Israel Airports Authority predicts some 50,000 travelers to go through terminal on peak days in July, August. Estimated number marks 9% drop compared to last year
Some 2.3 million passengers are expected to go through Ben Gurion Airport in July and August, the Israel Airports Authority (IAA) estimated this week. The number marks a 9% drop compared to the same period last year.
Meanwhile, the Eilat Airport is expected to serve some 190,000 passengers in the summer months.
A total of some 15,100 aircraft movements are predicted at Ben Gurion this summer, with over 50,000 travelers going through the airport on peak days.
According to the IAA, the leading destinations for the summer of 2009 are the United States, Turkey, France, Germany and Italy.
A total of 4.389 million passengers have gone through Israel’s main airport since the beginning of the year, a figure that constitutes a 12.84% decrease compared to 2008.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, seen here during a visit to the United Nations on June 19, has insisted that the Jewish state wants unconditional and direct talks with Syria, effectively rejecting calls for a relaunch of indirect negotiations.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Thursday insisted Israel wants unconditional and direct talks with Syria, effectively rejecting calls for a relaunch of indirect negotiations.
“Israel wants direct negotiations as soon as possible and without mediation,” he said, in a statement from his ministry.
Israeli army radio said the minister rejected a Syrian proposal to restart indirect negotiations that were halted in December.
The proposal was presented to Israel by Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen during a Middle East trip.
Syria has expressed readiness to resume preliminary contacts through Turkish go-betweens and has been sending messages to Israel through intermediaries.
Turkey brokered four rounds of indirect contacts between Israel and Syria last year, with the aim of relaunching US-sponsored peace talks between the two foes that were broken off in 2000.
But the contacts were suspended in December when Israel launched its devastating 22-day military offensive against Gaza.
The Israeli government of hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since ruled out meeting Syria’s central demand — the return of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau Israel seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Exclusive interview of European Desk of Trend News Agency with President of the State of Israel Shimon Peres
Question: You are scheduled to visit Azerbaijan next week. What documents will be signed during the visit? How do you estimate the present and how do you see the future of bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Israel?
Answer: Well, there are many things in common. First of all, Azerbaijan discovered the great wealth of gas and is head a cultural bust which is quite impressive. People don’t know it, but Azerbaijan gave a right to women to vote before the Swiss and before the Americans. Azerbaijan has shown patience and respect to the place where the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians can live together without hatred, without fanaticism. So, for me it is a special country that I know I can trust in and has cultural background. Oil you can buy, but culture you have to create. And Azerbaijan created culture.
Azerbaijan is a small people. Azerbaijan and Israel have the same problem. How can small people become greater in spite of their size? You can become great irrespective of the size of your land if you adopt modern science and technology.
President of Azerbaijan Mr. Ilham Aliev provokes the highest respect. I found him extremely humane, almost modest, educated, and sophisticated. It’s a pleasure to talk with him. He showed interest in these domains: agriculture, water, health, and high tech. We discussed it.
Israel doesn’t almost have either land, or water, or gas, or petrol. So, we have to hang in our brains, in our science and we should share whatever we have, whatever Azerbaijan wants. The great thing about Israel is that we are not dangerous. We are too small to danger anybody. But on the other hand we are developed and we are ready to share with our friends whatever we can offer in the domain of development and science and so on. In that we can cooperate fully.
We have the culture, we have the will and the readiness. I also met the father of the present president [of Azerbaijan]. I was impressed of him very much. I have met him twice. He was the man of tradition and intelligence.
I also know that Azerbaijan has problem around. Basically, the problems stem from your neighbors. Because in politics you cannot choose your neighbors, as in the family you cannot choose your parents. It is a fact of life. Israel is totally for the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. We don’t think that one country can come and annex a part of another land.
So, even before visiting the country (I have been there once) I have a great deal of sympathy. And also historically a profound thing for the way that Azerbaijan has handled the Jewish people. Many of them have emigrated to Israel. They carry with them very warm feeling to Azerbaijan. And they have a special flavor to your own society. So, I think that there is a collection of reasons that makes one very much interested in coming visit to your land.
Q: Do you expect expansion of diplomatic ties between the two countries?
A: I hope you will have a full embassy in Israel. It gets needed. I think more the cooperation goes up it is natural consequence of the relationship. It is going to happen, because I hope that we shall enrich our relations in this visit. There are many people coming from Israel with this matter, accompanying us in this visit. We want to establish better ties in the name of economy and in the name of science. And then the embassies will be very necessary on both sides.
Q: You said that Israel supports territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. Israel has been taking constructive role in the regard to resolving the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Is Israel prepared to more active involvement in the process of settlement?
A: We are a small country. We are not a weighty power. We can express our views and with our views we can contribute. But we are not a wealthy power, when it comes to our views, our attitudes and positions. I think else Azerbaijan would like very much to come closer not only with Israel, but with Jewish life abroad, and even in the United States of America. And we can do only what we can – to support the integrity of Azerbaijan in all domains.
Q: Israel has recently expressed its intention to get Azerbaijani gas that runs from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia. However, a pipeline that will go from Turkey to Israel through the Mediterranean Sea is needed in this respect. What volume of gas purchase is possible? And what who will undertake the expenses?
A: The minister of infrastructure is coming with me. He handles that issue and I would prefer him to answer this question, because he knows more details of it. But the purpose of his coming is really to check the real possibilities of connecting and bringing the Azerbaijani gas to Israel.
Israel’s new Ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, is a firm believer in the veracity of the Armenian Genocide, despite his government’s denialist position on this issue.
Prior to his ambassadorial appointment, Oren repeatedly confirmed the facts of the Armenian Genocide in his writings. In the May 10, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books, he wrote a highly positive review of Taner Akcam’s book: “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.” The review was titled: “The Mass Murder They Still Deny.”
In his most recent book, “Power, Faith and Fantasy,” Oren made dozens of references to Armenia and Armenians, including lengthy heart-wrenching descriptions of the mass killings before and during the Armenian Genocide. Here are some of the most striking quotations from his book:
“The buildup of Ottoman oppression and Armenian anger erupted finally in the spring of 1894, when Turkish troops set out to crush a local rebellion, but then went on to raze entire villages and slaughter all of their inhabitants…. Some 200,000 Armenians died — 20 percent of the population — and a million homes were ransacked. ‘Armenian holocaust,’ cried a New York Times headline in September 1895, employing the word that would later become synonymous with genocide.”
Oren then went on to establish that more than a century ago, similar to today’s acrimonious political tug-of-war over the genocide recognition issue, the Armenian atrocities seriously affected U.S.-Turkish relations. He wrote: “Maintaining amicability with Turkey would prove complicated, however, because ties between the United States and the Porte [Sultan] had long been frayed. The perennial source of friction was the oppression of Armenian Christians. Though a band of modernizing Young Turks, many of them graduates of Roberts College, had achieved power in Istanbul in 1908 and promised equal rights for all of the empire’s citizens, barely a year passed before the slaughter of Armenians resumed. Some thirty thousand of them were butchered by Turkish troops in south-central Anatolia.”
In a section titled, “The most horrible crime in human history,” Oren wrote: “The first reports, from December 1914, told of anti-Christian pogroms in Bitlis, in eastern Turkey, and the hanging of hundreds of Armenians in the streets of Erzerum. Armenian men between the ages of twenty and sixty were being conscripted into forced-labor battalions, building roads, and hauling supplies for the Turkish army. The following month, after their defeat by Russian forces in the Caucasus, Turkish troops salved their humiliation by pillaging Armenian towns and executing their Armenian laborers. In the early spring, Turkish soldiers laid siege to the Armenian city of Van in eastern Anatolia and began the first of innumerable mass deportations. The slaughter then raged westward to Istanbul, where, on April 24, security forces arrested and hanged some 250 Armenian leaders and torched Armenian neighborhoods. Interior Minister Talaat Pasha informed the Armenian Patriarch that ‘there was no room for Christians in Turkey’ and advised him and his parishioners ‘to clear out of the country.’”
Oren then exposed Turkey’s attempts to falsify history by pointing out that: “Most contemporary observers agree that the massacres were scarcely connected to the war, but rather represented a systematically planned and executed program to eliminate an entire people. Indeed, foreshadowing the Nazi genocide of the Jews twenty-five years later, Turkish soldiers herded entire Armenian villages into freezing rivers, incinerated them in burning churches, or simply marched them into the deserts and abandoned them to die of thirst…. By the end of summer, an estimated 800,000 Armenians had been killed and countless others forcibly converted to Islam.”
After citing numerous eyewitness accounts of the mass killings, Oren concluded: “In all, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a genocide that the Turkish government would never acknowledge, much less regret.”
While it is true that Michael Oren published this book before his assignment as Ambassador to Washington, his compelling position on the Armenian Genocide would hopefully make him refrain from following the footsteps of his predecessors who shamefully lobbied against the congressional resolution on this issue.
The appointment of a staunch supporter of the truth of the Armenian Genocide as Israel’s Ambassador to Washington comes on the heels of a serious rift between Turkey and Israel following the Gaza war earlier this year. On that occasion, there were major manifestations of anti-Semitic statements and acts throughout Turkey, including anti-Israeli remarks by Turkish Prime Minister Rejeb Erdogan. His insulting words to Israel’s President Shimon Peres in Davos, Switzerland, antagonized Israelis and Jews worldwide. Even though Israel downplayed Erdogan’s offensive words, they did a lasting damage to Israeli-Turkish relations.
The combination of an Israeli government that is less sympathetic of Turkey and the presence of Israel’s Ambassador in Washington who is a firm believer in the facts of the Armenian Genocide may facilitate the passage of the pending congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide.
Special National Intelligence Estimate Number 100-8-60, “Implications of the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability,” 8 December 1960, Secret/Noforn, Excised Copy
On the basis of evidence collected during the summer and fall of 1960, the U.S. intelligence establishment drew relatively firm conclusions that Israel had an ongoing program to produce “weapons grade plutonium.” In recent years, the U.S. government has been more forthcoming in declassifying information about what it knew and when in the early years of the Israeli nuclear program. In declassifying this previously exempted document, ISCA is following that pattern.
This Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) was controversial as soon as it was published because information surfaced showing that the intelligence agencies and other U.S. government organizations had overlooked telling evidence that Israel had a nuclear weapons program underway. As Avner Cohen has shown, an intelligence post-mortem requested by President Kennedy showed that information available as early as April 1958 could have led to an accurate understanding of Israel’s purposes. Why this happened can not be easily explained, but Cohen identified a number of relevant factors, including “Israeli secrecy and deception,” underestimation of Israeli capabilities, “friends [of Israel] in high places … who might have helped to suppress the early information,” organizational bottlenecks at the CIA, and the possibility that Eisenhower wanted Israel to have the bomb. According to Cohen, “the late 1950s might have been the only time the United States could have successfully pressured Israel to give up its nuclear weapons project in exchange for American security guarantees, but the opportunity was not explored.” (Note 6)
Man who killed guard at Holocaust museum has links to BNP
• White supremacist injured in Washington gunfight
• Records show 88-year-old was at fundraising events
Matthew Taylor and Daniel Nasaw
F.B.I. investigators examining a bullet-riddled door at the entrance of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where a gunman entered the building and shot and killed a security guard. New York Times
A white supremacist who killed a security guard at a Holocaust memorial museum in the US has links to the British National party, which gained two MEPs in last week’s European elections.
Thousands of visitors fled the museum in Washington on Wednesday after James von Brunn opened fire, killing a security guard. In the gunfight that followed, the 88-year-old was shot, and is now in a critical condition in hospital.
Yesterday it emerged that Von Brunn, a longtime antisemite, had attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National party (AFBNP), which was set up to raise funds from far-right activists in America.
Mark Cotterill, who ran the US-based organisation before it folded in 2001, said: “He did attend meetings. I have just checked my database and he is down as ‘meetings only’, so he was not a major donor, although he may have put some money on the plate when it was passed round.”
The AFBNP treasurer, Todd Blodgett, also told the Washington Post that he and Von Brunn had attended fundraising meetings in Arlington County. The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, spoke to at least two AFBNP meetings and said the money raised by the organisation made a “significant contribution to the BNP’s [2001] general election campaign”.
Yesterday a spokesman for the party said: “You get a lot of people coming to meetings but I don’t think you can blame us for that. Even if he did go to meetings, it was nothing to do with us.”
However, anti-racism campaigners said Von Brunn’s links to the BNP underlined its extremist agenda. “It is clear that Nick Griffin is at the centre of an international network of white supremacists,” said Dan Hodges, of Searchlight. “The BNP must explain the full extent of his organisation’s links with this antisemitic gunman.”
The far-right party gained its first two MEPs in last week’s European elections – Griffin in the north-west and former National Front leader Andrew Brons in Yorkshire and the Humber.
During the campaign, photographs emerged of Griffin alongside the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen “Don” Black, who was banned from the UK by the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith. He was also criticised for defending a BNP leaflet that said black and Asian Britons should be referred to as “racial foreigners”.
Yesterday Von Brunn was charged with murder and killing in the course of possessing a firearm at a federal facility, both capital offences under US federal law; police said hate crime charges were also possible.
At a press conference in Washington, Cathy Lanier, the Washington police chief, said security guard Stephen Johns was shot when he opened the door of the museum for Von Brunn. Other guards opened fire, and Von Brunn slumped to the ground.
In his car, officers found a notebook with a handwritten note saying, “You want my weapons, this is how you’ll get them. The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews,” according to a court affidavit.
Von Brunn’s .22-calibre rifle held 10 more bullets and investigators found more in his car and at an apartment in nearby Annapolis, Maryland, that he shared with his son and his son’s fiancee.
Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office, said Von Brunn was known to the police as an antisemite and a white supremacist, who had a website that espoused hatred against African-Americans, Jews and others.
“We know what Mr Von Brunn did at the Holocaust museum. Now it’s our responsibility to determine why he did it,” said Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office. “We have to ask ourselves did all these years of public display of hatred impact his actions.”
A self-described artist, advertising man and author, Von Brunn wrote an anti-semitic treatise, Kill the Best Gentiles, decried “the browning of America” and claimed to expose a Jewish conspiracy “to destroy the White gene-pool”.
In 1983 Von Brunn was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the US federal reserve board. At the time, police said he had wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. On the website, Von Brunn blames his six-year imprisonment on “a Jew judge” and “Negro jury”.
Last night civil rights groups said they had been monitoring Von Brunn for decades.
Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s intelligence project, said: “He thinks the Jews control the Federal Reserve, the banking system, that basically all Jews are evil. He’s an extreme antisemite.”
