Bush praises IDF strike
U.S. President George W. Bush was quoted as saying Israel’s air strike in Syria last year was an “important preventive action.” During his visit to Israel last week, Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert discussed the Sept. 6 attack in northern Syria, Defense News reported Monday, citing a Jerusalem official who was briefed on the talks. The president said the mission, which many independent analysts believe targeted a nascent nuclear reactor, “was an important preventive action,” according to the American magazine. Jerusalem and Washington have not given details on the bombing. Syria has denied having any secret nuclear facilities. Defense News reported that Israeli intelligence found no links between the alleged Syrian reactor and Iran.
More than three in four Israelis do not believe U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit last week will bring progress toward peace, a Yediot Achronot poll found.
Seventy-seven per cent of Israelis do not believe Bush will bring diplomatic progress, as compared to 21 per cent who do, the poll found. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents said the visit would have no effect on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s prospects ahead of the publication of a commission of inquiry’s final report on the failings of the Second Lebanon War; 38 per cent said it would bolster the Israeli leader; and three per cent said it would weaken him. The poll had 500 respondents and a 4.5 per cent margin of error.
Five Israeli diamond dealers were killed in a plane crash in Namibia. Officials in Windhoek said Sunday that a light plane that crashed upon takeoff over the weekend was carrying five Israeli employees of the international diamond firm Lazare Kaplan International. The pilot also died. The Israeli Embassy in neighbouring South Africa sent a team to help recover and identify the remains.
The United States erred in not bombing Auschwitz during the Holocaust, U.S. President George W. Bush said. Bush made the comment to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while viewing an exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem of U.S. aerial photographs of the Nazi concentration camps, according to the memorial’s chairman, Avner Shalev. Shalev took Bush on an hour-long tour of the museum Friday; it was Bush’s second visit to Yad Vashem. Avner reported that the president’s eyes welled up with tears twice during the tour.
“I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it,” Bush said. Bush laid a red, white and blue wreath at the centre’s main memorial – a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six Nazi extermination camps.
