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Newsletter : 9fax1005.txt
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>Israel Faxx
>JN Oct. 5, 1999, Vol. 7, No. 183
Tickets to NYC for $479
By IsraelWire
Competition, with the entry of Continental Airlines to the Israel market, has increased. Continental announced a roundtrip package from Tel Aviv to New York for $499. TowerAir announced it will sell its roundtrip package for $479. El Al and TWA expect similar reductions in rates in the near future as well. The Continental package is for Nov. 1 to Dec. 15 and from Jan. 15 to March 17. TowerAir announced its reduced fares will start Oct. 15.
Israel Never Promised a Golan Withdrawal
By IsraelWire
Despite repeated claims to the contrary, senior government officials insist that Yitzhak Rabin never made a promise to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad for a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Last week, Minister of Justice Yossi Beilin, a political dove, stated the Golan withdrawal concept was presented to al-Assad as a hypothetical case and Israel never committed to such a move.
Minister of Regional Cooperation Shimon Peres said Sunday that a commitment for an Israeli withdrawal was never made and the so-called maps of the pre-June 4, 1967 boundaries do not exist. Peres explained that reports from Damascus speak of the pre-'67 boundaries but that too is not a reality.
Peres, among the chief supporters and active participants in the Oslo process called upon Damascus to make a decision about peace talks with Israel. The former prime minister explained that Assad couldn't continue his anti-Israel campaign in the media while expecting Jerusalem to take steps towards the negotiating table.
Peres told Israel Radio that the United States was never authorized to convey to Assad the details of discussions it had with Rabin. "He (Rabin) didn't promise. There was a hypothetical question not to be passed on. He wanted to know what the Syrians were prepared to do, what were their demands," said Peres, who was foreign minister under Rabin.
Book Paints WW2 Pope as Hitler Ally
By IsraelWire
Pope Pius XII helped Adolf Hitler gain power and did nothing to stop Nazi atrocities because he believed Jews got what they deserved, an explosive new book charges. The book, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," by John Cornwell, is excerpted in October's Vanity Fair.
Cornwell, a best-selling author and Vatican observer, said he was given access to secret church files because he had initially planned to defend the pope against charges he was silent about death camps. But after studying Pope Pius XII's own files and depositions taken under oath 30 years ago to support his eventual canonization, Cornwell said he was in a "state of moral shock."
Cornwell says that when the pope, Eugenio Pacelli, came to power in 1939, he knew about Hitler's plans for a "Final Solution" and was begged repeatedly by bishops in Germany, even by an emissary from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to use his authority to condemn Nazi atrocities. But he said nothing, and never acted to stop Catholic clergymen who collaborated in racial certification to identify Jews before they were sent to death camps.
Pacelli, who became pope in 1939, met with Hitler several times and first agreed to help him in 1933, when he was a Vatican diplomat, the book says. He promised Hitler he'd disband a German Catholic political party in a deal that protected the Vatican's rights in Germany. When he did, millions of Catholics joined the Nazi Party.
In a letter Pacelli wrote in 1919, he described a group of revolutionary Jews in Munich as "a gang of young women of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them...with provocative demeanor and suggestive smiles," led by "a young man, about 30 or 35, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly."
One papal report about the "Jewish Question," written under Pacelli's authority, says the Jews were responsible for their own fate: "Blinded by their dream of worldly gain and material success," they deserved the "worldly and spiritual ruin" that they had brought down upon themselves.
When the Nazis invaded Rome in 1943 and moved to deport 1,000 Jews who lived near the Vatican, the German ambassador in Rome, fearing a backlash from the general Italian population, pleaded with the pope to issue a public protest.
He did not. And the Roman Jews were sent by cattle car to Auschwitz. Only 15 survived, one of those a woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who served as a human guinea pig of Dr. Josef Mengele. In a recent interview, Spizzichino said Pius "was an anti-Semitic pope, a pro-German pope...He did not save a single child."
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