Ah! Mr Soros... Where are you when Romania's democrats need you and your pet Open Society Institute?????
Sep. 23, 2004 10:37
With aides like these
By HERB KEINON
Sharon's close advisor and Israel's top PR man is so eager to be a player on the international stage that he's willing to give a kashrut certificate to a known anti-semite.
One day high-powered political strategist Eyal Arad is in Kfar Hamaccabiah as part of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's negotiating team, facing off against a Labor Party delegation over forming a new coalition. A few days later he is in Bucharest, giving advice to a leading Romanian presidential candidate.
Were that candidate not Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a man with a record of anti-Semitic outbursts, Arad would likely be a source of pride for Israelis who enjoy seeing native sons playing prominent roles on the world's stage.
But the candidate is Tudor, and, rather than being a source of pride, Arad's involvement with Tudor, the head of the Greater Romania Party, is for many an acute embarrassment.
"I think it is disgusting," says Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office. "It is purely mercenary."
And Zuroff is not alone.
Yad Vashem severed its ties with Arad's public-relations company, Israel's largest, and issued an explanation saying it "views cooperation between Israeli organizations or individuals and anti-Semitic entities as unethical and highly objectionable. It is shameful that such a prominent figure in Israeli public life as Eyal Arad is lending his hand to such a suspicious venture as Vadim Tudor's election campaign. Even if Tudor has truly improved his view of Jews, it is improper to enter such a relationship with him so quickly. There is no way to know at this stage whether or not Tudor's supposed transformation is nothing more than an election stunt."
The Wiesenthal Center and Yad Vashem were only two of a number of organizations and governmental bodies, including the Foreign Ministry, that tried to dissuade Arad from running Tudor's election campaign, but to no avail. In March Arad signed a contract with the candidate; the election is scheduled for November 28.
Israeli diplomatic officials say that Arad's connection with Tudor has strengthened the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews will do anything for money. Also not lost on the Romanian public, the officials say, is the irony that a prominent Israeli who has Sharon's ear is representing a man boycotted by the Israeli Embassy in Bucharest.
Arad's detractors, and they are many, say he is being used by Tudor to "purify" the candidate's anti-Semitic past, and to enable him to overcome his current pariah status both in Romania and around the world.
Though Tudor came second in the 2000 Romanian presidential elections, no Romanian party - because of Tudor's xenophobic and anti-Semitic views at the time - would consider him a legitimate coalition partner. According to the critics, hiring Arad, a high-profile Israeli who ran Sharon's successful campaign in 2001 and 2003, was meant to buy Tudor this legitimacy.
Tudor, the "court poet" during the days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, emerged shortly after Ceaucescu was toppled to publish Romania Mare ("Greater Romania"), a magazine that immediately proved popular for its anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and xenophobic content. He frequently attacked the country's Hungarian, Jewish, and Gypsy populations.
In 1992, he founded his political party and entered parliament. He ran for president in 1996 and finished fifth. He ran again in 2000 and finished second.
66.102.9.104
"Israeli diplomatic officials say that Arad's connection with Tudor has strengthened the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews will do anything for money." Well, sort of... More accurately, it has strengthened the suspicion that Judeofascists will do anything for the furtherance of Zionism/Greater Israel. They'd ally themselves with the Devil himself or, more to the point, with Dracula himself --Romania's most famous son.
Gus |
