To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (2281 ) 10/9/2002 3:39:30 AM From: GUSTAVE JAEGER Respond to of 3959 Talking of the Judeofascist conspiracy, here's another clue:Israel invites former neo-fascist Fini for official visit Tuesday, October 8, 2002 Posted: 4:54 PM EDT (2054 GMT) ROME, Italy (AP) -- Israel on Tuesday invited Deputy Premier Gianfranco Fini to visit the country, signaling a thaw in tense relations between the Jewish state and the formerly neo-fascist Italian politician. Israeli Health Minister Nissim Dahan told a press conference that an official invitation would be issued and that the visit was expected to take place soon. Fini heads the National Alliance, which was founded on the ashes of Benito Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship but has moved toward mainstream conservative politics in recent years. His party is the second-largest in Italy's governing coalition, after Premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, and Fini himself is one of Berlusconi's top aides. With such a high-profile job, he has tried to bury his party's post-fascist past, and earlier this year, retracted his onetime assessment that Mussolini was "the greatest statesmen of the century." He has also reached out to the Jewish community in Italy and abroad. Last month, he gave an interview to the Israeli daily Haaretz in which he said Italians must accept responsibility for crimes under Mussolini, including the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Almost 7,000 Jews were deported from Italy during World War II, 5,910 of whom were killed. Mussolini was also responsible for anti-Semitic laws in Italy that expelled Jews from government and university jobs and the military, and restricted their work, schooling and right to own property. As part of his campaign to remove the National Alliance's Fascist vestiges, Fini visited the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland in 1999. At the time, he was pelted by eggs and snowballs by protesters opposed to the visit. Dahan, an ultra-Orthodox Jew of the Shas religious party, said he knew of no opposition in Israel to Fini's proposed trip.cnn.com