Levitt Letter Extra News

Will King, “Our Man in Jerusalem” for Zola Levitt Ministries, aimed his camera around the city of Jerusalem last week as Israel marked various national days of celebration. For more photos, visit his website www.imagesofisrael.com.

May 7, 208 Israel’s Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror

IDF soldier stands near memorial to fallen armor corps soldiers at Latrun.

A girl points to names on the memorial for fallen armor corps soldiers at Latrun.

The wall of names of fallen armor corps soldiers at Latrun

May 8, 2008 Israeli Independence Day Celebrations

Lightshow in downtown Jerusalem

Lightshow in Downtown Jerusalem

Lightshow in Downtown Jerusalem

Man celebrating Independence Day

Israelis with balloons

Israeli girls dancing

Independence concert in downtown Jerusalem

Israeli girl celebrating Independence Day

Girls wrapped in Israeli flag

Israeli Air Force planes flying in formation over Jerusalem

Israeli Air Force planes flying in formation over Jerusalem

May 11, 2008 40th Anniversary of Jerusalem’s Reunification

Israeli flags on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem

Sound and light show on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem

Fireworks over the Old City walls in Jerusalem

May 14, 2008 President George W. Bush Arrives To Celebrate Israel’s 60th Anniversary

President Bush’s motorcade in Jerusalem

Security outside the King David Hotel

Bomb-sniffing dog on streets in Jerusalem

Israeli Shin-Bet security agent

Policewoman near the Old City

By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland - Irena Sendler — credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets — died today, May 12, 2008, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed “great regret” over Sendler’s death, calling her “extremely brave” and “an exceptional person.” In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler’s name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members — a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.

The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body — but she refused to betray her team.

“I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity,” she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska’s biography, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler.”

Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.

After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

“A great person has died — a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak,” Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender’s “courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind.”

Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world’s attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called “Life in a Jar.”

It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.

Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father’s teachings, arguing that “people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don’t matter.”

She married Mieczyslaw Sendler but they divorced after the war’s end. Sendler then married fellow underground activist Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter. One died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of a heart failure in 1999.

Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.

See page 28 of April 2008 Levitt Letter.

By Hillel Fendel, www.israelnationalnews.com

The CIA — the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — is set to confirm that the Syrian installation destroyed by Israel on September 6, 2007 was a nuclear reactor. CIA representatives will brief members of a Congressional intelligence subcommittee.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the installation was meant to produce plutonium, and was partially funded by North Korea. Israel bombed the reactor before it attained its planned capacity to manufacture plutonium for nuclear weapons, the CIA says.

The Congressional subcommittee session is to deal with Syrian-North Korean relations, amidst reports that a possible deal is in the works to remove North Korea from the American list of state sponsors of terrorism.

At the presentation at Congress, which will be repeated afterwards to reporters, the intelligence officials will show video images showing Korean faces among the workers at the Syrian plant. Other pictures show what appears to be the construction of a reactor vessel inside the building.

Shortly after the Israel attack, Syria bulldozed the area and constructed a new building there, which it has not allowed foreign visitors to enter.

Israel, the U.S. and Syria have never divulged details about the attack, and today’s presentation is a major departure from this policy. Israel is reportedly not happy with the change, fearing that it will revive the tensions between Syria and Israel.

Syrian media reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed in principle to hand over the entire Golan Heights to Syria. Syrian Immigration Minister Boutina Sha’ban confirmed the reports, while Olmert’s office was silent.

Two years ago, Olmert said, “As long as I serve as prime minister, the Golan Heights will remain in our hands because it is an integral part of the State of Israel.” He was quoted in Israeli newspapers as reported by the French news agency AFP.

Nationalist Knesset Members said Olmert was recklessly endangering Israel with his consent to give away the strategic heights.

By Ali Akbar Dareini, www.apnews.myway.com

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying.

Iran already has about 3,000 centrifuges operating in Natanz, and the new announcement is seen as a show of defiance of international demands to halt a nuclear program the United States and its allies say is aimed at building nuclear weapons.

“The president announced the start of the phase of installing 6,000 new centrifuges in Natanz,” state television reported.

Centrifuges are machines that can enrich uranium to a low level to produce nuclear fuel or a high level for use in a weapon. Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful and solely focused on the production of energy.

Ahmadinejad made his announcement as he toured the Natanz facility in central Iran on April 8th. State television also quoted Ahmadinejad as saying that “other activities have been carried out” in Natanz that he would announce later.

The president’s trip was scheduled to coincide with Iran’s National Day of Nuclear Technology, marking the second anniversary of Iran’s first enrichment of uranium.

Ahmadinejad is widely expected to confirm for the first time that Iran has installed hundreds of more sophisticated centrifuges that can enrich uranium faster.

The workhorse of Iran’s enrichment program is the P-1 centrifuge, which is run in cascades of 164 machines. But Iranian officials confirmed in February that they had started using the IR-2 centrifuge that can churn out enriched uranium at more than double the rate.

Iranian state television did not say if the installation of the 6,000 new centrifuges included the older P-1 or the advanced IR-2 centrifuges.

Diplomats in Vienna told The Associated Press that Iran has assembled hundreds of advanced centrifuges at Natanz.

One diplomat said more than 300 of the centrifuges have been linked up in two separate units in Iran’s underground enrichment plant and a third was being assembled. He said the machines apparently are more advanced than the thousands already running underground, suggesting they could be the sophisticated IR-2 centrifuge.

But a senior diplomat said that while the new work appeared to include advanced centrifuges, they were not IR-2s. Both diplomats are linked to the Vienna-based International Agency for Atomic Energy, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, but asked for anonymity because their information was confidential.

A total of 3,000 centrifuges is the commonly accepted figure for a nuclear enrichment program that is past the experimental stage and can be used as a platform for a full industrial-scale program that could churn out enough enriched material for dozens of nuclear weapons.

Iran says it plans to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment that ultimately will involve 54,000 centrifuges.

The U.N. has passed three sets of sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend enrichment.

The same day, China said it would host a meeting of officials from the five members of Security Council and Germany, as well as the EU, to discuss ways to restart negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program.

By Jonathan Tobin, www.JewishWorldReview.com

Recently, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that American officials are again pressing Congress to open up the U.S. aid pipeline to the Palestinian Authority.

If the plea sounds familiar, it ought to. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Americans have been subsidizing the activities of the P.A. to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Today, as in the past, the arguments in favor of this policy are urgent. We are told by both administration officials who are friends of Israel and by some Israelis that unless we help fund the training and the payment of Palestinian security forces, the P.A. will have no way to cope with terrorists who want to sink any chance of a two-state solution which would enable Israel to live side-by-side with a peaceful Palestinian partner.

With Hamas in control of Gaza, the P.A., under the current leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, is, we are informed, the only address for creating a moderate force that will work for peace. Given the alternative of the Iranian-backed Hamas or the equally unpalatable choices of either Israel reoccupying the territories or an international peacekeeping force doing so, reinforcing the P.A. seems to make sense.

But does it really?

Doubts about the wisdom of the policy have led Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-N.Y.) — respectively, the chair and the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee — to place a hold on a request of another $150 million in direct assistance to the P.A. Thwarted on that front, the administration now wants the committee to okay an additional $25 million in indirect funding for the military training program.

Both Lowey and Ros-Lehtinen rightly worry about the commitment of Abbas and his Fatah Party to peace. They cite recent statements by Abbas in which he would not rule out a return to “armed resistance” against Israel. The support by the P.A. media for attacks against Israelis, such as the recent slaughter of eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva, as well as the ongoing blitz of southern Israel by Hamas missiles, is also reason to doubt the P.A.’s sincerity.

The P.A. also continues to honor the memory of slain terrorists as “martyrs” and, as The Jerusalem Post reported this week, plans to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday by having Arab refugees to rush Israel’s borders to promote a “right of return,” which is synonymous with the destruction of the Jewish State.

Supporters of aid respond that these statements do not reflect Abbas’ real goals. Yet, they ignore the fact that what the P.A. has done for the past 15 years is to legitimize a Palestinian culture in which political plaudits are won only by killing Jews. Indeed, via its control of broadcast outlets, newspapers and the schools, the P.A. has solidified a mindset of hate.

Just as bad is the history of attempts to create a P.A. security force. The Oslo agreements called for the creation of a Palestinian police force that would combat terrorists. But Arafat had other ideas.

While most of the billions that came his way via aid from the European Union and the United States went into the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of Fatah officials, some of it was used to create a byzantine web of Palestinian “security” agencies whose purposes were anything but peaceful. When push came to shove as Arafat blew up the peace after the Camp David summit in 2000, it was these P.A. forces (including some who’d been trained by the Philadelphia Police Department) who committed terrorist acts against Israelis.

Adding to that sorry tale was the fiasco in Gaza in 2006 when Fatah thugs, aided and equipped by foreign sources at the specific instigation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sought to maintain Abbas’ control of the area, even after the Hamas election victory.

As detailed in an investigative report published in the April issue of Vanity Fair magazine, the concerns voiced by some Israelis and skeptical members of Congress over that particular venture in bolstering Abbas were prophetic.

While Fatah goons tortured and kidnapped some of their rivals, neither they nor their leader Abbas had the stomach to face down Hamas, despite promises to do so. In the end, Abbas’ men wouldn’t fight, and the more popular Hamas seized control of Gaza. As David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair, “The exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition — including the Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.”

For 15 years, critics of such expenditures have been labeled as “anti-peace,” but that tag just served as an excuse for whitewashes of misbehavior by first Arafat and now Abbas.

An anonymous U.S. official told JTA that the 1,100 P.A. gunmen currently in Jordan, at American expense as well as with Israeli permission, are being schooled in such things as “training in riot control, human rights, and effective arrests and defensive shooting.” But so were their predecessors. Left unanswered in this account is why reasonable people should think this group will behave any differently.

Painted Into A Corner
The alternatives to Abbas are frightful. He is both weak and probably not much less ill-intentioned than Hamas, but he and his loyalists are seen as a counterforce to Iran’s allies.

Should American supporters of Israel therefore feel obligated to support the continued flow of funds to P.A. sources?

The problem is, the peace processors have painted themselves into a corner. Having crowned first Arafat and now Abbas, they are forced to ignore or suppress the truth about them in order to maintain American support for a two-state solution.

At the same time, Israel’s government takes the position that it needs a Palestinian partner who at least pays lip service to peace, as Abbas does. And no one here wants to do anything that would help create a greater “Hamasistan.”

Yet experience shows that the realpolitik strategy of propping up Fatah has not undermined Hamas, nor promoted peace. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is the recognition that it’s time to stop reinforcing failure.

America’s attempts to create a Palestinian peace partner have failed. No amount of money will buy us a moderate state that will accept peace with Israel if the Palestinians don’t want one. If the president and the secretary of state aren’t honest enough to admit this, then perhaps it’s appropriate to ask Congress to turn off the spigot that sends more of our tax dollars down a Palestinian drain.

By Hana Levi Julian, www.IsraelNN.com

As Palestinian Authority Arabs in Gaza were transporting, unpacking, and preparing to distribute a recent shipment of humanitarian aid from Israel, local PA terrorists said “thank you” by launching two Kassam rockets at Israeli citizens whose taxes helped pay for the aid shipment.

The two Kassam rockets were fired at Israel from northern Gaza at the same time 60 trucks of goods and supplies were passing through the Sufa Crossing for Arab civilians in the Gaza region.

Bags of flour, sugar and other supplies slowly made their way into the region despite the dismal driving conditions caused by the pouring rain, along with other humanitarian supplies from Israel.

Thousands of other Gaza residents meanwhile were lined up against the separation barrier, exhorted by the ruling Hamas terrorist organization to crowd the separation barrier in a massive protest against Israel’s closure of crossings into the region.

As did Egypt, Israel sealed off crossings into Gaza after Hamas terrorists took control of the region in a violent coup last June. The crossings have been opened sporadically since that time, primarily for deliveries of humanitarian and other supplies into Gaza from Israel. Recently IDF and security forces tightened the closures in response to the constant attacks on Israeli civilians in the western Negev.

While Hamas terrorists hid among the women, children, disabled, elderly, and other civilian adults massing for a protest at the Gaza-Israel separation barrier, their colleagues continued the attacks on Israel.

One of the rockets exploded in southern Ashkelon. Gaza terrorists have increasingly targeted the coastal city since increasing the range of their rockets; a number of strategic installations are located there.

The other rocket missed the mark and landed within Gazan territory.

By David Stringer, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Clad in mud-smeared combat fatigues, the young Muslims trained on picturesque British farmland, hurling imaginary grenades, wielding sticks as mock rifles and chopping watermelons in simulated beheadings.

A four-year inquiry, which came to a close with guilty pleas from the last two of seven gang members, has exposed a network of alleged British terrorism training camps meant to prepare recruits for mass murder.

Security officials believe hundreds of men — including a gang that made a failed attempt to bomb London’s transit network — passed through camps set up across the English countryside.

Investigators say it was a worrying discovery at the heart of Britain’s homegrown terrorism: training camps once thought to be exclusive to northern Pakistan or Afghanistan are being held in sleepy rural England.

“The exposure to that ideology — that radicalism, that extremism, that ‘them-and-us’ mind set — starts here on our streets in Britain,” a former extremist, Ed Husain, told Britain’s first police counterterrorism conference in Brighton.

Husain said British officials had been too tolerant of Islamic radicalism taught in universities and mosques during the 1980s and ’90s.

The two training camp ringleaders — one who claimed to be the “No. 1 al-Qaeda in Europe” and the other who nicknamed himself “Osama bin London — will be sentenced next month on charges of running the camps and inciting participants to murder. Five others were each sentenced to at least 3-1/2 years in prison on charges of attending terrorism training.

Their convictions — one last year and the rest last week following a four-month trial — could be reported for the first time when a judge lifted restrictions banning publication of details of the case after the final sentencing.

Prosecutors told a court hearing that the men set up camps in idyllic spots across England to train in military skills.

National parks in the Lake District of northern England, the New Forest in the south and quiet corners of the southern counties of Berkshire, Kent and East Sussex were all used for training, including a former school.

“This was not innocent activity taking place on a camping weekend,” said Peter Clarke, Britain’s most senior conterterrorism detective.

Officials fear the case shows that British Muslims can be radicalized, trained and funded to carry out terror attacks — without ever leaving the country.

The British camps also offer a glimpse of the training centers that British-based Islamic extremists allegedly hoped to open in Oregon before authorities upended the plot.

“People have got to be alert to the fact that right in the middle of our society these things are going on,” said Patrick Mercer, a former intelligence officer who is a member of Parliament with the opposition Conservative Party.

The camps may help explain why Jonathan Evans, head of the domestic intelligence agency MI5, has said Britain faces an ever growing threat from about 2,000 potential terrorists within its borders.

There were 37 terror-related cases prosecuted in Britain last year. This year, there have been 16 cases — five of which included guilty pleas because of overwhelming police evidence, Home Office minister Tony McNulty told the terrorism conference in Brighton.

Video secretly made at the camps showed recruits marching with backpacks — like those used by London’s transit network attackers to carry their deadly suicide bombs in 2005 — and conducting weapons drills used by insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

An undercover police officer, code-named “Dawood,” infiltrated one group and captured cell phone video of the training. One clip showed trainees rehearsing a beheading with a watermelon.

The gang of North African men who made a failed attempt to bomb London’s transit network on July 21, 2005 — two weeks after the July 7 subway and bus strikes that killed 52 commuters — met and were trained at one of the camps, said a government security official, who agreed to discuss the inquiry only on condition of not being quoted by name.

Another recruit, Hussan Mutegombwa, was ordered jailed for 10 years in November over an alleged plan to carry out a suicide bombing in Somalia, police said.

Officials said the ringleaders of the camps were two London-based preachers — Atilla Ahmet, who once said in a CNN interview that he was “the No. 1 al-Qaeda in Europe,” and Mohammed Hamid, who gave himself the nickname “Osama bin London.”

This undated photo provided by London’s Metropolitan Police,
Feb. 26, 2008, shows Mohammed Hamid. Hamid who boasted of being “Osama bin London”,
has been found guilty of organising terrorist training camps and of encouraging others to
murder non-believers at the end of a four-month trial at London’s Woolwich Crown Court.
(AP Photo/Metropolitan Police/ho)

Ahmet is a longtime aide to radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian the U.S. is attempting to extradite over the alleged plan to set up terrorist training camps in Oregon.

Hamid, originally from Tanzania, hand-picked recruits from mainstream mosques, inviting them for radical meetings at his home and then selecting a smaller number to attend the camps, police said.

Prosecutors said Hamid was candid about his hope that recruits could dwarf the scale of the 2005 London bombings. He hoped they would carry out six or seven major attacks before London hosted the 2012 Olympics, prosecutors said.

“Fifty-two. That’s not even breakfast for me,” Hamid said, referring to the number killed in the 2005 bombings, in a recording from a secret bug installed in his home which was played at his trial.

Dozens trained at Hamid’s camps were hoping to carry out attacks, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss counterterrorism work. “There was repeated talk of finding and killing nonbelievers,” he said.

On the Net:
Police videos: http://www.met.police.uk/pressbureau/opoveramp/training.htm

By Matt Siegel, www.jta.org

MOSCOW (JTA) — Although it’s hard to tell by the unusually bare streets here, it’s still winter in Russia. This year, however, instead of piles of snow, the streets of the Russian capital have been blanketed by election posters.

In every public space, posters extol Russians to cast their ballots on March 2 in a presidential campaign derided by observers and most voters as a fait accompli.

Photo: Matt Siegel
A billboard in Moscow that reads “I’m voting for the Future of Russia” extols Russians to cast their ballots in March’s presidential elections.

In one poster, a smiling family is pictured sledding down a white hill with the message, “Everyone in the family to vote, together!” Even metro cards have been stamped with the Russian national emblem and a reminder to riders to do their civic duty.

It’s not much of a contest, however.

With Russia’s popular but term-limited president, Vladimir Putin, having anointed First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, Medvedev is all but assured a landslide victory.

Part of this is due to Putin’s enormous popularity. Indeed, even some of the regime’s harshest critics concede that Russians’ standard of life has improved significantly during Putin’s eight years in the Kremlin.

With Russia’s tiny opposition largely being excluded from the process — no major opposition candidates have even been allowed to register — the carefully stage-managed vote for Putin’s successor is being seen as a referendum on Putin’s rule.

Putin has declared that he will head the Medvedev government as prime minister — an indication that he doesn’t plan to cede power.

So while there is little question about the election’s outcome, there are many unanswered questions about the transition of power, such as it is, its long-term impact on Russia and, for Russia’s Jews, its impact on their community.

In many ways the fate of Russia’s Jewish community over the past eight years generally has mirrored that of Russians. No comparable period in Russian history has had as much security, stability and growth of Jewish communal life. Life for Jews here has improved even as political dissent has become more treacherous in Russia.

Michael Savin, a spokesman for the Russian Jewish Congress, praised Putin for helping restore Jewish communal life but refused to answer any political questions.

“The diversity of Jewish life in Russia serves as a proof that the policy of state-directed anti-Semitism has vanished into the past,” Savin said.

The main questions facing Russians — Jews and non-Jews — is how power will be divided between Putin and Medvedev, and will the Russia that Putin has forged survive without him at the helm?

During his tenure Putin “accumulated both formal and informal authority,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. “Now that he’s handing over the formal authority to Medvedev, what happens to the informal part?”

Under the Russian constitution, the president is commander in chief of the Russian armed forces and responsible for setting the direction of foreign and domestic policy. The role of prime minister traditionally has been quite weak, but Putin himself has made clear he intends to wield significant influence from his new post.

Putin will be leaving office at the pinnacle of his popularity and power. According to a recent poll by the Levada Center, an independent Moscow-based research organization, Putin’s approval rating in January was 86 percent.

Although Medvedev enjoys high approval ratings, too, little is known about him. Medvedev’s main appeal seems to stem from Putin’s endorsement and the tremendous resources thrown behind his campaign by the state.

“Right now Medvedev is certainly not his own man; his nomination is not due to his own political campaign,” Lipman said. “It’s due to the fact that Putin hand-picked him and offered him to the public and to the elite as his choice. This is the way that people perceive him.”

Medvedev has made almost no major policy speeches during the election cycle, and coverage of him on state-controlled media is constant, glowing and vague. The 42-year-old law professor is said to be a reformer, but on foreign policy issues he has uttered little more than vagaries about increasing cooperation with the West.

Russia’s election campaign has been widely criticized in the West both for the use of state-controlled media to advance the party of power’s candidate and the exclusion of opposition figures.

For the second time in four months, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe announced that its monitors will boycott a Russian election due to restrictions on the number of observers allowed in the country and the duration of their stay. In December, the OSCE did the same with elections for Russia’s Duma.

“The restrictions that were imposed on us by the Russian authorities basically forced us not to send an observation mission for the upcoming elections,” said OSCE spokesperson Jens-Hagen Eschenbaecher.

Medvedev will face three opponents in the election, none of whom is capable of mounting a serious challenge. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, perennial also-ran Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the little-known Democratic Party’s Andrei Bogdanov were the only candidates allowed to register. Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was disqualified for allegedly submitting forged signatures.

The don’t-rock-the-boat message from the Kremlin seems to have been picked up in the Jewish community as well. Of Russia’s three major Jewish communal organizations, only the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, which has thrived here due to what many see as its leaders’ connections in the Kremlin, was willing to discuss the political situation with JTA.

The federation’s Rabbi Berel Lazar praised Putin for combating anti-Semitism, promoting interfaith dialogue and strengthening the country. Asked about Putin’s supposed rollback of democracy and human rights, Lazar blamed the West.

“I think that the West in general doesn’t really understand Russia all the way,” he told JTA.

“I’m not saying that everything here is the best, but the country needs a different kind of leadership and not necessarily the kind you have in America today,” Lazar said. “To try to apply the same standard to Russia is not a good idea.”

By Allan Little, www.bbc.co.uk

Nominations for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize closed on February 1, and among the entrants is a 98-year-old Briton, Sir Nicholas Winton, known as the “British Schindler,” who transported 700 Jewish children to the UK before WWII.

Photo: Sir Nicholas was nominated for the prize by the Czech government.

In a school room in southern Bohemia, a class of teenagers sit mesmerised by a film about a young Englishman who came to their country a long time ago and did something so remarkable - brave as well as honourable - that 70 years later they petitioned the authorities to rename their school.

It is, now, the Sir Nicholas Winton School.

In the spring of 1939, the young Nicholas Winton cancelled a skiing holiday in Switzerland and, at the urging of a friend, went to Prague instead.

The city was full of people who had fled their homes in the wake of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland.

Nicholas Winton was particularly shocked by the condition of the children: many of them he found living in squalid - and freezing - refugee camps.

He resolved to do something about it.

With a group of others he drew up a list of children whose parents would agree to send them to Britain until the emergency - however long it was to last - was over.

When his list was complete there were 5,000 names on it.

He lobbied the Home Office in London. They said he could bring as many children as he liked, provided he could find foster families for them, and provided they went home when it was safe to do so.

The Winton group then advertised for families. “It wasn’t the ideal way to place children,” he told me, 70 years later.

“But if someone wrote to say they could take, say, a girl aged seven, then we sent some pictures of girls aged seven and said ‘choose one’.

“Not ideal, but it did work and it was quick.”

Father’s tears

He then organised a series of closed trains to take the children from Prague directly to Liverpool Street station in London.

Alicie Klimova was 11 in 1939. She took me back to the platform at Prague’s Masaryk Station, where she last saw her parents two months before the outbreak of war.

Photo: Alicie Klimova was on one of the Winton trains to England

“The platform was full of children and parents” she said. “My parents did their best to keep on smiling, telling me it was so exciting that I was going to England.

“But at midnight when the train pulled out, my father couldn’t hold back his tears.

“I said ‘Daddy don’t cry - you’ll disgrace me!’ Of course I had no idea that we would never see each other again”.

When Alicie went back to Prague in 1945 she found that both her parents had died in Auschwitz.

Lost contact

The transports continued through the summer of 1939. The last one was due to leave on 1 September - the day war broke out.

There were 250 children on board, but the train never left the station. Most of them died in the Holocaust.

For 50 years Nicholas Winton, of Maidenhead in Berkshire, lost contact with the 670 children he had brought to Britain - and whose lives he had saved.

When he married he didn’t even tell his wife what he had done.

Then, when he was almost 80, some of his children began to get in touch. He found that the original group had grown to more than 5,000.

“Normally events that happened a long time ago diminish in importance as time goes on,” Sir Nicholas told me.

“This story is the opposite - it keeps on growing, because there are more and more people. They keep breeding, you see!”

A Sign of Life from Gilad Shalit Received by Israel
By Hana Levi Julian, www.IsraelNN.com

Israel has received a sign of life from kidnapped IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit, according to the daily Hebrew newspaper Maariv.

Egyptian officials involved in talks between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization said the letter was checked and found to be authentic. It was passed to Shalit’s family, said the source.

Shalit was kidnapped in June 2006 by Hamas terrorists, the same organization whose paramilitia operatives one year later wrested control over Gaza from the rival Fatah faction that currently leading the Palestinian Authority.

The sources said the letter intensified efforts to negotiate with Hamas, which has demanded the release of thousands of terrorists, in exchange for Shalit’s freedom. Many of the requested terrorists were directly involved in the murders of Israeli citizens, and have thus been classified as having “blood on their hands.”

But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has decided to relax the standards by which terrorists are categorized as having such bloody hands. Thereby Olmert can broaden the eligibility for release among the thousands of PA terrorists held in Israeli jails, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Olmert met Sunday to discuss his decision with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Public Security Minister and former head of the General Security Service (Shin Bet) Avi Dichter, former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon, Environment Minister and former deputy Shin Bet head Gideon Ezra, Vice Premier Chaim Ramon, Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

The current definition of the term includes terrorists who have masterminded, ordered and organized deadly attacks on Israeli citizens as well as those who physically prepared and carried out the attacks.

General Security Services (Shin Bet) director Yuval Diskin vehemently opposed the move. Israel’s representative in talks with the terrorists, Ofer Dekel, is the one who recommended it.

Diskin warned that releasing prisoners with “blood on their hands” would result in increased terrorist attacks, increase Hamas’s standing among PA residents, and thereby weaken Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s control over the population.

A senior government official said that even if Israel made the concession, “The road ahead is still very long. Hamas has high demands to which we have no intention of conceding.”

The State of Israel has so far not agreed to release terrorists classified as having “blood on their hands.”