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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (65727)	1/12/2003 11:08:43 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Must be nice to be Safire. Ya gotta question about Israel, you pick up the phone and say, "Hey Arik, baby! Whas happening? January 13, 2003 Sharon Under Fire By WILLIAM SAFIRE WASHINGTON Sailing serenely toward re-election at the end of this month, Israel's Ariel Sharon was jolted by two political torpedoes. One was the revelation that Likud Party leaders were corruptly deciding who would serve in Parliament after the elections. Sharon acted quickly to reform Israel's corruption-prone party system, urging that the power of priority be moved from party bosses to primary voters. The other shot was personal. A well-timed leak from an investigation showed that in repaying excessive donations to his campaign of three years ago, Sharon's sons had not mortgaged the family farm, as he had thought. Instead, they borrowed and later repaid $1.5 million from a British businessman who had fought alongside Sharon in Israel's war of independence. The story created a pre-election media firestorm. Sharon went into a televised news conference to denounce "the contemptible libel concocted to bring down and replace the government." After 12 minutes of rip-snorting counterattack, he made history by becoming the first prime minister of Israel to be cut off the air by a judge who deemed his pre-election appearance impermissibly partisan. Did the election official's censorship (which, paradoxically, blacked out the televising of skeptical questioning by reporters afterward) diminish Sharon's chances, or did it energize his base, as we say, thereby stopping the defections of dismayed Likudniks? As a longtime aficionado of "Checkers speeches," I called Sharon yesterday to get his reaction to the audience reaction. "The fact that the telecast was stopped caused much anger here," the prime minister replied, not a bit angry at that response. "People did not like that at all." Maybe speechus interruptus stopped his slump; we'll see soon enough. But if the polls are accurate, voters turning away from oust-Arafat Likud have not embraced appease-Arafat Labor. Instead, they veered off into a different spectrum altogether, to the two domestic political forces that cannot stand each other: the secular party, Shinui, and the religious parties on the hard right. How will the secular-religious split, apparently growing, affect Israel's policy against the Palestinian campaign of terror? "I don't doubt I will form the next government," says Sharon. "I won't put myself in the hands of any radical parties, neither of the left nor of the right. I can't have those who want to give up everything or those who want to keep everything. I need the center because we have to take painful steps." He hasn't given up on getting Labor to rejoin a unity government after the election, despite what its current dovish leader now says. The left's main vote-getter is the proposal to isolate the Palestinians behind a fence, but Sharon believes that "a fence, which we are building as fast as we can, is not the ultimate answer in fighting terror. A fence is neither a political border nor a security border, especially with Iranian terrorists trying to recruit suicide bombers among Arab Israelis." With the U.S. focused on the weaponry threat from Iraq and North Korea, Sharon hopes we will not overlook the danger elsewhere: "From Iran, where the `moderates' say their goal is to eliminate the Jewish people. And we have information about Syria, where Iraq carried chemical and biological materials, which may have stayed there or were moved to Lebanon. Libya is involved in a real effort to possess weapons of mass destruction, working with Iraq." Like President Bush, he sees a web of connections among rogue states and terror groups. "Everybody laughed when I said, years ago, terror was not a tactical issue. Even my friend Rabin said it was just tactical. But terror is a strategic threat to our values and must be dealt with globally." Sharon, though irritated by criticism of his sons, seems unshaken by the current drumfire of accusations or the loss of his aura of invincibility. "After 28 years in the army and 28 years in politics, this is not my hardest time. I'm one who is suitable for difficult times. In two weeks, this will pass. "A rabbi told me that when you have two problems ? one near, one not so near ? concentrate on the immediate one. So it's the election first. The other, the big one over the next four years ? in due time."

To: greenspirit who wrote (65727)	1/12/2003 11:26:15 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Michael, that guy's a wacko or that is purely a fantasy piece, akin to the Evil Iraqis tossing babies out of incubators and taking the incubators to Iraq. Don't be gullible. If it was a bit funnier, it could be straight out of Satwire. He forgot to add that the Dear Leader eats the children of Christians because they are more tender than other meats. <Witness to genocide By Uwe Siemon-Netto Published 3/6/2002 7:13 PM United Press International WASHINGTON, March 6 (UPI) -- The mass extermination of Christians in North Korea has an ironic effect on some of this Stalinist country's henchmen, according to a German doctor who worked there for 18 months. They convert to their victim's religion. "I have spoken with the former commandant of 10 concentration camps, who was so impressed by the strength of the inmates' faith that he fled the country and had himself baptized," Norbert Vollertsen told United Press International. Vollertsen was stationed in North Korea in 1999-2000 as a physician for the German relief agency Kap Anamur, known in English as German Emergency Doctors. Later he interviewed hundreds of North Korean refugees in China and South Korea. "As a German, I feel a special obligation to bring this evil the attention of the public," insisted the 44-year old doctor, who in recent days briefed ranking State Department and National Security Council officials of his experiences....blah, blah, blah wacko ranting .... > Uri Geller bends spoons and the Hale-Bopp crowd wore Nikes to fly to the spaceship. There are charlatans and wackoes everywhere. What a joke, Mqurice PS: Just a technicality, but exterminating Korean Christians isn't genocide, it's religicide. Genocide is based on racial extermination, not cultural engineering.