Obviamente... apoio!

Como é do conhecimento geral, na Arábia Saudita não é permitido às mulheres guiar. É, aliás, o único país do mundo em que isso acontece. Hoje, uma demonstração no país levou muitas mulheres à rua na luta por esse direito tão básico[1].

Já agora, naturalmente que isto não tem nenhuma desculpa de cariz religioso. Existem muitos mais países muçulmanos, vários onde a sharia é lei e no entanto as mulheres guiam. 

Não há muito a acrescentar. Obviamente têm o meu total apoio.

Farahani - Iraniana e corajosa

Golshifteh Farahani - actriz iraniana exilada em Paris

Durante os meus anos tive oportunidade de conhecer bastantes iranianos. Naturalmente não os suficientes para conhecer o pulsar daquele povo, mas o suficiente para pelo menos colocar em causa as ideias pré-concebidas que trazia comigo. 

A maioria dos que conheci não eram distinguíveis dos europeus. A forma de vestir dos homens era perfeitamente ocidental. Em relação às mulheres tinham, regra geral um ar de italianas. Bem vestidas vaidosas e nada parecidas com as árabes. Num ou noutro caso usavam lenço a tapar o cabelo, mas normalmente nem isso. 

Body of Lies, realizado por Ridley Scott com
Di Caprio, Farahani e Russel Crowe

Foi depois de começar a conhecer casais iranianos que começei a reparar com mais cuidado nas imagens que vinham do Irão. Na rua, notava-se que as mulheres usavam sem excepção hijab (o lenço utilizado para não mostrar o cabelo), mas ao contrário dos países árabes do golfo, os lenços eram coloridos, à semelhança dos utilizados no Levante (Palestina, Líbano, Jordânia e Síria). Também dava para ver que esse uso era fruto de imposição da lei islâmica que (ainda) impera no país. Afinal de contas, o lenço aparecia sempre uns centímetros mais atrás do que devia, deixando umas cuidadas madeixas à frente. A maquilhagem, proibida no país, estava presente em todo o lado, embora suficientemente discreta para poderem fingir que era a sua cor natural.

Fui ficando por isso com a impressão que talvez o povo iraniano já esteja realmente cansado do creativo regime semi teocrático e semi democrático do seu país. A leitura do livro de Shirin Ebadi[1] (prémio Nobel da Paz em 2003) "Iran Awakening" forteleceu-me em muito essa ideia. A recepção que lhe foi feita quando regressou ao Irão, com centenas de milhares de pessoas na rua, mostrou que são muitos os que estão com ela.

Farahani no filme "About Elly"

Entretanto uma nova personagem emerge, a actriz iraniana Golshifteh Farahani[2] que contracenou com Leonardo di Caprio no filme "Body of Lies" de 2008[3]. Desde o início que o regime se mostrou extremamente desconfortável com o à vontade desta. Posteriomente, começa a aparecer em filmes sem o mandatório hijab. Mais tarde revela-se totalmente na revista francesa Madame Le Figaro, onde aparece despida.

A coragem de Farahani é invulgar. Certamente que muitos considerarão que estas fotos não passam de um golpe de publicidade para fomentar a sua carreira. Não dúvido que isso seja verdade. Acontece diariamente no mundo da moda e cinema. O que não acontece todos os dias é alguém de uma teocracia fazê-lo. Os riscos que corre são tudo menos comuns. E a mensagem política que envia é muitíssimo mais forte. Farahani foi, segundo a própria em entrevista ao Der Spiegel[4], avisada de que já não era bem-vinda no seu país e que se arriscava a ser presa. Encontra-se por isso exilada em Paris há 4 anos, sem qualquer esperança de poder voltar à sua terra Natal. Quando li este artigo lembrei-me de algo que aqui escrevi sobre umas imagens de Angela Merkel nua: "No lugar onde cometeu este acto o naturismo era proibido? Cometeu algum crime?". Esta entrevista fez pensar que não deveria ter escrito tal frase. Afinal de contas, no caso de Farahani, ele poderá mesmo ter cometido um crime no seu país. E mesmo assim eu não quero saber e não sou capaz de a criticar por isso.

Espero sinceramente que Farahani possa um dia voltar à sua terra natal. E que o faça sem medo e em liberdade. Com hijab ou sem ele, conforme a sua vontade.

Judeus da Dinamarca

O holocausto nazi não foi sempre igual. Não teve sempre o mesmo ritmo. A vergonha não foi sempre a mesma. E a história do genocídio do povo judeu na europa é a história de cada uma das vítimas, mas também de cada um dos sobreviventes. Na Dinamarca passou-se algo muito interessante. Pelo trabalho de dois oficiais nazis, pelo desinteresse de Berlim e pela discreto apoio da Suécia, a quase totalidade dos judeus dinamarquesas conseguiram escapar ao horror dos campos de concentração e extermínio.

É da história desses 7000 judeus e dos que os ajudaram que fala este interessante artigo da revista alemã Spiegel[1] que passo a transcrever.


The Exception: How Denmark Saved Its Jews from the Nazis

By Gerhard Spörl
Denmark was the only European country to save almost all of its Jewish

Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz

residents from the Holocaust. After being tipped off about imminent roundups by prominent Nazis, resisters evacuated the country's 7,000 Jews to Sweden by boat. A new book examines this historical anomaly.
They left at night, thousands of Jewish families, setting out by car, bicycle, streetcar or train. They left the Danish cities they had long called home and fled to the countryside, which was unfamiliar to many of them. Along the way, they found shelter in the homes of friends or business partners, squatted in abandoned summer homes or spent the night with hospitable farmers. "We came across kind and good people, but they had no idea about what was happening at the time," writes Poul Hannover, one of the refugees, about those dark days in which humanity triumphed.

At some point, however, the refugees no longer knew what to do next. Where would they be safe? How were the Nazis attempting to find them? There was no refugee center, no leadership, no organization and exasperatingly little reliable information. But what did exist was the art of improvisation and the helpfulness of many Danes, who now had a chance to prove themselves.

Members of the Danish underground movement emerged who could tell the Jews who was to be trusted. There were police officers who not only looked the other way when the refugees turned up in groups, but also warned them about Nazi checkpoints. And there were skippers who were willing to take the refugees across the Baltic Sea to Sweden in their fishing cutters, boats and sailboats.

A Small Country With a Big Heart

Denmark in October 1943 was a small country with a big heart. It had been under Nazi occupation for three-and-a-half years. And although Denmark was too small to have defended itself militarily, it also refused to be subjugated by the Nazis. The Danes negotiated a privileged status that even enabled them to retain their own government. They assessed their options realistically, but they also set limits on how far they were willing to go to cooperate with the Germans.

The small country defended its democracy, while Germany, a large, warmongering country under Hitler, was satisfied with controlling the country from afar and, from then on, viewed Denmark as a "model protectorate." That was the situation until the summer of 1943, when strikes and acts of sabotage began to cause unrest. This prompted the Germans to threaten Denmark with court martials and, in late August, to declare martial law. The Danish government resigned in protest.

At this point, the deportation and murder of European Jews had already been underway for some time in other countries that had submitted to Nazi control. In the Netherlands, Hungary, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, the overwhelming majority of Jews, between 70 and 90 percent of the Jewish population, disappeared and were murdered. The Nazis deported and killed close to half of all Jews in Estonia, Belgium, Norway and Romania. About a fifth of French and Italian Jews died. As historian Peter Longerich writes, the Holocaust was dependent, "to a considerable extent, on the practical cooperation and support of an occupied country or territory."

The Danes provided no assistance to the Nazis in their "Jewish campaign" in Denmark. They viewed the Jews as Danes and placed them under their protection, a story documented in "Countrymen," a new book by Danish author Bo Lidegaard. "The history of the rescue of the Danish Jews," writes Lidegaard, "is only a tiny part of the massive history of the Shoah. But it teaches us a lesson, because it is a story about the survival instinct, civil disobedience and the assistance provided by an entire people when, outranged and angry, it rebelled against the deportation of its fellow Danes."

Ten Years Documenting the Danish Resistance

Lidegaard, born in 1958, is a tall intellectual with many talents. As a diplomat, he represented his country in Geneva and Paris. After that, he served as an adviser to two succeeding Danish prime ministers and, in 2009, he organized the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. He has been the editor-in-chief of Politiken, Denmark's large, left-liberal daily newspaper, since April 2011.

He worked on his book for 10 years. During a conversation in Hamburg, Lidegaard said that he was interested in finding out why Denmark had wanted to save the Jews -- and why the Nazis allowed them to be saved. Two men played a key role in the affair -- two German Nazis, each with his own story.

One of the Germans was named Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz. He was from a merchant's family in the northern port city of Bremen and joined the Nazi Party in 1932. Duckwitz was a Nazi and an anti-Semite out of conviction. He worked for Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler's race ideologues, who was sentenced to death in Nuremberg in 1946 and executed.

Duckwitz gradually developed an aversion to the Nazis' brutishness and bloodlust. Because he was familiar with Denmark from his earlier days and had a fondness for the country, he went to Copenhagen in September 1939, working as a shipping expert for the German Reich's Ministry of Transport.

Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, but the protectorate was allowed to direct its internal affairs. It kept a certain amount of latitude and rejected the Nazis' demand that it introduce the death penalty and segregate Jews. The country asserted itself as much as it could.

Germany declared Denmark a model for the protectorates that Hitler intended to establish in Western Europe after the end of the war. The Nazis initially sent only 89 officials to the country, and they were responsible for 3.8 million Danes. By contrast, Berlin sent 22,000 officials to France. Unlike France, Denmark was small and had only a small Jewish population. The country also had no raw materials of importance to the war effort. Denmark supplied agricultural products to Germany, but its economic role was relatively small.

An Enemy from Within

Duckwitz wrote a manuscript describing his official and unofficial activities in Copenhagen. The document, which remains in the political archive of the German Foreign Ministry today, both complements and contradicts Lidegaard's account.

Part of Duckwitz's job was to manage German ships calling at Danish ports. He signed agreements with Danish government agencies that regulated "the reciprocal use of tonnage." He was also required to report to Berlin when the Danish underground committed acts of sabotage against ships.

In addition, Duckwitz established ties with Social Democrats and young labor leader Hans Hedtoft, and he assisted Danes who had fallen into the Germans' clutches. Duckwitz's office soon became unofficially known as "the office for rescuing people."

A Nazi himself, Duckwitz became an opponent of the Nazis who simultaneously had good connections in Berlin. The Nazis could hardly have failed to notice the change. They threatened to recall him several times but never followed through.

Duckwitz exemplified what the German philosopher Hannah Arendt called "the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin," a phenomenon that she found astonishing. "It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds.

The second German was and remained a staunch Nazi and anti-Semite. Werner Best was a senior official at the Reich Main Security Office, where he worked closely with SS leader Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the agency. But then Best quarreled with Heydrich and fell from favor. He left Berlin and joined the German military administration of France, where he managed the internment and persecution of Jews, earning the nickname "Bloodhound of Paris."

In the summer of 1942, Best was sent to Denmark as Berlin's new plenipotentiary, which made him the highest authority in the protectorate. "Best was to play a key role in the fate of the Danish Jews, but exactly what that role was is still debated today," writes Lidegaard.

Lidegaard believes that Best was an opportunist who, in the fall of 1943, was smart enough to recognize that the war was lost for Germany. He tolerated what Duckwitz was doing, because he assumed that he would be treated more leniently after the war if he had turned a blind eye to Duckwitz's activities. But Duckwitz would have disagreed with Lidegaard. He saw Best as a man who had changed his mind in Copenhagen, in the way Hannah Arendt described.

In his manuscript, Duckwitz writes that the Nazis had intended from the beginning to proceed eventually against the Jews in Denmark. In early September 1943, Best and Duckwitz received word from Berlin that Hitler's cohorts were pushing to have the Danish Jews deported. This prompted Best to take initiative, writes Duckwitz. On Sept. 8, the plenipotentiary sent a telegram to Berlin in which he proposed that the German military, the Wehrmacht, should take action against the Jews in Denmark -- in effect appropriating what had, until then, only been a rumor.

But that was only a trick, suggests the well-meaning Duckwitz, who asserts that Best had believed "that his suggestion to launch a campaign against the Danish Jews would be rejected outright. He saw a great benefit in taking the initiative away from those groups that wanted Hitler to persecute the Jews in Denmark."

As Duckwitz tells it, Best had never meant the Nazis to take up his suggestion. He had bluffed and miscalculated. But Lidegaard doesn't buy that assessment. He believes it was an earnest request.

In any case, the response arrived from Berlin on Sept. 19, 1943. Hitler approved of Best's proposal and had ordered Himmler to execute the plan.

Preempting the 'Jewish Campaign'

Duckwitz promptly notified his Danish informants in the government, among the Social Democrats and within the Jewish community. He traveled to Sweden and told Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson what was about to happen. The Swedish government instructed its envoy in Copenhagen to freely issue passports to Danish Jews and made preparations to accept refugees at home.

The "Jewish Campaign" began on the night of Oct. 1. The German security forces consisted of 1,300 to 1,400 police officers, together with Danish volunteers and the Schalburg Corps, an SS unit consisting of Danes. Several hundred Jews fell into their hands, and 202 were designated for deportation and taken, along with 150 Danish communists, to the Wartheland, a ship with the capacity to hold 5,000 passengers.

Neither the German Wehrmacht nor the police "proved to be especially eager to help the Gestapo hunt down the Danish Jews," writes Lidegaard. The campaign was declared over at 1 a.m., and Best wrote in his report to Berlin that Denmark had been "de-Jewed."

"De-Jewed?" One can hardly assume that the Nazis failed to notice that only a few hundred people had been transported on the large ship, while at the same time, thousands of Jews were fleeing to the coast in order to escape to Sweden. It is also difficult to imagine that Duckwitz's conspiratorial activities remained completely unnoticed in Berlin. So why didn't the Nazis do anything about it?

Denmark simply wasn't that important to them, Lidegaard said during the conversation in Hamburg. Besides, he added, the Nazis knew that the Danes would protect their Jews from mass deportation. They had opted to present Denmark to the world as a model protectorate, so they decided for once to dispense with violent reprisals.

Aftermath

What about Duckwitz and Best? Lidegaard believes they acted in the knowledge that Berlin had only a moderate interest in Denmark. One of the oddities of the Danish situation, he says, is that Adolf Eichmann traveled to Copenhagen in November 1943 and expressed his satisfaction with the "Jewish Campaign."

In the end, 7,742 Jews were able to flee to Sweden across the Baltic Sea. Each of the refugees received government support in Sweden if it was needed. The Danish government also advocated on behalf of those who had been deported. After negotiations with Himmler, 423 Danes were released from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in early 1945.

How many Danish Jews were killed? An estimated 70, or one percent of the country's Jewish population at the time. Denmark is a shining exception in the history of the European Holocaust.

Both Best and Duckwitz survived the war in Copenhagen. Best was arrested, testified in the Nuremberg War Crimes trial and was later extradited to Denmark. The Copenhagen Municipal Court sentenced him to death on Sep. 20, 1948, but in appeal proceedings his sentence was reduced to 12 years in prison. He was given credit for his behavior in the fall of 1943, and in response to pressure from the new German government in Bonn, he was released on Aug. 24, 1951.

After that, he worked in the office of Ernst Achenbach, a politician with the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), for the rehabilitation of former Nazis. He provided the defense with exonerating material in many Nazi trials without making an appearance himself.

Honor, Dishonor

In Germany, Best lived undisturbed for two decades. Only in the late 1960s did documents and witnesses turn up to shed light on his past in the Reich Main Security Office. But his trial was repeatedly postponed for health reasons. Best, an eternally colorful but sinister figure, died in June 1989.

Duckwitz remained in Copenhagen after the war, initially working as a representative of the West German chambers of commerce. He entered the diplomatic service when the Foreign Ministry was rebuilt in West Germany. He returned to Denmark as the West German ambassador in 1955. Ten years later, he chose to retire early, because he disagreed with Bonn's policy of marginalizing East Germany.

But soon Chancellor Willy Brandt brought him back and made him his chief negotiator for the Treaty of Warsaw, which was designed to reconcile Poles and Germans.

Soon after the end of the war, Denmark honored Duckwitz, the converted Nazi, for his role in the rescue campaign. In 1971, two years before his death, Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, presented him with its "Righteous Among the Nations" award.

The Eleventh Day

Da autoria do jornalista da BBC Anthony Summers e da sua esposa Robbyn Swan, "The Eleventh Day - The definitive account of 9/11" é um extenso e detalhado trabalho de investigação sobre o atentado de 11 de Setembro de 2001. Este trabalho, que foi finalista do prémio Pulitzer em 2012, é de facto uma obra impressionante. Os autores trataram cada uma das pontas soltas com bastante seriedade e não aceitaram nenhum informação pelo seu valor facial.

Por um lado não se fugiram ao estudo das diversas teorias de conspiração que abundam na internet e na literatura da última década. Infelizmente muitas destas tomaram tais proporções que devem mesmo ser estudadas oficialmente de forma a que se lhes possa ser dada resposta cabal. Milhões de pessoas pelo mundo fora acreditam que o governo americano fez os atentados. Muitas outras defendem que o governo americano teria conhecimento e deixou que acontecesse. Tal como os autores, não acredito em nenhuma dessas hipóteses. Uma conspiração desse tipo exigiria um tipo de organização nunca vista. E certamente nunca visto num governo que nem sequer conseguiu plantar uma bomba no Iraque quando percebeu que afinal não havia lá nada que justificasse o ataque.

De qualquer forma, Summers e Swan correm cada um desses pontos que mais dúvidas têm causado: a inexistência de imagens do avião que bateu no Pentágono e a hipótese de ter sido um missil; a queda do avião na Pennsylvania; a forma como ambas as torres gémeas do World Trade Center ruiram e, umas horas depois, do Edifício 7. Em todas as situações em que tinha algumas dúvidas em relação à história oficial fiquei convencido (no que toca à autoria e formato do ataque).

Mas os autores estão longe de ser o que os apoiantes de Bush gostariam que fossem, e se é verdade que se opõem de forma categórica em relação às principais teorias da conspiração, por outro lado expõe de forma clara a enormidade dos erros cometidos pela administração de George W. Bush, pela do seu antecessor Bill Clinton e ainda pela absoluta incapacidade das várias organizações americanas responsáveis pela segurança do território comunicarem umas com as outras (nomeadamente a CIA, o FBI, a NSA e a FAA).

Embora ainda muita documentação esteja ainda longe dos olhares do público, também ficamos a saber como alguns dos membros da cúpula americana estavam absolutamente obcecados com questões em nada relacionadas com o ataque, em especial o Iraque. No próprio dia, Rumsfeld já procurava motivos para invadir o Iraque quando todas as informações apontavam para Bin Laden. Também percebemos que muitos serviços secretos estrangeiros avisaram que algo estava para acontecer, que Bin Laden estaria na sua origem, que seriam utilizados aviões comerciais e até datas muito aproximadas do que veio a acontecer. Egipto, Arábia Saudita, Alemanha, Jordânia e França foram alguns dos avisaram os Estados Unidos - e em alguns casos pessoalmente George W. Bush - mas foram totalmente ignorados.

Depois do ataque, todas as referências à Arábia Saudita e às provas que ligavam algumas figuras da sua família real à Al Qaeda foram removidas. Muitos dos intervenientes mentiram nos primeiros inquéritos. E, não obstante a inegável incompetência de muitos dos que deveriam estar a assegurar a defesa dos EUA, nem uma pessoa na organização militar, política ou de inteligência foi penalizada pelo sucesso dos atentados.

Um livro interessante e que aconselho. Não alegrará os que fielmente acreditam que o governo americano provocou os ataques, mas parece-me que é até ao momento a visão mais lógica, crítica e realista do que aconteceu nesse dia.

Que se passa com o Canal História?

Há alguns anos atrás, o História era o meu canal de eleição. Depois de me inteirar das notícias, tipicamente na SIC Notícias passava para o Canal História e via documentários atrás de documentários sobre a Segunda Guerra Mundial, sobre o Antigo Egipto, sobre Roma e Cartago e até algumas produções portuguesas e espanholas de documentários bastante inesperados e interessantes.

Hoje em dia, o Canal História - e o mesmo pode ser dito do Discovery - resumem-se a disparatados programas sobre extra-terrestres sem o mais pequeno rigor científico, como os Ancient Aliens[1], uns grupos de compradores de antiguidades ou leilões como o Caça Tesouros ou Preço da História, ou uns documentários baseados em teorias da conspiração puramente especulativos como o Livro dos Segredos. Em geral aqueles que eram antes canais que nos traziam ciência e conhecimento transformaram-se em entretenimento barato. Ainda teve alguma piada quando apareceram os Mithbusters[2], que procuravam provar ou desmentir mitos urbanos com alguma ciência e muita experiências práticas. Depois disso, muito pouco de interessante apareceu.

Mas este Ancient Aliens deve ultrapassar mesmo todos os limites. Semanalmente, um grupo de loucos defendem que toda a nossa história é explicada exclusivamente pelo facto de, no passado, extra-terrestres terem comunicado com os nossos antepassados dando-lhes conhecimentos que de outra forma eles nunca conseguiram adquirir por si sós. Assim, e ao longo de 6 anos, foram-nos dizendo que cada um dos mitos e religiões são totalmente verdadeiras - todas em simultâneo - com o pequeno detalhe de que cada um dos deuses era um E.T. Todas as grandes construções da antiguidade - especial destaque para as pirâmides do Egipto - são obras de seres de fora do nosso planeta. Tudo isto apresentado como se de uma teoria científica fosse. Admito que os programas têm imagens interessantes, são bem realizados e têm um ritmo que ajuda a colar os telespectadores ao ecrã, mas ao apresentar estas divertidas teorias num canal como o História, estão a colocar estas ideias ao lado das que passaram pelo crivo de cientistas independentes e que garantem a utilização de um verdadeiro método científico na produção de resultados e nos testes práticos às teorias. Este programa está, obviamente, ao nível da ficção científica e era como tal que deveria ser apresentado. Como uma versão documental do Star Gate[3] (que pega precisamente na ideia de que o antigo Egipto era uma civilização controlada por extraterrestres).

Enfim, perdoem-me o desabafo. E o pior é que não é um exclusivo nacional. No médio oriente, onde me encontro, já percebi que todos estes canais apresentam praticamente os mesmo programas. Um nível muito baixo, e uma tristeza para quem efectivamente gosta de História. 

US cowardice will let Israel’s isolated right off the hook

Mais uma vez, Robert Fisk e a sua experiência única de Médio Oriente num brilhante artigo de opinião no The Independent.


US cowardice will let Israel’s isolated right off the hook

These are hard times for the Israeli right. Used to bullying the US – and especially its present, shallow leader – the Likudists suddenly find that the whole world wants peace in the Middle East rather than war. Brits and Americans didn’t want to go to war in Syria. Now, with the pleasant smile of President Rouhani gracing their television screens, fully accepting the facts of the Jewish Holocaust – unlike his deranged and infantile predecessor – the Americans (75 per cent, if we are to believe the polls) don’t want to go to war with Iran either.

Having, live on television, forced President Obama to grovel to him on his last trip to the White House – Benjamin Netanyahu brusquely told him to forget UN Security Resolution 242, which calls for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from lands occupied after the 1967 war – the Israeli Prime Minister did a little grovelling himself on Monday. He no longer called for a total end to all Iranian nuclear activities. Now it was only Iran’s “military nuclear programme” which must be shut down.And, of course, like Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction programme” which President George W Bush had to invent when the weapons themselves turned out to be an invention, we still don’t know if Mr Netanyahu’s version of Iran’s “military nuclear programme” actually exists.
What we do know is that when Mr Rouhani started saying all the things we had been demanding that Iran should say for years, Israel went bananas. Mr Netanyahu condemned him before he had even said a word. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Even when Mr Rouhani spoke of peace and an end to nuclear suspicions, Israel’s “Strategic Affairs” Minister – whatever that means – said time had run out for future negotiations. Yuval Steinitz claimed that “if the Iranians continue to run [their nuclear programme], in another half a year they will have bomb capability”.

Mr Netanyahu’s own office joined in the smear campaign.

“One must not be fooled by the Iranian President’s fraudulent words,” one of Mr Netanyahu’s men sneered. “The Iranians are spinning in the media so that the centrifuges can keep on spinning.”The Rouhani speech was “a honey trap”. Mr Netanyahu himself said Mr Rouhani’s address to the UN, a speech of immense importance after 34 years of total divorce between Iran and the US, was “cynical” and “totally hypocritical”.

Israel Hayom, the Likudist freesheet, dredged up – yet again – the old pre-Second World War appeasement argument that the Israeli right have been reheating for well over 30 years. “A Munich wind blows in the west,” the paper said.Perhaps it had its effect. If he was not so frightened of Israel – as most US administrations are – President Obama might actually have shaken hands with Mr Rouhani last week; though Mr Rouhani himself might have preferred not to touch the hand of the “Great Satan” too soon. Instead, President Obama settled for a miserable phone call and proved that he knew how to say goodbye in Farsi. Pathetic is the word for it.
In the past, Arab delegates would storm out of the UN General Assembly when Israelis took the stand. When the crazed President Ahmadinejad spoke, Western nations and the Israelis stormed out. But when Mr Rouhani came to speak, Western nations crowded into the chamber to hear him. But Israel stormed out.
“A stupid gesture,” according to that wise old Israeli sage, writer and philosopher Uri Avnery. “As rational and effective as a little boy’s tantrum when his favourite toy is taken away. Stupid because it painted Israel as a spoiler, at a time when the entire world is seized by an attack of optimism after the recent events in Damascus and Tehran. Stupid, because it proclaims the fact that Israel is at present totally isolated.”

Mr Avnery’s contention is Israel wanted two wars, the first against Syria, the second against Iran.

As he wrote last week, when Congress hesitated to strike Damascus, “the hounds of hell were let loose. Aipac (the largest Likudist pro-Israeli lobby group in the US) sent its parliamentary rottweillers to Capitol Hill to tear to pieces any senator or congressman who objected”.

Yet at the White House on Monday, the Israeli Prime Minister had calmed down. I doubt if it will last. Israel, I suspect, will do everything it can to cut down Mr Rouhani’s overtures, whatever American public opinion might say.

For there was President Obama at Monday’s meeting, praising Mr Netanyahu for his support for a two-state solution. And what did President Obama actually say? That there was “a limited amount of time to achieve that goal”.

So why was there only a “limited amount of time”? Not a single scribe asked the poor fellow.

There is, of course, only a “limited amount of time” – in my view, no time at all – to achieve this illusory goal because the Netanyahu government is thieving, against all international law, yet more Palestinian Arab land for Jews and Jews only, at a faster rate than ever, to prevent just such a Palestinian state ever existing.The Israeli right are well aware of this. And when President Obama can’t even explain this weird “limited amount of time”, the Israelis know that he is still a groveller. This is what real “appeasement” is all about. Fear.

And even if President Obama had the courage to say boo to a goose in his final term in office, you can be sure that Madame Clinton – to quote Sir Thomas More – doesn’t have the spittle for it. For she wants to be the next appeaser-president.

The Likudists have isolated Israel from the world just now but be sure American cowardice will let them off the hook.

Let's be honest about Israel's Nukes

Um artigo muito interessante sobre a questão das armas nucleares em Israel. O habitual elefante na sala que ninguém quer ver. E os grandes diplomatas ocidentais pretendem ignorar o facto de que o motivo porque toda a gente na reunião sente necessidade de armas nucleares, químicas ou biológicos é em grande parte o terror que têm pelo facto de Israel ter 200 (?) ogivas nucleares.

Artigo do New York Times escrito por Victor Gilinsky e Henry Sokolski a 18 de Setembro.

O Cartoon é retirado de um outro site, e que me pareceu apropriado...

Let's be honest about Israel's Nukes

THE recent agreement between the United States and Russia on Syria’s chemical weapons made clear what should have been obvious long ago: President Obama’s effort to uphold international norms against weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East will entangle the United States in a diplomatic and strategic maze that is about much more than Syria’s chemical arsenal.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria insists that the purpose of his chemical arsenal was always to deter Israel’s nuclear weapons. If Syria actually disarms, what about Egypt and Israel? Egypt (about whose chemical weapons the United States has been strangely silent) points to Israel. And Israel of course has its own chemical weapons to deter Syria’s and Egypt’s, and it is not about to give them up. A headline in the Israeli daily Haaretz a few days ago stated: “Israel adamant it won’t ratify chemical arms treaty before hostile neighbors.”

These three countries have not adhered to the Biological Weapons Convention either. And Israel is not a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, despite having developed a formidable nuclear arsenal of its own, which will soon become the central fact in this drama, whether the United States likes it or not.

An obstacle of America’s own making has long prevented comprehensive negotiations over weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. While the world endlessly discusses Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the likelihood that it will succeed in developing an atomic arsenal, hardly anyone in the United States ever mentions Israel’s nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama, like his predecessors, pretends that he doesn’t know anything about them. This taboo impedes discussions within Washington and internationally. It has kept America from pressing Egypt and Syria to ratify the chemical and biological weapons conventions. Doing so would have brought immediate objections about American acceptance of Israel’s nuclear weapons.

What sustains this pretense is the myth that America is locked into covering up Israeli nuclear bombs because of a 1969 agreement between President Richard M. Nixon and Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir. For Mr. Nixon, it was mainly about gaining Israeli support in the cold war. He and Mrs. Meir understood the need to discourage the Soviets from providing their Arab allies with nuclear weapons. A declared Israeli nuclear arsenal would have led to pressure for Moscow to do so. But such cold war reasons for America to stay mum evaporated decades ago. Everyone knows the Israelis have nuclear bombs. Today, the main effect of the ambiguity is to prevent serious regional arms-control negotiations.

All other countries in the region are members of the nonproliferation treaty, but there are still unresolved issues. Syria was caught building an illicit nuclear reactor in 2007, which Israel swiftly bombed. Mr. Assad still has not allowed international inspectors to fully investigate that obliterated reactor site. And Syria’s ally Iran is suspected of trying to assemble its own weapons program to challenge Israel’s nuclear monopoly. Indeed, many analysts believed that Mr. Obama’s decision to issue a “red line” barring the use of chemical weapons in Syria was in fact driven by the perceived need to demonstrate that he was prepared to use force against Iran if it moved further toward nuclear weapons.

This witches’ brew was supposed to become the subject of an international conference, mandated in 2010 by the unanimous vote of the members of the nonproliferation treaty, including the United States. But that conference hasn’t happened, in part because of White House ambivalence about how it might affect Israel.

In April, the American assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, Thomas M. Countryman, expressed hope that the conference would be held by this fall. And earlier this month, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, urged all parties to set a conference date “as quickly as possible.” He also argued that it should include Israel and Iran. Russia attempted to include the conference in last week’s agreement, but Secretary of State John Kerry resisted. It is not going to go away.

If Washington wants negotiations over weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East to work — or even just to avoid making America appear ridiculous — Mr. Obama should begin by being candid. He cannot expect the countries participating in a conference to take America seriously if the White House continues to pretend that we don’t know whether Israel has nuclear weapons, or for that matter whether Egypt and Israel have chemical or biological ones.

And if Israel’s policy on the subject is so frozen that it is unable to come clean, Mr. Obama must let the United States government be honest about Israel’s arsenal and act on those facts, for both America’s good and Israel’s.

Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is an energy consultant. Henry D. Sokolski, a former deputy for nonproliferation policy in the defense department, is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.