French leader supports Obama's Iran policy; flings cold freedom fries at Haaretz story

Conservatives the world over are getting nervous as November 4th draws nigh. But, despite headlines to the contrary, the French are not in agreement with the GOP's bogus "Joe the Plumber. " Diplomats have refuted Jerusalem gossip that suggested Sarkozy, who is half Jewish, shares the impression that "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." The Huffington Post details how:

The last-ditch attempt by the Israeli hawks to trash Barack Obama appeared in the respected English daily Haaretz , which has been noticeably tilting further right in the past few months. Oddly, an anonymously-sourced news item echoed the latest volley of television ads by John McCain, faulting the Illinois Senator for his diplomatic stance towards Iran. Between the lines, lurked the unspoken caveat: Barack your world and we Israelis get nuked.

Haaretz’s front page story berated the Democratic candidate as “utterly immature”, an interesting choice of insult, given the quarter century age chasm between the US presidential contenders.

"Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as 'utterly immature' and comprised of 'formulations empty of all content.' 

"Obama visited Paris in July, and the Iranian issue was at the heart of his meeting with Sarkozy. At a joint press conference afterward, Obama urged Iran to accept the West's proposal on its nuclear program, saying that Iran was creating a serious situation that endangered both Israel and the West. 

"According to the reports reaching Israel, Sarkozy told Obama at that meeting that if the new American president elected in November changed his country's policy toward Iran, that would be 'very problematic.' "

Putting these words into the mouth of the French President, who like most Gallic statesmen ranks diplomacy as a French art as elevated as its cuisine, perhaps was intended as punishment for Obama’s ‘presumptious foreign tour’ this summer when he advocated negotiating with America's adversaries. It backfired rather quickly. A crisp diplomatic communiqué from the French embassy in Washington flung the cold freedom fries back in the face of the nameless rumor-mongers.

"The remarks attributed by the newspaper Haaretz to the President of the French Republic concerning Senator Obama's positions on Iran are groundless. To the contrary, the in-depth discussions between the President of the Republic and Senator Obama on Iran during their meeting in Paris in July demonstrated a broad convergence of views on this issue. President Sarkozy and Senator Obama agree to oppose Iran's development of a military nuclear capability."

Furthermore, Sarkozy has said that France ought to worry more about tensions between Iran and Israel than between Iran and the United States, and has urged neighbours to ramp up sanctions against Tehran.

One can only conclude that Israeli hawks view a McCain administration as an extension of the sweet deal they had under George W Bush. For the past eight years, the US offered scant criticism of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and very little pressure to adhere to a ‘roadmap’ or even the gentle Annapolis nudge towards conflict resolution. The nags of Condoleezza Rice during her more than 20 diplomatic shuttles to the Holy Land resulted in very little substantial action. Israeli expansion was emboldened, and even the lame duck Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has despaired belatedly that he allowed too many "facts on the ground" to go unchecked. Now it appears that under Barack Obama, the Israeli right may fear that “No, we can’t.”

Gettin' on for Armageddon, Pastor Hagee says

The luxury coaches are crammed with White Bread Americans, and the name of Pastor John Hagee,of Texas mega-church fame, is emblazoned on the side like a multinational brand. The vehicles have been crisscrossing Israel in the past few days, basically following in the footsteps of Jesus-- except for the omission of Palestinian Bethlehem. The itinerary stops at Armageddon, as Time magazine reports:

An Evangelical at Armageddon
By TIM MCGIRK/TEL MEGGIDO


It's quiet at Armageddon, these days, with only the wind racing like invisible war chariots across its grassy plains. But lately, the northern Israeli site — also known as Tel Meggido — designated in the New Testament as the field of the final battle has become a popular tourist destination. Christians arrive by the busload eager to see the battleground where the world as we know it will end. At the souvenir shop, they flock to buy maps of where Jesus walked, and tiny vials of water from the Jordan River. The river may now be mostly a murky rivulet, but thousands of Evangelical Christians insist on being re-baptized in its waters.

Armageddon was a brief stopover a few days ago for a contingent of Christians led by the Texas televangelist Pastor John Hagee, who believes that doomsday is nigh. In his recent book Jerusalem Countdown, which sold 1.4 million copies, Hagee uses contemporary news events, such as the threat of a nuclear Iran, to describe the lead-up to a war in which the Russian and Arab armies invade Israel and are destroyed by God in a terrible battle on this very spot.

Hagee, whose views on Catholicism caused controversy for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain when he endorsed the Arizona senator, didn't charm many Palestinians, either — not even the Christians among them — when he said that "turning all or part of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban." So much for the fate of Jerusalem being on the agenda of the Bush Administration's peace initiative.

Hagee's remarks, however, have certainly endeared him to Israel's hawks. Ex-Premier and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Hagee's rally in Jerusalem, calling the American Christian Zionists Israel's best friends.

Other Jews, in Israel and in the U.S., are less comfortable in the embrace of the American Evangelicals. They cite a verse from Revelations claiming that Jesus will return only after two-thirds of the Jews are killed and the rest are converted to Christianity. "They are not supporting us out of love," says one opponent, Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifshitz from the anti-missionary group Yad La'achim, "but because they believe that if we convert out of Judaism to Christianity, it will bring on the Apocalypse." And that, he says, is "a danger to the people of Israel."

One pastor in Jerusalem from a mainstream church expressed skepticism about the motives of the Christian Zionists — and of the cynicism of Israelis who play along. "It's the worst kind of anti-Semitism," says the cleric, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the issue. "At the end, these Evangelicals say that all the Jews will be dead except those who become Christians. But in the meantime, the Israelis are happy to fill their hotels with them and use their help to get American weapons."

Shortly before Hagee's tour, American Rabbi Eric Yoffie from the liberal Reform Jewish Movement denounced the friendship between Israel and Christian Evangelicals, not only because Hagee and his like-minded brethren reject the two-state solution (with East Jerusalem as capital of a future Palestinian state) but because they are often at odds with liberal Jews in the U.S. over such incendiary topics as abortion and gay rights.

America's Evangelical movement is vast and diverse, and so are the reasons why Evangelicals rally to Israel. They range from the simple Sunday school teaching — God loves the Jews and abhors their enemies — to a belief that the Jews' return to their ancestral lands, and the "miraculous" victory of the Israelis over the Arabs in the 1967 war, is a harbinger of the Apocalypse and the Messiah's return. In a 2006 poll conducted by Pew Research Center, 35% of all Americans say that the creation of Israel is a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy about Jesus' second coming. And also that Armageddon is just around the corner. But for now, the only legions arriving on the battlefield are those traveling on tour buses.

Izzy Bee has learned that the good Pastor spurned a scheduled Q & A with the American newsweekly last week. Was this perhaps because it featured Pope Benedict on the cover? (The pontiff, he has implied, plays Eliot Spitzer to the Whore of Babylon.) Meanwhile, Hagee's congregation sent a $6m donation to Israel (and West Bank Jewish settlers in Ariel, Samaria) which has assured an open-armed welcome.

Iron lion zion: peace pipe tunes?

Hopeful campaigners for a more peaceful "Jah-rusalem" rely on the Rasta sounds of Bob Marley plus old Beatles medleys to help soothe over the decades of rancour. Eric Pfanner, advertising columnist in the International Herald Tribune, reports how Issie Kirsh, a South African Israeli, wants talk radio to bridge the divide between Ramallah's listeners and the audience in Jerusalem with tunes. The posters definitely show a stamp of approval for the late, great dreadlocked one.

Amid another flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, there are plenty of raised, partisan voices on either side. A new ad campaign suggests a different way to address the divide: speak, or even sing, to both sides at once.

The campaign is for a radio station, 93.6 RAM FM, that broadcasts from Jerusalem and Ramallah, reaching Israelis and Palestinians alike - in English rather than Hebrew or Arabic. The station was set up last year by Issie Kirsh, a Jewish South African. The idea came from a similar station, Radio 702, that he set up in the apartheid era of South Africa, allowing blacks and whites to speak on the same call-in and talk shows.

The station, 93.6 RAM FM, underlines its neutrality by avoiding Israeli or Arab songs and featuring the music of American, British and other English-speaking artists.

Some of them, including Bob Marley and the Beatles, feature in the ad campaign, which recently started to appear on billboards, in newspapers and magazines and on buses. The portraits are rendered through a kind of pointillist technique that uses the stamps applied to passports at border crossings, to reinforce the idea that music can surmount such barriers.

Unusually for an ad campaign in the region, the same images were used in Israeli and in Palestinian areas.

"The station views music as being a universal language that can cross all borders and reach all people, all nations and all religions," said Guy Bar, creative director of Gitam BBDO, the ad agency in Tel Aviv that created the campaign.

The station was spending about $400,000 on the campaign, a spokeswoman said. So far, she said, 93.6 RAM FM has attracted only small audiences, but it hopes those will grow, so that it can start selling ads, too.

Something's gotta give soon. The latest weekend violence near my mixed Jerusalem neighborhood was orchestrated by right-wing groups, who led a mob of angry Jewish teens downhill into the village Jebel Mukaber. There they flung stones at Arab houses and vowed to pull down the family home of the slain gunman who recently killed eight students at the uber-Zionist Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. (No seminary students were said to have taken part in the reverse-intifada tactics used by these vigilantes.) Police broke up the scuffle after 23 arrests, and were aided by colleagues in helicopters. All the Sunday papers had run corrective articles that emphasized how, despite early reports, no violence was sanctioned by any rabbis to avenge the mass murders of Jewish students.
At first, I'd assumed that all the extra security was in place to protect the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, from those who consider her presence in the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish State to be an abomination. And tomorrow we must add candidate John McCain into the security mix, followed by VP Dick Cheney and ex-VP Al Gore. That's one overriding common reaction: we all dread the lockdown, man. Israelity bites.

Spring fever, Israeli style

Birdsong, blossoms and sunbeams -- spring definitely has sprung in Israel. Fields of wildflowers --red anemones, wild mustard and blue field iris --bloom beyond Jerusalem's Peace Forest and scent the fresh breezes. Alas, there's not much love in the air yet. Smiles are scarce in a place where rancor and mistrust rule. Blood still is the overriding odor, at least subliminally.

Down in the dunes of Holon, south of Tel Aviv, the locals are reeling after a hot-headed guy was murdered over a parking spot dispute

"Today people murder each other over anything - a dog, a woman, so what's so surprising that this happened?," one mother told a reporter.

After a brief weekend lull, the violence has ramped up again. Not a big surprise. A Qassam rocket struck Ashkelon yesterday, shortly after the departure of the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the IDF forces killed five Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank and arrested 30 more in Nablus.

Edginess is almost palpable. For days, local police in Jerusalem have refused to release the body of Abu Ala Dheim, the gunman killer who killed eight teens at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva and wounded 10 more. Authorities fear that if more than 5 family members attend his funeral, it may erupt into a media feeding frenzy or a literal bloodbath. They require burial by night with no martyr's fanfare. A fansite posted on Facebook has drawn condemnation for praising the horrific slaying as "an heroic act" across graphic photos of the dead students from the Zionist seminary.



According to television news reports,some yeshiva students have threatened to take revenge for the school shooting spree by attacking a senior Palestinian official at the al Aqsa Mosque, the volatile sacred site which Jews call the Temple Mount. An attack at this mosque could prompt a outbreak of violence across Israel and the Palestinian territories. Israeli police say they have prepared for the possibility of vengeance, but so far there have been no arrests. Demands for 100 new houses to be erected in settlements for each murdered student are frequently heard; expansion in the settlement was officially announced, much to the scorn of peacemaker Condi Rice.

So the next thing on the agenda is the arrival of America's Darth Vader... America's Vice President Dick Cheney is on the way to "prod for peace" in the Holy Land. Republican presidential candidate John McCain may show up as well, we are told, to further establish his security credentials while he woos Jewish voters.

Israelity bites