to hide his excitement when he takes his guest, an Israeli journalist, to the central room in his parents’ home. His family, which is of Jewish descent, has lived in this home for more than 100 years. After the death of his grandmother and grandfather, Shi, together with his father, turned this room into a mini-museum and a small Jewish center, where he gives classes on Jewish tradition to children and adults of Jewish descent.

Shi Lei, who graduated with a degree in English from the University of Kaifeng, spent close to three years in Israel studying at Jerusalem’s Machon Meir and at Bar-Ilan University: “I was the first person from Kaifeng that studied in Israel. I decided to return to Kaifeng and to develop my mini-museum, because if I would leave here then there would be no one to teach the younger generation. We feel connected to the Jewish people and to the State of Israel.”

An emperor’s welcome

It is not clear when exactly the first Jews came to China or when the Jewish community in Kaifeng was formed. In the prophecy of the redemption in the book of Isaiah it states: “See, they will come from afar - some from the north, some from the west, some from the region of Sinim (Chinese)” (Isaiah, 49:12); but biblical scholars agree that the verse does not speak of China per se. Some claim that the Jews of Kaifeng are descendents of the Ten Lost Tribes. Others theorize that they came to China in the second century following the downfall of the Jews in the Bar Kokhva revolt (132-135CE).

Most of the researchers, as well as the Kaifeng descendents themselves, tend to suggest that the original Jews in China were merchants from Persia that came by way of the Silk Route (in today’s southern Turkey) to the city of Xian in central China.

Historical references and archaeological findings have proven that the Persian Jews first arrive in China in the eighth century; and since the long, arduous journey made family life difficult, the solution was to establish a permanent base in China. The location of choice was Kaifeng - China’s capital from 927BC to 1127AD.

A stone tablet dating back to the 1489 Kaifeng synagogue - which is now in the city museum - in inscribed with the following: “According to the commandment of their god, the Jews came from Tian-Sho (Chinese for both “India” and “every state to the west of China”) with woven materials from the west in their hands, meant as a gift for the emperor.”

The last emperor, according to the tablet, said “welcome to our country; dwell here and keep the customs of your ancestors”.

The emperor’s warm welcome provided them with automatic Chinese citizenship, not a trifle feat at a time the Jewish communities in Europe and the Muslim countries were suffering persecution. It is believed that one of the reasons for this show of tolerance was that the Chinese of the time did not have a “religion” in the sense of any of the three monotheistic faiths: The common practices of faith based on the teachings of Chinese philosopher Confucius, were an array of ethical and behavioral codes more than the belief of religious ordinances commanded by a higher power.

Kaifeng’s Jews found it easy to adhere to Confucianism since it doesn’t require the recognition of a new Messiah or prophet and there was no need to give up on the rules of keeping kosher or observing the holidays.

The ancient stone tablet also states that one of the emperors from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) bestowed “the gift of incense” upon the Jewish community. It was given to the Jewish doctor Yung-Ching who appears to have been his personal physician. This indicates that Kaifeng’s Jews used Chinese names rather than Hebrew names, and incorporated a Chinese ceremony into their religious rituals - the lighting of incense.

Eligible bachelors

Kaifeng’s Jews were away from any Jewish center, as they had no contact to other Jewish communities around the world. At its peak, the community numbered no more than 6,000 people. There was no yeshiva and the young Jewish men that were interested in academic studies naturally attended the local institutions, which cultivated knowledge of Chinese literature and tradition. Given the circumstances, the chances of the small, isolated Jewish community to maintain its unique features in the hub of China were remote.

According to researchers, another key to the demise of the Kaifeng community lies in the fact that China was the first to allow all its residents to join the top rank of government officials - the Mandarins - by taking qualification exams.

Most of the Jews in Kaifeng were proficient in Chinese and some also in Hebrew, which gave them an advantage over most of the residents in the empire; and so the number of Jewish descendents that applied for the Beijing positions was substantially higher than their actual representation in the population.

After five years of study in the emperor’s courtyard, they were sent to various regions in the vast empire. If they hadn’t married during their years as students, they were certainly interested in doing so when they began their government service and, as Mandarins whose careers were mapped out, they were considered eligible bachelors. Excluding Kaifeng, however, there were no eligible Jewish brides to be found in China, prompting the assimilation further.

According to the information available, the Jewish community life in Kaifeng came to a virtual halt about 150 years ago. The community synagogue existed for almost 700 years, until 1854, when Kaifeng was flooded by the Huang He - the Yellow River. It was never rebuilt.

Although Kaifeng’s Jews had already completely assimilated, their descendants continued to observe several customs, like keeping kosher and keeping Shabbat. Many continue to live the old city in the old section, and the Jewish names of two of the neighborhood’s streets still appear in Hebrew and English. The community is now slated for an evacuation-renovation project, like many of its Chinese counterparts.

Highly regarded second-rate citizens

When Mao Zedong took over China in 1949, his regime faced several dilemmas pertaining to national minorities, as 20% of China was not dominated by the Han - the largest national group. In 1953 the new regime decided to recognize 55 national minorities but the Youtai - the Jews - were not one of them. Mao was rumored to have made the decision personally.

By that time, the majority of Jews living in Harbin and Shanghai had already left China and the move was undoubtedly prompted by this decision; but the scholars believe that the decision had nothing to do with anti-Semitism since China has never, to this day, demonstrated any signs of anti-Semitism.

Jews enjoy a very positive image in China. The decision not to recognize them is believed to have stemmed from sheer math - they community was simply too small - a few hundred in a country of a billion people.

In the 1980’s, as China started moving toward a free-market economy and opened up to the West, Jews from Canada and the US came to Kaifeng and met with the old community’s descendants in the city. These visits strengthened the Jewish awareness of the descendants.

In the last several years, Shavei Israel has been the main Jewish organization that has been actively involved with the Kaifeng’s Jewish descendants. Michael Freund, an American Jew who made aliyah 13 years ago and now heads Shavei Israel, said, “Since establishing contact with the Jews of Kaifeng, we have translated numerous books and articles for them, and have provided them with basic materials on Judaism and on Israel. Even more importantly, we have already assisted 10 young adults from the community to make aliyah and get settled here in the country”.

While many of the descendants are interested in a much more intensive connection with Jewish tradition, only a small group is interested in immigrating to Israel and converting.

The Chinese authorities have yet to voice any objection to Shavei Israel’s activities in Kaifeng. Freund sees that as a sign: “If some of Kaifeng’s Jews decide to reclaim their Jewish heritage - as I believe they will - it would make for some very important and historical closure.”