Friday, May 16, 2008
US President George W. Bush and his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres review a guard of honour in Jerusalem on Mayk 14. Bush has vowed to support Israel in battling "terror" groups, a day after a rocket fired from Gaza wounded 14 people and triggered warnings of retaliation.(AFP/Jim Watson)
“The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals assume that by holding celebrations...they can save the sinister Zionist regime from death and annihilation…. Nations of the region hate this criminal fabricated regime and will uproot this fabricated regime if the smallest and shortest opportunity is given to them.” These words were spoken Wednesday by a head of state, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, in a live address on state television.
Ahmadinejad knew that, even though incitement of this kind is illegal under international law, he would pay no penalty for his words. Indeed, for Austrian oil and gas giant OMV, which in April last year signed a 22-bn-euro joint natural gas project with Teheran, the mullahs’ regime is not only not criminal, but big business.
Also on Wednesday at OMV’s annual stockholder meeting in Vienna, protesters from the Stop the Bomb movement distributed flyers and asked questions that didn’t get very far. Queried whether it was consistent with OMV’s ethical code to do business with a country that “has executed more adolescents than any other state,” CEO Wolfgang Ruttenstorfer replied, “We reject the execution of adolescents, whether in the USA, China or Iran. We cannot change governments.”
His animus against America is understandable since, when asked about sanctions against Iran, Ruttenstorfer replied that OMV is waiting for “political change in the USA.”
And OMV is far from alone in Europe; Switzerland, for instance, is going ahead with the huge gas deal signed in Teheran last March by its foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey in a headscarfed handshake with Ahmadinejad, and Germany is Iran’s biggest European trading partner of all. So when you see Ahmadinejad smiling so much, there’s good reason for it.
Meanwhile the “Zionist regime” was indeed celebrating its 60th birthday along with President George Bush, who touched down in Israel on Wednesday. When a few hours after his arrival an Iranian-made Katyusha rocket crashed into a shopping mall in the coastal city of Ashkelon, wounding fifteen including four seriously, some of the Israeli ministers departed the festivities for the site of the attack.
One of them, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, invited Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—part of Bush’s entourage—to come with him and see the damage and the reality of life in southern Israel, but she declined.
Although one indeed doesn’t want to spoil the mood at a party, Bush expressed concern to Olmert about the strategic situation in the region and said the crisis in Lebanon “is an Iranian effort to destabilize that young democracy.”
Yet about the Palestinians Bush was optimistic as always; while allowing that “Hamas’s stated objective is the destruction of the state of Israel,” he added that “the United States will stand strongly with Israel, as well as stand strongly with the Palestinians who don’t share that vision.”
It was hard, though, to know who he had in mind as Palestinians not only in Hamastan/Gaza but also throughout the West Bank and even in Lebanon geared up to mark Israel’s 60th—or, for them, Nakba (Catastrophe) Day—in their own way with marches and strikes. And Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, the centerpiece of Bush’s peace plans and object of his praise, lent his signature to a document vowing to continue the “struggle” for all Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.
A document, in other words, touting that very “vision”—Israel’s destruction—that Bush insists is only an objective of Hamas. But even if Bush attended to any of this—and, since he keeps affirming the peacefulness of non-Hamas Palestinians, there is no indication that he does—he could have found even worse tidings in Palestinian Media Watch’s latest report on Abbas’s Palestinian Authority’s severe anti-Americanism.
If Bush were to take some time out from his busy schedule and leaf through it, he could learn that just last March on PA TV a legislator from Abbas’s Fatah party called the U.S. “the greatest Satan in the world”; that the PA feels comradeship for distant, non-Muslim countries like North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela “precisely because [they] publicly challenge and express loathing for the U.S.”; or that the PA has named schools, streets, and sporting events after Saddam Hussein and its media are full of tributes to him.
He could learn, too, that the PA media lauds terrorist groups fighting the U.S. in Iraq; that in April 2007 the speaker of the PA Legislative Council implored Allah on PA TV to “take hold of the Americans and their allies… Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one”; and that the report concludes by saying “this hatred by Palestinian Fatah and its closeness to these enemies of the U.S. are not a result of any specific U.S. policy, but are reflective of a deep and sincere ideological affinity to those enemies of the U.S.”
Israel’s 60th anniversary is indeed cause for celebration, but when looking at the security environment one’s jubilation has to be tempered. Whether it’s the European democracies—including the descendants of the Nazis—doing brisk trade with the Nazi regime in Teheran, the West’s and Israel’s continuing helplessness before Hezbollah’s assault on Lebanon and Hamas’s pounding of southern Israel, or the U.S. president’s ongoing delusional preoccupation with the Palestinian issue and perseverance in coddling and strengthening deadly enemies, the situation is hauntingly similar to the bleak landscape from which Israel eventually emerged.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
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