China Confidential
Foreign Reporting and Analysis Since April 2005
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Syria Should Come Clean About its Nazi War Criminal
Foreign Confidential....
Iran's secular ally, Syria, says it seeks peace with Israel in order to regain territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
"We believe a just and comprehensive peace is good for the prosperity of all people in the region,'' Syria's deputy prime minister, Abdallah Dardari, told the Bloomberg news service on August 12.
is Syria serious? Maybe. The regime in Damascus is clearly having some second thoughts about joining Tehran in an all-out war with Israel that could trigger the nuclear obliteration by Israel of its enemies. The Jewish state that was reborn in blood and fire in historic Palestine in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust--the Arab nations rejected the United Nations-sponsored second partition of the ancient Jewish homeland into Arab and Jewish states and instead attacked Israel--will not hesitate to hit back with the utmost ferocity and fury should its cities come under missile bombardment.
If Syria does intend to regain territory at the bargaining table instead of on the battlefield, it could start instilling confidence in Israel (and world Jewry) with a meaningful gesture. Syria could--and should--come clean about the whereabouts of Alois Brunner, the world's highest-ranking Nazi war criminal believed to be still alive.
Brunner, who was born April 8, 1912, was Adolf Eichmann's assistant. Eichmann referred to him as his "best man."
As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner was responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Nearly 24,000 of them were deported from the Drancy camp. He was condemned in absentia in France in 2001 to a life sentence for crimes against humanity. 
Brunner was last reported to be living in Syria, where the government has steadfastly refused to cooperate with international efforts to locate or apprehend him.
He settled in Syria with the help of the postwar Nazi underground, using the alias Dr. Georg Fischer. Among other jobs, he reportedly advised the Syrian government on "Jewish affairs."
Some experts believe he may have died in 1992.
In a 1980s interview with the German magazine Bunte, Brunner said that his sole regret was not having murdered more Jews.
In a 1987 telephone interview with The Chicago Sun Times, he said: "The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again..."
Brunner lost an eye and several fingers from letter bombs sent to him in 1961 and in 1980 by Israel's intelligence service, Mossad.]
In December 1999, rumours surfaced saying that he had died in 1996 and had been buried in a cemetery in Damascus. But German journalists visiting Syria said Brunner was living at the Meridian Hotel in the Syrian capital.
On March 2, 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity, including the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region (which had not been judged in the earlier trials) and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, the trial was largely symbolic, an effort to honour the memories of victims such as Celestine Ajzykowicz, 11; Jean Bender, four; and Alain Blumberg, a two-week-old baby kicked to death by an SS guard. Klarsfeld's own father, arrested in 1943, was one of Brunner's victims.
National Energy Policy Key to Russian Resurgence
Foreign Confidential....
It was 20 years ago today. Cancel that. It was only 10 years ago that Russia triggered a financial crisis by devaluing the ruble and defaulting on its mounting debt.
Today, resource-rich Russia is resurgent, thanks to its aggressive national energy policy, which aims to dominate energy trade in its near abroad, as Moscow calls the former Soviet republics that have been cozying up to the United States.
The policy is consistent with the policy on the oil and gas industry adopted by former president Vladimir Putin. The ex-KGB officer reversed a decade of Wild West-style capitalism--piratization masked as privatization--to reassert the dominant role of the Russian state, which is heavily dependent on oil and gas for revenue.
Putin took a national energy company approach. He sought to reorganize the Russian oil and gas industry to enhance the power of the Russian state.
He succeeded, while the US, in sharp contrast, failed to develop a national energy policy and instead continued to depend on big oil companies that answer to stockholders, not the state, and a far-from-free, OPEC-manipulated market.
The US also allowed itself to be paralyzed by environmental extremists, who are fanatically opposed to domestic oil and gas development (and even more fanatically opposed to shale oil and coal liquefaction). But that's another story....Palestinian Summer Camps Teach Terrorism
Foreign Confidential....
It's that time of year again. In the United States, Europe, and Israel the annual summer camp season is coming to an end.
It is ending in Gaza, too. But summer camp has a radically different meaning in the Hamas-controlled enclave, where terrorism is both a religion and a way of life.
In Gaza, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been training youngsters in the use of weapons--including rockets.
Thousands Trained
Hamas is conducting no less than 300 summer camps for tens of thousands of children. The focus is on ideology and indoctrination--e.g. familiarizing kids with the Palestinian towns and villages destroyed in the 1948 war with the reborn Jewish state--as well as instilling Islamic religious fervor in them.
The camps also feature sports; but military exercises, such as crawling under barbed-wire, are the main activities.
Not to be outdone by its rival, PIJ has launched its own summer camps, offering some 10,000 children activities similar to those of Hamas. The kids study passages from the Koran and participate in quizzes on religious matters, with emphasis on the required commitment to political prisoners and Palestinian land.
They also learn how to hold--and fire--Qassem rocket-launchers.
A PIJ operative said: "In the camps we emphasize the need to unite and put an end to the internal struggles. We call them 'unity and principle maintaining camps.'"Iran Preparing for All-Out War with Israel and US
“Israel must be uprooted and wiped off [the pages of] history” -- inscription on a Shahab 3 missile in a military parade in Tehran, September 22, 2003.
Foreign Confidential....
Countdown to conflict.
Iran is stepping up preparations for an all-out war with Israel and the United States. The monstrous mullahocracy expects to be attacked before the end of the year as it approaches an atomic bomb breakthrough planned to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Islamist-led overthrow of Iran's pro-US modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (which was assisted by the catastrophic Carter administration).
The coming conflict will mainly be a war of missiles. Iran, which has threatened to "burn Tel Aviv" and drive the US from the Middle East, has missiles that can reach 2,500 kilometers--meaning, they can hit Israel and US military bases in the Gulf.
Israel is approximately 1,000 kilometers from Iran.
Iran also intends to deploy stealth submarines and other advanced and specially designed naval weapons, including swarming speedboats capable of sinking US warships, and foreign flagged, seemingly civilian cargo ships armed with missiles concealed in containerized launch systems. The latter could be used to fire rockets into US coastal cities; there is no known defense against a so-called Scud-in-a-bucket attack.
Syria Still Undecided
Although Iran's secular ally, Syria, has not decided if it will join the fight, Israel is preparing for the worst, stocking up on WMD defense gear, including special suits and gas masks. Syria has hundreds of chemical warheads and the missiles to deliver them.
There may also be a bomber threat. The head of the Iranian air force said Sunday that Iran has increased the range of its warplanes, allowing them to fly as far as Israel and back without refueling.
Iranian state TV quoted air force chief General Ahmad Mighani as saying Iranian warplanes can now fly 3,000 kilometers without refueling. Mighani did not specify the type of the aircraft type or explain how the range had been extended.
Israeli analysts say the increased range could be achieved by using external fuel tanks attached to the wings or fuselage that can be released when empty.
Next: Nuclear ICBMs
Also on Sunday, Iran announced that it had launched its first domestically made satellite into space. BBC has a video of the launch. Click here to view it.
"Iran's Omid [hope] satellite was launched on Sunday by using Safir [ambassador] satellite-carrier rocket," the official IRNA quoted a statement published by Iran's armed forces.
In February, Iran tested the rocket designed to carry the satellite.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reportedly read Sunday's launch countdown.
The technology used to put satellites into space can also be used for launching weapons; and Iran is clearly aiming for acquisition of an arsenal of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In short, Islamist Iran is the new Nazi Germany; Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler; and the West is again asleep at the switch. Three decades of attempts to accommodate and appease Iran--and Islamism in general--have failed miserably. The West has totally misread Iranian intentions; in so doing, it has not only failed to prevent war but has actually made war inevitable--on Iranian terms.
Sunday, 17 August 2008
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