Re: We do not need missiles! We need peace and free trade. You think if we threaten other countries with our missile systems that they will want to engage in free trade?
I think you'd better turn your point the other way around: Eurasia and Eastasia are not gung ho about engaging in Free Trade, hence the need for the US to build a defensive deterrence against any anti-Free-Trade coalition that may arise in the future.... On that subject, see:
Subject 33609
Besides, here's a follow-up to my post #9159 on this very same thread (re: the ongoing Byzantine Alliance between Russia, Israel and the EU):
Overturning History, Kremlin Goes Kosher-Friendly
Michael Wines New York Times Service
Thursday, January 25, 2001
MOSCOW-- It was on the last day of Passover 51 years ago that the KGB seized Yitzakh Kogan's grandfather for the high crime of baking kosher matzo.
"It was impossible to bake matzo in Leningrad - it was the law of the city - and he had made it for all the Jews," the grandson said.
"They took him and my mother, but my mother had small children, me and my brother, so they just kept him. They called him in every day for interrogations, then gave him a pass to go home." After three weeks of this, he collapsed on the street and died.
"My grandfather was killed for baking matzo."
So it is all the more amazing that Rabbi Kogan, of Moscow, spent Sunday in a slaughterhouse here, knife in hand, making sure that the meat and fowl served Tuesday night to the president of Russia - himself a former KGB agent - were killed in accordance with Jewish dietary law.
President Vladimir Putin dined Tuesday with the president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, and the meal was kosher, making the occasion no doubt a first for a Russian leader in 1,000 years. The vegetable-stuffed veal was kosher. The roast turkey with fruits was kosher. The mushroom soup was kosher. The caviar was kosher - red salmon caviar, for black caviar comes from sturgeon, which have no scales, which is not kosher.
Nor is that the most amazing part. The Kremlin created an entire kosher kitchen for the occasion, an undertaking that required, among other things, an army of rabbis, all-new cooking utensils and a blowtorch.
For a place that branded Israel a pariah state not two decades ago, this is no small gesture. Even the White House, which has embraced Israel for half a century, still has to order kosher takeout when an Israeli dignitary visits.
"This is evidence of the great respect which we have toward Jewish culture and Judaism," Anton Ignatenko, who heads the Kremlin department responsible for relations with religious organizations, said in an interview. "Judaism and Jewish culture are an inseparable part of the common cultural heritage of the people of the Russian Federation."
They also appear to be of special interest to Mr. Putin, who has gone out of his way since becoming president to publicize Russia's Jewish heritage and to preach acceptance of Judaism and other religions that were persecuted in Soviet times.
Mr. Putin attended the dedication of a Jewish community center last autumn and delivered a brief and eloquent speech on ethnic and religious tolerance. Not long afterward, he lunched with Natan Sharansky, the onetime Soviet dissident who now heads an Israeli political faction representing Russian émigrés.
At a news conference Tuesday with Mr. Katsav, Mr. Putin said Russia was disgusted by the terrorist attacks that have been waged against Israeli civilians, saying the toll of wounded and dead children "is hard to take in for any Russian."
Skeptics questioned Mr. Putin's consistency. The Kremlin has brushed aside compelling reports of atrocities by its troops, in the case of its civilians in Chechnya, and Russian police and militia regularly harass Chechens and other ethnic Caucasians.
That said, Mr. Putin's endorsement of Russia's Jews and his repudiation of their persecution in Soviet times seems heartfelt. And leaders of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia, who appear to have the closest relations of any Jewish group with the Kremlin, have credited his statements with helping to spark a renaissance in Jewish culture in Moscow in the year he has been in power.
"This is a Russia where, two years ago, a synagogue was bombed; three years ago, a synagogue was bombed; six years ago, a synagogue was burned down," said Rabbi Berel Lazar, the chairman of the Rabbinical Alliance of the Commonwealth of Independent States. "Today, we see a different atmosphere."
Creating a kosher kitchen within the Kremlin, he said, "shows an incredible amount of respect" for Jewish tradition. Perhaps the Kremlin did not quite know what it was getting into.
For starters, the main Kremlin kitchen was off-limits. Besides prohibitions against mixing meat and dairy products, and limiting the eating of meat to that of cloven-hooved animals, the essence of kosher food is that it never comes in contact with non-kosher ingredients, no matter how minute.
Russian chefs had to find a separate place to cook. Eventually, they settled on a kitchen in the Palace of Facets, a limestone building that was once home to Ivan the Terrible and where visiting heads of state now stay.
On Sunday, Rabbi Lazar and his aides came to the Kremlin, sealed the room and fired up a blowtorch. They seared the big iron oven that was chosen to cook the dinner, obliterating all traces of non-kosher food from past meals. The metal sinks and countertops were blowtorched or drenched in boiling water.
The silverware was boiled; new pots and pans replaced tainted ones. Table settings, once used, cannot be rendered kosher. So the Kremlin found new plates, cups and saucers.
On Sunday, Rabbi Kogan went to Miasokombinat, a huge meat-packing plant in southern Moscow and, in a specially prepared slaughterhouse, slit the throats of the calves and turkeys selected for the dinner. On Monday and Tuesday, the chefs prepared and cooked the food. And Tuesday evening the two presidents and their guests dined, lifted glasses of kosher wine and toasted each other's health.
iht.com |
