Olmert: George Bush is my Poodle

As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale.He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi herself had written. Bush did as told, said Olmert.
The crowd loved it. Here is the background.After intense negotiations with Britain and France, Secretary of State Rice had persuaded the Security Council to agree on a resolution calling for a cease-fire. But Olmert wanted more time to kill Hamas.

So, here, in Olmert’s words, is what happened next.

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a cease-fire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.

According to Olmert, Bush was clueless.

“He said: ‘Listen. I don’t know about it. I didn’t see it. I’m not familiar with the phrasing.’”

“I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor. …

“She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor.”

The U.N. diplomatic corps was astonished when the United States abstained on the 14-0 resolution Rice had crafted and claimed her country supported. Arab diplomats say Rice promised them she would vote for it.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, with Rice at the United Nations during the debate on the resolution, said Olmert’s remarks were “just 100 percent, totally, completely untrue.”

But the White House cut Rice off at the knees, saying only that there were “inaccuracies” in the Olmert story. The video does not show Bush interrupting his speech to take any call.

Yet the substance rings true and is widely believed, and Olmert is happily describing the egg on Rice’s face:

“He (Bush) gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it — a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for.
She was left pretty shamed. …”

With Bush and Rice leaving office in hours, and Olmert in weeks, the story may seem to lack significance.

Yet public gloating by an Israeli prime minister that he can order a U.S. president off a podium and instruct him to reverse and humiliate his secretary of state may cause even Ehud’s poodle to rise up on its hind legs one day and bite its master.

Taking such liberties with a superpower that, for Israel’s benefit, has shoveled out $150 billion and subordinated its own interests in the Arab and Islamic world would seem a hubristic and stupid thing to do.

And there are straws in the wind that, despite congressional resolutions giving full-throated approval to all that Israel is doing in Gaza, this is becoming a troubled relationship.

Two weeks ago, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in opposing any truce, assured the world there “is no humanitarian crisis in the (Gaza) Strip,” and the humanitarian situation there “is completely as it should be.”

Not so to Hillary Clinton. In her confirmation hearings, the secretary of state-designate, reports the New York Times, “struck a sharper tone toward Israel on violence in the Middle East.”

Clinton “seemed to part from the tone set by the Bush administration in calling attention to what she described as the ‘tragic humanitarian costs’ borne by Palestinians, as well as Israelis.”

More dramatic was a weekend report by the Times‘ David Sanger that the White House had rebuffed Olmert’s request for new U.S. bunker-buster bombs and denied Israel permission to overfly Iraq in any strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz.

Sanger described these U.S.-Israeli talks as “tense.”

Repeatedly, Israel has warned that Iran is close to a bomb and threatened to attack unilaterally. Indeed, Israel simulated such an attack in an air exercise of 100 planes that went as far as Greece.

Bush both blocked and vetoed that attack, says Sanger. But he did assure Olmert that America is engaged in the sabotage of Iran’s nuclear program by helping provide Tehran with defective parts.

This would seem a stunning breach of security secrets, but no outrage has been heard from the White House, nor has any charge come that the Times compromised national security.

With Olmert, Rice, and Bush departing, and Obama and Hillary taking charge committed to talking to Iran, can the old intimacy survive the new friction and colliding agendas?

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Olmert indicted as deputy is accused of war crimes

Here is an article of interest on corruption indictment against Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and allegation of war crimes having been committed by his Deputy Shaul Mofaz. To quote the article: "The Israeli Attorney General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz, a leading prime ministerial candidate, ordered "war crimes" to be committed when he was the military's chief of staff." .... "David Kretzmer, emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that accounts of the briefing by Mr Mofaz give rise "to a grave suspicion" that he "committed serious offences, some of which at least, fall into the category of war crimes".

Ed CorriganBy Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
On 1 August The Independent reported claims by a leading Israeli law professor that Shaul Mofaz ordered war crimes to be committed

The Israeli Attorney General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz, a leading prime ministerial candidate, ordered "war crimes" to be committed when he was the military's chief of staff.

A leading Israeli law professor has written to justice officials, calling for the investigation into claims – highlighted by The Independent last month – that during a briefing to army officers in May 2001, after the start of the second Palestinian uprising, Mr Mofaz ordered a daily "quota" of Palestinian deaths.

Last night, Israeli police recommended to prosecutors that the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, be indicted in a corruption investigation. With Mr Olmert committed to resigning after his Kadima party holds a leadership vote a week today, the recommendation will have no immediate impact on his tenure and does not guarantee an indictment by the Attorney General.

The Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, is the front-runner in the contest for the leadership of Kadima. Mr Mofaz, the Deputy Prime Minister, is his main rival.

David Kretzmer, emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that accounts of the briefing by Mr Mofaz give rise "to a grave suspicion" that he "committed serious offences, some of which at least, fall into the category of war crimes".

The letter to the Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, refers to a book by two Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, which says that Mr Mofaz, after ensuring he was not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll of 70 per day.

Professor Kretzmer tells Mr Mazuz that one lesson of the corruption inquiry into Mr Olmert is that it is best to investigate candidates for high office before they reach it. "Otherwise the public is liable to be exposed once more to the disgrace of having police officers arrive at the Prime Minister's official residence in order to interrogate him."

Police have urged Mr Mazuz to indict Mr Olmert on two counts – that he funded personal trips abroad for himself and his family with money secured by the multiple billing of public organisations, and another arising out of claims by a US businessman, Morris Talansky, that he illegally used political donations for personal expenditure. It is up to Mr Mazuz to decide if Mr Olmert should be indicted.

The Shelah/Drucker book, Boomerang: The Failure Of Leadership In The Second Intifada, says that while Mr Mofaz's alleged instruction caused disquiet among some senior officers, a Hebron district commander said that the subsequent fatal shooting of a Palestinian policeman was in accordance with the briefing.

Professor Kretzmer, who also holds a senior academic post at the University of Ulster, says that an order to kill people "by quota" is "not consistent with the norms of humanitarian law", and that the test of proportionality is especially relevant in cases of military occupation, in which even the actions of armed groups do not "relieve the Army of its obligations to residents of the territory".

The letter cites reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2001 and 2002 which, he says, raise suspicions that Mr Mofaz ordered officers to shoot at every armed Palestinian regardless of the threat posed to Israeli forces.

It points out that at the start of hostilities in 2000, Palestinian police in particular were armed by agreement with the Israeli government, that the military had insisted the conflict was with armed groups and not against the Palestinian Authority or people, and that the Geneva Conventions prohibited killing people not taking part in hostilities.

Noting that countries are obliged to investigate grave breaches of the conventions, he warns that if the Israeli authorities do not do so, "there is a fear that it may be carried out by the authorities of another country".

Professor Kretzmer has been told his letter has been passed to "relevant persons" in the justice ministry who will read it. A ministry spokesman said this did not mean that it accepted there was a case against Mr Mofaz, or that an investigation would be launched, and it was normal that "any complaint or letter" was studied before a reply was drafted. There was no response from Mr Mofaz's office.

In 2002, while Mr Mofaz was visiting Britain, the British lawyer Imran Khan, representing a group of Palestinians, presented the Director of Public Prosecutions with claims of other war crimes by Mr Mofaz, including targeted assassinations and the demolition of Palestinian homes. While Mr Khan claimed the DPP had passed the file to Scotland Yard's "crimes against humanity" section, no action was taken before Mr Mofaz departed.

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Hollow Time

EHUD OLMERT'S resignation speech reached us on our way back from a demonstration.

Uri Avnery

We were protesting the death of Ahmad Moussa, aged 10, who was murdered during a demonstration against the Separation Fence at Na'ilin village - the fence that robs the village of most of its land in order to give it to the nearby settlement. A soldier aimed and shot the child with live ammunition at close range.

The protesters stood under the windows of the Minister of Defense's apartment in the luxurious Akirov Towers in Tel-Aviv and shouted: "Ehud Barak, Minister of Defense / How many children have you murdered so far?"

A short while later, Olmert spoke about his strenuous efforts to achieve peace, and promised to continue them until his last day in office.

The two events - the demonstration and the speech - are bound together. Together they provide an accurate picture of the era: peace speeches in the air and atrocities on the ground. I AM not about to join the choir of retrospective heroes, who are now falling upon Olmert's political corpse and tearing it to pieces.

Not an attractive sight. I have seen this happen several times in my life, and every time it disgusts me.

This phenomenon is not particular to Israel. It can be found in the history and literature of many times and places: "The Rise and Fall of…"

It's an old story. People grovel in the dust at the feet of their hero. The ambitious and avaricious prance around him. Court-poets and court-jesters sing his praises, and their modern successors - the media people - extol his virtues. And then, one day, he falls from his pedestal and they trample all over him without mercy and without shame.

This is the mob that idolized Moshe Dayan after the Six-day War, and then smashed his statue into pieces after the Yom-Kippur war. The mob that kicked David Ben-Gurion viciously after years of boundless flattery. That toppled Golda Meir after following her blindly. I certainly struggled against all three of them when they were at the height of their power, but the rush of the political mob to trample upon their bodies after they had fallen was simply loathsome.

Now this is happening again. I have never been captivated by the charms of Ehud Olmert. I have followed his career from the moment he appeared on the stage to the moment he announced his resignation. I saw nothing to arouse my admiration. But now, when I see and hear the outpouring of abuse upon him by those who exalted him to high heavens only yesterday, I feel like averting my eyes. The right to criticize him is reserved for those who have struggled against him over the years.


HE IS a total politician, and nothing else. Not a statesman. Not a leader. Not a man with a vision. Only a political technician. Intelligent. A very smooth speaker. I friend among friends. A politician for whom power is the aim, not a means to achieve an aim.

The first time I came across him was almost 40 years ago. He was then an assistant of Shmuel Tamir, in the most concrete sense: he assisted him in carrying his bags.

Before this, something had happened that was to characterize the whole career of this ambitious man. Tamir, then a young Knesset member for the Herut party (today's Likud), thought he had an opportunity to topple Menachem Begin and take over the party. He tried to push him out during the party convention, and for a moment it seemed that he would succeed. Begin, then 53, seemed totally worn-out after suffering six consecutive election defeats. Olmert, then 21, jumped onto the rebels' bandwagon and made a passionate speech against the legendary leader.

But his calculations were faulty. Begin sprang into action and delivered a death blow to the conspirators. They were thrown out of the party in disgrace. Olmert remained with the tiny faction around Tamir, which presented itself as a moderate party, attuned to the peace-seeking mood of the country at the time, mocking the nationalistic stance of Herut ("Both sides of the Jordan belong to us"). But then the Six-day War changed the public mood completely, the weathercock turned and Tamir coined the popular slogan "Liberated Territory shall not be Returned!" Without batting an eyelid, Olmert the moderate turned into Olmert the extremist.

But in that small faction there were too many chiefs and not enough Injuns. The road to advancement was blocked. Before long, Olmert engineered a split in order to become the No. 2 in an even smaller faction. He later split that one too and pushed out its veteran leader, Eliezer Shostak. The proceedings bordered on farce: Olmert ran off with the faction's rubber stamp.

After the 1973 elections, Olmert return to the Likud at long last and became candidate No. 24 on the party's election list. Before that he had not been idle: he finished law school and flourished financially, using his connections in the Knesset and the corridors of power for his clients' benefit. That's when he perfected the method of exploiting the connections between power and money, a method that he practiced ever since and that eventually caused his downfall.

In the Knesset, the young member was looking for a way to attract attention. At the time, the media invented "organized crime", long before it came into being. (A wag jested: "In Israel, nothing is organized. So how come crime is suddenly organized?") Olmert smelled a horse he could ride on. He made rousing speeches, waved papers in the style of Joe McCarthy, presented himself as a valiant fighter against the criminals and reaped a lot of publicity. It was an empty performance: even the police chiefs confirmed that it did not contribute anything to the struggle against crime. But it was a good example of what later came to be known as "spin".


IN 1977, Menachem Begin came to power. But he had not the least intention of promoting the man who, 11 years earlier, had tried to stick a knife in his back. Among his other strengths, Begin had a good memory. When Olmert saw that his career in the Knesset was going nowhere, he decided in 1993 to make an Olympic jump: he declared his candidacy for the office of Mayor of Jerusalem.

Mayor Teddy Kollek was popular, but old and tired. Olmert won. Today there is general agreement about his tenure: he was a bad mayor. The city deteriorated, poverty increased, young people left for other places and the Arab neighborhoods were criminally neglected. In 1996, he pushed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into opening a tunnel leading from the Western Wall to the Muslim quarter, causing a conflagration that killed 17 Israeli soldiers and almost 100 Palestinians. He never expressed any remorse.

He also pushed for the creation of the Har Homa settlement between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which has caused unending friction with the Palestinian community. All the recent attacks in Jerusalem were carried out by youngsters who grew up in the Arab neighborhoods adjacent to Har Homa. Olmert presented himself as the Judaizer of Jerusalem and as a fearless national fighter.

But when he ran for Likud chairman in 1999, he was easily beaten by Ariel Sharon. He got only the 32nd place on the Likud election list (out of 38 who won Knesset seats). His rational reaction was to get on Sharon's wagon and push him into leaving the Likud and creating a new party, Kadima.

That was a successful bet, testifying to his sharp political senses. Under Sharon he became the de facto No. 2 of the new party and Sharon's official "Deputy Prime Minister" (as a consolation prize, after Sharon could not give him the Treasury but only the far less important Ministry of Industry and Trade). At the time it looked like an empty title, but when Sharon suffered a stroke, Olmert adroitly took over his job. The long and meandering road had finally led to the summit.


SHARON'S SUCCESSOR was his opposite in almost every respect. Sharon was a rather maladroit politician and a poor speaker, but a determined leader with a clear political vision. He had an aim and strove towards it consistently. Olmert is a politician, soul and body, a complete opportunist and a smooth speaker, but lacks charisma and has no vision. He is satisfied with the routine mantra of a democratic, Jewish state.

After coming to power through the accident of Sharon's stroke, he tried at first to look as if he was following the same path. Sharon wanted to turn Israel into a strong, compact state by annexing the settlement blocs and leaving the Arab enclaves to a weak "Palestinian state". For this purpose he carried out the Gaza "separation". Olmert promised to do the same in the West Bank, but gave up the idea almost immediately. Throughout his term of office he invented grandiose schemes at a dizzying rate, with each of them doing little more than providing fuel to his spin-machine.

His incompetence as a leader and commander soon revealed itself. Lebanon War II was a disastrous scandal. The media, which had applauded enthusiastically at the beginning of the war, attacked him after the event for its "faulty execution", but ignored the main failure: the very decision to go to war without a clear and realistic aim and without a political and military strategy.

His incompetence as statesman and strategist was equaled by his competence as politician and survival artist. The fact that he held on for an additional two years after such a monumental failure testifies to his political acumen, but also to the degeneration of the Israeli political system.

After the war he was desperately in need of a new horse to ride. He chose the "political process" - negotiations with the Palestinians, and later on also with the Syrians.

This choice is significant: his sensitive political nose smelled that this is now the really popular thing: not Greater Israel, not the settlements, but peace negotiations and "two states for two peoples" - the more so as this was already popular with the US and Europe.

This week, Arab leaders complained that now "the political process will begin again from Square One." That is a complete misunderstanding: the "process" has never left Square One. It was wholly without content, wholly "spin". The "process" has become a substitute for peace, the idea of a "shelf agreement" a substitute for a real peace agreement. There was never any possibility that Olmert would dare to provoke the settlers.

The final summing-up of the Olmert era: not the smallest real step toward peace has been taken. The historic peace initiative of the Arab League has been buried. The secular, peace-seeking Palestinian leadership has been almost destroyed, paving the way for the Hamas takeover in the Gaza strip, and perhaps also in the West Bank. Not one single hut in a settlement was dismantled, and the settlements have been enlarged everywhere.

In one respect, Olmert resembled Sharon: they both loved money almost as much as power (as do Netanyahu and Barak). They both cultivated close relations with billionaires. They both trailed behind them a cloud of corruption wherever they went.

This did not hurt Sharon. He radiated leadership, and the scandals did not really harm him. He was robust enough to carry them on his back. Olmert, being much more fragile, was crushed by them.

In the end, he has fallen: not because of the criminal war, not because of his lack of seriousness in pursuing peace, not because of the appointment of a Minister of Justice whose aim is to destroy the judicial system, but because of cash in envelopes and free trips abroad.


WHEN FUTURE historians look for a way to characterize this chapter in the annals of the state, one word will readily present itself, the one the writer David Grossman applied in a similar context: hollow.

It was a hollow era. A hole in time. A meaningless period, devoid of content (though not for those who paid the price with their lives, destruction and ruins.)

And that is also the suitable title for Olmert himself. A hollow politician, devoid of vision.

Anyone researching the headlines of these two years will find a lot of drama there. A lot of initiatives. A lot of slogans. A lot of spin. A lot of hot air. And the sum of all this: nothing.

A hollow leader of a hollow party pursuing hollow policies in a hollow political system.

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The Olmert Scandal Deepens as Investigators Find New Evidence Of His Guilt

Following a third round of questioning of Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, amid fresh claims that he defrauded several charities and state institutions to pay for the same trips abroad and to fund family vacations, the Israeli police and Justice Ministry released a joint statement saying they are widening a corruption investigation against the Israeli premier.

The police and State Prosecutor's Office are now simultaneously handling six allegations of corruption against Olmert. This is the sixth time that he has been investigated in three years and due to the new evidence and the severity of the allegations the investigating team has been enlarged.However, this time the accusations appear so serious and there is little doubt that Olmert will survive politically. There is also widespread speculation that this affair will bring his Kadima party down as the party prepares to hold primary elections in September.

The State Prosecutor's Office will need some time to decide whether to charge the prime minister, but should an indictment be filed, Olmert has already promised to leave office.

However, Olmert has vigorously denied the accusations that he stole thousands of dollars from charities, calling them "distorted and despicable."

But a source close to the investigation claimed that Olmert actually further implicated himself during intense questioning.

"It could be said that Olmert was unable to extricate himself from the cloud of suspicion," an official said on Sunday of the allegations that the prime minister had asked several charities and state institutions to pay for the same trips abroad and used the money to fund family vacations.

Furthermore, sources within his Kadima party, including Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Minister of Internal Security Avi Dichter, assert that Olmert is also attempting to sabotage a vote involving the recruitment of a majority needed to alter Kadima's code that would enable the upcoming September primaries.

When the primaries are held, there is little doubt that these will spell the end of Olmert's less than illustrious career.

Originally Olmert was being investigated primarily for allegedly receiving bribe money, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, from American businessman Morris Talansky during his tenure as Jerusalem mayor and minister of industry and trade.

The latest allegations now involve Olmert double-dipping by asking for and receiving money from organizations primarily in Israel and primarily involved in public activity, to finance his family trips abroad.

Olmert's travel agency, Rishon Tours, allegedly sent invoices to each organization who gave money for the same flights, as though each had been the only contributor.

Each organization then received a receipt for the trip that it had funded and the remainder of the money, apparently $100,000 accumulated over the years, was deposited in a private banking account belonging to Olmert.

The agencies which allegedly funded Olmert's trips include AKIM, a charity geared toward aiding mentally disabled children; ALEH, a group that cares for physically challenged children; Yad Vashem; the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and American Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Consequently, the political fallout from the latest allegations has involved the entire spectrum of Israel's political make-up with sources from the radical left to the ultra-conservative right lambasting Olmert.

The latest suspicions against Olmert "reinforce the demand that he fight for his innocence as a private citizen, rather than as a prime minister," the left-leaning Meretz Chairman Haim Oron said, while Knesset Member Shelly Yacimovich (Labor) called on the prime minister to resign immediately.

The prime minister "should not wait for his dismissal in the September primaries, but rather, announce his resignation immediately. The Israeli public is entitled to have a prime minister who is not facing criminal suspicions," she told the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the hawkish Likud party, Gideon Sa'ar said it would be interesting to see how the Labor party will be justifying its decision to remain in the Olmert government.

"Labor's membership in the Olmert government carries moral and public turpitude," he said.

Regional politicians, from Israel's Palestinian negotiating partners to Syria's Bashar al-Assad, are also only too well aware of Olmert's weakness and his desperate attempt to make some political headway in a last-bid attempt to salvage what remains of his tattered reputation.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the one hand is hoping that peace talks on the Israeli-Palestinian issue will be accelerated as these might be put on hold indefinitely should a domestic Israeli political crisis arise.

The Syrian leader, on the other hand, stated he is in no rush to help Olmert gain any political brownie points vis-à-vis indirect negotiations over the Golan Heights, which Israel and Syria are currently conducting through the mediation of third-party Turkey.

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Israel's Olmert admits taking cash, won’t quit

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
admitted on Thursday taking cash
from a U.S. businessman but resisted
calls to resign over a police
investigation into alleged hefty
bribes over almost a decade.

As Israelis enjoyed festivities marking their 60 years
of Murder and Mayhem, police lifted a week-old media gag
order and announced details of accusations that sparked
opposition calls for Olmert to quit.

He said he would resign only if he were formally indicted.

Whether he goes or not, doubt over his future is likely to upset
his faltering, U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations with the
Palestinians and will cast a heavy cloud over next week's
celebratory visit to Israel by U.S. President George W. Bush.

The White House said Bush still intended to make the trip.

In a effort to try and convince the people of no wrong doing
Olmert appeared in a late-night televised address saying
he did nothing wrong.

Israelis are no strangers to tales of corruption in this make believe
democracy and the latest case may fuel calls for an overhaul
of political funding rules.

String of investigations

Olmert, who was questioned by police for an hour last Friday,
has weathered a string of investigations since he succeeded
Ariel Sharon as prime minister in 2006. Sharon's son is in jail
for campaign funding misdeeds on his father's behalf.

On Thursday, Olmert said all the cash he received --
put at hundreds of thousands of dollars by one judicial source
-- was legitimate support from New York financier Morris
Talansky to fund various election campaigns over nearly
a decade from 1993.

Olmert has made the claim that if the attorney general decides to
file an indictment against him he will resign."

American 'helped me cover deficits'

In a terse six-minute address, Olmert said Talansky funded his
two successful campaigns for mayor of Jerusalem in 1993
and 1998, an unsuccessful bid to lead the right-wing
Likud party in 1999 and a further internal Likud election
in 2002. He also said the American "helped me cover deficits"
after elections.

Earlier, a police statement said:
"The investigation deals with suspicions that the prime minister
received significant sums of money from a foreigner or number
of foreign individuals over an extended period of time."

A police spokesman named Talansky as a key witness, along
with Olmert's long-time secretary Shula Zaken, who has been
under house arrest, and his former law partner Uri Messer.

One police source said investigators cracked coded notes kept
by Zaken that they suspect recorded sums given by Talansky
-- referred to in some of the jottings as "The Laundry Man."

Gideon Sahar, an ally of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu,
said: "Olmert is unworthy and cannot carry on in his post.
The Kadima government is sunk up to its neck in corruption."

There was no immediate comment from Livni or from
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, leader of Olmert's main
coalition partner the Labour party. Barak is under pressure
from some Labour members to bolt the alliance, but others in
the party fear that would trigger an election which
Netanyahu could win with ease.

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War Report Could Topple Olmert

An Israeli regime's panel
investigating the
conduct of the 2006
invasion of Lebanon
publishes a final report
Wednesday that could rock Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert's regime.

Though Olmert is unpopular in opinion polls and
has lost allies from his fractious coalition regime,
he has vowed to stay in office and repair any
faults found by the inquiry.

The regime-appointed Winograd commission's
interim findings delivered last April were highly
critical of Olmert, his regime and senior military
commanders, spurring calls for the prime minister to resign.

The commission cannot recommend that Olmert
or others should resign, but the prime minister
was widely expected to face harsh words from
the five panel members.

The war minister at the time of the war, Amir
Peretz, and armed forces chief Dan Halutz
resigned last year.

The commission, set up to investigate deficiencies
in the conduct of the war, will give Olmert a copy
of the report at 5 p.m. (1500 GMT). An unclassified
version will be released to the public after a news
conference about an hour later.

The war was triggered when Israeli occupying army
launched a wide scale attack against Lebanon at the
pretext of releasing two army troopers in July 2006.
Nearly 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis,
mostly troopers, were killed in 34 days of fighting.

In its interim findings, the commission accused
Olmert of lacking "judgment, responsibility and
prudence" in his decision to go to war against Lebanon.

Olmert, who is pursuing new US-sponsored talks
with the Palestinian Authority, says he has already
acted to implement the panel's early recommendations.

Unlike the interim report, the final findings will focus
on the last days of the war when Olmert ordered a
costly ground assault even as a UN-brokered truce
was in the works.

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Ehud Olmert's Memorial Day Speech

Andrew Winkler

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed that Israel
would not ignore any calls for its obliteration.
In his speech to the Knesset, Olmert refered
to some of the favourite ingredients of the Zionist
poison kitchen. "We will not permit ourselves to be
complacent to the sounds of voices calling for the
obliteration of Israel, which are backed by
murderous and jealous ideologies, tyrannical regimes,
supporters of terrors and malicious programs to develop
weapons of massive destruction."
He wants to make us believe that Israel
was surrounded by neighbours poised at finishing
Hitler’s job of exterminating the Jewish people.

I won't even go into the question how on earth
Israel's neighbours could possibly 'obliterate' a
country with the 5th strongest military force in
the world and enough atomic weapons - plus all the
delivery systems they could wish for - to wipe out
the entire planet. What I want to write about is this
neo-pagan ritual of 'Memorial Day', commemorating
the day when Auschwitz was 'liberated' by Soviet troops.
(Anybody upset with the use of apostrophs for the word
'liberated' should read Elie Wiesel's The Night to find
out how he felt about the approaching Red Army.)

It is a tell-tale sign of 'Jewish Power' that it is
illegal in most Western countries to question
whether Hitler ever had a plan to kill all European
Jews. According to many revisionists, Hitler was
actually working with Zionist organisations on their
common goal of transferring Europe’s Jews to
Palestine. Some of them even go as far as saying
that Hitler was an extra-marital grandson of the
Viennese House of Rothschilds brought into power
by the merchant bankers to create the conditions
for the foundation of a Jewish state.

What fits into that disturbing picture is that the
Nazis allowed Zionist organisations to run training
camps in Nazi Germany, featuring Zionist flags with
the David Star and preparing future settlers
for a life in the Holy Land.

Zionists are facing the same embarrassing problem
with their alleged Nazi extermination programme as
the Neopaths with Iraq’s and Iran’s supposed weapons
of mass destruction. They have no proof other than
witness reports based on hear-say and coerced
confessions. The revisionists are insistant that there
were no written orders, no paper trails and no
homicidal gas chambers, not even engineering
designs, that could have been used for the alleged
purpose, for technical, capacity, logistical and a whole
string of other reasons. That would explain why
Holocaust novellist Ellie Wiesel described in his
above mentioned ‘autobiography’ how the Auschwitz
prisoners, who weren’t too sick from typhus, begged
their German prison guards to rescue them from
the approaching Soviet 'liberators'.

I don't consider myself a Holocaust expert, but
common sense is telling me that the revisionists
are probably right. Apart from Nikor - who is as
bad at debunking as Popular Mechanics - nobody
has ever bothered trying to counter the revisionists’
arguments. Instead, they are systematically destroyed
by a well oiled Kosher Inquisition, in a blatant
infringement on their freedom of expression. In
German courts, who routinely imprison hundreds
of Holocaust heretics every year for 'incitement',
revisionists aren’t even allowed to defend themselves
by providing proof for the incriminated claims.
The judges simply declare the Holocaust as ‘self-evident
truth’ and order the defendants and their councils to
shut up. If the council persists, he gets imprisoned too,
loses his license or both.

The Holocaust promoters allege that those who question
the official narrative are promoting ‘hate’. What a load
of crap. Since when is defending an accused of an alleged
crime a crime itself, especially if the circumstances of
his conviction are that dubious? The procedures of the
Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal didn’t have the
slightest resemblance to what’s called ‘due process’,
and yet asking for a retrial puts an end to anybody’s
career. What kind of Orwellian nightmare are we in
where we are bullied to blindly believe what we are told?

There is plenty of evidence that our governments
and media are controlled by groups and people
benefiting from the Holocaust story. And there is
even more evidence that our governments and media
have no qualms about lying to us again and again.

What’s happening here is that we are being brainwashed
by repetition of the same lies from the cradle to the grave.
What’s even worse is that we are being forced by
taboos and the threat of legal persecution not to question
the official version of the truth. It takes courageous people
with a lot of character to resist the power
of this evil machine.

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