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Newsletter : 0fax0204.txt
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>JN Feb. 4, 2000, Vol. 8, No. 22
Rabin's Grave to Receive 24-Hour Protection
By IsraelWire
The grave of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who is interred in the Nation's Leaders section of the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem, will be assigned around-the-clock protection. Officials report the decision was made based on intelligence data pointing to planned attacks against the grave by right-wing extremists.
Barak, Arafat Fail to Achieve Breakthrough
By Meredith Buel (VOA-Jerusalem)
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat have failed to achieve any breakthrough in solving serious differences that are holding up progress in the Middle East peace process.
After meeting for more than two hours, Barak and Arafat left the summit without making any significant progress on issues dividing both sides in the Middle East peace process. A joint news conference was canceled and Palestinian officials say the talks have reached a "crisis" stage.
Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy denied there is a crisis, but he indicated there is sharp disagreement over the next handover of 6.1 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
Israel insists it has the right to decide unilaterally which land will be transferred while the Palestinians are demanding a say in the matter. A map of the latest handover does not include areas around East Jerusalem that Palestinians want for a future capital. The exclusion of these areas has apparently angered the Palestinians and is causing friction between the two sides.
A similar dispute delayed the last transfer of part of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. Levy also indicated that a Feb. 13 deadline for reaching a framework accord on a permanent peace treaty is not likely to be met. He said the deadline is "not sacred."
The foreign minister also said the Palestinians want greater U.S. involvement in the peace process, while Israel wants to keep the negotiations on a bilateral level.
Arafat spokesman Marwan Kanafani says despite the signing of the revised Wye River peace accord last September, intense talks in recent months have yielded very little progress. "All of that has added to the wasting of the last four or five months in cancellations and implementations that are not effective and not useful. I think that President Arafat was extremely patient in the last five months and he reached a point today that he cannot go ahead with what is planned and what is put on the table by the Israelis."
Despite the problems, officials in Barak's office say intensive talks on issues involving a permanent peace agreement are expected to resume Sunday. Those discussions are on such difficult issues as the borders of a possible Palestinian state, the status of refugees, Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and the future of Jerusalem.
Truth on Trial in London
By Arutz-7
A major Holocaust-denial trial continues in London, in which David Irving is suing American Holocaust expert Prof. Deborah Lipstadt for claiming that he is a "falsifier of history." Recent court sessions dealt with claims by Irving that there were no holes in the roof of an Auschwitz crematorium through which to insert poison.
Prof. Robert van Pelt, appearing for the defense, has said that there is a "massive amount of evidence" of the camp's use for mass extermination - including witness accounts, photographs, and drawings by a Jewish inmate selected to work in the crematoria. Van Pelt, who argued that the gas chambers were dismantled and then dynamited, is professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo, and co-author of "Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present."
The official Syrian Press continues to engage in its own brand of Holocaust denial. Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reports that the editor of the government-run Tishrin newspaper, Muhammad Kheir Al-Wadi, published an article this past Monday denying the Holocaust and accusing Zionism of being "worse than Nazism."
Following are some selections from
the article, entitled "The Plague of the Third Millennium,"
"Zionism hides the dark chapters of its black history. It invents
stories
regarding the Nazi Holocaust in which the Jews suffered and
inflates them to astronomic proportions...The Zionists try to
strangle any voice that reveals the truth...The problem is not in
the Zionist ambition to forge history, but rather in the Zionist
organizations' ambitions to revive their distorted version of
history and use it to deceive international public opinion, win its
empathy, and blackmail it..."
The editorial has sparked a formal condemnation from Jewish leaders and distinguished Holocaust scholars, led by Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein. "Unfortunately, this is the latest in a series of outrageous and offensive statements and actions by Syria concerning the Holocaust," the statement reads.
"Syrian government publications have repeatedly denied the Holocaust and claimed that Israeli policies are similar to, or worse than, the policies of the Nazis. In addition, after the Holocaust, Syria gave shelter to numerous Nazi war criminals, and to this day harbors the most-wanted Nazi war criminal in the world, Alois Brunner."
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