CATCHING UP - A bad word about the Swiss

Morality in neutral


Switzerland is situated in the heart of Europe, surrounded by Germany, France, Austria and Italy. But unlike these EU-member countries, the Swiss are neutral in international affairs.

And under cover of neutrality, Swiss President Hans Rudolf Merz, who is both chief of state and head of government, met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last night over dinner in Geneva. The Iranian leader is in town to attend the Durban II "anti-racism conference," which opens today.

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told Army Radio that the Merz-Ahmadinejad meeting "caught us by surprise." It shouldn't have.

The Swiss have their interests. Swiss businessmen with ties to Pakistan's A.Q. Khan have been implicated in selling, on the black market, blueprints for a compact nuclear weapon. The Swiss trading company EGL is doing billions of dollars' worth of (technically legal) business with Iran.

When Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey was granted an audience with Ahmadinejad last year, the feminist politician, eager not to offend, donned a head-scarf.

THE SWISS Foreign Ministry explains that Berne has a "long-term strategic rationale" for its actions. Some of that rationale was already on display during World War II, in Switzerland's erratic policies toward Jewish asylum seekers.

When it looked like Germany would win the war, Switzerland, for the most part, kept Jewish refugees out; but when it appeared the Allies might win, the Swiss reversed course. In the final weeks of the war, they even demanded that the Nazis stop deportations altogether.

Back in 1938, when Berlin was ascendant, the Swiss requested that Germany and Austria mark the passports of their Jewish citizens with a "J" so that Berne could distinguish between "genuine political refugees" and fleeing Jews. A Swiss police captain named Paul Gruninger who allowed thousands of Jews to cross the border illegally was thrown off the force.

But when it suited Swiss "rationale," Jews were allowed in - from The Netherlands and Belgium in 1941; from Italy in 1943. And in 1944, 1,684 Jews were permitted to enter from Bergen Belson as part of the Rudolf Kastner-Adolf Eichmann deal.

All told, perhaps 30,000 Jews managed to reach Switzerland during the Shoah.

All along, Eduard Von Steiger, who was in charge of Switzerland's refugee policies, claimed that "the boat is full." He would later explain that had he known the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Europe's Jews on the other side of the Swiss border, "we might have widened the bound (sic) of what was possible."

That alibi has more holes than a piece of Emmental cheese. By May 1942, Swiss army intelligence had photos of Jews who had been asphyxiated by the Nazis at the Russian front.

In fact, the Swiss leadership knew exactly what the Nazis were doing - from their own diplomats and businessmen, from the Brazilian ambassador and from German sources.

Hugo Remuad, of the Swiss Red Cross, argued that genocidal anti-Semitism was simply a consequence of there being too many Jews. Or as Swiss judge Eugen Von Hasler put it: "It is also in our own interest that the greatest thing of all [the destruction of Europe's Jews] is coming to pass, and our hearts beat as one with the young white men who, dog-tired, forge onward to the East as [defenders] of European culture."

Meanwhile, Swiss banks raked in their spoils both by collaborating with the Nazis over pilfered Jewish cash and gold, and - later - by retaining some 36,000 bank accounts, valued at $1 billion, belonging to murdered Jews. This wealth lay dormant until 2004, when a class-action suit (and the resultant Volker Committee) forced Swiss banks to begin returning the money to the estates of the murdered.

IN 1995, former Swiss president Kaspar Villiger apologized for his country's treatment of the Jews.

And yet his successor, Merz, met last night with Ahmadinejad even as the Iranian leader puts the finishing touches on his atom bomb, swears that the Holocaust never happened, and calls for the extermination of of the "filthy [Zionist] bacteria."

While Swiss leaders shamelessly fete Ahmadinejad, we Israelis are heartened by the decision of the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Italy to boycott the Durban II circus, along with its various sideshows.

CATCHING UP - too slick to deny the Holocaust outright

The new deniers


It is Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day - Yom Hashoah. Here in Israel, the sirens will sound at 10 a.m. and for two minutes work will come to a halt, vehicles will idle, and Israelis will stand in silent memory of the six million victims of Hitler's war against the Jews.

The opening ceremony of Holocaust Remembrance Day was broadcast live from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem last night on television and radio. In the presence of President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Rabbi Meir Lau, chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and himself a child survivor, six torches were lit by six men and women who lived through the war as children. About 1.5 million of the murdered were children.

Today, therefore, is a time to reflect on the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people in modern times and to think about how anti-Semitism has morphed into anti-Zionism. It is also a day for soul-searching about the state of Holocaust remembrance.

Sixty-four years after the defeat of the Nazis, the memory and the meaning of the catastrophe they wrought is being chipped away, sometimes unintentionally, but mostly in a cynical, premeditated manner.

Holocaust denial dates back to the late 1960s and takes various forms. Some try to denigrate the Shoah by claiming that Hiroshima and Dresden prove that the allies were as heartless at the Nazis. Denial is propagated on the radical right, the radical left and by many in the Muslim and Arab world.

ON THE eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world's preeminent Holocaust-denier and leading anti-Zionist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was granted a platform at Durban II, the UN's so-called anti-racism conference in Geneva yesterday. He promptly called for the destruction of Israel: "Governments must be encouraged and supported in their fights at eradicating this barbaric racism. Efforts must be made to put an end to Zionism," he said.

We watched in distress as many in the audience and galleries applauded. Such barefaced anti-Zionism is, however, offensive to Western governments and we were gratified that dozens of EU delegates - including those from France, Finland and the UK - walked out as Ahmadinejad spewed forth his venom. Of course, the real heartbreak was that these countries were represented in the hall in the first place.

Yesterday's farce in Geneva proved again how the charge of "racism" has been cheapened to the point of having lost much of its meaning. The same holds true for the words "genocide," "war crimes," "apartheid" and "ghetto." Those who distort - willfully or through ignorance - the meanings of the dreadful vocabulary of hate for tawdry political purposes commit an unpardonable injustice.

EQUALLY pernicious are those who are too slick to deny the Holocaust outright but instead claim that Israel inoculates itself with the memory of the six million in order to kill or oppress innocent Palestinians with impunity.

A variation on the theme that Israel uses the Holocaust as a battering ram against the Palestinians is the disingenuous argument that it's time for us Israelis to move on: We need "closure," runs this line of more subtle attack, because Zionism's guiding principle of "Never Again" supposedly deludes us into thinking that we face existential threats (from Iran, Hamas, Hizbullah) or demographic threats (posed by the Palestinian demand for the "right of return"). None of these factors, these manipulators would have the world believe, really threatens our existence.

Our bogus fears, goes the claim, are as "corrosive" as they are delusionary. They make us think we are vulnerable when we - a nuclear power - are stronger than all our enemies combined. Moreover, say the anti-Zionists proponents of "closure" - Israelis have "walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked" millions of Palestinians "into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness" all because of our exaggerated sense of fear. We've taken our unfounded fears of annihilation and used them to inflate the nature of the threats against us. And this "retreat into the victimhood" has made us think that our violent ways are nothing more than "self-defense."

It's hard to decide which is worse - outright Holocaust-denial of the Ahmadinejad variety, or insidious assertions by Euro-leftists and anti-Zionists that would lull Israelis into letting down our guard and robbing us of the will to fight for our survival.

CATCHING UP - Meeting Flemming Rose

I've been too busy to post lately. Here are three piece back-to-back.

An Islamist 'new world order'

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) member-states at the Durban II gathering in Geneva is pushing for "a new world order" that would expand and impose "nondemocratic and illiberal values on the West," says the Danish editor who in 2005 commissioned and published a series of cartoons, one of which depicted the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban that led to worldwide Muslim rioting.

Flemming Rose, editor of Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest-circulation newspaper, is visiting Israel under the auspices of the Hebrew University's Shasha Center for Strategic Studies, headed by former Mossad director Efraim Halevy. He's here to lecture on how nations need to find the right balance between religious sensitivities and freedom of expression.

Rose says the OIC is trying to use Durban II to rewrite the rules of human rights and international law in a way that undermines the values of liberty enshrined in the Western canon - including the US Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It's all part of an ongoing Muslim campaign that has been making significant strides, says Rose.

European liberal values, which dominated United Nations voting following the fall of the Soviet Union, are now in retreat. Muslim states attending Durban II are pushing the conference to say that criticizing Islam is a form of incitement.

"We're seeing an erosion of support in the West for freedom of expression in the guise of preventing incitement against Islam," says Rose.

He wants the West to stop being so defensive, pointing out that "Muslims in Demark enjoy far more civil and political rights than they would have in their home countries."

Rose would distinguish between criticizing Islam as a theological and political idea and insulting its adherents.

"I spent many years in the former Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent and married a Russian woman. I am a strong anti-communist, but my late Russian father-in-law was a staunch Stalinist. I abhorred his convictions, but felt love and tenderness for him as an individual."

His experience in the Soviet Union gave him a "very strong antagonism against self-censorship and intimidation of people because of what they are saying."

In Muslim society, he notes, the rights of the dominant religion and culture are paramount. In the West, it is the rights of the individual that reign supreme.

Rose argues that in a globalized world, the idea that Westerners conduct their lives according to Western values while Muslims conduct theirs according to Muslim values simply does not work - because globalization involves both technology and human migration.

"When you publish in Denmark, you can read it within minutes in a totally different political and cultural context. At the same time, every European society is getting more complicated culturally and ethnically. Different taboos and moral codes are forced to live together."

Within their own world, says Rose, Muslims "do not see their own minorities. And when they come to the West, they continue to behave as if they were in the majority."

In this context, the West has no choice but to stand firm on its values - because Muslims are constantly pushing theirs. In our interconnected world, the old model of live and let live simply doesn't make sense.

What Rose would really like to see is reciprocity. He dreams of challenging Muslims: "Accept my taboos, and I will accept yours. If it is a crime to build a church in Saudi Arabia, then it should be illegal to build a mosque in Europe."

But such an approach, he readily admits, is unacceptable because it would lead to an intolerable decrease in freedom.

He talks about "sleeper" blasphemy laws - statutes that have long been on the books in European countries, and that Muslims are trying to reinvigorate. He argues for a "redefinition" of the concept of blasphemy so that it is not exclusively about religion but includes values, classical liberal ones as well.

Were it up to Rose, the only free speech restrictions he'd allow are those that prevent incitement to violence, and discourage libel and infringement on privacy.

"All other restrictions - like blasphemy laws, some of which date back to the 1930s - I'd get rid of."

The key, says Rose, is for the West to continue to emphasize individual rights and not, as in Muslim society, collective rights.

That leads him to make the controversial case for repealing legislation that makes Holocaust denial a crime - even though he feels strongly that the Shoah was a unique event in history, "without precedence. But I think it is a question of morality that you deal with through education and debate; it is not something you legislate. I would only leave [the Holocaust denial law] on the books if you could prove that repealing it would lead to violence. That is not a danger in today's Europe."

"Let's be consistent," he says. "We don't want Jews to have a law based on them as a group if we're arguing that Muslims living in the West should equally not have special group privileges."

Moreover, he says, holding firmly to preserving Western values at home makes it easier for the West to defend human rights in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

Rose wants Israelis to understand that Durban II is part of a broader trend of non-democratic societies trying to hijack international law, thereby instituting a new set of values.

How ingenious, he notes, that having coined the term "Islamophobia," Muslim countries are insinuating that criticizing Islam - as distinct from discriminating against individual Muslims - "is a disease, a sick fantasy that needs to be cured."

Durban II - Here we go again

Wishing all of you a Shabbat Shalom

Friday & Saturday - April 17 & 18

The Durban II charade


First the good news: United Nations professionals have taken over the operation of next week's Durban II conference, determined not to permit the meeting to deteriorate into a repetition of the infamous (2001) Durban I - an anti-racism conference which ironically became a cesspool of Jew-hatred.

Now the bad news: Even if the conference, in Geneva on April 20-25, is conducted in an atmosphere of superficial civility, the deck is already stacked against the Jewish state. The real, irreparable damage has been done by the preparatory committee chaired by Libya and co-chaired by Iran - and paid for mostly by Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The PLO threw in $1,700 as a token of its esteem.

This is akin to purveyors of trans-fat orchestrating a conference on good nutrition. You just know they have ulterior motives.

Under Western pressure, the Durban II organizers "cleaned up" a draft declaration which "reviews" how well the "action program" of Durban I was implemented. All the blatant and egregious references to Israel have been removed. Nevertheless, the supposedly sanitized document begins with an "affirmation" of the original Durban hate-fest and closes with a spiteful denunciation of "occupation" as being "closely associated with racism."

Those who understand the Orwellian newspeak of the "World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" will appreciate that by affirming Durban I and denouncing "occupation," the conference's built-in anti-Israel majority has simply found a palatable way to continue exploiting the cause of human rights in order to demonize the Jewish state.

Canada, to its credit, was first to announce it would not participate in the Durban II charade. Israel followed suit; then Italy.

Unfortunately, the EU appears set to attend since it can hardly oppose a reaffirmation of Durban I, in which it participated. And Germany, once again, rather than being Israel's true friend inside the EU, says that given its past, it can't be seen to miss an anti-racism conference - even a bogus one.

The Obama administration continues to demand significant changes in the draft declaration and opposes a reaffirmation of Durban I. We urge it to hold firm.

HOWEVER the conference plays out, whatever Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says when he addresses it, and whatever surprises the Organization of the Islamic Conference may have in store for the wording of the final declaration, this conference will end badly because it is attracting the same old crowd, the non-governmental organizations that made Durban I a scandal.

On Sunday, the anti-Zionist radicals plan a massive protest against Israel in Geneva.

So, in the final analysis, it isn't only the text that's a problem, it's the overall Durban gestalt.

Israel has wisely decided to boycott Durban II. Jerusalem's policy is not to play along with phony probes over false massacre charges in Jenin (2002); suspicious deaths of Palestinian civilians in a Gaza beach explosion (2006); the Palestinian bid to use the World Court to block the security barrier (2004); and Richard Falk's investigation of Israel's "human rights abuses" in Gaza (2009).

And if Richard Goldstone does not investigate Hamas when he probes civilian deaths in the recent Gaza war, he too should get no cooperation.

If you hold a political pogrom and no Zionists show up, it kind of takes the pleasure away.

Israel has no interest in enabling sham investigations where its guilt has been predetermined or in facilitating propagandistic show trials.

THE REAL losers in the Durban II charade are the millions of human beings who suffer at the hands of state practitioners of systematic intolerance. With the Jewish state serving as a scapegoat, authoritarian states, including China, Russia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Iran, will get a free ride at a conference supposedly dealing with oppression. Countries like North Korea, Libya, Sudan and Somalia, whose citizens enjoy neither political rights nor civil liberties, will strut about as they judge our country.

Fortunately, while the world makes a mockery of human rights, the honor of Geneva will be salvaged and the suffering of the oppressed will receive a glimmer of attention via a parallel gathering - the Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance & Democracy - co-sponsored by genuine human rights groups including Freedom House, Stop Child Executions and UN Watch.

All is not lost.

George Mitchell in Israel

Thursday - Helping Mitchell


US Middle East envoy George Mitchell, on his first visit here since the new government took office, is scheduled to meet separately today with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to discuss how to move forward on negotiations with the Palestinians.

He may well find the Israeli leadership distracted.

In a report neither confirmed nor categorically denied by the White House, The New York Times has stated that Barack Obama may be ready to drop a previous Bush administration demand that Iran stop enriching uranium as a precondition for holding direct negotiations with Washington. The US has anyway said it is ready to join talks with Iran that Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia want to convene. Simply put, Teheran's intransigence has yet again paid dividends.

The US would be willing to "allow Iran to continue enriching uranium for some period during the talks," according to the Times. America's immediate aim is for Teheran to allow international inspectors into its nuclear facilities wherever they may be. Washington's longer-term goal is for Iran to cease enrichment.

Clearly, even at this late date, a compromise could be found that would allow Teheran to maintain a closely monitored civilian nuclear program in return for acquiescing to intrusive international inspections to guarantee it has ceased pursuing a bomb.

Israelis worry, however, that the administration will delude itself into thinking that it has lots of time for talk. We've seen how adept Iran is at playing for time. So, any diplomatic approach needs to have fixed dates and performance-based milestones.

There is reason to think US decision-makers appreciate how fast the clock is ticking. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a House committee last month that Iran had enough material to manufacture a bomb. He added: "Iran having a nuclear weapon… is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world."

Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told a Senate committee that, "although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them."

CIA director Leon E. Panetta was more explicit: "From all the information I've seen, I think there is no question that they are seeking [weapons] capability."

Even the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran's 5,500 centrifuges provide it with enough enrichment capacity to build two nuclear bombs a year.

In other words, with the Bush administration bogged down in Iraq, the EU shamelessly stoking Iran's economy, Russia and China flagrantly running interference for it at the UN, and Iran's apologists in the media presenting Israel as the real villain in the Middle East, the mullahs were able to cross the threshold - they now have the material and the knowledge, but have not yet constructed a bomb.

WITH THE threat of an Iranian nuclear device hanging over us, it is improbable that Mitchell will make much headway on the Palestinian track.

Furthermore, the Palestinian polity is paralyzed by divisions between an ascendant Hamas and a fading Fatah. Yet in rejecting an unprecedentedly magnanimous peace plan proffered by the Kadima government late last year, Mahmoud Abbas's "moderates" exposed themselves as unwilling to make the most rudimentary compromises necessary to achieve a two-state solution.

To restate the obvious: No Israeli government will agree to withdraw to the 1949 Armistice Lines, or to a militarized "Palestine" or to a Palestinian "right of return." Moreover, Fatah's recent affirmation of its disgraceful refusal - 16 years after Oslo - to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state speaks volumes about ultimate Palestinian intentions.

And while we welcome Abbas's cordial pre-Pessah telephone call to Netanyahu, what Israelis would really like to happen is for Fatah to become a genuine alternative to Hamas. That means preparing its people for the kinds of painful concessions they will have to make - alongside the painful concessions Israelis have already indicated a willingness to make - for peace.

So the sooner Iran's toxic sway over the region is dissipated, the better the prospects that Mitchell can help us all move toward reconciliation.