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Newsletter : 7fax0320.txt
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Auschwitz Book Wins Awards
Israel Faxx News Services
A children's book about the relationship in Auschwitz between a young inmate and the commandant's son won two prizes at the Irish Book Awards.
John Boyne's "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" won children's book of the year and a people's choice award after spending 40 weeks at No. 1 on the Irish bestseller list. It has been nominated for numerous prizes in the United Kingdom, United States and Italy.
The novel tells the story of Bruno, the young son of Auschwitz's new commandant, who escapes loneliness by befriending Shmuel across the wire in the camp. The book has been translated into 24 languages, including Hebrew. Miramax is scheduled to start shooting the film version in Budapest in April.
Rice Presses Hamas to Renounce Violence
By David Gollust (VOA-Washington)
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday the new Palestinian unity government should unequivocally renounce violence to gain international recognition and enter peace talks with Israel.
Rice conferred with top European Union officials on the new Palestinian cabinet, whose leader has called for continued "resistance" against Israel
However, the Bush administration is taking a somewhat more conciliatory approach to the new Palestinian government, saying it would have contacts with non-Hamas members of the cabinet.
But it is standing by its insistence that a Palestinian government must recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements if it is to expect international aid and be part of a regional peace process.
The formation of the new Palestinian government was a key issue in a day-long dialogue in Washington by Rice and key officials of the European Union, including chief diplomat Javier Solana.
Solana expressed seeming eagerness by the Europeans to work with the new government, saying he hoped it would at least incrementally accept peacemaking terms of the international Middle East "Quartet," which includes the EU, Russia and the United Nations as well as the United States.
In the meantime, Solana suggested the actions of the unity government are more important that its rhetoric: "We would like to continue working with the Palestinian people," said Solana. "We are not going to let the Palestinian people down, and we hope very much to follow in great detail the facts, the deeds that this government behaves. It's much more important what they do that what they say at this point in time."
Rice however, seized on the declaration by the new government's Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh - a holdover from the previous Hamas-led government - reaffirming the Palestinian's "right to resistance" against Israeli occupation: "I'm not going to try and interpret what the right of resistance means. But I'll tell you, it doesn't sound very good to me when one talks about all forms of resistance. So I would put the question to the Palestinian government and to its prime minister. Do you mean the right of resistance by violence? And let's get an answer."
The comments here came as the military wing of Hamas claimed responsibility for a shooting attack Monday that wounded an Israeli civilian near the border with the Gaza strip, the first such act since the unity government took office Saturday.
Israel denounced the attack, saying it showed the new coalition was flouting the will of the international community, while the State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack called the incident clearly disturbing and unacceptable.
Earlier McCormack confirmed that unlike the U.S. political boycott of the previous Hamas-led Palestinian government, the United States is prepared to talk to non-Hamas members of the new cabinet. He mentioned in particular the new finance minister, Salam Fayyad of the mainstream Fatah party, a U.S. educated economist with whom the United States had close ties before the Hamas election victory early last year.
A formal Quartet statement is expected Tuesday, which McCormack said would reaffirm a collective ban on direct aid to the Palestinian government unless it met all its terms for dialogue.
Rice is due to begin another mission to the Middle East at the end of this week that will include separate meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and talks in Cairo with foreign ministers of moderate Arab states.
Report: U.S. Shuns Israel on Iran Plans
Israel Faxx News Services
The United States reportedly has shut Israel out of its planning for possible military measures against Iran's nuclear program.
Citing Israeli security officials, Ma'ariv reported Monday that Washington has not been inviting Jerusalem to talks about a military option on Iran. "They are prepared to talk about three topics only: Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," an Israeli official was quoted as saying.
But according to Ma'ariv, the Olmert government is in doubt about whether President Bush is capable of mustering domestic support for anything other than diplomatic pressure on Tehran. The report clashed with public declarations by Israeli and U.S. officials that they see eye-to-eye on what is the most pressing strategic issue facing the Middle East.
Israel Develops System to Neutralize Nuclear Waste
By IsraelNationalNews.com
Israel has developed a new technology that is supposed to safely dispose of radioactive waste.
The system was developed by Environmental Energy Resources (EER), an Israeli company that helped clean up after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and is based on plasma gasification melting (PMG) technology. The toxic waste is turned into a highly ionized gas, broken down, solidified, melted and vitrified - forming a solid glassy environmentally benign material when cooled.
The process was developed together with scientists from Haifa's Technion and the Russian research institute of Kurchatov in Moscow. According to EER, the facility turns radioactive medical and municipal waste into harmless solid substances at a low level of radiation, which leaves no pollution in the soil or water – both above and below ground.
EER says the process is economically and environmentally superior to all other waste disposal methods such as landfill and incineration, as well as other non-incineration thermal treatments. The end products of the process can be used to power generators and in the construction industry as non-leeching molds to form tiles and blocks.
A demonstration of the process, set for Thursday, will not involve actual radioactive material, the company said. Representatives from the United States, Russian, Japan and South Korea are in Israel to attend.
New PA High School Textbooks Reject Israel, Peace
By Ha'aretz
New textbooks for 12th-grade Palestinian students reject the existence of Israel and make no attempt to educate students about peace or coexistence, according to Palestinian Media Watch, an organization that monitors Palestinian Arabic-language media and schoolbooks.
"The teachings repeatedly reject Israel's right to exist, present the conflict as a religious battle for Islam, teach Israel's founding as imperialism, and actively portray a picture of the Middle East, both verbally and visually, in which Israel does not exist at all," the group wrote in a February report entitled "From nationalist battle to religious conflict: New 12th Grade Palestinian schoolbooks present a world without Israel."
According to the report, the book describes the establishment of the State of Israel by saying: "Palestine's war [in 1948] ended with a catastrophe unprecedented in history, when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and expelled its people from their cities, their villages, their lands and their houses, and established the State of Israel."
The textbooks were written by the Center for Developing the Palestinian Curricula and introduced by the Palestinian Authority at the end of 2006, according to the report.
"Defining Israel's founding as a 'catastrophe unprecedented in history,' a theft perpetrated by 'Zionist gangs,' together with numerous other hateful descriptions of Israel as 'colonial imperialist' and 'racist,' compounded by the presentation of the conflict as a religious war, leaves no latitude for students to have positive or even neutral attitudes toward Israel," wrote PMW director Itamar Marcus and associate director Barbara Crook in the report.
Marcus and Crook noted that Israel does not exist in the maps printed in the textbook. "Maps of the region likewise teach children to visualize a world without Israel, as Israel does not exist on any map and its area is marked as 'Palestine,'" stated the report.
Hitler May Be Stripped of German Citizenship
By DPA
Almost 62 years after his death, Adolf Hitler could lose his German citizenship. A German politician from Braunschweig wants to revoke the Nazi leader's 1932 naturalization -- as a "symbolic step." Hitler became a German citizen in 1932.
When Hitler was awarded German citizenship, he abruptly brushed off the congratulations: "You should congratulate Germany, not me!"
It was Feb. 25, 1932 and Hitler had just been naturalized after being appointed as a civil servant in the then-free state of Braunschweig -- a crucial step for the continuation of his political career.
Three quarters of a century later, Isolde Saalmann, a Social Democratic member of Lower Saxony's regional parliament, would like nothing better than to rescind this momentous bureaucratic act. The Austrian-born Führer, who has been dead for almost 62 years, should no longer be a German, in her view. Stripping him of his citizenship would be a "symbolic step," Saalmann believes. She has already proposed her idea to the leadership of the SPD faction in the regional parliament.
Saalmann is chairwoman of the party's local association in Braunschweig's Gliesmarode neighborhood -- and she's rankled by her city's historical connection to Hitler. She talks about a "Braunschweig complex" burdening the town, which prefers to advertise itself as the "lion city" due to its historical connection with Henry the Lion, the powerful duke who ruled the state in the 12th century.
"If the Lower Saxony region, the legal successor to the former free state of Braunschweig, were to distance itself from Hitler's naturalization, that would perhaps help," Saalmann told the newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.
The story of Hitler's naturalization process resembles something of a farce. The then-stateless would-be politician had long been pushing to become a German citizen -- a precondition for holding political office in the Weimar Republic. But, true to his characteristic megalomania, he refused to go and stand in line at the registration office like everyone else. He wanted German citizenship brought to him on a platter.
But the native Austrian's difficult moods foiled the first attempts at making him a German citizen. In 1930, a member of the Nazi Party arranged for him to be appointed chief constable of Hildburghausen, a town in Germany's Thuringia region. This would automatically have made Hitler a German citizen. But the future Führer made a fuss: The job as a village cop wasn't to his liking.
Then members of the Nazi party in Braunschweig -- a stronghold of the Nazi movement -- eventually found a way. Their first attempt to install Hitler as a professor at Braunschweig's Technical University failed, but they later succeeded in finding him a position with the Braunschweig land surveying office. Time was short, since Hitler wanted to run as a candidate in the imminent presidential elections. The Ministry of State then gave him the office of "administrator for the Braunschweig delegation in Berlin."
Devoid of all professional skills qualifying him for this position, the newly-naturalized immigrant immediately made several requests for vacation. And, as planned, he never took office.
The means by which Hitler obtained a German passport may have been unusual. But Saalmann's project of expatriating Hitler faces a small problem: German constitutional law prohibits stripping a person of their citizenship if they would then become stateless -- as Hitler would, since he had already surrendered his Austrian citizenship in 1925.
He ought really to have been expelled from the country a year earlier, since he had been found guilty of high treason and imprisoned following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. But the sympathetic nationalist judge held that the relevant laws of the Weimar Republic couldn't be applied to a man "who thinks and feels like a German, as Hitler does." And so the Nazi leader remained in Germany.
Lawyers have their doubts as to whether a dead man can be stripped of his citizenship at all -- although Hitler was already stripped of his status as honorary citizen of Braunschweig in 1946. "Dead is dead," commented an official from Lower Saxony's Ministry of Justice. "There's nothing more you can take away from them."
Meanwhile, legal experts working for Lower Saxony's regional parliament are looking into Saalmann's odd proposal. It will probably take them a few weeks to reach a decision on Hitler's citizenship. Isolde Saalmann rejects allegations that her proposal is tailored to win her votes during the next regional elections. "This will be my last legislative period," she insists.
